Now don’t get me wrong, I love travelling, but after all that I’ll be looking forward to spending summer in my lazy Osaka suburb.

Anyway, the main reason I’m hitting the road again is to attend the .net awards, where Sidebar is nominated in the “Best Side Project” category, on May 31st in London

Before this, I’ll also talk about Discover Meteor at the London Meteor meetup on May 30th. Even if you’re not a Meteor developer, you might want to come if you’d like to learn more about self-publishing and marketing your products.

Finally, on June 3 I’ll drop by the Paris Meteor meetup to (you guessed it) talk about Discover Meteor again. After that I’ll spend a week in Paris, and then go back to Japan.

I’m always interested in meeting local designers/developers/entrepreneurs, so if you’ll be in London between May 30 – June 1 –or in Paris the week after that– drop me a line (or leave a comment here) and I’ll try to arrange a mini-meetup one afternoon.

P.S. Another reason to come to the Meteor meetups in Paris and London: there will be free copies of Discover Meteor to win!

At least, that’s what Nathan Barry is saying in his latest post about eBook pricing:

Sacha and Jarrod, thank you so much for sharing your story and your numbers. But I think both of you are wrong when it comes to pricing.

It’s true it’s hard to argue with his results. After all, his eBooks made an order of magnitude more revenue than mine.

But let’s back up a little. When I wrote a guest post about eBook pricing over at the A Smart Bear blog about one year ago, I never imagined it would spawn such a debate and trigger two follow-up posts by two different eBook authors.

The first rebuttal to my post was penned by Bootstrapping Design author Jarrod Drysdale, who coincidentally released his eBook on the same day as my own Step by Step UI Design, and blogged about it on A Smart Bear as well.

So it’s only natural that Nathan would come back to the same place to conclude the trilogy. Still, I feel like being called out gives me a right to explain myself.

Why Nathan’s Wrong

Nathan’s post (as did Jarrod’s before) ignores something that seems obvious once you state it: maximizing revenue is not the only possible goal.

My eBook might have brought in less in revenue, but it also reached a lot more people. Having a 1500-email list of people interested in what I was doing was instrumental in kick-starting my weekly newsletter, which now has more than 4000 subscribers.

(As an aside, since I don’t really have a product to sell, that newsletter has turned into a kind of more personal blog/support group where I can share both my successes and my failures. You should sign up to get access to the archives.)

The second factor is that this eBook was fairly short (because I wanted to make sure people actually read it). Now sure, you’re supposed to price on value and not by “weight”, but I still didn’t feel confident charging too much for something you could read in 20 minutes.

So I might’ve missed the mark by a few dollars, but to this day I still don’t believe that charging $39 for that eBook would’ve been appropriate.

Why Nathan’s Right

Now on the other hand for my new book, I followed Nathan’s model (almost) to a T.

In an admirable display of cross-marketing and thinking ahead, I followed up my book about design with a book about… coding.

So yes: I took a good look at my 4000 email subscribers who signed up to hear me talk about design, and then said to myself “You know what would be great? Writing a book for a completely different audience!”.

Still, I don’t regret it. The result, Discover Meteor (which I co-wrote with Tom Coleman), is not only the best book I ever wrote (not very impressive, I know), but also –I believe– the best book about Meteor out there (still not that impressive), and according to some, it’s also “some of the best writing on programming in general”.

If you head over to the landing page now, you’ll see that we both priced relatively high (at least compared to other programming books) and implemented multiple packages.

(By the way, the reason we priced high is because we think the book is worth it. Actually it’s more than a book: you also get access to multiple code commits per chapters, live instances of the app you’re building, plus support from both authors if you run into any stumbling blocks.)

I was also planning on doing “the flip” (presenting the higher-priced packages first in the page) but since our Premium Edition package isn’t quite done yet we kept a more traditional order (on Nathan’s own advice, by the way. Thanks Nathan!).

