 And I'm here to tell you the story, I'm here to tell you the story of The Realist Tutorial Project. But I just want to get a quick survey. How many people here have read The Realist Tutorial book or have know about it? Okay, so quite a lot of people, that's great. So just a little bit of my own background, just to set the stage for The Realist Tutorial Project. I have a background in theoretical physics and I did physics research in graduate school with Caltech, where I also taught classes in the physics core curriculum. But while I was in grad school, I got bitten by the entrepreneur bug and so after I graduated I thought, you know, I'm going to go the different way and I'm going to become an academic. And one of the influences for me was a series of essays including this one called How to Start a Start Up, by a man named Paul Graham. And interestingly, Paul has a similar sort of background, he had a PhD in computer science from Harvard and decided not to become an academic, decided not to become an academic. And one of the things he discovered after he graduated, he's cutting it out, isn't it? One of the things that he discovered after he graduated is that he was doing a list of consulting, which as he says, it was like turning water. It was easy, but he knew he would drown if he stopped. And so he decided that he wanted to solve his money problem by starting a startup. And so I thought, that seems like a good idea. What happened with Paul's company is he ended up selling it to Yahoo for a large amount of money and he could solve his money problem. So I thought, well, maybe I can solve my money problem and I'll start a startup too. The startup I started with, one of my Caltech friends, was a fantasy sports startup of all things. It was pretty cool. And for a variety of reasons it didn't quite work out, including some things beyond our control. And so I was left with another kind of money problem, which didn't really have a lot of money after doing a startup. I was in grad school before that too, so you needed a map and a bunch of money ahead floating around. So after my first startup shut down, one of my friends from Caltech has approached about writing a book on Rails. And I thought, that's a good thing to do. Maybe if I write a book, it'll help me in my technical career. And so we wrote this book together called Rails Space. I'd like to apologize for the title. This is my fault. The title is Rails Space, Building a Social Networking Website. This would be on Rails. And so people thought it was about social networking, building a social networking website. But it really was just a Rails tutorial book. It happened to use a social networking website as its example application. Now, the publisher wanted to call this book Ruby on Rails Tutorial, which I thought was such a boring, stupid name for a book. Why would you want to call it something so lame? So I talked in Rails Space. So that's my fault. I'm going to atone for that mistake. Rails space did really well. It was very well received. But it was fine. For maybe the first six months, it was really the best Rails tutorial out there. But then something happened. The rest revolution came. When we started Rails Space, it was at Rails 1.1. And those of you who do a lot of Rails application development know, especially for a while, that there was a big shift in the way Rails applications were structured. And so we did have some rest structured application code in the book. But most of the book was not restful, I would say. And so we went out of date pretty fast. And even though it did pretty well for a technical book, even a technical book isn't going to solve any problem. And the next thing I did was to do another startup. It takes me a while to learn things, I guess. I applied and was accepted to a program called Y Combinator, which, among other things, was started by Paul Grant, who I mentioned previously along with several of his colleagues. And I'm not going to go into details. This is a blank slide by design. I've applied with one idea, with my co-founder, and I had one idea, and then we switched to another idea, and we started another idea. And sometimes people say, oh, no, we're really interested in hearing. We're interested in hearing what the ideas were, the process. And if you say to me, you're interested in hearing about that, I believe you, I just don't want to talk about it. It was painful, it was unpleasant at times. But there is something about the Y Combinator program you should know, which is that at the end of this entrepreneur program, you give a pitch. You give a pitch. You give a pitch to a large number of investors, including a lot of the biggest shots in Silicon Valley. And so Paul is always telling you, you must fear demo day. You must fear demo day. It's like a shark coming to get you, or possibly a defo. Something very dangerous. And so Paul is sitting right here. What was your book about again, something about social networks? Well, do that, make a social network and platform. So that's how Ensochi was born. It was sort of born out of desperation. It has something to say on demo day. And actually Ensochi did pretty well, in the sense that he got quite a bit of adoption. This is for the time one of the top most popular for repositories on GitHub. It wasn't really a business by