Author Archives: Jason

Entrepreneurship Journal, 6/29/2016

Yesterday I did a book launch. It greatly exceeded my expectations. I’ll tell you about it.

I’ve had the idea for a couple years about writing a book about Angular + Rails. My site AngularOnRails.com is pretty popular and it stands to reason that some of the visitors there might like to read a book on the topic. The reason I didn’t write such a book was because I didn’t want to invest several months in writing the book only to discover that no one wanted to buy it (or too few people). I’ve experienced that sad scenario several times already and I’m not eager to do it yet another time.

I also couldn’t conceive of any other way to make money with AngularOnRails.com. This changed at MicroConf in April. Tim Conley suggested to me that I offer paid courses on the site. I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me before. I shared the idea with Brecht Palombo and he suggested that I pre-sell the courses before investing the time in creating them. Good idea.

It took my a while to figure out what to do. The plan I came up with was to start with a book priced at maybe $49, then evolve that book into a $200 course, then evolve that course into a $500 course, then evolve that course into a $1000 course, and so on, keeping each tier in place as I develop the next tier. What I would end up with is what they call a “product ladder”. Customers start with some little free offering, then buy the cheapest thing, then buy a more expensive thing, etc.

Yesterday I opened the book up for presale. I wanted to strike an appropriate balance between “don’t prematurely optimize” and “don’t half-ass it”. I also had a very hard time believing anyone would buy the book, so I found it very difficult to muster the motivation to do anything more than half-ass it. So I pretty much half-assed it.

To my surprise, seven people bought the book. All seven bought the $39 tier meaning my total sales yesterday were $273. That’s nothing compared to the $5,000 or $10,000 book launches I read about, but for someone who has experienced so many utter failures over the years, I’ll gladly accept a $273 launch. I was already happy after just one person bought the book. When the second person bought, I couldn’t believe my luck. Four people had bought by the time I went to bed, and again I was completely satisfied with this number. When I woke up this morning I discovered that three more people had preordered the book yesterday for a total of seven.

A question I’m asking myself now is what are the next steps. Obviously, one of the next steps is to actually write the book and deliver it. Delivery is scheduled for September 1st. I believe I should also keep the blog posts rolling so I can keep my email list warm. (My email list is a little over 300 people now.) At some point I should also create a not-half-assed version of my sales page but I’m not sure where to prioritize that.

Lastly, I’d like to make an observation. It took me 18 months to make my first dollar with Snip, and after that, I never earned more than about $60/month for a very long time. AngularOnRails.com has been around since 2014 (and I’ve been writing various technical blogs forever) but I didn’t decide to turn it into this-is-my-next-full-blown-product-business-attempt until April of this year. So it took me about two and a half months to make my first dollar with AngularOnRails.com, and instead of $30/mo like my first month of Snip revenue, I earned $273 in a day. Time will tell what my monthly revenue will be like from here on out but I think the time it takes to make your first dollar says a lot.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 6/3/2016

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In my last update I shared that I was officially embarking on my seventh attempt at a product business. My plan was/is to monetize AngularOnRails.com by offering courses there.

As of April I had about 260 people on my AngularOnRails.com email list, I believe. I developed a few different plans and scrapped each in succession in favor of a better one. Where I landed at one point was this:

Put up a sales page for an e-book (that won’t exist yet) called “A Beginner’s Guide to CRUD in Angular and Rails” (or something similarly titled)
Perform a two-week launch process culminating in a 48-hour purchase window
If enough people buy, write the book and deliver it

In order for this plan to work, I decided I should have about an 80/20 mix of helping/pitching. Because I’m learning Angular as I go, the blog posts I write require a lot of research and exploratory development. So I haven’t had much in the “helping” category to share, although some.

I’m glad I write these posts because articulating this stuff is helping me realize that I could really stand to get more specific about my plans. There’s no reason I can’t decide that my launch sequence will include X “provide value” emails and Y “pitch” emails, and then work backward from those numbers to figure out how many tech posts I need to come up with, and then queue up that many tech posts. That’s a much better idea than what I’ve been doing so far, which is to put out a tech post whenever.