I’m not prepared to share hard figures just yet, but I can say that the launch was very successful. Although I must concede that Nathan still has us beat by a sizable margin on the first 48-hours total sales. Then again, Meteor is still a fairly niche topic (although I’m pretty sure this will change!), so it was to be expected.

Too Expensive?

I said earlier that we priced “high”. “High” and “low” are relative terms. Saying that a mountain is “high” only has meaning compared to other mountains on Earth (for example, Mars’ Olympus Mons dwarfs our own puny Everest by more than 12km).

So when I use the word “high”, all it means is that our programming eBook costs more than other programming eBooks.

But wait, that’s unfair! Why should one book cost more than another? Clearly all books have the exact same content, offer the same value, and should be priced at the exact same price point.

I’m kidding, but you get the point. We’re perfectly fine with a Ferrari costing more than a Subaru: we just assume the Ferrari is better in some way, and if we can’t afford it we just move on.

But digital goods such as eBooks differ from Ferraris in one important way: they don’t have any associated cost of production (more on this later), which completely warps our little human brains.

Here is a Hacker News comment about Nathan’s new book by an otherwise smart individual (at least twice as smart as me, if HN karma points are any indication):

Oh, for $29 I only get a PDF … but I wanted a book. For that much money I really expected at least a paperback, possibly a hardcover.

There is no basis here for expecting a paperback, or possibly a hardcover (would it have to be leather-bound, too?). The mind just wants to associate that $29 cost with something real, something tangible to justify parting with your hard-earned money without feeling regret.

But I shouldn’t be snarky. If my studies of the human mind (i.e. reading Malcolm Gladwell books and watching TED talks) have taught me one thing, is that being smart is no help against biases and fallacies, and that nobody is immune from them (including me, of course).

Is It Right?

We’re finally approaching the crux of the matter. We know you can price high, make loads of money, and retire young to a tropical island. But is it the right thing to do?

In other terms, is it ethical to, as another HN commenter put it, “try to wring every last penny out of your customer with inflated prices just so you can brag about it on guest blog posts“? (ouch)

This is another display of the “Price is Right” fallacy (yeah, I just made that up): the idea that a good has an inherent “right” price and that anything above that is over-charging and unfair.

That idea is already debatable for physical goods (want to guess how much your expensive Nike shoes actually cost to make? Or worse, your iPhone?). But for digital goods, it’s even harder to pin down a price!

After all digital goods don’t cost anything to produce. So if the “right” price was based on production costs, all eBooks, movies, and music would be free! (also know as the Pirate Bay Theory of Economics).

But maybe the “right” price is based on recouping your initial investment. Well, both me and my co-author spent about 3 months working full-time on the book. Assuming a salary of $4000/month, that’s a $24k cost. But then, how do you distribute that cost over multiple sales? After all you won’t know how much you’ve sold until you’re done selling…

At the end of the day, unlike food and water, eBooks about JavaScript frameworks or selling products online are not a necessity of life.

So I don’t believe there’s any ethical issues with charging $100, $200, or even $10000 for a digital product: if people don’t want it, they don’t have to buy it.

It’s true it feels unfair and overprice, but that’s just our dumb instincts speaking. We’ve evolved to be deeply sensitive to injustice (even monkeys feel that way), and that instinct kicks in whenever we think we’re being taken advantage of.

A Truly Fair Pricing Model

I just said that pricing high is fair, but just like some infinite sets are demonstrably larger than other infinite sets, some types of fairness are fairer than other types (if that makes sense).

For example, it’s hard to argue that the pay-what-you-want model favored by Humble Bundle or the Lost Type Co-op is as fair as it gets.

But it’s not the only model. Heroku uses a usage-based payment that tries and match up your costs with your consumption perfectly. That’s certainly fairer than one-size-fits-all pricing plans. For a book, that might translate into letting people pay by the chapter.

And you could go even crazier: for example, you could set a total goal at, say, $100k, and start refunding a small amount to all previous customers for each additional sale past that goal.

