Episode 81
· 01:06:04
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Product People Podcast. I have another interview for you with Adam Wavin, and, that was a part of a live video I did, and that's coming in just a bit. But first, I haven't had a chance to tell all you Product People listeners that the new marketing for developers is out. You can go to megamaker.co/coupon and get $50 off, And that's just an offer for podcast listeners.
Speaker 1:The other offer codes are all gone. So if you're interested, go check it out or go to devmarketing.xyz. Alright. Let's get into this interview. Alright.
Speaker 1:So I texted out, know, I'm gonna chat with Adam this morning. And the first text I get back was, oh, Adam, I love that guy. So you got a good reputation. And part of what I think what we'll talk about today is how did you build this reputation? Let's let's start, like, what were you right now, you're full time products.
Speaker 1:Right? Yep. What were you doing before this?
Speaker 2:So before this, I was working as a software developer, for a company called Titan based out of Chicago. Just they do, like, client services, consulting stuff, so building web apps for client. So I was doing that for about a year and a half and before that, I was working in another that's local. And those I had one job in between there for another local consultancy that only lasted a couple months because it turned out not being a good fit and I was looking for something else real fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah, those are the actually only two real software development jobs I've ever had. Okay. So I started working full time as a developer in 2013 after getting into college. And before that, I was doing a bunch of other random stuff. I was I ran a recording studio out of my house for a couple years recording bands for a living, didn't really work out because bands don't have money.
Speaker 2:And I worked in the oil sands in Northern Alberta for a couple years. No way. Yeah. So all sorts of different stuff, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Hold on. Some people say your audio is a little bit low. Can you just crank up your volumes on your side? We're gonna get it loud for Aaron m 14.
Speaker 2:That should be
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Alright. Cool. Hopefully, it might clip, but it should be okay.
Speaker 1:No. You sound great. So wow. So you were in you were in the oil sand. Were you always a developer?
Speaker 2:I've been doing programming in some capacity for, like, as long as I can remember. I remember the very first thing I ever did was I can't remember which one's first, but the one that comes to mind first is when I was a kid, was like so obsessed with pro wrestling. It was like my favorite thing in the world.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was I was always looking online when I was like nine or 10 years old trying to find like, there was these wrestling simulators you could download where you could like make people wrestle each other and create wrestlers and it's all text based and stuff.
Speaker 1:What what era are we talking about? Are we talking Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant or later?
Speaker 2:This would this would have been like WWF attitude era, like Stone Cold Steve Austin's like prime. Okay. So, yeah, I remember stumbling on like a tutorial when I was like searching for this stuff that was like build your own wrestling simulator, and it was like teaching you how to do it in Q basic. Yeah. And I got all that stuff kind of up and running on my parents' computer, and I'd never had so much fun like just trying to make the computer do stuff.
Speaker 2:Then I got into like making little websites and stuff like that and yeah. But doing it for basically as long as I can remember and then I kind of got back into it. I went to university for a year doing computer science and, dropped out because I was too preoccupied being in a band and trying to be cool and do all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:What what kind of music were you into?
Speaker 2:Like, heavy metal hardcore Okay. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we gotta do we gotta have a little heavy metal diversion here. What I whenever I talk to people about heavy metal, I say, saying you like heavy metal is like saying you you're from the planet Earth.
Speaker 2:Totally. You you can
Speaker 1:be from totally different countries. So what country are you from in terms of heavy metal?
Speaker 2:I would say, like, my all time favorite band is Slayer. Okay. And that's probably, like, the tamest thing I listen to. So everything after that is, like, more extreme. Like, I really like bands like Rotten Sound, which is like, you know, European grindcore band or like Napalm Death or Exhumed or, you know, lots of death metal and grind stuff.
Speaker 2:So yeah.
Speaker 1:Nice. So we're we're from a little bit the slayer is a little bit of crossover, but I I came to heavy metal late. And so I'm really into all the old stuff that I couldn't listen to when I was a kid. So I I started literally like it's like Rainbow and then, you know, Ozzy and Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. And currently, I think my favorite old metal band is Still Maiden.
Speaker 1:And then all my new stuff is like, it's you wouldn't like it at all. It's like, I I really like this band called Battle Beast that is very like it's not hair metal, but it's it's like got some synth in it, and it's a female singer, and but that's rad. The cool thing about metal is that literally, like, you could call all of these different genres different genres, but you can go to a metal show and there'll be a bunch of different people that all like just the umbrella and they can all hang out.
Speaker 2:It's kinda funny. Like, I think it's probably like the most diverse genre of muse I mean, I say that as like somebody's into it, but I listen to a lot of metal bands that are, you know, you'd call them metal, but if you put one next to each other, like, there's nothing in common between the two bands. You know what I mean? Like so Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you listen to, like, Iron Maiden and Rotten Sound, like, they're not the same in our music, but, like, it's totally everyone likes both. You know what I mean? Like Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Especially the old guys. Okay. So you were playing music and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You wanted to but were you still programming during that time?
Speaker 2:No. So after I left university, I was just kind of burnt out on programming and just was doing the music Why
Speaker 1:were you burnt out on programming?
Speaker 2:I think I just had like a bad experience in university. I was like commuting and I didn't know anyone. So I just had a hard time like kind of making that like a priority in my life and kind of like really like putting myself in that. It was just something that I drove to every day and couldn't wait to leave to come back to my regular life.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So I just couldn't get invested in it. And I think like I kind of conflated the fact that I wasn't enjoying university but like not enjoying programming. And it's not that I wasn't enjoying programming. It's just I was doing other stuff that was more fun for me at the time and taking up my time like playing music and recording bands and whatever. So yeah, after that I was just kind of working just whatever, you know, bony jobs I could find and doing the music thing.
Speaker 2:And then I tried to start this recording studio. And then as part of that, I was finding that like the tool I was using, I was missing a bunch of features that I wish it had. Okay. Yeah. And it was actually like a really, really hackable audio engineering software called Reaper.
Speaker 2:It's made by the guy who originally made Winamp.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you can like script in all different plugins and like write your own features for it and stuff. And someone's kind of opened my eyes to that and I started like writing all these new features for it and stuff. And I started realizing, man, I forgot how much I love programming. Like I was having more fun improving the software than I was recording bands.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I was like, you know what? I should, like, try this school thing again. So then I went to college instead because it's more practical and they have like a co op program and stuff so I could get workplace man and get some experience. And I did that and then, you know, I've been doing the software stuff ever since then. That's like a career or so.
