I also ended up reading the new book by Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness which I’d highly recommend.  The story of how Zappos came to be a billion dollar company is filled with many twists and turns, and near death experiences.

I just wanted to jot down a few ideas that stuck with me from the tour and the book:

1. Customer service = good marketing
   Zappos today is known for having great customer service.  But that wasn’t always the case.  When they were nearly bankrupt and had no money for marketing, they decided to reach out to their existing customers in the hopes they’d become repeat customers.  It worked.  Taking a $39 loss on a free pair of shoes might appear to be bad business on the surface.  But when that person told 5 of their friends, it ended up being more cost effective than $39 worth of advertising.

   This is a powerful idea that your customer service can actually be your best marketing.

2. Don’t outsource your competitive advantage
   At one point Zappos was relying on manufacturers to drop ship all the products they sold on their site.  This allowed them to carry zero inventory and run a simple business, but the orders only had about 95% accuracy and were slow to ship. It also limited the selection of what products they could sell.

   At some point they had to make a tough decision: if customer service is what they were all about then they needed to control the entire customer experience from beginning to end.  They made a major shift (and nearly went bankrupt) in the process of starting to keep their own inventory, but it paid off.

   It’s worth spending some time thinking about what your core competency is and focusing only on that.  Once you decide what it is, you may have to sacrifice in other areas to achieve it – so you can’t make everything your focus.  As Jim Collins said, “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities”.  What are you willing to sacrifice so that you can focus on your competitive advantage?

3. Fun & purpose > Money
   Finally, one of the most interesting take aways is that Tony ended up preferring fun and purpose over money.  Even after nearly going broke trying to keep Zappos afloat, he still realized that the money wasn’t that important.  He started valuing seemingly unimportant things like hanging out with friends at work or playing pranks around the office as bigger contributors to his happiness than money.

   This definitely showed during their tour as there were plenty of shenanigans.  It’s surprising how once a person’s basic needs are met, money starts to become much less important than how they get along with bosses and coworkers.

You can check out Tony’s talk from South by Southwest here and checkout Delivering Happiness on Amazon.

Thank you Zappos for the tour!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Here is a quick write up on the three outstanding ones.

1. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) – by Richard Feynman

This is an auto-biography of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, who worked on the atom bomb in the 40′s (amongst other things).  From that description alone I thought it might be a pretty academic book, but I was totally wrong.

It was at times laugh out loud funny, and other times made me want to cry.  It’s basically just a collection of funny stories from his life, from pranks he used to pull while at MIT, to how he learned to pick up women in bars, to how the army mistakenly diagnosed him as mentally insane, to how he learned to pick the locks on safes containing national secrets for fun.

I think what I liked about this book is that it is a great model for how to live life – he always stayed curious.  Here you have a brilliant guy, by any measure, but you can see how he deals with adversity and setbacks, and learns to just appreciate the little things in life.  He was a renaissance man also, having lived abroad for years in Brazil (a trip which reminded me of my time in Argentina) and he made an effort to learn from many fields outside of physics (art, music, etc).  I was actually really sad when I finished this book because I was starting to look forward to reading it every night.  It just…made me happy.  A book hasn’t done that for me in a long, long time.

2. Hacker and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age – by Paul Graham

One way to judge a book is by how many “holy shit” moments you have when reading it.  A “holy shit” moment is when something clicks in your head – a connection you hadn’t seen before, an articulation of an idea that you always knew to be true but couldn’t quite put into words, etc.  A moment that gives you a new perspective on life, and often a practical way you can change something in your life (or business) for the better.  A good book for me might have two or three “holy shit” moments buried in the pages and you have to read the whole book to find them.  Hackers and Painters was averaging about one of these per page at times.

The first half of the book is the best.  The collection of essays cover a variety of topics from education to building wealth.  They are deep and fascinating.   Paul Graham is turning into one of my favorite writers.  The writing style of the book is actually similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and his other books.  I’m actually really surprised after reading Hackers and Painters that it isn’t more famous than The Tipping Point or a book like that, because I think it’s actually better in many ways.  On thing is for sure, Paul Graham is the MASTER of analogies (summing up an idea by comparing it to an similar one that everyone can relate to) – he uses them liberally and they are very effective in driving his point home.

The second half of the book gets into some more nerdy topics related to computer programming which may not be as interesting to most audiences.  Even as a certified computer science super-nerd I found these slightly less interesting.  But the first half of the book alone makes it worth reading.  I recently got to (sort-of) meet Paul Graham in person at a recent Y-Combinator event, so that was pretty sweet.

If there is an overarching theme to this book (a big if, given the scope) it is to compare the current technology renaissance in Silicon Valley to the 15th century artistic renaissance in Florence, and how they both changed the world.