itself, but we actually did attract an investor interest and using Ensochi as a jumping off point. And we were actually on the brink of raising a substantial amount of money around October of 2008, depicted here. Do you remember what the markets were doing in October of 2008? Turns out that was a bad time to be on the brink of raising a lot of money. And so our potential investors kind of gave us the run around for a while. And they said, we'll be happy to fund you, if you can show us a mature product with lots of traction. And so for those of you who don't know, this is how they say no in Silicon Valley. It's a polite no. And I heard the potential investors know it will. But unfortunately, it left me with the same situation I had. I've got the wrong kind of money problem. I want to solve this money problem and it's not working out. So I started to think about this, and I decided to analyze the search for the first principles. There's this balance between risk and reward. And sort of at the low end, you've got a job, which is actually I have a very positive view on jobs and sort of the entrepreneur community people are always, they're always saying bad things about jobs. But jobs are a good thing. It's all an important problem. But they're low risk, low reward. And up here, where a startup is, it's a really high risk, really high reward. Potential, really high potential reward. And so if things work out well for you, you could end up like that. One of the other companies in the same economy around that I was in, Paroku. You might end up like this. I haven't actually been to the new Paroku headquarters in San Francisco, but I've been told that this is pretty much what it looks like. The problem is that more likely you start a startup, you end up with my situation. And so I started to reflect on this risk-reward spectrum. And I thought, you know, I think there are a lot of good reasons to start a startup. But solving your money problem isn't really one of them. I mean, it might work out for you, but the chances are that you'll be left with very little. I thought maybe there's like a sweet spot in between. Maybe there's sort of a medium-risk, medium-reward kind of situation. And if you want to end up like a pirate sitting on a bunch of gold balloons, but you also want to end up with this, I thought maybe I can do something in between. This would solve my money problem. I don't really need to be super rich. It's just something more than this very small amount. And so I did reflect to this point, though, on one of the core principles of Stardust, which is to make something people want. This is incredibly difficult. And it is, in fact, the Y Combinator motto, and you might be able to see this on the shirt, make something people want. This is a shirt that you get when you join the program. It's really, really hard to make something people want. Don't underestimate how hard that is. But I looked at this and said, you know what? I have made something people want. It real-spaced it pretty well. Maybe I can write another Rails tutorial book and turn Rails-based into this. But maybe I can write another book. And in fact, I thought this isn't going to be enough because it's a technical one. It's not going to solve my money problem. But I used my knowledge of the market for Rails educational products, which I'd been consuming myself and had contributed to, to see this gap in the marketplace, which I believed that there was a need for a long, comprehensive introduction to Rails a series of screencasts, much more comprehensive than had been made before. This is based partially on my intuition from having taught the core curriculum in physics at Caltech. I felt like becoming a basically competent Rails developer was about the size of a one-term course at Caltech like Physics 1A, which is about 20 hours of construction. So I thought maybe 10 to 20 hours of construction, which was much longer than anything else out there. I also knew Rails 3 was coming out, so I thought that might be some good timing. And so this is one of the first marketing principles that I learned as a key to sort of coming to marketing educational products, which is to address the market, you understand. This is so important, I think, to address the market where you really know what's going on. And I also think that sort of implicitness is this idea that you should do something you're good at. In other words, you should understand the market and you should be able to address that market and do it well. So I knew that I could write a good book because I'd done it before with Railspace, and I also knew that I could make screencasts, even though I hadn't done a lot of screencasting. It's essentially just teaching, and I had a lot of success in the classroom at Caltech, so I figured that I could do this. There's another principle that I adopted really early on, and it was later driven home to me by a certain Sif Lord who's actually in the audience right now. So this is a common thing in information product marketing, but Giles Boquette really drove this home for me, which is you should give something away. This is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. And so even from the start, I thought, I want my book to be available for free as HTML. So I had a vision for what this could be, something