Product > Pricing

At the end of the day though, what truly matters is that people be happy with their purchase, and your pricing model is only a small part of that equation. Much more important is the actual product.

And judging from the reviews our book has been receiving, I’m happy to say we’ve succeeded at least on that level!

More on Pricing

• Discuss this on Hacker News
• Four Pricing Principles on the Intercom blog
• Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel Spolsky
• Dan Ariely’s Behavioral Economics class on Coursera
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Discover Meteor is my latest book. I wrote it in collaboration with Tom Coleman, and we released it last week with a great party at the Meteor offices where more than 100 “meteorites” (that’s what people who’re interested in Meteor are called…) came.

The book covers everything you need to know to build a Meteor app from scratch, provided you have a basic degree of familiarity with JavaScript already.

The book is based on our experiences building Telescope, and will walk you through creating a simpler version of a social news app, which we call Microscope.

I’ll share more about our sales and our process in an upcoming post, but for now go check out the book!

The book is about the Meteor JavaScript framework, and I’m co-writing it with Tom Coleman, one of the main figures in the Meteor open-source community.

We’re planning on launching next week and I will share more details on the book after that, but in the meantime if you’re in San Francisco I woud like to invite you to our book release party at the Meteor HQ on May 6th.

I will be making the trip all the way from Japan, and I’m really looking forward to meeting up with SF’s vibrant Meteor community, as well as seeing old friends again.

So see you on May 6th, and if you can’t make it be sure to join the book’s mailing list to avoid missing out on the launch discount.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a book to finish!

Sidebar has been doing great lately, and will soon see its 10,000th subscriber! But as I watch the subscriber count slowly tick up, I’ve also been thinking about how to keep that number growing in the future.

Keeping a constant growth rate is deceptively hard. After all, growing by 20% a month when you have 100 subscribers means finding 20 new subscribers. But if you already have 10000 members, maintaing that same growth rate now means finding 2000 new people in the same timespan!

This means maintaing the same growth rate is impossible, unless your current users can somehow help you find new ones (a.k.a. viral growth). This led me to wonder if there wasn’t a way I could use Sidebar’s existing subscriber base to my advantage.

I started thinking about setting up an email-based referral program. Pretty soon, I realized that not only was such a program possible, but I could implement it pretty cheaply, and without writing a single line of code!

The Process

Let me explain how it all works.

First, let’s lay out our basic goal: we want to incentivize people to refer new subscribers to our newsletter. So in simple terms, if you get a friend to sign up, I’ll give you both something in exchange (for example, a free eBook). By the way, rewarding both sides is very important, as I’ll soon explain.

There’s a thousand possible ways to set this up, but since we’re talking about newsletters here we’ll do as much of the work as possible by email.

So the whole flow will look something like this:

• Alice receives a newsletter containing a personalized sign-up referral link.
• Alice forwards the newsletter to her friend Bob, who’s not a subscriber.
• Bob signs up using Alice’s special link.
• Both Alice and Bob receive a reward.

Rewarding Both Parties

Why is it so important that Bob also receives a reward? After all he didn’t do anything special. But giving Bob a reward is what makes it socially acceptable for Alice to forward the email in the first place, since she is also doing Bob a favor. Without that dual reward, Alice would probably be hesitant to push a referral link on her friend.

In any case, we have two technical challenges:

1. Generating the special sign-up link.
2. Sending the reward.

It turns out smart people have already created services that easily let us do just that.

Generating the referral link

First, let’s see how we can generate a unique referral link using MailChimp. As it happens, our email subscribers already possess a unique identifier… their email addresses!

We’ll simply use MailChimp’s EMAIL merge tag to inject the recipient’s email into our sign-up link. So our sign-up links will end up looking something like this:

http://sidebar.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=b5af47765edbd2fc173dbf27a&id=9abeab36bb&REFERRAL=your@email.com

(the part in bold is the part that we’re adding)

Note that that including people’s email address in the referral link means they probably won’t want to share those links openly on social networks. But since our referral campaign’s whole concept is based on referring one’s friends by email, that shouldn’t be a problem (plus, using some kind of unique ID would require custom coding).

