Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
6
Hi Jason, love the write up! Did you have a wealth of knowledge about Angular + Rails, and landing pages before you started the blog and book, or is that knowledge something you can acquire as you go?
6
Thanks! I had been comfortable with Rails but I was new to Angular. And when I started writing my book, that's when Google totally re-wrote the framework and I had to start completely over with learning Angular. I think being a non-expert actually helps because then you don't have the "curse of knowledge" where you think all your knowledge is obvious and can't imagine not knowing it.
4
Heya Jason
My biggest question is how did you get traffic to your angular book's blog? That's the traffic that got the ball rolling for you.
Aside from that question, I'm convinced that webdev tutorials are super useful for getting initial traffic. I still get thousands of visits to my personal site for a rails jquery 5 star rating article I wrote years ago. If 1,000 people write the same tutorial, most of them will get good traffic - you know developers: open 20 tabs while googling/stackoverflowing and if your content is good enough it will bubble up to the top of the SERPS.
But I'm working on helping people write better sales/marketing emails. This domain is filled with a craaaaaaaap ton of rubbish and this niche is also way more self-serving than webdev tutorial writing. I guess my question is an open question to anyone reading this... where do you seed the links to your business-related content marketing?
2
I think my first big "hit" was a post called How to Wire Up Ruby on Rails and AngularJS as a Single Page Application. It was a long, definitive post. It got to something like the #3 spot on the front page of Hacker News. This told me there was demand for the topic I was writing about.
More generally, I wrote very targeted posts for searches like "angular rails heroku", "angular rails webpack", etc. I usually tried to make my posts long and comprehensive, not bite-sized.
I don't know if I understand your question about seeding links to content marketing. My strategy for my new business, Landing Page Breakdowns, is to tap into other people's audiences. For example, I wrote this post on Indie Hackers a) to be genuinely helpful and b) to get the word out about my new business.
3
Great post. Why do you believe that most web apps should not be SPA's?
9
Building and maintaining an SPA typically costs more (in time/money/headaches) than building and maintaining a "traditional" app. If the benefits of having an SPA justify these extra costs (e.g. Gmail), then I think an SPA is just fine. But for regular old CRUD apps where it's not even apparent to the average user that the application is an SPA, then in my opinion the SPA route is a super wasteful choice.
2
Hi Jason,
I loved your article. I liked how you broke down the essential steps of your process, and I don't think I had seen anything put together like this in a way that after I read it, I thought, "yeah, I could totally do this."
I've been ruminating on this all week and I've got an idea that I'll try to get launched over Labor Day weekend.
I'd be interested in more details about how you presold the book via Gumroad. Did you have an outline of the book put together when you presold it to your list? What info did you give about your book in order to presell it? Did you collect people's money upfront and then write?
Thanks again for the inspiration!
Ben
2
Thanks!
I don't think I had an outline. I think all I did was give a few bullet points describing what the book would be about. This was after I had written some pretty serious blog posts, though, so I think I had already demonstrated that I was someone who could be trusted to write reasonably well on the topic.
Yes, I collected people's money upfront and then wrote. I made 7 sales on Gumroad at $49 each. More precisely, Gumroad takes a customer's credit card upfront but doesn't actually charge the customer until the product is released.
Good luck on your project. Feel free to share what it is.
2
Thanks for your response.
I put a landing page live earlier this week, but haven't done any promotion and would like to tweak it a little more before I do:
How is landingpagebreakdowns going so far: What kind of metrics do you track :) ?
2
Hey Jason I really enjoyed the blog post. Thank you. I recently have been spending money on info products and not actually paying for any SaaS apps.
This post made me think about and become more aware of my own psychology when it comes to buying stuff. We like products that hope to make us better in someway in the future. A promise. Because we've ultimately associated being better at that thing with being happier in the future. I'm still not sure if this is just because Western society has a way of selling us on what we're not good at. The belief that If we work hard we can do anything that's very dominant in American society.
And I'm sure that the psychology of that single purchase of a promised better future is different than the monthly subscription which begins to feel like an expense.
Do one time purchases work better for products that promise to improve and do monthly subscription work better for entertainment and products that help you make more money without too much effort?
