7 Day Recap in detail: 1038 Sales of The Tiny MBA

Hoo boy, what a launch this past week has been!

I wanted to write up a super detailed but fairly unedited recap so everyone can see the work we did before launch, as well as during, and some of the unexpected things (good and bad) that came up along the way.

• The Buildup. For about three weeks I was letting folks know that the book was launching soon, though I didn't share a specific date. What I DID do is tell people to email me to get on the pre-order queue like I talked about in this post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/experimenting-with-part-of-heys-launch-strategy-on-my-new-book-9b30f96086

During those three weeks I gew that list to a little over 300 people. The three main drivers were our main email list + Twitter. But I knew those 300 people were interested enough that I could send a quick email and they'd be ready to buy.

Also notable: people were finding the sales page because I redirected the domain of the email I set up for the queue to the page, and people kept asking when they could buy! So that was a good sign.

• Recruiting Early Reviewers. On the Friday before launch, I asked for a handful of people to read an advance release copy of the book and write an honest review. I specifically asked people to email me with the subject HONEST REVIEW, and it was interesting how many people ignored that specific instruction, so I decided not to have them review the book.

I ended up sending about 10 copies (including to some Indie Hackers members), and noticed that it was a lot of white guys. So I posted on Twitter specifically asking for reviewers that were women and POC, and asked for help signal boosting. Got another 10 or so volunteers from that, and asked folks to send in their reviews within the week.

• Go for launch. Once I had a final print proof of the book in my hands, I decided it was go time. I flipped the switch on the shop so people could buy. Before I even shared it publicly, someone bought a copy! Anticipation for launch had been pretty high in the days before, so it was fun to see that in action.

Then I posted to twitter and emailed the first ~100 people from the queue. Within minutes, sales were pouring in! Most of the people I emailed directly from the queue were completing their purchases within minutes, some even faster.

• Reviews start coming in. @AndrewKamphey's was actually the first draft review to come in, but we decided to wait a little bit to post it. Several more, sometimes a couple in the same day.

Some reviewers had really good pointed feedback/fixes, but for the most part, people were really into the somewhat unusual take on "business book." My favorite responses were from people who wrote about their experience reading the book, rather than just the content inside of it. That helped calm my nerves that people might not "get" this book.

• Adding reviews to the site. One of the hardest things about getting reviews was figuring out the one-liner that would make sense to put on our site and in social share images. But it's also one of the fun parts!

As I continued to send ~100 emails per day to people on the pre-order queue, I included those social share images as well as an invitation to help spread the word. It was really nice to see how many people were willing to share when I made it easy!

• Ranking #1 on Amazon. The paperback can only be bought through our site, and we're only selling Tiny MBA Ebook in the Kindle store, for a bunch of reasons. On the technical side, KDP doesn't print books in the size that I wanted. But from a customer service perspective, I really wanted the ability to communicate with our customers directly.

That said, we know from publishing other books like @amyhoy's Just Fucking Ship that people REAAALLLYYY want a Kindle version, so we decided to experiment with a Kindle edition of Tiny MBA.

So we did.

After 7 days, roughly 32% of our sales are on Kindle. Sadly there's no way of knowing how many of those came from our site vs ranking on Amazon. Booo.

• Finally emailing our list. Remember, up until this point, I was only emailing preorder queue people with personal messages (but getting an incredibly high and fast purchase rate).

On Friday after launch (so, 4 days) at 3pm eastern (which is later in the day than I would normally send a sales broadcast) I sent this email to everyone on our list who had not bought: https://ckarchive.com/b/92uzhnhnmdww

For the next 2.5 hours, we were averaging a book every minute. We've been selling products for a long time and never saw anything like it!

Obviously that didn't last forever and within 48 hours things had slowed down to the more consistent ~5-6 sales an hour. But it was fun while it lasted!

• Trickling out reviews. Adding new reviews every day meant that I had another reason to talk about the book besides "BOOK!" - and having new reviews come in almost every day meant that I had something new to talk about that day.

• People offering to buy bundles to give away to folks who are underrepresented in business communities. This started with a private DM from a longtime friend and business owner, but once others saw me doing it with the first, they jumped on.

Tomorrow is the third day in a row that I'll get to offer free books that were actually paid for by other businesses, which is pretty sweet! Gonna make it a formal thing and give it its own page with offer details.

• Stuff people asked for that I didn't have a great answer prepared. There isn't an obvious way to give the book as a gift (you can buy and put down the gift recipients address in shipping, but it doesn't say that anywhere). The BIGGEST thing I hadn't planned for was signed copies. Since we're doing print on demand, there's no way for me to intercept a book before it leaves the warehouse.

I'm thinking about doing a nice bookplate that I sign and mail to the first X,000 buyers, but postage alone for that adds up quick. So maybe do it by request. We'll see.

• Announcing sales goals. When we were getting close to sales milestones like 500 book, 750 books, etc. I would jump on twitter and talk about how close we were to the milestone. People LOVE momentum and want to be a part of it when they see it.

This was the most fun last night as we were getting close to 1000 sales, and I posted that I wanted to get there by midnight. It was a totally arbitrary number, but when I posted that we finally hit it, people were cheering in the replies. It felt like your team winning the game!

I'll post more detailed numbers soon, and more about the strategy for the rest of the pre-order window between now and August 26th, and beyond!