Episode 82
· 59:10
Hey, everybody. Justin Jackson here. Welcome back to the Product People Show. In this episode, I'm talking to Adam Wavin of testdrivenlaravel.com. He has an incredible launch story.
Speaker 1:Really excited to share it with you. And this is actually also a full length video interview that you can get as a part of the marketing for developers course. And right now, can get $50 off that course if you go to megamaker.co/coupon or you can also go to the show notes for this episode, productpeople.tv/80two, and get the coupon there. Alright. Let's get into the interview.
Speaker 1:How's it going, Adam?
Speaker 2:Pretty good, man. How are you?
Speaker 1:Good. I thought we should jump on another call. It's December 23 right now. One, because it'd be nice to put something out over Christmas. You know, people have time sometimes.
Speaker 1:They're wrapping presents or, you know, just hanging out after the Christmas meal, washing dishes. Right? Yep. And the other thing is that you just had a launch. So the last time we talked, we talked about your refactoring to collections launch.
Speaker 1:Yep. But it had been a while, hadn't it? When did you launch that?
Speaker 2:That was launched second week or May.
Speaker 1:Okay, so last spring.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what did you just launch now?
Speaker 2:So I just launched early access to a course that I've been working on since about July called Test Driven Laravel. So it's a a video course on teaching people how to do test driven development with the Laravel PHP framework.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now, I wanna kinda go through this whole thing, including, if we can, recapturing how you felt before you launched it to early access and because I think, you know, often all we see is what happens after, you know, people launch and it either does well or doesn't do well. There's all these other emotions and things that lead up to it. How did how did you even choose that topic? Why did you know, or how did you know that that would be a good topic to even cover?
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. I think it's something that I've been wanting to learn for a long time. Something I spent a lot of years trying to figure out. And it's just something that I saw a lot of people talking about.
Speaker 2:I probably wouldn't have picked it if I just saw other people talking about it and I wasn't interested in it myself, but I knew it was for me like a holy grail topic that I really wanted to master. And it was just so hard for me to figure out an approach that I was happy with that I thought, you know, this has gotta be something that other people are gonna you know, must be dealing with as well. Yeah. So yeah, I just decided, you know what, this would be a cool thing to do and I threw up a landing page. I announced it at a conference in the summer at the Laravel, official Laravel conference because I was speaking there and people seemed really excited about it.
Speaker 2:So I threw up a landing page and started gathering interest and blogging about different topics around it and stuff like that. And then, yeah. Now it's in early access.
Speaker 1:Now when you say people were excited about it, like you spoke about this thing and you say they were excited about it, what does that mean? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the thing that really kind of sold me on I should turn this into, you know, a paid product or really do something serious with it was I gave a talk called Test Driven Laravel at a conference in Vegas in October 2015.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And the creator of Laravel, Taylor Ottwell, he's kinda like the DHH of the Laravel world Okay. Was there at the conference and he attended my talk. And right after my talk, know, he was telling me, wow, that was really cool. Like I learned a lot of cool stuff about like how I can do stuff even with my own framework. And then they released like sort of a video.
Speaker 2:They tried to videotape it but they didn't videotape it. They captured the audio but not the video but they put the audio up on YouTube and Taylor saw them tweet about it and he instantly tweeted it and was like, everybody has to watch this now. And that got tons of retweets and everyone was like, oh where's the actual video? There's no actual video component. So I went and turned that into a screen cast that I posted on my blog and it got a ton of traffic and lots of people sharing it and talking about it and lots of people telling me like wow, I've always been so intimidated by this topic and I never knew how to do it and you just made it seem you know, so simple or at least so approachable.
Speaker 2:So that's when I kinda knew like, okay, this is something that you know, people are are really keen to to learn more about. So I decided to kinda run with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's sometimes hard to explain kind of what that what that feels like when you actually hit on something people are really interested in. You know, like, I just I have a lot of people who email me and they say, you know, they're working on a product, or they're working on a course, or they're working on a book. And when you hear the topic, you're just kinda like, ah. It's like it's not something that makes you go, hell yeah, or, you know, like, yes, like, shut up and take my money.
Speaker 1:And and there obviously was something about this, Even like your your examples here so I'm gonna read a bit of your your landing page copy.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:So your your headline says, most examples make testing look pretty easy. When I was first learning how to test, every example I could find made it seem fairly straightforward. Assert five plus five equals 10? Sure. Piece of cake.
Speaker 1:By the way, just as an aside, this is how I test Landing Page Copy two, is I read it out loud. And if it if it sounds if it's fairly easy to read, and it has like the right tone when you're reading it, it's usually really good landing page copy. So, so far so good, Adam. But here's the but as soon as I tried to test a real application, I was paralyzed. What's the very first test I'm supposed to write for this brand new app?
Speaker 1:How do I test, how do I test that this email gets sent? That that one there, that example there, I was like, oh, I've seen tons of developers run into that. And how, basically, what about this code needs to talk to the Stripe API, and how do you test stuff like that? So you give these concrete examples, and I could see people going, Yeah, like I need to know this stuff. Especially for like real world application development.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so were those pains you'd noticed in other people or were those quotes I just read, were those you? Those are me.
Speaker 2:That's me. So, yeah, I just tried to go back and think, like, you know, what are the things that, like, I feel like people don't talk about enough? Like, the things that made this hard for me because that's a that's a true story. You know? That's a true timeline of what it's like to learn this stuff.
