Race to Saturn

Makerbook (Pieter Levels)

Great Examples: The Founder Toolkit
#1

This is great Sean - thanks for the links too, there was some I was not aware of here. I have one other extreme example, which probably is not meant to be replicated in too many places, but it does massively emphasise the point of shipping early, charging early and all that fun stuff.

Pieter Levels is quite well known in the Indie Maker/Bootstrapped world. He had a few successful products before and decided he wanted to write a book about bootstrapping business.

He created a landing page - literally a typeform - announcing the book, stating it hadn’t been started yet and asking people to support it for something like $20. He quickly made $50k and then shared a doc with all the people who had ordered and asked them what they wanted in the book.

Again just shows an extreme example of getting in front of customers and building/delivering what they want rather than what you think they want.

Some more info about the makebook story here

#2

@Sam: Thanks very much for this reference. I had not heard of Makerbook before, and it’s a good story. Also seems like a good book.

FYI - I’ve moved your post over to the “Contributions” area linked to the MVP Post. That way, we can have a discussion here about the contribution (similar to a pull request on github).

I think it’s a good story to share. I want to think more about the best spot to share it. It’s a slightly different type than the existing MVP stories that are there. So I might put together a more specific spot that fit it, either in the Great Examples section or a spot specific to the Founders Project. I’ll consider it further.

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