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Leanpub at Sixteen

Leanpub's mission is to be the best way in the world for authors to write books and create courses.

That mission hasn't changed in sixteen years. What has changed is our ambition.

At the time of this writing, Leanpub has paid over $15 million in royalties to our authors. I'm proud of that number. But I don't want Leanpub at Twenty to say $20 million, or even $30 million. I want it to say $100 million.

Not by waiting. Not by coasting. By changing the curve.

This essay explains why we're making a number of changes to Leanpub all at once, and how every single one of them connects back to the same goal: fulfilling our mission at an order of magnitude larger scale. The mission itself is unchanged. Some of the strategies and tactics are changing.

I'm going to be completely transparent about all of it — the business model, the inspiration, the economics, even the limiting belief I held for years that prevented us from doing this sooner.

The Honest Problem

Leanpub is a bootstrapped startup. We've never raised a dollar of investment from anyone. From 2010 to 2019 we did consulting work to fund Leanpub, and from 2019 onward, Leanpub has funded itself. We could easily keep doing what we're doing for decades. The platform works. Authors publish books. Readers buy them. We pay 80% royalties.

But here's the thing: we could never figure out how to grow faster.

The reason is simple math. We pay 80% royalties — which means an author earns $16 on a $20 sale. That's great for authors, and it's one of the things we're proudest of. But it means Leanpub earns about $3 on that same sale, after PayPal or Stripe take their cut. When you're earning $3 on a $20 book, you cannot afford to buy Google ads to sell that book. You're competing on keywords against platforms that earn a lot more than $3 when they acquire a new customer.

We tried a couple of times. We'd spend $250 on ads and earn $100 in revenue. That does not work when you're a bootstrapped startup.

So I concluded — for years — that we simply could not afford to buy ads for the things we sell. Not even for memberships. I figured we were an organic growth company, and that was that. We'd focus on product-led growth, make the platform as good as possible, and rely on our existing flywheel.

And we do have a flywheel. Our member newsletters are self-profitable, because the cost of newsletter sponsorships pays for the sending of the newsletters. Our free books help market Leanpub — if an author has a free book that attracts a lot of readers, those readers get Leanpub memberships, and then they go on to buy things, and some of them eventually write books themselves.

The flywheel has always been:

  1. Somebody becomes a Leanpub reader.
  2. They discover more about Leanpub.
  3. One in a hundred of them turns out to be someone who wants to be an author.
  4. They write a book on Leanpub.
  5. Hopefully they publish it in progress and attract more readers.

I like to joke that Leanpub has the world's slowest viral loop, because it takes an order of magnitude more effort to write a book than to write a tweet. But it works, slowly.

The problem was that for sixteen years, we had to rely entirely on this organic flywheel, because of my limiting belief that we could never buy ads to pull more people into it.

The Epiphany

Last year, I read Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers, then $100M Leads, then $100M Money Models.

$100M Offers was meaningful and influenced how we priced some of our services. $100M Leads was useful. But the thing that really clicked — and I'll be completely straightforward about this — was $100M Money Models.

There's a section in that book about "winning your money back" and about getting at least two times the customer acquisition cost back in the first 30 days of cash collected. When I read that, I had an epiphany: events can solve all of this.

If we create events — workshops, boot camps — we can charge enough for them that we can afford to spend money on ads to fill those events. And if the events are good enough, the people who attend them become Leanpub authors, which means they create books and courses, which means more products on the platform, which means more readers, which means more memberships, which means more revenue, which means we can buy more ads.

That's a flywheel that actually works with paid acquisition.

I had this realization about six months ago. I sat on it. I gritted my teeth. Because the most important thing to do for our authors right now was to ship Leanpub v3 — the complete rebuild of our frontend — and I didn't want to get distracted. We shipped v3. It's done. And now we can do this.

I want to be completely straightforward: this approach is directly inspired by Alex Hormozi. I'm not going to pretend I invented it. I read his books, had an epiphany about how to apply his model to Leanpub, and now we're executing on it. That's how good ideas spread. (If you're a bootstrapped founder who's struggled with the same limiting belief I had about paid acquisition, I'd strongly recommend reading $100M Money Models.)

V3: The Foundation

Before we could build any of this, we needed to ship Leanpub v3 — the complete rebuild of our frontend on modern technology. We did that. It's live. If you're reading this on Leanpub, you're looking at it.

