What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
So it's funny, I've been thinking about books a lot recently.
Stripe has a publishing arm called Stripe Press, and they've been hounding me to write
a book for like two years, and every single time they approach me, I'm like, ahh.
It would be cool to have written a book in the past.
That's a thing that I would like to have done, but I don't want to write a book, and part
of it's like, I've got other things to do.
I've never been fully convinced that it's worthwhile to do, at least for me.
How much money can you really make by writing a book?
Is the reward worth the effort invested?
There's a really good way to reach people, like millions of people have been to IndieHackers,
tens of thousands of people listen to the podcast, like if I write a book, is it going
to get anywhere near that amount of sales, or will it touch people deeply?
There's a lot of questions, and yeah, around me, I see all these people like yourself who
are happily writing books all the time, and you seem to know something I don't, so what's
the reason why you write books?
Why write a book?
Well, I enjoy the activity itself is a big part of it.
A book is too big of a project to go into cynically.
If you're doing it as a pure money game or a numbers game, even if you look at it as
a reputation enabler, if you don't actually like the writing and the beta reading and
the refining and figuring out how to explain something abstract in a way that works for
people, for me, that's fun.
It's the same fun that I get from programming or any other product design.
I asked myself years ago, I was like, what would I do if I was retired?
I was like, well, I'd wake up, I'd write something I'm interested in, and then I'd
learn, and then I'd play video games and hang out for the afternoon.
And I was like, okay, there's no reason I can't just start living that life now.
Yeah, just do it now.
But it is good.
It's better than people think, and it's passive revenue that truly is passive.
If you design it right, it grows rather than fades, it allows you to think deeply about
something.
I was talking to an entrepreneurship teacher from Georgetown the other day, and instead
of having his students write business models, business plans, anything like that, he's having
them write a book about the topic of their future business.
So kind of spending the year, the school year, basically deeply diving and thinking about
the problem that their business hopes to solve.
And at the end of it, they have this book, he helps them launch it, get it published.
And then their startups are also more successful because they haven't skipped the deep thinking
part.
And they're also experts who have a published book under their name.
Exactly.
That's cool.
It's pretty rare to hear about a course that actually gives you something so tangible.
He told me he was planning to quit.
His name is Eric Koster, and he's an entrepreneur, right?
He got cynical about the academic side of it or the academic version of entrepreneurship.
And they asked him to stay for one more semester, and he's like, okay, if I stay, I'm going
to do something crazy because I've already tried to quit and you didn't let me.
So I'm going to try this experiment.
And then however many years later, he's still doing it because it worked so well, and he
had so much fun with it.
And he said they've now published a thousand books.
They kind of set up an imprint.
And if the students can pre-sell at the end of the year 200 books, so they kind of work
on it in public, write it in public.
And if they can do this little pre-sell campaign, that's enough to cover the editing and the
publishing.
And then they get a box full of books and they can continue from there.
So most indie hackers, I would say, have zero interest in writing books.
Not all, but like most, but they are interested in sort of this goal of financial freedom.
And that sort of keyword you mentioned as well, which is passive income.
And I'm looking at right now, like you've sort of published the monthly royalties that
you've earned from your first book, The Mom Test.
And it's a graph that's just up and to the right.
So like, I'm looking at like, you know, 2013, you launched the book or published the book,
you know, you're making like $500 a month.
Next year it's, you know, $1,000 a month and so on and so forth.
By the time you get to like 2016, you're making like three or $4,000 a month.
By the time you get to 2019, this book is making you $10,000 a month in revenue.
That was a pretty exciting milestone when it, when it cruised past 10,000.
And it's passive.
You wrote the book like, like nine, eight, nine years ago, and it's still, it's making
more and more and more money, which is the exact opposite of how I think most people
think about books.
I think of a book is like, you publish it.
It's like a huge flash in the pan.
Everybody loves it.
It sells a ton.
And then, you know, the sales decline and it's on.
That's, that's how the industry traditionally thinks about it.
And that's the expected outcome for most books, nonfiction bestsellers, like New York Times
traditionally published bestsellers, they peak on average within 12 weeks.
And then they lose 95% of their peak sales within the year and they never recover.
If you've got that, you really need to hit the launch hard and you need to get this combination
of preexisting platform and luck, because those 12 weeks is where everything happens.
And to me, that was scary.
And as someone who doesn't love marketing, and when I wrote my first book, I had no platform.
Now I have a small platform, still not a substantial one.
That wasn't a business model I could believe in.
And so I tried to rethink it just using the stuff we learned from customer development,
from tech product design, from bootstrapping, and it's like, okay, how do you make this
so that it's long lasting instead of expiring?
And how do you make it so it grows through word of mouth rather than through the author's
own platform?
And I bet fully on that.
That's why I chose such a weird name for my first book, The Mom Test, because I didn't
think anyone would discover it.
I thought they would only ever be recommended it.
So I want to say that it was easy to say, and I just doubled down hard on that thesis
and it worked.
Then it worked again for my second book and third book seems to be going the same way.
And that's the topic of the third book is, you know, write useful books.
How do you actually do this?
Because it's different than normal writing.
And we're watching other people do it as well.
We set up this little paid community, we've got 150 nonfiction authors in it now.
And so I'm seeing all of them writing books, they're trying to follow this process.
And it's so cool to see the excitement and the results, they're like, because they get
over the imposter syndrome.
When you start doing beta reading and reader conversations, and you actually figure out
that people want what you're writing, and you know exactly who you're writing for, and
you have that picture in your head, you're like, oh, these two chapters don't need to
be here.
And oh, of course I should write this book, there's people who want it and need it.
All these problems with writing just disappear, if you actually understand your readers.
Yeah, isn't having the community cool?
It's like one of the most fun things to do if you start a business is just to get a bunch
of other people who you like you're affecting positively and just like see them help each
other and talk to each other and work with each other.
Like I just restarted the some of the indie hackers meetups, we used to have a ton of
them all over the world, but then COVID hit.
And we just sort of resurrected like the Seattle and the hackers meetup.
Right now, there's just like five or six of us and the Telegram group, like a couple of
them are like passing the hackers podcast guests like Ayla and Daniel Pozalo.
So the guy Justin is working on like games.
So we just like got together Sunday and just like sat down and had like a workshop meetup
where we all just got on our laptops, worked on our stuff, gave each other feedback.
