From Toilet Seats to $1 Billion: Lessons from Brian Chesky | Hacker News Reader

From Toilet Seats to $1 Billion: Lessons from Brian Chesky

startupsopensourced.com

77 pointsanateus12 comments

Ok....I would just like to say....dude...your marketing approach for this book is brilliant. I won't even lie. You have this treasure trove of interviews and every time they come up in news, you release some snippets from the book.

I think this is one of the most effective uses of 'new media' to promote a book or any product I have seen in ages.

After reading the Wufoo interview you released, I had to go and buy the book. Got it for the Kindle, am only 20% through, just read the AirBnB one last night and am loving it so far.

Every single time I see you post one of these things around the news, I just smile and think how brilliant you are.

So I figured I would say something.

Keep it up.

Edit: Would love to see some stats on how that's working out for you. In terms of sales and traffic - if you are going to do another post-mortem.

Wow. Thanks. That strategy was coincidental; I only knew I'd have to promote the book once I finished it, but I didn't know how I'd do that. As about a week ago, I got ranked in the top 50 bestsellers in 3 different categories, so Amazon is basically promoting the book for me right now. I'm trying to understand how the Amazon ranking algorithm works--I reduced the Kindle price from $9.99 to $2.99, and I am still unsure whether they weight downloads or absolute revenue higher. If I had to guess, they look at number of downloads first to rank your book, and I also assume reviews and ratings play an important role so I've been encouraging people to write reviews if they like it. I'll bump the price back up to $9.99 tomorrow and see how it affects the rank.

As for other methods of promoting, I'm always experimenting. I've noticed that giving away more content is a good thing, for example. You mentioned after reading Wufoo's interview that you decided to buy, but that was not intuitive to me; someone else who is an expert in the publishing space advised me to give away more interviews. I wanted to give away one interview per day for a week, and then realized I'd have to get the founders' permission. The first person I asked said he didn't want his interview to be cached by Google because it's too personal. So I thought maybe I'd just open the interviews up after companies get acquired, for example.

I'm interviewing John Resig tomorrow, and I'll make all of that publicly open. If you have some questions you want me to ask, please let me know, my list of questions so far: http://bit.ly/mHhA37. Stuff like that helps promote the book to varying degrees. Still in an experimental phase with everything.

Someone is interviewing me for an article on Friday to talk about how I've made sales post-AppSumo. So I'll cover everything I've done to promote the book in that interview (will post a link on the blog when it's ready). I have a blog halfway written on the topic, so hopefully will finish that soon (this book is paying my rent while I'm trying to focus on doing my other startup, so I'm not giving the book 100% of my focus right now).

Looks good, there are a bunch of questions he answered in his reddit interview that you have up there that probably don't need to be there (e.g. Resig knows Alexis and briefly did a YCombinator startup in Cambridge).

Reddit link here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/related/h42ak/i_am_john_resig_c...

I didn't realize until I read that IAMA yesterday that he was in YC. He didn't provide much detail on it, maybe I can get him to talk more about that--maybe other projects he would have liked to build instead.

People seem to be most interested in why he went to Khan Academy and how Javascript should be treated moving forward. He didn't talk much about Khan Academy, so will try to ask more questions about that since he has probably been there for a while now.

yeah, it sounded like he was interested in doing another YC startup in the future. Might ask him what kind of ideas he has poking around in his head.

The long-term vision of Khan academy is also most interesting.

Was telling Hacker News that your Kindle edition is currently $2.99 part of your marketing strategy? Either way, thanks for the heads up. Purchased! :) (I was thinking of buying it anyway, but this was too cheap to pass up.)

That wasn't intentional, but if a few sales came from it I can't complain about that. I made the page more explicit to point this out though, near the end. Thanks for checking it out.

I just purchased the book. To good a deal to pass. Thanks!

Oh, for those curious, the actual product Chesky designed that I reference in this article is called the PUREFLUSH. Here is the presentation on American Inventor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAWB5wzSUb0

Did the ever sell the IP for that? I wonder if a company like Brondell would want to buy the patents.

I'm not sure on that. Brian would have to comment if he's lurking, although not sure he'd know either since the company is separate. They still operate a web site.

love airbnb!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com