With the incredible success of Eric Ries's previous book, THE LEAN STARTUP, I can only say that I am excited to see how THE LEADER'S GUIDE stacks up.
In my opinion, his previous book launched a "mini revolution" in Silicon Valley and everywhere that led to the "F**K IT, SHIP IT" mentality. Although this is phenomenal, to some degree it also hurt the quality of some MVP's being pushed out by founders and entrepreneurs.
I do like the attempt he is making at creating a community with this project; "The Leader's Guide Beta Tester Community" as he calls it. Being able to have access to a motivated startup-minded community like this would be really powerful. I'm curious to see how this pans out. All in all, I am very excited to get my hands on this "Kickstarter-Exclusive" product and I can only hope that it lives up to the powerful brand that Ries has created.
I backed it. Easy decision. I like seeing how Eric uses his ideas on his own products.
The first time I interviewed him, I asked him how he used the Lean Startup ideas himself. He said that before he did his first conference, he sent out a survey and at the end of it, he asked people to put down a deposit to show how serious they were.
If that doesn't seem mind-blowing today it's because Eric's been teaching ideas like that for years. He opened my eyes to a technique that I still use.
Last month, I had an idea for an event so I sent out a survey and on the last page I asked people if they'd buy tickets. They did, so I'm doing the event.
I backed this so I could continue to watch and learn how Eric does things.
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@andrewwarner That's what we did with the first Leanconf :)
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Hunter
hat-tip to @hunterwalk - who was apparently the first buyer
@hunterwalk@_jacksmith@ericries Well that makes things kind of interesting really - because we also saw @StartupLJackon identify that he's a backer (he posted a screenshot of the "edit pledge" screen, meaning he's already backed), and according to the TechCrunch article (http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11...), @hunterwalk is one of the candidates.
What makes this more interesting is that even though Kickstarter removed the link at the end of 2014 that allowed you to view a project's backers, you can still access that page by adding /backers to a project URL: https://www.kickstarter.com/proj... - something that not everybody knows, and something that @StartupLJackson may not have realised when he identified himself as a backer.
Which means that we can take the list of @StartupLJackson suspects and find out if they're backers:
Dustin Curtis - no
Benedict Evans - no
Eric Ries - no (for obvious reasons)
Ben Horowitz - no
Semil - no
Balaji Srinivasan - no
Chris Dixon - no
Hunter Walk - YES!
Dave McClure - no
The plot thickens...
@ericries I had a similar thoughts to @rrhoover. Surely a more straight forward "tim ferris" style book launch would have been just as effective/more effective.
@rrhoover@benaldred been there, done that: http://www.startuplessonslearned...
I wanted to try something new, see what I could learn about launching a book in 2015. The Kickstarter % doesn't bother me, since the campaign isn't really about the money.
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