Crossing the Rubycon

I had the pleasure of talking to Francesco Ciulla about my journey into programming. We also discussed my book and what it was like to write it.

Francesco is on a challenge to interview 100 programmers in 100 days, and it was an honor to be interviewed among all these exciting people from tech. Also, I got 20+ new Twitter followers in the 24 hours following the interview, which is a pretty impressive growth considering the total number of followers I have at the moment (294 followers). It remains to be seen whether this interview will drive book sales, but I am really glad to have the additional exposure.

Doing a video interview was incredibly stressful and definitely out of my comfort zone, but it seemed like a good way to reach more people. I am looking forward to being on more podcasts in the future, so if you are doing one, feel free to invite me 😊

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for "No CS Degree", which is a great resource for self-taught programmers.

We talked about my journey into coding, my experience with technical interviews, and what a typical workday as a programmer looks like for me. I also shared some tips for people learning to code without doing a degree.

I plugged my book several times during the interview, and have already made a few sales from it. Since this is an evergreen piece of content, there is a chance I'll be getting more sales from this interview in the future. I also included a link to my book recommendation newsletter which is not related to tech at all and got a couple of new subscribers. You never know 🤷‍♀️

Check out the interview and let me know what you think.

I launched "Crossing the Rubycon" on social media on November 29th.

Since this happened to be Sunday evening, just before Cyber Monday, I launched with a Cyber Monday 50% sale ($12.50 instead of $25) that I kept going until Tuesday morning. I launched on Twitter, Facebook, vk and LinkedIn.

The biggest shock came from the launch results from LinkedIn. I had a strong profile there with around 500 connections (my professional network, but mostly recruiters). However, I had never posted anything there, and I had never even considered LinkedIn a serious marketing tool.

I was wrong.

The LinkedIn announcement went viral. At the moment of writing this post (Dec 12th), it has 2,212 views, 79 reactions, 21 reshares. What helped make it viral was that: I shared a link to the post on my company (Zendesk) Slack channels, and people supported it massively by liking and sharing. The fact that Zendesk is a big company helped immensely along with the fact that people there are very empathetic and supportive, and the bulk of my initial sales came from people who know me professionally or don't know me but also work at the same company. Some of those who bought the book reached out to me on Slack later, so I built some new connections along the way.

On November 29, I sold 6 books. The next day, Cyber Monday, was my best sales day so far: I sold 13 books in one day.

Lessons learned:

1. LinkedIn can be a great marketing tool, and it might make sense to invest time in creating appropriate professional content there.

2. Consider using corporate channels or your professional connections to promote your work if it's relevant to what you do at work.

3. Pricing is tough (I know, shocking information)

My launch announcement on Twitter was a thread, where the first tweet had a link to the full book price ($25), and the last had a Cyber Monday discounted link ($12.50). I realized it only later, but when people retweeted this thread, their followers were likely to only see the first, not discounted link, and the number of tweet impressions proved that only a fraction of Twitter users saw the $12.50 option. I didn't have any fancy tracking in place but judging from the fact that I sold ZERO books priced at $25 (not only on launch day, but ever), that price was probably too high.

I also read some unrelated tweets later on that pointed to the fact that you can only charge $25 for an ebook if you are a Pieter Levels level type of celebrity. I kept the higher price up for a bit after that, but I soon started testing out lower pricing.

In any case, I have played around with the price to see what works and what doesn't. Since I don't have enough data (sales) to really understand what's happening, I've decided on a pay-what-you-want option with a minimum amount of $10. This way the book is accessible to more people, and those who want to support me as an author have an opportunity to pay more.

Also, if I ever decide to do a print book, $25-$30 would probably make more sense, and having a lower ebook price gives me more flexibility there.

At around 3.30 a.m. on November 27th, I launched "Crossing the Rubycon" on Gumroad. The book took eight months to finish, so pressing "publish" felt exhilarating.

It was a "soft" launch: I didn't share the news on social media but sent a few of my friends coupons to download the book for free and check it out. This way I hoped to find out if there were bugs in the book's formatting or if people had questions about getting the book from Gumroad (it's unknown in Poland and Belarus where my first readers came from).

It was my first time using Gumroad, but the platform is fairly intuitive, so I was able to figure it out even in an exhausted and sleep-deprived state. My initial readers didn't have any trouble getting the book either.

I was ready for a more public launch.

As for the price, I wanted to start out with a higher price than I felt comfortable with, which is what is usually recommended. I priced the book at $25 and planned to use discounts to drive initial sales.

More on that in the upcoming posts.