The Most Painful Compliment

A handful of times in the past few years, someone who loves me very much has given me a compliment which caused me an intense amount of pain. The person always thought they were saying something nice, but it was nice like a punch in the gut.

Now, I have a very bad episodic memory (presumably related to my having Aphantasia), so I don't really remember the specifics. But at a high level, I think it went like this:

The first time, I smiled. They were trying to be nice.

The second time, I deflected. A non-founder wouldn't understand.

The third time, I feigned a laugh, saying "As the founder, everything is my fault."

The fourth time, I said something to the effect of "You do realize that as the founder, everything is my fault, don't you? So, the reason clearly is that I'm not very good at my job."

So what did they say?

Leanpub is an amazing idea... I don't know why everyone doesn't use it.

Well, I know why...

Everything Is My Fault

I've known why for years. I just haven't known how to solve it. Until recently.

When you are an employee somewhere, and something is not going how you'd like, you can always blame someone or some system.

But I'm the founder.

We're bootstrapped, so I can't blame any investors: there aren't any. And I can't blame the board: I have control. And I hired everyone here, so by the transitive property, all mistakes are mine as well.

So, every single thing that is currently wrong with Leanpub and that has ever gone wrong with Leanpub is 100% my fault and my responsibility.

The fact that we are not 100x our size is 100% my fault.

Leanpub is turning sixteen this month. If we were a person, we could drive a car. And we've only recently crossed $15 million in royalties to authors.

A better founder would have already paid $100 million in royalties to authors, or $150 million in royalties, or a billion dollars in royalties, or more. Through this lens, my limitations have cost authors tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in royalties.

Note that I didn't say "cost our authors". I said "cost authors". Why?

Because, well, Leanpub is an amazing idea, but we can't pay our amazing 80% royalty rate to authors who don't know we exist. So if an author got 10% somewhere else instead of 80% with us, to some extent that's my fault.

So, while we've paid excellent royalties to Leanpub authors over the years, there are many orders of magnitude more authors who haven't earned a penny from Leanpub, because they've never heard of it.

The Dickens Process

Earlier this year, I did Tony Robbins' virtual Unleash the Power Within workshop.

There's an incredibly intense exercise on the third day. It's called the Dickens Process, inspired by A Christmas Carol. You close your eyes and project yourself into the future — five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years — imagining what your life looks like if you don't change. If you don't solve the problems you know you need to solve. If you keep coasting, stuck in the prison of your limiting beliefs.

Here's the thing about Aphantasia: I can't make pictures in my mind.

It turns out that when most people close their eyes and are asked to visualize, they can see images.

I see nothing. Darkness.

So when Tony told us to close our eyes and project forward what would happen if I didn't change, I couldn't see a future version of myself or my company. I couldn't picture my face at sixty, or seventy, or eighty — I can't even picture my wife's or my son's face today with my eyes closed, even when I'm in the same room as them!

But I could feel it.

Five years forward: Leanpub is roughly the same. We've paid maybe $20 million in royalties. The platform works really well, but Leanpub is still a "hidden gem" that almost nobody knows about.

Ten years forward: I'm 60. The world has moved on. AI is still slowly transforming publishing. (It's not the fastest-moving industry.) Leanpub is still here, still paying 80% royalties, still growing slowly. We've paid maybe $25 or $30 million in royalties. And I know that if I'd been a better founder, it could have been ten times that.

Twenty years forward: I'm 70. Leanpub has paid maybe $35 or $40 million in royalties over its lifetime. Most of our current authors have moved on. The platform has aged, and I've aged with it. And I start to feel something I can't push away: the possibility that this is all it will ever be.

Thirty or forty years forward: I'm dying, not having created a company that will outlive me. Leanpub is dying with me. Not having realized the ambition I had in 2010 when I said "Imagine a world where authors could make money writing books."

There's a scene in episode 57 of the 2010 Chinese television series Three Kingdoms, where Lu Su is weeping before Sun Quan and says: "My lord, Gongjin must have died with regrets!" He's mourning Zhou Yu, a brilliant strategist who, due primarily to his own limitations, died without accomplishing his lifelong objectives. It's devastating.

He must have died with regrets.

Limiting Beliefs

So why doesn't everyone use Leanpub? Why haven't we grown faster?

Well, if there's one thing I learned in school, it's this:

Nothing has one cause.

There's never only one reason for anything. But for Leanpub, most of our growth has been hurt by the following three limiting beliefs:

1. Leanpub cannot spend money to attract authors.
2. Leanpub cannot be usable enough for most authors.
3. Leanpub cannot make the flywheel turn fast enough or produce enough revenue for growth.

My epiphany was that these were just limiting beliefs, not the laws of physics.

None of them are real. They are all just the old story, nothing more.

I'm going to break them down here, one at a time.

I'm going to show you what replaces these limiting beliefs, since the new story is driving a lot of what we're building right now, some of which launched yesterday.

But before I continue, I want to say a huge thanks to Alex Hormozi: his $100M Money Models book is what got me part of the way here, and his interview with Tony Robbins is what got me to do the Tony Robbins events which got me the rest of the way.

Anyway, now for the three limiting beliefs...

1. Leanpub cannot spend money to attract authors.

Since Leanpub is 16 years old and since I'm 50 years old, combined we're too old to raise angel or VC money. And even if that wasn't true, the slope of our revenue growth curve meant it was. Because we cannot raise money, we cannot spend a meaningful amount of money to drive author signups or storefront sales.

