Bootstrapped Web

Brian Casel: 00:09

Okay. Let's do this. Hello, bootstrappers. Welcome to Bootstrapped Web, the show for business owners like you and me who believe that to get to where we're going, we have to learn by doing. I'm Brian Casel.

Brian Casel: 00:20

You can follow me on Twitter at Castjam or on my blog at castjam.com. Today, you're going to hear my interview with Nathan Barry. You might know about Nathan's recent six month challenge where he conceptualized and launched a 5,000 per dollar per month SaaS app. And he just finished that challenge up, so there's a lot of information about that on his blog. But Nathan is also the author of three self published books, and that's what we spent most of our conversation talking about.

Brian Casel: 00:53

As I always aim to do in all of my interviews, try to dig into the parts of the story that often go untold. The behind the scenes stuff, the work, the tactics. So in my interview with Nathan, I was really most interested to hear him talk about his his very first book because that was released at a time before he built up the large audience that he has today. And then so you'll hear the story of how he managed to write and release that first book, and then earn over $10,000 on his first day of of the release. And again, this was at a time when Nathan had less than 500 Twitter followers.

Brian Casel: 01:37

So that really gives you a sense of how he was able to accomplish something really so successful, starting with a very small audience. So it is very inspiring. We also talked about his other two books, as well as Nathan's portfolio of products, and really how he manages to handle so many different things all at once, which is certainly something that I can relate to. This interview was a real treat for me because I'm gearing up to write my first book, so there were certainly lots of takeaways that I'll be putting into action over the next few months for sure. And if you wanna hear more about that book that I'm putting together, be sure to head over to castjam.com, join my newsletter, and I'm gonna be putting out more information and things about that over the next few weeks.

Brian Casel: 02:35

Okay. So let's get into the main event, my interview with Nathan Barry. Nathan Barry, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time.

Nathan Barry: 02:47

Hey. Thanks for having me.

Brian Casel: 02:49

Cool. So for those who may not know you or or seen what you do, can you tell us a little bit about who you are or what you do?

Nathan Barry: 02:56

Sure. So I started out as a web designer. And more recently I've written a few books on designing one on designing iPhone applications, one on designing web applications, and then most recently I wrote a book called Authority which is on building an audience, writing a book, marketing, promoting, and profiting from that book. So it's a bit of a broad topic, but it's a ton of fun.

Brian Casel: 03:23

Very cool. You know, this was kind of kind of a difficult interview for me to prepare for because you're involved in so many different things. You know, you're you're doing iPhone apps, iOS apps, Books, and, of course, you have your your latest or current project, ConvertKit, which is a SaaS application for for email marketing. And so things are kind of all over the place. But one thing that really struck me, and I think strikes a lot of people when they first come across your stuff online, is that clearly, you're a very skilled designer.

Brian Casel: 03:58

Everything that you do is communicated visually very well. So can you tell us a little bit about your background as a designer? I mean, like, how did you start out? Did you go to design school, or are you self taught, or how did that work?

Nathan Barry: 04:12

Yeah. So I'm I'm self taught, though in a way I don't like the term because I didn't come up with any of the material myself or anything like that. I guess I'm more self motivated in that I didn't, you know, I didn't need somebody assigning me, web design homework in order for me to actually get it done. You know, but I'm not really self taught because other people put out, you know, hundreds of fantastic blog posts on everything from visual design to HTML and CSS and all I did was was learn those things. But I I didn't go to school for it.

Nathan Barry: 04:52

When I was, like, early on in high school, I started to pick up, you know, basic HTML. I just like that I could type something into a brow into a text file, save it, and hit refresh, you know, the background color would be red, Things like that. My original sites were pretty ugly, of course, but, you know, the first site I designed that I got paid for, made a $100 on and it was for the Idaho Chess Association. I think that site is still online now. I just kept learning, kept doing more freelancing, gradually raised my rates, and, you know, then I got into apps and, you know, both web and iOS.

Nathan Barry: 05:43

And now I focus on, you know, any anything product rather than just web design.

Brian Casel: 05:47

Gotcha. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, it you know, I'm I'm a strong believer in learning by doing. You know, same thing.

Brian Casel: 05:53

I I I'm I'm again, yeah, I I mean, I wouldn't really call it self taught either. I I just reading, you know, a lot of those tutorials and and blogs out there. And really just when when you have a task, when you when you have to deliver for a client or or, you know, you're doing some kind of project, you just gotta kinda figure it out. Right? So over the years, it just builds up that way.

Nathan Barry: 06:14

When I was learning to code iPhone applications, I don't have a lot of experience programming, but what I would do is break it down, figure out what feature I was trying to add, and break it it down to the smallest possible steps. You know, so at one point, I realized, okay. The easiest or, you know, the smallest thing that I need to do next is I need to pass a string from this view to that view. Okay. How and and then that gave me a really specific thing that I could start, you know, doing some Google searches.

Nathan Barry: 06:50

I'd come across Stack Overflow. I'd come across, a few tutorials, you know, read those, implement that, and then go move on to my next smallest possible problem. And and that's my way of learning by doing.