Most of the stuff I've bought has been info products. Just my own thoughts.
3
When talking about this I think it's important to make a distinction between B2C and B2B products.
For a consumer, it's not a big deal to spend $9/mo for the small luxury of Spotify but $100/hr would be way too much for most people. I enjoy Spotify but it's totally an expense, not an investment.
But for, let's say, Leadpages, $79/mo is a no-brainer for many businesses because Leadpages saves them time and maybe unlocks the ability to make thousands of dollars of extra revenue per month. Plus, businesses have more money than individuals do.
This investment vs. expense idea applies to both one-time purchases and subscriptions.
So I think the distinction is less one-time vs. subscription but more B2B (investment) vs. B2C (expense). It is possible to sell a product to a consumer that represents an investment with a return (e.g. "how to get a raise"), but the consumer has much less spending money available than a business and you can't provide nearly as much to a single individual as you can to a business.
My old business, Angular on Rails, sold to consumers. My new business, Landing Page Breakdowns, targets business owners.
2
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I'm hoping to read more. I've subscribed to your newsletter.
2
Wow, excellent article, it has helped me a lot! Thank you very much for writing it!
3
Thanks! I'd be curious to know exactly why/how it was helpful to you.
2
Well, I am between projects, and kind of in the situation you're describing at the beginning - tired of my projects failing(financially), and looking for ideas. This article gives me extra motivation to look into info products.
Also I like your way of coming up with ideas. I don't have an idea yet, but now I'll be looking for 2 niche topics nobody has put together yet. This sounds like a great place to start.
It's like thinking about ideas as lego blocks instead of the blank canvas. If you can write absolutely anything - it's confusing and hard, but if you can create something unique by putting together two things that are already there - it sounds doable and promising.
2
great article. Really inspiring. I might start a project of my own because of it ;)
I'm also on your site with the whole "SPA hype" thing. I think 80% of the SPAs people build on the site don't need to be a SPA but people coming from a front end angle are just so used to do it. One example would be the gatsby.js static site generator. I really really don't know why you need a SPA generated from markdown and other markup. That just bloats the initial bundle download and hurts your SEO (I don't know if Gatsby.js still generates a SPA but it did some versions ago).
2
Thanks! If you do start your own project, I'd love to hear about it.
2
Thank you Jason for this wonderful article. I'm not a programmer, but the steps you laid out are transferable for others who don't code but share similar goals. At least in my opinion.
2
Thanks! I think you're right about the steps being transferrable.
2
Loved the article and really liked how you talked about having to rewrite and learn something mid-stream in a project.
How long did it take you to write and produce your course?
3
Thanks! Surprisingly, the e-book only took me a few weeks to write, only working on it part-time, and even though I had to learn all the material as I went. The videos took a couple weeks of part-time work too, IIRC. The hardest part of the whole project has been the constant re-updating everything over and over again. That has taken way more time than the original production.
2
I have a theory: The most important aspect of getting a product off the ground is: a) working in a market where it's known people pay. b) getting it in front of the audience (traffic).
Info-product's advantage stems from their easy-to-convey value and in your case, you were able to attract traffic through blogging.
I am trying to experiment with this idea through perfectcontactform.com. I haven't built an app to build a form, yet but the page is enough to convey what it's about. People are known to pay for form builder because it's annoying to build one and integrate it with your website.
My focus is to get traffic through blogging and guest posts and see, where it goes. In the ideal world, I would have focused on selling this beforehand but, to be honest, this isn't one of those pressing problems that people are dying to get solved.
2
I think you're right about working in a market where people will pay and getting in front of the audience.
What would make Perfect Contact Form preferable to someone over, say, Gravity Forms or Wufoo?
2
This is an amazing article. It really spells things out pretty clearly. The funny thing about me is that I want to replace my salary but I also don't want to have to use crappy tech. Rails is decent, but angular is horrible.
The idea of writing/teaching about something I don't believe in just to make a buck is only marginally better to me than working a day job. I could probably write some info products around c# and react and make decent money, but I definitely need a change in perspective.
3
Thanks! Yeah, it was hard for me to write about how to build an SPA when I really don't think an SPA is right for most applications.