Speaker 2:You go through and you see someone give an example where they're just trying to kinda teach you the mechanics of it and kinda what it's all about. And the easiest way to do that is to pick like a really simple example where you're not gonna run into any nasty corners or anything because that's just gonna distract you from trying to understand like what the concepts are really all about. Right? So it's important to teach stuff that way too. But then when you go and try and apply those ideas in the real world, all of a sudden, oh, I have to generate a PDF that gets attached to an email.
Speaker 2:How am I supposed to test that? Especially following some of the principles and practices that you kinda see espoused online about how everything is supposed to be really fast or isolated or you shouldn't depend on third party APIs in your tests and and things like that. So I found for me, like, most of the work when I'm building a real application is not, you know, writing brand new code. It's mostly stitching together stuff that already exists with sprinkling a little bit of my own custom logic about how things need to work. Right?
Speaker 2:But the bulk of it is like, okay. This data needs to get validated and stored in the database. Then I gotta send this email, and then I gotta charge the customer with this external service that I'm using. Or now I gotta tag someone in ConvertKit when they purchase this product or you know, all sorts of different stuff like that. It's always interacting with external stuff and that's the stuff where there's not a lot of great information out there about how to do it or the information that's out there makes you feel bad about any approaches that you would come up with for testing that stuff.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to do something that kind of intentionally went into the dark corners of things and tried to show real examples of how you could do this stuff for real and kind of figure out strategies for doing it that was a lot more practical than what you kind of see out there a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I wonder if there's a lesson there too. Like, what you just described was a lot of low hanging fruit has already been discussed online, and often for free. And it seems like you were saying, okay, well the low hanging fruit's all gone, but really when people are building this stuff, it's all the stuff at the top that's hard to reach that people struggle with, or at least that you were struggling with. That's the stuff I'm gonna focus on.
Speaker 1:And if you think about products that make you kinda go, Hell yeah? They're all I mean, there's some products that maybe were low hanging fruit way back in the day, like, I don't know, maybe project management was a low hanging fruit, like everyone needs it, and it's fairly simple, it's not extremely complex, doesn't have a lot of dependencies. But something like Stripe, like, that is not low hanging fruit. Like, that's a complicated, you know, service where they have to I think I have friends that that work there and they say, like, if we could see what's happening in the back end, we would all just like,
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like faint, you know? Like, they're like printing out, like, bank statements from, you know, old old legacy systems and reconciling them manually and doing all this crazy stuff. Right? But when when we see Stripe, we're like, Hell yeah, I need that because it addresses this high point of friction. And it seems like this test driven Laravel course had a similar kind of feel to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Now did you know though that that was widely felt? Like, were you like, I I've got this pain and also other people, have this pain?
Speaker 2:It's hard to say. I definitely had seen other people talk about it but not a ton. It's one of those things where there's I think there's a little bit of shame associated with it almost. You don't wanna admit that you don't understand something or you don't know how to do something and that's why people just end up not testing their applications or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they're not they don't really wanna put themselves out there and go and fake you know, ask the questions. Like everyone is saying like I shouldn't do this but I can't figure out any other way to do it, you know, and they don't wanna silly or whatever. I was not afraid of that. I was I really tried hard to like get direct answers to things and get into arguments with people that would tell me something was not the right way to do something and bring it back to the concrete and be like, okay, well, if you say that this is the right way to do it, how do you do it when this is what you need to do? And you start to kind of like chop some of these people down a little bit that kinda make you feel bad about things and kinda realize okay, well it's not that these people actually have the answers.
Speaker 2:There just seems to be a tendency for people who I don't know how to say this. I think it's like there's this kinda weird curve where you're more likely to kinda talk about something online as if you're an expert about it. Like when you're way earlier in the learning process than you actually might think you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people who really know how to do this stuff well are a lot quieter because they're not excited about the topic anymore. They've kinda figured it out and you know, they don't really see the need to devote all this time to discussing it online. Yeah. So this trend I tend to see is like when people who talk about stuff a lot are usually like still learning it but there's a group of people who feel like they know everything and those are the loudest people and it's easy to kinda see that and think that that's the way that things should be done. And it takes a little bit of courage I think to go out there and like try and get to the bottom of it and find out if the information that you're seeing online is really actually any good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's another thing think is, maybe not unique to you, but you you get into like, you choose a topic and you're not just like in your cave writing about it. You're out in, like, the real world, you know, banging into people and talking about things and, like, really getting dirty. And I wonder if that's another mistake product people make is that, you know, they're they're just working on things kinda in their own little bubble and they're maybe sometimes scared to to to, like, you know, interact with the real world or test some of their ideas in the real world. But that only gets scarier because then if you have to actually launch something that you haven't tested anything, like you haven't, like, released anything to the public and had them give you any feedback on it, to me that would terrify me.
Speaker 1:But at least you're kinda like testing little bits as you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And it's not really intentional. It's more just like I need to get these friggin' answers somehow. And the only way to do that is to go out and and talk to people and, you know, see what other people think and and try and apply this stuff for real and then go back and be like, okay.
Speaker 2:I tried what you said. It didn't really work. So, you know what I mean? So just you're right. Getting dirty is kind of the right way to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where's that
Speaker 1:where's that interaction happening? Is that happening on Twitter and forums?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Twitter and forums and, you know, comment threads and blog posts and even like I bring people on my podcast that I know I don't agree with and I will try and get to the bottom of things with those people sometimes. Know what Yeah. I So yeah, just wherever I can really.
