

Starting and Sustaining - redguava
http://startingandsustaining.com/

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bdunn
This is the first book in a very, very long time that I've really looked
forward to.

Garrett's successfully bootstrapped a SaaS that now sustains him and his
family, and he's taken everything he's learned over the last few years and
condensed it into a 50k word guidebook.

I read an early draft and was blown away. And the spreadsheet it comes with is
easily worth the sticker price (and then some.)

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cristianpascu
I looked forward to this book. Here's what puts me off for now. One price
option only. I want to read the book. I'm not the interested in the
spreadsheets and other stuff. Am I gonna pay $79USD for a book? No.

Table of content is missing. I don't really know what's inside. Makes me
nervous. The money back guarantee is not that appealing although it should set
some of the stress aside.

Hopefully these will be fixed quickly.

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garrettdimon
Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear that you're disappointed about the
price. We've considered selling the book separately, but it's all really a
package deal as there are quite a few references to the spreadsheet throughout
the book.

Ultimately, we chose to price the book based on value. It's less about whether
you're paying $79 for a book than it is about paying $79 to cut hours, days,
or even weeks of pain and mistakes from the process of launching an
application.

As far as the money back guarantee. I stand by it, and fully plan on
processing those requests immediately should any come in.

~~~
carsonm
Garrett has earned a solid reputation with me in how he has run Sifter. I've
been a customer on-and-off, and he's always treated me fairly and promptly,
even when I was "churn." I agree the price feels a little stiff, but I see his
argument about the value. If confidence in the money-back guarantee is all you
need to pull the trigger, I wouldn't hesitate.

Note: I don't know Garrett, we're not friends, just wanted to add another
voice.

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madrobby
I'm the co-founder of a successful SaaS (<http://letsfreckle.com/>) and would
easily have paid $300 for the spreadsheet alone.

I wish I had had the spreadsheet back when we started. Garrett seriously got
your back on the finances of a bootstrapped SaaS.

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JohnHammersley
Just bought a copy - I remember reading through the slides and thought there
was a lot of good stuff there.

Whilst $79 may seem a lot for a pdf and a spreadsheet, it's really very little
to pay for good advice! There really is no way to learn other than to do it
and make your own mistakes on the way, but having something like this to hand
should help you recover quicker, and if you avoid a few pitfalls because of
it, all the better :-)

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jkulmala
I just finished reading this and it's a goldmine of information.

If anything, it's priced too low ;)

The best part for me was the focus on bootstrapping costs and the lists of
things to take into account when budgeting.

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scottmagdalein
Garrett, I'm buying your book. Definitely.

Question: How long did it take you to write the book and build the
spreadsheets? I don't mean hours. I mean, from the day you started to the day
you said "ok, done", how long was that?

~~~
garrettdimon
The short answer is October 25, 2012 to March 18, 2013.

The spreadsheet is something that I've been fine-tuning for the last five
years with Sifter. It took me a couple of days to clean it up and make it more
user-friendly.

The book was about 1.5 months of full-time writing and editing. But I've been
working on it about half-time since October doing research and working out all
of the logistics.

We also hired both an illustrator for the cover and an editor to reduce the
amount of effort I'd have to put in. So that probably shortened the timeline a
bit.

~~~
scottmagdalein
That's really helpful. Thanks.

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omervk
Is there going to also be a Kindle (or any other e-Reader) version?

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garrettdimon
I may add one if there's incredibly high demand, but my initial attempts to
create them left me with the impression that it would be a significant amount
of effort for marginal additional benefit.

~~~
omervk
If it is available in some point in the future, would it be available for free
to those who have already purchased the PDF version?

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garrettdimon
Definitely. Unfortunately, I won't have a way to push updates, so I'd only be
able to send the updated package to people that requested it.

~~~
evolve2k
+1 kindle version

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tcdowney
How long will the special launch pricing be available?

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garrettdimon
Not sure yet. I figured I'd give it two or three days to give everyone a good
shot at picking it up at the lower price.

