Over the Christmas period I finished the first draft of my upcoming book. I’m really happy with how it has shaped up and I am very grateful to everyone who has been in touch with what they think should be included. As a taster, here is the provisional Table of Contents. There may be small changes depending on comments from reviewers, however everything below will be covered in the book.
Why Side Projects?
Sign up for my list to get a free PDF of this first chapter.
- Profitable Side Projects
- Dreaming Small is Underrated
- What Defines Success for your Product?
- Getting to the Shipping Point
- A Cautionary Tale
- Minimum Viable Infrastructures
- Small Things Can Grow
- First Steps to Launch
Your Product
- Ideas and approaches
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- One off purchases
- SaaS vs. one off purchases
- Plugins, themes and add-ons
- Putting your main product on hold
- The Concierge approach
- Validating ideas
- Your Product Tasks
Productivity
- Making time for side projects
- Spend Time to Save Time
- Tools and Techniques
- Outsourcing
- Productivity Tasks
Pricing
- Choosing a Pricing Model
- The Pricing Model for Perch
- Step by Step Pricing
- Customer Acquisition and Lifetime Value
- Card up front or after Trial?
- Special Offers and Discounts
- Pricing in one currency or multiple currencies
- VAT and Local Taxes
- Next Steps
The practicalities of selling products online
- Taking payment
- Hosting
- Legal Matters
- Stats and tracking
- Next Steps
Identity and Brand
- Visual Identity
- Identity through Voice
- Writing marketing copy
- Next Steps
Setting up for Support
- Supporting your product
- Tools for Support
- Public Forums vs Ticketed Support
- Social Media Support
- Pre-sales and purchase support
- Dealing with Difficult Customers
- Next Steps for Support
Planning a Launch
- Building an audience
- Pre-launch pages
- The Slow Launch
- Next Steps to Launch
We launched! Now What?
- Adding features
- Balancing client work and your product
- Marketing Your Product
- Switching focus
- Enjoy the Journey
My next steps are to do battle with trying to create a usable book in formats that will ensure it is readable on various devices. I have become a great fan of Scrivener during the process of writing this book and I have been able to generate a reasonable preview of the book in PDF form – but the outputs for e-book formats are less than satisfactory. It looks as if the best way to create the final book will be to use HTML – which I can output from Scrivener via the Markdown support – and then convert that into the formats I need.