And we were like play testing this guy's game.
And like I left like full of energy because it's like, wow, these other people are working
on the same things that I'm working on.
And it's like, I don't know what it is.
But like, we're just social animals.
So like if you have a community, you get to like work with other people.
And I'm sure you're energized to probably write more books now that you have this community
of other people who are writing books and you're getting to see like what works for them
and what doesn't.
Well, I need to take a year or two break, I think before I jump into another book, I've
kind of been because the workshop survival guide took 18 months, this book took 24 months,
and they were basically back to back.
And so it's kind of my last four years I've had a book project going.
And it took me a while I was doing little kind of goof around projects, you know, I'd
call them more projects than businesses, you know, pay the bills, lifestyle stuff, bootstrapping
stuff, fun things.
And recently, I was like, actually, I want to build a business with a bit more upside
again, take it a bit more seriously.
And so that draws from the same well of energy as writing.
And so I feel like I can't jump straight back into writing, I need to give myself a little
bit of time to build the business.
Makes sense.
It's like about money for a bit, because like, you're kind of in a position financially where
you can do this without like, I imagine you don't have a job, you're making, you know,
over $10,000 a month in royalties from the mom test alone, plus you have two other books.
That's about 20 grand a month at the moment from the three books together.
And that's awesome.
It's purely passive.
I mean, what marketing you really like, we're having a conversation with me, this even counts
as marketing, you know, it's just a friendly conversation, you're like, you're not doing
anything, you're not like hustling, you're not like, you know, crushing it on Twitter,
you're not trying to like have some huge launch.
It's just passive.
It's stuff you did years ago.
And I think people underestimate how much money you can make from this stuff.
Like I think you've sold, you tell me you sold something like 100,000 copies for the
mom test.
The mom test has cleared more than 550,000 in royalties.
So that's like profit in my pocket.
And I take a little bit of it.
But most of it we, Devin Hunton and myself, my business partner, we basically use the
bulk of the book revenue as our seed funding for our other businesses.
And so we were able to start the current business with zero stress because we had this, we allocated
whatever, some portion of that, because he's been my partner for a long time.
We share book revenue and we, you know, like we kind of share all of our business interests
is the way we've set it up, even when we don't have a legal entity wrapped around it.
And yeah, it just made it so stress free to start.
And I'm not saying this is the optimal path.
Like if you were starting from scratch, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to write the
book first.
But if you're interested in it and you're strategic about what you write and how you
build the book, yeah, it's incredible.
And I could, I tried a mini-retirement, you're just telling me you've been driving around
in your van.
I got out with a little sailboat, an eight meter sailboat, and I spent three years kind
of living in the boat and sailing around England, France, Spain, eventually bringing the boat
from London to Barcelona.
And I was like, actually houses are pretty nice.
It's nice to have one in water and, you know, not coming down from the ceiling, but kind
of staying where you want it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I tried the mini-retirement, three years I did with basically just writing for fun
and thinking and being a principled layabout.
And I had one, I can't remember what exactly happened.
I think that Devin needed some help on a project and we just did an intense weekend, you know,
almost like a little mini hackathon where I just jumped in and we worked together.
And I came out of that with so much energy and such excitement.
I was like, wow, I actually don't want to retire early.
And so that's when I got the apartment, you know, settled down and started building stuff
again.
It was quite a surprise for me, honestly, because I'd worked so hard for the freedom
and then I finally got it and I was like, wait, it's not what I want.
But I'm still glad I have the option.
I think if you're the kind of person who's got the energy and the motivation and the
creativity to actually, you know, write books and build websites and create apps that can
earn you your financial freedom, you're also likely to be the kind of person who's like
unlikely to stay in that state for very long because you're eventually going to do something
that's going to energize you and be like, oh, this is actually like the process itself
is super fun, not just the reward.
But the reward can be, it's kind of a self-fulfilling thing where the reward will be, you know, ideally
passive income, which then fuels you to have more time so you can start more projects.
And I guess you'd use those to generate even more passive income and start more projects.
I'm finding now that I don't even need to be 100% involved in everything.
So there's kind of like five products I'm involved with now and some are very light
touch where I kind of found the person to run the business and helped out to financially
support them.
And there's a mix.
We've got full services, we've got product services, we've got pure tech, we've got,
you know, books, we're setting up a publishing imprint.
We're doing all this, all for the same customer in theory, which makes it nice because you
get to share the understanding and the marketing, which I think is, this is a total tangent,
but that's what people keep getting wrong when they do these personal skunkworks projects
like 12 startups in 12 months or however people call it these days.
It seems to work if you keep serving the same customer over and over in different ways because
then you get to build up the insight and the customer list and otherwise it's just throwing
a bunch of stuff around and hoping you get lucky.
That's exactly what Peter Levels did it.
I think he's the one who started this trend and he started off by doing completely random
projects that had nothing to do with each other and then he started Nomad List for digital
nomads and that started working so then it's like next project was like a chat community
for digital nomads and then he did like a job board for digital nomads and he just kept
hitting the same target every month with like a different product and like that worked super
well and now I think he's approaching like $3 million in revenue, he was like a solo
founder from his like constellation of projects, which is super cool.
I want to talk about your latest book called Write Useful Books.
We sort of made the case that writing books is a worthwhile endeavor, assuming like you
want your financial freedom, assuming you actually like the process, you're obviously
crushing it financially with your books.
I interviewed James Clear and Mark Manson, two other like sort of like he orders a magnitude
above me.
These are like the unicorn founders of nonfiction book writing and I think people would be surprised
like you can make literally tens of millions of dollars from writing books like they've
sold like 3 million copies and I think 12 million copies of their books respectively.
I don't know, you'd know more than me about how the royalties work, but they're probably
making at least 3 or 4 bucks per book.
If they're traditionally published, they're probably making closer to one and a half dollars
per book.
I mean, it depends a lot, but you're looking at royalties from 8% to 12 and a half percent
depending on how we negotiate and because of the cost structures of the publishing industry,
they can't really go far above that.
And so what you tend to negotiate around if you're in a really good position is the advance.
So if you're well-platformed, then you can get a nice advance, but that comes out of
your future royalties, so it's not really extra money.
And so you're really just trying to play the scale game if you're going with traditional
publishers.
Whereas if you're self-published, I make between $7 and $15 per book depending on the format,
which is a pretty big difference compared to $1.50.
