It took a bit longer than 11 months: Eric Ries was our first customer (a good first customer to have!), and his first sale was on April 21, 2010. So it took ab

It took a bit longer than 11 months: Eric Ries was our first customer (a good first customer to have!), and his first sale was on April 21, 2010. So it took about 2 years. When we launched we were based on a hacked up version of WordPress MU. We've pivoted a couple times, and Leanpub today is based on writing your book in Markdown on your own computer (or iPad), and syncing with Leanpub using Dropbox. Along the way we had a brief period where we used GitHub instead of Dropbox, but we felt that limited us to only highly technical authors. (We do use Git internally still, but Dropbox is a lot more accessible and it makes our publish workflow really nice.)