Make Money Online

Probably Monday.

It’s enough to to launch. I don’t know. I need to write the email. I need to like tell other people about it. I might do it on Tuesday or Wednesday. I don’t know.

Mostly. I mean, everybody has been trying to pick it apart. I have a really good point about the video that I just pasted from a friend who’s basically like This is one of the funniest things you’ve ever done, but it’s because I know who you are and it’s not going to help sell it. And so it’s like, okay, well. Great. I I’ve told you this, I feel, but I don’t want a Kickstarter to just be about my network, right? Like that’s going to be The first 30% of sales in the first three days because people have already kind of qualified themselves into it. But it’s a PR vehicle. It’s to spread the word a little bit and like Make yourself more well known. That’s what Cadence did for me. No one knew who I was. I had 38 followers on Twitter when I launched Cadence and Slings Kickstarter project in 2009. Should this be an episode? Are we recording an episode right now? We’re recording an episode right now.

Just Twitter followers. At all. I had no mailing list. I had no Facebook account. The first person I think to back cadence in slang was my dad. Thank you, Mr. DeSabado. Thank you so much, Dad. You’re probably listening to this. I. You know, had no name for myself. And there’s kind of two things that happen that kind of hook into the Why Write a Book episode of Make Money Online we recorded. I made a name for myself by being the author of a book, which is dope, but that didn’t happen for a year and a half yet. I launched this in. Oh gosh, when was it? October, September of 2009. And the book came out in October of 2010. Nobody knew that the book was going to be good for a while yet. They just knew that the Kickstarter project existed. But I ended up probably 10xing, 20xing my followers on Twitter over the course of the project, which was great. I made a name for myself. I also just because this was early in Kickstarter’s development, I spent a lot of time evangelizing Kickstarter as a platform. Kickstarter came out that April of two thousand nine, and I was one of the earliest projects on there. Most people that I talked to hadn’t heard of Kickstarter, so I had to do two things sell a book to them and convince them to buy it through this unknown, baffling electronic commerce platform. And they had never heard of that before. Right now it’s a little bit it’s easier and it’s harder because everybody knows what Kickstarter is. There’s a Portlandia episode making fun of it for crying out loud. But there’s also a lot more publishing projects on there. There’s a lot more noise on there. There’s a certain amount of emotional baggage to Kickstarter around like I Didn’t budget correctly, or I’m writing the great American novel. There’s like a pathetic edge to it, and not like a badass edge. And it’s not a significant edge, but it’s there, and you have to get over it. And show that you’re a safe bet and that you’ve had a pedigree with the site, which I do in the project description. Yeah, there’s just a lot of things that you need to be accounting for, and you have to like assess what the ecosystem looks like. I don’t know if this is gonna 20x my followers on Twitter. My heavens, I hope not. Fuck Twitter. But I do hope that it causes me to get more of a name for myself as a business owner and as a bootstrapper and as somebody who cares a lot about running an independent design practice.