So if you care about the royalties, you definitely want to self-publish.
If you care more about the reach and the reputation, then traditional publishing is still very
valid.
And something that Marty Kagan mentioned is that when you self-publish, you've got more
upside potential, but also you're taking more downside risk because you're paying all your
own development costs for the book, the editors, the layout, all this stuff.
And so if it completely flops, you're out of pocket for that.
Whereas when you traditionally publish, you cap the downside, but you also slow down your
upside.
Not to mention you don't have an advance if you self-publish.
So you're probably burning through your savings to support yourself while you spend the time
writing the book.
So it's like being an indie hacker.
You only need an hour or two per day, but you need to do it most days.
Writing works much better if you make it a small daily process instead of trying to do
these big, intense one-day sprints to make up for lost time.
So like Tendai Vicky, he wrote Pirates in the Navy and three award-winning books about
corporate innovation.
Full-time job, family, he just said he woke up two hours earlier every day and just did
that for a year.
And he was like, I've only got a year to spend on this book, so let's wake up.
Let's use those two hours well.
He did it three times.
He said toward the end of the process, he would have to book a hotel room just to get
away from the daily obligations of life and just spend a weekend doing the final push
to get it out the door.
I hear stories like that, and I envy those people who are such consistent robotic machines.
I have certain things that I'll do on a regular basis, but they're, again, things that I love
to do.
No one has to tell me to code.
I'll set aside five, six hours a day to code.
Someone has to tell me to stop coding, but I don't know if I can sit down and write a
book for two hours a day.
I really have to develop a new habit.
But let's say you do put all this work in.
You put in a ton of work.
You publish a book.
You don't want it to have that terrible graph where all the work and all the revenue comes
up front.
You want it to be one of your books, Rob, where essentially, year after year, it's growing
and generating more and more passive income.
So every single year, you're patting your past self on the back for having been so thoughtful
to have written this book that's made your future life so much better.
And this is what your new book is about.
Your book is called Write Useful Books.
It's all about how do you write a book that is essentially recommendable, that is basically
going to market itself so it's going to continue to increase the number of sales and the amount
of royalties it's generating for you without you having to do anything.
And I think this is like every indie hacker is wetsharing, not just with like books, but
with like products and apps and websites and stuff.
And what's cool to me about reading through your book is that a lot of the principles
are the same.
A lot of the things you can do to make a book recommendable also make an app or a website
recommendable.
So I thought we could walk through like a little bit of your book.
We did the same thing with your other book, The Mom Test, earlier last year, I believe.
And people really liked that episode.
So we should do the same thing here.
What does it mean to write a book that markets itself?
This is, let me just caveat this with this is a particular type of nonfiction.
This would not apply to a novel and it would not apply to a memoir or a biography.
But if you're writing a book that was useful, it solves a problem for the reader.
They pick it up for a reason.
They're not looking for fun or entertainment.
They're looking to solve a technical challenge or to level up their career or to whatever,
understand some abstract concept clearly.
Then you're building a solution, right?
Like they have a problem.
You're building a solution.
And there's different ways people screw it up.
Books tend to get written, like startups were built in the 90s where the author goes into
the tank for a year or two, then comes out and hopes everything magically works and the
people want it.
But I spent long enough in education, like I'm sure you've done this just because you
understand it and you do your best trying to explain it doesn't necessarily mean that
the other party is going to receive what you're putting down.
They're not going to necessarily understand it.
They're not necessarily going to be able to act on it or integrate it into their life.
And so like teaching, education, knowledge, it needs to be tested in the same way that
you would test the user experience of an app.
And so for tech, we have user testing and customer development.
And for books, instead of user testing, you have beta reading and customer development
looks pretty similar.
And you can do stuff like use one-on-one coaching or teaching as a proxy, as kind of a concierge
MVP for the book, because you get to test the knowledge without having to write and
rewrite a manuscript.
And alongside that, you're iterating on your table of contents because that's your underlying
kind of wireframes, the education design.
And if you're smart about this, you can get a solution that really works and you can also
confirm that the people care about the problem.
If you write a book about an unimportant problem, that's not going to get recommended.
And if you write a book about an important problem, but it's not the best solution, then
again, it's not going to get recommended.
So you need those two things to be in place.
And the way I think writing about the best book is one, you could either be a super genius,
what that's hard and not very repeatable, or you can scope down who you're serving until
you've chosen a very narrow type of person, the same way we niche down any other product.
And you can then write the best book for them.
So the mom test isn't the best book about sales or customer interviews, but it is the
best book about that for technical introverted founders because that's what I was and I had
to learn sales.
And it turns out there's a lot of them.
And so I could never write the best book about sales, but I can write the best book about
sales for introverted techies.
And that's what I try to do.
Write useful books is not the best book about all types of books.
But if you're writing this type of nonfiction and you have these goals and you understand
the product process, then it really resonates with people like that.
And then they're like, wow, no one has ever spoken to me so directly.
What this allows you to do is cut out all the other chapters so that what's left is
very dense with value.
And all these things combine to form this recommendation.
And also the long lasting is slightly different, but it overlaps.
You have an acronym in your book that you say, in order to write a recommendable book,
it needs to be deep.
So the D is desirable.
You're actually-
That's like, does the problem matter?
Right.
Does it matter, promising to solve a problem that people actually care about?
E is effective.
So does your book actually deliver results for the average reader?
That's what you're talking about.
Are you teaching effectively or are you just sort of, you know, bearing your head in the
sand for a year while you write and then hope and cross your fingers that people actually
learn?
Like I've read so many books about chess and I am no better at chess.
So those are books where it's a desirable promise, but it's not an effective solution,
at least for me as a reader.
The second E in deep is engaging.
So it's got to have a high value per page and feel rewarding to read.
Like ideally as a reader, you're like, oh my God, I got to write this down or oh my
God, I got to use this.
Like you feel like you're getting utility every single time you read a page.
Exactly.
And that's what James Clear did so well with Atomic Habits.
When you're reading Atomic Habits, every couple of pages, it's just like, wow, he did such
a good job of intertwining the actionable takeaways with the theory.
So you never feel like you're suffering through 50 pages of theory.
Every page, every two pages, you're like, yeah, I can use this.
I can use this.
And it's just so easy to get through.
And it's something you can plan for.