Speaker 1:You know and that's the other thing. I think, I mean, it feels like almost any great product is opinionated in some way. Either the product's opinionated or the founder's opinionated. There's some sort of point of view. That's why people either love or hate DHH.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, they're they know if they bring him on a show or if they ask him a question, he's gonna tell you what he thinks. And, yeah, I think it's I think it's hard to build, products, especially products that get noticed when you're when you're too maybe passive or too bland or too, you know, just going with the flow. Like if you'd written a course that just went along with the common wisdom, it might not have done very well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's bring let's go back to the launch here. So you started working on this in July. You know, some I think some people are gonna I wanna get to the actual launch sequence, but some people wanna know like, do you just launch right into things? Do you like start recording day one?
Speaker 1:You work on this demo application first? Like what what's do you write an outline?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I did is spent a bunch of time trying to figure out like, okay, I know the way I wanna do this course is I wanna build an app from start to finish and keep the same context the whole time and try and pick something that's gonna touch on as many of these kind of different areas as possible. So I would brainstorm with some friends and eventually we came up with this idea of like an Eventbrite style app. Like something where you could post events and purchase tickets and stuff like that. And then from there, just kinda tried to narrow the scope down to that into something like kind of pretty focused and small but still kinda touching a little bit of a bunch of different things.
Speaker 2:So then I worked with a friend of mine, Steve, who's a designer And he just helps me a lot with product stuff and from a design perspective. And we just started working on trying to figure out what is this app gonna be, how is it gonna work, what are the flows gonna be like, and just trying to prototype it together and kind of figure out how's this thing gonna work. So we started building this Ticket Beast app which is the app that we build in the course and kept running into kinda nasty corners of hard product decisions. The thing that I didn't realize was that when I decided to build the course this way, I kinda accidentally signed up for figuring out how to design an actual viable real SaaS product at the same time as trying to build a course because I didn't wanna make something crappy. I wanted to make something that was, like, representative of something you might actually build and ship and charge money for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we probably spent, like, almost two months trying to really figure out, like, what does this thing do, what doesn't it do, why is it a good app that people would actually wanna build. Because it's easy to just like add a feature for the sake of showing it in the course even though it maybe doesn't make that much sense for the product. But I didn't want that. I really wanted it to feel like you know, real stuff.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna run into hard things because these are the needs of the application.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As an aside, when I watched the well, when I looked at the landing page and watched the video, I was like, man, I almost want to sign up for this just to learn how to build that app. You know? So I wonder if that ended up being a good decision because I was just like, man, that that just looks like a fun thing to build, you know? Testing might feel like kind of a bland or boring topic, but all of a sudden you're building this, you know, this ticket beast app and it looked really cool.
Speaker 1:I was like, man, that'd kind of fun just to like walk along and kind of build that at the same time. Yeah. And and while while we're on this topic, what was your arrangement with Steve? Like was Steve just helping you out or were you like paying him or like how did that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I help Steve out with stuff. He helps me out with stuff but he ended up spending so much time on this that I decided you know, send me an invoice for some time like for two weeks of your time or a week of your time or whatever because I feel so bad about constantly asking for your feedback on this stuff and you spend all this time on this stuff. So I did end up paying him. Definitely, he should have been paid more but you know, he's a good friend and he's helping me out and yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm really lucky to have him as someone to lean on for this sort of thing for sure.
Speaker 1:And how did you meet him?
Speaker 2:I actually met him through a friend of mine. So he's local to me and a friend that I went to college with knew him from high school and we kinda just got introduced because we both kinda like to build stuff on the side and he was always looking for someone to help him with code and I was always looking for someone to help me with design. So yeah. So we've been hanging out a ton ever since. I've probably only known him for maybe maybe two years but he was like a groomsman at my wedding even.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean? Like that's how kinda close that we are now. So yeah, really lucky to have him to to lean on for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And did you so July and August, you were working on the SaaS?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And kind of that as well as I did a ton of conference traveling and speaking this summer, so preparing stuff like that. I also gave a workshop at a conference in Amsterdam on the same topic that this course was on. So I spent a lot of time preparing that which was of course beneficial for the course as well even though we did use a different app for that but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then eventually it got to a point where we kept running into things with the product. What I really wanted to do was build the whole app, have it all done and up on a server somewhere and put that on the landing page where you could go in and click around and buy fake tickets and stuff like that and just kinda see like man, what we're building is really cool. Wanna build this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I still think it would've been awesome if I could've pulled that off but it was just it was so easy to just nitpick and perfect things forever that I never would've got to recording the videos. So I decided I've got tons of it planned already. Let's just start recording and like get the stuff out there and as long as I stay a few steps ahead, you know, as I'm working on it, then I'll be fine. So I don't have any demo open up anywhere unfortunately. Hopefully, I'll eventually get to that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it it all went fine even without being able to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And as a sidebar again, it's clear as you're talking, you were workshopping this material over and over again. Like you were speaking, were doing, you know, examples of this, and I think people miss all of that background. Like they just say, Oh, Adam launched the course. It must be because he had it all up here and he just knew what to do.
Speaker 1:But they don't see like all the practice, all the iteration, like this goes back to at least October 2015, when you get that first talk, and then it it continues from there, and it's like it's commitment. It's like a long commitment in the same direction to get to these these kind of product launch points. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What Yeah and it's not like I in October decided to make a product either. Right? Cause that sounds hard. It sounds hard to be like okay, I wanna build a product so now for the next year and a half I have to do all this other stuff before I start on the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was more like you know, I wanna give a talk. Well this is a topic that I'm interested in. You know, I'll give a talk on it. Talk goes well, another conference asks me to give the talk, well I give the talk there.
