robfitz

> It's like I'm missing some key element necessary to just start writing things.

You're probably missing the value proposition of your writing in general (what is your set of essays giving to the people who read it), and the thesis of each post in particular.

For the VP I use: "My essays all about helping _________ learn/be/do/become ___________."

Once you've got that value prop, you can get specific ideas by thinking about the type of person you're serving (the first blank) and thinking about the sort of questions that person asks you over a beer when you're hanging out with them.

Or you can use trigger questions like:

* Mistakes you've made or seen in this industry * Most common bad advice in this industry

Etc etc. I made a little interactive version of this process at http://whattowrite.org (it's a free and unsupported old hobby project, but it works all right).

Good luck. In the early days, essays/blogging are more about refining what you think, so don't worry too much about whether or not people read it. Write for you first (but with a reader in mind so you don't wander all over the place).

A kindle direct title can easily earn you $3 profit even if you keep the price very low, and more like $7 if you price it like a normal book. So if you're able to move that many copies, then certainly yes.

Self-publishing is more profitable per copy. With a publisher you'll make ~10% of cover sales (so $1-1.50 per copy) versus the above.

Publishers offer [small] advances and cover some of the costs like editing. If you can pay the $1250-3500 for a cover design and editor, and can do the marketing, then you don't need a publisher for anything else.

The resources you're going to want are:

  * KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing for main distribution)
  * CreateSpace (turn PDFs into physical print-on-demand and list them on Amazon)
  * Scrivener or softcover.io (writing apps that easily export to ebook formats)
  * Wordpress + Themeforest (or softcover) for a book page

And that's about it. Very doable without a publisher.

There are lots of freelance editors and cover designers, yes. Covers may run $100-300. Editors from roughly $1000-3000.

The marketing you largely have to do yourself, and there are a few different approaches. For business books, the main one is to treat the book as a regular old problem-solving-product and do content/permission marketing with a focus on building the mailing list.

For fiction, it seems that the most successful authors are serialising their full-length books into a number of chapters that they release monthly on Kindle Direct for $1-3 each. They focus on building their catalog of titles over time to slowly build and retain fans who then [hopefully] keep buying new titles or binge-read the whole back catalog.

There are also some premium consultancies that help self-publishing authors have a publisher-quality process through and through, for a price more like $10,000-30,000. And finally, you've got the parasites who will "offer" to "publish" your book for a small fee, which basically means the author is the customer.

And given that I'm currently borrowing (and conveniently forgetting to return) swombat's copy of the aforementioned book, I would have to agree.

I've been recommending it to everyone as a counterpoint to the Lean Startup stuff. It's hard to make a real decision if you've only got one voice in your ear.

Probably my favourite book I read this year. Well worth the time.

Any sense of what makes him that way? Is it something you've seen in other people as well? Is it a skill thing or a communication thing?

Any of the host companies willing to share details of the projects that were worked on? Quite curious!

Edit: Also wondering about the general experience of getting good work done with someone new to the team/project in just a couple days.

The Mom Test book (how to talk to customers when everyone is lying to you)[1] sold roughly $5k in preorders and another $10k since launch ~4 months ago. Probably 50% of that has come from speaking gigs where the event bought a bunch of books instead of paying a speaking fee.

It's on Amazon[2] as a paperback via createspace[3] print-on-demand and as an ebook via gumroad[4]. Both platforms have been great.

It took 10 months part-time from first words on paper until the finished book was in people's hands. Editing was the most painful part and took 3 months. I did the first draft on paper, and the revising in scrivener[5], which also handles exporting to all the ebook formats.

I made illustrations for it, but left them out since the layout was taking more time than it was worth and I wanted to ship it.

Incidentally, I'm also working on a book landing page generator called heylookabook[6] . I'm building in some of the marketing best-practices that I learned from working on my own, so it's there if it's helpful!

[1] http://momtestbook.com [2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Mom-Test-customers-business/dp/149... [3] http://createspace.com [4] http://gum.co/momtest [5] http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php [6] http://heylookabook.com

Quick testimonial:

I went to Georgia Tech and did a CS degree there from 02-06. I taught some of the courses as a teaching assistant and did a year of grad school there before dropping out to go through YC in summer 07.

The CS education was good and rigorous. It's much more formal than you need for web apps (as are all CS degrees I would imagine), but it was a solid program and has served me well.

When I was video blogging it reduced a 1h daily process to a 5m one, so depending on how you value time. In my case, my alternative was to pay a PA £15/h, so there was some [small] money attached.

