Lucas Carlson's Blog, page 5

How to Create Killer Landing Pages That Convert Users

So you want to grow your business, but you haven’t gotten around to creating a great landing page for it yet. “Later,” you tell yourself. “I’m too busy building the business to create a silly landing page.”

That’s ok, I was just like you. For 10 years I would put my head down and focus on building the product whenever I had something I thought was a great idea.

Then one night five years ago, around 10pm, I had another crazy idea. But that night I was too tired to start coding. So instead I threw up just a simple landing page without a product. All it said was three words: “Heroku for PHP” with an email form.

I stuck the page on Hacker News and fell asleep. You can still find the original post with all the comments.

The next morning I woke up and had 800 people signed up for a product I hadn’t even built yet.

That’s when I started spending a lot more of my time learning how to create simple and highly converting landing pages. Here are some great resources to get you started.

Blogs

Landing Pages: A How-to Guide
6 Fantastic Landing Page Examples You’ll Want to Copy
The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read
Landing Pages Turn Traffic Into Money by Moz
Unbounce Blog

Podcasts

Clay Collins From Lead Pages On Creating Irresistible Landing Pages – And Lessons From Tens Of Thousands Of Split Tests
How to Craft Landing Pages that Work – Copyblogger Podcast
The Conversions Podcast – Learn Conversion Rate Optimization and Landing Page Optimization Strategies
Landing Page Optimization – by Tim Ash

Videos

Secrets To Setting Up Landing Pages To Convert Traffic To Profits (7 mins)
Squeeze Page – How to Make a Landing Page in under 5 min (5 mins)
The Perfect Landing Page (7 mins)

Courses

The Smart Marketer’s Landing Page Conversion Course (free) – Learn how to use landing pages for higher conversions from Oli Gardner from Unbounce.
Landing Page Mastery – Optimize, Convert, and Profit ($299) – Over 1,200 have done this Udemy course with 28 lectures and over 2 hours of video

Products/Services

LeadPages – Unlimited fully hosted landing pages that are proven to convert well for sales pages, opt-in forms, email collection or anything you can imagine
OptimizePress – A really elegant landing page plugin/theme for WordPress. Doesn’t have AB testing like LeadPages
Unbounce – Another hosted landing page service, the price is tiered by unique visitors per month
LaunchRock – a free hosted landing page service

What did I miss? Leave the best landing page resources you know of in the comments.

Podcast 10: Building Enterprise Software Companies from a Venture Capitalist

Frank Artale is a managing partner at Ignition, a boutique early-stage venture capital firm investing in enterprise software. He joined the firm in 2011.

Before that, Frank was the GM of Windows NT, working alongside the now CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. He founded Consera which was sold to HP. Then he worked for Accel Partners, one of the larger VCs. From Accel, he decided to join XenSource which was acquired by Citrix in October 2007 after raising $38 Million from Accel and others.

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

What separates great entrepreneurs from the pack? First time entrepreneurs are all about energy and raw talent, and a big brain. I like to see entrepreneurs with some mistakes that they learned from.

What do you look for in an entrepreneur? Being a good listener. If you can’t be a good listener with an investor, can you imagine how bad of a listener the person will be with a customer? We love opinions, but listening is super important. We also want entrepreneurs to understand their own weaknesses. The final thing is being a domain expert.

How does a first time entrepreneur raise money? Team up with one or two people who have been involved with startups before so you can draw from people.

What mistakes do entrepreneurs make? They think that VCs will provide the all the expertise the entrepreneur needs, but we can’t be there all the time. We don’t work at the company, we are just advisors.

What’s the biggest misconception that founders have about investors? Investors are not evil. Investors are not just money. We do work as advisors, especially early stage investors.

What should an entrepreneur know about VCs? A single investment should be able to return our entire fund. Let’s say we own 20% of a company and our fund is $150M, we need to have conviction that the company could be worth over $750M some day. That can’t happen in a short amount of time. That can take 7-10 years.

What do you wish that more entrepreneurs knew? I wish more founders knew more mistakes and learned from them. Think about things that didn’t work and make that part of your memory on a day to day basis. Remember your mistakes. And celebrate your successes. And finally give more credit. There is far too much “I”. I love it when people give credit to others which make great teams.

How do you pick a team? The best teams are together for a reason. They have a history. They have gone through tough times together. Forcing a team together is generally not successful. A mediocre team almost never produces a great product.

Why did you become a VC? I love working with a portfolio of companies and stay involved as an advisor. Watching people grow during the process is really rewarding to me. If a few people have a life changing positive event at the exit of a company, it makes me feel really good.

How many investments do you make in a year? Investment pace is dictated by the fund size. Any single investor can handle about $50M worth of investment over 10-15 investments. For me this means 2-3 investments a year of $3-5M in each investment.

What’s your investment thesis? Does this startup make a class of product that most businesses will need one of. And the businesses I mean have at least 1,000 employees. We think about what will those businesses need one of 10-15 years from now. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t think that way?

What makes a great enterprise software entrepreneur? It is great if the founder worked at a big company for long enough to have access to enterprise customers willing to fork over money to pay for something. Understanding how businesses buy software is important. You can’t stay there too long though because you end up becoming a big company person.

What’s a misconception about building an enterprise software company? Enterprise software sales is not just about the product. It is because the buying company deeply understands the system and also provides high-touch, in-person advice around implementation, how to use it and things like that. B2C doesn’t include high-touch trusted advice. B2B takes sales people on the ground and long-term relationships. The customer wants to believe that you are smarter than they are about what they are buying.

What do founders get wrong when picking startup ideas? Being a victim of a false signal and being a “me too” kind of company thinking they can get a quick exit. Also understand you are not building a product for yourself. Finally, not understanding the total market size. Just because there is a lot of press doesn’t mean that there are people who will pay money?

What excites you about startups? Every day is different. The excitement about being part of the success and helping to manage the low are the things that excite me. The other thing is that I get to be around the smartest people I ever meet.

