I launched a baby book, Computer Engineering for Babies (https://computerengineeringforbabies.com/), back in September. And have surpassed my regular salary by a 3x. It’s still a side project because I am having a hard time leaving my own job. I’ll probably leave soon, but when you have a mortgage and kids, something about a regular paycheck is hard to leave behind.
I know how it is, i only managed to leave my "real" job when my "side" things amounted to 22x salary the real job. Should have done it sooner, in retrospect.
It's ironic because early on, people saw the video but didn't have the link, so his Kickstarter basically showed a huge flood of organic traffic to the campaign.
I just got super lucky. I launched it on Kickstarter and did a post on /r/arduino the day of the launch that just kind of blew up over there, and that got me to my 10k funding goal on the first day. Then someone stole the video and crossposted on LinkedIn, and that REALLY blew up. The post got like 1M views or something. They didn't share a link to the Kickstarter or anything, so I was getting a lot of traffic but it looked like it was all showing up as direct/search traffic, because people had to go to google and actively seek out the book. Halfway through the campaign I brought on an ad agency that just does Kickstarter campaigns, and I had a pretty good experience with them as well. The campaign ended at just under $250k.
Since then I've continued to take pre-orders and have just been doing facebook ads. I expect that when people start getting their books, that will help drive a lot more traffic, and then I hopefully won't have to be so reliant upon facebook ads.
I think the book has a really high virality factor. I was able to do a few posts on reddit, and people would like and share it. It's that whole "product market fit" thing. If you have a good product that people need or want, then marketing is pretty easy, and word of mouth (whether online or in real life) drives way more sales than anything else.
Making money from books is hard in general. OP found a great niche and amazing market fit. For frontend books, you will have tough competition not just from other similar books, but also bootcamps, free tutorials etc.
Great idea. Selling educational materials might honestly be the best option for people in tech where our employers often own our code IP by default due to our contracts.
I’ve designed one or two circuit boards in the past but that’s about it. I did a lot of prototypes to get things to work the way I wanted it and then working with a manufacturer in China that was very patient with me while we work out all the bugs.
How does the whole designing, printing actually works in this case? So the manufacturer would send a prototype and you would test it, make sure it meets your quality requirements and then give a go ahead? The to and forth would also take lot of time!
I am really interested in learning more about this and your journey
