nathanbarry

For sure! I always want to know the details.

Originally we had it all lumped together as 3 weeks, but then when we hired in California we had to split it out and have at least 3 sick days. That was done before we were profitable, so we may still increase it. Also since people work flexible schedules from home the sick days just don't get used very often.

I love the idea of having a car specifically for children to play. I'd pay extra for my kids (5 and 2) to have a place to play. Just a carpeted car with basic toys like many airports have.

Airfare is super cheap right now. So that helps. But most people in the US in tech will have access to credit cards. So it doesn't make sense to complain about someone showing you how to travel the world cheaper.

But you can get the miles for free with a credit card sign up bonus, so it is actually $1,000 per month. The entire point is to learn how to use travel hacking to pick up hundreds of thousands of miles.

I love travel hacking so much. In the last 5 years I've picked up about $40,000 worth of flights for just miles and taxes and fees.

Now my entire family leverages credit card sign up bonuses for free flights. Hopefully this course will help you do the same!

Hey thanks for sharing! Hope people enjoy the post and the customer focused angle.

I worked on it pretty consistently all along. Though there were a few months in there where I only did 10-15 hours a week on ConvertKit.

I'm not sure we could have. A year ago we had $10,000/month in revenue and more than that in expenses. It's really hard to be profitable before you have meaningful revenue.

We were profitable from July to December last year, but only a couple thousand each month. It felt like we needed to keep hiring and spending just to stay above water with supporting growth.

January is the only month in the last year that we weren't profitable (though most months were only $1-3k in profit).

Those are mostly from asking for volume discounts. At that time we were spending over $4,000/month, so it wasn't more than a 20% discount.

Now that we're at $10,000 per month I was able to get another $1,500 knocked off.

Yeah, now that we have a decent amount of cash on hand Wells Fargo and other banks have offered to reconsider on smaller lines of credit ($100k).

Ah, I didn't know that! For some reason I always thought of them as self-funded until that funding round.

A friend described it to me as AWS wanting to get a few multi-million dollar per year accounts. By offering tiny amounts of credit to every YC startup, they know they have a good shot of getting a couple of those each year.

Which totally makes sense.

Thanks for sharing this. It's exactly as you said: we were getting bogged down because the work felt impossible. That was affecting the attitude and productivity of the entire team. It's amazing how much more you can do when it feels possible.

The other thing is we had focused our entire 5 person dev team on helping support with bug fixes and help text / documentation for common problems. That took a while to kick in and lower the support load, but it's definitely helped!

Thanks for sharing this. I've always appreciated the HN community. Happy to answer any questions!

(Also, that's a weird title. Any mods want to change it?)

Really solid article. I love that it includes actual numbers.

"Apple has taken $600,000 (USD) of that in fees. Ouch!" is much more concrete than just "30% of revenue."

I'm running a deal on my design and marketing books here: http://nathanbarry.com/black-friday/

As an ebook author I found that the common email marketing tools just didn't cut it. So I built one specifically to help technical authors make more money.

I'd love to hear what you guys think!

Pricing an ebook based on number of pages is silly. Would you pay 20% more if he added an equivalent number of pages? I think the author should charge more for a shorter book, since it respects the readers time.

Maybe about 10,000. My email list is 25,000 subscribers and I've been building it for just over two years.

First, I want to congratulate Matthew on creating a truly valuable resource that people love and are learning from. That's the hardest part of any online business. Typography for Lawyers and Practical Typography are great resources that deserve every bit of praise and attention they've received.

Whenever someone creates something this valuable I like to see that they get paid for their work. After all, the only thing better than creating products and content people love, is getting paid to do it.

Based on my experience Practical Typography could, without too much effort, make $100,000 per year. So you can think of this comment as a short article titled:

"How Matthew Butterick could have made 27x as much revenue from Practical Typography"

Let's jump in.

// The numbers

Matthew quotes a few numbers in his post, but the two I want to focus on are traffic (649,000 readers, actually I'm not sure if this means visits or visitors...) and book revenue ($3676).

My blog actually averages a similar amount of traffic. For the last two years I've had about 660,000 visits from 420,000 visitors. So about the same amount of traffic. This includes plenty of lower quality viral traffic from communities like Hacker News.

I wrote three books [1] and each one of them made $100,000 within their first year (roughly). That tells me with the same amount of traffic—which is probably better targeted than mine—it's reasonable that Matthew could make $100,000 off of one book.

That's 27x times as much revenue as he actually made ($3676). What I find most interesting is that increasing revenue by 27x actually comes down to three simple changes.

