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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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?
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.
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.
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.)