Setting up our sign-up form

Now that we’re sending over the refferer’s email address, we need to tell Mailchimp what to actually do with that info.

So we’ll simply add a REFERRAL form field to our signup form, and that field will automatically get pre-filled with the variable we passed in the URL!

The Sidebar sign-up form

Note 1: Ideally, you’d want to hide that “Referred By” field if someone hasn’t been referred by anybody in particular. While this is not possible with MailChimp, you could do it if you used Wufoo for your sign-up form.

Note 2: We don’t have any way to check that the email entered in the “referred by” field actually belongs to an existing member. But our primary goal is to get more sign-ups, so people “gaming” the system to receive the gift even when not referred isn’t really a problem as long as they sign up,

OK, so our new sign-ups now have an extra “referral” field in their profile. But how do we actually do something with it?

Introducing Zapier

For that part, we head over to Zapier.

Zapier is a bit like the swiss army knife of the web (or maybe like some kind of tool that would let you combine one swiss army knife with a different kind of swiss army knife).

Anyway, to put it more clearly it lets you define simple rules to take data from one app, and use it in another completely different app.

Our Zapier rule

In our case, we’ll define two simple rules:

1. When somebody signs up to our newsletter and their “referral” field contains “@”, send them an email.
2. When somebody signs up to our newsletter and their “referral” field contains “@”, send an email to the referrer.

And of course, that email is where we include a link to our welcome gift!

Our Zapier filter

In case you’re wondering about the “contains @” part, that’s a crude way to validate that the fields actually contains an email address. Of course it’s not perfect, and it would’ve been better to do the validation on the MailChimp side, but it’ll have to do for now.

If I ever revisit this topic, I will show you how to use Wufoo to avoid this problem and add a couple other improvements as well.

The Final Piece of the Puzzle: Mailgun

Finally, we need an app to actually send the emails containing the gift. You can use any email app. I picked Mailgun because they have a nice free tier, but SendGrid is also a great option.

And if you want to use this setup yourself, I’ve exported both “zaps” to make them ready to use:

• Referral: Send Gift to New Subscriber
• Referral: Send Gift to Referrer

Finally, if you’d like more details on the setup, you can also check out this presentation I did that explains the whole thing (sorry for the bad sound quality!):

The Results

You’re probably curious to know what kind of results I got from all this. Let me break it down for you.

I first tried out this referral system on my own mailing list (which is where I first explained the whole thing by the way – sign up if you’d like to receive more content like this!), offering a free eBook for people who referred a new subscriber.

So how did it turn out? A quick search on the “@” character shows that 42 people have entered an email in the “referral” field at sign up.

In green: the referral sign-up spike

42 people might not seem like much on a 4000-person list, but on the other hand it’s about 4 times more than my average sign-up rate of 9 people a day. And at least it showed that my idea worked.

I then decided to try the experiment with Sidebar’s 9174 subscribers. Thanks to the awesome folks at Creative Market, I came up with a great incentive for referrers: $5 in Creative Market credits!

I bet you can find the spike

The result: 213 extra sign-ups, which means about 2.3% of existing subscribers referred somebody. I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed. I thought that with a quasi-monetary incentive, the system would turn out to be more effective and have a higher conversion rate.

Who knows why the conversion rate wasn’t higher? There could be many reasons:

• My instructions on how to earn the coupon code weren’t clear enough.
• People couldn’t think up of somebody to send the referral email to.
• People hate referral programs and my idea sucks.

In any case, it was a fun experiment and I’m still glad I did it. And now that I’ve set the whole thing up, it would be pretty easy to try it again with a different prize!

Other Solutions

You might be wondering why you should go through the trouble of setting up your own custom system instead of simply signing up for one of the countless dedicated referral management service out there.

There’s a couple reasons: first, most of these services are geared towards e-commerce referrals, and integrate with shopping cart systems like Shopify or Magento, but not necessarily with email newsletters.

