Show HN: The Found a Business Book – Interviews with Entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Found a Business Book – Interviews with Entrepreneurs

foundabusiness.com

76 pointsjjets71853 comments

Pros:

  - about half the interviewees are HN regulars
  - the other half look very interesting as well
  - nice sample chapter
  - DRM-free pdf
  - one good idea can from this can change everything
  - a thumbs-up from Dan Shipper
  - supports & encourages a young member of this community
  - re-confirms that the good/inspriring on HN outweighs the negative

Cons:

  - data inside may be free elsewhere

The Pros win. I'm buying it. Thank you, Jack.

Hi, Ed! Thank you so much for your comment and for buying it! I really appreciate your kind words!

- data inside may be free elsewhere

I thought about that too, but then realized that even though some (maybe many) of these people have published interviews "out there" for free, each interview stands to hit on some unique insight or thought that a previous one missed. Given all the other "pros" you mentioned above, especially

- supports & encourages a young member of this community

I had no trouble deciding to buy a copy.

I just wish I'd been this motivated when I was in High School. :-)

Thank you so much for your kind words and for buying a copy of the book! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Just bought the book too.

Worth noting that the guy who wrote this is 17 and still in high school. Pretty impressive stuff.

Thanks, Dan! I really appreciate it!

Interesting landing page. The choice of three <h1> feels weird. You usually go from <h1> to <h3> for the sub-headlines. The <h1> being the main hook. I would actually move your second headline ("Do you wish you could learn about business from some of the world's best entrepreneurs?") to the top, and then move the other ones to <h3> tags.Adding a picture of the book cover to the page usually helps sales due to how connects the price to a "tangible" product (even if its not). Make the free sample offer more noticeable. I did not see it the first three times I browsed the page. Tip: use a different color other than blue. The call to action button also washes away in the theme. Since you are using bootstrap, test using the btn-danger class (which makes it yellow), and change the button font color to black or dark grey. The page background should be a bit lighter to ease readability. Maybe use a light pattern from subtlepatterns.com. Instead of using italics in the second sub-headline ("Then The Found a Business Book is for you.") test changing the font color to a dark red. It tends to improve how much of the page people read.

Still, a very good start. Much better than most startups out there.

Thank you so much for all of this feedback regarding the design of the site. I'll definitely be sure to incorporate some of this feedback when updating the site!

Given that you are currently getting lots of traffic, the best time to test is right now. A .5% improvement could translate into quite a good amount of money.

Hi everyone! I'm the creator of The Found a Business Book. I'll be around for a while to answer questions if you have any!

Hey! Looks interesting. Who did the interviews, you?

I did all of the interviews!

Were they in person or via email as someone speculated?

It's a Q&A format. Probably done over email since there's not a lot of back-and-forth banter. The interviewer doesn't say "Oh that's interesting! Why'd you do that?" But that's not a knock, it looks good so far.

The interviews were done using a combination of email and Skype.

Gah. Sometimes I am so twentieth century. I keep forgetting such things can be done via Skype these days. (You can tell I'm not a Skype user, right?)

Hey there. The book looks pretty impressive! I'd really get someone to do at least a little bit of design on the landing page though.

There are mostly just basic typography and spacing issues, but it can make a big difference in how professional your presentation looks.

Thanks for the feedback and kind words! I agree that the landing page needs improvement, and that's something I hope to work on soon!

These entrepreneurs are great, but they all look like they do web stuff only.

The only thing I think about when I see this is: "The facebooks are great, but what about the Maersks"

Kudos to you creating something, but maybe the title is a bit too ambitious. The fact that you are 17 and have done this is commendable, but I strongly recommend that you reach out and try to get exposure to the entrepreneurs who build physical product innovations.

Best of luck champ.

Thank you very much for the feedback! My plan is to add more entrepreneurs to the book in the future, and I will definitely try to add people who have created physical products.

Godspeed.

Books like this should really offer a money back guarantee.

Why? It signals quality and enables speculative purchasing.

The quality signal I think is obvious.

The speculative purchasing is an incremental sale. Emotionally, I'm not going to purchase this book without a guarantee unless I've decided to commit time to read it. However, with a guarantee I can buy it on the chance that I might read it. It's not logical, I know, but it is how customers work emotionally.

Also, economically your guarantee is basically free. 99% of the time its not worth my time to request the refund even if I don't like the book. The 1% is if your book has made me emotionally angry due to its poor content (1 book I've ever read).

But, people will game the system? No they won't. At least not in sufficient volume to make it worth worrying about. If I want to scam a free copy of your book, it's likely I can find a pirated version faster than I can get my wallet and enter my credit card number.

Thanks for the downvotes guys. Might be a bit better if you engaged in the argument, but hey, you're busy and you disagree with something. Wish I knew what that something was.