Brian Casel: 07:06

Awesome. Yeah. And you know, I think it is so much easier today. I mean, with sites like Stack Overflow and and, you know, looking back a couple just a couple of years ago when when I was getting started, probably probably you as well. I mean, when you Google, there might be one, maybe two little, you know, strings of of of an idea.

Brian Casel: 07:25

But today, I mean, you can get the the answers so much so much more quickly.

Nathan Barry: 07:30

Yeah. The other thing I would do is find somebody that you who's much more experienced that you can go to for help. Because I would what I would do is I would code my application till I got stuck and then I'd you know, till I got totally stuck and I couldn't find answers online. And then I would code, you know, a different feature until I got stuck. And then, every so often I'd I'd take it to my friend Chris who I actually worked with at the time and, you know, ask him for help.

Nathan Barry: 07:59

And he would quickly point out what was wrong and and teach me how to how to how to fix it.

Brian Casel: 08:04

So Yeah. Definitely. So how did you so so you kinda started out as a designer doing doing consulting work. Is that right? Or did you get straight into products?

Nathan Barry: 08:16

I did did freelance web design for quite a while. I did it through college. And then I I joined a software a software design team at a a small startup and then grew with that startup and led their design team. And and there, we worked on almost exclusively on web apps, but that's also where I got into iOS.

Brian Casel: 08:36

Gotcha. So, I mean, how did you how how would you say that you transitioned into being an entrepreneur? I mean, before you even started doing products or iOS apps, I mean, was there someone or or a business or something that that inspired you to to learn more about business and marketing and and not just focus on design?

Nathan Barry: 08:57

You know, in a way, I've been been doing business all the way through. As far as in my freelance design work, you know, I joined the local chamber of commerce and went to leads groups and got to know the business side of things as far as getting clients, working out contracts, and all of that. And so for at that point, it was just a matter of, you know, switching from just working hourly to then working on a product. My my journey has been you know, my first businesses, I made money just by working hourly. My next my next products or kind of the next phase of my businesses was one time sales.

Nathan Barry: 09:49

So that was iPhone applications, and then I got more sophisticated with the books, all still one time sales. And then most recently, I've moved with ConvertKit, my email marketing tool. I've moved to a SaaS model, so recurring sales. So I've kind of, I guess as far as revenue models and and and business, I've I've done all three. And, you know, making money is good, but making money from customers who pay you every month is best.

Brian Casel: 10:21

Absolutely. So can you talk about your very first product? Was that, an iOS app?

Nathan Barry: 10:29

Yeah. So let's see. My very first product it's a good question. I tried to start a WordPress theme company at one point. I have a lot of of failed projects, but we'll go with that one.

Brian Casel: 10:45

Well, may maybe we can talk about what like, one thing that that you started that didn't quite lift off before you hit something that worked.

Nathan Barry: 10:52

Yeah. So the the WordPress theme company, it was called Legend Themes. I think the site is still online. It's I didn't know how to get an audience to it. That that was the the biggest problem.

Nathan Barry: 11:05

Actually, first, I waited. I was thinking, I've been you know, I'm building all these WordPress themes one off for clients. And so I knew a a ton about it. I think I was, you know, just in in that last year and a half or so, I'd built, like, 50 WordPress themes for clients. And so I knew that area, and I kept thinking I should sell WordPress themes.

Nathan Barry: 11:31

And a company called StudioPress had just started up actually, it wasn't called StudioPress at the time, but and I thought, ah, it's it's somebody's already doing that.

Brian Casel: 11:42

There's already one or two themes coming. There there can't be any more than that.

Nathan Barry: 11:46

Right. And then, know, Wu theme starts and then, you know, like, you get four or five and each time I kept thinking, oh, it's it's even more crowded now. And then somebody else would start up and and be successful. Anyway, a crowded market isn't is not a bad thing. But once once I did finally start, I didn't know how to actually draw users to it and and get an audience.

Nathan Barry: 12:15

So I made a bunch of themes, and, I was fairly proud of some of them. And I think I sold two themes ever, so a $140 in revenue. But it also brought in a small consulting job. So I I guess which was a thousand. Dollars.

Nathan Barry: 12:34

So Very good.

Brian Casel: 12:36

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I kinda did the same thing back in, like, 2009 or 2010. I I was watching Woo themes, and and then I started Theme Jam, which that that's also still around today, but it's very much off to the side. You know, never really did much with it. Yeah.

Nathan Barry: 12:54

So that that was that was my my first venture into, I guess, what I consider real products. I sold some iPhone apps after that. Some successful, some not.

Brian Casel: 13:07

Then, I mean, marketing an iOS app, it's it's a very different thing. You're going into the the App Store marketplace. Right? I mean, did you how did you go about marketing those first iOS apps?