Second, these services are actually quite costly. For example, Ambassador starts at $99 monthly for 250 “ambassadors”, which I assume 250 referrals. In Sidebar’s case, if I wanted to potentially enable all 10000 subscribers to be “ambassadors”, it would cost me $799 a month!

Contrast this number with what I paid: apart from my MailChimp subscription (which I’m paying anyway), the whole thing cost me $34: $19 for a Mailgun subscription, and $15 for a Zapier subscription.

Finally, I just think assembling multiple services like lego bricks to build your own system is a lot more fun and way cooler!

DIY for the Web

I think there’s something a bit magical about unrelated services being able to talk to each other through their APIs. I’m the furthest thing from the DIY type, so I will probably never know the joy of fixing my own car, or building myself a desk.

But I’d like to think that setting up my own little hack and watching those 213 new people sign up is almost the same thing!

Note: Zapier also did a write-up on this topic, showing you how you can use Wufoo for your sign-up form. 

As usual, you can discuss this on Hacker News.

Go ahead and take a look. The site is a perfect example of what you could call the “Apple-style” school of web design: white background, plenty of whitespace, crisp icons, and Myriad Pro.

Kickoffapp.com vs Apple.com

The site has clearly been designed to trigger a strong association with Apple in the visitor’s mind, and communicate the fact that this is a Mac app with the same level of design polish as Apple’s own apps.

But this admiration for Benjamin De Cock’s amazing ability to out-Apple Apple made me reflect on my own feelings about imitation in general.

Why do I feel like imitation was something to applaud in this case, yet in other instances my instinct is instead to shame and condemn it?

LayerVault vs Flat UI

Specifically, the other case I have in my mind is the Flat UI vs LayerVault battle that took place last week.

It all started when DesignModo released a UI kit that offered some striking similarities with LayerVault‘s overall aesthetic.

Flat UI vs LayerVault

(Now to get one thing out of the way, LayerVault’s problem with the UI kit was not with its general style, but with the fact that the kit allegedly copied specific icons from their site.)

However I’m not interested in discussing all that. What I’m interested in is my own reaction: when I saw Flat UI, I immediately felt indignant that someone would rip off LayerVault so blatantly.

Drawing The Line

Yet thinking about it, I can’t really find any justification. After all, if Kickoff’s case is ok yet LayerVault’s is not, where do we draw the line?

What if DesignModo released an Apple-inspired UI? Or if the Kickoff site had copied LayerVault? Somehow the first option feels ok, yet the second doesn’t. But why?

And where does something like WP-Svbtle fit in? It’s a literal rip-off of Svbtle’s design, yet its author doesn’t seem to feel ashamed of it in the least, going so far as to name his theme after the site it’s copying.

No need for comparison, Svbtle is exactly the same.

Clearly WP-Svtble is the worse form of plagiarism, but where would it start being ok? If you changed the name? Changed the font? Changed the background color? It’s the Ship of Theseus paradox applied to design…

It’s All Pointless

What I’m driving at is that this whole debate is pointless. Even though our gut thinks it knows right away what’s right or wrong, coming up with concrete arguments to back up your position can prove much harder.

The deeper you dig, the less it makes sense. For example, why should writing a song earn you royalties, yet creating a logo doesn’t? On the other hand, why can you copyright a logo, but not a typeface? Unless that typeface appears itself in a logo, of course.

All this to say that unless you want to waste hours arguing on Twitter, (or become a copyright lawyer), I suggest you do what I intend to do from now on: stop caring.

Want to use the same red as I do? Fine.

Want to copy this blog’s layout? Why not.

Want to use my “SG” logo? I’ll be pissed off, but go ahead. I have no legal or moral basis to keep you from doing it, and there’s not much I can do about it anyway.

Marc Edwards said it best on Twitter:

Time you spend being angry is time you could have used in a happy, productive way.

