Monday, September 21, 2009

Simplicity Cycle Downloads

My Simplicity Cycle book has been downloaded over 1400 times. The most recent 200 or so are largely sparked by my little Google AdWords advertisement, as far as I can tell.

It's a free download, so I'm not making any money off this at this point. I really should read Chris Anderson's book Free and find out more about this business model, but his book costs $26, so I'll have to check the library.

Anyway, I'm giving it away for free on purpose. Even charging one dollar would establish a significant barrier to downloading the thing, and I suspect the download count would be closer to 14 than 1400. So, I'm basically giving up $14 in order to get my idea seen by 1400 people.

As I learned from Exposure, the value of an idea increases with familiarity. So, the more people are familiar with the concepts in the Simplicity Cycle, the more valuable the idea is (and the greater the possibility of someone eventually hiring me to do stuff because I'm the Simplicity Cycle guy). Plus it's just fun to think that 1400 people have clicked download and (hopefully) read through the thing. I think that's cool.

3 comments:

Gabe said...

Any more feedback via e-mail from people who might have downloaded it?

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed reading this a few years ago and would like to download the latest. But the lulu.com link is broken.

Dan Ward said...

Thanks Markhu - glad to hear you enjoyed it! I took down the Lulu site because HarperBusiness will be publishing the updated version in early 2015 (probably April / May). You can find regular updates on my Twitter feed @thedanward or on my website thedanward.com.