Speaker 1:Ever since so that was 2013 that you 02/13
Speaker 2:is when I I didn't even graduate, honestly. It was a three year program. The way they had it set up is you two years of school, and then they do like a full year of co op. Okay. And then you go back for your third year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So my only goal was to like be hireable, right? Yeah. So once I had the co op experience, the company I was doing a co op with hired me right out of school or like while I was there for more than what most people graduating were going to get paid. Yeah. So I have a mortgage and all the stuff too.
Speaker 2:So I couldn't really afford to like not get paid again for another year and go back to school. So just didn't go back and just kept working.
Speaker 1:Just kept going.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:yeah. So that was I
Speaker 2:did that for three years and now I work for myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So three that was three years ago. One thing that surprised me is, like, when I first heard about you, and, you know, I was like, oh, hey. I this you found out about this guy named Adam and was talking about with some friends about it, and they're like, man, this guy really knows a lot about what he talks about on his blog. It's like, you're primarily PHP?
Speaker 1:Is that Yeah. Yeah. So primarily PHP guy, but they were just really impressed with your expertise. So is that something that you kind of purposefully cultivated? Is that something you just always understood?
Speaker 1:Because in some ways, go, well, three years is not a super long time to cultivate expertise. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is to be doing it kind of full time. I don't know. I just have always kind of been I'm like really addicted to learning. So like when I get into something, I like consume everything that exists in the world about that topic until I feel like I understand it as good as anyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I can't really attribute it to anything other than just like never really like doing anything part time. Like anytime, like, I want to learn something, it's like I'm obsessed and I like won't stop until I feel like I, you know, can explain it from first principles. You know what I mean? It's been the same with like everything I've ever been into. Like, I used to play guitar like eight hours a day for like eight years.
Speaker 2:You know what mean? I wouldn't stop. I got into like weightlifting and powerlifting to the point where like I've won national powerlifting competitions after two years. Wow. It's when I, like, get into something, like, I just sink my teeth into it and I can't let it go.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:You gotta go all in. Yeah. And so you're you're k. So you graduate, you start working, and you're learning right away. Like, you're into it.
Speaker 1:What about this idea of building an audience? Where did that start? Where did you start doing that?
Speaker 2:I don't know if I ever really, like, did it super intentionally at first. I've always been, like, anytime I've gotten into, some new hobby or whatever, I've always found like online forums or whatever and always been really active in participating communities and talking to people. And, you know, I've basically developed like a fairly good reputation in almost any community that I've been involved in. So even with that, like Reaper software, you'll still see people like starting threads on that forum that have my name in it because they're talking about like Adam Watham's drum editing method or you know, things like that. So, it's the same with programming.
Speaker 2:For me, Twitter was like the perfect place to get involved in that. That seems to be where like all the programming and discussions seem to happen. Yeah. Because I haven't really found like a good message board that I participated in or anything. But yeah, just like kind of trying to participate in conversations and, you know, share anything that I I wanna talk about.
Speaker 2:So blogging and stuff like that. But for the longest time, really intentionally like, oh, I'm doing this because I wanna build an audience or whatever. Just kinda, you know, wanna share what I know. And I've all like, honestly, I remember being like a little kid, like seven years old when we got, like, our computer and, like, getting up early in the morning because I couldn't sleep because I was so excited to, like, go on the computer and try and write, like, walk throughs for, like, doom. You know?
Speaker 2:Just, like, write and just put it out because I I love just, like, creating things for other people to consume.
Speaker 1:Wow. So you've been practicing this a long time. This idea of learning something, wanting to get involved in the community, and then also wanting to like share what you've learned. Yeah. And I think that's a good just a good point.
Speaker 1:Good thing for people to write down is that these things just don't happen overnight. Like this is these are habits and skills that you've developed over time of, Okay, I can learn anything I want to because I'll jump right in, I'll find the community, I'll be involved in the community, I'll contribute to the community and I'll share what I've learned. If you do that enough times, if you if you were doing walk throughs of of doom, then, you know, you've been doing this a long time. It's and a lot of those skills kinda build up over time to the point where if you wanted to do a screen cast on refactoring collections, you have that ability.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:have some practice there. Would you would you say that's true?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, like, a lot of it too is not like It's definitely like a a skill, but I think it's also just comes down to for some people, it's more natural than it is for other people. Right? Like for me, that's just like my natural way of being. Like, I just want to be loud, you know, and participate in things and have strong opinions about things and whatever.
Speaker 2:Some people, you know, kinda keep to themselves and just observe. So maybe for those people, you gotta be a little bit more intentional about it. I'm more intentional about it now now that I kind of know what, like, the real benefits are to me, like, you know, in terms of helping develop my career and stuff like that. Mhmm. But it's still just something that I, you know, really enjoy doing just for like, you know, the merit of the activity itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And for for you, like you say, Twitter's been a huge thing for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that what made you wanna start blogging and podcasting? Like, what was the the drive there? Was that just more like giving back to the community?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The blogging, I I didn't even really start blogging until I was at my first job. And the guys that I worked with there kinda were really, you know, good about encouraging people to, like, get involved in that. Like, hey. You should, like, give a talk at a local meetup or you should start coming out to this or we wanna write blog posts for the company or whatever.
Speaker 2:Or even if you just do it on your personal blog, you know, it's good for us, whatever. So I just kinda like really kinda instilling the importance of like doing that stuff. Mhmm. And then I just got into it and it was it was fun. Right?
Speaker 2:I don't do it like super consistently. I definitely have like months and months where I've never blogged anything and then sometimes I'll blog a couple times a month or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, it's just kind of I don't know. It's it's it's good.
Speaker 2:It feels good to like write stuff and finish it and put it out there and like here's like a complete thought that I like put effort in like completing and like I can call that done and you get a little bit of a sense of like accomplishment from that, right? Yeah. And it's cool when like I I'm addicted to you know, it sounds bad, but like it's great to put something out there and then like have people like see it and be like, man, like this was so helpful or whatever. Yeah. And it's like a really good feeling to feel like, you know, you've shared some information that like helped someone else along.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think the other thing that folks don't always realize is, like, I know some brilliant people, but they just never share anything that they've learned. Sometimes they don't care, but sometimes they're scared for whatever reason. And if you don't tell people, it's really hard for them to know who you are. It's really hard to build a reputation.
Speaker 1:It's really hard to build trust. And often like I'm a complete jackass, so the fact that anyone pays attention to me is completely related to the fact that I just keep sharing stuff. And so if a jackass like me can do it, there's people way smarter than me that could be doing it as well. And I think the other thing is just once it really is easier the more you do it. It's like that publishing that first blog post is hard, but once you've published a 100, it's a lot easier.
