Table of Contents for The Profitable Side Project

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?

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  • 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.

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