The Single Founder Handbook Public Launch

One of my life-long goals going back to my early days as a kid was to write a book. I remember spending entire summers going back and forth to the library checking out books. I was a voracious reader and would sit at home for days at a time, sometimes as much as 12-14 hours/day reading. Three 400 page books in a day? No problem. I’m sure that’s where my aptitude for reading, writing and the itch to be an author comes from.

Back in early December, I decided that I wanted to give this a shot. I started a mailing list dedicated to the book that I was calling The Single Founder Handbook, set up an autoresponder to ask people what their top 3 challenges were in building their business and started writing. The first few weeks of December and into January, I made a huge amount of progress. Then I sat down one day to review all of the responses I was getting to my question and categorized them.

The direction I was going wasn’t the one that people wanted to hear about. That meant some of my work would need to throw away so I could get back on track. *sigh* This isn’t a lot different than building a product before talking to customers to be honest. I tried to do the writing and customer development in parallel but just like building a software product, there are always things that you learn along the way that will invalidate some of your previous work.

Fortunately, I wasn’t dramatically off track and so I corrected my course and kept going. In March, I was essentially done writing and started on the editing and formatting process. I busted my tail for several weeks, getting all of that work completed and shortly before MicroConf ran a private launch to the people on my mailing list. Then I shut down sales for a month so I could get through MicroConf, mail out the physical books I’d sold to people, analyze what went right/wrong during the launch, and then gear up for the public launch.

This week is the culmination of that labor. The Single Founder Handbook is here and it’s available to the public. Head on over to the website if you want to pick up your own copy. It’s on sale until Thursday at 5pm EST for 20% off.

However, I wouldn’t expect that you’re quite ready to buy it today, even with the 20% discount. That being the case, you should at least download the table of contents and the sample chapter while you’re there so you can get a feel for it. I’ll follow up with you in the near future with a bunch of free information about starting down the path of entrepreneurship that I think you’ll find useful.

Cheers!