Tell us about it. So I made a book called Draft Evidence, which is a compilation of many essays I’ve written in the past four or five years, some blog posts, a lot of uh Photos and screenshots and teardowns of interfaces and transcripts of other podcasts. I’m surprised, Kai. I’m hoping to get a Make Money Online transcript in there. Lol. And I’m. Going to just bind it all together as an overall statement of where my business is at and make it as helpful for you as humanly possible. I think that you should be able to take this book and have a clear sense of what is required to run an independent bootstrap design business. You can remove any one of those words except for business, and it can still be a useful book. Are you a developer? You’re going to learn a lot about how to develop a good business model. Are you a designer who wants to go independent? Well, you have no idea how to do that because you just quit your job at Google and you’ve been coddled for your entire life, and they never taught you. This is an art school, so maybe you need some 101 steps for it. There’s a degree of utility to it, but it’s also meant to be entertaining. And the The project itself is pretty entertaining. It’s if you read it, it’s a funny description, it’s a funny video. But I’m very serious. About it. It’s meant to be useful. It’s meant to teach you something. You’re meant to come away from it saying, okay, I now know more about this practice, this daily craft, than I did before. And so that’s what I’m doing. I’m launching it probably within a week from the date of this recording. You’ll be neck deep in the project. It’s going to run for a month. And we’re trying to raise twenty thousand dollars for it. That is the goal for breakeven. That’s how much it will cost to print and edit and ship the thing. I have budgeted that out. I have a line item budget for this. I’m pretty ready to do it. I’m hoping to make much more money than that because I want to make a profit off of this book. I have no secret about doing that. It’s a business book. I run a business. Businesses thrive on profits. So I don’t think that I’m being terribly like harsh or cynical by doing this. It’s pretty consistent. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I running a Kickstarter is interesting because it’s automatically a PR bump. It’s a different form of marketing than I think a lot of the people in our circles, me and Kai, are used to. They usually run a drip campaign on their own mailing list and then they put it online. But man, is it a good lead Macinik to have it on Kickstarter? It is extremely useful. About half of my mailing list came in through my last Kickstarter at the time that I imported it. It doubled my mailing list. And if you care about doubling your mailing list, which I think you might, dear listener, if you’re listening to a podcast that’s literally called Make Money Online, then that might be useful to you. So there’s another thing around the podcast, which is I’m selling sponsorships. And if you sign up and pay us, I believe the amount is $650, we will write and record a sponsorship slot at the beginning of an episode. And this is the first time we’ve taken sponsorships of any kind or sold advertising of any kind. And correct me if I’m wrong, this is kind of a special case, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. And The theory is that if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably care a lot about what we do for a living. There’s, I believe, what, like 600 listeners to every episode of our podcast, which is the first time we’ve disclosed that number. I’m very grateful for that. This is you know, we’ve only had nine episodes online as of this recording, and I am gobsmacked and intensely gratified about that. I think those 600 people are of a specific niche demographic that They’re not shy paying money for your service. They’re not shy thinking about business in this particular way, and it could be a terrific fit.

You know, if you’re listening to this on a computer or some sort of other device to listen to it, then you’re part of the target market for Make Money Online. If you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re part of the target for Make Money Online. And just think about computers. Think about how that might help you in computers. Okay.

Now is because I have enough content for it. This book, I have been Kicking around for over two years. I have I print zines for people that have various bits of content every three months. And I’ve been serializing my letters in those. I’ve been doing little photo essays of interesting design details that I find around the city and around my travels. And that book has gotten ever fatter, and it is now fat enough that I can print it and feel okay about it. It is also fat enough that it can be useful. If I give you one essay, it’s like, oh yeah, that was great. I did not unsubscribe from Nick D’s mailing list. If I give you 80 essays, then all of a sudden you get a portrait of what the practice looks like. You get a better picture of it. And you don’t have to wait eighty weeks for it. So I think that’s why now it seems like a good time to serialize it. We’re coming up on the three-year anniversary of my mailing list, and we just passed the four-year anniversary of draft. And it’s time to I don’t want to say half closure around it because that’s more for myself than for my audience, but it’s time to fully articulate what the point of view looks like.

It’s not a gift basket. You’re wrong. I think it’s another thing that’s a little bit selfishly motivated. I’ll end with the selfishly motivated one. I want to see how people respond to the work in this to determine what I should write about for my next book. And so I’m making this book so I can make the next book. Because there’s a variety of different topics. And again, they offer a complete portrait, but that’s breadth, not depth, right? I want to know how to do depth. Because I could talk about design, but I feel like It’s I don’t know, for me, it’s kind of solved in my head in a lot of ways. Like I know how to practice design and I just practice it. It’s not I’m never finished at it, but if you want to learn about design, get my first book. I don’t have a second book of design in me right now, but I do have multiple books of business in me. In fact, I’ve outlined several of them and gone down the road of writing beginnings of manuscripts for some of them. I write about this in a blog post called FollowingTheHunch on 99U. com. And This helps me validate my hunches better, seeing how people respond to it, seeing what people like, seeing what people don’t like, seeing what Oh, I read this essay and it generated this amount of money for my business. Well, that sounds like it’s a very good, valuable thing for business practice, no? So there’s all that. There’s I don’t want to make this whole thing a commercial necessarily for draft evidence. I think we’ve gone enough time in here. Maybe talking about Kickstarter would be interesting because I’ve been on there since essentially the beginning, talking about how it’s changed, what you need to watch out for, how to run a good project. The notion of this is a blog post that’s very near and dear to me and Kai, and why wasn’t I consulted? And how it is the fundamental question of the web. All of these things are probably good to talk about.