Like word counts matter.
Word counts per section.
What's the learning outcome of the section?
What's the word counts?
Okay.
That tells you how many minutes they need to spend to get this takeaway.
And you can kind of debug your book's reader experience in that way.
Well, the way you're describing writing a book makes it almost seem fun.
It seems like building like a web app.
Like it's like analytics.
Okay.
How many words they take to get this concept across and you're doing testing and tweaking
and you're building it like an engineer rather than writing it.
Like one would think of traditional author who's, you know, has a sort of tortured existence
huddling over a typewriter.
Exactly.
I mean, word count for a section is like the loading times for a page or the responsiveness
of an app because like the app, the website, it does something for the visitor, right?
But there's delays and the delays annoy them.
And in this type of useful nonfiction, word count works the same.
They're not there for the words.
They're there for the outcome.
And if you can deliver the same outcome in fewer words, then you've gotten them there
faster.
That's equivalent to reducing your loading times on your website.
And when you do that consistently through the whole book, like this is quite a short
book.
This is 30,000 words.
It takes two hours to read and you know, it's, it's punchy.
Well, at least that's the goal.
I hope it is.
You can probably tell me better.
Well, it's funny because like all of your books are pretty short, at least the two that
I've read.
Um, the mom test is, I don't know what, probably almost exactly the same length, but that was
just coincidence.
Not planning.
I try to make them as short as I can while still getting everything across.
The second book workshops and Bible guide was about twice as long.
Okay.
There's more to cover.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm reading a review on Amazon, actually write useful books as 119 pages.
Now the mom test is about 126 pages and you got it, you got a two star review from this
guy from the United Kingdom.
He's like, this book is 126 pages and yet it costs 22 pounds.
But it's like, that's the exact opposite of how I felt when I bought the mom test.
I'm like, Oh my God, I'm not going to waste hours of my life reading a bunch of random
craft to like every chapter, every word of the book is actually helpful.
And so you end up writing these books that I actually even, I feel better recommending
the book to people because it's short.
I'm not like, Hey, I'm going to burden my friend with this like, you know, 500 page
tome.
I'm going to give them like, you know, a short useful guide that they can easily return to
and flip through.
And so people do sometimes get mad.
It's very rare.
We've had two people leave those scathing reviews and complain.
They've both been from England.
I'm not, I'm not sure if there's something cultural about that where they want a nice
thick book.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's interesting and it's kind of a place where it's common for useful books
to start out with a perfect five star rating because the only people who are hearing about
them are people who have the problem and get individually recommended the book as a solution
to their problem.
And they love it.
And then they evangelize it to other people.
And over time, because the people who it was written for received so much value, they start
recommending it more and more widely.
And so it eventually starts reaching people it wasn't written for.
And then they weren't recommended it personally, they just heard about it because so many other
people were recommended it or received value.
So as these books, like typically the, the, the ranking start at five stars, just pure,
pure, pure, and then get pulled down to somewhere around 4.7, 4.6, just because of the, it's
like a victim of their own success.
And I also made that mistake with advertising early on where I realized we could target
broadly and because the book had such good reviews, people would buy it.
And so for two months we were really excited.
It's like, Oh, we can get a bunch more sales.
And then I realized it was pulling the reviews down because we were advertising it to people
it wasn't written for.
So after that, we went back really tightened up the ad campaign, stopped a lot of them
completely, tightened up the language, really clarified like, you know, it's for this sort
of person in this situation.
Right.
It sort of highlights why word of mouth recommendation is so good.
Because ultimately, like, okay, if you advertise, like you're going to be hitting a lot of people,
you don't really know who they are.
You can try to control that, but like give lemon to control.
But like word of mouth is going to be people who've like read your book and they know exactly
who they're talking to, to recommend your book to.
And they know what that person's problems are.
And they know if that book, if your book will sort of apply to that person, and they end
up basically recommending your book to the right people.
And so by building a book that's like sort of engineered from the ground up to be recommendable,
you're sort of like, I guess, increasing the percentage of people who read your book who
actually should read your book.
There's some books that kind of enter the public consciousness, the conversation.
A big one recently, the last one I can think of was why we sleep and lean in were two examples
in nonfiction.
And it seems like everyone's talking about them for like a month, and then no one's talking
about them.
And that's a very different type of recommendation.
That's much more like writing the PR tsunami or the, you know, this PR wave.
And it reaches critical mass.
It happened in fiction with Harry Potter and with Fifty Shades.
And that to me, I looked at that also.
And a lot of people, it was hard for me to find the language to describe, like I call
it the recommendation loop and it's triggered by someone having a problem and your book
being the best available solution.
But it was hard for me to distinguish between this because people are like, oh yeah, people
talk about Harry Potter all the time.
Is that what you mean?
It's like, ah, it's a little different, you know, that's more like a critical mass thing.
You can't design for that.
If it happens, you try to write it and maximize it, but you can't design for that or test
for it as the product creator.
So that's not what I worry about.
So describe this concept of the recommendation loop that you worry about, because you have
like a sort of a good passage in the book where you break down, okay, you've written
this book, the mom test, what does it actually look like for somebody recommend the mom test
to another person?
And by understanding what that process looks like, you can kind of understand why people
share and recommend books.
It's so important.
So for the mom test, it's that an entrepreneur has heard or an indie hacker, they've heard
that they got to go talk to their customers, but they try and they're like, okay, fine,
I'm going to do it.
This is uncomfortable.
I don't really want to do this, but everyone says it's a good idea.
So they go, they do it and it doesn't work very well.
Either it's really awkward, or they can tell they're not getting good information, or it
seems like busy work, or no one even agrees to talk to them in the first place.
And they go, huh, that sucked.
And then they either ask for help, they search for help, or they're just talking to a buddy
like at an indie hackers meetup saying like, Oh, what have you been doing?
I tried this.
It was really tough.
And as soon as they kind of verbalize or express that problem, or they search for it, they're
triggering a recommendation loop.
And this is potential.
It's not guaranteed, but they're basically saying, I have this problem.
And then if the other person knows about the solution, which, you know, in the case of
the mom test is like, Oh, you're having trouble talking to customers, you're getting bad data.
It's awkward.
You got to read this book.
It is the solution to the problem you're having right now.
As it worked for that, people started using it like they teach it in a lot of universities
now.
So that's more preemptive.