I had socialcam on my phone post to YouTube. ifttt picked up new youtube videos and posted them as wordpress posts. Feedburner then picked up the RSS item and tweeted it.

So making a 5m video ended up taking exactly 5m and everything else was cobbled together as a chain of services.

You are conflating minimal and cheap. A good minimal design takes the same sort of person (who may or may not enjoy milky coffee) as a good design of any other aesthetic.

[HN Meta] Comments aren't ranked by upvotes. The stuff at the top has a combination of upvotes, recency, and a poster with a high average comment rating (discounting their most recent X comments). So if someone who is typically insightful posts something inane, it will still appear near the top.

(Edit: not that I actually think the original comment was inane. Forgot context when I wrote this -- sorry!)

For more css wizardry, check out the author's homepage and click on the big him: http://hailpixel.com

Have any other investors posted similarly concrete perspectives/guidelines? I've seen some fluffy PR ones on VC sites, but never anything this clear or honest.

Does anyone have links to good ones? Will any additional angels write up their own?

Thanks for this, Gabriel. Very interesting/helpful.

This isn't accurate. An "acquihire" is, by definition, purely about the people.

Face.com was an acquisition, not an acquihire (or talent acquisition).

As for retaining the acquired folks, you usually pay out their earning over 4 years rather than all at once. So if an acquired founder leaves after a year, the acquiring company keeps 3/4 of what they ought to have paid to that person.

Just realised I never said thanks for these kind words.

Thanks!

Enough people have asked about it that I'll add it asap -- I only check my email about once a day so it didn't even occur to me as a relevant use case!

It's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have long to wait! ;)

For example, I do a little video blog where I film a 1 minute video about my startup progress most days[1]

I make the video on socialcam, which sends it to youtube. ifttt then picks up the youtube video once it's uploaded and turns it into a wordpress post, then picks up the wordpress post and tweets about it. It turns a 5-step process (full of annoying upload delays) into a 1-step process with no delays.

I haven't found any consumption use cases for it, but I love it for tying together all the places I create stuff at.

[1] http://bootstrapchallenge.com

It's just twilio for texts plus django and a cronjob. Text messages are the use case I wanted most for myself, so I just did that first. I'll add email/twitter/etc if the simple version gets a good enough response to warrant it

ifttt is pretty much my favourite service at the moment. It saves me hours a day and everyone should use it!

edit: Well, let's say it saves me hour per day. Hours plural is probably stretching it

If you reply to the text message, it will cancel all alerts going to that number.

So if you are signed up to get alerts on 3 domains and only want to cancel one, you'll have to send one unsubscribe (which will cancel all 3) and then re-add the ones you still want to be active.

Not ideal in that edge case, I know, but I wanted to make sure unsubscribing was easy in case someone got cheeky and starting signing other people up.

Right you are. Glad I had the thing hooked up to notify me about this potential trainwreck! Big thanks for the heads up.

It's fixed & off debug mode now. It will fail silently, which still isn't exactly ideal, but at least it doesn't reveal its innards any more. Thanks again.

And guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!

Compliments on the internet are not validation! Fishing for them is an easy route to false positives and big heartbreak.

Don't quit your day job before launching -- that's the only way to get real data about whether it may work or not.

Ideas like this can't be judged good or bad in a vacuum. If user acquisition works, then it was genius. If not, then a flop. But I don't think it can be predicted in advance. Can you scope down and get v1 out the door in days instead of weeks? All the risk is in adoption & execution -- I don't think anyone here is going to be able to offer useful advice.

Index is one of the very top firms globally & it's super exciting that more founders here (in Europe) will have access to Index-level support at the earliest stages. Congrats to all involved!

Ya, exactly. 'Always Be Closing' helps performance for small-value sales where there's only ever a single interaction with the customer and the purchase price is low enough that they can't be bothered to come back and harass you.

For anything which takes longer than one meeting/call (e.g. everything a startup does in the early days) or which has a high value, though, ABC is actively counter-productive.

Neil Rackham did an awesome job of debunking most of the myths about hard closing in 'SPIN Selling', which is the only book on sales I've ever gotten real value out of.

The whole project is super awesome and I love it. Really nice work and am excited to see what you do in the future with this ethos!

Folks are apparently down on this. Why in the world? It's awesome!

How cool to spend 50 days digging into people's problems, travelling, and putting it all out there. I'd bet anything that his 50 days of travel have led to more advancement, opportunity and insight than almost any other use of 50 days.

Be happy and supportive for someone who is breaking convention and being prolific!

If only I hadn't made the idiotic decision to compete with twitter for the term "bootstrap" :)