Nathan Barry: 13:21

Yeah. So my first iOS app was called One Voice, and the idea behind it is that if you can't speak, so you have nonverbal autism or you had a stroke and lost the ability to speak, then you use One Voice on the iPad and it's got all these tiles and each tile has a word or a short phrase and then a picture or an icon. And so you tap on those to build a sentence and then it has synthesized speech so it speaks for you. It's a very, you know, very very small focused market but it replaces a $7,000 dedicated hardware medical device. It does a much, much better job.

Nathan Barry: 14:03

And so I knew I wouldn't sell very many copies of that just because you know, I wasn't gonna put it up for $2 and sell tens of thousands of copies. So what I did instead was sold it for $200. My idea being the iPad at the time was $500. So iPad plus app came to 700 which is 10% of the competition. So that sounded like an okay price point.

Nathan Barry: 14:32

So with that app, what I was able to do is focus a lot more on direct sales. I could put more time into every sale because I was making a decent amount of money for every sale. After paying royalties to everybody, was making a $114 a sale.

Brian Casel: 14:50

Did you develop a a direct sales process? I mean, we're actually going out and and and finding customers, like, out like like, one by one, or how did that work?

Nathan Barry: 15:01

So what I was doing is I was finding speech language pathologists who weren't the customers themselves but they would be talking to parents and patients and people who would need these devices. And so they were these tiny distribution centers all over the country. So they might, over the course of a year, they might see thirty-thirty five people that were a candidate for one of these and they might recommend that five to 10 of them, maybe 10 of them actually get one. And so, what I did is I The first month that One Voice came out, I contacted a bunch of people and said, you know, a bunch of speech pathologists and said, I have this new app. You know, I'd love to know what you think of it.

Nathan Barry: 15:51

I'll give you a free copy and trade for feedback. And the people that were interested, got back to me. I gave those free copies. I ended up getting a lot of feedback iterating the app pretty quickly. Those initial people liked it that they're they could see that you know, I sent them an email once I put their changes in the app and they could download the new version.

Nathan Barry: 16:11

And so they they like that. They bought into that. And it it worked fairly well. I think the app started out at about ranging between 501,000 a month in sales. At the peak, it did $5,000 in a month.

Nathan Barry: 16:33

And then I kinda stopped focusing on it for a while, and it's it's tapered back down to where it now does about 800 to 1,000 a month in sales, but that's without any marketing in the last year.

Brian Casel: 16:45

Nice. Very cool. So so let's kinda skip ahead a little bit and get into your books. So coming out of doing I iOS apps, it is that when you when you got into writing your your first book on, what is it, designing iOS apps? Is that

Nathan Barry: 17:05

Yeah. At the time, I'd been I I had since quit my job. I had a couple iOS apps, and I was spending all my time designing, whether for other clients or friends or all of that.

Brian Casel: 17:23

But at this point, you were still kinda balancing the client work and and putting out products.

Nathan Barry: 17:28

Yep. So when I quit my job, I I had the apps making a little bit of money. It was kind of like a a baseline, at the time, like, 4,500 a month. And then, let's see. And then I I so I had that as a baseline, and then I would freelance on top of that.

Nathan Barry: 17:51

And so that helped me even out my income. Cause freelancing can be a bit of a roller coaster. But a lot of people were asking me about app design and I didn't find any resources that I really liked and so I started to write down my own and that eventually grew into a book. And then I, you know, I learned that if I taught people things about design, so I put out tutorials, I put out blog posts, then people would pay attention. And that was something that I'd never been able to do before up until this point of all my products.

Nathan Barry: 18:28

And there's actually quite a list of products that I've tried before. I couldn't get people to to pay attention. And without without attention, I couldn't get sales. And so that was when that lesson finally clicked of if I teach things, if I give valuable information away for free, then I can build an audience. People will trust me, and they'll be happy to pay for other products.

Brian Casel: 18:54

Gotcha. So so let's let's kinda break that down a little bit. I mean, were you were you first blogging and putting out tutorials about app design, and then that led to questions about app design, which led to the book? Or were you did you put out the book and then kind of in the process to support that, you started blogging more about that topic? Or how did that come together?

Nathan Barry: 19:16

Kind of a combination. I had two blog posts about iOS, one about the business side and one about design, and they both did very well. And they were my first blog posts that people actually paid attention to really beyond, you know, a few 100 people here and there. And so that's when that lesson set in. And from that point, I would this was July 2012, I went about actually building credibility and launching the book.

Nathan Barry: 19:54

And so I put out a lot more really detailed in-depth blog posts on iOS design. So that both to help people and help me build my email list for the book, but also so that people would see me as a credible expert on the topic. I'd spent a lot of time designing apps, but you know, I hadn't designed anything for startups you would have heard of. You know, I hadn't worked on the Facebook app or the Mailchimp app or something like that. And so I I needed to at least I felt I needed to put out some content that demonstrated that I really knew what I was talking about before my book came out.

Brian Casel: 20:40

Gotcha. And so at that point, this is still your your first book here. Were you so you had some some blog posts and and tutorials. You're building your emails. How were you doing that exactly?

Brian Casel: 20:51

Were you giving away, like, a a free chapter of the book or or, like, a a core a pre course to the book, something like that?

