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How I sold $500 pre-orders for my new e-book in 2 days?

Hello, I'm KP (@thisiskp_ on Twitter)

I've been fascinated by the rise of the "Content-as-a-service" model and wanted to experiment with a simple e-book offering.

2 days ago, I posted on my Twitter that I'll be launching an e-book on my favorite topic: How to attract 1000 early beta signups for a b2c product

I speak about this niche/topic on Twitter all the time [even wrote an IH post a while ago] but I was unsure if people wanted to hear from me so I added a twist at my launch, it worked.

The pre-orders went from 0 to $500 in 2 days. I'm thrilled and grateful!

Here's the Gumroad link to pre-order: https://gumroad.com/l/FpmEu

Image

So, what did I do? Some lessons if you are curious:

1. People buy results

Make your offering about actionable frameworks and tangible results. Instead of saying, here's all the theory of building an audience, I explicitly made it clear that this guide would teach you how to grow from 0 to 1000 early signups for b2c products. This is a domain I am familiar with (due to my recent projects) and can speak with conviction. I sold that!

2. Be as specific as you can

As Naval Ravikant says specific knowledge is always rare and in demand. Specificity depends on your target niche. I have written content on several themes before on my personal blog. I've topics like meditation, mindfulness, philosophy, and products. I didn't choose any of these general themes for the e-book offering as I knew it wasn't specific. I chose to help makers/founders gain early sign-ups... especially go from 0 to 1000.

3. Create a sense of FOMO

I am super new to the content-as-a-service game. I was unsure if I would get even basic traction so to built a bit of urgency into the launch, I announced I would only give away the ebook for free for the first 200 people. My hope was this would get me at least enough readers for my future launches. It worked like a charm! I met this goal in 3 hours.


[View tweet]
(https://twitter.com/thisiskp_/status/1308431288001593344?s=20)

4. Build incentives for quick action

People are inherently not driven to act on your command. They may be busy, tired, and may not care to act promptly unless there's an enticing incentive. So I figured I would layer my incentives to get them to act. On the Gumroad page, I shared that the book would be $10 for 2 days and then the price would go up to $20 and in another 2 days to $30. This makes it clear that if they are even remotely interested, they should act quickly. This was an experiment and it worked! Got to $300 by the end of day 1 and $500 by day2.

5. Keep building an audience before launch

None of this would have happened if I didn't already have a highly engaged niche audience on Twitter. People buy from people they trust and trust is built over a long span of time by delivering value consistently. Most of my tweets are about helping makers/creators/founders and I get 5-10 DMs each week from people thanking me for writing and sharing my playbooks openly. I did this for months and built leverage. Here's some more guidance on how I built a following on Twitter: https://threader.app/thread/1303315459329208321

6. Build in public

The most under-rated habit is sharing your work and insights publicly. I used to be a lurker on Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, and Twitter and always felt I wasn't great enough to share anything original. That's a trap. People are not looking for original, they just want useful and valuable information. As builders and makers, we have tons of insights and insider knowledge hoarding in our heads but we don't share because we tend to think everyone knows this. Untrue. A lot of people are just getting started in your niche. Help them. Build in public is a great way to develop accountability, share stories (learn how to write interesting content), and help people by showing your work than just the final polished outcome. Here's a site I'm building if you love this theme: http://buildinpublic.xyz/

That's all for now. Thank you for reading! ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿผ Hope this was helpful and if you want to chat further, DM me at @thisiskp_

PS: This is meta but the most important lesson is to have zero expectations on the outcomes and just have fun with your experiments. I was ready to try 9 other ways if this didn't work as nothing is guaranteed. Greatness is an iterative loop, not a one time hack.

  1. 6

    Congrats!

    I don't want to diminish your achievement, and it's really great, but from my experience of analyzing similar posts ("How I managed to sell 1000 of my books in 2 weeks" and such) I found there is one and only one secret. It's your audience, usually on Twitter. As soon as you have at least 3-5 thousand followers it will be a real piece of cake. But if you don't have thousands of them nothing helps.

    And the more followers you have the more money you can make fast. A sample proof:
    https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-made-210-822-selling-a-pdf-and-a-video-on-the-internet-028d5b0a2c

    He has 45.5K followers.

    Conclusion: create a big audience in social media :)

    1. 1

      Couldn't agree more, that's why included that point as #5 :)

  2. 3

    Great reflection!

  3. 2

    Thanks for sharing ๐Ÿ™

  4. 2

    Iโ€™m a huge fan of KP. This has been a while in the making. A must grab for anyone looking to replicate some of the success KP is having.

    Really pumped people get to see this!

  5. 2

    Love this. Straight from someone who's done it. Multiple times.

    Congrats KP!

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