Quick Links

Ignition
Under the Radar Conference
Zero to One by Peter Theil

How to Build Enterprise Software Companies from a Venture Capitalist

Frank Artale is a managing partner at Ignition, a boutique early-stage venture capital firm investing in enterprise software. He joined the firm in 2011.

Before that, Frank was the GM of Windows NT, working alongside the now CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. He founded Consera which was sold to HP. Then he worked for Accel Partners, one of the larger VCs. From Accel, he decided to join XenSource which was acquired by Citrix in October 2007 after raising $38 Million from Accel and others.

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

What separates great entrepreneurs from the pack? First time entrepreneurs are all about energy and raw talent, and a big brain. I like to see entrepreneurs with some mistakes that they learned from.

What do you look for in an entrepreneur? Being a good listener. If you can’t be a good listener with an investor, can you imagine how bad of a listener the person will be with a customer? We love opinions, but listening is super important. We also want entrepreneurs to understand their own weaknesses. The final thing is being a domain expert.

How does a first time entrepreneur raise money? Team up with one or two people who have been involved with startups before so you can draw from people.

What mistakes do entrepreneurs make? They think that VCs will provide the all the expertise the entrepreneur needs, but we can’t be there all the time. We don’t work at the company, we are just advisors.

What’s the biggest misconception that founders have about investors? Investors are not evil. Investors are not just money. We do work as advisors, especially early stage investors.

What should an entrepreneur know about VCs? A single investment should be able to return our entire fund. Let’s say we own 20% of a company and our fund is $150M, we need to have conviction that the company could be worth over $750M some day. That can’t happen in a short amount of time. That can take 7-10 years.

What do you wish that more entrepreneurs knew? I wish more founders knew more mistakes and learned from them. Think about things that didn’t work and make that part of your memory on a day to day basis. Remember your mistakes. And celebrate your successes. And finally give more credit. There is far too much “I”. I love it when people give credit to others which make great teams.

How do you pick a team? The best teams are together for a reason. They have a history. They have gone through tough times together. Forcing a team together is generally not successful. A mediocre team almost never produces a great product.

Why did you become a VC? I love working with a portfolio of companies and stay involved as an advisor. Watching people grow during the process is really rewarding to me. If a few people have a life changing positive event at the exit of a company, it makes me feel really good.

How many investments do you make in a year? Investment pace is dictated by the fund size. Any single investor can handle about $50M worth of investment over 10-15 investments. For me this means 2-3 investments a year of $3-5M in each investment.

What’s your investment thesis? Does this startup make a class of product that most businesses will need one of. And the businesses I mean have at least 1,000 employees. We think about what will those businesses need one of 10-15 years from now. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t think that way?

What makes a great enterprise software entrepreneur? It is great if the founder worked at a big company for long enough to have access to enterprise customers willing to fork over money to pay for something. Understanding how businesses buy software is important. You can’t stay there too long though because you end up becoming a big company person.

What’s a misconception about building an enterprise software company? Enterprise software sales is not just about the product. It is because the buying company deeply understands the system and also provides high-touch, in-person advice around implementation, how to use it and things like that. B2C doesn’t include high-touch trusted advice. B2B takes sales people on the ground and long-term relationships. The customer wants to believe that you are smarter than they are about what they are buying.

What do founders get wrong when picking startup ideas? Being a victim of a false signal and being a “me too” kind of company thinking they can get a quick exit. Also understand you are not building a product for yourself. Finally, not understanding the total market size. Just because there is a lot of press doesn’t mean that there are people who will pay money?

What excites you about startups? Every day is different. The excitement about being part of the success and helping to manage the low are the things that excite me. The other thing is that I get to be around the smartest people I ever meet.

Quick Links

Ignition
Under the Radar Conference
Zero to One by Peter Theil

Podcast 9: Inside The Mind Of A Professional Investor

Investing is personal. Make it personal. ~ Chris DeVore

Ever wanted to know why investors go cold sometimes? Find out why in this candid conversation with a professional seed investor and mentor of mine, Chris DeVore (or @crashdev on Twitter).

Chris is not your regular seed investor. His background is as an entrepreneur himself. He raised millions of dollars for Founders’ Co-op, an early-stage venture fund built by founders, for founders in the Pacific Northwest. He also runs TechStars Seattle.

If you have never met a professional investor before or built a strong relationship with one, you will learn a lot about how investors think about you and your startup ideas.

Listen Now

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

What’s the biggest misconception about raising money for your business? Investors aren’t just wallets flapping down the street that spends money into ideas that come along. They have points of view, they have life experiences, they have values and goals. At the seed stage of funding (usually less than $1M, and more around $100k) it is very personal. Investors are seeking people who not only have great ideas, great ambition, and great talent, but they are looking to support people who’s vision of the world squares with the investor vision.

What do founder’s get wrong talking to investors? Too often, founders come in trying to convince the investor of an idea versus finding investors who already believe what you believe. It is much easier to sell someone who has already sold themselves than it is to talk someone into a new idea. Find that match.

How do you do that? Read the blogs of investors before you talk to them (here is Chris’s by the way). If they don’t have a blog, read their Twitter or Facebook timelines or AngelList profile. The world is much more open now than it used to be. There is very little excuse for not doing your homework.

What’s the one thing you can’t teach an entrepreneur? This was the newest blog post on Chris’ blog. Successful entrepreneurs have a really burning need to prove themselves to the world. At some point, someone told these people that they couldn’t and they have made it their life struggle to prove that person wrong. It doesn’t matter how much they achieve, it is about proving to the world that they are as good or better than the people who doubted them. That drive never goes away. It is not always a happy thing to have to live that life, but that fire is very powerful.

How do you get a fundraise going? Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion because it is all about behavioral psychology. There is a lot of herd behavior among investors, but it is much much less true for professional investors.