approximately like this. Now I want to emphasize that this is not charity. In fact, I'm a little jaded about charity actually, and pointed opinions on charity. This is not charity. This is a business strategy. If you have a free HTML book online, I thought people would give you in bell links, right? They'll link to you. Especially because it's free, right? You're much more likely to refer people to a free source. I also thought the search engines didn't come in an index. The web is made of text and links. I should make a book that's made of text and links. It's also a good karma. If you give away a book, people notice. And even though I'm jaded about charity, it really feels good. The first time you get an email from some guy in India saying, you know, I can't afford to buy your product, but thank you for making the book free online. I just used it to learn Rails. That's going to get to you. I'm not a free bar. But it's great to say this, to give away free books online. Let it be noted, it's not going to. It's not your money problem. It's not a viable business model. But so I had a plan. I had a vision for what this could be. I said, I'm going to take an HTML book and I'm going to put it online for free. But then I'm going to make a PDF of the same book. And I'm going to make some screencasts. And I'm going to sell those. And so I just want to know that there's a big surprise here. You have already thought about this. Wait a minute. You're going to sell a PDF of the book that's available for free online. This is one of the biggest surprises of this whole thing. People will buy a PDF. It's unbelievable. I'll talk a little bit more about this. And so in order to realize suspicion, I needed actually some tools. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my digital chain and the technology. So I wanted to implement this dual publishing model. This idea that I could start with a single source file and convert it to an HTML book and also convert it to PDF. I wanted to be able to make two books from the same source. And so to this, to this end, I sort of looked around and looked at all the different options. And there were some things that met some of my needs, but nothing that really met all of the requirements. And so I rolled up my sleeves and I wrote my own system called Polytechnic. And so some of you might be able to guess from the tech here that Polytechnic is ultimately based on Donald Knuth's tech-type setting engine. In particular, it starts with Leytech, which is a series of macros written on top of tech for making documents, like articles and books. And it converts this to, like, a subset of HTML, or of Leytech to HTML. Now, there are some projects, there's a thing called Leytech to HTML, but it's terrible because it tries to be too general. I just support the subset that I need to make a book. And then there's a little bit of trickery here, but it's really easy if you want to have a Leytech file to make a PDF. There's some, like, Polytechnic has some extra stuff to make it a nice PDF. But this part is easy, but there's a program called PDF-Laytech. So Polytechnic met my needs for a number of reasons, but one of the requirements was that I'd be able to typeset code. And so I just want you to see this is a web page. This is the PDF. They're not exactly the same, but they're pretty close. It's the same source file, so they're in sync by its construction. If you want to see the full result, you can go to realstutorial.org slash book. And it's a real book. I mean, it's a 500-page PDF, and it's all online. It just says, as an aside, and one of the reasons I chose Leytech is because I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics in all good math typesetting, or all roads to good math typesetting through tech. And so there is an example of one of these documents that I made on the web. This is a web page with nice math typesetting. It uses math jacks to do the heart rendering. This is a document called Talon in the Festo. Anyone? Anyone need to have us? All right. All right. This is an anti-pi propaganda piece. You should totally read it at TalonA.com. Really, read it. I'd like to interview you at TNN.com just interviewing you for this online. It's becoming a thing, so you should check it out. So as I approach polytechnic though, I need to tell you a little bit about it. I have a confession to make, which this is hard to say, but I actually suck. I really do. I suck. I don't have a background in academic computer science. This is a market system. Maybe you need to write a parser. I don't really know much about this, but I thought this is one of the situations where there's this potential barrier. I need some imagination energy to get over that potential barrier. Instead of worrying about not being good enough to write a parser, I'm just going to plunge forward. I was inspired by this code. Anyone recognize this horrible language? What is this horrible language? Pearl? This is Pearl. In fact, this is part of the source code from markdown.pl. Markdown, for those of you who don't know, is a nice lightweight market language that can be easily converted to HTML. If you look at it, if you read Pearl, this is just a global regular expression of substitution. In Ruby, we call it a G-sub. I saw this, it was inspiring. I thought, well, I might not