This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Long ago, when I first learned basic coding, I would spend hours reading books like HTML for dummies or JavaScript for complete idiots, whatever it's called, sitting in the bookstore cafe at bookstores like Barnes and Noble. And I wish I'd had a resource like the one I'll tell you about today, a different kind of book, the one that our featured side hustler makes and sells. Now, for myself, I never learned to be a real programmer, just to be clear, but even a superficial knowledge of coding can be helpful if you're making things online. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau and in this story, a wedding app founder exchanges side hustle vows for a new coding book business.
Specifically, after running from tedious computer science lectures as an undergraduate, a self-taught developer decides to help others learn through a series of friendly coding tutorials, emphasis on that word, friendly. Now, a lot of people want to learn to code because they want to make their own app or do basic web development or not be completely dependent on a specialist to be able to fix a small problem on your website. So this series of books in our story focuses on designers or other people who work alongside developers and want to better understand the other half of creating functional applications. Now, of course, this is a profitable side hustle. I'll tell you where the idea comes from, how she makes it happen, and what the outcome is.
And of course, the challenge is along the way. Right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Stay tuned. [Music]
Tracy Osborne initially pursued computer science back in college. She bailed out to avoid what felt like boring lectures and transferred into art and design.
She was convinced her initial interest in programming had been a simple mistake. Still, a few years later, she ended up running a business called Wedding Lovely. It was a planning app for Brides and it reintroduced her to coding. While teaching herself the language Python in order to build the app, she noticed that most tutorials assumed she already had a grasp on programming tools and resources. Dedicated to cracking the code, Tracy pushed through the challenges, went past the theory and straight to the play-by-play, and found the fun in coding.
She also found a problem. Surely there must be other would-be coders who were ready to create if only they had a more friendly and welcoming guide. Inspired, she ran with her new idea and wrote the tutorial she wished she'd had for other right-brain designers with no backend programming experience. Researching formats, Tracy decided to package her development blueprint as a book. She opted for self-publishing based on a track record of similar authors.
She also knew she could more easily update the material, she published it on her own, and she could sell it in a variety of formats and for a range of prices. Having witnessed the success of similar books funded through Kickstarter, Tracy invited a videographer friend over to film the story of Hello Web Books. And the name of her new business was determined simply by looking for available domains. They made a video to help Tracy connect with potential backers and threw in some silly bloopers at the end to add personality. With her first campaign, she raised $12,000 from 540 backers, proving the concept before she ever wrote the book.
So what were the keys to her Kickstarter success while strategically timing the launch with PyCon, the largest Python coding conference in North America, and then making it around to the convention to get influencers to share her campaign? This helped a ton, but she did learn some lessons. Unsure what kind of rewards would motivate people for the campaign, she got creative, perhaps too creative. She learned the hard way to not offer a care package of treats, stressing herself out, baking hundreds of cookies. She targeted just $7,000, half of what she felt she needed, because she thought more people will jump onto a campaign that is likely to reach its goal.
From there, she made stretch goals, offering workshops, and promising more content the more money that she raised. Getting the ball rolling was also important. One of Tracy's friends sponsored the first $1,000 in exchange for her featuring his startup in her promotions. Then came the actual work of writing the book. Tracy had already refined the idea through a popular talk she'd given "Design for Non-Designers." Once the first book was done, she wanted to write more.
So she used a similar model of crowdfunding for the next two, an intermediate version of Hello Web App, that was her first book, and an all-new title, Hello Web Design. For each of these three books she's written so far, all tailored to designers and other non-programmers, it's taken Tracy nine to 12 months of dedicated work. She's also refined her marketing and is now experimenting with zines as a shorter format for quick learning on the go. And I'll give an example of that more specifically in a moment. Tracy continues to offer physical books that readers can treasure.
Before graduating to a drop shipping warehouse from her initial closet full of book stock, she amused her local post office clerks. She was a frequent visitor, shipping single copies in between the yearly expedition to dispatch 300 plus copies to her crowdfunding backers. She admits her greatest strain has been believing in herself and her books. In the beginning, she felt pressured to keep her prices low. On Amazon, if you're selling a digital copy as a self-published author, you have to keep your price under $10 to receive a 70% royalty payment.
You can charge a higher price, but you'll make much less of a percentage. So it's usually better to stay under $10. For the physical copies and videos, she has appropriately raised prices, but they're still low for what readers are willing to pay. Talking to other coding authors has convinced her to almost double her prices in this coming year. Still, despite the challenge, Tracy is now earning enough to live off her side hustle.
She's letting her other business, the wedding app, fall by the wayside in order to pursue the bigger idea of practical programming for regular people. [Music]
So Tracy's website looks really great. As you might expect for something like this, a designer who's selling tools for people who'd like to learn about development. It looks really great. It's easy to navigate, really clear, simple.
You kind of understand exactly what's going on. You can watch a fun video. You can see all the resources. It's really focused on e-commerce, like she's trying to sell her books, of course, but it's also fun and friendly, which is the whole vibe and ethos of the project. Now, I mentioned her new strategy of giving away zines.
Now, in this case, a zine is just like a short PDF, or you can also just look at it on a webpage. So it's just some short content. And if you want, you can actually purchase it for a few dollars in the form of a Kindle book, or I think there's some other formats as well. But her primary strategy here is just to help people and kind of build her audience. So her first scene is the really friendly intro to command line.
A command line is an interface that you have on your computer, whether you know about it or not, that can help you navigate files and folders, do some different stuff that you don't usually do if you're not a programmer. But everybody has access to this. And if you start going down the road of learning about coding, and you'll probably notice a lot of references to the command line in the tutorials you watch. Well, if you don't know anything about the command line in the first place, you're gonna be stuck, just like Tracy was at first, and like a lot of people get stuck. So the goal with this resource is to help people with that.
And I think as she does more of these, I think that's just gonna be more and more helpful to build that audience and eventually sell them on her products. Now, in our notes with her, she also mentioned that publishing print books can be a challenge. In fact, one of her greatest struggles is trying to figure out shipping and fulfillment for those paperbacks. She said, "I would save myself a lot of time and money "if I went all digital, "but it's really cool to have a physical product." So that is just an expression of values. If you don't care about having a physical product, then you can do it all digitally and save time and money.
If you're like Tracy or like me as well, you really do value that print product, then that's okay as well, as long as you understand that there can be some hassle or at least some difficulty to overcome some work you have to do if you go that route. Anyway, a wonderful project. I can't wait to see what happens when she raises her prices. Totally agree that she should do that. This is something that is very valuable to people.
People will spend a lot of money to learn how to do this. So it should probably cost more than $10 or even more than $20 or $30, which is what she sells some of the other books for. So good luck, Tracy, and thank you for letting us share your story with our community. Listeners, if you're interested in coding, if you are a designer or somebody who's just interested in learning about coding, you might want to check it out. We will link up her website in the show notes, of course.
Those notes are at sidehustleschool.com/712. Episode 712, and still going strong. Much more is on the way. Thank you so much for listening. Do come back tomorrow.
Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School.