Why? How does an investor make the decision to be the first person to invest in a company? Professional investors (those who have made more than 50 investments) know what conviction feels like. They know their mechanism for getting to conviction. They know what happens when they get to conviction. Small angel investors just don’t have as much data, so it is not right to say they lack courage or conviction to make an investment.

How does an entrepreneur find a lead investor? Stop looking for a lead. Close investors one-by-one with a convertible note which is a lighter weight way to put a round together without setting many of the major terms up front. Read Paul Graham’s High Resolution Fundraising.

What should an entrepreneur be careful of when picking an investor? Ask yourself this: is this a person you want in your life for the next 5 years? Investors aren’t just check writers that walk away. You are creating a relationship with someone. Make sure you want to do that.

What else do founders not understand about investors? Angel Investors and Investment Fund Managers have very different incentive schemes. Understanding the mental math (which they don’t expose to you as a founder very often) is very powerful. Angels have more money than they need and investing is about loving the people or the idea or they want bragging rights at cocktail parties. Professional fund managers have an economic platform that they are responsible for (rate of return, time window, their economics, and how much time do they have). A venture investor needs to invest their money and time in roughly equal segments, which means that venture investors have an ideal check writing size. Sometimes they can’t write a $500k check because they don’t have enough time to watch over that small amount of money. Maybe they need to write $50M checks and you might or might not fit into that kind of investment yet.

What’s another misconception? Venture Capital firms are not a company. They are partnerships. A partnership is a collection of individuals. Every individual has their own quarks and biases. A fundraising process is an individual sales process with an individual person. You need to build a relationship with a human being, not just “accessing the capital markets.” Investing is personal. Make it personal.

Why do some investors go cold? Nobody wants to burn a relationship or say no to somebody for fear that they can’t say yes later on. Everyone is trying to preserve optionality. Being a founder is hard. Shitting on someone’s motivation by telling them that you don’t think they have what it takes is bad karma, but I do think investors should be more honest if there are more constructive feedback people can give them. Maybe that makes me a bad investor because very few investors seem to think that way.

What’s the biggest mistakes founders make when they pitch you? There are so many ways. Remember this is about a relationship with a human being. Investors need to feel like this is an authentic person sitting in front of you. If you try to convince an investor on the business without selling them on you, you are misunderstanding what the investor is investing in. Investors invest in you as much as they do your idea.

When should an entrepreneur look for funding? You shouldn’t raise money when you are on the journey trying to figure out the problem you are going to solve. You usually start with a convertible note round ($250-750k) after you are a real corporation, have co-founders, and know the problem you are going to go solve. Hopefully you have built something already by that time. Then a price Series Seed round ($1M+) needs more momentum and traction behind the business. You don’t necessarily need to make much money, but people that use your product should really love it and you should be showing great growth and acceleration. Read Paul Graham’s Startup = Growth. Then there is an A-Round is now growth capital which means you are making a lot of money already ($1M+/year in revenue). The business engine needs to be working.

What’s the best piece of advice for entrepreneurs? You find a lot more happiness following your nose and figuring out what you want from life. Many young people think they want to be entrepreneurs and they head down that path. Choose the journey that’s the right thing for you.

Quick Links

Chris DeVore Blog
Chris DeVore Twitter
Founders’ Co-op TechStars Seattle
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Paul Graham: High Resolution Fundraising
Paul Graham’s Startup = Growth

Inside The Mind Of A Professional Investor

Investing is personal. Make it personal. ~ Chris DeVore

Ever wanted to know why investors go cold sometimes? Find out why in this candid conversation with a professional seed investor and mentor of mine, Chris DeVore (or @crashdev on Twitter).

Chris is not your regular seed investor. His background is as an entrepreneur himself. He raised millions of dollars for Founders’ Co-op, an early-stage venture fund built by founders, for founders in the Pacific Northwest. He also runs TechStars Seattle.

If you have never met a professional investor before or built a strong relationship with one, you will learn a lot about how investors think about you and your startup ideas.

Listen Now

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

What’s the biggest misconception about raising money for your business? Investors aren’t just wallets flapping down the street that spends money into ideas that come along. They have points of view, they have life experiences, they have values and goals. At the seed stage of funding (usually less than $1M, and more around $100k) it is very personal. Investors are seeking people who not only have great ideas, great ambition, and great talent, but they are looking to support people who’s vision of the world squares with the investor vision.

What do founder’s get wrong talking to investors? Too often, founders come in trying to convince the investor of an idea versus finding investors who already believe what you believe. It is much easier to sell someone who has already sold themselves than it is to talk someone into a new idea. Find that match.

How do you do that? Read the blogs of investors before you talk to them (here is Chris’s by the way). If they don’t have a blog, read their Twitter or Facebook timelines or AngelList profile. The world is much more open now than it used to be. There is very little excuse for not doing your homework.

What’s the one thing you can’t teach an entrepreneur? This was the newest blog post on Chris’ blog. Successful entrepreneurs have a really burning need to prove themselves to the world. At some point, someone told these people that they couldn’t and they have made it their life struggle to prove that person wrong. It doesn’t matter how much they achieve, it is about proving to the world that they are as good or better than the people who doubted them. That drive never goes away. It is not always a happy thing to have to live that life, but that fire is very powerful.

How do you get a fundraise going? Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion because it is all about behavioral psychology. There is a lot of herd behavior among investors, but it is much much less true for professional investors.

Why? How does an investor make the decision to be the first person to invest in a company? Professional investors (those who have made more than 50 investments) know what conviction feels like. They know their mechanism for getting to conviction. They know what happens when they get to conviction. Small angel investors just don’t have as much data, so it is not right to say they lack courage or conviction to make an investment.

How does an entrepreneur find a lead investor? Stop looking for a lead. Close investors one-by-one with a convertible note which is a lighter weight way to put a round together without setting many of the major terms up front. Read Paul Graham’s High Resolution Fundraising.