be some sort of computer science genius, but I can make a bunch of G-subs. All exactly. It's basically a bunch of G-subs. It has a really good test for you, so it can be refactored. Once I figured out how to do it right. What's Justin? That helps me. So I wrote my technique, and it was good enough to write the book. So I started. I started by giving something away. But you can't just get something away. You have to do something else. You have to paint your product. I find self-promotion very unnatural and awkward, but I've discovered that I can pin my product. From practice, I've learned how to pin my product. In particular, I got in touch with an awesome guide in Peter Cooper, who launched the first four chapters of my book for me on Rails inside. So this is the little brother-to-Ruby inside, which is the biggest Ruby blog. So this is how it started. I gave away the first four chapters. If you're thinking about ever doing this sort of thing, you may wonder, how do I get my thing on Rails inside? Or how do I get other people to pin my product for me? So it's important to know that humans are primates. You may not be aware of this. Humans are primates. And they're more likely to do things for people if they have met them or if they have met someone who can give, or if they get a personal introduction. So it is a really good idea as a computer program to get out of your room and go meet people. And I especially recommend going to conferences. So go to conferences. Everyone in this room, you've already followed this rule. Even if you're watching and this is reported, you should know that the value of a conference is only partially in the talks. A lot of the value is to meet people. One of the other marketing techniques I used was to have lots of launches. Well, there's lots of little launches. So I did the first four chapters. And then one chapter at a time after that. And every one of the chapter releases was a little event. And every time it happened, I would send a post to my news feed. I would tweet about it. This is my happy news submission page. I know this is too small to read, so I'll indicate with red arrows the submissions that are a Rails tutorial related. Remember, came pure products. So let me be noted that we still have a problem. This is still not solving my money problem. I'm still just giving everything away. And so I want to talk about the e-commerce tool chain that I used. Now, if you ever want to sell stuff online, you're going to discover that there is... you'll be paralyzed by all your choices. This is the activation energy problem. So Amy Hoy has a mantra. Worry about it when you're rich. Don't agonize over every choice. You want to accept payments, right? I know it hurts. She's like, no, I don't want to. Yes. Worry about it when you're rich. I know you want to use something else. Use PayPal. You need to have some sort of part maybe, like coupon codes. You need to handle file downloads. You're going to use eJunkie. I decided to use eJunkie. eJunkie, I mean, with the name like eJunkie, can it possibly be good? They're like, and their UI is written in flash. I'm not kidding. It's horrible. But no, worry about it when you're rich. Okay, storage. You're going to store it someplace like something cool and cheap, and I can do better than, no, you can't do a better than that. Worry about it when you're rich. Just use S3. Okay, so launch time. I'm just going to make no decisions. Just do the defaults. And just get something out there. So launch time came for the PDF. This is PDF sales for the Rails 3, for the Rails 3 tutorial. Remember, you have to paint your product. This was the main launch on Ruby Inside. Michael Hartle's Rails 3 tutorial look. There's a Ruby and Rails tutorial. Learn Rails by example link there, by the way. This is a good thing to have. Someone linking to your site with this good link text. I also got a post, Greg Pollock made a post on writing Rails. I mean Rails tomorrow. Rails has great documentation. The first example, RailsTutorial.org. So how do you arrange this? How do you launch your thing on Ruby Inside and writing Rails? You use your primates. You cultivate relationships with people. Go to conferences. So remember our surprise? People will buy a PDF. They will buy a PDF. There was a time when there was no screencast. It was just the online book and the PDF. And people bought the PDF. Like, lots of people bought the PDF. Even after the initial launch event, even a couple of months out, I was still selling like three PDFs a day. Which isn't, you know, that's 12, but it was a $30 PDF. So, you know, it's pretty good. The amazing thing is, too, that I discovered, I kept thinking, people are going to, they're going to buy a PDF and they're going to feel burned because they're going to discover that it's available free online. But I was amazed. This is another surprise. They want to pay you. You have no idea how much people want to pay you. So I got an email from a guy saying, I just, I bought your PDF and I just discovered that it was available for free online. Can I get a refund? And I wrote back and said, no problem. I just gave you a refund. In fact, I'm surprised that more people haven't asked for refunds because the whole thing is available for free online. And the next day he wrote back and said, I have to admit