Speaker 2:Another conference asks me if I can do a workshop on the topic so I decide to do that. I share some things that I'm learning as I go on my blog or whatever. They're all just kinda like micro goals that eventually get to the point where it's like, I've kinda been like doing a bunch of stuff for this topic for a year. Mhmm. Seems like kind of a logical thing to kind of run with and maybe turn into something that I can release as a product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And one thing I've been telling people, and a lot of people don't like hearing this, but if you're going to start a business where you're writing books, or you're creating tutorials, or you are creating courses, that's a personality based business. And if you're one of the ways you can figure out if you should even be in that business is if people are asking you to give them advice on that topic, if they're asking you to speak at their event on that topic, if they're asking you to write a blog post or go on their podcast on that topic. And I think if you're not getting that kind of those kind of requests, it doesn't have to be a ton of things, but there should be some sort of demand for your expertise. And if you don't have that yet, I think it's gonna be hard to, first of all, workshop material and get the feedback you want, but also just even have the some level of notoriety so that when you launch something, people are like, oh yeah, I've been waiting for this.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I've been hearing about this or something. Would you agree with that or no?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think the other thing that's like kinda related to that but from the other side is Something that I started noticing with my own stuff that's been like a common trend in everything I've done that's like been successful is that it's always been stuff that I've really struggled not to give away for free because I was so excited and wanted people to see it. You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't think you get that when you're just working on something because you think there's a good market for it or something like that.
Speaker 2:Like with this testing course, it's so hard for me not to give away more and more free videos because I just like I'm so in love with the topic and I just wanna put it out there. You know what I mean? Yeah. Same with the book that I did. Know, between all the previews and stuff I put out, I probably gave away over half the content for free just because I was like, oh man, this chapter turned out really cool.
Speaker 2:I really want people to be able to see this or whatever. So I think enthusiasm for your topic and passion for the topic is incredibly important too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and again, you have to see that reciprocated. Like, can't just be excited about there's this quote from, I think it's Merlin Mann and John Gruber that people throw around a lot, which is like, they're speaking at South by Southwest, and they said, don't talk about Star Wars. Talk about the second Jawa in that one scene. And I've always thought that was kind of a I don't know if I'm taking it out of context, but I'm like, I don't think anyone's interested in that Jawa.
Speaker 1:Like like, sure, you could do something on that, but that your interest, your excitement has to be reciprocated. And I mean, look at this test driven Laravel from scratch video you did eleven months ago on Vimeo, it has almost 16,000 views. Yeah. Like, that's insane. Like, that is that's a that's a huge amount of feedback, you know, from and this is on Vimeo, it's not even on YouTube.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Like, that those those are I think you need both. You need the excitement and the passion and the the the the drive to be like, ah, I just wanna talk about this all the time. But you also need that to be reciprocated in the marketplace, which is people saying, yes, like I really, really want this. And I've been thinking about this is jumping ahead a little bit, but I've been thinking a little bit about levels of reciprocation.
Speaker 1:You know, like, in some ways maybe that's not the right word. I think I think it is though. In some ways like, what you when you launch something, especially a digital product, your upside is completely dependent on how excited other people are about it, and how many people how many of those people there are.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you kinda get it, what I'm what I'm saying?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:And so, I think, you know, sometimes people are like, Okay, well I'm gonna write about that second Jabba in Star Wars. And sure, you could be super excited about it. But if there's only five if your total market size for that is five people, then you you don't really have a a product unless, you know, you can sell you can sell it for, I don't 20 or $30,000 apiece or whatever. Right? Sure.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Okay. So what point going back to your launch, what point did you put up your landing page?
Speaker 2:So there was a landing page up in July which was just a really basic landing page that was kinda like a list of bullet points about like here's some of the hard questions testing that I'm gonna try and answer in this course, you know, sign up for updates and I'll let you know how the progress is going on it sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you decided you're gonna you you decided I'm gonna build this and your first step is to put up a landing page with that email form.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 100% because that's the only way I'll start working on it is when I people expect it from me. Like I'm a bad procrastinator and I'm also bad at doing like you know the first 80% of the work that gets me all the satisfaction I need and then just abandoning something because I've gotten what I need out of it. But as soon as I commit to something in public, then it makes it a lot easier for me to follow through. So I've learned that for myself that the most important thing I need to do if I wanna actually get something done is to promise people that I'm gonna get it done for them.
Speaker 2:And then I have a little bit, you know, of accountability there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And did did you put a date on that? Like did you say, I'm gonna have this done at a certain point or were you just like, I'm working on this and here's the sign up here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I said I think originally I said like this fall because I didn't wanna commit to a hard date until I had kinda put in a little bit more work and started to kinda get an idea of how long things were taking to get done. Eventually, I think probably in October, I committed to a date of November 29. Okay. And that was gonna be my launch date.
Speaker 1:Okay. And so when you you put out the landing page, what kind of initial feedback did you get?
Speaker 2:I don't know specifically, honestly. I remember everyone thought it was, you know, exciting. There's probably a tweet that I could find and we could kinda see, you how many people retweeted it or whatever.
Speaker 1:Did how many people like did you get a sense? Was there people signing up for the waiting list?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely. More people signed up for that waiting list than signed up for my book waiting list for example. I think I probably had and I was getting like probably I probably got like 400 or 500 on the first day by by announcing it at the conference first of all where there's 500 people in attendance at the conference. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the conference was streamed. So a bunch of people were watching online and stuff and I was tweeting it out and people with large audiences were retweeting it for me. Yeah. So a lot of uptake at the beginning. And then you know, the whole time I was working on it, I'm actually looking through like my Twitter search history now.