What should an entrepreneur be careful of when picking an investor? Ask yourself this: is this a person you want in your life for the next 5 years? Investors aren’t just check writers that walk away. You are creating a relationship with someone. Make sure you want to do that.

What else do founders not understand about investors? Angel Investors and Investment Fund Managers have very different incentive schemes. Understanding the mental math (which they don’t expose to you as a founder very often) is very powerful. Angels have more money than they need and investing is about loving the people or the idea or they want bragging rights at cocktail parties. Professional fund managers have an economic platform that they are responsible for (rate of return, time window, their economics, and how much time do they have). A venture investor needs to invest their money and time in roughly equal segments, which means that venture investors have an ideal check writing size. Sometimes they can’t write a $500k check because they don’t have enough time to watch over that small amount of money. Maybe they need to write $50M checks and you might or might not fit into that kind of investment yet.

What’s another misconception? Venture Capital firms are not a company. They are partnerships. A partnership is a collection of individuals. Every individual has their own quarks and biases. A fundraising process is an individual sales process with an individual person. You need to build a relationship with a human being, not just “accessing the capital markets.” Investing is personal. Make it personal.

Why do some investors go cold? Nobody wants to burn a relationship or say no to somebody for fear that they can’t say yes later on. Everyone is trying to preserve optionality. Being a founder is hard. Shitting on someone’s motivation by telling them that you don’t think they have what it takes is bad karma, but I do think investors should be more honest if there are more constructive feedback people can give them. Maybe that makes me a bad investor because very few investors seem to think that way.

What’s the biggest mistakes founders make when they pitch you? There are so many ways. Remember this is about a relationship with a human being. Investors need to feel like this is an authentic person sitting in front of you. If you try to convince an investor on the business without selling them on you, you are misunderstanding what the investor is investing in. Investors invest in you as much as they do your idea.

When should an entrepreneur look for funding? You shouldn’t raise money when you are on the journey trying to figure out the problem you are going to solve. You usually start with a convertible note round ($250-750k) after you are a real corporation, have co-founders, and know the problem you are going to go solve. Hopefully you have built something already by that time. Then a price Series Seed round ($1M+) needs more momentum and traction behind the business. You don’t necessarily need to make much money, but people that use your product should really love it and you should be showing great growth and acceleration. Read Paul Graham’s Startup = Growth. Then there is an A-Round is now growth capital which means you are making a lot of money already ($1M+/year in revenue). The business engine needs to be working.

What’s the best piece of advice for entrepreneurs? You find a lot more happiness following your nose and figuring out what you want from life. Many young people think they want to be entrepreneurs and they head down that path. Choose the journey that’s the right thing for you.

Quick Links

Chris DeVore Blog
Chris DeVore Twitter
Founders’ Co-op TechStars Seattle
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Paul Graham: High Resolution Fundraising
Paul Graham’s Startup = Growth

Podcast 8: Tucker Max on How To Write a Bestselling Book in 4 Hours

Tucker Max is a 3 time #1 NYT Bestselling author and entrepreneur. He has been a prolific blogger on TuckerMax.com (college humor like the books) and the TuckerMax.me (more “mature” posts). He has started and sold publishing businesses and is currently working on a startup idea that could revolutionize not only writing books, but how we learn online.

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

You went to law school, were you good at law? I am very good at excelling at law school without doing any work. I am very good at hacking that system. I wasn’t good at being a lawyer. I got fired from my first lawyer job within 3 weeks of starting it.

Were you surprised at your success selling millions of copies of your books (I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues)? No.

Did you know they were going to be awesome bestsellers when you were writing them? Yes.

How did you know that? I was applying “lean startup” methods to my writing long before lean startup methods existed (testing, failing fast, trial and error).

When did you decide to write the first book? There is nothing more foolish than taking a bunch of time to write a book if you don’t know there is an audience for it. I knew there was a massive audience because I spent 3 years building a website with multi-millions of unique views and a huge fan base.

Many people don’t do that, right? A lot of people decide what they want to do and then go search for demand. People don’t ask themselves if there is latent demand exists before starting on a project. That’s really the wrong way around. The better thing to do is to figure out what people want and need and then create that.

How did you go beyond writing books into creating publishing companies? I created the content and built the fan base, but was only getting 15% of hardcover royalties. Because I had a leveraged position (I knew my books were going to sell no matter who the publisher was), I made the publisher into just a distributor and took 89% of net receipts for my third book.

Did any of the negative press have backlash and affected your long-term strategy? Yes, of course. Every action has consequences. There have been negative consequences, but at the same time there have been positive results. I’m not exactly sure, to be honest, if it was the optimal strategy for me. But it was the strategy I took. There was a point in time that I thought it was the strategy I needed to take. I wouldn’t recommend a negative strategy for most people. The other side of that coin is that this is the reason I am now so good at marketing, branding and media is because I had to learn it to manage the negative strategy.

Do your decisions still haunt you today? Nothing haunts me, dude. I’ve sold millions of books and I’m famous and super successful and I have fuck you money. A legitimate argument could be made that I could have been more successful or could have achieved more without doing that. I don’t know if it’s true.

What are you doing now? Two major projects:

Mating Grounds – the definitive guide to sex and dating for guys. Most of the information out there is offensively bad (pickup artist stuff) or political or incorrect or foolhardy. There is a lot of good information but nobody’s pulled it together in a way that guys can use.

LionCrest Publishing, The BookStrapper Guide to Marketing Your Book and Book-in-a-Box.

What’s Book-in-a-Box? I developed it by accident when a client wanted to have a book written with the specialized knowledge in her head. I wondered: is there a way to have anybody be able to write a book in let’s say, fuck it… 4 hours. And I thought about it and realized there might be a way. What is a book? A singular idea in a self-contained unit (digital or physical). So I wondered how do I get the information out of her head? Ghost writing is a broken process that doesn’t work. Can we do it quicker and better?