2
Great article, you described me and my situation almost exactly and I think the information product route is a pretty good approach.
I disagree about the SPA part though. About 6 months ago I was mostly a backend developer doing a lot of Go, Java, and .Net work and I was skeptical about SPAs. However, I recently started a new project with a Vue.js front end and it is amazing. If you scaffold a project with the vue-cli tool you will have an SPA up and running in minutes that is easily maintainable, runnable locally with a hot-reloading local web server and configured for production build with Webpack. Coupled with VSCode as an editor, its a killer development experience. Right now I'm enjoying Javascript just as much if not more than other "server side" languages.
3
Thanks! I'm glad Vue.js has been a good development experience for you. My bad experiences have mainly come from cases where junior developers wrote a bunch of spaghetti code on both client and server side and made the development workflow a nightmare. If they had only written a bunch of spaghetti code on the server side, it still would have been bad, just not quite AS bad.
2
Great stuff Jason, I've been meaning to reach out for a while now after I saw your interview. I wrote a post about Vue.js and Rails which continues to get steady traffic after over a year now. I've been meaning to do an updated post (Vue 2 / webpacker gem) as well as entertain the idea of writing a book. I think it would be great practice, as I have not managed to build anything profitable yet. Thanks for sharing your experience!
3
Thanks and you're welcome. If you do end up turning your site into an info product business, please feel free to reach out if you have questions. (jason@landingpagebreakdowns.com)
2
Do you have links or an article about single page app vs the alternatives?
2
No, sorry. To me the alternative is just "build a regular old web application".
1
Hi Jason, Fantastic to see how you experienced the process as a developer. In any case, you have inspired me; Thank you!!
Your approach to setting up a successful business focuses solely on setting up an info product method. However, I am not convinced that this is the way for every developer.
Are you trying to say that developers should work on 1 product and bring it to market as you are now going to do with LandingPageBreakdowns instead of the startup idea you've tried with toastmaster and snip?
Hi Jason, love the write up! Did you have a wealth of knowledge about Angular + Rails, and landing pages before you started the blog and book, or is that knowledge something you can acquire as you go?
Thanks! I had been comfortable with Rails but I was new to Angular. And when I started writing my book, that's when Google totally re-wrote the framework and I had to start completely over with learning Angular. I think being a non-expert actually helps because then you don't have the "curse of knowledge" where you think all your knowledge is obvious and can't imagine not knowing it.
Heya Jason
My biggest question is how did you get traffic to your angular book's blog? That's the traffic that got the ball rolling for you.
Aside from that question, I'm convinced that webdev tutorials are super useful for getting initial traffic. I still get thousands of visits to my personal site for a rails jquery 5 star rating article I wrote years ago. If 1,000 people write the same tutorial, most of them will get good traffic - you know developers: open 20 tabs while googling/stackoverflowing and if your content is good enough it will bubble up to the top of the SERPS.
But I'm working on helping people write better sales/marketing emails. This domain is filled with a craaaaaaaap ton of rubbish and this niche is also way more self-serving than webdev tutorial writing. I guess my question is an open question to anyone reading this... where do you seed the links to your business-related content marketing?
I think my first big "hit" was a post called How to Wire Up Ruby on Rails and AngularJS as a Single Page Application. It was a long, definitive post. It got to something like the #3 spot on the front page of Hacker News. This told me there was demand for the topic I was writing about.
More generally, I wrote very targeted posts for searches like "angular rails heroku", "angular rails webpack", etc. I usually tried to make my posts long and comprehensive, not bite-sized.
I don't know if I understand your question about seeding links to content marketing. My strategy for my new business, Landing Page Breakdowns, is to tap into other people's audiences. For example, I wrote this post on Indie Hackers a) to be genuinely helpful and b) to get the word out about my new business.
Great post. Why do you believe that most web apps should not be SPA's?
Building and maintaining an SPA typically costs more (in time/money/headaches) than building and maintaining a "traditional" app. If the benefits of having an SPA justify these extra costs (e.g. Gmail), then I think an SPA is just fine. But for regular old CRUD apps where it's not even apparent to the average user that the application is an SPA, then in my opinion the SPA route is a super wasteful choice.
