NOTE: These recaps are a bit more for me than you. I’ll skip over stuff, include asides that are more personal notes to me, etc. Your mileage may vary. More detailed/sanctioned recaps will be available at http://microconfrecap.com at some point.

Presenter: Nathan Barry

  • If you want to get good at something, practice continually
  • Just like you learn to play the drums by practicing, you can learn to make money by practicing
  • Products that have made less than $1,000 to start. That’s where the learning happens
  • Couple more apps that make a couple thousands
  • Then products that make $20k to $100k+
  • 14 total products, but it took a while before they started making meaningful money
  • What people never see are all the products that completely fail
  • It took me quite a while before I made any money at all
  • Start with a small product and work from there
  • CSS Hat
  • Start small and practice making money

How do you get customers to know (and care) about your product?

  • Chris Coyier
  • I kinda thought he wasn’t much of an expert because I already knew what he was writing about
  • Chris built up an audience and then blew away a small Kickstarter campaign.
  • While Chris was teaching, I was just working.
  • Emulate chefs. You have all these secrets. For chefs, they have recipes. Most people keep them entirely secret. Chefs say take everything. I’ll sell you all my recipes. Let me bring in cameras and you can look over my shoulder and see exactly how I do this.
  • Chefs aren’t worried that someone is going to take their recipes, open a restaurant across the street and put them out of business
  • Instead, they’re going to have more fans, more business
  • They don’t teach because they’re experts, they’re experts because they teach
  • Teaching is a fantastic way to draw in an audience and get people to trust you
  • I became determined to teach everything I know
  • Be much more open, much more public

Seven years, one product

  • It’s easy to have ideas that you underestimate how much work it takes to get done
  • Write 1,000 words a day. Make slow, consistent progress
  • Tired of being the guy who talked about the book I was going to write, but never shipped.
  • 600+ days in a row writing 1000+ words a day
  • It goes back to teaching
  • Apply same idea to software - Make progress every day
  • Products are hard; make progress every day

The quest for passive income

  • Stick with one niche so your work compounds from product to product
  • I have two audiences now: Design and marketing
  • Try to focus products on a specific audience, so any work you do to promote one products promotes them all a bit
  • Cross-sell

Q&A

  • Landing page first? The easy way to validate an idea is to landing page, drive traffic, get email addresses. Guess that 1-in-20 might buy. That works well for ebooks. For bigger things, do preorders - ultimate validation. If you can’t get people to pay for a product before it exists, reconsider the product. Do the landing page no matter what.
  • This can work in any audience you have something to teach
  • If you haven’t made first dollar yet, better to do it right or get dollars in the door? If it’s a problem you want to solve and you can get it out quickly, that’s good. if your big idea will take you a year before you make a dollar, maybe hit pause on it for now.
  • How do you keep the streak going when unforeseen circumstances? Build up words in advance. If I skip a day, write 2k words the next day. Great thing about making rules this is that it’s your thing, you can make the rules whatever you want. Important thing is to keep making progress.
  • Edit cycle. If I do a lot of editing, it can count as my writing for the day. Your habit, you make the rules.