I wasn't completely honest with you. I think your book is great and it's really worth it. I'm just kind of running short of money right now. And so I wrote back to him and said, don't worry about it, dude. I have to run short of money. Keep the refund and keep the PDF as a gift. It's okay. And I looked at my logs. Later that day, he went back and re-bought the PDF. If people have opportunity to pay you. I had this PDF book, but the real flagship product was these screencasts. And so the last part of the tool chain you need to know about is what you do for making screencasts. And this is really easy. You should use ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is awesome. It does everything you could ever want. And more, in fact, I've used part of any of the fancy features of ScreenFlow. If you made a ScreenFlow for screencasts, it's available only on the Mac. So I do have an alternative for you if you don't have the situation. You should first buy Mac and then use ScreenFlow. So I made the screencast. This was like two and a half months of bone crushing effort to make this screencast. More than 15 hours of screencasts. And this came time to launch them. And here it is. Rudy inside Michael Hartle's 15 hours of Rails 3 screencast. So this is really exciting. And I discovered that through this that not only do they want to pay you, they really want to pay you. So let me tell you about a guy and I got an e-mail from a guy in Nigeria. I got this Nigerian e-mail. This is it. Request for urgent business relationship. We were talking initially a little bit about it. But seriously, I actually got an e-mail from a guy in Nigeria saying, I'm having trouble buying your screencasts. There's some issue with country code at Paypal. And we exchanged a few e-mails and I said, maybe you can pay my credit card. And I thought, this is ridiculous. I want to support this guy in Nigeria. Here's a link for a free copy of the PDF screencast bundle. Please enjoy it. He wrote back and said, thank you very much. I'm still going to find a way to pay you. And a week later, he wrote back and said, okay, it's taking a lot of time, but I figured out a way to pay you $95. Which was the price of the PDF screencast bundle. So it's shocking that people, they really, really want to pay you. Give them an opportunity. Not a donate link. Give people an opportunity to pay you for a product that gives them some value. So I want to talk a little bit about the implications of this. Look at this model again. We've got an HTML book or an HTML document for free online and a PDF with the screencast for sale. If you look at this, this is a premium model for content. It says you can give away, you can actually give away your book and still sell the PDF and then sell screencasts as well. This is applicable to lots of different kinds of content, but I have a specific suggestion for the people in this room. What sucks about open-source software? Open-source software this is a new open-source library. It's really great. But the documentation sucks. So I have a suggestion for solving this problem. I want to align the financial interests of people who write good documentation or I want to align people's financial interests with writing good documentation. You can do this with any project, your own project or another project, but this is the basic idea which is to put an HTML documentation tutorial or structured documentation on the web for free and then make a PDF and possibly some screencasts Now you might notice that in my tool chain, there's one thing that you wouldn't necessarily have access to if you wanted to replicate my exact model which is polytechnic. And so I want to say polytechnic will I really swear someday I'll probably definitely need it. So there are a number of reasons I haven't released polytechnic yet. One of them is that open-source software documentation sucks and I don't want to be part of the problem I want polytechnic to have good documentation right from the start. But now luckily I have a tool for writing that document called polytechnic. And in fact I have an idea for how to align my financial interests with this documentation I'm going to write an article for possibly a book on how to use polytechnic and make it free online. Then I'm going to make a PDF and a screencast of how to use polytechnic and make that for sale. So now knowing that polytechnic can be used to write the documentation for polytechnic but it will also be monetized using the business model for which polytechnic was written. I'd like to quickly acknowledge the images I used in extremely small unreadable finds. But these are just the images. I do have a code though I want to note that I haven't actually answered the question implicit in the premises of this talk. Did the Rails Tutorial project solve my money problem? Did it solve my money problem? Anyway, that's the wrong slide. Yes! Yes! For really successful launches especially the screencast launch went really well. And it continues to sell. I have a passive income stream from that and something I haven't even mentioned which is actually a pretty cool part of this is the book has also been published. It's available on Amazon near you and here it is there's the print edition. This is part of the Addison Wesley Professional Ruby series and I just want to