One of the benefits of insomnia is all the extra time it affords you to read (and write). Unable to sleep, I started reading Jeff Gothelf’s interview with Nir Eyal, which explores – amongst other things – how Eyal built an audience and launched a minimum viable edition of ‘Hooked’, prototyping his bestseller into existence.
If you don’t know Gothelf, he’s the author of ‘Lean UX’ and ‘Sense & Respond’, his most recent book is ‘Forever Employable’. If you don’t know Eyal, he’s the author of ‘Hooked’ and, more recently, ‘Indistractable’.
Gothelf is sharing a series of interviews with individuals from a variety of professions, who have created a platform for themselves. His interview with Eyal echoed a recent discussion we had in The School of Design Slack, about building a following by sharing content, before using that following to test and validate your product assumptions.
Gothelf notes:
Eyal began writing … he shared insights, learnings and thoughts on how to build habit-forming products. This was a casual, side gig that helped him work through his own research and thoughts.
But something interesting happened on the way to his first book – people started reading…
Because he was consistent and active and offered valuable, tactical details not only were people reading, but [they] started asking him to consult on their own projects.
This echoed a number of the themes we explored in the second week of Sell While You Sleep:
- Eyal used his writing to help him work through his own research and thoughts, and
- a by-product of that writing was the audience he built, enabling him to test his assumptions.
Gothelf continues:
Sensing this market feedback, Eyal took his blog posts and turned them into a self-published book of around 150 pages … using Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing.
The first edition of ‘Hooked’ sold 5,000 copies … based primarily on the following and the associated email list Eyal had developed over two years.
Eight years later, Hooked has sold over 250,000 copies and Eyal’s email list has over 100,000 subscribers.
Eyal’s trajectory echoes the narrative we explored in our second week:
- start building an audience: sharing your content (not just writing) via your website and establishing an email list;
- test your assumptions with a proof of concept or minimum viable test (in Eyal’s case, a self-published first draft of ‘Hooked’); and
- use market feedback to iterate and develop your product (until you create a bestseller).
The process is, in essence, quite simple: build an audience, test product ideas against that audience, gather findings and iterate.
#everythingisaprototype