Speaker 1:It's almost it's like a lot like breathing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I would say like, I don't know, I don't really pay much attention I guess to like how much traffic I get to my blog or anything like that. You know, I'll write something and I'll share it on Reddit or whatever even though that's kind of a a really sad place to look for feedback on things. But sharing stuff on Twitter has honestly been like just as rewarding. Like, I noticed like a buddy of mine, Wes Boss, who's done a bunch of courses and stuff, He has like a massive Twitter following like 70,000 people or something and the best thing I can attribute it to is just like he's always sharing just little things like just a little GIF or a little screenshot with like a sentence just saying like, here's like a little quick tip.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean? Yeah. Something like super digestible. And so I've been doing that more and more and you know those tweets like take off. Like I'll get like a 100 retweets on something that to me like seems simple, but you know a lot of other people don't know about it or or whatever.
Speaker 2:Right? You kind of take you take for granted the things that like you know and you forget that like at one point you didn't know them and there's lots of people who still don't know it. Yeah. So just being able to share like little things like that and you know the sort of micro blogging format or whatever has been really good for, you know, getting followers and, you know, kinda building a reputation and stuff too. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the other thing is as you get in the habit of thinking about this, like even tweets, like I'm always not like actively thinking about tweets, but passively thinking about tweets. So if something comes up, I'll be like it's almost like a trigger like, oh, you know what? That little thing would make a great tweet. And, you know, and that so people ask me, like, can how can you always come up with ideas to of things to say?
Speaker 1:But as soon as you're kinda, like, somewhat focused on it, it's just always kinda going in your mind, and then you might be working on something, like you said, and be like, oh, you know, I could screenshot this, and this would probably be helpful for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You get a third sense for what would be helpful.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned you mentioned Wes. Is that a relationship you built online or is that a relationship you built offline?
Speaker 2:No. Online. So like I know Wes through Twitter. I've only actually met him in person one time. We like caught up for lunch maybe two months ago or something to kind of chat about some business stuff and bounce some ideas off each other.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I don't know. I think he probably does the developer training product thing like better than like anyone. So I'm always kind of watching what he does because he's been really successful with it but he's also kind of like doesn't do things in like the traditional way really either, like not really a lot of email marketing at all. You know, doesn't like really try and leverage the price tiers as hard as most people do. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I don't and it's been interesting to kinda like follow like his progress and and find out what's working for him and what's not. Because the developers are kind of an interesting audience, I think. And that they're I feel like they're more sensitive to certain types of marketing and stuff than other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's another question I think people ask a lot is how do people end up building relationships with know, now Wes is a significant figure in the development training community. And some people go, how do you get to know a guy like that? Like how does that happen? And it sounds like for you, was just organically, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think like a lot of it comes down to just being kind of bold with initiating conversations with people. Mhmm. Like, you'd mentioned the podcast. You know, I started that podcast only because I had questions for Ryan Singer, and I needed an excuse to get him to talk to me.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:that's literally why I started the podcast so that I could one day email Ryan and be like, hey, I have a podcast. Do you wanna come on the podcast and talk about jobs to be done or whatever? Yeah. Because I couldn't just say, hey, do you wanna do an hour long Skype call? That's for no reason other than for me to pick your brain about stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's turned out to be like awesome. Like, never started that as like a a platform to build an audience or whatever intentionally. It was literally just like an excuse to have some reason to get people to answer my questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For you, it really comes back to curiosity. Like, curiosity is what drives Ford drives
Speaker 2:that's a good way to put it for sure.
Speaker 1:We've got a few questions in the chat here. I just you had I had a thought in the back of my head and now I've kinda lost it. Maybe before well actually let's let's talk about this stuff now because it's probably a good time to bring it up. So Hamza Hamza wonders, does sticking to a niche matter or can a blog have varied topics especially if they're all in tech? So what's your take on that?
Speaker 2:My blog has been somewhat varied but I do sometimes feel like I'm not being smart when I post things that are totally unrelated. So I have a vast kind of a wide sweeping array of topics I'm interested in development. Right? Like I'm just as interested in like, you know, scalable CSS architectures as I am in like unit testing the back end. Right?
Speaker 2:Which are usually jobs that are done by different people at a lot of companies. Yeah. So I try and stick to mostly talking about things that back end developers would be interested in on my blog. So lots of testing stuff and like object oriented design stuff and I try not to branch out from that too much because I do want kind of to develop a bit of authority around a couple different topics. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But I don't think there's any harm I don't think there's any reason to like not blog about something if you have an interesting idea to share and like something that's a little bit different than what you normally talk about, definitely do it because otherwise you're just like throwing away like an opportunity to you know, share some information with people and build your reputation a little bit more. So I think it's valuable to develop a reputation for being like an expert in like a of a more focused area, but I don't think that you should like not share information about other things if you have something interesting to share. I don't know if that makes sense, but
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I I think the other thing I always think about is is to observe the way that people find out about people. So like, imagine you're in Slack and someone goes, hey, you should check out Adam Wavin. And someone's like, okay.
Speaker 1:You know, they click on the link in Slack and they go. What are they gonna get an immediate sense of what Adam Wavin is about? Or are they gonna be confused? Are they gonna like and I think you can go to your site right away and you can be like, oh, okay. I get I get his deal.
Speaker 1:You know? I think there's something helpful about that because people know right away, is this for me or is it not for me? Is this going to be helpful or is it not going to be helpful? Yeah. Anything else on that?
Speaker 2:No. I think that's kind of it. Like, did Yeah. It's valuable to focus on an area where you can kind of, like, build some authority so when so you kind of become associated with a topic. So you know, there's a higher likelihood if someone's interested in testing whenever like if I'm a testing guy, then there's a good chance that they're gonna stumble on my stuff or whatever but if I just blog about all sorts of different things, then people aren't gonna find that stuff as easily.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Were Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you ever like because one it seems one of your benefits is you focused on PHP and there's a lot of PHP developers. Like, you think you would have done as well in terms of building an audience and products if you'd focused on like Erlang or something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely not on a language like Erlang. You're right. PHP is like a huge, huge market of people. And the other thing that's like great about PHP is that it's a very, very wide range of, kind of skill sets and abilities.
Speaker 2:Like there's lots of senior there's lots of junior people because the barrier to entry is really really low in PHP. So there's a lot more opportunity to teach I think than there is in other languages where there's like a higher barrier to entry and like the likelihood of you already knowing this stuff is a lot higher because otherwise you you never would have found yourself writing that programming language or whatever. Yeah. So I kind of stumbled onto it by accident really, but it's definitely been a it's a a really awesome spot to be in as far as like having an opportunity to teach people and share ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this would probably be a good time to answer Aaron m's question which is one thing it's if I'm getting him right, he's saying one thing that holds him back is is thinking, you know, it's all saturated. Like everyone's already talking about everything. Everything's already been said. You know, and if you think about PHP, like there's there's probably millions of PHP blog posts written every year.