V3 was the prerequisite. You can't build a sophisticated membership and events platform on top of a fifteen-year-old frontend. Now that v3 is shipped, everything that follows is possible.

The Flywheel

Every change we're making is a piece of the same machine. Here's how they fit together.

Credit Pricing

When you have a Leanpub membership, you get book credits (and with learner memberships, course credits). Each credit is worth $25. Previously, if a book had a minimum price of $29, it would cost 2 credits — because one credit wasn't enough to cover the minimum price. That meant you'd spend $50 in credits on a $29 book. That's not a great deal.

We've changed this. If an author has allowed Leanpub to sell their book at a discount (which most authors do — it's the same setting that lets us include their book in our newsletter sales), we now use the discounted price to determine the credit cost.

Here's how it works: if a book has a minimum price of $29 but the author allows Leanpub to discount it by up to 50%, that means the lowest possible price is $14.50. Since that's below $25, the book now costs 1 credit instead of 2. We pay the author as though it was a $25 sale — so instead of earning $23.20 on a $29 sale (80% royalties), the author earns $20 on a $25 credit sale. That's a small reduction for the author, but the book is now available for 1 credit instead of 2, which is a dramatically better deal for the reader.

This matters because it makes credits genuinely valuable. Before this change, credits weren't always a great deal — you'd sometimes waste a few dollars on the rounding. Now, credits are a good deal for both readers and authors. This reduces membership churn, which is essential for the flywheel to work.

If an author doesn't want us to use their discount setting for credit pricing, there's a single checkbox to opt out. But we think this is in the best interest of most authors — it's just another discount channel, like our newsletter sales — so it's opt-out, not opt-in.

Learner Memberships

We've always had Reader Memberships, which give you book credits and access to about 2,000 free-with-membership books on Leanpub. Now we also have Learner Memberships.

A Learner Membership is a Reader Membership with course credits added. A course credit is worth $125 — which is a lot, but our courses are priced for the corporate training market, because that's who buys courses. The primary audience for courses is people whose companies are paying for professional development.

We have multiple tiers of Learner Memberships with different numbers of book credits and course credits. If you buy an annual membership, you get all your credits up front, which is nice if you don't want to wait for credits to accumulate month by month.

The reason Learner Memberships matter for the flywheel is that they give us a higher-value product we can sell to individuals and to organizations. A reader who's spending their company's training budget on a Learner Membership is worth a lot more than a reader who bought a single $20 book. That changes the economics of what we can afford to spend on acquisition.

Organization Memberships

Organization Memberships are for companies, publishers, universities, non-profits — any organization that wants to give their people access to Leanpub books and courses.

An Organization Membership gives you seats. Each person with a seat gets access to all the free-with-membership books. The organization gets book credits and course credits that any member can spend on books and courses. By default, any member can spend any number of credits, but you can also set limits on how many credits an individual can use.

Organization Memberships are a big part of the flywheel because they represent recurring, higher-value revenue from the corporate training market. When a company buys an Organization Membership for their engineering team, that's a very different economic relationship than individual book purchases — and it's a relationship where paid acquisition can work.

Events

Events are the keystone of the whole flywheel. They're important enough that they get their own section below, but here's the short version: events are the thing that makes paid acquisition viable for Leanpub for the first time in sixteen years. More on this shortly.

AI Services and GhostAI

We've repriced and simplified all of our AI services.

TranslateAI is now $79 per language. It used to be a complicated pricing structure with bundled languages and overage charges after a certain word count. Now it's simple: one language, $79, no word limits. We want translation to be as accessible as possible, because getting your book in front of readers in 31 languages is one of the most powerful things we can offer our authors.

CourseAI now has two versions: CourseAI Standard ($499), which uses AI with human prompting to turn your book into a course, and CourseAI Pro ($1,999), which adds three hours of video interviews with Len to make your course really shine. We simplified this from a more complicated set of options because simpler is better.

Publish on Amazon is now $1,999 — cheaper than before. We handle the formatting, metadata, and submission process to get your Leanpub book published on Amazon.

Global Author now has three tiers: Standard ($1,999), which includes 31 AI translations and CourseAI Standard; and two higher tiers for authors who want more comprehensive packages.