Nathan Barry: 20:58

Yeah. So what I did is step one was put up a landing page saying, a landing page for the book, and the book was called the AppDesign handbook. So I had a little header, a short paragraph, a book image off to one side, and then an email opt in form. The most important thing on that page being the email opt in form. And I started sharing that around, you know, on Twitter and other places and saying, Hey, I'm writing a book.

Nathan Barry: 21:29

And that got me, 40 to 50, people to put in their email address. Most of whom I already knew in some way or had already had interactions with online. And then what I did is I wrote a blog post that, you know, I thought was fairly good about design and published that. And at the bottom of the post was a well, at the top of the post was a note saying, I'm writing a a book called the AppDesign Handbook. Learn more about it here and link to the landing page.

Nathan Barry: 22:03

At the bottom of the post was an email opt in form that said, basically, same thing. Write a book called the App Design Handbook. There's a little icon for the book. In your email address to hear more about it when it launches. And so then I took the content of that blog post and sent it to the 40 or 50 people who are already on my list.

Nathan Barry: 22:26

And, basically, just to stay in touch. I had the first that first blog post and then I started promoting it. Know, it promoting a landing page, can get people to pass it around, share links to on Hacker News and that sort of thing. But there's not a lot of value just in the landing page itself. Whereas a tutorial that's in in-depth, you know, I'm gonna share that with my design friends because it teaches something.

Nathan Barry: 22:56

And so that got a lot more traction I picked up, you know, maybe a hundred, two hundred more email subscribers. And then I just repeated that process. So I'd write a new blog post and then send it to my now larger group of email subscribers because it's really important to stay in touch. The last thing you wanna do is put up a landing page and collect email addresses and then three months later say, Books here, buy it. And they're like, who are you?

Nathan Barry: 23:25

How did you get my email address? Right. And they're hovering between clicking delete or clicking spam, which is not a good thing.

Brian Casel: 23:32

Sure.

Nathan Barry: 23:33

And, so I found that doing that process with about three or four blog posts that were really good and really in-depth, is enough to demonstrate expertise, build a decent email list, and have a successful launch. So just to follow that through to the end of the launch, what, after a few of those blog posts and about two months of time, I had built the email list up to almost 800 people. I think it was 795. And I'd stayed in touch with them almost weekly. And the day before launch, I gave them all the information they would need to know about buying the book.

Nathan Barry: 24:19

And then on launch day, I just sent an email saying, hey. It's available. Pick up your copy. Mhmm. And the fun thing about that and about using email in general is within ten minutes, I'd sold a thousand dollars worth.

Nathan Barry: 24:35

And by the end of the day, the book had sold $12,500 worth, which absolutely blew me away compared to revenue from all my other projects. You know?

Brian Casel: 24:46

It And this was your very first book. This is not today where I mean, you've you've built up a pretty big following right now, but we're talking before all that. This is your book number one.

Nathan Barry: 24:56

Yep. Exactly. So July 2012, I had maybe a 100 combined subscribers like from an RSS feed and that sort of thing. And my blog did almost nothing in traffic. It was really really sad.

Nathan Barry: 25:11

And then that's when I started the launch. Trying to build this list and trying to build up towards the launch of the book. And so two months later in September was when I had those 795 subscribers and the book launch.

Brian Casel: 25:27

Wow. That's amazing.

Nathan Barry: 25:28

So

Brian Casel: 25:29

So, I I mean, you you know, you're talking about putting out blog posts, you know, high value tutorials and building up the list that way. You kinda mentioned that you promote your your blog post. I mean, how do you actually go about doing that? How do you get those those first visitors or or, you know, the first influx of traffic?

Nathan Barry: 25:49

Yeah. So step one, I tweet the link. At the time, I think I had 500 or so Twitter followers, so it wasn't going to go super far. But then the next step would be sending it to your existing list, even if it's 30 people. Because you get the advantage of staying in touch, but then also those people have more engagement with you than anybody else and they're already interested in your topic.

Nathan Barry: 26:18

And you should add a note in there. Hey, you enjoyed the post, I'd really appreciate it if you could share it around. And and people will. So people would start submitting it to hack news. Or if they didn't, I would submit, you know, my early posts.

Nathan Barry: 26:35

See, I would also try different subreddits on Digg on on Reddit, and then I don't think I ever got any traction on Digg. I think it was before they they redid it or right about the time they were redoing it.

Brian Casel: 26:52

What about, like, guest article writing? Were you doing any of that for that first book? Or

Nathan Barry: 26:57

I didn't do any leading up to that first book before the book came out. I I did a handful of guest posts, but they all came out the same day as the book

Brian Casel: 27:08

Okay.

Nathan Barry: 27:09

Which is a good strategy as well.

Brian Casel: 27:12

Right. Kind of building up excitement for that launch day. Very cool. So let's kind of get into so so beyond the app design handbook, then you got into designing another a second book about designing web applications. And then your third, of course, is Authority about it's a book about writing, books, I guess.