Speaker 2:I can see like I always forget how much stuff I share. Yeah. Like even just little things like I'm going back through and rereading this book right now to see if I can take anything away from it. Share a picture of the book and just kinda say like, hey, here's something that I'm looking at. Or I spend a bunch of time making like fake concert posters for the for the app.
Speaker 2:Making these like dream concerts of bands that like don't exist anymore, you know, and stuff like that. I even went so far as to like make like the itineraries on the posters like reasonable. Like okay, well they're gonna play Portland and then they're gonna play Seattle and then they might play Vancouver. You know, silly things like that or whatever. But, yeah, no, the reception was, like, really good.
Speaker 2:I wish I could find
Speaker 1:this I'm looking at a I'm looking at a tweet from July 27 where you said, I just announced my next project at LariCon US and that has 56 retweets and 200 likes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is a reasonable amount.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. And even getting 500 people the first day, again, like I think that shows this level of like, level of feedback that people who are building something for the first time don't often realize what kind of kind of response you're looking for, you know? Like, you're the response you get as you're talking about it is a mixture of a bunch of things. It's a mixture of your rep your current reputation, it's a mixture of, you know, your network, how many people are sharing it, it's a mixture of if you've picked a topic that people are excited about, all those things, how big the audience is. But, you know, getting 500 people the first day is a really, really good sign that you're on the right track.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah. And it helped that, like, I tweeted out I'm looking at this the history here. Like, when I tweeted the screencast, I put that on January 11, which was when I rerecorded that conference talk as a screencast and that had 76 retweets Yeah. On just a little video.
Speaker 2:You know what So I that was kinda like, okay, yeah. I'm right that people do wanna learn more about this stuff and people are into this content.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. It's another reason I think people need to get in the habit of sharing things all the time. That's something else you're good at is like sharing your progress, sharing a screenshot, sharing things, is you you get this barometer for whenever, response is different or higher than the norm. All of a sudden you'll you'll like share one thing, and this happens to me all the time, know, I'll work on something, I'll be like, I'll share it, and I'll be like, man, that didn't get the the pop that I was expecting it to, and then I'll, you know, it'll be two in the morning and I'll start, you know, a tweet storm about Steve Jobs and that'll get, you know, hundreds of retweets. And you can kind of see, well, this topic here had, you know, mediocre response, but this one here, wow, that had a lot.
Speaker 1:But if you're always just if you're just like, again, if you're not constantly kind of doing things and telling people, it's really hard to get that gut feel for what, you know, might have some traction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. It's always good to have more data points there for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool. Okay. So you get the landing page up, you're working on this thing, then you decide, okay, I'm gonna start recording the videos. You set a date, November 29.
Speaker 1:Let's get into the actual launch now. So, November 29 rolls around. What what happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I started recording the videos probably the October. I think I was about two weeks before November 29 or maybe a week and a half before November 29, the Sunday night and it had just been kinda building that I was not as far along as I wanted to be. Every single thing was taking longer than I wanted to be able to explain. Like it's not so much that like, oh it takes a long time to record these videos.
Speaker 2:It's that wow, there's way more videos than I thought I was gonna need. Mhmm. And when you think about it, it makes sense. I'm trying to document building an entire app that you could ship and make money for from start to finish and I wanted that to be like maybe twelve hours of video, like that's insane. Like no one is gonna build an entire app that you can actually charge money for in twelve hours and be explaining what you're doing as you go and showing things that don't work and things that do work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So in hindsight, it was kind of like obvious that okay, well this is not gonna be that size of a project. It's gonna be be bigger than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I had like four and a half hours of video done or something This and was like a week and a half before November 29 and I was still early in like the actual app building process and I was just like stressing out hardcore because you know, I promised that I would get it done on this date. So I in my mind, I had like kinda two options. One was to like figure out a way to basically stay up for a week straight recording videos and sort of rush and half ass things and cut things out because that'd be the only way to get it done on time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or the other option was to push the whole thing back and be like, okay, if I keep up this pace, I can probably get it done mid December or something or even that seems unrealistic now that I look back at it after putting more work into it. But I didn't wanna launch anything in December because it just didn't seem like you know, you launch a new product two weeks before Christmas, it just doesn't seem like a smart time to launch a product to me. Yeah. So that would've meant pushing it back till January which just looks crappy to email everyone and be like hey, it's gonna be another few months before this thing is done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was talking to a friend of mine, Jonathan, about like you know basically that night, that Sunday night, I specifically remember I couldn't sleep. I was like in panic attack mode. Like I've never felt this horrible and stressed in my life. Like just sitting in bed, I literally felt like I was physically like spinning in space. Like it was the weirdest physical reaction I've ever had to like not feeling like I was gonna get something done that I wanted to get done that was really important to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the next morning I was talking to my buddy on Telegram and he could just tell based on the things I was just saying in chat like dude, we gotta hop on a call to help you figure this out. So I'm grateful to have friends like that that that are willing to do that for me. And we just started chatting about it and he was like, why don't you just, release what you have now? Like, just release it kinda early and just tell people that, you know, it's not done yet, but just keep working on it and release this stuff as you go.
Speaker 2:And I was hesitant about the idea because to me it felt like I was basically admitting that I wasn't gonna deliver what I wanted to deliver, that I wasn't done. But the more we talked about it, the more it sounded like, you know what, this is probably better than the other two options at least. So I started reaching out to every single person I know that would have an opinion about this sort of thing, yourself included. And just kind of asking what do you think about this idea? Do you think this is a good way to go?