As time passed I noticed a certain problem with the site. One of the site’s main jobs is to be collecting emails for my list. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out an opt-in form that would convert at more than 0.5%. Every time I emailed my list with a new post, a few people would naturally unsubscribe, and so I was losing people at a faster rate than I was gaining them. That’s no way to be.

Since the opt-in problem certainly needs to be solved at some point, and time is just burning while people are not signing up, it probably makes sense to prioritize fixing the opt-in problem first. I had an idea to kill the opt-in popup thing and instead put up a squeeze page for a “learn Angular 2 mini-course” or something. But then something unexpected happened.

I’ve been talking with some training companies about doing some Angular training for them. A couple weeks ago I scheduled a “demo presentation” with a certain training company for June 3rd (today). I figured a good way to prepare would be to go through my presentation with some people the day before. I decided just for shits and giggles to toss up a free webinar in case a couple people might want to sign up. It turned out that 24 people signed up for the webinar, which was way beyond my expectations, especially since my webinar “sales page” was comically bad and lazily done. That also of course means that I added 24 new people to my list. I also learned a lot about my audience from the experience. So I think what I’ll do is perform a webinar, say, every few weeks. I’ll put up a squeeze page for the webinar and collect emails that way, which might fix the opt-in problem. Plus after (or during) the webinar, I can pitch other products to these people.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

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I finished The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt last night. It was one of the absolute best books I’ve ever read in my life. One reason is that it was so well done. The other reason is that TR was such a guy.

From reading a couple Jon Krakauer books I get the impression that Jon has some kind of mild obsession with people who are really academically smart but also tough athletic guys. I too find those types of people interesting because the stereotype and the reality in most cases is that geeks are physically unfit and good in one area to the exclusion of many others. I always find it interesting when people are geniuses or at least competent in a number of disparate areas.

TR was definitely one of those people. He wrote a fuckload of books but he wasn’t just a nerd. One time in a bar a guy was threatening people with a gun and TR punched him in the face (or something like that, I don’t remember). There were also some guys out west who stole a boat and escaped in it and TR chased after the guys and captured them and brought them back to the town, which was a really dangerous thing to do. He could have just said oh well and let the guys go but he was too much of a badass. TR also famously led a group of soldiers called the Rough Riders into the Spanish-American war. The Spanish were shooting at them and guys were dying everywhere but TR didn’t even get down from his goddamn horse. Oh yeah, and he came from a really blue-blooded background but he wasn’t some dainty dandy or something, obviously.

TR also started life as a skinny weak kid who got sick all the time. His dad told him “You have the mind but not the body,” so he said “I’ll make my body,” and he transformed himself into a burly badass by working out all the time.

This book was long as fuck but it only covered TR’s birth to the time McKinley got assassinated. The next book in the three-part series is called Theodore Rex. Definitely have to read that one.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 4/19/2016

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Last time I wrote I said my client had unexpectedly run out of work for me. Fortunately, I did in fact find a new client at MicroConf. I traveled all the way to Vegas only to run into someone I had met in college over ten years ago who now runs a Rails dev agency. What a crazy place the world is.

Another thing that came out of MicroConf was a decision to kill Freelance Launch Kit and focus on AngularOnRails.com as my next product business endeavor. Previously, the only way I could conceive of to monetize AngularOnRails.com was to write an e-book. I talked to Tim Conley at MicroConf and he asked me why I don’t offer courses on the site. I can’t believe I never thought of that.

I shared my traffic figures with a few people (between 4,000 and 5,000 visits a month) and to my surprise, everybody seemed to think that was a lot. I had had no idea if that was a lot or a little.

I also met a couple other people who run technical courses as a business. I’m scheduled to Skype with both of them to compare notes.

My plans for first couple steps were to write two new blog posts to warm my email list back up, then send them another email asking them what they want to learn. I did write those two blog posts and the first one got featured in Ruby Weekly. (My writing has been featured in Ruby Weekly a number of times before as well.)

