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Comment by jordanmorgan10 | Hacker News Reader

Yes - it’s absolutely true that an existing audience is super helpful. No doubt about it. But I also like to tell people, it takes a long to get there too. But hey, there is never a perfect time to launch - so if someone is reading this and wanting to take a crack at it, I’d definitely encourage that!

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Yea but it’s like you said there’s an opportunity cost. And if you don’t have a strong following, so therefore a lower probability of success, that calculation is even worse.

Well….they had a following and an asset they transformed.

Step one is build the asset and the following. The book is almost the easy part relative to that.

But some don’t realize they can just….provide something useful and people will follow them. And others do have an audience and don’t realize they can make a product for them.

Why not actually follow up on this, and find an example of someone with success [that you're advocating], that goes beyond or similar success without the twitter following.

Sounds like a simple, control experiment. It's just -- will you do it?

I can't find the link right on hand, but I believe it was on HN - but there is a guy who does Ruby courses if memory serves. When I looked, he had around 9k followers on Twitter, and his courses have made over 1,000,000 to date. If someone is reading this is and it past of the Ruby community, they may know who Im talking to.

While no books related but apps, I know 3 or 4 Indies who are a wonderful living (close to 1mil) with their apps and their social following isn't huge - but they are great of marketing outside of it. Not the same thing, but kinda the same thing.

Given the simplicity, perhaps you could do it instead?

Yes. Launch you must. There is never a perfect time to launch. Rome was not built in a day :)

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