- I was always interested in blogging. In the web design community, there's been bloggers who have
been around for a long time. That's how the whole community was shaped. Someone would invent a technique, write a blog post about it,
and then it was slowly spread as people built on it and all that. So blogging is pretty
core to the design world. I'd read these bloggers and I saw Chris Guillebeau
writing these books and self-published guides
on how to build a business, how to grow an audience,
these other things. And I remember thinking,
that'd be really cool. I'd love to do that in design. A couple different times
I tried to start writing and it just stalled out. And what I eventually learned
is that when your output and your motivation are tied together, you're not going to make it very far. Like that motivation is
going to last for a day, maybe a week. You have to have a system
behind it to make real traction. And again, I was reading Chris Guillebeau and he said something like,
it's really easy to write. And then he lists off the
most ridiculous thing, like a book every year,
a hundred blog posts, 50 guest posts, couple
long form magazine pieces, maybe a self-published book. It's pretty easy to do that in a year. I'm like reading this and I'm like, who is this guy? He just continues to like, if you write a thousand words a day. I remember thinking like,
okay, a thousand words, that's like two pages and
that's a lot to write, but you can write it in 30
minutes to two hours is kind of the the range depending
on how focused you are. So I decided, okay, I'm going to sit down and write a thousand words a day. And I made it like a day or two in and then I realized that
I broke like the streak. So then I thought, okay, pause. I'm going to build an iPhone
app to help me track the habit of writing a thousand words a day. So I made an iPhone app called Commit which every day it just pops
up and asks you, you know, did you do your habit? Did you write a thousand words today? And you say, "Yes." You check it off and it says, Great, you've done it for three days in a row, five days in a row. If
you miss a day, it resets. I built that app, put
it out in the app store and then I started using it
to track my writing habit. And by the time I published
the book in September, 2012, I had a habit of writing a thousand words
a day for 80 days in a row. And I put the book out
there, it's self-published, it's launched to my
email list of 800 people. And I thought, okay,
I want to make $10,000 over the lifetime of sales for the book. And then most of my money
I'll make from, you know, design work that comes from that project. And I ended up making
$12,000 in the first day and I was like, wait, what? Like, this is amazing. It went on to sell $19,000
worth in the first week and then it just kept selling and I was completely blown away. But probably the more
important thing for my career as a creator is that Commit, that little iPhone app that I made, popped up the next day and was like, "Are you going to write
a thousand words today?" And then my first thought was like, no, I already hit my goal. Like I did it. Then I
saw that 80 days in a row and I was like, well I
can't break the chain. So I thought, okay, what
could I write about? Well, let me write about my launch. Let me share all the numbers,
that way someone else who's following along can learn from it. So I published that and the
next day Commit popped up and it was like, "Are you going to write
a thousand words today?" And I was like, no. Like what would I even write about? But then I saw 81 days in a row and I was like, oh I
can't break that chain. And so I decided to write another book. And I wrote every single day for 90 days straight and
then published my next book. 'Cause turns out, you can write a lot of content if you write
a thousand words a day. Actually, one thing that inspired me to share all the numbers from
my book is there was this day in early 2012 when two designers, their names are Sacha
Greif and Jarrod Drysdale, and they randomly released
design e-books on the same day. And it was pure chance that they released on the same day 'cause they
didn't know each other at all, and they had completely
different pricing methods. Jarrod was charging $39 for his book. And then Sacha had written, you know this, his book was called,
"Step by Step: UI Design," and it was much shorter
and he had it for $3 or if you wanted the Photoshop files and resources that came
with it, it was $6. And this guy named Jason
Cohen, who founded WP Engine, he saw these completely
different pricing methods in the same industry, in the same niche. And was like, why don't you both come on my blog and write a guest post about why your pricing method is better? And so they both wrote these posts and it was the coolest thing for me because I'd seen people
talk about self-publishing, like the guys at Basecamp and other companies had said like, "Oh, here's how you we made
$300,000 self-publishing." And I was like, well
yeah, of course you can. Like you guys are internet famous, you have a giant audience. But here were two guys who
like, I saw myself in them. And just like, this is an example for me of why representation is so important because they had small audiences. They were in my exact niche,
like they were designers and they're writing the same
topic that I would write about. They weren't already famous. Sacha had sold I think
$7,000 in the first 48 hours and Jarrod had sold $8,000,
something like that. And so I had these two great
examples and I just saw that and I was like, okay, if they
can do it, then I can too. And it was the coolest thing
that they shared their numbers. And so actually ever since then, every number that's
mine to share is public. So that's why I wrote blog posts sharing how much ConvertKit was making. All of my books, every
launch that I've done, I've shared those numbers 'cause you just learned so much from it. Like let's say someone's giving advice, and they're like, "Oh, do this thing. It worked really well for me." You have no idea if your
business is similar to theirs. Does really well mean
that it sold $500 worth and that's smaller than what you're doing and you probably shouldn't
take that advice? Or maybe it's sold $500,000
worth and it's way bigger and they have a totally different business and you shouldn't take
their advice either. And so numbers give things context. And so I've always included
numbers from then on. 'Cause it's really like
just paying it forward and trying to leave bread
crumbs for other creators.