usually you save the full disclosure this here is an affiliate link you already knew I had a financial interest in the sales of this book and so if you use this link then I win coming and going because I get a commission behind the royalties. The screencasts are also being published by Addison Wesley too so inform my TN so I got this passive income source plus whatever the royalties might be I don't know what they're going to be something not zero I hope. And maybe the coolest thing about publishing your own stuff is that you end up with a customer base so I've got a bunch of people many of whom paid me $95 this is a really qualified list of customers. These are people who really are likely to buy a follow on products so if I ever find myself in the position I was in at the end of the Wacomator program where I was worried about paying the rent you know three or four months down the line I can make another product and I can have ideas for follow on products. So this whole thing could have been done without a whole bunch of awesome people and so I'd like to thank some of them on the left we've got Peter Cooper and Grape Pollock and Maddie Manetti these guys have just been stalwarts. Maddie Manetti helped me get this thing kicked off you introduced me to your Cooper Grape has been an incredible supporter you go to the end of Rails for Zombies the Rails 3 tutorial link there is to the Rails tutorial project which is awesome. O.B. Fernandez was the series editor on the professional Ruby series and really helped make this made it possible for me to sell this stuff from my website and also get it published and he wrote me a great forward as well. Art Pasco was the co-author on Rails Space and this could never happen without him. I'd also like to thank Amy Coy and Josh Boquette for being inspirations when it comes to selling educational information products online. Derek Sivers who are those of you who don't know him is incredibly awesome go to Sivers.org and read what he has to say Derek wrote an unbelievably awesome forward that you should read that online it's really amazing. So Derek is great and Ron Evans didn't have anything specific to do with this project but has been one of my biggest supporters in the Ruby community so and he will be seen and speak next and finally Evan Dorn we just saw talk about Ninjascript has been a friend of mine for more than a decade and his company Logical Reality had a hand in a lot of this including the design and development of the Rails tutorial so I'd like to thank all the Rails tutorial readers one of the cool things about publishing online is that you can outsource some of your debugging and copy editing when you publish one chapter at a time people write in and say hey there's a problem with your with your controller or this code listing or there's a typo and it's really awesome when you can fix the error and deploy the fix and then write back and say thanks for the report it's fixed and then you just reload the browser and it's just awesome and finally this has been great talking to you this morning and having the chance to tell you about this story so thank you we've got some time for questions yes we'll thank you Michael very inspiring I'm curious if you understand on this side why do people buy the PDF even though the HTML is online for free the question is why do people buy the PDF even though it's for free I think that people really like to be able to take that file with them put it on the computer and not worry about whether they're going to be online or not they can put it on that USB drive they can put it on their iPad or their Kindle by the way I mentioned iPad and Kindle I do have the proof of concept for an EPUB version of this probably technically I hope they're able to support EPUB and maybe maybe performance as well but so people like having that file that shares but I am surprised that this many people bought it any questions how many copies have you sold the screencast the question is how many how many copies of the screencast have I sold I don't know offhand but if I don't want to reveal specific numbers necessarily but I'll say that let's see I've sold many hundreds I don't know if it's more or less than a thousand but it's somewhere in that the question is have I thought about broadening out and becoming a publisher for other people like Jeffery Rosenbach at EPUB code certainly EPUB code is an inspiration for this and in fact I pitched this idea to Jeffery at Coco Ruko a couple years ago and said I want to make something that takes people from zero to EPUB code to take it or go to his material I think that my thing is the intersection of education and technical subjects and I don't see that my thing is having better taste or better recruiting abilities to get authors or screencasters to come work for me so Jeffery's gotten really good at recruiting good people I think that my competitive advantage is that there are certain things I can do really well and so what I'm interested in is scaling those things up I taught physics at Caltech which was great but teaching in a classroom setting doesn't scale very well so the idea behind this whole thing is to make a product that I can capture or I can capture what I do as an educator and then sell it to potentially too large number of people. Any other questions?