As I wrote in my last entrepreneurship journal post, I launched a book the week of March 18th, 2019. The book is called Rails Testing for Beginners. The launch lasted from 8am Eastern on Monday, March 18th to 3pm Eastern on Friday, March 22nd. Here are some stats.

The numbers

Email subscriber count at start of launch: 683
Total number of sales: 32
Total sales dollar amount: $988

Here are the sales broken down by day:

Monday: $388
Tuesday: $165
Wednesday: $232
Thursday: $58
Friday: $145

Here’s a Stripe screenshot. (The totals are slightly off due to test payments.)

Here are the sales attributions, based on discount code:

Email list: 22 (68.8%)
Twitter: 5 (1.6%)
The Ruby Testing Podcast: 2 (6.3%)
Reddit: 1 (3.1%)

Two buyers paid full price. Since both of them bought soon after my first launch email went out, I assume both of them came from my email list, which would put email attribution at 24 or 75%. If 24 of my 683 email subscribers bought the book, that would put my email-to-purchase conversion rate at 3.5%.

The sales page

Here’s what my sales page looked like at the time of the launh.

My plans from here

These days, when I find that I’ve done something that worked, my reaction is to do more of that thing that worked. I’ll explain exactly what that means to me in this case.

At the broadest level, my plan is to launch again, and next time do it bigger and better. “Bigger” meaning more subscribers to launch to and “better” meaning having a higher-priced offer and doing a better job of presenting the offer (for a higher conversion rate).

Since the conversion rate for this launch was what I’d consider in the acceptable range, I don’t intend to focus too much on squeezing every drop of efficiency out of that area the next time I launch. I think my effort is more profitably spent on adding a higher-priced product to my offering and on getting more subscribers.

Of those two things – more expensive offer and more subscribers – I believe I want to prioritize the offer. I know exactly what I plan to do, too. When I launched Angular for Rails Developers in the fall of 2016, my first launch was the book and then my second launch was a video package related to the book. The videos were simply walkthroughs of the book. They were pretty easy to create, and apparently people found them valuable. I plan to do the exact same thing with Rails Testing for Beginners.

Monthly income reports

I plan to pick back up with the monthly income reports I was doing for Angular on Rails, which I stopped when I kind of stopped making money. March 2016 is $988 so far which would make it my third best product income ever after September and October 2016, which were $1053 and $1580, respectively. I hope and expect that I can manage to avoid with CodeWithJason.com what I did not avoid with AngularOnRails.com: a couple great months followed by several shit months. My entrepreneurial skills are stronger now (thanks largely to 30×500!), and I know to anticipate the “trough of sorrow” now, so let’s see what I can do.