HN user
What I did at first is I bought stuff from competitors or similar products. It was easier for me since I considered it market research in my head :) But now of course it's a lot easier to spent the money I've made online on other products. I feel like I give back when I do so. This is all just a story you tell yourself.
Sorry about that, I think I fixed it. My english is not as good as it should indeed. You can see I "translated" valorizing straight from French there...
Great presentation! Some exciting new stuff in Eventmachine.
1. I did everything myself, except reviewing
2. Sorry the old page is gone, it was a very crappy 2 colors page w/ a box in the middle w/ bullet points. My idea was, if I get decent CR on this, I'm guaranteed to sell some. I don't remember the CPC and the bid, but I spent 50$/day for 2 days on just a few keywords (about 10 iirc).
Of course I was not working full time on this. Most publishers give an advance of $6K when writing a full book, which can take a year or so. Nice article about this: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/
No I'm not worried. I'm just trusting people buying the book like they are trusting me by buying it. I hate penalizing everyone for what some people might do.
Also, it's a pretty small niche and it got good exposure when it came out. I think it would be hard to copy and sell it to the same market again.
Thx a lot! I'm also surprised by the low quality of most products on ClickBank & other sites. That's why I'm talking openly about it, I'm sure most geeks here could do way better then everything on those sites.
Based on other similar package/eBooks around at that time and the price it cost me to run AdWords for 1 day. The initial market research w/ AdWords can also help choosing a price. According to my tests, I guessed I could sell one book per day w/ ads, which cost ~50$/day. I thought $50 was too much, so cut it back to $40.
Aww yes I need to learn LaTex :/
1. I've been interested in language and VMs about 1 year ago, built http://code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/ and a couple other languages.
2. No, it all started w/ a passion for languages. I had the idea to write a book after reading 4 Hour Work Week
3. What do you want to know exactly? I used the keywords "create programming language" iirc
4. Yes, I think it helped a lot. The only "marketing" I've done is on Twitter and my blog (also recently on my site http://refactormycode.com). I was surprised by the success, but I'm now convinced that OSS can pay in a way or another.
I've heard ppl selling a lot more then I did in a lot less time. Self-publishing is probably less glamourous, but surely more profitable.
That's why it's important to sell more than just an ebook. I included 2 full languages you can use in OSS, http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ started from the Ruby language included in the package. + screencast and more. Also the book is amazingly good :p
ClickBank is ok, a little better the e-junkie, but e-junkie has digital delivery built-in, but still... we're very far from the nice UIs we usually take for granted in our community. My dream setup would be Shopify + http://www.fetchapp.com/ but this is quite expensive for my low volume.
5 so fare fyi.
It started as an experiment to apply what is described in the 4 Hour Work Week book, Muse Project chapter. I've learned about marketing and ebook publishing mostly by looking at how others did it. http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/ came out a little bit before mine so I was inspired by it a little.
Yes exactly! It works for everything you want to sell online.
Writing took about 2 months IIRC. But the learning took >1 year :p
e-junkie is OK, but the UI is horrible, it's all in flash. I went w/ e-junkie at 1st because of the coupon code that gave me 120 days for free & because they handle all the digital delivery logic like link expiry. I'm now w/ ClickBank as it seems to be more popular w/ affiliate marketers, only costs an upfront $50 & can accept multiple methods of payment.
Yes yes of course! Don't try this unless you can land other stuff. I've been snowboarding for 15 years and still land on my butt most of the time, but I know how to avoid breaking my neck.
The point I was trying to make is that most of the time, what prevents you from doing something is not lack of skill, but lack of confidence / courage.
Yes we tried XMPP at first but was way to complex for our needs.
We use Orbited for comet. The backend chat server is custom and based on RabbitMQ. See our protocol on https://talker.tenderapp.com/faqs/api/talker-protocol
Yes! That's what we're working on now, we just decided to launch before we had video/tour on the site. Thx for the suggestion.
Talker is more extensible, we're focusing on API and plugins http://talker.tenderapp.com/faqs/api, has inline feed notification for eg.: github commits, twitter search results, tickets updates in the chat room. And a lot more to come.
Talker also has a free version (4 concurrent users) https://talkerapp.com/signup/free