How I made $2,000 in 7 days launching my ebook
Published in 2013, this chronicle by @joshearl details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $2,000.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 11 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 3 comments
Looks great! I'd love to see examples of your email promo, and also the time effort required to write the book. Is LeanPub really only good for technical books? Looks like the top best sellers there sell ~ 2000 books. But even books that are selling just ~ 500 copies are listed as Best Sellers... How does this compare with other platforms?
$2,000 in 7 days at a lowest price of $19 means 100 or fewer buyers. And I think you mentioned you had a pre-sell list of 154 interested parties. Sounds like most / all the sales were made to those who had already expressed interest in the first 7 days.
You did mention sales was closing in at $5k after the next 4 months, so if sales are consistent roughly month to month, sounds like you're picking up another 30-40 readers per month, which is good. Primarily word of mouth or are you doing more email list building / email marketing?
I think there was another post just like this that showed that you are best able to sell eBooks quickly if you build up an email list, promote your book BEFORE it is ready, build up some demand for it, and then sell it. You'll see a spike of sales for the first few days and then it will die off, but hopefully you'll have another eBook in the waiting if you want to repeat that cycle... if it's financially worthwhile.
How many hours did it take you to write the book? From an ROI perspective, if it took you 100 hours to write the book and your rate is $100/hour, you would need to make $10,000 to break even. Of course, if used as a marketing tool to increase your rate, you would get more ROI as an investment in yourself.
What was your motivation in writing the book?
So, the email list still owns any other marketing channel. Not a surprise. Only a reminder to set up my own for my own ebook.