They're teaching it to people before they have the problem.
And those people don't love it as much.
They still like it because you know, it's a short fun read.
But they're not like this changed my life.
Whereas when people actually have the problem, it's like, this changed my life.
And you get such incredible evangelism out of it.
And originally, one of the problems I had was that my early drafts of that book were
too broad.
They were trying to do too many different jobs.
I was trying to explain how startups worked.
Then I was trying to justify why customer development is worth the effort.
Then I was trying to explain the traditional approach.
Then my approach.
It was trying to build people up to the point where they understood the context of the book.
But by then they've sat through 50 pages of theory and they're bored and they hate me
and they've thrown the book away already before they even get to the good stuff.
And so by just saying, you're already at this stage in your life, in your business.
This is my ideal reader profile.
You already know what customer development is.
You already agree it's a good idea, but you're having trouble actually doing it.
That's where my reader's at.
And I just start from that assumption, which lets me begin with my real advice on page
one.
And in this book, I assume that they can write.
I assume that they can make the time and build the writing habit.
I don't give any real encouragement about, you can do it or like, here's how to write
a beautiful sentence.
I'm taking that for granted because you get to choose.
You're designing a product.
You get to choose who it's for.
So choose the people who you're going to have the sharpest best advice for and they're going
to be most excited.
They're going to feel the pain and also be most excited to tell people about it afterwards.
That's such a hard decision to make.
So many founders struggle with that.
I struggle with that.
So how do you basically say, you know what, my book, my product, my website is not for
these people.
For example, with Andy Hackers, I kind of look at the community as like a tool for inspiring
people to get started.
And who needs the most inspiration?
It's the people at the very top of the funnel of entrepreneurship, the people who think
they might one day start a business, but they're not quite sure.
And it's like, I'm trying to convince these people they can do it and push them over the
edge.
But simultaneously, I get a lot of people who are over that edge and who have started
a company and who are working through these actual concrete problems and they're like
a different set of customer.
They're a different type of person.
They want different advice.
They want more practical advice.
And these two groups of people want very different things and it's very difficult to just say,
you know what, I don't care about group A, I don't care about group B or vice versa.
And so the fact that you can do that with your books is not only like necessary, but
also like impressive because it requires making some kind of sacrifice.
The way I thought about it and what reassured me is that no one buys the second best book
for what they need.
If they're looking at two books and one of them, like imagine a year or whatever, growing
a, you want to grow vegetables, like out on our terrace, we don't have land, but we got
lots of suns.
We grow terrace vegetables.
I've got a book on the shelf that's called something like how to grow vegetables in small
spaces on a terrace.
Because when I was looking at Amazon, there's books called everything about vegetables or
farming or whatever or plants.
And I'm like, hmm.
And then I see this one that's speaking exactly to my situation and I'm like, this person
probably understands my constraints and trade-offs and situation and that that's more likely
to be the best solution for me.
So I bought that one.
And people do that like by just being more specific.
Like recently I got a coach.
I'd never worked with a coach before.
I was having some trouble with focusing and everything really.
And the business is starting to grow and we need to hire people.
So I'm like, okay, I need to figure out this management thing that I've typically always
avoided because I preferred working by myself.
So I need a coach.
I need some help.
And I went on and I searched coach and I was like, ooh, there's going to be a big search.
And then I'm like, hmm, ADHD coach.
And suddenly it's like, okay, here's a person who gets exactly where I'm at and what I need.
And I don't know if he's any better or worse than the others.
I didn't compare, but because he was, he'd scoped himself down to a niche that related
to me.
I was like, oh, that's the person for me.
And it was the easiest hiring decision, right?
Yeah.
So what is your, what is your opinion of these books, like, like James and Mark's books that
do have a broader audience?
Like James wrote Atomic Habits.
There's no real niche for Atomic Habits.
Anybody can essentially develop better habits.
And Mark wrote the subtle art of not giving a fuck.
Pretty much everybody wants to not give a fuck.
You know, that's a problem that most people have.
Like, how could I care less and just be more confident in myself and be happy?
And yet they've somehow been able to sort of hit this holy grail of targeting a broad
audience.
It hasn't reached out and also is like solving this incisive problem where people recommend
their books and they're selling millions of copies.
It's so good.
And I wish I had an answer for you.
Obviously they've crushed it, right?
I've sold a hundred thousand books.
They sold 10 million.
So they're what?
Two orders of magnitude bigger than me.
So it's yeah, I have no idea.
I hope to one day figure that out because as you say, that would be the holy grail.
It's like all the benefits and wonder of the book and a book that sells 10 million copies
doesn't take longer to create than a book that sells 10 copies, right?
The production cost is essentially fixed.
Part of me feels that you can try to be the category winner, but it's hard.
Like you can try to win social networks as an entrepreneur, but it's hard.
It's like you're jumping into a winner take all market.
One person's going to win.
Is it going to be you?
Maybe they both did it.
Is there space for two books like that?
Maybe in the same niche.
I don't know, but it's like, it's hard, right?
Whereas one of the things I was looking for was reliability.
So 70% of nonfiction, traditionally published nonfiction doesn't even sell enough copies
to pay back the advance.
So the authors never earn a dollar of royalties.
And so for me, I was like, I don't need that much money to never have to work again, right?
It's more important to me that I had a reliable path toward secure passive income than to,
I mean, it's just a VC bootstrapping metaphor here, isn't it?
Right?
I was like, I want reliability, the way to make a reliably successful product since I'm
not a genius.
The only way I know how is to get specific about who it's for and what it does.
And then I will win more easily in that smaller arena.
I would much rather have a 90% chance of making like $20,000 a month than a 1% chance of making
$10 million.
Right?
I was chatting with Nirayal recently who wrote Hooked and Indestructible.
And those two books were both huge successes.
And he said for his third book, which he's working on now, he wants to target everybody.
He's like, I know this, and he's going into it eyes wide open.
He's like, I know this is going to be a harder task.
I know that it might flop as a result.
But he's had two books that crushed it and he's like, okay, let's go for the big prize,
right?
If I sold it, yeah.
And he's in a position where he can do that.
In his approach, he says he wants to write one book every five years.
So every five years, he takes a year or two to write a book and that's kind of to allow
him to stop and process his last five years of thinking and experience.
And I love that approach.
And he plans to do that for as long as he can.