Speaker 1:Maybe not millions, but lots. Yeah. So what like, did that ever hold you back feeling like, it's already all been talked about?
Speaker 2:I don't think so because I don't think that's true. For me, there's so many things that I try and learn that I can never find the canonical resource to learn it from. And when I know when I notice that, then to me that's an opportunity. So to me, like, I'm working on this TDD course right now, and anytime someone asks me like, hey, where what book can I pick up to learn more about testing or what videos can I watch to learn more about testing? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was like, read this Ruby book, check out this Java presentation Yeah. Whatever because all the best information is kinda like scattered and I can't point them at anything that's like this was written for you. So I I mean I think that's a good place to look for opportunities. It's like anytime you're learning something and you have to piece it together from other places like that means that everyone else has to do that too and there's maybe a lot of people who are not gonna put in that same amount of effort to kind of like look everywhere to kind of consolidate this into, you know, some information. It's the same with the the refactoring book that I put out.
Speaker 2:Like all that information and all those approaches I learned from Ruby or Elixir or other programming languages.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's it's awesome to be able to like bring those back and be like, hey, like I traveled across the ocean, you know, to this other land and I gathered all these things and I'm now I'm bringing it back for you so you don't have to go over there. You know, that's I feel like that's kind of been my approach and it's it's worked really well so far.
Speaker 1:Totally. That if you're if you wanna get into training like writing books or creating courses or doing talks or doing workshops, I think a lot of it is just being willing to put in the time to do the research and collect it and then present it in a way that is compelling and makes sense and helps people move forward. That's really the job that you're doing for people. It's like, you go out and you be my researcher and you collect all the information and then you just give me the, you know, the thing that's gonna help me get over this struggle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that that's a good point because sure a lot of people are talking about things but not a lot of people are putting real thought into how am I gonna present this for an audience in a a real really complete way that they'll understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Well, we're just we're just right on. Let's see if there's anything else here. I think we're good. I mean, there's a lot of chat in here, but let's get into the product launch. When did you think when did you start thinking about doing products?
Speaker 1:Like, what what was the you're you're going along, you're doing community stuff, you're doing some things. When did you think, oh, you know what? I could do something. It's hard
Speaker 2:to say. Like, I remember even when I was in the audio engineering communities more, I I kinda had an idea like, man, it would be kinda cool to like take my workflow and bundle it up into some training thing that I could sell to people. And I just like never did it, you know what I mean? Mhmm. And then with programming, like this testing course that I'm working on is actually what I wanted to do for the longest time and it just seemed like too intimidating of a project.
Speaker 2:It just seemed like really big. Yeah. And, yeah. I don't know if there's ever like one moment where like I decided, hey, I'm gonna be like a product guy or whatever. But you know, I've always loved creating things and sharing them with people and the idea of like trying to make money from it sounds like pretty cool and being able to like have freedom and control over what you're doing with your day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So yeah, had this idea for this testing course and then I was talking to a buddy of mine about it that he actually does do training products in the audio engineering space.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I was explaining to him like, you know, just like I I don't know how I'm gonna have time to do it like it just seems like such an ambitious thing and
Speaker 1:because you were working at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, was working full time. So he had mentioned this idea of like a tripwire product which is a term I hadn't heard before.
Speaker 1:I haven't heard that So
Speaker 2:basically the idea is like you create something really small that you can put together, know, and not a ton of time that you can sell for really cheap like $3 to $10, know, something just tiny. And for kind of two main reasons. One is just kind of like to get something done and like get some momentum going and feel like, okay, I've sold something now. I've taken someone's money like that's a good step in the right direction. I'm moving on to something bigger.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is that it's good for building your list and it's a list of like real qualified people that are actually like willing to spend money on things and someone who's given you a dollar for something is much more likely to give you $200 for something than someone who's never given you anything, right? So I thought, yeah, that sounds kind of fun. Like, I'll kind of like think about any ideas I have for something small that I could put together just to kind of get a quick win out there. Yeah. Because it and I had kind of been like developing a reputation for the collection stuff that I wrote the book about, which is basically just trying to, like, apply some functional programming ideas in PHP.
Speaker 2:Just kind of by accident because I was always tweeting about, like, dude, look at like, I was able to take this code and do this with it. Isn't this cool? Because I was excited about it. Yeah. And people would start coming to me with questions like, how would you do that with this piece of code or whatever?
Speaker 2:And so I would like, oh, that looks fun. I'll try and figure that out and I would help people. So I thought, hey, it would be kinda cool to put together like a just like something small, like a 40 page PDF on like some of my favorite like tips and tricks for using this programming strategy. And so I announced that in like February.
Speaker 1:February 2015?
Speaker 2:02/2016.
Speaker 1:02/2016. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I pulled it up here so I could see. February 23. So I I tweeted after I put together a little simple landing page. I'm writing a book, a short book on collections. Check it out if you're sick of ifs, loops, and variables was the tweet.
Speaker 2:So I went into it with this idea I was gonna build this like 30 to 40 page thing. And then next thing I know, was like a 100 pages already and I still had a bunch of other stuff to put in it. Like, I remember like having conversation with friends like, how much do think I should charge this? Like, $9? Like, $12?
Speaker 2:Whatever. Yeah. And, by the time I was done, was, a 160 page book with, like, four hours of accompanying screencasts. And basically, it's the size of this next project, But I kinda got it done because I thought it was gonna be smaller. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So then when I finally did release it, you know, I put it out, like, at launch, the tiers were, like, $29, $59, and a $135. Yeah. You know, all of which are dramatically higher than like what I had gone in intending to do, which was like a under $10 tripwire product or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, it just like went million times better than I could have ever hoped and it's kind of given me the opportunity to spend more time on this product stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Your your story is awesome because well, first of all, most people don't have that kind of success right out of the gates. And you've done very well. I I found that first tweet. It's right here.
Speaker 1:So this was back in February and was retweeted 82 times, liked a 193 times. You know, it's it's funny, like, again, all of your background leads up to this point. So everything you've done, everything you've invested your time in, everything you've shared, every way you've helped people kind of culminated at this point. And then you're you know, you end up doing something that's a lot bigger than you thought you would. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So and were you on a real hard schedule? Or were you just like working on this like evenings and weekends? Did you have a a launch date in place, or were you just, when I get it done, I'll get it done?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I went into it thinking, like, I could, like, put together this short thing in, like, two weeks or whatever and just put it out there. Sounds easy. And then, obviously, that didn't happen. And then, I eventually announced a release date, which I think I announced, like, an April release date just to kinda light a fire under my ass and kinda, like, give me something to aim for.
