nathanbarry

Nice! What did you spend your time doing over the summer/fall?

It's hard to do in the consulting world. I've moved away from consulting, but know exactly what you mean. Another good reason you should move more towards selling products. :)

You're definitely right. It took me 48 hours of trying to stop working (or at least slow down) to show me I had to find something else to do. Now I'm just trying to find a balance between general life stuff and (more slowly) working on my business.

I max out retirement accounts (plus a lot more) each year.

I don't do consulting anymore. My living comes from products that will still sell (for a while) without new work. I'll be fine.

Wow, thanks for sharing my post. I'm honored. I wrote this quickly and didn't expect it to go anywhere (I didn't even send it to my email subscribers), because it was more personal to me. Glad you all are enjoying it as well.

I should answer a few things:

1. This is possible because I sell products. I don't do consulting and haven't for over a year. My products will continue to sell even when I'm not working like crazy to create new ones.

2. I live in Boise, Idaho which is not very expensive. I could live quite comfortably on $80,000 per year. In Q1 2014 I made $140,000, so I'm not exactly hurting for money. If I hadn't purchased a house last week, my bank account would have plenty in it. This is not a risky financial move.

3. The consulting example was just a story I heard from a friend. That's not me, I don't do consulting. Being able to do something like this is another reason I like selling products even better.

4. This would not be possible without the great team I have in place to run ConvertKit. While it still takes my time (and I really enjoy it) they handle all the support and serious issues.

Anyway, hope that clears a few things up. Thanks again for all the kind words and attention.

-Nathan

I think you're right. I found the article I was thinking of:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24patterson-t.htm...

Here's the section:

"WHAT IS PERHAPS most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of books it produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those books are published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size, mass-market paperbacks. “Scarcely a week goes by when we aren’t publishing something by James Patterson,” Young told me, only half-joking."

I was reading about this yesterday. Seems the publishing industry will release a hardcover, softcover, and then a small softcover version of the book. Not sure the exact benefits, but they wouldn't do it unless it made money.

Or just read all the articles I put out for free. I bet you'd learn a lot.

Very bold move Josh. I love this idea! This is a great example of how teaching and sharing can help everyone involved. Baremetrics gets more visibility and promotion (as well is demoed to thousands of people) and visitors get to learn more about what metrics they should be tracking as well as what is a good range for their own numbers.

Have you considered allowing other Baremetrics customers to turn on public access to their own data?

1. Yes, you are right. This is more of a tutorial than an redesign for the sake of doing a redesign.

2. Because Photoshop is far faster and I create much more visually interesting designs when I use it.

Everything in the design is very easy to recreate with CSS. But I agree, sometimes it is better to design in the browser.

Yep, there are always things missed. This redesign is actually for teaching Photoshop techniques more than it is about getting the best possible United search screen. For example, I didn't make any major changes to the flow or UX side of the design (which is needed for a real redesign!).

I use Stripe for my SaaS app, but for all my digital download products (ebooks and courses) I use Gumroad [1] which actually has really great fraud prevention. Not only that, but Gumroad will fight a chargeback on your behalf and if they lose they cover the fees. That includes both the credit card fees and the $20-30 chargeback fee.

You know a company that has taken responsibility for the related charges will work hard to fight fraud.

Disclosure: I really like selling through Gumroad (and once they sponsored a workshop I taught).

[1] http://gumroad.com

This looks like the work of Mike Matas and the rest of the team from Push Pop Press. Nice to see them be able to work on a full experience like this after being acquired by Facebook.

It's definitely a lot more work, and since I hate tracking time, it's hard to quantify.

The book is the majority of the work. I would guess that adding multiple packages increases the amount of work by 50-75%.

Good thing Ryan knew his audience: great UX is something I really care about. So I gave it a try and he wasn't exaggerating. The UX really is that much better than any other platform I had tried.

That actually made a big difference for me as well. When I had heard about self-published ebooks making money it was 37signals making $400,000+. That didn't inspire me at all since they had a massive audience.

But when I read Sacha Greif and Jarrod Drysdale share their numbers from small audiences (an audience size I knew I could achieve) I was inspired. They made $6500 and $8000 from their ebook launches.

Since I didn't have any kind of an audience at the time I thought if I did half that I would consider it a success. Turns out I did 2x!

I still share numbers, since I always have, but I agree that it is the smaller numbers that are truly inspiring.

Congrats Josh! Happy to have been a small part of the inspiration for you. Thanks for paying it forward by sharing your numbers.

My experience matches yours when it comes to email, Twitter, and other sales channels.

One thought: If you add a second price tier (a course with videos and add-ons at $50-100) your revenue will double.

Cmd + T, then resize it. Simple. Works as expected (they just released this feature in Photoshop CC).

Yep, Layer Comps are awesome. I'll cover them in more detail in the course. That tutorial was starting to get longer than I originally planned.

Both the button and text should, if possible, be recreated in CSS without any images at all. But if you have to use an image, you are right that the text shouldn't be a part of it.

From the Adobe site "While we are not planning another full release of Fireworks and will not release any new Fireworks features, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 and make it available in the Creative Cloud."

So you can use it, but they won't be developing it further.

I think now that Fireworks is gone Adobe will add more of those features directly into Photoshop. I think their live shape tools for editing the radius on rounded rectangles are just the start.

Agreed. That is one useless designer. When I hired designers I would only hire people who could write front-end code as well as they designed.

For the vast majority of professional designers Photoshop is critical to creating design elements. Not everyone creates a final, pixel-perfect mockup in Photoshop, but those who don't use Photoshop for smaller parts of the design.

It is very common to screenshot your rendered HTML/CSS, take that into Photoshop, design one portion of the interface, then take that back to code.

I've always referred to designing how things function as "user experience design." I agree that the terms aren't perfect. The skinning or rendering stage as you call it is still very important. Most of what we point to as good design (on the surface) is because it is well skinned.

I've written two books (http://nathanbarry.com/webapps and http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook) on end to end process, so now I'm working on teaching the practical skills to create the end result all new designers are looking for.

I think we agree about the process though. I always start on paper before moving to Photoshop and code.

I agree many interactions should be designed directly in the browser, but even the designers I know that champion designing in the browser (Ryan Singer, etc) take a screenshot and move into Photoshop when they have something complicated to design.

I'm working on putting out more tutorials on the topic. I just wanted to get the absolute basics out there first. My course will cover these basics, but also some pretty advanced techniques.

Stay tuned. More are coming!

I made Commit to help form habits. One of which is writing 1,000 words a day, for 500+ days.

Indoor soccer with 6 players (including the keeper) per team. It's a small field.