My next step will be to send that email asking what people want. Before I get too ahead of myself I think I want to find other people who run technical courses and see what they did and in what order. When people ask me for advice I always say, “If you want to be successful at something, find someone who’s already successful at the thing you want to do, and copy what they did.” So I think I’ll take my own advice.

My last product business attempt, Snip, was my sixth attempt. Here goes number seven.

What you should do after MicroConf 2016

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This is a post written specifically for those who attended MicroConf 2016. If you run a bootstrapped software business and you haven’t been to MicroConf, do yourself a favor and get on the waiting list for 2017.

It’s natural to think of a conference as a series of talks. As you already knew or surely discovered at MicroConf 2016, the most valuable part of any conference is actually not the content of the talks (although that’s great too) but the relationships you form and the conversations you have during the conference.

You spent a not-small amount of time and money to go to MicroConf. So what you should do after the conference is to put in a couple hours of work to hold onto the relationships, which are possibly the most valuable part of your investment. I’ll tell you how I do it.

First, during my conversations with attendees, I make sure not to end the conversation without asking for a card. (Some people think business cards have been made obsolete by phones but that’s very much not true.)

Maybe you didn’t get everyone’s card, or anyone’s card. That’s okay since MicroConf has its own Slack organization. If you remember the names of the people you met, you can look up those people’s email addresses there. From my stack of cards and from the people I look up in Slack comes my list of people with whom to follow up.

For each person, I do three things.

First, I send an email saying it was nice to meet them. I try to include at least one detail about them from our conversation to show them that I care about them and their business.

Second, I add the person to my CRM, along with all the relevant details I can remember about that person, including both business and personal stuff. Hopefully you’re using a CRM too. I can’t think of any situation where running a business and not using a CRM (or something like a CRM) makes any sense.

Lastly, I evaluate the person’s business focus to see if it makes sense for us to schedule a time to talk and learn more about each other. For example, my new friend Melanie runs a design agency. I know a lot of the kind of people who would hire a design agency, and she might know the kind of people who would hire a developer, so I’ll probably invite Melanie to have a Skype so we can learn a little more about each other’s business. A couple other guys do technical education, which is what I want to do, so I’ll probably talk to them about the possibility of a mastermind.

That’s all. It can be surprisingly time-consuming to do this for everyone you’ve met but it’s very much worth it.

If you were at MicroConf 2016 and you want to keep in touch with me (whether we met in person or not), please send me an email at jason@benfranklinlabs.com.

How I remembered the names of almost everyone I met at MicroConf

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If you take five minutes right now to learn the skill of remembering people’s names, I promise it will be one of the highest-ROI activities you’ve ever carried out.

The reason I make this bold claim is that remembering a person’s name is one of the best ways to instantly make a deposit in that person’s Emotional Bank Account and to make that person like you. Conversely, a failure to remember a person’s name is an indicator to that person that you don’t consider him or her important. You’ll make a withdrawal from that person’s Emotional Bank Account before you’ve even made any deposits and you’ll damage the relationship right off the bat.

(By the way, I failed at remembering people’s names a couple times at MicroConf but not nearly as many times as I succeeded.)

You’ll instantly get better at remembering people’s names if you learn one simple fact: The problem isn’t that you forget a person’s name. The problem is that you never really learned the person’s name in the first place.

At conferences you’re often introduced to people in groups. As you greet each person in the group and hear each person’s name, there are a number of things you might be doing simultaneously, such as judging the other person’s appearance, thinking about your own behavior and how you’re coming off, continuing to digest whatever was said right before you heard the person’s name, having an unrelated thought pop into your head, or any number of other things. By the time you hear the third person’s name, you’ve already forgotten the first person’s name.

The solution to this problem is to pay very close attention to each person’s name as it’s said and to take a couple steps to deeply imprint the name in your mind. When I met my new friend Ed at the conference I said, “Ed? Nice to met you, Ed. So, Ed, what do you do?” It might sound slightly silly but it feels pretty natural. It’s really very difficult to overuse someone’s name. People love hearing their own names.