But let’s make one thing clear first: these tips should not be abused. So I’m trusting you to follow Quora’s community guidelines and be a valuable contributor to the site.

Asking Questions

The most basic way to use a question and answers site is… to ask questions! For example, I personally often use Quora to research blog post ideas. When I was writing a post about design case studies, I also asked about it on Quora to get some suggestions.

And before launching my newsletter, I also used Quora to research design and tech newsletters.

Don’t be shy about asking questions. Quora has a pretty good search function, so if you can’t find your question on the site, chances are good that nobody’s asked it yet.

Giving Answers

Of course, the other side of the equation is answering other people’s questions. Answering questions can help you establish credibility in a domain or promote your products or blog posts.

The key here is that even when promoting something, your answer still needs to be informative and self-contained:

Bad:

• Q: What is the best way to streamline widgets?
• A: Our app WidgetStreamliner is the best way to streamline widgets!

Good: 

• Q: What is the best way to streamline widgets?
• A: There are many ways to streamline widgets. For example, you could […] or […], or even […]. And by the way, our app WidgetStreamliner will help you automate a lot of these tasks.

Providing helpful answers not only makes the site better, it’s also great marketing since you’re demonstrating your competence on the topic.

The Double Kill

You can asks questions, provide answers… so why not do both at the same time!

As long as your question is interesting and your answer helpful, there is nothing wrong with both asking the question and answering it yourself.

For example, if you write a book about app design, you might ask something like “What are some good resources for mobile app design?” and provide an answer mentioning your book yourself. Of course, be sure to include other suggestions too, to make your answer truly useful.

Being the one who asked, you’ll also be the first to answer, which mean your answer will have a good chance of staying near the top.

Wiki Wisdom

Another little-known Quora trick is the question wiki. This is simply a crowdsourced summary of a question’s answers, and anybody can edit it.

For example, I personally compiled the wiki for this question, and since it was relevant I added my own startup, Folyo. Note that this is not just self-serving marketing: the info I compiled actually improves the usefulness of that page (which should be your guiding principle whenever posting on Quora).

Ask to Answer

One of my favorite Quora feature is the ability to ask a specific person to answer a question.

It can be a great way to get someone’s attention about a specific topic, get them to provide a quote that you can reuse in a blog post (with their permission, of course!), or just make first contact (since they will see you’re the one who asked them to answer).

And sometimes, even just seeing who Quora recommends to best answer a question can be interesting. It’s a great way to quickly find experts on any given topic, and in my own experience Quora rankings are much more reliable than Twitter followers or Klout scores.

Conclusion

Unlike posting to Twitter or Facebook, posting on Quora will never get you thousands of pageviews. But the site’s strong focus on specific topics means that the people who do see your questions or answers are probably much more relevant to you.

So although the site can seem a little opaque and unfriendly at first, it’s definitely worth a look. And hopefully, these tips will help you make the most of your Quora experience.

Note: this article was originally sent out in my newsletter. Sign up now to receive design tips like this once a week, and in addition you’ll also receive my Color Theory for Startups eBook for free.

It’s a site that lets you suggest and vote on improvements to Hacker News. I built it as a way to showcase what Telescope can do, and how it doesn’t necessarily need to be used as a social news site.

And I must say I’m quite flattered by the couple people who have suggested that the easiest way to improve Hacker News would be to replace it with Telescope outright. Although I must confess Telescope isn’t quite there yet…

Anyway, go take a look, post your ideas, and if you haven’t done so already go try out Telescope for yourself.

On the other hand, once you’ve built that great new thing, it can be frustratingly hard to actually get people to even find out it exists. It sometimes feels like no matter what you do, you’re doomed from the start if you don’t know the right people or can’t just buy traffic outright.

My own personal answer to this problem has been Content Marketing, otherwise known as “writing” (but “Content Marketing” sounds so much fancier…).

(Quick plug: my new project Sidebar gives you the 5 best design links of the day. You should go check it out!)

