In September I joined a 2 Week Product Challenge led by @jsjoeio, inspired by @dvassallo. During that time I wrote and published my first ebook Getting Started in Developer Relations.

Here's a thread on the process & tools I used, what worked, and what didn't.

I used @draftsapp as a scratch pad and @NotionHQ to plan out the content & compile all of the links and resources I would include. Notion makes it really easy to drag around blocks of content and create databases that you can refer back to.

I wrote the book in @ulyssesapp and it turned out to be a great platform for writing and for generating the final PDF. Ulysses has a custom styling format (basically "CSS lite") that let me shape the book how I wanted without too much hassle.

I hired someone on @fiverr to do the cover. It took a while to hammer out the look and feel, but it was well worth it. It cost me about $90 to get this cover, but that's only because I misunderstood something & had to pay for an additional revision (& still worth every penny).

One thing that was kind of annoying about Ulysses is that it doesn't support TOC generations or anything else. I had to manually stitch together Ulysses' output with the cover and TOC I made in Pages. Not ideal and it makes the book difficult to maintain.

Rather than have an appendix of resources at the end of the book, I created a page on my site that I linked to at the end of each chapter. That way I don't have to release a new version of the book every time I want to tell readers about a new resource. https://www.samjulien.com/devrel-book-links

I used @Podia to sell the book, which gives me flexibility to upload new versions or add additional formats/downloads & immediately give all customers access. Podia also lets you do a "pre-launch" status where you can collect email addresses. I set this up with @ConvertKit.

I bought a custom domain ( http://gettingstartedindevrel.com ) and pointed it to the landing page for Podia instead of writing a custom page. I might replace that landing page at some point, but it wasn't critical to get it shipped.

What worked:

I got a much bigger reaction than I expected when the book launched. I was expecting a handful of sales over a few days but broke 100 within 24 hours. This tells me I struck a chord with people looking to get into dev rel, which is super encouraging.

I priced the book at $9. I wanted to make it easy to purchase and easy to discount, a no-brainer. That price point seems to be right. I was originally going to boost the price to $19, but I've decided to do that if I do a revised and expanded second edition.

The book has definitely driven a lot of growth in my email list on @ConvertKit. I have an automation set up to put customers through a welcome sequence, which then transfers them to my main email list. There are opt-out links for each sequence as well as unsubscribe links.

What I learned:

Formats are WAY harder than expected. Ulysses was great for PDF but didn't do ePub/mobi well. I hired someone to convert them & it was all still a mess. Next time I need to write in a format that can easily output all 3 like Bookdown: https://bit.ly/3855Pa7 

The integration between ConvertKit and Podia isn't quite perfect. Sometimes the lists don't sync properly, and if someone was already on the list and purchases, they don't get necessarily get updated with that status. This meant a lot of re-importing, double-checking, etc.

My previous upgrade course was on a different platform that used the Stripe API, so I had a bunch of CK automations around Stripe purchases. Stripe doesn't differentiate between products, so a bunch of people got emails about ngUpgrade before I could catch on & restructure.

Team purchases are a manual process. I have to create an invoice on PayPal, then have the customer send me a list of email addresses to manually enroll. This makes those customers appear to be "free" customers, which means group purchases don't get included in Podia's revenue.

Overall, this was a great "stress test" of my content planning, creation, & marketing systems. I learned about where my weak spots are & where I'm doing a good job. The writing part was easy for me because it's a subject I'm so passionate about, but the logistics were tough!