Speaker 2:It turned out to be, like, way too ambitious, and I I didn't reach it. Yeah. And they announced another release date, shortly after that, which was, May, and just worked towards that and, you know, got it out in the eleventh hour up till two in the morning trying to finish the landing site and everything. And yeah. So I can't remember if there was more to that question.
Speaker 1:No. No. That's that's exactly it. I think people are just wondering, like, if I'm working full time, how am I gonna what does this look like? And I mean, definitely, I found for myself having a deadline, like a launch date, is super important.
Speaker 1:And the I've even found it better to say, like, I'm gonna launch I've got, you know, 10 chapters written. I've got two more chapters planned, but I'll release those later. I wanna I wanna try to hit that date as much as I can because it it really does motivate you to Yeah. Like, get it out.
Speaker 2:I actually had the same thing. Like, it's kinda funny. It's, you know, like the 37 signals rework book Yeah. Or like getting real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They
Speaker 2:talk about like fixing time and budget and flexing scope. Yeah. I think it totally applies to this sort of thing too. Like, it's it's just like pick a deadline and make that deadline like fixed and do whatever else you need to do, tweak the product if you're not gonna build what you want to build by that time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you don't have like a deadline, then it's just gonna go on forever. You need to like decide a date that you're gonna release something and then just figure out what that something is as you get there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you didn't do too bad. It was February, March, April, May? Yeah. Released four months later?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Four months. Yeah. And I was working evenings and weekends. Not too crazy at the beginning.
Speaker 2:Like, obviously, at the beginning, you're, like, a little more amped about it, so you're kinda, like, focusing on it more because it's more fun. And then you start to kinda, like it starts to kinda feel like work. Yeah. So there wasn't as much effort put in in the middle, but once I announced like the release date, I was working, you know, six or seven hours a night every night for like the last kinda two weeks, which was pretty brutal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But was worth it Yeah. Ultimately. So
Speaker 1:Well, let's get into the marketing stuff now. So as you were going along, you're you you announced the book and you had a landing page up right away. Is that
Speaker 2:what you Yeah. So, I don't know if I can find a copy of the old landing page, but it's real real real simple. It's just like a screenshot of a book cover, kind of a call to action, which is the same one I've had the whole time, which was never write a loop again.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just kinda like a couple paragraphs kinda saying like what it's gonna be and what I'm working on and then just an email sign up. Like, nothing below the fold. You know what I mean? It all just kinda fits on a
Speaker 1:On a page?
Speaker 2:On a screen at once. Just not a lot there, but just enough to kinda commit to it publicly.
Speaker 1:Okay. And do you do most of your design yourself? Your your your site and your pages look really great, like really clean and
Speaker 2:I did the original landing page myself and then I had a friend of mine help me kind of figure out the sales page. But he just kind of helps me in his spare time for free. So he kind of gave me a skeleton and I kind of had to work with it from there. So I'm not like a talented designer but I I it's something that again I've focused on a lot and wanted to become better at. I don't think I have it in me to become good at it.
Speaker 2:Don't think it's as learnable as certain other things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I I do okay if you give me a starting point, I can kinda take it from there. It's just I have a problem with, the blank canvas. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 2:So I did I would say, like, a lot of the design was was me, but, definitely had some help from a buddy to just kinda get it kinda scaffolded out. So
Speaker 1:Okay. And I think I found the original landing page. It might not be rendering properly, but this is No.
Speaker 2:That that's it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh, here we go. I'll I'll expand my screen a bit. So, yeah, it's just really simple. Never write another loop again.
Speaker 1:Great headline. You know, people know right away what this is gonna be about. If you enjoyed my screen cast on here, that's good. A little social proof. And then here's all of the benefits you're gonna get.
Speaker 1:And then a place to sign up with your email address. So how many people signed up for this?
Speaker 2:I don't know exactly over time. I know by the time that I launched it, list was about 1,500 people.
Speaker 1:Nice. Okay. So what besides the list, what else were you doing along the way to, you know, for marketing or promotion? Or were you like emailing little updates to people? Were you tweeting little screenshots?
Speaker 1:What were you doing along the way?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So most of it was honestly over Twitter. Basically, anytime I was working on a chapter, if I put together like a cool example that I thought was tweetable, screenshot it, tweet it out, all those got lots of likes and retweets and stuff. I ended up doing like some stupid programmer things like that every developer does like for the book. I could have just used some existing tool but of course I like wrote my own tool to generate the book from markdown.
Speaker 2:And and the cool thing was though like like the way I wrote the tool was like using all the principles from the book. So half the examples in the book came from building that tool and the way that I use those. It was kind of cool to be able to say like, hey, I'm building this thing. It's like the super meta thing and just like sharing those examples. I think I I released maybe it looks like only one blog post in April 6, so kinda like getting closer to launch date.
Speaker 2:I released basically one of the chapters kind of tweaked a little bit to fit better as a blog post.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:And I emailed a couple updates out to the lists but nothing too crazy like maybe three updates total and one of those was like, here's the launch date and then sorry I missed the launch date and then and then as I got closer to the launch, I was emailing a little bit more because I had more stuff done. Yeah. So I had more stuff to show. Yeah. And But still not a lot.
Speaker 2:Like, three to five total emails I could go and look, but not like what you hear people doing, which is, like, twice a week or whatever. Definitely nothing like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm pretty like I don't email a lot when I'm working on it. It's hard it is hard to like work on something and promote it all the time. The mistake I find people make though is they go into their cave and then like they work work work work Then they finally pop their head up and then they, you know, send out one tweet and one email. And what I always say is like, I've had friends launch things and I didn't hear about it.
Speaker 1:And they're my friend. So if I didn't hear about it, that means nobody knows about it. And you really do need, especially on Twitter. Twitter's like a rushing river, like you put a tweet in and it's gone. You need to have some sort of flow reminding people, hey, this thing's coming.
Speaker 1:Hey, remember me. Hey, I'm working on this thing. Hey, have you thought about this? Etcetera. And it doesn't have to be a ton, but it has to be, there has to be something there.
Speaker 1:Some sort of Yeah. Reminder that this is coming.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I would say that I did most of that work through Twitter, versus through email. And I don't know if that's, like, smart or not. I think, like, for me, I felt less guilty about doing it on Twitter because it's, like, I'm not, like, forcing it down your throat. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm, putting it out there so if people are, like, excited and following along, then they can see it. And it's also helpful because I have, you know, a lot of, friends on Twitter that have much bigger audiences than me that'll retweet stuff and Yeah. And stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. The nice thing about Twitter is it's social. Like, if you send an email, people are likely not gonna screenshot it and share it unless you're Louis CK or someone. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Twitter's got this nice element where people will share. And if you've got if you've made connections in the community over time, that helps. So you said you might share some a few launch stats with us. Maybe Mhmm. Just give us a picture of what like, what emails did you send up leading up to launch?
