[peterarmstrong]

Hi Sundeep,

[Leanpub co-founder here.]

Thanks for the kind words about Leanpub, and for choosing Leanpub as one of your publishing platforms!

We're fond of our pricing sliders and of our newsletters as well :) Also, thanks for the very fair comparison with us and Gumroad. Gumroad is an excellent service, and this type of detailed information will be helpful to many authors.

In terms of the differences on payment timing, the reason Leanpub takes longer to pay is so that we can offer the 45-day risk-free 100% refund policy on all purchases, which we believe helps increase sales...)

Finally, two questions for you:

1. Have you considered also converting your books into courses in Leanpub? We think we've built the best and easiest way to produce courses based on Markdown. Also, courses naturally have a higher price point than books, especially when bundled into course sets.

2. Would you like to be on our Frontmatter podcast (https://leanpub.com/podcasts/frontmatter)?

Thanks,

Peter

[asicsp]

Yeah, agree that 45-day refund policy is a great option for readers and thus increases the likelyhood of a purchase.

Regarding the questions:

1. I thought courses were video, similar to Udemy. I just went through FAQ and found that video is optional. Courses has quiz, certificates, etc. Personally, I'm more interested in an interactive programming environment where users can execute code snippets and exercises can be solved from the website itself. I've also thought about creating a desktop application as an alternative.

2. Thanks a lot for the offer, I would like to think about it. I'll let you know if I'm interested.

[peterarmstrong]

Sounds good re. #2. Re, #1, we don't offer anything in terms of an interactive environment at the moment, and we probably won't do so for a long time. That seems like a full startup in itself.

Instead, we are differentiating by focusing on being the easiest way of making a course based on Markdown (since our books are already typically written in Markdown, so the conversion is simple). These courses need to have automated marking and certificates of course, but everything else (video, interactivity, etc) is either optional (like video) or not supported (like interactive exercises).

For us, the big win is on making courses which are easy to update: recording a video course takes a long time, so updating a video course regularly typically just doesn't happen...