Yeah, I don't get the downvotes. I guess this comment goes against the spirit of congratulations and encouragement in the rest of the thread.

Sure, money back guarantees work for lots of products. The late-night infomercials have proven that. And they work because they influence buying (it's no risk!) but don't cause too many returns in reality. Irrational human behavior.

But for $15, it's a really low investment for most people. If the price were a lot higher (even $40), it might be worth needing to offer a money back guarantee.

Does Starbucks offer money back guarantee on your coffee? If you drink the whole thing and didn't enjoy it, they'll give you a full refund? No. It's not for everything.

Money back guarantees are better for the consumers and better for the producers. There's still psychology involved at $15, and more than anything it's to mitigate loss aversion. If I spend $15 and the product sucks, I loose a lot more than $15 worth of happiness.

Its fine if these guys don't like the advice.

And, yes, Starbucks does offer money back guarantees, usually at the rate of "this one's free and so is the next one."

It looks like it's possible for authors on Gumroad to issue refunds: https://gumroad.com/faq

It's a book on entrepreneurship. It's only fitting that buying it is an entrepreneurial act (in the economic sense) :D

Seems there is only a PDF version? I'd suggest to add an epub and/or mobi version: Much easier/better to use on mobile devices and tablets. Of course, it is possible to convert a non-DRM PDF for customers, but it's a hassle. Moreover, you could think about publishing on bigger platforms (Amazon, Apple, Smashwords or even Leanpub) as well: that might increase reach. Perhaps lower the price to 9.95$ in that process - that way you'd get 70% from every sales through KDP (35% else).

Bought,

will read it on the train on Monday. Excellent timing since I just finished reading all the interviews in "Founders at Work" that were on my most interesting list.

I saw that I used Gumroad to pay for it and Sahil is interviewed in the book. I think I'll read that one first :D

Edit: Small piece of advice: Imo it looks better and is easier to scan if single points actually have some sort of bullet or similar. This goes for the landing page (you'll learn X,Y,Z) as well as for the table of contents of the actual book :D

Thank you so much for buying the book! I think your feedback regarding the landing page design and the design of the table of contents is great, and I will definitely incorporate it soon!

I started something similar with www.founders.cc (launches May 1)!

I'll definitely be buying this one as well. Looks like a solid list of entrepreneurs.

Hi, Ryan! I saw founders.cc on Twitter a while back. I'm looking forward to buying your book as well! I think you're doing great work.

Awesome! You should shoot me an email. I'd love to discuss both books.

DMd the email to you earlier.

This book looks genuinely compelling, and is the first "HN books" in which I've been truly interested for quite some time. Alas, the price is too steep for me, and, were I in a position to buy it, this book would likely sit dormant in my queue of unread books for months if not years. Still, good luck.

(As an aside, the website is downright unusable on mobile.)

Feel free to email me at foundabusinessbook@gmail.com and I would be more than happy to work something out if you want to read it!

When I was a teenager I was interviewing bands with a tape recorder and printing the interesting parts in photocopied fanzines we would give away for free at shows and record stores. Nowadays kids interview CEOs via email and charge $15 to download a PDF of their responses. The times they are a changing.

I'd like to buy, but ... in the spirit of only pursuing immediately-relevant and -actionable information, is there anything in here about outsourcing, and lessening the time expended on repetitive tasks? 4HWW-type material?

Cheers!

Hi! Thanks for the comment! I don't believe there is anything in the book about outsourcing or lessening the time expended on repetitive tasks. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Thanks for the honest reply :) bookmarked for later in case I need some info on the other topics. Best of luck and congrats on the launch.

No worries, and thanks!

Have you read Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guid to Launching a Startup? Quick read, lots of good info on exactly what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-ebook/dp/B...

Thanks so much for the heads up :)

I just bought the book! Working on something very similar (www.Disruptorsbook.com) but we both have featured different entrepreneurs and different angles. Would love to talk sometime!

Purchased, thanks for putting all these great opinions in one place. looking forward to the read.

Thank you so much for purchasing the book! Please feel free to let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Purchased. Great job putting this together. Looking forward to the read.

Thanks for buying the book! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Bought. Nice job, looks really interesting.

Thank you so much for buying it! Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

by chance, was this inspired by Mixergy?

Purchased.

I'm not a member of Mixergy, but I think all of the work Andrew has done with Mixergy has been great! This was in part inspired by Mixergy.

Looks like a lot of value here, and congratulations to the author / editor for shipping! One niggle though: no audio format (and if there is I didn't see it).

Anecdotally, I saw noticeable jump in sales to my eBook No Budget Budget: https://leanpub.com/nobudgetbudget when I added an audio book with it. Some people either don't like to read or don't have the time.

Something to consider.

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