Speaker 1:Was it like, did you do a seven day, a day before, a day of? Kinda what what was your sequence?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm looking now. So it looks like March 21, I sent out an example, like a sample chapter.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then March 29, I sent out, like, another sample chapter. So I I dripped out, like, quite a bit of the content from the book. I would say, like, I probably gave away 50 to 60% of the book for free. Wow. Not not in a way that, like, someone could go back and find it now, but if you were kinda on the list the whole time Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would have seen a lot of it. I posted that blog post on April 7, so I tweeted the or I emailed the list let them know about that. April 10, I sent out a launch update basically to say, like, hey. Like, I screwed up and it's not actually ready. April 26, I sent out another free chapter and just an update on my progress, I guess.
Speaker 2:I probably said then, like, release time frame, but I didn't give a date. Yep. And then May 16, which was two days before I launched, I sent out an email saying, hey. I'm gonna be launching it on Wednesday or whatever. Here's one of the screencasts from the book because I hadn't given away any screencasts yet.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that was the last one I sent out until I sent out the it's out email on the eighteenth. So
Speaker 1:Launch day. Cool. And tell me a little bit. Were you worried? Were you nervous?
Speaker 1:Were you
Speaker 2:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Were your expectations?
Speaker 2:So the night before when I was like working on the sales page, I was like so stressed to the point where like, I don't even understand this now, but like I was second guessing everything about it. I was like, is this even good? Like is this whole thing even trash? Like do I even wanna release this? You know, like because you're just like, oh man, I'm gonna be taking people's money.
Speaker 2:People are gonna pay for this. Like are people even gonna like this? Just like total imposter syndrome. But I was talking to a buddy of mine at the time and he was kinda telling me like, you're an idiot. Like, just release the stupid thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, yeah. So I was up till two in the morning. I basically had no landing page until the day before kind of thinking, it's just like a one HTML page. That'll be easy.
Speaker 2:Of course, like it took me like ten hours to do. So got that done and out at two in the morning and I didn't tell anyone. I actually I told a couple people you know that are friends of mine that were online when I was working on it. Okay. It's up.
Speaker 2:I'm done. I'm going to bed. Yeah. Couldn't sleep barely of course. I woke up to let's see.
Speaker 2:I had made 14 sales overnight Wow. Even though I had not told anyone that it was even out because I guess some people knew that that was the launch date and maybe they just checked. So that was kinda cool to wake up to it was $752. So I was like nudging my fiance, now wife, like, I made $752 while we're sleeping. This is like so cool.
Speaker 2:I can't even believe this. Holy crap. And then I I sent out the launch email at like quarter after seven I think in the morning and tweeted it out at like a quarter to nine. So just from, like, the email before I had, tweeted it, it looks like I had done 81 sales.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So that was between the time I went to sleep and the time I tweeted where I had sent out the mailing listing, in between there. So that was $5,200 which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I tweeted it out and you know, by 09:00, I had a 109 sales and $7. By 09:30, I had a 133 sales and almost $9. By lunchtime, I had 225 sales and $15,000 in revenue. And this was like mostly so I had three tiers, like a $29, a $59, and $1.35. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The pretty expensive one performed like really, really, really well. Yeah. It actually was like outselling the cheapest tier in terms of quantity for quite a bit during the launch. So I don't know what that says. Maybe it was either too cheap or I was yeah.
Speaker 2:I I don't know what it says. Yeah. That was interesting.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:For marketing Middle tier sold the most in terms of quantity. Wow. By, like, a vast amount, like, the other two tiers.
Speaker 1:Wow. For marketing for developers, it was it was half and half. Half of my sales came from well, half of the revenue came from the $39 tier. Mhmm. And half of my revenue came from $1.95 tier.
Speaker 1:And the middle tier sold very little.
Speaker 2:So Interesting.
Speaker 1:It kinda anchored people on either side. Yeah. But so but
Speaker 2:you see you
Speaker 1:were the reverse.
Speaker 2:I think I minded the opposite. Like, the more expensive one kinda made the middle one seem more affordable, and the cheapest one kinda made the middle one seem like a better deal, I guess. Because the the it was only 20 or $30 between the low tiers. And I guess people aren't as sensitive to that sort of pricing as maybe you would think. I think the other key thing, like, obviously, like, the pricing tier stuff is, like, so crucial.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember following all Nathan's stuff, Nathan Barry's stuff, and he was always talking about, like, if you know another way to just like magically make triple the revenue, I'd love to hear it, but this is the best I have so far. Yeah. And it it's magical because like there's kind of a everyone kinda expects to pay a certain amount for a book, but if you put other stuff with it, all of a sudden, you can charge whatever you want to charge and there's an you know, people aren't going to compare it as much to existing stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's awesome to be able to charge to have people pay a $135 and felt like they get awesome value, you know, when they're not getting that much more. Like, they could learn the same stuff from what they were paying, you know, $29 for. There's some extras and bonuses and stuff but Yeah. You know, it's nice to be able to see people pay that and feel like they still got their money's worth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So by the end of the day, I had done 403 sales, $28,299. And I did like a three day launch. So I had it was 25% off for the first three days. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So by the end of the third day, I had sold 901 copies for $61,454 US.
Speaker 1:That is an incredible launch. And how are you feeling? Like, I mean
Speaker 2:I was losing my mind. Like, to me, that's still the best day of my life. Like Yeah. I got married the next week and like I still have never like felt so I don't know, it's just like such an amazing feeling to feel like you've created something that like people wanna pay money for and people are happy to pay money for and they're so happy with like what they got. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just a really awesome feeling and yeah. It was really cool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. I I wanna just like pause here because I wanna go back to that feeling of of anxiety and like, you know, working hard. And the truth is sometimes your first launch and this wasn't really your first launch. You've done other things in the audio community and etcetera.
Speaker 1:But sometimes your first launch, it goes gangbusters like this and it's amazing. The reverse can also be true. You can go through all that anxiety. You can launch, and it might not meet your expectations. And I know that there's some people listening here that they've either gone through that or that's their biggest fear.
Speaker 1:And one thing I wanna say is it's okay if if your first launch doesn't kind of meet what you wanted it to or whatever. The whole point is you want to keep working, keep trying, keep going. And the just to remember that, you know, Adam or myself, everybody I know, my friend Paul Jarvis, everybody before lunch is worried that it's not gonna go well. So we all have that anxiety and we're worried because there is always a chance that it's not gonna go well. That's just that's how it works.