So how do you write a book in 4 hours? I helped her create an outline of the singular idea, how do you want to convey it, who is your audience, what do they want to learn, why do they care about this? Through those answers we came up with a great outline of exactly what she had to say. Her thesis, main point, 3 supporting points, evidence, conclusion. It ended up taking 6-8 hours of interviews. But we just interviewed her following the outline. Transcribed it into 35,000-40,000 words and then edited and structured it down to 30,000 words. With one more review and 12-16 hours total (not in a row), the full book was done.

So anybody can be the author of a book now? Yes. Writing is a skill that you don’t need to have in order to be an “author”. We are de-coupling the writing from the authoring process. Ghost writing costs $40,000-50,000. The one-on-one high-touch Book-in-a-Box process generally costs $8,000-10,000 right now, but we are building automated software solution that will only cost $100-200 per book without having to do the writing themselves. Tell us you heard about Book-in-a-Box from Lucas Carlson to get a discount.

What will this do to Amazon? Self-publishing took the universe of books published a year from 50,000 to 500,000 books per year. Book-in-a-Box systems could add another 0 and take that to 5,000,000 books per year.

What’s the definition of a good book idea? It is cogent, it make sense, and there is an existing audience for it. That’s it.

Who will be writing books? Anyone with something to say. There are so many people out there who don’t write books because they don’t have the skill to write. We’ve developed a practice to turn ideas into books.

How do you get attention for your books in a noisy world? The first and best thing you can do to market your book is to create a great book. All marketing eventually funnels down to word of mouth. If you don’t create something great to start with, marketing won’t help it spread. Next is focus on the title, subtitle, cover and author bio and how it relays value to the consumer. Most people skip over these parts but they are the most crucial steps to marketing.

How do people choose to buy a book? The price of the book is not the choice. The choice is the investment of time. Buying something and not reading it is the fear people have and then feeling guilty for having wasted their money. So the question is why do I care about this fucking book? because reading is much harder than sitting around with your dick in your hand and doing nothing.

How do you market fiction books? Informal word of mouth. The only real way to market fiction is to write more books because discovery for fiction books is broken. BookBub, BookVibe and GoodReads is the best you can do right now, but they are not that good.

Solving the book discovery problem in fiction is a pretty good startup idea then? Yes, but it’s tough. If you can solve that problem, you can probably solve discovery for something way more lucrative than fiction. And that is a HUGE business.

What are some common mistakes startup founders make? There are so many…

Worrying too much about competition. For the vast majority of startups their competition is entropy (lack of focus or order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder), not their competitors. Once you get to a certain point, your competitors do matter. When you are small your competitors don’t matter. What matters is getting traction.

Focusing on something besides having users or customers. Customers are always a function of you creating something people want. Are you creating value to people’s lives. If you are doing that, then you will generally have customers. That causal chain is something a lot of founders loose sight of and forget.

What’s the best pieces of advice that’s the most valuable things you have ever heard?

Recognizing and dealing with emotions appropriately. I took things too personally like my identity was getting attacked. I had a lot of problems appropriately dealing with my emotions in a business context. I see that a in a lot of people… 80% of unsuccessful founders have this problem and 30% of successful founders have it. It’s the reason my first startup failed.

Ask why does anyone care about what you are doing. Are you solving a real problem? That’s the fundamental question.

What’s the one thing you would like to change most about the world? Our educational, governmental and social institutions do not sufficiently prepare us for our lives. One way I am working to solve that is through Mating Grounds (sex, dating, and relationships). I’m trying to help people turn great ideas, knowledge and wisdom into value for other people. The common thread is helping people understand what we need to do to be happier and more content in our lives. Societies and institutions of power don’t teach us this. The stronger relationships between people are, the weaker the state is.

In another great podcast you did with Joanna Penn, you said that the future of books isn’t printed word, it is multi-media. Is that where Book-in-a-Box is going? You are giving away my fucking long-term strategy dude! I want to be part of a team that makes creating all creative things easier. Imagine if you templatized education. If you can reduce the barrier to creating ideas, the best ideas win.

Tucker Max on How To Write a Bestselling Book in 4 Hours

Tucker Max is a 3 time #1 NYT Bestselling author and entrepreneur. He has been a prolific blogger on TuckerMax.com (college humor like the books) and the TuckerMax.me (more “mature” posts). He has started and sold publishing businesses and is currently working on a startup idea that could revolutionize not only writing books, but how we learn online.

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

You went to law school, were you good at law? I am very good at excelling at law school without doing any work. I am very good at hacking that system. I wasn’t good at being a lawyer. I got fired from my first lawyer job within 3 weeks of starting it.

Were you surprised at your success selling millions of copies of your books (I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues)? No.

Did you know they were going to be awesome bestsellers when you were writing them? Yes.

How did you know that? I was applying “lean startup” methods to my writing long before lean startup methods existed (testing, failing fast, trial and error).

When did you decide to write the first book? There is nothing more foolish than taking a bunch of time to write a book if you don’t know there is an audience for it. I knew there was a massive audience because I spent 3 years building a website with multi-millions of unique views and a huge fan base.

Many people don’t do that, right? A lot of people decide what they want to do and then go search for demand. People don’t ask themselves if there is latent demand exists before starting on a project. That’s really the wrong way around. The better thing to do is to figure out what people want and need and then create that.

How did you go beyond writing books into creating publishing companies? I created the content and built the fan base, but was only getting 15% of hardcover royalties. Because I had a leveraged position (I knew my books were going to sell no matter who the publisher was), I made the publisher into just a distributor and took 89% of net receipts for my third book.

Did any of the negative press have backlash and affected your long-term strategy? Yes, of course. Every action has consequences. There have been negative consequences, but at the same time there have been positive results. I’m not exactly sure, to be honest, if it was the optimal strategy for me. But it was the strategy I took. There was a point in time that I thought it was the strategy I needed to take. I wouldn’t recommend a negative strategy for most people. The other side of that coin is that this is the reason I am now so good at marketing, branding and media is because I had to learn it to manage the negative strategy.

