🔎 The Elasticsearch Handbook
Step-by-step solutions to real-world challenges
It took almost 2 years to achieve stable organic SEO traffic, thanks in part to showing chapter previews as outlined in https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-2022-tech-stack-for-an-e-book-lessons-learned-ce34886908
The handbook is getting some traction, thanks in large part to a well-timed HackerNews post bringing in over 1K page views in a day:
Inspired by @harrydry's communication style guides, I prepared and sent out emails to the ~20 people who signed up on Typeform.
After that, I posted on reddit and got the first paying customers!
After the book's content was finished I started putting together a NextJS landing page. 160 github commits and around a dozen recommendations from friends & fam later, the landing page was ready!
Here's how I started off on reddit:
I've been quite active on stackoverflow during these wonderful quarantine months and observed a few commonalities among the problems we all are facing when integrating Elasticsearch in our software... This inspired me to compile a bunch of use cases that I've grappled with and solved into a Notion handbook that could be useful for you too 👊 …
I also included a link to my Typeform and asked the potential leads what topics are relevant for them and how much they'd be willing to pay.
After I've gathered preliminary feedback from 20 people, I knew I was onto something. So I started writing.
I experimented with different chapters and chapter groups and finally went with:
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