Brian Casel: 27:34

Yeah. So how do you, go about coming up with topics for for these books? I mean, I I mean, pretty clearly, you're you're writing about things that you know quite a bit about or or that you've you've done quite a bit of work on. But is there any other, pre research into the topic or even, like, validation of of the topic before you get into it?

Nathan Barry: 27:56

Yeah. For me writing a book, the validation comes from the landing page and how well it collects email subscribers. If you put something out there and you're not able to get twenty, fifty, a 100 email subscribers, probably wouldn't follow through and write the book.

Brian Casel: 28:17

Gotcha. Has that has that ever happened? Like, were you kind of toying with two different book ideas and

Nathan Barry: 28:23

No. It hasn't. I've basically just written about what's interesting to me, hope it's interesting to other people. It's also helpful when you see other books in that that topic do well. Right.

Nathan Barry: 28:37

So I'd seen, books by Sasha Greif and Jared Dresdale both make money. So at that point I knew that you could make money from a design book. And that encouraged me to actually finish the book. But I basically just write about what's interesting to me and hope other people like it. And each time, you know, I've launched three books and each time before I launch the book, I think you know, the first time it was, I don't know if people buy this and have done this before.

Nathan Barry: 29:07

The second time it was, well this is a book about a slightly different topic and you know, maybe my audience is sick of me writing books, you know, I don't know that I can repeat that. And then the third time it was this is a book about a totally different topic. Maybe only my design books will sell. And so I have kind of that that doubt every time. Yeah.

Nathan Barry: 29:32

And it's been unfounded every time.

Brian Casel: 29:35

That's awesome. I mean that absolutely every time I launch something new, I'm the first week, I'm expecting zero customers. I I just assume that nobody's gonna buy this. And then

Nathan Barry: 29:44

And and sometimes that happens. You know? I've I've had that happen with enough products that, you know, in some ways, it's not unreasonable for me to expect that. But the biggest thing on topics is about a year ago, I made a a commitment because I tried to start a few books before the App Handbook. They'd be a rough idea.

Nathan Barry: 30:09

I'd write a few pages and never make progress past that. And I didn't want the App Design Handbook to be that. And so I made a commitment after reading an article from Chris Guillebeau and what he talked about was writing a thousand words a day and how, you know, that's a couple of pages. It's not a huge amount of content. I can write that in anywhere between at the time, it was one to two hours.

Nathan Barry: 30:40

Now it's, like, thirty minutes to an hour. And he was just talking about how if you make that consistent progress, it'll turn into a lot of stuff over the course of a year. 365,000 words if you just write a thousand words a day. And so I made an appointment to do that. I have a little iPhone app that I wrote that tracks that.

Nathan Barry: 31:03

And so what happened with each book was I wrote the first book and by the time I finished it I was at like eighty five days in a row. And a day after the app design handbook came out, I went, oh. You know, my phone popped up and said, are you going to write a thousand words today? And I thought well my book's done. So what now?

Nathan Barry: 31:28

And you know there's no way I was going to break that chain of eighty five whatever it was days in a row. And so I kept writing and I wrote down what was going to be an article on designing web apps. And I and I just kinda kept writing and the stuff that resonated with me was on designing web applications. And so, you know, I I kept writing and

Brian Casel: 31:57

So you kinda just, like, kept on

Nathan Barry: 31:58

book. Yeah.

Brian Casel: 31:59

Right. You just kinda started writing onto the next thing.

Nathan Barry: 32:02

Yep. And after, you know, I released that book ninety days later and was able to take everything that I learned, build into a much bigger launch. And it turned out to be a much more popular topic too. And so that that book did did 26,000 and and change in sales on the first day.

Brian Casel: 32:24

Wow. Awesome. And so yeah. I mean, that that kind of leads nicely into my next question. Over over the course of your three books, what were the biggest changes?

Brian Casel: 32:33

Know, what did you learn from book one that you changed in book two and then into book three?

Nathan Barry: 32:39

Yeah. So with with book one, I did a pricing and packaging strategy. I had the book at $39, $79, and $1.69 for three different packages. One the bottom one is just the book. The next one had book plus videos plus some other resources.

Nathan Barry: 33:03

And the final one had all of that plus code samples and and even more resources and a bunch more stuff. That that pricing strategy was hugely important to to actually profiting from the book. Most of my revenue comes from the top end package. And, I can reliably say that having multiple packages like that at least doubled my revenue from that book than if I had just sold one copy of the book for $39. So moving to the next book, I refined those prices and that packaging model.

Nathan Barry: 33:45

And so I went with some higher prices. Went with, $39.99 and $2.49. And that's kind of been the sweet spot that I like now. I also added interviews, like, to those top end packages, and that worked really, really well. Especially because I was able to get some really, really great people.

Nathan Barry: 34:13

You know, Brendan Dunn, Jason Fried and a bunch of other really great people to to be a part of those inner interviews. And I think that added a lot of value to the top end packages. I'm trying to think of some other things.

Brian Casel: 34:29

How about, like, in terms of marketing strategy or or building up your list leading up to those that second and third launch? Did you kinda just repeat the same process, putting out content and having the landing page, or did you try anything new?