Do your decisions still haunt you today? Nothing haunts me, dude. I’ve sold millions of books and I’m famous and super successful and I have fuck you money. A legitimate argument could be made that I could have been more successful or could have achieved more without doing that. I don’t know if it’s true.

What are you doing now? Two major projects:

Mating Grounds – the definitive guide to sex and dating for guys. Most of the information out there is offensively bad (pickup artist stuff) or political or incorrect or foolhardy. There is a lot of good information but nobody’s pulled it together in a way that guys can use.

LionCrest Publishing, The BookStrapper Guide to Marketing Your Book and Book-in-a-Box.

What’s Book-in-a-Box? I developed it by accident when a client wanted to have a book written with the specialized knowledge in her head. I wondered: is there a way to have anybody be able to write a book in let’s say, fuck it… 4 hours. And I thought about it and realized there might be a way. What is a book? A singular idea in a self-contained unit (digital or physical). So I wondered how do I get the information out of her head? Ghost writing is a broken process that doesn’t work. Can we do it quicker and better?

So how do you write a book in 4 hours? I helped her create an outline of the singular idea, how do you want to convey it, who is your audience, what do they want to learn, why do they care about this? Through those answers we came up with a great outline of exactly what she had to say. Her thesis, main point, 3 supporting points, evidence, conclusion. It ended up taking 6-8 hours of interviews. But we just interviewed her following the outline. Transcribed it into 35,000-40,000 words and then edited and structured it down to 30,000 words. With one more review and 12-16 hours total (not in a row), the full book was done.

So anybody can be the author of a book now? Yes. Writing is a skill that you don’t need to have in order to be an “author”. We are de-coupling the writing from the authoring process. Ghost writing costs $40,000-50,000. The one-on-one high-touch Book-in-a-Box process generally costs $8,000-10,000 right now, but we are building automated software solution that will only cost $100-200 per book without having to do the writing themselves. Tell us you heard about Book-in-a-Box from Lucas Carlson to get a discount.

What will this do to Amazon? Self-publishing took the universe of books published a year from 50,000 to 500,000 books per year. Book-in-a-Box systems could add another 0 and take that to 5,000,000 books per year.

What’s the definition of a good book idea? It is cogent, it make sense, and there is an existing audience for it. That’s it.

Who will be writing books? Anyone with something to say. There are so many people out there who don’t write books because they don’t have the skill to write. We’ve developed a practice to turn ideas into books.

How do you get attention for your books in a noisy world? The first and best thing you can do to market your book is to create a great book. All marketing eventually funnels down to word of mouth. If you don’t create something great to start with, marketing won’t help it spread. Next is focus on the title, subtitle, cover and author bio and how it relays value to the consumer. Most people skip over these parts but they are the most crucial steps to marketing.

How do people choose to buy a book? The price of the book is not the choice. The choice is the investment of time. Buying something and not reading it is the fear people have and then feeling guilty for having wasted their money. So the question is why do I care about this fucking book? because reading is much harder than sitting around with your dick in your hand and doing nothing.

How do you market fiction books? Informal word of mouth. The only real way to market fiction is to write more books because discovery for fiction books is broken. BookBub, BookVibe and GoodReads is the best you can do right now, but they are not that good.

Solving the book discovery problem in fiction is a pretty good startup idea then? Yes, but it’s tough. If you can solve that problem, you can probably solve discovery for something way more lucrative than fiction. And that is a HUGE business.

What are some common mistakes startup founders make? There are so many…

Worrying too much about competition. For the vast majority of startups their competition is entropy (lack of focus or order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder), not their competitors. Once you get to a certain point, your competitors do matter. When you are small your competitors don’t matter. What matters is getting traction.

Focusing on something besides having users or customers. Customers are always a function of you creating something people want. Are you creating value to people’s lives. If you are doing that, then you will generally have customers. That causal chain is something a lot of founders loose sight of and forget.

What’s the best pieces of advice that’s the most valuable things you have ever heard?

Recognizing and dealing with emotions appropriately. I took things too personally like my identity was getting attacked. I had a lot of problems appropriately dealing with my emotions in a business context. I see that a in a lot of people… 80% of unsuccessful founders have this problem and 30% of successful founders have it. It’s the reason my first startup failed.

Ask why does anyone care about what you are doing. Are you solving a real problem? That’s the fundamental question.

What’s the one thing you would like to change most about the world? Our educational, governmental and social institutions do not sufficiently prepare us for our lives. One way I am working to solve that is through Mating Grounds (sex, dating, and relationships). I’m trying to help people turn great ideas, knowledge and wisdom into value for other people. The common thread is helping people understand what we need to do to be happier and more content in our lives. Societies and institutions of power don’t teach us this. The stronger relationships between people are, the weaker the state is.

In another great podcast you did with Joanna Penn, you said that the future of books isn’t printed word, it is multi-media. Is that where Book-in-a-Box is going? You are giving away my fucking long-term strategy dude! I want to be part of a team that makes creating all creative things easier. Imagine if you templatized education. If you can reduce the barrier to creating ideas, the best ideas win.

Tucker Max on Startups, Publishing, and If Past Decisions Haunt Him

Tucker Max is a 3 time #1 NYT Bestselling author and entrepreneur. He has been a prolific blogger on TuckerMax.com (college humor like the books) and the TuckerMax.me (more entrepreneurial posts). He has started and sold publishing businesses and is currently working on a startup idea that could revolutionize not only writing books, but how we learn online.

Here is just the audio for those who are interested in listening:

iTunes
Stitcher
RSS Feed

Show Notes

You went to law school, were you good at law? I am very good at excelling at law school without doing any work. I am very good at hacking that system. I wasn’t good at being a lawyer. I got fired from my first lawyer job within 3 weeks of starting it.

Were you surprised at your success selling millions of copies of your books (I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues)? No.

Did you know they were going to be awesome bestsellers when you were writing them? Yes.