Speaker 1:Right? Sometimes you you make something people want and you really connect with the need and it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But your story is awesome because it's very clear of there's a few things. One, you've got a huge potential audience, PHP developers that want to level up. That's like and even the way you said it, like it's easy to get started in PHP, and but eventually that might lead to, man, I've got all these holes in my knowledge, like I don't know about testing, I don't know about object oriented programming.
Speaker 1:Do you know Carl Alexander, by the way?
Speaker 2:No. Name isn't familiar.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Because he does a lot of object oriented PHP in the mostly in the WordPress community. But Okay. Yeah. So you you you had all of these great things in place, and all of those things matter.
Speaker 1:Like, the audience you choose like, you had chosen refactoring for Erlang, it Yeah. It's very possible you would have sold, you know, maybe a couple thousand Yeah. Dollars if you're lucky. I don't know. So all of those things matter.
Speaker 1:And that's why sometimes you choose your first thing and it's like, ah, man. Like, that just didn't hit the mark. What wasn't right? Market size, maybe I haven't built up a good reputation, Maybe people don't trust me yet. May you know, all of these kind of factors
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That you can go through. But you kinda aligned all of those perfectly for this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It kinda scares me because it makes me worried that like, should I expect the next one to go as well? You know what I mean? Because my expectations for this were a lot more humble. Like, I was I was gonna be really happy if it made me, like, $20 over six months.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it made me triple that in the first three days. Yeah. You know, it it made me more than like my salary at my job within like the first two weeks. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was kinda crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Yeah. And that anxiety is kind of what makes us creative people. Like, that's what that's part of that's the disadvantage of making products is that you're always gonna be thinking, what am I gonna do for the next one? What am I gonna do for the next one?
Speaker 1:And that's I think one of my most popular blog posts on Medium is called focus on your own shit. And it's like I have to remind myself of this all the time of like, you know, I can't look at other people and what they're doing. I can't look at other people's success and what they've got. I can't look at my competition. The only thing I need to focus on is who am I trying to help and how can I best help them?
Speaker 1:That's all that matters. And I've found that helpful in removing the stress. Going back to I keep an encouragement folder in Gmail, just people that found value in my course or whatever. And whenever I'm feeling shitty, you know, oh man, like this didn't work or whatever, I'll go back to that folder and I'll be like, these are the only people that matter. I'm just gonna try to help them today with this next launch.
Speaker 1:It takes the focus off of you and your whatever hang ups and it also takes the focus off any other distractions like what's whatever. What's Nathan Barry doing? What's this guy doing? What just like forget about it. I'm just gonna focus on people.
Speaker 1:But it is always anxiety. There's always anxiety like, ah, like, is this gonna work or not or, you know, like, it's always scary. And and part of that also is to keep growing. You have to keep trying things that make you uncomfortable. So for this last relaunch of marketing for developers, I went from three tiers to one because I just wanted another, how do we say it in Canada?
Speaker 1:Datapoint. I wanted another datapoint. Did they say dada? Dada? What did they say in The States?
Speaker 2:Datapoint?
Speaker 1:How do
Speaker 2:you how I say datapoint.
Speaker 1:How do
Speaker 2:you Datapoint. Say
Speaker 1:how do you say JavaScript?
Speaker 2:I say JavaScript.
Speaker 1:You say JavaScript like me? You don't say job. Do you say Java?
Speaker 2:I said JavaScript. I say JavaScript.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Americans think that's hilarious. I don't okay. So I wanna get into in our last few minutes, I wanna talk a little bit about you quitting your job, a little bit about what you do next. But I'll I'll write, I'll write, I'll write in the chat, wants to under talk about our tooling.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing, he says, what Justin uses versus what Adam uses. I think he's talking about, like, for email newsletters,
Speaker 2:for
Speaker 1:all that stuff. Yeah. So why don't you talk about what you use? What's kind of your your your Stack. Your product stack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. So I'm trying to think of everything involved. So like my landing page, I didn't use like lead pages or or anything like that, just kind of whipped up an HTML thing. And for email marketing, use ConvertKit.
Speaker 2:Again, honestly like for me, I was trying to decide between, like, Drip and ConvertKit. Those are kind of the two, I think, like, things you hear the most about in that kind of, like, email automation space. Yeah. But I had just, like, gotten so much value from everything that Nathan has put out there, like his authority book and his podcast and all that stuff that I felt like I have to give this guy my money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I I use ConvertKit, and I'm very happy with that. Again, I don't really leverage it as hard as probably a lot of people do in some months. It's kinda like, oh, I paid a $150 and didn't send an email this month. But it's fine, it's totally worth it. For the actual selling of the product, I use Gumroad.
Speaker 2:I still haven't really seen anything that offers as nice of an experience for the customer than that for something that's just like a digital download. Yeah. So at first, this is at first I had it set up so with Gumroad you can either have like open a modal or like go to like the actual product page on Gumroad.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So for the launch it was just going to the Gumroad page, didn't seem to affect anything. I use the modal now but whatever.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Really awesome platform. Like the the competitor for Gumroad for me was a cycle lean pub. Yeah. And it's mostly developers selling books and stuff on there. I think you can attach files and stuff other than books now like videos and stuff.
Speaker 2:But they have like a 10% fee whereas Gumroad was like 3 and a half if I was paying for their monthly thing. Yeah. And Lean1B does like monthly payouts or Gumroad does weekly payouts and so it seemed like the right choice. Although I haven't really seen any other people in my space really selling stuff through Gumroad yet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know, Gumroad was fine. I can't think of other stuff I might have used. Is there any other categories that you can think of where I would have a tool?
Speaker 1:No. I think that's pretty much it.
Speaker 2:I mean, like, generating the book. I wrote the book in markdown.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You wrote your own I
Speaker 2:wrote my own tool to spit out the PDF.
Speaker 1:For screencast, you used
Speaker 2:I used QuickTime, actually, just a free QuickTime Okay. That comes with your Mac. And then I edited it in Reaper, which is this tool I use for editing the podcast. I didn't do anything fancy like it was literally just like trimming and cutting sections out if I had to do a section twice or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So nothing fancy at all. I'm using ScreenFlow now, because I find it actually does better screen capture quality than QuickTime was doing. Yep. But I think QuickTime is actually real really underrated for that sort of thing Yeah. For just like a free quick option.
Speaker 1:Especially if you're getting started. Yeah. My stack is very similar. ConvertKit for newsletters, almost always HTML landing pages. What else?
Speaker 1:And for HTML landing pages now, I often just use GitHub Pages. It's like super it's free and it's super fast.
Speaker 2:That's what I used too.