That takes care of hearing the name but how do you lock it down permanently? I do a few things. One is to come up with a concept to pair up with the person’s name. I met a guy named Dele at the conference. I’m a big Hieroglyphics fan so I immediately thought of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, which was my mnemonic device for Dele. In college I met a girl at a party named Cate who I called “Cool, Awesome and Totally Excellent”. That was my (stupid) mnemonic device for her (but effective!). Another thing I sometimes do is to imagine the first letter of the person’s name imprinted on the person’s forehead as I’m talking to the person. Believe it or not, it works. Lastly, the simple repetition of the person’s name throughout the conversation is usually quite effective in permanently implanting that name in your brain. You can repeat the person’s name out loud or just in your head to yourself.

Put these into practice and you can avoid the embarrassment of forgetting people’s names. People will be impressed by your “good memory” and you’ll be more likable because you’re signaling to the other person that you like him or her and consider him or her important enough to remember.

If you were at MicroConf 2016 and you and I didn’t get to talk, I want to meet you. Please send me an email at jason@benfranklinlabs.com and tell me what you do and we can be friends.

Entrepreneurship Journal, 3/31/2016

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I’ve been subcontracting with a certain development agency since late January. On Monday afternoon I found out that they had unexpectedly run out of work for me.

I got to work immediately on Monday on finding my next gig and since then I’ve had four prospect conversations. I have one more call scheduled for tomorrow. Then on Sunday I fly to Vegas for MicroConf, so it will be an interesting challenge to try to continue my client search while also getting the appropriate amount of value out of my MicroConf investment. I’m hoping and expecting MicroConf to be a good place to find potential clients as well.

Freelance Launch Kit is on hold for the time being as I imagine it’s probably wise for me to put all of my focus into finding my next gig. This unexpected loss of work and subsequent scramble to find another client is not doing any favors for the imposter syndrome I was already feeling toward writing the book. I was also banned from /r/freelance recently (banned for 30 days) because someone asked how to build a network as a freelance programmer and my response included a link to my blog post about how to build a network as a freelance programmer. I don’t feel too upset about some overexcited moderator banning me but it definitely hinders my ability to be helpful to the community.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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I’m not sure what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was about but I do know that it blew my mind. I like Robert M. Pirsig because he seems to be one of those geniuses of infinite intelligence who is also just a regular guy who talks about regular stuff in plain language.

Zen mentioned a number of things with which I don’t have much familiarity, like Aristotle and, um, motorcycle maintenance. Lately I’ve been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People for about the fifth time (the original version, not the jacked up “updated” version) and I’m noticing now that I see it a little more clearly now that I’m more familiar with the things it references. I didn’t really know anything about Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt the first time I read it but now I do. I have a new respect now for how well-educated Dale Carnegie must have been. I’m betting that I’ll be able to see Zen in a new light some years from now after I gain some more knowledge and life experiences. Maybe someday I can even ride a motorcycle from Minnesota to California so I can really have some reference points.

The Art of Learning

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Since I value my time, I’m very deliberate about which books I read. There are so many “known good” books out there that it seems like a total waste of time just to randomly pick one. There are certain books that keep popping up on my radar so frequently that I eventually feel like I have to read them to see what all the fuss is about. I find that the fuss is almost always for good reason.

Having said that, I relish the occasions when I come across a more obscure book that turns out to be a gem. For example, I don’t know a single other person who’s read Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors but it’s one of my favorite books of all time.

I just finished another book that I’d put under the “hidden gem” category: The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. (By the way, for some reason I appreciate that he goes by Josh and not “Joshua”.) Josh was a chess prodigy as a child and later in his life, like in his late teens or something, he quit chess and became a martial arts world champion. Pretty interesting since those two things are obviously such disparate disciplines. The movie Seaching for Bobby Fischer was made about Josh Waitzkin. I was vaguely aware of the movie’s existence (I was apparently 9 when it came out) but I’ve never seen it. It was made from a book written by Josh’s dad.

