Principles, Strategies, and Tactic for Junior to Senior Devs
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
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/
"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.
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
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.