So you talked a lot about books needing to basically solve a problem.
Like this recommendation loop that you were speaking of is basically somebody encounters
a problem, a friend or a colleague in the vicinity is like, oh, I've got the perfect
solution to that problem.
You should read this book.
And I think one of the helpful aspects of that is basically like the title, like what
do you say on the cover of your book?
And you call this the promise.
So how should somebody think about the promise they're going to deliver when they're writing
a book?
The equivalent, if a business has a value proposition in a customer segment, a book
has a promise or a value proposition and a reader profile, who it's for and what it does
for them, again, for this type of nonfiction.
And there's this trend in traditional publishing, these like one word lofty titles, like success
or transformation, or like light bulb, I don't know.
And a lot of what the traditional industry seems to do is to maximize a lot of their
plan is built around bookstores and impulse buying.
And you see it in the featured shelf space and you go, oh, I want a light bulb moments
or whatever the book is called.
And that could apply to me and you grab it.
And they've kind of got this narrative.
It's easy going.
It's like, okay for everyone, but amazing for nobody.
And it seems to thrive on the shelf space business.
You impulse buy it.
That's not the type of books I want to write.
I want books that write there for a certain type of person.
And so that means being specific.
These one word titles, for me, they don't work because when someone looks at the cover
a season on Amazon, they need to know, is this written for me?
And does this deal with the problems I have right now?
So the Montas subtitle, like the Montas title is weird and abstract, but you're looking
at the title subtitle pair and the subtitle is how to talk to customers and figure out
if your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you.
And it's like, oh yeah, I kind of get that.
And the workshops, the Bravo guide is how to design and teach educational workshops
that work every time.
Like I'm kind of verbose because if I was more clever and a better wordsmith, maybe
I could make those shorter while maintaining the descriptiveness.
But for me, the descriptiveness comes first and I'll make the subtitle as long as I need
to explain what the book's about and who it's worth.
It's perfect.
It's like kind of cheating.
It's a title and we just add an extra sentence here, but it makes it super clear.
I mean, your latest book is called Write Useful Books, a modern approach to designing and
refining recommendable nonfiction.
Like there's no way to look at the cover of this book and not know exactly what you're
going to get out of it.
That goes back into your Amazon ratings.
And this is a place where books are kind of different from other web projects, but Amazon
creates a pretty powerful flywheel and reviews are a big part of that.
And so if you can be specific about who it's for so that people can choose not to buy it
if it's not for them, then that keeps your reviews really high because you're only getting
reviewed by the people who you wrote it for, you know, until the book becomes successful
enough that the wrong people start reading it as we mentioned.
But and it's helpful if you can get the first 20 to 40 reviews all at five stars, then it
really puts the flywheel in your favor and Amazon has some interesting quirks behind
the scenes like there's hidden flags that get thrown for a book.
If you get five days in a row of organic sales and organic reviews and it increases the amount
of places where Amazon will put your book.
And if you think about Amazon as a search engine, they're not only trying to show you
the most relevant result, they're trying to show you the combination of relevance and
conversion rate because they get a cut of product sold.
And so if your book gets reviewed better, sells better, right, they're going to push
it higher up the rankings even if it's lacking in relevance because they're like, hey, this
book converts.
People buy it.
They love it.
Then they'll actually add you into extra categories that you didn't even list for.
They'll start prioritizing you.
It's like someone doing your advertising for you.
Have you ever read the book Contagious?
It's a great book.
I highly recommend it.
But I read this earlier this year, at least half of it.
And it reminds me so much of kind of the principles that you're talking about and write
useful books about shareability.
And so I think a lot of people when we think about like products and books that get shared,
sort of like our intuition tells us people share things because they love them, right?
Like, oh, if you write something that somebody really loves, if you make a product that like
is delightful, people will tell their friends and family about it.
And it's like, that's kind of sort of true sometimes, but like not really.
You know, it's funny stuff that like you and I have read that we don't tell anybody about.
And then you were saying earlier, there's like books you've read where you're like,
this was crappily written and the covers all wrong.
But like you recommend it anyway because it like it solves this incisive problem for people.
And the sort of chief sort of takeaway from this book Contagious is like, well, there's
like five or six things that make an idea contagious that make us share.
And one of them, like the number one is social currency, which is that like one of the reasons
why we share things is because we want to look good ourselves by recommending things
to people.
And like it turns out, if your friend or your coworker has a problem, and you know the solution
to that problem, and it's this very neatly packaged book title that you can give them,
or you know, an app or a product or something, and you can say that, then that's awesome.
And you look good and feel good about yourself.
And they think highly of you.
And so I thought that was very interesting reading sort of your recommendation loop and
thinking about Contagious and thinking about the times I've recommended a book to somebody
it's has been when I thought that it would probably make me look good to recommend that
book.
I don't want to read that book.
I know it's going to be actionable.
I know they're going to like it.
The same is true when founders asked for introductions, if someone asked me for an intro, and they're
amazing, right, their, their, their stats are going crazy, their, their growth is great.
They're profitable.
Like, of course, I'm going to introduce them to every VC I know, because the VC is going
to be excited to hear about them.
I look awesome.
Everybody's happy.
And it took me a while to realize this, that people don't do these introductions for free.
Yeah, they do them for a reason.
And the same is true.
I'm sure Stripe benefited from this in the early days, because back then you were dealing
with these messy payment gateways, setting up payments was a nightmare.
And every startup founder would be like, oh, every indie hacker, oh, how do I do this?
This sucks.
Like, why are these services so bad?
And someone's like, oh, you got to try Stripe.
It solves this issue.
And it's like, okay, great.
There it is.
Exactly.
But in order for this to work, obviously, the book has to actually be good, right?
People have to be good.
People and they read it, they can't be like, this is shit and put it down.
Like, they've got to be getting these dopamine hits from every page.
They got to have some actionable takeaway.
How do you actually write a book that is effective and engaging?
How do you make sure that what you're writing is something that people are going to enjoy
and recommend to their friends?
Pre-manuscript, I use teaching and coaching.
And I basically look for volunteers.
So when we were writing the Workshop Survival Guide, we tried to find a few people who were
trying to get started and raise their rates as freelance workshop facilitators.
And we just coached them.
And we got their rates from like 500 per day to 2000 per day.
And for them, that was a pretty meaningful change.
And they were really happy with it.
