| > As far as the price I agree it is premium but with such a niche audience and focused value proposition I thought it was worth it. I hope my comment didn't sound like a back-handed compliment. I genuinely think you're making the right move charging a premium. I read a lot of posts from Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN), and he's always urging folks to charge more. It feels like very few people take his advice, so props to you for doing so! > I’m a bit allergic to marketing that tries to cover up weaknesses 100% agree. I'm actually planning on releasing my full book in blog form on my site, a bit like Michael Hartl's "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" [1], so people can judge for themselves whether it's worthwhile to pay for premium features like a PDF copy or video screencasts. > What’s the topic of your book? The plan is to do a soup-to-nuts walk through of popular, lynchpin open-source codebases. I'll take newbie developers from "this codebase is too intimidating, only 10x engineers would grok it" to "oh, that's all there was to it?". I'm a software engineer from a non-traditional / bootcamp background, and I want to help people who are suffering from impostor syndrome to feel like they too can become 10x engineers. I'm starting with a Ruby version manager called RBENV and progressing toward open-source codebases from unicorns like Gitlab, and eventually even the Ruby codebase itself. I've already walked through the entire RBENV codebase on my own, and written 500+ rough pages in a Google doc (over 100k words that I wrote during COVID lockdown). I'm slowly but surely editing it into something that I can show people, but my immediate issue is that a) I don't know anything about the skillset of launching a product, and b) I feel like I only have one shot at a launch, and if my thoughts and words are disjointed, people will write off not only my idea but also me as an engineer and teacher / mentor, and I won't get a 2nd shot at launching. My head says that's BS, but my heart isn't so sure. The first launch is always the hardest. 1. https://www.railstutorial.org/ |
Also the world is constantly changing so trying to make a perfect product is partially an evaluation of how long your solution will even be relevant or how isolated it is from external change.