The book talks some about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I find interesting because I listened to Zen like two audiobooks before The Art of Learning, but my choice to read The Art of Learning was, as far as I can think, totally unrelated to the fact that I read Zen. There was also an interview with Tim Ferriss at the end of the book, which I again found interesting because I just started listening to the Tim Ferriss Show a couple months ago but that also didn’t influence my choice to read The Art of Learning. And then today I noticed that Tim Ferriss’s most recent episode is a second interview of Josh Waitzkin! It’s weird how frequently those seemingly-improbable connections pop up.

I try to distill each book I read down to just one takeaway. This seems like kind of a waste of all the other takeaways the book has to offer but I don’t seem to have the mental capacity to extract more than one lesson from a book, at least not on the first pass. What I took away from this book is that opportunities beget more opportunities. Josh Waitzkin seems to be an exceptional person who has a certain way of mastering skills. Additionally, though, he was born in the New York City area to supportive, loving and intelligent parents and he had access to things like Washington Square Park that someone living in, say, some small Midwestern town wouldn’t have access to. Because Josh played chess in Washington Square Park, he was able to get noticed by a well-known chess coach, and then he gained access to more coaches. Like Malcolm Gladwell observes in Outliers, opportunities you get early in life often lead to more and better opportunities later in life. The opportunities have a compounding effect resulting in exponential progress.

I don’t think the lesson is that people who don’t get the same opportunities should be bummed about it or use it as an excuse or something. Like Dan Kennedy said, a fact isn’t something to be feared; it’s something to be used. It’s not immediately obvious to me how it might be useful to know that some people are given more opportunities than others. Dan Sullivan said that some people start life on third base and other people start life with two strikes. I guess it can be helpful to observe what your starting point in life was so that you can calibrate your expectations over time accordingly. An 25 year-old Charles Dickens shouldn’t be upset that he doesn’t have the same net worth as a 25 year-old Donald Trump, since (I believe) Donald Trump came from a rich family and Charles Dickens came from a poor one. To compare myself to someone who was dealt a much stronger hand could be needlessly discouraging to me and possibly actually hinder my progress. I might direct my energy toward “What the hell am I doing wrong?” instead of understanding that I’m doing the right things, it will just take me some additional time to get to my destination because I have to put in active effort as an adult just to get to the point where another person might have started out at birth. I imagine that the understanding that my journey might be longer than that of others who have had more luck in their antecedence could be helpful in making that journey successfully.

How to meet other freelancers

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I saw a question on /r/freelance the other day about how to meet other freelancers. Here’s how I’ve met other freelancers.

Local tech meetups. Grand Rapids has a number of tech meetups including a Ruby meetup, a general web development meetup, and a few others. I only go to the Ruby one and the web development one. At both those meetups I’ve met a number of freelancers.

National conferences. I’ve been to Windy City Rails in Chicago a couple times and met freelancers there. Last September I went to Double Your Freelancing Conference (DYFC) where I met a ton of freelancers. The people I met at DYFC are some of my favorite people I’ve ever met. One thing about national conferences is that due to their cost they tend to filter out people who aren’t very serious about what they’re doing, meaning every single person you meet there is probably pretty serious about what they’re doing.

Jobs and freelance gigs. In the past I’ve tried to keep in touch with my former employers and co-workers after I’ve left jobs. Sometimes these people go freelance later. I’ve also found that the kind of clients who will hire me as a freelancer will also hire other freelance developers. I like to reach out to these people and make it a point to form relationships with them because these relationships can be mutually helpful as time goes on.

Online communities. When I bought Double Your Freelancing Rate I was given access to something called The Freelancer’s Guild, on online forum. This forum has been a good place to ask and answer questions with other freelancers. The other day I reached out to someone I found on /r/freelance and had a Skype with him. Now we have each other in our network. I also run a Slack organization full of freelance developers.

By following influencers. I listen to a number of freelancing podcasts, follow freelancers on Twitter, and occasionally read freelancing blogs. Sometimes I comment on what these people are saying. Sometimes a conversation emerges, and sometimes out of those conversations a relationship develops.

This blog. Just like I sometimes engage with people I follow, there are some people who follow me (inexplicably) and engage with me. This is another way I’ve met people. If you’d like to meet me this way, send me an email at jason@jasonswett.net. I’d love to talk with you.