Learn How Products Get Started
$24.99
Minimum price
$24.99
Suggested price

Learn How Products Get Started

Stories of how tech founders setup their products and the lessons they learned

About the Book

Praise for Learn How Products Get Started:

  • Holy crap this looks awesome so far! - Nicholas Hance, CEO Reenhanced, LLC
  • I've just finished reading it. It's great. This is a book, that I'm going to recommend to our clients, when we explain the MVP approach. Having some real, practical arguments for the "less is better" process is very helpful. Thanks! - Andrzej Krzywda, arkency.com
  • Thanks for such a beautiful book! It’s very inspiring to read all the stories. I’m looking forward to receiving the next interviews :) — Dmitry Suholet (@suholet)
  • Was a featured book on the Leanpub homepage! 

Wouldn't it be great to know how others have launched their SaaS products and what architectures and services they used to get it out of the door?

Say you're building a Web Product or SaaS and you're about to launch, do you risk running it all on one server?

Should you run your database on one server and the web application on another server?

Maybe yet another server to handle worker queues? How much is all of this going to cost? What about sending emails, how can you make sure your customers will get their emails? What happens if you can't afford an email provider just yet?

You're taking payments from customers right out of the gate and Amazon corrupts your database, what do you do?

Now, the database is causing a SEGFAULT in MySQL, who do you call?

These are just some of the anecdotes shared in the candid interviews in the book. Imagine you had the ability to have conversations with other founders who had been through all of this before, and they could tell you what to watch out for, and which mistakes they made for which they paid the price.

Read interviews with founders of some truly world class products:

  • Tyler Rooney - 4ormat
  • Oleg Gutsol - 500px
  • Ryan Funduk - Bugrocket
  • Nate Kontny - Draft
  • Jen Adwent-Fong - NoodleApp
  • Brennan Dunn - Planscope.io
  • Marc-Andre Cournoyer - TalkerApp
  • Nick Ragaz - EMRInbox
  • Adam Meghji - Uniiverse

Each story is fascinating and shares many insights into the realities of getting your product out into the world and accepting users.

  • Share this book

  • Categories

    • Startups
    • Software

About the Author

John McDowall
John McDowall

John is the Founder of Revolution Lake, a different way to build software products. Prior to this, he was CTO of 500px, a popular photo-sharing web service. He's been developing software for over 23 years and leading teams and startups for over 10 (and he has the white hairs to prove it.)

Originally from Scotland, John has been an Lean practitioner since 2003. He successfully applies Lean principles to leading large-scale government projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as startups worth $100.

These days he is mostly a Rails craftsman and Team Lead for Hire. Ask him about Kaizen and his fear of entropy.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
    • Who Should Read This Book
  • About The Author
  • Acknowledgements
  • 4ormat.com - Tyler Rooney
  • 500px.com - Oleg Gutsol
  • Bugrocket - Ryan Funduk
  • Draft - Nate Kontny
  • EMR Inbox - Nick Ragaz
  • NoodleApp - Jen Adwent-Fong
  • Planscope.io - Brennan Dunn
  • TalkerApp - Marc-Andre Cournouyer (2010)
  • Uniiverse - Adam Meghji
  • Cheat Sheet / Aphorisms
  • Thanks

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub