About

Leanpub is a fairly complex idea. It can be reduced to a few simple ideas (“we make blogs into books”, “publish early, publish often” , “we’re going after the in-progress book market”). However, these don’t quite capture everything that Leanpub is about. So, we’ve developed a couple elevator pitches, for varying lengths of elevator rides…

The 30-Second Elevator Pitch:

Imagine a world in which authors can actually make money writing books…

Imagine a world in which authors know who their readers are, and can have a meaningful conversation with them about their books—before they’re even “published”…

Imagine a world in which authors could apply Customer Development and Lean Startup principles to the process of writing and publishing a book…

If you imagine that world long enough, you realize that the authors who know their readers the best are bloggers, and that the future of publishing is turning blogs into books. Automatically.

That future is what we’re building at Leanpub.

The Stuck-In-An-Elevator Pitch (for Authors and Investors)

Leanpub, a new web application found at leanpub.com, is based on a revolutionary idea:

Imagine that authors can actually make money writing books.

The way that Leanpub accomplishes this is to empower authors to apply Steve Blank’s Customer Development and Eric Ries’ Lean Startup principles to the process of writing and publishing a book.

Specifically, Leanpub allows authors to self-publish and sell their books–while they are in-progress. This lets authors determine if there is a market for their book and build a community of readers around their book. This community building is vital, since it not only helps authors build buzz around their books but also helps them get real feedback from real readers who are invested in the success of the book.

At Leanpub, we enable authors to publish early, publish often and listen to their readers.

The insight behind Leanpub is that the writers who are the best at doing this are bloggers, and that the best platform for writing a book is actually a blogging platform. So, we’re taking the world’s best blogging platform, WordPress MU, and making it into the best platform for writing and self-publishing books.

Footnote (for Investors Only)

So, what we’re really doing is a market resegmentation attempt, in which we attempt to divide an existing market (“books”) into segments (“in-progress e-books”, “completed e-books”, “completed books”) and then go after one of those segments first (the “in-progress e-books” segment).

We feel that the the in-progress e-books segment is not served very well by incumbents, with the exception of some technical book publishers like Manning, The Pragmatic Programmers and O’Reilly. We’re going to make this process not suck for self-published authors, and be the best way in the world to write and self-publish an in-progress book, growing a community around your book and getting real feedback and marketing buzz doing so.

All books are in-progress before they are finished, and there are millions of blogs, so this is a huge market.