The Coding Career Handbook

Principles, Strategies, and Tactic for Junior to Senior Devs

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Books
Writing

Devs don't have great resources on improving their coding career. I have had a very fast ramp up in my career, from starting webdev in 2017 to getting hired as a Sr. Dev at a FAANG in 2020. So here's my genuine advice.

March 15, 2021 Crossed $100k in sales, 7 months after launch

Yay arbitrary six figures!

I have yet to look up the product breakdown, but it's probably something like 50% book tier ($59), 40% community tier ($99), and 10% creator tier ($249). I had some bulk sales via bootcamps, companies, and an instructor friend that helped me cross the finish line.

My main realization - I didn't want to quit my job! I definitely feel more confident that I can support myself should I ever need to become an independent creator, but for now, I think I get to work on more interesting problems and meet more interesting people with my day job, while still running my community and doing extra writing and content on the side.

I wrote some reflections here: https://www.swyx.io/part-time-creator-manifesto/ but am wondering if I should write a more Indiehackers specific post on how continued making 3x of my sales AFTER launch compared to my launch week.

July 15, 2020 Closed Launch Sales with $37k lifetime sales

about 2 weeks into launch, sales were slowing to about $300/day (which is still not bad tbh). Adam Wathan says not to precommit to ending the launch sale but i wanted the launch sale to be credible so I put up a countdown timer and did some last min publicity around the end of the launch sale

This was good for another $4-5k of sales on the last day :)

Now I need to follow through on v1.1 of the book, the audiobook, and the workshops I have sold.

July 3, 2020 Launched my book, #5 on HN, $25k lifetime sales

I finally launched! It took me a day to recover from the all nighter I pulled going into the launch but I blogged about my process here: https://dev.to/swyx/lessons-and-regrets-from-my-25000-launch-3aaa

Since i'm now using Stripe you can see my stripe verified revenue here on my IH profile.

I had a lot of small little tactical lessons learned but honestly i dont think I did anything unusual. just followed standard launch advice everybody says. I will confess honestly was hoping for a 40-80k launch, but i think I was comparing first week or first month or lifetime numbers to my day 1 numbers so idk where this ranks. anyway its not a competition.

AMA, of course :)

June 30, 2020 Crossed $12k in sales - Prelaunch

Together with my initial sales ($4k) and endorsement sales (~$4k) and then followon sales I was hovering at around $9k. With the 3 tiers sorted out, I sent a prelaunch discount to my mailing list of about 700 people and pretty soon another $3k today, taking me to $12k!

Now i have to actually launch the thing successfully.

May 28, 2020 First Major Endorsement - drove $1.6k in presales

I sent Dan Abramov a preview copy and he publicly liked my book: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1265463366694440960?s=20

This drove 800 followers to the book's twitter overnight, 300 to my own personal twitter, landed me 42 more prelaunch sales at full price. And i have a nice endorsement for the landing page.

Influencers. Can't live without em!

i launch in 5 days

May 20, 2020 Set up Podia and Stripe

i was selling on gumroad but the landing page didnt look great and the features weren't really compelling. i decided i needed a new platform ahead of the launch and a friend referred me to Podia. it has the memberships and other features i might want in future, as well as a no code landing page builder that looks more presentable.

May 17, 2020 Hired first help

Just hired my first external help to work on some "reach goals" stuff ahead of the launch. Pretty excited!

I have $4.5k in presales at this point. Intend to spend it on prelaunch prep.

One of my many flaws is lack of organization and design. I have a friend who is between jobs and reached out to get her to help design a cheatsheet for $500 upfront and a cut of sales.

May 16, 2020 Created 2 week launch plan, announced Jun 1 Launch

With most of the book written, I announced the launch date of the book yesterday to my personal mailing list.This gives me enough time to:

  • finish writing
  • figure out book publishing
  • hire 10 reviewers
  • get 10 endorsements
  • build a credible landing page site
  • get on 3 podcasts

its getting real...

I also shipped a basic site yesterday, choosing to make it its own domain rather than live on my own. https://www.crackingthecodingcareer.com/

May 10, 2020 Livestreamed 5 hrs of writing Why You Should Write

"Writing for Developers" is an obvious career skill of high interest and I figured I would make it public. If I'm going to make it public, might as well livestream the writing process.

I foretweeted it a day prior, and got some good live participants but it wasnt huge. 14 peak concurrents with 10min avg watch time, tho some watched all the way thru.

April 13, 2020 Wrote and Released free chapter

I knew I needed lead magnets and also to build up demand for the book. didnt exactly know what worked best but figured i would just write the most obvious, in demand chapter possible and then release it for free. It took 2 straight days of drafting and writing - 5 hours of which i livestreamed.

This project had some risk - it was marketing advice, while also marketing my book. if it failed, i would lose credibility. if i gave bad advice, i might be cancelled. but i thought it was worth a shot and that I had thought through defensibility of my points.

9 hour stats on a follower base of 15.7k: 67k impressions, 500 link clicks. 600 likes, 100 RTs. https://twitter.com/Coding_Career/status/1249931369095946240

About

Devs don't have great resources on improving their coding career. I have had a very fast ramp up in my career, from starting webdev in 2017 to getting hired as a Sr. Dev at a FAANG in 2020. So here's my genuine advice.