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Eyeballs... Our problem with action for eyeballs is when you have nothing to sell the brains behind the eyeballs. Just building an audience with nothing to sell

Eyeballs... Our problem with action for eyeballs is when you have nothing to sell the brains behind the eyeballs. Just building an audience with nothing to sell (beyond ads) is what we rail against. But building an audience that could also be your customers is something we encourage. Sorry, Jason, I think you're being disingenuous again. Did you come up with the idea of writing Getting Real and then try to market it and sell it to web developers? Or did you gather the content of your book from your blog posts, bundle it into Getting Real and up sell it to your readers? Did you start out with the idea of having a job board on a popular blog? Or, did you have a popular web developers blog, and then decide to monetize those eyeballs by selling to people looking for developers on your job board?

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Did you come up with the idea of writing Getting Real and then try to market it and sell it to web developers? Or did you gather the content of your book from your blog posts, bundle it into Getting Real and up sell it to your readers? What's the difference? From what I can see, 37signals came up with the idea of writing a book called Getting Real and marketing it to web developers. But they came up with the idea very slowly and incrementally by starting out with one post on a blog, observing the response, and working up from there. It's positional chess. Yes, the checkmate on move 37 is caused directly by the pawn move at move 1. But that doesn't mean that the chessmaster planned move 37 all along. The chessmaster started out with a plan to make money ("win this game") and then made strong moves that led in winning directions, refining as the game proceeded. 37signals has had a mechanism for translating developer attention into cash from day one: Selling developer project-management tools. What's disingenuous about that?

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Did you come up with the idea of writing Getting Real and then try to market it and sell it to web developers? Or did you gather the content of your book from your blog posts, bundle it into Getting Real and up sell it to your readers? What's the difference? From what I can see, 37signals came up with the idea of writing a book called Getting Real and marketing it to web developers. But they came up with the idea very slowly and incrementally by starting out with one post on a blog, observing the response, and working up from there. It's positional chess. Yes, the checkmate on move 37 is caused directly by the pawn move at move 1. But that doesn't mean that the chessmaster planned move 37 all along. The chessmaster started out with a plan to make money ("win this game") and then made strong moves that led in winning directions, refining as the game proceeded. 37signals has had a mechanism for translating developer attention into cash from day one: Selling developer project-management tools. What's disingenuous about that?