And we're like, okay, that was just running the process that we're going to put in the
book.
And there were some places where stuff didn't work or they couldn't understand or they couldn't
apply.
So we tried changing them or we removed them.
Pretty helpful.
You may already have this.
You know, like you spend your whole life doing indie hacker stuff.
So you've helped a lot of people through this transition.
So if you sat down to write a book, you would probably already have all of this loaded in,
which would make your first draft just fundamentally better because you already have this teaching
experience and this customer contact.
It's one of the reasons books like April Dunford is obviously awesome about product positioning.
So many of these great books, they come out of people who have had a coaching or a teaching
practice beforehand.
James Clear did it differently, right?
He did it through blogging and Arvid Kahl did the same and Marty Kagan also, they all
use blogging as their way to test the early ideas and figure out what works.
I think both are fine.
And then post manuscript, you kind of go into the tank and you write the first three drafts.
And this is the stage where like, I just got to program this.
I just got to do the work.
And that's the bit of the modern process that still feels the most like the traditional
process because you just need those drafts.
You don't need to do the whole book, but you need a chunk that's big enough to deliver
a value.
Once you got the manuscript, you jump into early beta reading.
Beta reading is not pre-sales and it overlaps like halfway through beta reading.
I like to start pre-selling and even doing early access where my beta readers become
paid beta readers and because it's early access, right?
And then they get the finished book.
And what people get wrong about beta reading is, well, one, you want the right tools.
Google docs is fine or we're building one called help this book that I use for my book
that's, you know, does some extra nice things.
And you don't want to be sending PDFs because books like any other products, they rely on
the speed of iteration and the number of iterations.
And if you're sending PDFs, people take say four weeks to get started or to read it.
You don't know.
Are they making progress?
Are they not reading it?
Did they read chapter one and then give up?
So you want to use an online tool so that you can kind of see the engagement and also
importantly see the abandonment.
If they left lots of comments in chapters one and two and then they disappeared, something
happened.
Like was chapter three undesirable?
Was chapter two a bit of a grind and wore them down and they didn't want to continue?
Like what's happening?
Did they realize the book was misrepresented and wasn't for them?
And so you want to run this in like tight iterations.
I do two to eight weeks early on is faster because usually like the book is worse.
So people give up sooner.
And so you only have data to improve the first couple of chapters, which makes the iterations
really quick.
And then as you make the book better, people are getting further and further through it.
They're loving it.
The comments in the beginning are getting really good.
The comments at the end are still confused because you haven't had this many iterations
on the end bit and those get slower.
And over time it just, you have more words to deal with.
I look for a couple of signals.
I look for most beta readers are registering the end and receiving value.
And I look for at least some of the beta readers are bringing their friends.
So they're basically asking for permission saying, Hey, I know someone who really needs
to read this.
I've sent them to the manuscript also.
And that's early evidence of the recommendation loop.
And so the teaching gives me effectiveness.
The beta reading gives me effectiveness and engagement.
And then you get these early signs of the recommendation loop functioning.
Yeah.
And so you know, you're optimizing for the right thing because it's subtle.
If you, if you optimize for like, I'm getting lots of people who tell me this is great,
but then none of them bring their friends that you've written a book that people like,
but that's not recommendable.
Even if you have a book that people are like, I hate it.
But then like you see on the Google Doc that they've got like 10 friends in here.
What else is important about beta reading?
It's really helpful to get negative and big picture feedback.
So you kind of need to tell people that you're okay with that.
And that's what you need.
There's a little bit of guiding the testers to the right kind of feedback.
I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for a web app, but you want to know the bad
news, right?
And you don't want them focused on typos when you're still trying to figure out if they
want it.
And it works.
But it's like the customer development journey, like discovery, validation, et cetera.
You kind of go through these steps with the book in order, worrying about editing too
soon and making the words beautiful is the equivalent of premature scale in a tech product
or like being a hundred percent secure when you're still not sure if anyone even wants
it.
And so you want to do things in the right order.
It just lets you get more iterations out and get a better product.
Yeah.
I was just looking at, I'm building a job board for indie hackers and I was just looking
at other job boards online.
And one of them is created by Peter levels, who I mentioned earlier, Tromoto K for like,
you know, remote digital nomads, finding jobs.
And like all over his website, he's got like a feedback box and he's like, leave feedback
here.
Even when you go to post a job, part of the process is leave feedback for how to make
this job thing better.
And he kind of guides you to how to like leave feedback.
He's not just like leave feedback.
He's like, here's what this box is for.
He's here's the type of feedback I want.
He says, please be radically honest.
You know, he's encouraging people to be negative because that's how it gets good feedback.
So I love that idea of guiding people to get the right sort of feedback and you can do
it for web apps and for books apparently.
Yeah.
It's it blows people's minds, but it's pretty straightforward.
And like what they the guys who wrote a startup of you read Hoffman and Ben Kaznocha.
Ben wrote a really good post mortem after the book came out and obviously it was a very
successful book.
It did well.
It sold a lot of copies, but he said that they'd followed the industry's traditional
process when they were writing it.
And so they worked really hard on it for a year.
They had their launch date.
They had their publisher, all this stuff.
And then after it was edited, they sent it out to early review readers and I'm paraphrasing.
But Ben basically said, we immediately learned that the book was completely wrong, but we
didn't know why.
Like the book didn't work, but we didn't know why.
And so our choice was to release a book that we knew didn't work for readers or to kick
the launch date back nine months and basically restart.
And they obviously chose to kick back the launch date and rewrite the whole thing.
But by then they'd already done the editing, they'd already done the rewrites, they'd already
done all this stuff.
It's the worst time to learn that it doesn't work for your readers.
And I love that postmortem because it was so honest and they did the work to their credit
and they fixed it.
But it's better if you can avoid that in the first place by using this modern stack and
treating the book like a product.
It's a lot more fun too, I think.
It sort of seclude yourself in isolation and just like build something without showing
anybody or like write a book without telling anybody is like, it's not that fun.
It's not that energizing.
You're probably going to be full of doubt, especially if you listen to this podcast,
you're going to be like, oh shit, my book write for people.
But if you're like working people the entire way, you've got beta readers, beta testers
and you're getting feedback, you can kind of course correct.
It's more fun and you're not doing it alone.
And it completely deals with imposter syndrome and also the uncertainty of launch.