Hi Jason,
I loved your article. I liked how you broke down the essential steps of your process, and I don't think I had seen anything put together like this in a way that after I read it, I thought, "yeah, I could totally do this."
I've been ruminating on this all week and I've got an idea that I'll try to get launched over Labor Day weekend.
I'd be interested in more details about how you presold the book via Gumroad. Did you have an outline of the book put together when you presold it to your list? What info did you give about your book in order to presell it? Did you collect people's money upfront and then write?
Thanks again for the inspiration!
Ben
Thanks!
I don't think I had an outline. I think all I did was give a few bullet points describing what the book would be about. This was after I had written some pretty serious blog posts, though, so I think I had already demonstrated that I was someone who could be trusted to write reasonably well on the topic.
Yes, I collected people's money upfront and then wrote. I made 7 sales on Gumroad at $49 each. More precisely, Gumroad takes a customer's credit card upfront but doesn't actually charge the customer until the product is released.
Good luck on your project. Feel free to share what it is.
Thanks for your response.
I put a landing page live earlier this week, but haven't done any promotion and would like to tweak it a little more before I do:
https://benrobertson.io/accessible-web-design/
For others who are interested, I found this post really helpful and inspirational: https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-job/
And it led me to Nathan Barry's book on self-publishing which has been really helpful for me so far too: https://www.amazon.com/Authority-Become-Following-Financial-Independence/dp/1612060919
Hey Jason,
seems like you're on the same teaching path as Leo: https://code4startup.com/startuphack/2016-in-review-from-coder-to-entrepreneur-and-the-300k-annual-milestone
How is landingpagebreakdowns going so far: What kind of metrics do you track :) ?
Hey Jason I really enjoyed the blog post. Thank you. I recently have been spending money on info products and not actually paying for any SaaS apps.
This post made me think about and become more aware of my own psychology when it comes to buying stuff. We like products that hope to make us better in someway in the future. A promise. Because we've ultimately associated being better at that thing with being happier in the future. I'm still not sure if this is just because Western society has a way of selling us on what we're not good at. The belief that If we work hard we can do anything that's very dominant in American society.
And I'm sure that the psychology of that single purchase of a promised better future is different than the monthly subscription which begins to feel like an expense.
Do one time purchases work better for products that promise to improve and do monthly subscription work better for entertainment and products that help you make more money without too much effort?
Most of the stuff I've bought has been info products. Just my own thoughts.
When talking about this I think it's important to make a distinction between B2C and B2B products.
For a consumer, it's not a big deal to spend $9/mo for the small luxury of Spotify but $100/hr would be way too much for most people. I enjoy Spotify but it's totally an expense, not an investment.
But for, let's say, Leadpages, $79/mo is a no-brainer for many businesses because Leadpages saves them time and maybe unlocks the ability to make thousands of dollars of extra revenue per month. Plus, businesses have more money than individuals do.
This investment vs. expense idea applies to both one-time purchases and subscriptions.
So I think the distinction is less one-time vs. subscription but more B2B (investment) vs. B2C (expense). It is possible to sell a product to a consumer that represents an investment with a return (e.g. "how to get a raise"), but the consumer has much less spending money available than a business and you can't provide nearly as much to a single individual as you can to a business.
My old business, Angular on Rails, sold to consumers. My new business, Landing Page Breakdowns, targets business owners.
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I'm hoping to read more. I've subscribed to your newsletter.
Wow, excellent article, it has helped me a lot! Thank you very much for writing it!
Thanks! I'd be curious to know exactly why/how it was helpful to you.
Well, I am between projects, and kind of in the situation you're describing at the beginning - tired of my projects failing(financially), and looking for ideas. This article gives me extra motivation to look into info products.
Also I like your way of coming up with ideas. I don't have an idea yet, but now I'll be looking for 2 niche topics nobody has put together yet. This sounds like a great place to start.