You'll notice that three of our core services — Publish on Amazon, CourseAI Pro, and Global Author Standard — all cost exactly $1,999. That's not a coincidence. That alignment is essential to how our events work. More on that in a moment.

GhostAI

Now, here's something I need to tell you.

GhostAI is our newest AI service. It's a set of specialized skills for Claude Code — Anthropic's AI coding tool — that help you write books. If you're a programmer and you've heard of gstack (Garry Tan's open-source Claude Code skill collection — huge shout out to Garry for open-sourcing it), GhostAI is basically gstack for books. It helps you start a book, outline chapters, expand bullet points into prose, edit drafts, and review your manuscript with cross-chapter intelligence.

The thing I need to tell you is this: GhostAI helped me write this essay.

If you've been reading along and this essay sounds like me — like the same person who wrote "Imagine a world..." four years ago — that's because GhostAI is designed to write in your voice. I did a voice sampling session where GhostAI analyzed my previous writing, and then we wrote this essay together. I spoke my thoughts out loud. GhostAI helped me organize them, challenged my structure, and turned my rambling into the prose you've been reading.

That's the product. Not a robot that writes generic content, but a collaborator that sounds like you because it learned how you write. Every idea in this essay is mine. The voice is mine. GhostAI just helped me get it out of my head and onto the page much faster than I could have done alone.

(If you're an author and that sounds useful, it is. We'll be offering GhostAI workshops — keep reading.)

Events: The Keystone

This is the section that matters most. Everything above — the credit pricing, the memberships, the AI services — is important, but events are the piece that makes the entire flywheel spin.

Here's the fundamental problem, one more time: Leanpub earns about $3 on a $20 book sale. We cannot afford to buy ads at that margin. For sixteen years, this meant we couldn't do paid acquisition.

Events change the equation entirely.

If we run a workshop and charge a meaningful amount for it, and if we can fill that workshop partly through paid ads, and if the economics work out so that the revenue from the event covers the cost of the ads (and then some) — then we have something we've never had before: a paid acquisition channel.

The people who attend our workshops become Leanpub authors. They write books. They create courses. More products means more readers. More readers means more memberships. More memberships means more revenue. More revenue means we can run more events and buy more ads.

I want to be completely straightforward: this approach is directly inspired by Alex Hormozi's model. The specific insight from $100M Money Models is that if you can get at least two times your customer acquisition cost back in the first 30 days, you can scale paid acquisition sustainably. Events, priced correctly, can do that.

I've been iterating on event pricing over the past few weeks, and I'll keep iterating — I learned my lesson from previous essays about putting specific prices in an essay that I'll update over time. (You know, the whole "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" problem.) But here are the four events we're launching:

Book Workshop

A three-hour live workshop for people who want to write a book on Leanpub. This is our entry point — if you've maybe bought a Leanpub book, or you just saw a Google ad promoting the workshop, and you think "Yeah, I'd like to write a book," this is for you. Three hours, and by the end, you'll have your book set up and know exactly how to write and publish it on Leanpub.

GhostAI Workshop

A three-hour live workshop where you learn how to use GhostAI to write your book with AI assistance. This is a hands-on session — you'll be writing with GhostAI during the workshop.

Full Day Workshop

The Book Workshop in the morning, a 90-minute break, and then the GhostAI Workshop in the afternoon. The reason for the long break isn't that we enjoy long lunches — it's practical. People who do the Book Workshop in the morning might decide they want to try GhostAI in the afternoon, but GhostAI requires a Claude Code subscription. We want people to have enough time during the break to make that decision, sign up, set everything up, and be ready to go for the afternoon session.

Book Boot Camp

This is the premium offering, and it's where the Hormozi model really clicks.

The Book Boot Camp is a six-week program. If you attend all six weeks, or finish your book, or both — you win your money back. Not as a cash refund, but as a service credit for the full price you paid.

That service credit can be used for any one of three services that all cost the same amount:

This is the "win your money back" mechanism directly from Hormozi. The Boot Camp is priced so that the revenue covers acquisition costs. The service credit means that when someone completes the Boot Camp, they've already paid for the next thing — which means they're deeply invested in the Leanpub ecosystem, they have a book, and they're about to have it published on Amazon, or turned into a course, or translated into 31 languages. That's an author who's going to generate revenue on the platform for years.