Yeah, that’s the better one to answer first. Good Kickstarter project doesn’t look a whole lot different from a good marketing page. It addresses the offering, focuses on the reader, focuses on their business needs or personal needs or whatever the needs are. You aren’t being self-centered about it. You’re not being egomaniacal about it. And it addresses any potential objections that they may have. So you have to audit those objections. Figure out what are people thinking about going in the back of their head as they’re going through this project? What is preventing them from making a purchasing decision around it? And then closes with the sale, talks to you about what you’re going to get and how great it’s going to be, and how you can come along for the ride. There’s an aspect with Kickstarter in particular where you’re kind of investing yourself in the creator’s narrative. You’re maybe hooking yourself into the ground floor of a success that’s waiting to happen, which is amazing. Or you’re already connecting with somebody that Has a track record of doing something great, but on a more intimate level. So, for example, the team that recorded the Veronica Mars movie. They had already made Veronica Mars and done a pretty good job of it, but they wanted to make the new thing. And they wanted to Do it in a different way. And so you can, you know, you could have messaged the creators of it, and they’ll reply to you. And having that degree of intimacy is amazing. The thing you want to sweat as a creator to keep it from being a disaster, I tell everybody this. You want to reduce as many variables in the project as humanly possible. And that usually involves two things. A lot of upfront planning. You have to know how much everything is going to cost so you don’t run out of money. Because God help you if you run out of money. Don’t do it. That should be your paramount concern before you launch the project and settle on a number. You need to be honest about that number. Do not under predict the number, thinking that you can like actually set the budget as a stretch goal. Be careful because you are playing with fire. And you are hurting Kickstarter’s community if you underbudget. The other thing is you want to reduce the scope of the project. It is very, very tempting to expand the number of rewards to everything under the sun, right? So there’s Let’s say you make a book. I’m not even going to talk about draft heavens. Let’s say you’re making a book. It’s your first time making a book. It’s a fiction book, so it’s a novel. So it has nothing to do with what I do. You have one reward that is the book. Great, you’re backing the book. You get the book. That seems very germane to what the actual project is. No matter what, a book has to be produced, and therefore, you’re getting a book. Maybe there’s a different format of the book, like print versus PDF, something like that. Maybe there’s a limited run of the book and you’re doing the first print run and the second print run. Okay, well that’s another reward. Then you start getting into marketing, and that’s where it gets a little bit fraught. Oh, we have a party pack. Add a button, add a shirt. Add a sticker. Add a little zine. Oh, it’s a graphic novel? Great. The graphic novelist who made this book, the illustrator, is going to draw a cartoon of your face for like $500. Add that as a reward. Oh, now they can get on a phone call with you and ask answer any questions you have about the book. They can. Oh, it’s a music book. Okay, well, the band can come over and play a house show. and do all these things. Every time you add a reward that is not the reason you’re loading the page in the first place, you are setting yourself up for a potential entirely separate, highly distracting disaster. Don’t do that. Reduce the number of rewards you have. Another way to reduce the number of rewards you have, Kai even asked me about this the other day. I’ll tell you, dear listener. Don’t have the $1 thanks for backing reward because they’re not good customers. You don’t want that. You don’t want to inflate the backer count artificially. Kickstarter rewards honesty. And it’s honesty in the budget, and it’s honesty in how many people have supported you. And you just can’t fake it. It’s not something that is like sustainable or reasonable for you. And so those are things I would maybe account for up front when you’re trying to put this together. That