How did you know that? I was applying “lean startup” methods to my writing long before lean startup methods existed (testing, failing fast, trial and error).

When did you decide to write the first book? There is nothing more foolish than taking a bunch of time to write a book if you don’t know there is an audience for it. I knew there was a massive audience because I spent 3 years building a website with multi-millions of unique views and a huge fan base.

Many people don’t do that, right? A lot of people decide what they want to do and then go search for demand. People don’t ask themselves if there is latent demand exists before starting on a project. That’s really the wrong way around. The better thing to do is to figure out what people want and need and then create that.

How did you go beyond writing books into creating publishing companies? I created the content and built the fan base, but was only getting 15% of hardcover royalties. Because I had a leveraged position (I knew my books were going to sell no matter who the publisher was), I made the publisher into just a distributor and took 89% of net receipts for my third book.

Did any of the negative press have backlash and affected your long-term strategy? Yes, of course. Every action has consequences. There have been negative consequences, but at the same time there have been positive results. I’m not exactly sure, to be honest, if it was the optimal strategy for me. But it was the strategy I took. There was a point in time that I thought it was the strategy I needed to take. I wouldn’t recommend a negative strategy for most people. The other side of that coin, but the other side of the coin is that the reason I am now so good at marketing, branding and media is because I had to learn it to manage the negative strategy.

Do your decisions still haunt you today? Nothing haunts me, dude. I’ve sold millions of books and I’m famous and super successful and I have fuck you money. A legitimate argument could be made that I could have been more successful or could have achieved more without doing that. I don’t know if it’s true.

What are you doing now? Two major projects:

Mating Grounds – the definitive guide to sex and dating for guys. Most of the information out there is offensively bad (pickup artist stuff) or political or incorrect or foolhardy. There is a lot of good information but nobody’s pulled it together in a way that guys can use.

LionCrest Publishing, The BookStrapper Guide to Marketing Your Book and Book-in-a-Box.

What’s Book-in-a-Box? I developed it by accident when a client wanted to have a book written with the specialized knowledge in her head. I wondered: is there a way to have anybody be able to write a book in let’s say, fuck it… 4 hours. And I thought about it and realized there might be a way. What is a book? A singular idea in a self-contained unit (digital or physical). So I wondered how do I get the information out of her head? Ghost writing is a broken process that doesn’t work. Can we do it quicker and better?

So how do you write a book in 4 hours? I helped her create an outline of the singular idea, how do you want to convey it, who is your audience, what do they want to learn, why do they care about this? Through those answers we came up with a great outline of exactly what she had to say. Her thesis, main point, 3 supporting points, evidence, conclusion. It ended up taking 6-8 hours of interviews. But we just interviewed her following the outline. Transcribed it into 35,000-40,000 words and then edited and structured it down to 30,000 words. With one more review and 12-16 hours total (not in a row), the full book was done.

So anybody can be the author of a book now? Yes. Writing is a skill that you don’t need to have in order to be an “author”. We are de-coupling the writing from the authoring process. Ghost writing costs $40,000-50,000. The one-on-one high-touch Book-in-a-Box process generally costs $8,000-10,000 right now, but we are building automated software solution that will only cost $100-200 per book without having to do the writing themselves. Tell us you heard about Book-in-a-Box from Lucas Carlson to get a discount.

What will this do to Amazon? Self-publishing took the universe of books published a year from 50,000 to 500,000 books per year. Book-in-a-Box systems could add another 0 and take that to 5,000,000 books per year.

What’s the definition of a good book idea? It is cogent, it make sense, and there is an existing audience for it. That’s it.

Who will be writing books? Anyone with something to say. There are so many people out there who don’t write books because they don’t have the skill to write. We’ve developed a practice to turn ideas into books.

How do you get attention for your books in a noisy world? The first and best thing you can do to market your book is to create a great book. All marketing eventually funnels down to word of mouth. If you don’t create something great to start with, marketing won’t help it spread. Next is focus on the title, subtitle, cover and author bio and how it relays value to the consumer. Most people skip over these parts but they are the most crucial steps to marketing.

How do people choose to buy a book? The price of the book is not the choice. The choice is the investment of time. Buying something and not reading it is the fear people have and then feeling guilty for having wasted their money. So the question is why do I care about this fucking book? because reading is much harder than sitting around with your dick in your hand and doing nothing.

How do you market fiction books? Informal word of mouth. The only real way to market fiction is to write more books because discovery for fiction books is broken. BookBub, BookVibe and GoodReads is the best you can do right now, but they are not that good.

Solving the book discovery problem in fiction is a pretty good startup idea then? Yes, but it’s tough. If you can solve that problem, you can probably solve discovery for something way more lucrative than fiction. And that is a HUGE business.

What are some common mistakes startup founders make? There are so many…

Worrying too much about competition. For the vast majority of startups their competition is entropy (lack of focus or order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder), not their competitors. Once you get to a certain point, your competitors do matter. When you are small your competitors don’t matter. What matters is getting traction.

Focusing on something besides having users or customers. Customers are always a function of you creating something people want. Are you creating value to people’s lives. If you are doing that, then you will generally have customers. That causal chain is something a lot of founders loose sight of and forget.

What’s the best pieces of advice that’s the most valuable things you have ever heard?

Recognizing and dealing with emotions appropriately. I took things too personally like my identity was getting attacked. I had a lot of problems appropriately dealing with my emotions in a business context. I see that a in a lot of people… 80% of unsuccessful founders have this problem and 30% of successful founders have it. It’s the reason my first startup failed.

Ask why does anyone care about what you are doing. Are you solving a real problem? That’s the fundamental question.

What’s the one thing you would like to change most about the world? Our educational, governmental and social institutions do not sufficiently prepare us for our lives. One way I am working to solve that is through Mating Grounds (sex, dating, and relationships). I’m trying to help people turn great ideas, knowledge and wisdom into value for other people. The common thread is helping people understand what we need to do to be happier and more content in our lives. Societies and institutions of power don’t teach us this. The stronger relationships between people are, the weaker the state is.