And that's the flywheel. Events bring in new authors. New authors create books and courses. More books and courses attract more readers. More readers buy memberships. More memberships generate revenue. More revenue funds more events and more ads.

For the first time in sixteen years, Leanpub can do paid acquisition.

The Goal

Leanpub has paid over $15 million in royalties to our authors in sixteen years. I'm proud of that number. But it's not the number I want.

We could coast. We could keep doing what we're doing, grow slowly, and in twenty years, we'd have paid maybe $30 million or $40 million. That would be fine. Leanpub would still exist. Authors would still publish books.

But "fine" isn't why I started Leanpub. In 2010, I was saying "Imagine a world where authors could make money writing books." Sixteen years later, if I've built a modest, slowly-growing platform that paid $30 million over its lifetime — well, that's good, but it's not "Imagine a world" good.

I want Leanpub at Twenty to say $100 million in royalties. I'm not sure I'll get there by Leanpub at Twenty. But I want to change the curve so that we're on a path to get there, rather than just hoping we get there by surviving long enough.

Everything in this essay — the credit pricing that makes memberships a better deal, the learner memberships that tap into corporate training budgets, the organization memberships that bring in recurring revenue, the simplified AI services that are priced to align with the events, GhostAI that helps authors actually finish their books, and the events that make paid acquisition viable for the first time — all of it exists to change that curve.

The mission is the same as it was in 2010: to be the best way in the world for authors to write books and create courses. We're just done being modest about how big that mission can be.

Peter Armstrong

published: April 15, 2026

The above essay was written in one pass by the /ghost-start skill of GhostAI, using Claude Code and Opus 4.6, on the morning of April 15, 2026. It took GhostAI and Claude Code about 8 minutes to do this. GhostAI conducted a multi-turn interview to gather my inputs, then generated the entire essay in a single pass. It has not been edited at all. All I did was talk to GhostAI in Claude Code using Wispr Flow. I think the result is about 80% as good as what I manually write. However, it took me less than 10% of the time and effort, which means a lot when you're a busy startup founder! I'm publishing it totally unedited because I think it's the best demo of GhostAI that there is. In our upcoming GhostAI Workshop, we'll review and produce other versions of this essay, editing and expanding it using other GhostAI skills. You'll learn how you can write a full book in less time than you've ever dreamed was possible! If that's interesting to you, sign up! When Michael, one of my teammates at Leanpub, read the above essay and realized it was 100% produced in one pass by GhostAI, their feedback was simple: "I know it's called GhostAI because it's a ghostwriter, but it's also GhostAI because it's spooky!"

P.S. You will note that there was one mistake in the "The Goal" section: Leanpub has currently paid over $15M, not over $30M, and a sentence in the third paragraph implies the latter, even though the $15M number is used correctly throughout the essay. However, I'm just noting it here instead of editing it, to preserve the fact that the essay is 100% unedited, and to emphasize that an editing pass (either with the /ghost-edit skill of GhostAI, or with human editing) is always required!

P.P.S. Here's how this looked after running the /ghost-start skill this morning:

⏺ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  GhostAI /ghost-start                           │
  │  Your essay is ready!                            │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  Created:
  - remix/app/routes/_static+/leanpub_at_sixteen.mdx — full essay draft (~2,800 words)
  - ~/.ghostai/projects/leanpub_cc2/voice-profile.json — your voice profile for future GhostAI sessions

  Essay structure:
  1. Leanpub at Sixteen — $15M, mission unchanged, ambition changed
  2. The Honest Problem — $250 to earn $100, the world's slowest viral loop
  3. The Epiphany — Hormozi's $100M Money Models, the "win your money back" insight
  4. V3: The Foundation — brief acknowledgment
  5. The Flywheel — credit pricing, learner memberships, org memberships, events teaser
  6. AI Services & GhostAI — repriced services, GhostAI intro, the reveal
  7. Events: The Keystone — four events, the Boot Camp "win your money back" mechanic
  8. The Goal — $15M → $100M, changing the curve

  The GhostAI reveal lands in section 6: "GhostAI helped me write this essay. If you've been reading along and this sounds like me — that's
  because GhostAI is designed to write in your voice."

  This is a first draft. When you've reviewed it, run /ghost-edit to polish individual sections, or just tell me what to change.

  STATUS: DONE
  Skill: /ghost-start | Files created: 2 | Time: ~8m