Rob Fitzpatrick 📚

14 years running little businesses and 3 books about my learnings along the way. Tweets about the career path of entrepreneurship & the business of indie books.

[Carlos De la Guardia @dela3499]

Are you facing any particular frustration or block?

One random thing that's stuck in my mind: @robfitz's Write Useful Books, and his acronym DEEP, which says these things matter, in this order:

1. Desirable: The point you're making should be compelling somehow. The quality of the prose doesn't matter if the point isn't worth reading to begin with.

2. Effective: Get the point across. If you're trying to teach something, did the reader actually learn it? Doesn't matter if the point is desirable if you never manage to make the reader really get it.

3. Engaging: Deliver interesting points at regular intervals, without long gaps or intros that are boring. There's a bad tendency among teachers to say: let's first spend a long time on all the boring fundamentals, and then only much later will we get to the interesting stuff.

4. Polished: Here's where you worry about style and syntax, and making the prose nice.

[Nacho Cesarani @icesarani_]

Reading the mom test by @robfitz and bro I went through ALL of this just to learn an incredibly better way to shut up and listen

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

https://t.co/azE6bmppao

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@david_nwobia @IndieHackers Nir is smarter than me, so if take his strategic advice over mine. But if that leads you to a place where you need to run customer convos, I think he'd agree that my tactical advice is solid.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@davebloomdev Educational video at scale. Very muddled together with advice from entertainment/edutainment that doesn't quite apply.

Previously used same process to filter noise w/ communities (outcome-oriented vs. engagement-focused) and books (back catalog / reliable vs. hit-driven / hyped)

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

Trying to learn in a v. noisy field and finding this helpful:

1. Write down all commonly accepted best practices
2. Find examples of people/orgs who've spent YEARS following ALL those guidelines WITHOUT WINNING
3. With best practices balanced, try to find the actual difference

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

Generalized: The only results worth attempting to dissect and emulate are the extreme positive outliers.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@p_millerd @dela3499 The only books worth comparing to are the ~2% that enter back catalog (i.e. recommendable + long-lasting). The other 98% are irrelevant since they only sell during launch window. So question isn't how to write a "typical" book (yeah AI can do that), but how to write the 2%. IMO.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

~"Making video content reduces our paid CAQ by 3-4x because people see an ad, then Google us to check it out, then watch a video and see that we're good at what we do and decide they trust us."

(Extremely paraphrased from https://t.co/RwmhdXudSS)

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@p_millerd @dela3499 The only books worth comparing to are the ~2% that enter back catalog (i.e. recommendable + long-lasting). The other 98% are irrelevant since they only sell during launch window. So question isn't how to write a "typical" book (yeah AI can do that), but how to write the 2%. IMO.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

PS. Hello again after like 2 years. I'm back from baby sabbatical 🙋‍♂️.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

1/ You've heard a million times that the biggest factor in success is being in the right market.

Discovery is how you figure that out,
But we always want to rush it.

It's not about how fast you "get through" discovery, but how much you get *out* of it.

https://t.co/8zQyaoxY10

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

6/ It sounds cheesy, but authentic curiosity is the secret weapon here 🔍.

Engage without any hidden agenda, explore their challenges, understand how they make decisions...

Easiest way to do that? Pick a customer segment you'd want to be friends with:
https://t.co/0ZwevWweWN

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@sathishvj @amazonIN Also, is there a viable shipping option for you at https://t.co/CeV3zgaKsT? That buys from me directly via Shopify and Lulu. So if it's able to deliver to you, it guarantees you're getting the right thing. (And has bulk discounts baked in.)

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@sathishvj @amazonIN I think it's a local publisher trying to shake me down into giving them the rights by flooding the market with bootlegs and then telling me they can fix it. It's a bit of a whackamole situation that's hard to permanently prevent, but I'll try to improve it. Sorry for the hassle.

[Rob Fitzpatrick 📚 @robfitz]

@karintwood @jasonfried Love it. Can't wait to have a hands-on play with it.