dictates the marketing page, that dictates the rewards. And then the third component, which is my least favorite to make, and probably everybody’s least favorite to make, unless you’re actually a video producer, is the video. Uh Kickstarter projects generally raise about 2x their money with a video. It can be any video. It could literally be you tap dancing on the Clark Street Bridge, and it would be a video, and you would probably do something with it. That means that your. Failure rate effectively halves if you don’t have a video. And you can look at this on Kickstarter. They post all of their data. So you can see a lot about what that means for The potential success of your project. You need a video. It can be you in you know, Cadence and Slang’s first video was me in a filthy bedroom with my webcam turned on. It was awful. And I re-recorded it in the middle of the project because a bunch of people intervened and hated it. I actually, I’m I sent out the first draft of the video to a bunch of colleagues right before getting on this call, and I just checked Slack, and it’s blowing up with people like, are you okay? I’ve yet to see the video. I’m very excited to see the video. The first draft of the video, you may not see this video, dear listener, because it is madcap. Now, it might work. But it might also be an unfettered disaster. People have been telling me one of the big feedback points is this video is great for people who already know you, but it’s not good for expanding your audience. Seems reasonable. It could be weird as a video on Kickstarter and hence stand out from the pack. You know if you’ve looked at enough Kickstarter projects that there’s a certain genre to video. Where you start with, Hi, hello, I’m Nick D. I’m a designer from Chicago. I’m making a book called Draft Evidence, and I’d really like to have you support it. Then you move into the pitch. Draft evidence came about from my mailing list and my blog posts, and I thought, what if I just put this all together and gave you a retrospective of where I’m at right now? I thought that that might be useful, asked a few friends, and it turned out really great. Anyway, it’s and then you move into the scope of the project. It’s a two hundred fifty page book that’s going to be professionally printed and cloth bound and offset, and it’s going to look really wonderful. I need your support in order to make this happen. Then you move into the emotional plea. If I can’t get this by four weeks from now, then we’re not going to have this book at all. And so you can’t delay, and you need to actually make it happen. Finally, thank the listener. Thank you so much for listening. And if you have any questions, you can get a hold of me at nickd at nickd. org. Thanks again, and I hope you have a wonderful day. It’s the most boring video of all time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried tears of blood watching videos like that by people who are too talented to know better. So, you have to do something different, and like the frontier is open, man. You can do weird stuff. There was one video I’ll start citing a few Kickstarter projects. But this one guy, he was this like crazy hippie type and he made a bottle cooler called the Freaker. Have you ever heard of this? It became a business. It like blew up. But it started on Kickstarter in like 2009 or 2010. At the beginning of the video, I’m going to impersonate this guy horribly, so you’re going to have to forgive me. He’s like, Hi, hi, it’s so good to see you. You smell really nice today, are you? Oh man, it’s so good. I made this thing and it’s really wonderful. And God, you’re so great. And then it moves into the actual pitch. And it’s so disarming and disorienting that you’re just like. Who is this creature that just leapt out of my monitor and is telling me I smell nice? Like, doesn’t he know that this is the internet and it smells horrible? Like. Smells like trolling. So, um, but like there are a lot of ways to change up the plea, right? Another guy, his name is Frank Shimiro. He did a book called The Shape of Design. And his entire thing was him like placing note cards in a stack while a fortette song played in the background. And it turned out amazing. I’m not giving it enough justice at this point. But it um it worked out so well. And his project like got funded and like he like posted the project and went to lunch and came back and it was 200% funded