Nathan Barry: 34:43

I I repeated the exact same process. The things that were different was it was much more refined. The first time when I did it, that process that I described of, you know, landing page, blog post, and the blog to the post, the email list, you know, rinse and repeat. That just kind of happened on the first time around. I wouldn't consider it a system or anything like that until I did it for designing web applications.

Nathan Barry: 35:20

And so I wrote much better blog posts for designing web applications. They were even more detailed. And I saw it much more as a system rather than just something that worked.

Brian Casel: 35:34

Gotcha.

Nathan Barry: 35:34

I also did even more guest posts for designing web apps. And then a change that I made for authority is I didn't do any guest posts. No. I take that back. I did one guest post instead of the 10 that I'd done for designing web apps.

Nathan Barry: 35:50

I guest posts are a lot of work, and I wanted to see how the product would do, if I didn't focus on that area. And it still did well. So it actually did the same Authority did the same 26,000 I think it was I think Authority was $26,700 in the first twenty four hours, and designing web apps was $26,500. So they're really, really close. Nice.

Brian Casel: 36:22

I mean, I I think and I've been following your stuff for, I don't know, maybe six months to a year at this point. Do you think that by the time you you reached your your third book and and doing authority, your your own blog had built up quite a bit of traffic at that point, and and and that kind of helped? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep.

Brian Casel: 36:42

Know you you like, you were doing the the six month challenge with this with the SaaS app, ConvertKit. I'm sure that brought in, you know, quite a bit of interest. Right?

Nathan Barry: 36:51

Yep. So I think I think by the time I released Authority, my general blog list was, or email list for the blog was about 5,000 subscribers. 700 of which were had specifically signed up, to hear more about Authority.

Brian Casel: 37:11

Gotcha.

Nathan Barry: 37:12

Yeah.

Brian Casel: 37:12

Very cool. I I mean, so looking back on the last couple of months to a year, what what do you see as as kind of were were there any kind of big turning points in terms of a whole rush of new traffic hitting your blog raising Yeah. Your profile a little

Nathan Barry: 37:31

So the first big turning point was when I started teaching valuable content that people actually cared about. Each of the books was a big turning point because when you start writing a book, that changed me from a random designer who writes about not very useful stuff to somebody who's obviously credible because he's working on a book. And that got people to pay a lot more attention. Then another big inflection point would be when I launched the web app challenge, which you alluded to. That was me saying in in January, I said, I books are great.

Nathan Barry: 38:18

They're doing really well. But I want to build a product that has recurring revenue. So I was going to build a SaaS app, and the requirements were I could only put in 5,000 of my own money. I didn't have an idea yet and the goal was was to get to $5,000 a month in recurring revenue, within six months. So so from no idea to 5,000 a month.

Nathan Barry: 38:47

And, I just concluded that. But so to tell people how that went, I got to about $2,400 a month in revenue. So and and but came out of it with ConvertKit which, you know, has a bunch of paying customers and it'll keep growing and doing really well. But announcing that publicly, and if you just Google announcing what the web app challenge, can come across that post. But that post got a lot of people interested and it got shared around a lot because people liked how open and and public it was and they wanted to follow the process.

Brian Casel: 39:29

Right.

Nathan Barry: 39:30

So that that was all of the books and then and then that post were a big inflection point.

Brian Casel: 39:37

Nice. So let's kind of, you know, try to fill in some of the gaps here before we before we close. You know, we we talked a little bit about ConvertKit and and and your SaaS app. I mean, one thing that that really strikes me is that you were doing this this six month ConvertKit SaaS app challenge. I mean, am I correct?

Brian Casel: 40:00

Were you also writing Authority, your your third book at during that time, or was that before? It it seems like you're doing a lot of different things at at once. Is that right?

Nathan Barry: 40:08

Yeah. So I I wrote Authority at the same time.

Brian Casel: 40:12

I mean, that's pretty impressive.

Nathan Barry: 40:14

Well, that that's the thing. If you just write a thousand words a day, then then it's not that hard. Right? A a decent ebook length is 30 to 40,000 words. You write a thousand words a day, you write that in a month.

Nathan Barry: 40:31

Granted, not all that content is gonna be good. So it may take you a month and a half or two months to write a book length of, you know, actually useful content. My friend James Clear talks about this concept of, like, average speed versus, you know, I don't know, max speed. And, like when people think about writing a book, think about somebody going away to a cabin for a few weeks and pounding away on this book and just insane amounts of progress and they come back and they have this manuscript and they finish it up. And that's not how I work at all.

Nathan Barry: 41:09

I don't have you know, right before launch I'll I'll work work like crazy to finish something up. But in general, I just write a thousand words a day and and see what the end result is. And so that average speed of doing, you know, a a little bit of of content creation every single day adds up to a lot of things. The other reason I did it is because anyone who buys Authority is a good fit for ConvertKit. And so there's some really good benefits to get people in the door with Authority, teach them all the stuff on email marketing, product promotion, and all that that they need to really use ConvertKit well.

