Writing my book

What I learnt during the process

If everything has gone to plan, my book will be published at the exact same time as this newsletter is emailed out. I’ve mentioned it in passing a few times, but for the record, the book is called Productized: Stop Selling Your Time & Transition to Selling SaaS. And it’s a book for anyone running an agency or consultancy who wants to spin out their own IP into a SaaS product.

The book is available here:
Amazon in the USA
Amazon in the UK
(and just search on Amazon for Productized David Hart in any other locations).

It’s been a longer journey than I expected but it’s also been a rewarding one. In fact, I loved writing it. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way.

Writing is the easy part

For me, actually writing the book was easy. I’ve been working, thinking, writing and consulting on this topic for such a long time that it was all just there waiting to get out. One bit of advice I got was to treat the first draft of the book as the ‘Vomit Draft’. In other words, just get it out there and don’t worry how it hangs together too much. And if you know already what you want to write about and you’re bursting to get it out, metaphorically vomiting all over the page is easy.

To complete the writing part, or at least the first draft, probably took about nine months. Maybe less. Of course, I wasn’t doing it full time and there were times when I was pretty prolific and other times when I was busy with other things.

When I got to the end I announced to friends and family that I’d ‘written a book’. I just needed to edit and get it published.

In part, writing was easy because I’d already done it before

At ScreenCloud, I wrote a book. I mean, in the same way that I thought I’d written a book after I finished Productized’s ‘Vomit Draft’. But I’d been through the process of planning, structuring and writing a book. It was related to digital signage and employee communications but never saw the light of day. I worked with an external book writing company called Scribe Media who coached first time authors.

So, although I’d never published a book before, I had the experience to know how I should approach producing a book and then the confidence to just ‘write’. I know a couple of people, who shall remain nameless, who have struggled with the ‘just write’ part of authorship. The struggle is real.

I also think that writing this newsletter week-in, week-out since the 25th November 2022, without missing a single one, has also honed my writing muscles.

Editing it is the hard part

I imagined writing was, like, 90% of the journey and editing was the remainder. But in fact, I’d say it was more like 30% writing, 65% editing and 5% cover and manuscript design and figuring out how things work on Amazon.

Editing is particularly hard because you can’t just dip in and out in the odd half hour of downtime here and there. You have to be able to hold the flow of the book in your head and get a sense of how one part flows into the next. You also have to remember what you’ve said so as not to repeat yourself.

What I found was as I went back through it, my position had changed on a few things and so I ended up rewriting big parts of it. And I discovered that some of what I had said was veering off topic. So I ended up cutting lots of it. I deleted two or three entire chapters and chopped others drastically. At one point, I wondered if what I had left was enough to fill a book, but…..

The book ended up being longer than I thought

I imagined my book to be about 200 pages. It ended up being a bit shy of 300. And this was after I cut it down by half. I’m not saying that it’s too long, but I imagined it to be shorter when I’d finished editing it.

My opinions changed in the time it took to complete

When I first started writing the book, I had just stopped being an Executive in ScreenCloud and had moved to my new NED role. I believed that the way we transitioned from Agency to SaaS was the only way. Our way being to sell the agency and to 100% move onto one SaaS product. The reason I was so sure was that we’d tried a number of other approaches and they’d all delivered lacklustre results.

But as I moved from having one frame of reference to working with and talking to lots of other agencies at various stages of their move into SaaS, I realised there were many ways to skin a cat. I also realised that our way was successful in part because we were totally done with agency work. But many agency owners aren’t looking to kill off that part of what they do.

The other thing that changed during the period of writing was the sentiment around investment and growth at any costs. When I started writing it, the investment world was changing, but it hadn’t quite filtered through to the extent it did. Capital Efficiency became as important as growth.

All this meant that as I began to reread it after the initial draft, my opinions about certain aspects of what I’d written had evolved. This just meant that I had to rewrite parts where I was no longer sure of my original convictions.

The ‘important’ stuff changed in the time it took to complete

You can only fit so much in a book, so you have to pick the stuff you think people care about the most. As I started to work with others (rather than just reflecting on my own experience), I discovered that what I thought was important wasn’t necessarily what everyone else thought. I think the two things that I ended up adding and going into in more detail were:

1. Idea validation. I hadn’t appreciated how important validating your idea was. Working with others I realised that in pretty much every case, people don’t validate their ideas properly and run the risk of doing what we did prior to ScreenCloud: and that’s stick something out there that nobody wants. We launched 15 products during our time as an agency. And we sold four of them. So we had many more misses than hits. If only we’d understood how to validate our ideas!

2. Funding: specifically what I call the ‘Funding Gap’. Many SaaS founders, especially ones that were using their consultancy to fund their product development, were nervous about the open ended investment requirement. There was a concern that their product idea was just a folly and a potential bottomless pit of money. I remember that feeling of stepping into the void, wondering if we would ever see our investment returned to us, let alone be able to generate decent revenues that would eclipse our agency turnover. So, I spent a chunk of the book looking at how to quantify the investment needed and how to break it down into milestones that felt less scary (and gave you an ‘out’ if it was clear that things weren’t going to plan).

So, whilst I added some important stuff in, I also took other things out including:

1. A deep dive into the vagaries of SaaS. I felt there was enough in the book covering the fundamentals, I didn’t need to dig into the odd edge-cases, too.

2. The journey from $1m to $10m. Originally I had a chapter about this, but I realised that people were most interested in the transition and the launch (and then getting to their first million). By the time you get to $1m, you’re no longer in the transition/launch phase. And while I love this bit of the journey, it didn’t feel core to the topic of the book. So I wrote it and then ultimately removed it.

I wish I’d gotten more people to read the draft

Because it took so long to edit, I was getting really frustrated at the end. As I kept saying to my buddy, Joergen, “I just need to get the f*****g thing published.”

As a result, I didn’t want to spend another few months harassing people and getting them to read/give me feedback. This goes against all of the things I write about here when it comes to user testing! I did, of course, talk to a lot of potential readers about what their challenges were and I hope the book speaks to those things. But I also would have loved to get some real users (readers) to test (read) it. So I guess I’ll find out whether that was a mistake or not in due course.

Publisher or Self-publishing?

This is something I wrestled with for a bit. I have friends that work in publishing and spoke to one of them about my book. His advice was that, it was a good idea but it would be more appealing to a publisher if it was about how any service provider could build a product. The trouble is, I knew about agencies (because I ran my own), I didn’t know much about, say, plumbing. And also, I wasn’t really interested in writing something for plumbers. No offence to plumbers, but agencies are my thing.

I spoke to April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch and she said a similar thing happened to her. The publishers wanted her SaaS positioning book to be more about building a personal brand. But, as she explained to me, this wasn’t the book she wanted to write. So she self-published.

After that conversation and reading a few more things from other authors, I decided to do the same. My book is the book I wanted to write for the people I wanted to speak to. Will it sell as many copies than it would have done had I made it more generic? Probably not. Do I care? Absolutely not.

So there you have it. If you do decide to read it, I really hope you find it useful. And if you don’t, then that’s cool too. I’m hoping to do an audio version too, so maybe you’ll enjoy listening to it instead ;-)