Speaker 1:What else? For the new for the new relaunch of marketing for developers, I switched everything to WordPress because I wanna be blogging more under that brand. And I've got some tricks for like helping that page get more authority. I sold the first version of Marketing for Developers on Gumroad. And I've just recently switched to Coach for courses.
Speaker 1:And they're adding digital products. And I think I'm gonna put it all under Coach, just have it all under one place. Yeah. My newsletters through ConvertKit, I think I've covered and and for creating screencasts, I use ScreenFlow if you're on a Mac. If you're on a PC, I don't know what people Camtasia, think is what
Speaker 2:Camtasia is the one I hear about. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The only other thing I think is you've got a pretty good microphone. And yeah, that, the microphone I always recommend to people if they just want a good dynamic mic is the ATR 2,100. It's like under a $100 if you're Canadian even, And that's a good one if you just want something really close and you just have a pop filter on it and then the sound is really great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cool. Anything else we should talk about in terms of tools? Oh, for writing my book, I use I started with pressbooks.com. And for my last book, Jolt, I wrote it all in reedsy.reedsy.com. And of everything I've tried, it has the best export to Mobi, PDF, and EPUB all at the same time.
Speaker 1:Sorry. PDF and EPUB, and then you bring the EPUB into Caliber, and then you can get it all out. Yeah. Did you do all those versions?
Speaker 2:No. I did PDF only. Okay. The reason I did that is I saw Jared Drysdale did it with bootstrapping design. Yep.
Speaker 2:And I thought, fuck it. So it was gonna be way easier and I just couldn't see anyone like deciding, oh, I would have bought that but there's no EPUB version. Yeah. And I had maybe four people total ask me like, is there gonna be an EPUB version? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I still would like to like look into it but I didn't want it to hold me back from launching. I also kind of thought, well, it's kind of nice to have new things to talk about with the product. So if I can release a PDF only, like I almost feel like I would do it intentionally for the next product to be able to do EPUB a month later and be like, hey. Just launched the EPUB version of this. It's just another excuse to kinda talk about your product.
Speaker 2:You know what
Speaker 1:I mean?
Speaker 2:Totally. So
Speaker 1:And and going back to what you said before, fixed deadline but different, like, scope can change. Right? So, yeah. I think I think that's important. Like, you don't want anything to hold you back.
Speaker 1:So if you can't afford screen flow, just use QuickTime. If you can't figure out, like, the outputting to EPUB and Mobi is the worst. It's the worst. And so if you don't wanna deal with it now, just do PDF.
Speaker 2:I can say like the other reason I didn't do that is So I almost used like Leanpub has like an online tool for generating all that stuff. There's tons of different options. The reason I wrote my own tool was because I cared way too much about like how the product looked and something I really wanted to do that I'd never seen done in a programming book before was have code samples, but I wanted to be able to kind of point out the parts in that code sample that I was talking about, but still show it all in context. Yeah. So everything else I'd seen would do like syntax highlighting for the full code block, but if it was only like the two lines down here that I wanted people to focus on, there's no way for me to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I like I wrote my own kind of flavor of markdown that lets me put a asterisk in front of the lines of code that I wanna be highlighted Yeah. And then it'll gray out all the other lines of code but leave those ones syntax highlighted.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:And I don't think EPUB or Moby will even, like, let me do that properly.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I could probably just release it without that, but I've I worry that there's times in the book where, like, I specifically say, look at the two lines of highlighted code in this sample. You know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Too much work for for it really, but I I did get a bunch of compliments about like how good it looked for a programming book, so I felt validated.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think that's another thing is there's this this hard balance between doing things that are just truly exceptional and kinda conform to the taste you have in your head and shipping. And and so there those two parts are always fighting. You don't wanna put something out that's sloppy, but you don't wanna put something out that's so perfect because
Speaker 2:That you never put it out.
Speaker 1:You never put it out. So you you wanna be in there, but the things like that that are unique, kind of unique positives to your product, people do take notice of those. And it's another way talking about, you know, all the noise out there and how do you get noticed. It's another way to get noticed. It's like, I've never seen anyone do that with a book.
Speaker 1:Right? Cool. Someone's asking about our IDEs, but it doesn't really matter. I use Adam. What do you use?
Speaker 2:I use Sublime.
Speaker 1:Okay. So there you go. And let's talk about you deciding to quit your job. How how old are you right now?
Speaker 2:I'm 29.
Speaker 1:29. You just got married. You have a mortgage. You got you have a dog. Right?
Speaker 2:I do have a dog.
Speaker 1:And so you've just had this big launch. Was that enough for you to think, you know what? I could quit my job. Or was there some anxiety around that decision?
Speaker 2:There's a little bit of anxiety around it. My wife obviously was worried about it more than me because she doesn't have control over is the next product gonna get done or be successful, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So you have confidence in yourself.
Speaker 2:So it's easy to say, trust me. Like, I can put something else out and, yeah, we're gonna be fine. Whatever.
Speaker 1:She probably also doesn't read Nathan Barry every day.
Speaker 2:Sure. Everyone
Speaker 1:I think that It doesn't
Speaker 2:it doesn't take a lot to almost, like, become brainwashed almost pretty fast by, like, reading all this, like, entrepreneur and stuff about how, like, it's almost like irresponsible to like have a job if you can like make money for yourself. You know what mean? You know what I mean? So for me, I didn't really like release the book with that as a goal. The book came out, it did like extraordinarily well and I thought you know, if I just keep working, money is just gonna kind of slowly probably trickle away and it's gonna be like I never made it like maybe we'll like do some renovations or we'll build a deck or we'll go on a trip or it just it felt like I wouldn't have like anything to show for it.
Speaker 2:You know what Like I I just wouldn't have done anything smart with it. It would have just like slowly like vanished I feel like. Yeah. So I thought like am I ever ever gonna get an opportunity to try and work for myself like this like ever again? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Like I have enough money in the bank to pay myself the same salary I made at my job for the next year. Yeah. When is that ever gonna happen? So if it's something that I wanted to try, it seems like, you know, when else am I gonna get the chance to try it? And, you know, fortunately, I'm like a computer programmer, good reputation.
Speaker 2:So it's not like I'm gonna quit my job and then not gonna be able to find another job. Like, other people maybe have to weigh that a little bit more but Yeah. In this industry, you know, it's it's not that hard to pick something up if you have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:it seemed like, man, this is my chance to to do that, so let's give it a go.
Speaker 1:Alright. Beauty. That was a great conversation with Adam. You can go check out his site, adamwavin.me. And like I said, at the top of the episode, go to megamaker.co/coupon.
Speaker 1:Get $50 off my new course, marketing for developers. And by the way, that's my other show, megamaker.co. If you're not listening, go check it out. Cool. Talk to you guys next time.
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