Nathan Barry: 41:56

And then say, hey. Here's here's a couple months free of ConvertKit. And that that works well to get people over.

Brian Casel: 42:03

Gotcha. Yeah. Actually, that that was one of the questions I wanted to hit on clearly, you are doing some kind of some cross promotion between ConvertKit and Authority. Are you doing cross promotion between your three books? Like, do you have auto responders set up where your you know, customers of book two are then later on being offered book three or something like that?

Nathan Barry: 42:25

I don't have that specifically. You know, everybody goes on to the same email list. And so if you're interested in one of my books, you're going to hear about the others. Unfortunately, there's not really great overlap between all of my books. There is some but not as much as I would like, I guess.

Nathan Barry: 42:49

And so I don't cross promote super heavily, except between Authority and ConvertKit.

Brian Casel: 42:55

Gotcha. So let's just kinda jump right back over to the idea of working on different projects simultaneously. How do you feel about that? I mean, you ever feel like you're spread too thin, or do you kind of thrive on mixing things up and jumping back and forth?

Nathan Barry: 43:15

It's it's good to focus. I really like having solid deadlines to help me me focus on one thing. But anytime I think another project will really, really benefit what I'm doing with my primary project, like I thought with Convertkit and Authority, then I'll do it. The other thing is I just had so many people asking me about the business and launch side and the writing process of books that to some extent it was I just need to get all this content out there so my email inbox will stop blowing up so much. And I knew it was in demand.

Nathan Barry: 43:59

I'd written launch posts and, you know, launch summary posts for each of my previous books and those did really, really well. And so I knew that demand was out there and I just really wanted to write the book. But in general, is better. But you know, I'm gonna keep coming out with new things. I really like kind of the portfolio model where you have a bunch of different courses or e books or products.

Nathan Barry: 44:34

If you can cross sell them nicely. So mine is about as loosely integrated as I think you should go. A great model for closely integrated would be, all of Brendan Dunn's stuff. Everything he does targets freelancers just at various stages of their business. And so he can cross promote really, really nicely.

Nathan Barry: 44:57

I can still cross promote more than I do. But

Brian Casel: 45:03

yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, you know, I I do really kind of relate to that that portfolio model or of thinking about where where we're taking these, careers. I mean, I think the other side of that gets a lot more attention.

Brian Casel: 45:17

Focus on one startup and build it as big as you possibly can. And focus is key. And it is to a certain extent. But I mean, would you say that your goal as you see the next couple of years is to just keep on growing that portfolio and try out different types of products, different formats, different mediums? Or is it let's see what happens with ConvertKit or let's see what if one of these blows up, are you gonna become really focused on one?

Brian Casel: 45:48

Or is it just like, knows?

Nathan Barry: 45:50

Yeah. So what what you said briefly about, you know, focusing on one one one big thing, like a startup would focus on, you know, their core product. The core thing that I focus on is my audience and growing and building that. And then the products are almost a bit secondary. They're there because they help me grow my audience and help me make money from it.

Nathan Barry: 46:21

But that core thing that I focus on is totally my audience. So I'm going to keep keep building more products. I'll probably come out with a a Photoshop course at some point. I'm gonna try to focus back on design a bit more. But I really expect ConvertKit to grow and really be the big thing that I work on.

Nathan Barry: 46:51

You know it's at 2,500 a month in revenue right now. I'd like to have it 8,000 to 10,000 a month in revenue by the end of the year. And then just grow from there. I my my goal is long term is to turn ConvertKit into a a million dollar a year business.

Brian Casel: 47:13

Nice.

Nathan Barry: 47:14

So we'll we'll see how that goes. One reason that I wanna keep releasing products is because it makes it easier to keep learning. And, you know, I I have more stats and knowledge and all of that for launch case studies and

Brian Casel: 47:32

Sure.

Nathan Barry: 47:33

That stuff is just so much fun.

Brian Casel: 47:35

Yeah, totally. So we're midway through 2013 here. One thing that I like to ask every guest this show is, what is your biggest challenge right now? And what are you doing to work through it? You know, mean, I think a lot of people, like outsiders looking in, they they see all of your successes.

Brian Casel: 47:54

And, you know, you're you're you're just killing it with with your books and products. But, I mean, there's gotta be something that's that's challenging you. So what would you say?

Nathan Barry: 48:02

Yeah. Can I give two things?

Brian Casel: 48:04

Absolutely.

Nathan Barry: 48:05

Alright. So the first thing is learning to code in Ruby on Rails. As a designer, I've always done a lot of HTML and CSS. I learned Objective C and, you know, I never got great at it, but I could code. And ConvertKit's written in Rails.

Nathan Barry: 48:24

I have I'm working with a fantastic developer on it. But I get really frustrated when there are things that I feel like I should should be easy to implement and fix. And I'm I'm just having a terrible time learning rails and I I hate relying exclusively on somebody else. So that's why I'm trying to learn it and it hasn't been going very well. Really, I just need to put in probably a lot more time than than I am doing right now.