Like imagine the stress of, I'm going to launch, I don't know if this is going to work or not.
Whereas with not so much for the mom test because the mom test, I got kind of lucky
because I've noticed that a lot of products people and entrepreneurs, they tend to approach
books this way intuitively and whatever that would end up working.
I ran the process more intentionally for my second and third books and it was crazy because
I felt no fear while releasing them because I knew it would work because I'd seen the
data from readers.
And especially with write useful books, I actually, it started because a friend of mine
in Barcelona, Veronica said, hey, Rob, I'm going to write a book and you give me some
advice.
And I said, yeah, but before we meet, let me send you just some tips and read these
tips first and then we can talk specifically about your book instead of rehashing the basics.
And it ended up being a 10 page long bullet point list.
Just like do this, don't do this, this matters, this isn't important, boom, boom, boom, boom,
boom.
And as soon as we showed up, the first words out of her mouth were, can I send this list
to a few friends?
I was like, oh, that's an interesting early signal.
And then basically from then I was like, cool, yeah, let me talk to them.
Let me answer their questions.
And that was my reader conversations.
And I just iterated from there.
And that list of 10 page lists basically expanded out into the book over time.
We've talked about how to write a book that's recommendable, basically, such that, you know,
hopefully it follows the same trajectory as a mom test where every year you look at the
revenue and it's more and more than the previous year, you've done nothing, but you kind of
got to kickstart that group somehow, right?
You need like some initial seed pool of readers.
And so you've got a chapter in your book, it's all about finding basically your first
thousand readers.
How does somebody do that once they've written their book?
So the four approaches that I use is one is the podcast book tour.
The physical book tour is a total waste of time, but the podcast book tour is amazing,
right?
Really good.
You see your time if you enjoy it and you have the, you know, the, the interest.
Other options, Amazon's PPC ads are great if you are self published because it's a bidding
marketplace, right?
And since the margins are so much higher on self published books, you can outbid all of
the traditional publishers and still clear a good profit.
And I see self published authors all the time.
They doubt themselves and they try to price their book cheaply because they think that's
going to distinguish.
But from a customer's perspective, the difference between $3 and $10 is negligible and it's
much better to be $10.
And then you have the wiggle room to run your ads.
So this is what we did for the workshop survival guide exclusively was just asked for people's
mailing addresses and sent 50 copies to people we thought would enjoy it and who were connected.
And apart from that, we just ran ads, I was burned out.
My coauthor Devin was about to have his first baby.
Neither of us had the availability.
And so we're like, okay, let's just run the ads and wait a few months.
It sold about 50, 100 copies per month that after six months, organic sales from recommendations
were 10 times higher than those ad driven sales.
That's the easiest writing a public.
I think Arvid call did the best demonstration of this recently, you know, writing it as
blog posts, talking about it, using the book's own success as an excuse to talk about the
book.
He kind of turned his beta reading into writing in public and that's a killer strategy.
If you think of the book, it's basically 30,000 words of potential content marketing.
If you can break it into the right units and give them the right framing so that they're
valuable.
Early drafts of a section can be, you know, a post, an article.
That's a great, great, great option.
There's so much there.
I'm trying to get better at it because I enjoy writing in private, but I don't necessarily
enjoy the sharing.
And so I'm looking at my manuscript and like, wow, I missed a trick.
When I was interviewing Arvid about his approach, it's like, woo, how much value did I leave
on the table?
And what am I missing?
Oh, giveaways is the other one.
If you can give away, this is how I seeded the mom test.
One event, let me give away 500 books and another, let me give away 200.
And then I use content marketing to sell a hundred.
So I sold or got 800 books seeded.
And then I was like, great, that's enough.
Books either going to live or die on its own merits and its own strengths.
And yeah, the giveaways are the quickest, but it's like, it's different skill sets,
but like writing in public is like marketing, content marketing.
Giveaways is more like B2B sales because you're negotiating with conferences and trying to
figure out if they're willing to take the reputational risk and how much money can they
give you for printing costs.
The podcast book tour is like PR.
So there's different approaches and you pick what fits your skills and what seems easiest
for you.
Yeah.
You talk about like the different trade offs to each approach.
And so for example, the podcast book tour is like the most scalable because you can reach
so many people at once, but like the sort of like building in a writing in public approach
that Arvid took is like the most reliable and valuable yet time intensive.
It's going to take a lot of time to turn your book into all this content marketing.
Amazon pay-per-click advertising is the easiest, but not the most scalable.
And then even giveaways and bulk sales is like the fastest.
So if you've got the contacts, you've got the events, you can give away tons of books
super fast, but you got to have that sort of base to build on.
And I've got to say the podcast book tour is pretty cool because as a podcaster, my
favorite people to interview are book authors.
Like you weren't even like, Hey, Portland, can I come on the show?
Like I TMG, I'm like, Hey, Rob, let's talk.
You got a book out.
I want to talk about it because authors like tend to know the most stuff.
Like he's literally spent years researching a particular subject.
You're going to have like, we could talk for three hours, you know, we skipped over the
vast majority of your book, whereas like other people, even founders, I'll talk to them.
And it's like, they spend most of their time like coding and like filing taxes and like,
you know, they're not like learning a ton of stuff that they can really share.
And so I think the podcast book tour works super well.
Yeah, it's great.
And, uh, you know, it's fun and you meet people.
It's another nice side effect of writing a book is that you're, you're, you're doing
interesting stuff.
You're showing your thoughts and you make connections.
Um, Janelle Lloyd talked about this with newsletter, OS, how it's basically working on that product
as it's like a notion info product, but it's close enough to a book.
She said that, that built the foundation for her career because the people she interviewed,
the people who started working in public, they learned they could trust her.
And you know, now she's got a great thing going on.
Well, listen, Rob, I think people should go buy your book.
It's called write useful books.
The other is called the mom test.
I think pretty much any indie hacker, whether you're writing a book or building an app,
you should be the mom, the mom test, but write useful books is super interesting.
I think a lot of the concepts in it are broadly applicable to anyone, whether you're writing
a book or building an app.
If you want to know how people share things and you want to get some useful strategies
for getting stuff out the door, check it out.
Thanks a ton for coming on the show, Rob.
It was an absolute pleasure, Cortland.
Thank you so much for having me and good luck to everyone out there.
Let me know if you launch your book.
I'd love to see it.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.