> If you’re feeling really bold, try out Evan Reas’ hack: tell them you want them in your book so badly, you’ll e-mail them every day for the next 30 days with a good reason why they should do it.<p>If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.
> AppSumo.com 24-hour special: $8,120 (keep $2,436)<p>So AppSumo made $5684 in profits by promoting and selling your book? What a sweet business model..
$10,000 per week sounds like a good haul, but his personal share was closer to $3000. If the initial rush of sales dies down, he'll be making less than he would at a job... and that's excluding the opportunity cost from all the unpaid time it took to write the book. I guess what they say about writing a book being a labor of love is true.
> $15 per audio hour may seem low, especially considering that one hour of audio may take up to 4 hours to transcribe. But when you look at the conversion rate, it’s not that bad. $1 USD converts to 83 Kenyan Shillings. I paid around $800 total for the transcribing, which converts to 66,400 Shillings. That’s about a month’s worth of rent in Nairobi, the largest city and capital of Kenya.<p>This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an iPad will cost the same. There's a good chance it'll be costlier because of import taxes.<p>Of course, this is a unique case where transcriber had no feedback. In general though, you shouldn't be paying someone based on your opinion of their cost of living. It demonstrates a lack of respect, and shows that you don't treat them as an equal human being.<p>Maybe it's idealistic nonsense.
The title demonstrates why "open source" is a bad term to use. It's been loaded with multiple meanings. I thought the book was about startups that created free/open source software.
I'm not sure it's as effective for 'big bang' types of things like this where you want to sell as much as possible in a brief period, but to me, starting with a Kindle version only makes a lot of sense:<p><a href="http://blog.liberwriter.com/2011/04/22/self-publishing-the-incremental-way/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.liberwriter.com/2011/04/22/self-publishing-the-i...</a><p>That way you don't have all the typesetting and print on demand overhead; you just get it out there and see how it goes before investing in that stuff.
cache - <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wHndBggSdOoJ:www.startupsopensourced.com/+startupsopensourced&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wHndBgg...</a><p>Congratulations to the author, I would love to hear some reviews from those of you who have already read this.
Congrats on your success! It seems like your hard work has definitely paid off.<p>Just a few nit-picky things: Not sure if you are a native English speaker or not, but your analysis was somewhat difficult to follow. Spelling was okay, but there were just weird little things here and there that were confusing. Also, please link images such that they open in a new window/tab. I can't even tell you how many times I opened an image, then Xed out thinking it was in it's own window.
For people doing consumer internet startups, learning how the average normal person thinks, what makes them tick, is something I'd pay for. All of you reading this here are by definition, not normal ;)
for anyone interested, i wrote about how i dealt with the traffic here: <a href="http://jmtame.posterous.com/startups-open-sourced-is-out-go-grab-it" rel="nofollow">http://jmtame.posterous.com/startups-open-sourced-is-out-go-...</a><p>the story was down for the first 20 minutes. i was trying to call siong to delete the story but he didn't have his phone on him, so i was pretty much stuck with fixing it on the spot.
i hope my linode doesn't crash again...<p>edit: reboot #1. this is like monday all over again. i'm resizing my linode to 4gb now, then will install wpcache. will be back up in 4 min.<p>edit: wow, that was like 20 minutes of downtime. it should be working now.
Shameless plug. For an free Skype recorder for Windows and a painless audio transcription outsourcing service check <a href="http://scribie.com" rel="nofollow">http://scribie.com</a>.