Nathan Barry: 48:52

The other thing is getting customers for a SaaS application is a lot harder than I expected. I find it far easier to sell a one time product, and, that's been a big challenge. So that's the big thing that I'm working on now. I've been doing a lot more direct sales like talking instead of writing blog posts and hoping that somebody will click through and sign up in vague terms like that, I've been identifying people and saying, I think you're a really good fit for ConvertKit. Let's talk about it.

Nathan Barry: 49:27

And that's worked fairly well. Really it's gonna take a lot more work. You know. In in the first six months, I got ConvertKit to where it's at. Now in the next six months, I'd like to quadruple its revenue.

Nathan Barry: 49:43

And so that's certainly going to be a challenge, but I think it's totally possible.

Brian Casel: 49:47

Cool. And final question here. What is coming up for for you and your businesses? You're you're clearly focusing on on ConvertKit the rest of this year. Anything else on on your radar?

Nathan Barry: 49:58

You know, my first book, the App Design Handbook, I'm going to rewrite that. IOS seven is coming out. A lot of things are changing. So I'll rewrite that and release a new version. Hopefully, without distracting from ConvertKit too much.

Brian Casel: 50:17

Very cool. Well, Nathan, thanks a lot for taking the time. Where can people reach out to you and connect?

Nathan Barry: 50:23

Yeah. So my blog is at nathanberry.com, and berry's spelled B A R R Y. And then you can also email me nathanconvertkit dot com. And then the last thing I'd say is we talked a bit about product launches, which is one of my favorite topics. And I put together an email course powered by Convertkit, of course, that really over a couple of weeks really dives into product launches, and it's all free.

Nathan Barry: 50:50

And if you go to nathanberry.com/launch then you can hop on that list and people have said that the content is really, really helpful.

Brian Casel: 51:04

Very cool.

Nathan Barry: 51:05

That out.

Brian Casel: 51:05

Yeah. Definitely. And I mean, know, I've been following your stuff for a while, and it's it's all very inspiring and and really very educational. You know? So I thank you for that.

Brian Casel: 51:14

And I highly recommend that the audience here goes and checks out your stuff. So we'll definitely link up all these things in the show notes for this post, which is coming out on Monday. And Nathan, thanks again.

Nathan Barry: 51:27

Yeah, thank you. Okay,

Brian Casel: 51:33

so I really enjoyed that conversation with Nathan, and here are a few of my takeaways. Number one, this is what really stood out to me. It was when he talked about the lead up to his launch of his first book. All it took was just a few high quality tutorials published on his own blog, which linked to his landing page for the book, and that was how he built a prelaunch mailing list, which ultimately helped him do over $10,000 in sales on the first day. You know, he didn't have a massive audience at the time and, but the launch was still a huge success.

Brian Casel: 52:14

So that one is really making me rethink my strategy for the next few weeks as I'm starting to get the ball rolling on writing my first book. My plan was to do as many guest articles on other blogs as I can over the next six months, but I think I'm actually going to pull back on that strategy a little bit and focus more on publishing really great content here on my blog at castjam.com. I'm also going to do more video posts as well here on Cast Jam, so I think that will add more value than the guest articles probably would. So we'll see how that goes. The second takeaway from my interview with Nathan was, he realized that he must build trust and credibility with his audience first, before he can expect sales.

Brian Casel: 53:08

You know, he talked about, how his very first business was a WordPress themes company, and he only did he said that he only did, a $140 in revenue. You compare that to over 10,000 on his first day of selling his book, and you wonder what's the difference between these two? And the difference was that he built an audience built around trust and credibility for the book, and he didn't do that when he had launched his WordPress themes company. So, that was a good takeaway right there. And the third takeaway here is when I asked about which products he wants to focus on most, because he's involved in so many different things, his books, iOS apps, his SaaS app, It was an interesting answer.

Brian Casel: 54:05

Nathan said that he his primary focus is his audience and and providing as much value as possible to his audience. That that's kind of first and foremost. And then the monetization stuff, the products and the other things are kind of byproducts of building and nurturing this trusting relationship with this audience. So, that one really stood out to me as well. I hope you guys are taking a lot away from this and really putting some of these ideas into action and of course tweaking them to fit and suit your particular situation in your bootstrap startups.

Brian Casel: 54:51

And please, give me some feedback on this interview and tell me what you're learning, what really stood out, and I would also love some feedback on how I'm actually presenting these interviews because I'm always looking to improve on that front as well. So, do let me know about that. Tune in next Monday and every Monday for another episode of Bootstrapped Web. I'm definitely very excited about the upcoming schedule of guest interviews, so looking forward to that. And finally, I wanna tell you about a special report that I released on my blog last week.

Brian Casel: 55:29

It's called, 10 Year Mistakes and Lessons Learned Bootstrapping a Startup. So I give you, some of the key lessons that I learned the hard way to hopefully help you avoid some of the same pitfalls. You can get your copy by going over to castjam.com and joining my newsletter. So thanks for tuning in, and let's catch up on Twitter between now and next week. Take care.