Speaker 2:Do you think this is gonna damage the launch because there's not gonna be this big like curtain reveal or here's the course sort of thing? And everyone seems to kind of think, know what, that's not a bad idea at all. I think people will be grateful to get it. And going back through my interactions with people, a lot of people have been asking me like emailing me, are you taking preorders? Stuff like that.
Speaker 2:I wanna pay for it now even if it's not gonna be done yet. And I didn't really wanna take anyone's money until it was actually done. It just feels kinda weird to me. But yeah, so we got on a call and I started talking to you about it and you really convinced me that it was gonna be fine and that it was gonna be the right way to go. And by the time that we were done our call and it was kinda towards the end of the day, I was really feeling good about this idea of doing like an early access launch sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And really spinning it as not like okay, it's not that it's not done. It's not done but I'm not trying to sell you half a product. I'm trying to tell you okay well I coulda delayed it but I promised I would have something on this day so I'm gonna offer it a discount and you can get it starting now and I'm gonna send out new videos every single week until the thing is done. And honestly, in hindsight, it turned out better that way just because it's such a massive kind of project. It's gonna be like probably twenty five hours of video or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And saying here's twenty five hours of video to watch up front is already crazy. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people would still find that awesome, but to me it's actually awesome to be able to send out half hour of video every week. And it just seems really a lot more digestible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. Yeah. Because what you were saying was, I've already got a big chunk of this done, and I know a lot of you are excited about it, so why don't you just get access now? I'll give you a discount to get access now. And by the time you get through twenty hours of video, I'll have already added another five hours of video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So there's there's no risk to you, it's all upside for you, and then you as the course creator also get the benefit of having real, live, breathing human beings using it and giving you feedback. And sometimes even that, just launching it and getting some paying customers can be encouraging.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:So what you do then? Did you send out an email? What was the next step?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So basically from there when I had sort of decided, okay, we're gonna do this early access thing, I switched gears priority wise and kinda stopped recording new content and instead started kind of making sure that I was gonna be able to deliver this thing to people. Because originally, if I was gonna be able to ship an entire course, it's not too bad to be able to just provide people with download links through Gumroad or whatever. People can just download them and watch them. Now I knew it was gonna be like a lot of content, like gigabytes of video which sucks to download.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I wanted to do was put together like a kind of a simple static site that you could download as a zip file and it would have the videos embedded in it and just linked to Vimeo with links to download them. So you could just download like a 300 kilobyte zip file and watch all the videos like kinda locally Yeah. Instead of downloading this whole thing. And I thought, yeah, that'll be cool.
Speaker 2:But then when I kinda realized, okay, well, if I'm gonna do this early access thing and release new videos every week, really that's not gonna be great because now I'm gonna be asking people to download a new zip file every single time. It just seemed
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sort of gross. So all of a sudden I was in like app building mode. So so now it was like okay, we gotta like build this as like a hosted course app. And I I I contracted that workout to a friend of mine which is the first time I've ever paid anyone else to program for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which made me feel like a real entrepreneur
Speaker 1:Yeah. Finally.
Speaker 2:To pay someone to do the thing that you like to do the most.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And how did that feel? Like was that Were you kinda bummed about it or were you just like, I gotta get this done. I need help.
Speaker 2:No, honestly it felt awesome. I still like spent a ton of time on it after the fact. He did an awesome job and there was nothing about it that was bad but I just kept having new ideas on how I could add new things to it that would make it better. But it went really really well. So he put that together for me and I got all the videos kinda uploaded and loaded into this app and I deployed this thing.
Speaker 2:And the whole time I was thinking, okay, I'm gonna still use Gumroad to sell this because they have these features that are supposed to let you kind of have someone purchase and then they make a request to your app for you to fulfill it and they just kinda handle the checkout thing. But it turns out that Gumroad is even more rotten than I once thought and there's two ways to do it and it's not clear which one is supported and which one's not and one of them's deprecated but the documentation is still up and no notes about it. Yeah. And it just, it doesn't work properly. So then I was in, okay well now I gotta build like a whole checkout process myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I ended up doing that with Stripe and got all that done. And then I think it would have either been probably Sunday night I sent out an email kinda saying okay, I said I was gonna have this done on November 29. November 29 is Tuesday. Here's kind of the scoop.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be early access. These are all the videos that you're gonna get. Normally it's gonna be $2.49 when it's actually finished and released. You can get it for one thirty nine if you buy it now. I just did a single price tier.
Speaker 2:Originally, was planning to do like different packages where maybe you only got up to this part of the app and then we'd add like new features and those would be kind of in different packages but seemed really confusing to try and pre sell different packages when the videos aren't even recorded for those packages yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just
Speaker 2:seemed way easier to just be like if you get early access, you get everything and it's one price and straightforward whatever. So I threw that up I think Sunday night and then I sent out an email on Tuesday morning, basically as soon as I woke up. Probably more like 08:00 actually. I probably didn't sleep that night at all.
Speaker 1:What were you nervous about? Were you just like anxious about what people would say or just excited or
Speaker 2:I think it was mainly I had no idea what the response was gonna be to an early access launch. I didn't know what percentage of people that were interested in the course would be interested in early access. You know what I mean? Yeah. My gut was that it was gonna be a low percentage.
