Software Engineer Publishes Technical Writing Guide

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

What if you have no platform? What if you have no social media followers? You're not a famous blogger or an Instagram influencer, or you have a lot of podcast listeners or YouTube subscribers, whatever the metric is, whatever the medium, whatever the format. What if you've got none of that? And you think, well, I have a great idea for a product or service, but I'm just a voice in the wilderness here.

Who is going to care about it? How am I gonna reach the people that matter? Well, in that case, the answer is you have to get creative. The stock answer, like what you hear from people when you say, what do I do if I have no platform? The answer that you hear back is leverage someone else's, like find a way to gain access to somebody else's platform to reach their community.

And if that sounds kind of nefarious or negative in some way, it's not meant to at all. It's just a fact that some people have access to communities or people who would be interested in this thing. Okay, so how do you do it though? That's the question. How do you actually, quote unquote, leverage someone else's platform?

Well, first of all, welcome to Cida Soul School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Thank you so much for joining me today. And conveniently, today's story connects directly to this question. It's crazy how that works.

I mean, the segues, can you imagine? Well, in this story, after a computer programmer with a knack for technical writing is approached for a freelance gig, he ends up writing the book on the subject. And despite having a very modest online following, like very, very few Twitter followers, I think, we'll get into it in a moment, he ends up doing quite well. I'll tell you exactly how well he does, how much money he makes from it, how it all works out, and how he does it in this story. It's called Software Engineer Publishes Technical Writing Guide.

And that story is coming right up. Stay tuned. [Music]

In 2019, Philip Kiley was studying to be a software engineer. When the idea of writing his first book came to him, he followed a number of writers and bloggers online, and it seemed several have huge success in teaching what they knew through writing a book. For Philip though, the roadblock was platform.

He had only a dozen Twitter followers and what he describes as a modest personal network. If he wrote the book, he didn't know how he'd get eyeballs on it to make sales. Still, when he landed his first gig doing freelance work, he committed to the idea of following through. A former boss contacted him to produce some technical writing, knowing he had a knack for it. For Philip, it was a revelation.

Here was his former boss, who was a great programmer himself with a PhD, no less, and that boss was asking him, still a college student at that point, for his help writing content. He knew he had a valuable skill. Perhaps it was a skill he could even teach others. And that was the genesis of the idea for his own book. The working title was Technical Content Development Handbook, which Philip now thinks is terrible.

And by the way, side note, that title reminds me of one of the first titles I chose for an online guide that I was selling. I called it Discount Airfare Guide. So very different field, of course, but similarly terrible title. So I got better as I went along, just like Philip did, but let's stay with his story. So for this guide, Philip would cover topics like writing style, what to write about, how to find clients, and overcoming writer's block.

He knew he could write well. He was confident he could produce a solid book on the topic. But he wanted to give that book some additional credibility. So to do that, he decided to reach out to well-respected writers in the tech space and ask if he could interview them. He made a list of 100 people and set out contacting them via cold email.

He compiled their email addresses, many of which were either well-known or publicly available, and he sent each person a short yet specific message. He would address the person, say something he liked about their work, and then ask for the interview. He also made it very simple for them to say yes by making it clear he'd be available whenever it was convenient for them. This removed any possible friction. Using this method, he got 11 interviews from the 100 prospects, not a bad result.

Philip knew the benefits of those interviews would be twofold. First, they allowed him to create better content for the book. Second, he hoped to piggyback off their audiences by asking them to promote the book when it was ready. Of course, he still had to write the book. So in between studying for tests, he made himself sit down every day, often for hours at a time, and get down as much content as he could.

He worked in between classes, in the evenings, after dinner, basically whenever he had spare time. After several weeks of this schedule, he had a completed draft. As luck would have it, Philip's mom is a professional editor, and he leveraged her skills to edit the book in exchange for buying her a printer and a microwave. That mom knows how to ask for what she wants. After several rounds of revisions, and six months after first conceiving of the idea, Philip had a final draft.

It was time for him to market what he now called writing for software developers. Much better title. By now, he had a personal website and made a sales page for the book, priced at $36. He also spent a few hundred dollars for cover art and manuscript layout, because this was his masterpiece, after all, at least his first. To kick it off, Philip posted the sales page to Hacker News, a popular forum for programmers and tech enthusiasts.

He left a comment on the post and included an excerpt from the book. As he suspected, it resonated with the site's audience, and resulted in thousands of visitors and hundreds of sales. Next, he posted a tweet to his own modest following, and pinged at the interview subjects to let him know he'd done so. Several of them either retweeted his original tweet, or created tweets of their own. This led to another influx of sales, and a boost in his follower count.

He also emailed all of his personal contacts and shared the book on LinkedIn. But none of those efforts had a huge impact, and they generated only a few sales here and there. Still, that didn't matter, because the book launch was a tremendous success, netting Philip $15,000 in the first 24 hours. Over the next month, the trend continued, and by the time the initial peak was over, he'd brought in $23,000. Sales have slowed down since then, but still exceed $1,000 per month.

Because this is a self-published book, his profit margin is more than 90%. Beyond this big success, Philip now had several new contacts, a small but growing audience of his own, and perhaps most importantly, proved he could launch a product, something he plans to do a lot more of now that he's graduated. In fact, Philip doesn't want a traditional job at all. He's aiming to make a living solely from writing, building, and launching his own work. [Music]

Amazing story, congratulations, Philip.

Thank you for being a wonderful example of this whole concept of teaching what you know, which of course we've talked about many times inside of social school, but there are countless iterations of it. And I love how this story shows that even if you don't have, quote unquote, a lot of platform, there are creative solutions to that. There are things you can do. It means you have to work a little bit harder, but that's okay, right? Because eventually, you know, at least as part of this process, you're gonna start building audience of your own, which is exactly what we saw with Philip.

Also, I love his profit margin because as a traditionally published author, I make between seven and 14% on royalties for the sale of my book. But for self-published authors, like what Philip has done for his guide, as I said, it's more than 90%. So much better royalty rate there. Of course, there are pros and cons to everything, but in this case, that's definitely the right way to do it. And then last but not least, Philip points out that sites like Hacker News, there's also Indie Hackers, there's also Product Hunt, a few others, they are niche communities based around tech with enthusiastic consumer habits.

So whenever you're starting a site hustle, it could be in something totally different. Find those kind of sites, whatever they may be, where your potential customers are hanging out. So great strategy, well executed. I look forward to hearing about Philip's second masterpiece. All right, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this.

Hope I got you thinking. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Just remember that. And today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/15341534. I just noticed that tomorrow is the 15th of March, at least in terms of our distribution calendar.

So hey, look out, beware, you know, those nights of March. Last but not least, if you've got a comment or question for the show, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so, so much for joining me today. I hope you will subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and keep coming back. I will be back tomorrow, at least borrowing any action from those Ides of March.

But, you know, I'm feeling good about it. Okay, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.