I believed this for years.

The math seems to support it too: we pay 80% royalties, so on a $20 book sale, Leanpub earns about $3 after royalties and payment processing. Try buying Google Ads profitably for $3.

This is where I was stuck for years. And then I realized something that should have been obvious:

After sixteen years, we know a lot about how to write and publish books. We know Markdown, we know Lean Publishing, we know how to structure a manuscript, how to publish in-progress, how to get reader feedback, how to iterate, how to use AI to translate books, create courses and even help with the writing process. We've helped thousands of authors over the years. We have all this knowledge sitting inside our heads, and we weren't sharing it.

Zig Ziglar said: "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

What if we just... helped people? What if we ran workshops where we taught people everything we know about writing and publishing books? What if we ran a Book Bootcamp — a six-week program where we actually walked alongside authors as they wrote their books, helping them finish?

If we do that — if we genuinely help people write and publish their books — then they become Leanpub authors. Not because we tricked them into a funnel, but because we helped them do the thing they wanted to do, and Leanpub is where they did it. And it turns out that when you charge a fair price for genuinely helping people, you can afford to spend money telling more people about it.

For sixteen years, the root of all of Leanpub's growth is that we have helped our authors. This just adds another way of being helpful, especially to brand new Leanpub authors, and grow even more as a result.

The new story: Leanpub can attract authors by helping them write their books.

2. Leanpub cannot be usable enough for most authors.

Leanpub's biggest strength is also our biggest weakness: Markdown.

Markdown is the best way to write books. But there is a learning curve. And this limiting belief is dangerously self-reinforcing: if we think Markdown is too difficult for normal people, we stop trying to make Leanpub accessible for normal people. We just conclude they're not our target. Our "Ideal Customer Profile" becomes a computer programming book author who loves Markdown, GitHub and walks on the beach — and we get very, very good at serving that narrow audience while the vast majority of potential authors bounce off our landing page.

The answer isn't to convince people they're smart enough to learn Markdown. The answer is to give them a Visual Editor.

We shipped an early beta when we launched V3 last December. It's good enough for novels, but not yet for most nonfiction. We're investing heavily in improving it, because behind the scenes, the Visual Editor produces Markdown — which means Visual Editor books get the same production pipeline, the same AI services, the same everything. Authors who want Markdown can have it. Authors who don't, don't have to care.

The new story: Leanpub is usable for any author, not just technical ones.

3. Leanpub cannot make the flywheel turn fast enough or produce enough revenue for growth.

I've joked for years that Leanpub has the world's slowest viral loop, because it takes orders of magnitude more time and effort to write a book than to write a tweet. Someone buys a book, discovers Leanpub, maybe realizes they want to write a book themselves, spends months or years writing it, publishes it, attracts more readers — and the cycle repeats. It works. But it's slow.

To change the curve, we need to do two things: make more money with each turn of the flywheel, and make the flywheel turn faster.

For more money per turn: simpler Reader Memberships including an affordable Mini Reader membership, new Learner Memberships with course credits, and Organization Memberships for companies and teams. These tap into corporate training budgets — a very different economic relationship than individual $20 book purchases.

For faster turns: better tools so authors finish books faster. Our Visual Editor lowers the barrier. GhostAI — which is essentially gstack for books — helps authors write with AI assistance. And we've dramatically lowered the price of CourseAI, so more books become courses, which means more products on the platform, which means more revenue per turn.

The new story: Leanpub is making our flywheel both larger and faster every year.

A Serious Disease

Leanpub is an amazing idea.

But just because something is an amazing idea doesn't mean everyone will use it.

In fact, Steve Jobs described the thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work as a serious disease.

So, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We have events to build and run, a visual editor to improve, and a flywheel to grow and accelerate. And a ton of small improvements to make things better for our authors and our readers every day.

For this, I am incredibly grateful.

Not because everything is solved today. But because we're on the path. I have a small but amazing team, and together we're augmenting ourselves with AI to produce more features for our authors and readers than we have in years.

I am responsible for everything that is wrong with Leanpub. That is the most liberating thing in the world, because it means I am responsible for fixing it. There is no one to wait for. No board to convince. No investors to align. Just me, my team and the work.

I wrote more about this in Leanpub at Sixteen. If you read that essay, make sure you read all the way to the italics at the bottom, since there's a surprise at the end...

An Obvious Idea

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.

I want to change the curve, to build Leanpub into what it can be. Something that improves the lives of millions of authors. Something that outlives me. Not by coasting. Not by surviving long enough. By solving the problems I've known about for sixteen years, and couldn't solve until now because of my limiting beliefs.

We don't need to raise money. We don't need permission. We need to execute.

The mission is the same as it has been for over a decade: to be the best way in the world for authors to write books and create courses. We're just done accepting that we can't grow faster.

The old limiting beliefs are history. This is the new story:

1. Leanpub can spend money to acquire authors by running profitable events targeted at new authors.
2. Leanpub is a simple, powerful tool which is usable for any author to create a book or course.
3. Leanpub is making our flywheel both larger and faster every year.

We can do this. And if we do our jobs right, one day I look forward to hearing this:

It seems like every author I know is using Leanpub. I don't know what the big deal is, it seems like such an obvious idea.

Peter Armstrong

published: April 16, 2026

P.S. This was written by me — even though I use the em dash throughout. Em dashes are for people too.