Speaker 2:My kind of internal pessimist was kind of thinking people are gonna be oh it's not done? No matter how I try to spin it in this like kind of positive way Yeah. You know people are gonna be like you know I'll just like wait because I don't really wanna buy something that's not ready yet or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I mean yeah, it's something that's not ready yet, but when I look at it compared to what a lot of other people do with selling beta access to things, I did have a ton of content there. Yeah. So I don't really have to feel too bad about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The fact that you care so much I get is kind of indicative of your kind of personality, but also how you build things. Like, really care about the details. You really care about, you know, creating something that is well made. And the fact that you're stressing out about it just shows how much you care.
Speaker 1:You were really thinking this through. Whereas, you know, there's a lot of people that are just like, whatever. I'll just put it up for early release. It's not a big deal. Know?
Speaker 2:Sure. I mean, there's I think there's benefits to both mentalities and a lot of the time I wish I could be a little bit more relaxed about it but yeah so I put it out and my goal was kinda like if I could do like $30,000 in the early access, that would be awesome. I would feel pretty good about that. Yeah. And then have another launch when everything's done.
Speaker 2:Maybe do multiple packages then and I was expecting that kind of the bulk of the revenue would come from like the real launch. Yeah. But yeah. But we can get into what actually happened if you're interested in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd love to hear it. So what actually happened? You sent out the email, what happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So as soon as I sent out the email, my phone just started buzzing constantly with sales which is awesome. So there's a and there's always a bunch of people who are waiting for it and are ready for it. Right? So you know they're gonna buy right away which is you know an awesome feeling.
Speaker 2:But I think within I think it was probably twenty five minutes in, I had already made $30,000.
Speaker 1:Wow. Sorry, twenty minutes in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, something like that. Then by within the first twenty four hours, I made a 110,000 Canadian.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. Okay. So that's an unbelievable launch and way surpassed your expectations. So like what did you think those first twenty minutes?
Speaker 1:Were you just like
Speaker 2:I was just in shock. I was kinda like, okay. Wow. Just kinda messaging my wife like with numbers like as they kinda came in. Just kinda like I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean it was it was awesome but it was also stressful because unlike the book launch where it was like a totally finished thing, this was like okay, all these people are buying it. I hope they're happy with what's there so far and I really gotta deliver for these people you know going forward. It's not like the other launch where it was literally like sit back with feet up and just like you know hope that people buy Yeah. Knowing that like all the work is done. This was kinda like a little bit of both.
Speaker 2:And also the fact that it's like an actual app that's hosted and I'm the only one in charge of it and I've got hundreds of users using it and there was like a bug within the first hour which you know is horribly embarrassing when you're selling a course on testing your software. But yeah just like kind of that stress of like I gotta deliver for these people. All these people are paying me. It's always like it's awesome to have people pay you for something that you did but it's also kinda like it always still feels weird to me that someone else is giving me their money. Like, something about it just like even my wife says this all the time.
Speaker 2:She's she's always saying like, it doesn't feel real and that she feels like she's doing something wrong and that like she's always worried like when are we gonna like she feels like we're gonna get caught or something. You know what I mean? But yeah. So I was I was worried like, okay, is the app gonna hold up? Is the server gonna be okay?
Speaker 2:Are all the videos embeds gonna work? Because you know, we basically had to build like a full featured course application where people could pay and create accounts and stuff Yeah. You know in a couple of days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:So it all went fine though. The response was awesome. People were you know watching videos and messaging me and be like man I've learned like so much already just from the first couple. So no complaints. Everything went went really well and the sales kinda have been really steady and now it's it's not even a month in and it's made I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'll check right now. Now it's up to 224,000 Canadian.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wow. That's so awesome. I I mean, I love the story. And I remember like, cause you've been messaging me as you go along and I just like, so excited for you cause like, this is an unbelievable launch.
Speaker 1:Like this is like, there there are funded software startups that have never had a launch like this. You know what I mean? Like that Just to put that in perspective, you know, like it's just such a great thing that one Canadian who just was excited about a topic and took a risk on talking about it and giving talks about it and then doing little video tutorials on it and then going all the way in And then people saying, You know what? This is super super helpful for me, and I'm going to respond by giving you my $139? Is that what it was pre launch?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It That's To me, that's just like such a beautiful thing. Like that that can happen. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. No, it's amazing. I couldn't be more blown away by the you know, the results for sure.
Speaker 1:And and so, again, I mean, we've been trying to like pull this apart but what do you think now in retrospect, now that you've launched it and you're getting the good feedback and you're getting that you've had these incredible sales, What do you think? Why because you were thinking maybe if this could do 30 k pre launch, that would be amazing. Why did it exceed your expectations? How many people were on the launch list?
Speaker 2:Good question. I launched it to my entire list because I'm a bad email marketer, which I think was about 5,500 people at the time.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So pretty sizable crowd of people. I can kinda check the So I sent that out on, let's see, November 29 at 8AM and that was to actually 6,500 people, sorry. Okay. So there's a 61.5% open rate, a 25% click rate
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And 41 unsubscribers. Yeah. So pretty decent sized list like like four times the size of the list I had for the first product. Yeah. And I also I mean I really think a lot of it comes down to the topic.
Speaker 2:This was the thing that I wanted to build before I even created the book. Like I made the book as like getting my feet wet because I thought it would be a smaller project.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Turned out to be a massive project too. But this was the one that I always wanted to do that like I felt like there's a need for this or because it's just something that was so hard for me to learn. And again, we talked about this the last time we chatted but it was just one of those things where I had to piece things together from so many different places, try things myself because even the things I was finding weren't working. And I was able to kinda put this together now into something that like I did all the work for you. Here's the one resource that you need that you can learn this thing from.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think it's a really aspirational topic. The last thing that I did was you know a specific style of programming that's kind of fun and I think is really exciting and really cool but it's not like it's not like this topic where it's like learning how to deliver software with confidence and know that things are working. Mhmm. And it's the sort of thing that people try and fail at.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. I had a good feeling that it was gonna be something that people would be interested in but I'm it's still obviously magnitudes bigger than I still expected it to be.