Interviews from like Fast Company and like Wired, and he’s like, I don’t want this is horrifying. Another thing is like the psychological aspect of a Kickstarter. There’s like an up, down, up. There’s a huge emotional roller coaster that you just kind of have to prepare yourself for. And I’m kind of used to it at this point. But there’s this like. Slog, like, oh god, there’s another thing I have to do before I launch. And I hate it. And why can’t I just not do that? And then there’s the, Oh my God, I launched it and oh my god, it’s making money and your friends are doing it because the vast majority of backers happen at the very beginning of the project with all your friends and all the people who knew about it back and at the very end of the project when all the people are like, Oh God, there’s only twenty eight. 24 hours left, you know. And there’s very little in the middle. So you get this like huge thing, and then you get this trough in the middle when nobody backs it. And you think everyone’s ignored you, but they haven’t because they have. Their own separate lives, and they’re not thinking about your Kickstarter project every second of every day like you are. And then it finishes, and you probably hopefully have succeeded in funding the project, and you feel amazing. But then there’s this dread because now you have to make it.

I tell you, there’s nothing like the fear of God, like getting a bank transfer of $42,000 to your bank account overnight from a bunch of people who expect stuff out of you. That is horrifying. And it sounds amazing. Everyone is probably like, boohoo, Nick D, you’re Scrooge McDuck in the pit of gold coins. No, I spent most of that. Sorry. Like. I’ve been to Nick’s house.

No, half answer the question. The goal is to have a sense of inevitability about the project. You want to look like you’re a safe bet. And so a lot of people were backing cadence and sling towards the beginning that were like my friends, like my personal friends and other designers in like the organization I worked in at the time. And that sort of inflated the numbers and made it look more like it was a success. And then I started getting like A-listers like Curious about it once they saw that and supporting it like two-thirds of the way into the project. But the beginning of the project began with a trickle. It didn’t really, didn’t really have a whole lot of momentum. In the case of a project like Frank Shimiro’s, obviously it blew up because he had an enormous audience and was very well respected and well liked and had a very persuasive pitch for it. So that worked out really well for him.

Kickstarter is an amazing vehicle for reducing your risk as a creator by Testing the idea up front. It’s, I don’t have to spend $20,000 on printing a book that nobody’s going to want, right? Imagine how disastrous of a business decision that would be. No, I spent A little bit of time making the manuscript and a little bit of time making the Kickstarter project and putting everything together and beginning an outline of it and giving very generous deadlines around when it’s going to ship. And I’m going to see what people think. And maybe three people back this project and everyone hates it and thinks I’m a complete dumbass for even trying. But then I know. Right? And it’s you know, it’s your fault for making something that people don’t want to buy. That’s how the market works.

Right, but I know a few, right? It’s but economics and business are entwined, right? Businesses serve the broader market and They listen to the market and understand what’s going to go well or not. And I have a hunch that this will go well and it’s easy for me to fulfill and it has the potential to be profitable for me. Why not do it? Worst case, it fails, and then I don’t do it any more. And I dust myself off and move on.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it did take time, but it was fun, and I enjoyed it. and it cost me zero dollars. I had the audio recording software, I had the video editing software, I had Adobe InDesign, I had the microphone that I made to record the video, I had everything that I needed at my disposal. I made it the I literally cobbled together the book from all of these essays. I’m going to write four new essays that are exclusive to the book. But the process of typesetting this and getting all the content together and asking people for permission has taken maybe three weeks. So that’s all the existing content, and then I’m going to write a lot of new stuff around it. But I’m predicting November is the ship date. I think that this should be ready to go by probably July or August, which gives me about five months to make it. And I’m being realistic about all of those deadlines, keeping people apprised of it. And You know, I’ve done this before. I probably won’t screw it up. And if I do, people will be supportive because they know I’ve tried and they know I’m being honest. The worst is when you try and bullshit them. There’s a blog post we were talking about the post called Why Wasn’t I Consulted? And it’s essentially the fundamental question of the web. They come up people come out of the web. To answer the question, why wasn’t I consulted? Just as you go on TV to be like, what’s the news? Or give me something funny? Or you open a magazine to figure out what is fashionable these days. The web puts a lot of user agency in the hands of your customers, and you are serving them. They are your boss. So you have to make sure that if you’re going to provide a report of things going wrong, which I hope you don’t, When you do, you’ll be fully honest and upfront about it, because people can smell bullshit. They can smell holes in your logic. Make sure there aren’t any. Carry yourself like you have your shit together. That’s it. And have fun.

Yes, look at the marketing pages of Brennan Dunn and Ramit Seti as well. Both of those people do really good jobs writing long form content that addresses as many objections as possible. And I think that’s about all we got. Thank you for letting me just answer a bunch of questions about this. I felt like it was kind of a Nick D episode this time around, but there’s a lot to it and a lot of promise, and I’m excited and terrified.

We have very sophisticated technology that will find you.

More importantly, I have my mom’s phone number and I’m going to call her and I’m going to tell her who was responsible and to be very disappointed in them. And you do not want that.