TL;DR; Dried ramen comes with a fork - not chopsticks. Ramen makers know that their product isn't bought by people looking for a gourmet authentic Japanese meal - they're college students and busy people who just want quick carbs. Look at your product: are you lying to yourself about who your customer is?
So the reason I choose to send a PDF over a Word Doc is total visual control of the end product. If people open word docs on different versions, or with certain fonts missing or whatever, the layout can get screwy and messed up.
With a PDF I can guarantee what the end product will look like on every device, every software version. Even if they open it on a Windows XP machine, a PDF will look the same.
How will this API + HTML5 guarantee the same thing?
(For the record I think this sounds awesome and I'm a huge fan of PandaDoc, but I didn't see anything in the blog post announcement around visual consistency across browsers/devices)
I launched the pre-orders at the beginning of June and had some great feedback, plus plenty of suggestions for the next release.
I've found it really liberating and relaxing to write something that has a "flow" like a story. Any blog posts or guest posts need to be "standalone" where as the book has to flow and take the reader on a much longer journey, and I've found it hugely challenging but I've learnt tons from it already.
As the book is aimed at "data-driven beginners" (who are mostly really experienced marketers/CEO's but perhaps new to SaaS or tech startups) so it's a very specific target reader. I'll definitely work on more books in the future after the experience so far!
This is one of the introductory chapters to the book, so it's intentionally aimed at people who are either new to modern metrics/analytics or are looking to get into Growth Hacking, but don't yet have the foundation theory knowledge to get started with the strategy.
Any questions, or if anyone would like to be one of the case studies for the book, please get in touch!
Updated the post to include input from Mike Butcher after he checked out the first draft. He offered his advice on what to do if you want to get covered by TechCrunch's writers
Sorry I've changed the wording to better reflect that I'm encouraging discussion on here. Thanks for the headsup
I've noticed on a lot of blogs, there'll be 1-5 comments on the blog itself, but 30+ HN comments, so seems like a good idea to allow people to discuss on the forum that they're most comfortable with.
As I said on the tweet, I should have pinged you on the headsup that I was using your tweet for the "against" argument. Sorry again about that, poor judgement call on my part, but thanks for the positive words about the whole idea at the time and again now that I've blogged it all up.
You make a great point, and something I really wish I'd done at the time, in terms of the "trick" article actually having something else of value. Perhaps a list of some of the best (genuine) article headline crafting guides, some posts about real pitch decks, some actual sleep/life hacking posts.. etc.
Looking back I think that would have made the 'testing' phase much better experience for our followers, and just better all around and had a +ve brand impact instead of the minor hit our accounts took.
Yeah 100% agree, particularly with the "Instagram selfie tips to raise a seed round" link, I think people were more likely to be clicking to laugh at the article/author!
Worth noting, I churned a few twitter followers during his period too who I suspect were pissed off at being link-baited :-(
Everyone who was in the private Beta sees a "nagware" popup explaining our switch to a paid service, with options to also "Skip" and continue evaluating the product, or to email us to explain why they need a free plan
Yeah but the subtle wording in that CTA is "Try". We have a totally free, no credit card required, 30 day free trial :-) Something which I probably need to point out in my original article, my bad
Yes we offered a free Beta, but as we discussed in this article we intended to make the product 'Freemium' but realised we were going into the trap of 'Free'.
As a young and early stage team, we made some assumptions, and got some stuff wrong. We need to make changes and decisions that can guarantee we create a sustainable business, one where we can keep the lights on :-)
Actually yes, all the beta users who are engaging in conversation with us over this are actually been offered free plans where it's appropriate anyway. i.e. open source projects, developers writing plugins, university/college students, developers testing Trak.io for their employers etc.
Haha Thanks for the point of view - yeah it's a big splash but there was no hiding the fact so we just wanted to be totally transparent about it.
So far the replies from all our beta users has been exactly what we hoped for (expected), either "Thanks for the honesty" or "Cool, we were just checking it out, we're not in a position to need something like this now" or a few "Yeah screw you guys, delete my account I'm not using you anymore".
I understand a lot of your points, but I strongly disagree that we're regurgitating other peoples advice. This is taken exactly from our experiences.
And we're not telling anyone to get lost. We're explaining why we had to evolve and change our assumptions. If we carried the burden of every mistake we'd made as a startup, within a year we'd be so heavy we wouldn't be able to move anywhere!!!
(Oh and the blog theme is following a trend of about 20+ major startup blogs who switched to a typography led, single column design. We rebuilt the design a few months ago and tried to make it as much about the content as possible. I personally think the end goal was more like eerily similar to reading an eBook?)
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