In another great podcast you did, you said that the future of books isn’t printed word, it is multi-media. Is that where Book-in-a-Box is going? You are giving away my fucking long-term strategy dude! I want to be part of a team that makes creating all creative things easier. Imagine if you templatized education. If you can reduce the barrier to creating ideas, the best ideas win.

11 Deadly Startup Mistakes that Founders Make

Whenever I talk to a successful entrepreneur, I always ask them what common mistakes they see founders make over and over again. Luckily I have had the chance to record some of these conversations recently in the podcast and transcribe them to share with the world.

Read this list carefully and make sure you are not making one of these fatal mistakes.

Neil Patel (watch the full interview)

Founders don’t execute fast enough. They want to create the best product or over-think things rather than testing and measuring results.
Founders make decisions based on what they want vs. the data. They end up building products nobody wants to use or pay for. Use the 7 Secrets to Choosing Your Startup Idea to make sure you don’t make the same mistake.
Founders don’t think about marketing. The best startup idea or product in the world still needs to be marketed. Founders think they can’t start marketing until they finish the product or feature. These are just excuses and the excuses never ends. You will always come up with more reasons to not start marketing yet. The product does not need to be done to start marketing it.

Dave Hersh (watch the full interview)

Founders try to scale their company prematurely before they have proven their business idea… see the Startup Genome Project’s Report on the #1 cause of startup failure (74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling).
Founders are dogmatic about how to do startups (seed round of funding, then an A round, then a B round, etc). Founders should not force a company to be bigger than it should be just because you want it to be. Many companies aren’t VC fundable.
Founder ego gets in the way. Many entrepreneurs feel like they need to be successful in the eyes of their peers which leads them to be dogmatic and scale their business too early.

Chris Tacy (watch the full interview)

Founders look for advice from the Internet too often. The Internet is not your mentor. You can not crowdsource being a good entrepreneur. Find mentors who know what they are doing. Ask them for their advice. Take their advice. Stop asking Hacker News how you should do payroll.
Founders don’t educate themselves about VC realities, VC structure and VC practices. You can’t go into a relationship with a VC being ignorant of what their business is and how they do it.
Founders tolerate brilliant assholes. Startups are small and fragile. Hiring people you know are disruptive and unprofessional because they are brilliant can kill startups. Founders tolerate them and make excuses because of their brilliance. The problem is that teaches employees that there is a double standard and that the more brilliant you are, the worse you can behave. This is a death spiral for startup culture.

Patrick Vlaskovits (watch the full interview)

Founders aren’t aggressive enough with experimentation. They have a good idea and stop looking for a better one. Or worse: they have a bad idea and give up. What worked yesterday is not likely to work today any more, so you have to constantly be learning and looking for new angles.
Founders try to be all things to all people. Founders need to understand their target audience and their hopes and dreams. The hopes and dreams of a young woman are vastly different than those of an old man. Who exactly are you trying to sell to? It’s a question most founders avoid asking themselves.

Your Turn…

What’s the best advice you’ve heard? What lessons have you learned the hard way? Leave your story in the comments below…

11 Most Common Startup Mistakes that Founders Make

Whenever I talk to a successful entrepreneur, I always ask them what common mistakes they see founders make over and over again. Luckily I have had the chance to record some of these conversations recently in the podcast and transcribe them to share with the world.

Read this list carefully and make sure you are not making one of these fatal mistakes.

Neil Patel (watch the full interview)

Founders don’t execute fast enough. They want to create the best product or over-think things rather than testing and measuring results.
Founders make decisions based on what they want vs. the data. They end up building products nobody wants to use or pay for. Use the 7 Secrets to Choosing Your Startup Idea to make sure you don’t make the same mistake.
Founders don’t think about marketing. The best startup idea or product in the world still needs to be marketed. Founders think they can’t start marketing until they finish the product or feature. These are just excuses and the excuses never ends. You will always come up with more reasons to not start marketing yet. The product does not need to be done to start marketing it.

Dave Hersh (watch the full interview)

Founders try to scale their company prematurely before they have proven their business idea… see the Startup Genome Project’s Report on the #1 cause of startup failure (74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling).
Founders are dogmatic about how to do startups (seed round of funding, then an A round, then a B round, etc). Founders should not force a company to be bigger than it should be just because you want it to be. Many companies aren’t VC fundable.
Founder ego gets in the way. Many entrepreneurs feel like they need to be successful in the eyes of their peers which leads them to be dogmatic and scale their business too early.

Chris Tacy (watch the full interview)

Founders look for advice from the Internet too often. The Internet is not your mentor. You can not crowdsource being a good entrepreneur. Find mentors who know what they are doing. Ask them for their advice. Take their advice. Stop asking Hacker News how you should do payroll.
Founders don’t educate themselves about VC realities, VC structure and VC practices. You can’t go into a relationship with a VC being ignorant of what their business is and how they do it.
Founders tolerate brilliant assholes. Startups are small and fragile. Hiring people you know are disruptive and unprofessional because they are brilliant can kill startups. Founders tolerate them and make excuses because of their brilliance. The problem is that teaches employees that there is a double standard and that the more brilliant you are, the worse you can behave. This is a death spiral for startup culture.

Patrick Vlaskovits (watch the full interview)

Founders aren’t aggressive enough with experimentation. They have a good idea and stop looking for a better one. Or worse: they have a bad idea and give up. What worked yesterday is not likely to work today any more, so you have to constantly be learning and looking for new angles.
Founders try to be all things to all people. Founders need to understand their target audience and their hopes and dreams. The hopes and dreams of a young woman are vastly different than those of an old man. Who exactly are you trying to sell to? It’s a question most founders avoid asking themselves.

Your Turn…

What’s the best advice you’ve heard? What lessons have you learned the hard way? Leave your story in the comments below…