

A Practical Guide to Web App Success (2011) – now free and CC licensed - spxdcz
http://webappsuccess.com/

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gabemart
Could you talk a little about the commercial performance of the book, and what
led to the decision to release it under CC?

And thanks!

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spxdcz
Sure! Though I don't actually have much in the way of commercial performance
details - it's all split between many quarters of receipts over the last few
years, that I'm too lazy to aggregate...

I'd guess that I didn't profit more than a couple of thousand (British) pounds
(of both paper and digital sales), after all the publishing costs had been
paid for. I think there's still quite a bit of paper stock; I'm still waiting
to find out how much is left (though I'm unlikely to try to sell it - I'll
probably give them away at conferences, etc).

The parent company that owned the publishing company was acquired by Monotype,
and they made the difficult decision to close down the publishing arm as part
of the acquisition. The contracts with all the authors were nullified, and all
rights returned. As the book was a few years old, and some of it out of date,
I figured the best thing to do with it - especially as I'm 100% focused on my
startup, and it was never going to make me rich - was to "give it away" to see
if it could have any extra life.

It's about 80,000 words and I wrote it over the course of a full year (of
traveling; I was also doing some consultancy, so it wasn't full time). So I'd
rather that effort was 'available' for other people to possibly use.

~~~
boothead
You might as well put a "buy the dead tree version" link on the site - it's a
potentially useful resource for start ups to buy and put on the shelf, and it
might make you a few extra quid?

What are you working on now?

~~~
spxdcz
Yeah, that might actually be a good idea, thanks!

I'm 100% on [http://bipsync.com](http://bipsync.com) (as I have been for the
last year or two), a startup initially targeted at Hedge Fund analysts and
other professional investors. We were lucky enough to raise a seven figure
seed round, so have had the time to go through quite a lengthy customer
development phase with some reference customers to really nail the product-
market fit. We'll have a public beta out later this year.

~~~
boothead
Awesome! Bip sync looks really nice, I'll keep an eye out in case I ever go
back into finance :-)

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atmosx
I read a couple of paragraphs and I liked it. Will read it, even if it's not
up-to-date :-) Thanks.

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sandywilkinscr
Does the CC license allow me to update and sell it? The license itself isn't
clear on this.

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spxdcz
Yes, you certainly can do that.
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

You may adapt it for any purpose, including commercially. The only terms are
that you need to credit the original source (the website will do) and indicate
if any changes were made. There are no other restrictions. Have at it!

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chintan39
I have just started reading it.And I am excited to read it all. Thank you
@spxdcz / Don Zambonini

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notastartup
Any particular chapters that contains the really important lessons?

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spxdcz
Surprisingly, at least to me, I think the chapters on marketing are some of
the more interesting ones for the HN audience, and have aged pretty well.

It's quite a high level book, so doesn't go into anything in TOO much detail,
but instead is supposed to give an entrepreneur - even non-technical - a good
understanding of most aspects of building a web app (or at least, what that
consisted of a few years ago).

The dev chapters probably won't hold much interest to HN visitors (as they'll
know much of the advice), but the marketing ones, maybe some of the design
ones, might have some new insights if you've been focusing mostly on tech in
your day to day work.

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seriocomic
Given the breadth of information covered, I think you did a remarkable job on
providing one of the better, succinct and balanced introductions on the Search
Engine Optimization chapter (#23). If I could make one suggestion - your
alternate text attribute markup for the images is non-descriptive at best.

~~~
spxdcz
Ah, sorry about that - I did a fairly quick (and lazy) conversion of one of
the eBook files to make the website. Thanks for letting me know!