Speaker 1:So from that 6,500 people, how many people bought? Like what's your guess?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That would be a good thing to be able to know for sure. I know let's see what I can figure out here. I mean, it's like something like 1,200 sales so far, 1,232 sales. I'm not sure how many of those came from the list and how many didn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah.
Speaker 1:But I mean, when you first sent it out, that first twenty minutes and likely most of the first twenty four hours, most of those sales must have come from your email list and Twitter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. All all from Twitter and the email list for sure. Yeah. So it was definitely hundreds of people from the list bonnet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:That would be interesting for you to dig into and see like how, how many of it was your list? Because you Another thing that seems unique about your situation is I mean, marketers have been talking about the importance of an email list forever, but you've been pretty upfront to say, you know what? Like Twitter's been great for me, and just even like the general community, like people For example, one way I know a launch is going good for one of my friends is if their product pops up in two or more of my Slack chats. And Yeah. And, your course popped up in a bunch of different, Slack chats.
Speaker 1:Was like, okay, Adam's having a good lunch. Because that is how, like, people who aren't on your list, the way other people hear about it, it's all word-of-mouth. And where are those conversations happening? Slack, Telegram, Twitter DMs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Around the literal water cooler, you know, like those are that's where people are talking about things. And, when you see that kind of when you as like an outsider can kind of notice like, Woah, a lot of people are talking about Adam's course. That's a pretty good sign that it's got
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Buzz that it hit a nerve, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I just put together a segment here in ConvertKit to kind of figure this out. It looks like 600 people had signed up for the early access kind of like sorry, for the landing page mailing list
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Before I launched. So before the launch date and now are also tagged as customers. So about 50% of all my customers were on my list before I launched.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So 50% of sales came from your list. Yeah. Man, I mean, that's a huge that's a huge deal. Right?
Speaker 2:But the Yeah.
Speaker 1:The crazy thing to me because for me, I think most of my product launches, it's probably it's higher than 50%. Probably 80% comes from my list. So the fact that 50% came from outside of the list, like it was able to get this traction outside of people that knew you. Yeah. I think the the topic there was something about the topic.
Speaker 1:And also, like I've been saying the market one one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is just this idea of like, okay, who's Adam's Market? In a broad sense, it's developers. But then you go narrow it a little bit more, it's PHP developers. But PHP develop there's millions of PHP developers. Like, that's a great niche to be in because there's a lot
Speaker 2:of PHP But
Speaker 1:then you've narrowed it a little bit more. Like, okay, Laravel. Like, who's interested in Laravel? But even that, it could still be millions of people. Right?
Speaker 2:It's still huge. It's it's the most popular PHP framework, and it's still kind of on the upswing. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And again, so when you're choosing, I think maybe we've gotten too obsessed with this idea of choosing a niche. Like everyone's like, niche it down, niche it down. And I'm like, well, you gotta yes, you gotta choose a niche, but it it's a whole heck of a lot better if you can choose a a big niche with people that have money that also congregate online.
Speaker 1:Like, you kinda hit every single one of those check marks, you know? Like, you Yeah. Your market is just kinda bang on for great market. And it's not a tiny little niche, it's like there's a lot of people that could potentially be interested in this product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm lucky in that sense for sure. I don't know, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing and like none of the success is intentional. So I don't know what to say.
Speaker 2:I try to pick up as much information as I can and try and do things right but still a lot of it I think just comes down picking a topic that people are excited about, that I'm excited about and being lucky that there's a lot of people in the same boat as me that happen to write the same language that I do and are interested in the same tools. And I'm lucky to have an audience of people that I've kinda built up just by being involved in this community for a
Speaker 1:number of years now. Yeah. Well I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me right before Christmas and I think that all of these things what I love about your story is that I think people can learn something from it and actually apply it to what they're doing. And so everything you just mentioned, like picking a topic that people are passionate about, building up a reputation in a community, and, sharing your progress, being so excited about something you can't hold it in, you know, I think those are all things people could use, in their own businesses. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks, man. And, yeah, let's keep chatting. I I love these kind of follow-up calls because they're, like it's just interesting to see, okay, here's this stage here, and then catching you right after a launch and getting some of that raw emotion still. It's good. If folks are interested, you can go to adamwavin.me, that's wh sorry, wathan.me, and then /testdrivenlaravel.
Speaker 1:Do you have a domain for that as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Testdrivenlaravel.com redirects there.
Speaker 1:Okay. So testdrivenlaravel.com redirects there too. Cool, man. Have a great holiday.
Speaker 2:You too, man. Thanks a ton for having me on here, and thanks for all your help with the launch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dude.
Speaker 2:Appreciate
Speaker 1:it. Anytime, man. So thanks again to Adam for being on the show. You can follow him on Twitter. He's Adam Wavin.
Speaker 1:And go check out testdrivenlaravel.com. It's incredible. It's had a great launch. If you want the full video interview, you can get that as a part of marketing for developers. That's at devmarketing.xyzed, or go and get the couponmegamaker.co/coupon.
Speaker 1:And I will see you in thousand seventeen. Thanks again for listening.
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