// #1: Have a price

If the first rule of making money selling products is to actually have a product, then the second is to have a price.

Donations are nice, but you won't get nearly the same results as if you actually had a price for the product.

Now having a price doesn't mean you can't offer the book for free to readers. Michael Hartl gives aways his excellent Rails Tutorial [2] book for free, but charges for the PDF version and extra content. Pat Flynn [3] gave away his LEED Exam study guide for free online and charged for the same content packaged up as an ebook.

I can't share Michael's exact revenue numbers, but he makes a healthy salary from a book he shares for free online. Pat Flynn made over $500,000 in a few years of sales from his LEED certification study guide.

They both gave away their content for free, but unlike Practical Typography, add a price to a version of the product.

// #2: Build an email list

649,000 readers don't mean that much if you can't contact them. I've had plenty of posts that get 50,000 visits in a day, but then the week there is no difference in my business. Traffic is fleeting, viral traffic is just a flash in the pan.

You need a way to push new content and products to your audience, so they have to subscribe in some way. That means Facebook, Twitter, RSS, YouTube, Email, etc.

I'll just cut to the chase: email has the highest engagement and drives the most sales. Often seeing 10-15x the value of other channels [4].

To get email subscribers add an opt-in form to each page on your site giving away an incentive related to the content. In your case that could be a free font, a typography cheat-sheet, or additional lessons. It doesn't have to be a hard sell or seem spammy at all. Just say, "if you liked this content you'll also like... enter your email so I can send it to you."

Then give them an option to opt-in to a free follow-up course on Typography. Keep sending them valuable information and you'll build a loyal following that is happy to read your emails each week or month.

// #3: Setup automated sales pitches

That free email course should be dripping out free training every few days or once a week. After demonstrating plenty of value work a sales pitch into one of the emails. Simply describe the additional resources you've created or the benefits of getting the content in a specific format and ask them to purchase.

Then your next email should be educational content again. An email or two later you can work in another soft sell.

Since email courses are timed to when each subscriber joins, you'll have automated sales pitches going out to each of your subscribers on the perfect schedule. Effectively doing a mini product launch to just a few people each day—except that you don't have to do any work other than set it up.

Then later on in the sequence put in links to your fonts and other products. Having an email list is especially powerful when you have multiple products (as you do). Automated selling for the win!

Patio11 has a great course on this [5]. You can learn a ton just from reading the sales page.

Even if you don't want to charge for your product—which I think would be a huge mistake—you can still put in a request for a donation in one of the automated messages.

// Good authors should make money

Authors not making money from their work is a huge problem. It's frustrating to see someone put out such good content and not be able to make a living from it. Especially when the hard part is writing a great book, and it just takes a few techniques to actually make a living from it. This problem bothers me so much I actually wrote an entire book, Authority [6], to try and solve it.

It's also frustrating to see authors not be able to contact their readers, so I built ConvertKit [7] (email marketing for authors) to solve that problem.

Matthew, I'd love to see you get paid for your work. You deserve it. All these ideas can be implemented now and I bet you'll see great results over the next 12 months.

If you ever want to talk, email me at myfirstname[at]convertkit[dot]com

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[1] http://nathanbarry.com/books/ [2] http://railstutorial.org [3] http://smartpassiveincome.com [4] https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-worth/ [5] https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails [6] http://nathanbarry.com/authority [7] http://convertkit.com

I interviewed at ToyTalk when they were first starting out. Oren and Martin are both incredibly smart (both for what they build and for not offering me a job).

I love the combination of storytelling and technology that they've been building.

Just talk to Airbnb. They have really good customer support and if a host is doing anything fishy they will offer full refunds with an additional credit for a future booking.

I encountered a similar situation in Portland a couple weeks ago and Airbnb was great!

This video shows it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCj8q0gxmBQ

My thought exactly. Last time I was in London Uber didn't seem to have that many cars (I think they just had Uber Lux). Hopefully that increases quickly!

A GIF will play in an email. Unfortunately embedding a video in an email is still not widely supported.

I look back at things I said and thought a couple years ago and am amazed at how little I knew then. Then whenever I think I really understand something I remember that this has been a pattern for more than a decade.

Now I just admit that I am probably clueless and just try to make the best decision with what I know now. It's helped me to be a lot less cocky.

Oops. Fixed.

Agreed. It's brilliant. The great thing is you can see if that happens by just watching this page: http://demo.baremetrics.io

So true. I thought about removing it for this post, but then figured not many people were going to read it anyway (I was wrong).