Writing is hit or miss too (after all, how do you get people to find out about the posts you’re writing to let people find out about your product…), but at least it’s creative, it’s a great skill to work on, and a single popular blog post can keep on bringing in traffic for many months or even years.

But the big question is, what can you write about? Here are a couple suggestions that have worked well for me over time.

Be The Expert

If you’re an expert on something, the most obvious topic is your area of expertise.

The magic of this approach is that you don’t even need to actively sell anything. If you can establish yourself as an authority on the topic, people will come to trust you and naturally buy your product.

Of course, make sure you write about a topic that’s relevant to your customers. Writing about your back-end architecture will go over great with the technical crowd but it won’t do much for your bottom line if your product’s target demographic is actually fishing enthusiasts.

Example:

•  Nemo Cancelled Your Flight? 7 Helpful Travel Tips

Don’t Be The Expert

But maybe you’re only starting out and don’t have any special knowledge to share?

No matter, you can still write from the perspective of a beginner. After all, most people are also beginners. This means they’ll identify with you and be curious to know what path you’re taking.

A great example of this is all those “Here’s How I Learned Rails in 6 Months” posts. A post entitled “Here’s How I Learned To Be Somewhat Decent At Rails After 10 Years of Hard Work” would not have the same appeal, even though its author is probably much more competent.

Example:

• How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

Write About Your Competitors

Another good angle is reviewing other apps in your space. If you’re afraid of appearing biased, simply frame the products you talk about as complements to your own instead of competitors.

Don’t get me wrong though, this is not about comparing your own product to others in hopes of making it look good. The goal here is still to become an authority on your topic of choice, and that implies being fair and objective, even if that means your own product doesn’t come out on top in every category.

Write About Your Process

Another great topic is writing about the process of building and launching your product. So if you’re building an app, you could write about things like iOS development, or how you found a designer for your logo.

Again, being an expert at all those things is not required. Even if you suck at coding, seeing what you’ve achieved with the skills that you do have is still an interesting data point for readers.

In my opinion, it’s almost always more interesting to read about what somebody actually did than about somebody’s idea of what people should do.

Example: 

• My Experience Selling With Gumroad

Write About Your Failures

Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar: you’ve never heard of a particular startup, until the day when it finally closes doors and its farewell post pops up everywhere. I’m sure they could’ve used the attention when they were still alive!

I don’t know if it’s schadenfreude, or just wanting to learn from other’s mistakes, but posts about failures are always popular. So don’t be shy and tell us all about that time when your PHP developer stole your app idea and ran away with your wife.

Examples:

• Why Wesabe Lost To Mint
• Don’t Repeat My Product Launch Mistakes

Write About Money

Writing about anything money-related is a surefire way to get people’s attention. Whether you write about your product’s pricing, how much you paid for something, or how much you made, there’s nothing like putting a dollar sign in your post’s title to stimulate people’s curiosity.

Example:

• How Perfect Pricing Got Me 1500 Sales in 2 Days

Write About Data

The vast majority of writing on the Internet (including my own) is of the “Here’s what I think, and you should trust me because I have my own blog” variety.

So if you can actually back what you’re saying with hard data, you’ll instantly have an advantage over everybody else.

Of course it’s not easy to get that data in the first place, since you generally need a lot of data points (i.e. customers) to be able to discern meaningful trends. Still, you can often use surveys or even paid studies (using Amazon Mechanical Turk or similar sites) to produce interesting insights.

Example:

• Surprising Hacker News Data Analysis
• The OKCupid Blog

Learning by Example

The easiest way to find topics to write about is probably to check out other blogs. Here are a few very popular blogs that we can all learn from:

• Intercom
• Kissmetrics
• Buffer
• OKCupid

Notice that the Intercom guys care about their blog so much that they gave it its own domain (and also hired me to design it!).

Do you have other ideas? Have you noticed certain topics that seem to catch people’s attention? I would love to hear back from you, so just let me know in the comments here on over at Hacker News.