It's like thinking about ideas as lego blocks instead of the blank canvas. If you can write absolutely anything - it's confusing and hard, but if you can create something unique by putting together two things that are already there - it sounds doable and promising.
great article. Really inspiring. I might start a project of my own because of it ;)
I'm also on your site with the whole "SPA hype" thing. I think 80% of the SPAs people build on the site don't need to be a SPA but people coming from a front end angle are just so used to do it. One example would be the gatsby.js static site generator. I really really don't know why you need a SPA generated from markdown and other markup. That just bloats the initial bundle download and hurts your SEO (I don't know if Gatsby.js still generates a SPA but it did some versions ago).
Thanks! If you do start your own project, I'd love to hear about it.
Thank you Jason for this wonderful article. I'm not a programmer, but the steps you laid out are transferable for others who don't code but share similar goals. At least in my opinion.
Thanks! I think you're right about the steps being transferrable.
Loved the article and really liked how you talked about having to rewrite and learn something mid-stream in a project.
How long did it take you to write and produce your course?
Thanks! Surprisingly, the e-book only took me a few weeks to write, only working on it part-time, and even though I had to learn all the material as I went. The videos took a couple weeks of part-time work too, IIRC. The hardest part of the whole project has been the constant re-updating everything over and over again. That has taken way more time than the original production.
I have a theory: The most important aspect of getting a product off the ground is: a) working in a market where it's known people pay. b) getting it in front of the audience (traffic).
Info-product's advantage stems from their easy-to-convey value and in your case, you were able to attract traffic through blogging.
I am trying to experiment with this idea through perfectcontactform.com. I haven't built an app to build a form, yet but the page is enough to convey what it's about. People are known to pay for form builder because it's annoying to build one and integrate it with your website.
My focus is to get traffic through blogging and guest posts and see, where it goes. In the ideal world, I would have focused on selling this beforehand but, to be honest, this isn't one of those pressing problems that people are dying to get solved.
I think you're right about working in a market where people will pay and getting in front of the audience.
What would make Perfect Contact Form preferable to someone over, say, Gravity Forms or Wufoo?
This is an amazing article. It really spells things out pretty clearly. The funny thing about me is that I want to replace my salary but I also don't want to have to use crappy tech. Rails is decent, but angular is horrible.
The idea of writing/teaching about something I don't believe in just to make a buck is only marginally better to me than working a day job. I could probably write some info products around c# and react and make decent money, but I definitely need a change in perspective.
Thanks! Yeah, it was hard for me to write about how to build an SPA when I really don't think an SPA is right for most applications.
Great article, you described me and my situation almost exactly and I think the information product route is a pretty good approach.
I disagree about the SPA part though. About 6 months ago I was mostly a backend developer doing a lot of Go, Java, and .Net work and I was skeptical about SPAs. However, I recently started a new project with a Vue.js front end and it is amazing. If you scaffold a project with the vue-cli tool you will have an SPA up and running in minutes that is easily maintainable, runnable locally with a hot-reloading local web server and configured for production build with Webpack. Coupled with VSCode as an editor, its a killer development experience. Right now I'm enjoying Javascript just as much if not more than other "server side" languages.
Thanks! I'm glad Vue.js has been a good development experience for you. My bad experiences have mainly come from cases where junior developers wrote a bunch of spaghetti code on both client and server side and made the development workflow a nightmare. If they had only written a bunch of spaghetti code on the server side, it still would have been bad, just not quite AS bad.
Great stuff Jason, I've been meaning to reach out for a while now after I saw your interview. I wrote a post about Vue.js and Rails which continues to get steady traffic after over a year now. I've been meaning to do an updated post (Vue 2 / webpacker gem) as well as entertain the idea of writing a book. I think it would be great practice, as I have not managed to build anything profitable yet. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Thanks and you're welcome. If you do end up turning your site into an info product business, please feel free to reach out if you have questions. (jason@landingpagebreakdowns.com)
Do you have links or an article about single page app vs the alternatives?
No, sorry. To me the alternative is just "build a regular old web application".
Hi Jason, Fantastic to see how you experienced the process as a developer. In any case, you have inspired me; Thank you!!
Your approach to setting up a successful business focuses solely on setting up an info product method. However, I am not convinced that this is the way for every developer.
Are you trying to say that developers should work on 1 product and bring it to market as you are now going to do with LandingPageBreakdowns instead of the startup idea you've tried with toastmaster and snip?