Note: this article was originally sent out in my newsletter. Sign up now to receive design tips like this once a week, and in addition you’ll also receive my Color Theory for Startups eBook for free.

My friend/nemesis Jarrod Drysdale recently released the landing page for his new project, Cascade.

Now I didn’t have any inside information about Cascade. The first I ever heard about it was when I saw that page, and it did a pretty good job of making me curious about the project.

So I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at that page more in detail to see why it’s so successful (you’re gonna want to enable images for that one).

First of all, go take a look at the page yourself to form your own opinion. I’ll wait.

Back? OK, so let’s scroll down the page together.

The page’s main tagline is set in huge 80px font, and announces that “your startup design struggle is over“.

This doesn’t tell us anything about what Cascade is, but it does contain two very important keywords: “startup” and “design”. Both words are very familiar and — for lack of a better word — trendy, and help establish the product’s target audience right away.

Moving on to the second part of the screen, we see Jarrod did something very smart: he’s using a chalk brush style to depict the various UI elements you can generate with Cascade.

Digital design usually features straight lines and perfect shapes, so employing imperfect lines and analog textures like this is a great way to make something stand out. In fact, Jarrod already used this technique for his book’s landing page by peppering the page with small handwritten annotations.

We then reach the big call to action zone. Two things to notice here.

First, the triangle shape is drawing our eye down and encouraging us to focus on the form field. Second, that field and button are the only green elements of the whole page.

It’s true that this shade of green clashes with the page’s dominant orange, but on the other hand that clash ensures these elements stand out even more.

That tagline is also interesting because it’s phrased as a question. Questions are well known to attract attention more than normal sentences, maybe because in real life, a question usually calls for a reaction on our part.

The rest of the page follows a simple pattern: big headlines addressing the user directly, and a narrative that tries to anticipate the user’s mindset.

Again: big headline, address the user, put yourself in their place, and use big downward triangles to keep the user scrolling. Notice too how the section breaks off just after the colon (“:”), making it virtually impossible for the reader to stop there.

Jarred stays on message here, by reminding the user of their predicament (being “stuck on the design”). Did you notice how big the font size was throughout the whole page? Body copy is never smaller than 18px, making the page much easier to read than the traditional 12-14px.

Finally, the subscribe form is repeated at the end of the page to avoid forcing users to scroll all the way back up. Never underestimate the average internet user’s laziness!

Show vs Tell

Of course, I don’t actually know if this landing page converts well or not. After all, sometimes showing is more effective than telling.

A completely different style of landing page

The Pencil Case landing page is a good example of this: it barely tells you anything about the product, but by showing an appealing screenshot of the app it still manages to make you curious enough to leave your email.

(Note: I’m willing to bet that same landing page without the rainbow color scheme would perform far worse!)

Taking It Too Far

As a counter-example, I think ConvertKit‘s homepage takes the “tell” strategy too far: the copy is great, but there’s no screenshot, mockup, or wireframe of the app… in fact, the page doesn’t even feature the app’s name!

ConverKit: too much telling, not enough showing

The Meteor Book

I actually think the perfect landing page would be a mix of both approaches. After all, even if you write the best copy in the world, people still want to see something of your app.

And it’s never too early to establish your app’s brand, whether that’s a color, a font, or a silly mascot.

At least, that’s what I tried to do when I designed the landing page for my latest project, The Meteor Book:

Landing page for The Meteor Book

Screenshots of a book wouldn’t be too interesting, so I mocked up a quick illustration to give the product some substance. I also tried to establish brand colors with a distinctive purple/yellow combo (as well as the 8-bit banding effect on the gradient).

And to give people a reason to actually come to the site in the first place, the page also features a blog with a couple helpful articles.

Conclusion

Now none of these landing pages will win any design prizes. But this is precisely why I chose them: they show that by using good copy and simple design elements, you can design effective landing pages without being a Dribbble superstar.

But above all, remember the first Law of Landing Pages: an imperfect landing page is better than no landing page at all!

As usual, you can discuss/upvote this article over at Hacker News.