3. Atlas Shrugged – by Ayn Rand

I decided to read this book after listening to an interview with Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) where he described this as one of the books that most influenced him.

It did not disappoint.  On the one hand this book is a masterful piece of fiction that can hold its own amongst the best.  Ayn Rand’s writing is like poetry at times (albeit 1,000 pages of it) as she beautifully describes the interaction between characters.  To top it off, the main character, Dagny Taggart, is possibly the strongest (and sexiest) female character I have ever come across in fiction.  The fact this was written in the 50′s makes it even more impressive.

But the book is not famous for being a work of fiction.  It has a very strong motive underneath: to convince you of something important (and controversial) about how the world works.  I won’t give away exactly what it is – that would spoil the surprise of reading it – but there is no doubt this book is polarizing.  People typically come away either absolutely loving it or absolutely hating it.

I definitely came out more in the former camp of loving it, but I needed little convincing about its message.  The book is not without its faults either – there is a rather preachy diatribe toward the end which I thought was a bit long winded, and at 1,000 pages it certainly isn’t an easy read.  Also, Rand’s philosophical roots show through in her arguments at times which could be viewed as overly-intellectual (and thus unconvincing) by some audiences.  But given the number of people who list this amongst their favorite (and most influential) books of all time, I think it’s something everyone should read.

The weird thing is that this book seems to change you permanently after reading it.  It’s almost like being able to “see the matrix” after reading it (just as Neo did in the movie) because it gives you a new lens through which to see the world.  For weeks (and now months) after reading this I keep thinking about it as I overheard little pieces of conversation or discussions on the radio.  I also feel like I have entered a secret society of people who have read (and subscribe to the ideals of) this book.  They identify each other discreetly, but we know who each other are when we cross paths.

Anyway, check them out and let me know what you think!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

But I think it’d be interesting to get a collective approach from all the readers of this blog.  What books on business have had the greatest impact on you?  Which book do you find yourself recommending to other entrepreneurs the most?

A bunch of suggestions have already been added to BuyersVote.com.  What would you add or subtract?  You can check out the list here to add your two cents.

In case you’ve never used BuyersVote.com before, here is a quick review of how it works (it’s really simple):

• If you like an item, vote it up (+1)
• If you don’t like an item, vote it down (-1)
• If you have a better idea, add it at the bottom

You’ll have to login to vote (sorry, that is the only way I could find to keep voting fair), but you can use your Google account or one you already have so there is no registration process.

This isn’t really related, but another category that I put together recently on BuyersVote is for the best halloween costume ideas of 2009.

As you can see, some of them are good, some are bad (maybe even offensive).  But this is the beauty of crowd sourced data.  Good ideas get pushed to the top and bad ideas get pushed down (with enough participants).

I actually have an ulterior motive for this category: I’m hoping to get on the first page of Google for keywords related to Halloween costume ideas this season!  There will obviously be quite a bit of traffic over the next month for those keywords and, if it works, some new people will be introduced to BuyersVote that wouldn’t have otherwise seen it.  This is a nice little marketing technique that you might want to try: target a highly specific seasonal keyword.  If you can get on the first page of Google for it, you might be able to ride a nice wave of traffic that few other people are competing for.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

He loaned me a book to read while I was down here, Word Of Mouth Marketing, since I’m a little bit short on English reading material.  The book turned out to generate some good ideas.  Below are my notes while reading it.  At the end I posted some ideas it generated for my business.  Maybe it will help you out too.

My notes…

* 90% of WOM marketing happens offline, people mentioning you in passing to friends and colleagues.  We focus on the 10% that happens online because it’s easier to measure and track, but remember it’s only 10%.

* It’s easy to lose track of how important WOM marketing is.  We think of lead generation in terms of things we pay for (like Adwords) but since WOM is free we often don’t realize how many of our new customers came from it.

* give a weird perk to customers, ex. water guns at the car wash, free drinks at the barbershop, enterprise car rental offers to pick you up.  People will talk about it and remember it, it sticks in their head.

* WOM works against you if you suck

* no ad will convince someone if they have heard through WOM that you suck

* be known for something, like the 7 inch high corned beef sandwich in new york – nobody actually needs a 7 inch sandwich, but it’s memorable so it gets repeated to tourists who are looking for something to do

* stop buying ads, thrill your customers and they’ll advertise for you

* be funny, White Castle let people reserve tables for Valentines Day

* give people metrics to show off to their friends

* you can screw up WOM by offering to pay people for it, when the person gets to your website and finds out their friend got paid for it, the recommendation feels less sincere

* search engines only pull one link from the New York Times, but they pull hundreds from blogs, individuals now have the power to talk about you and get noticed, individuals (as a whole) are more important than major media now

* search engines are going to be death to bad companies (side note: why hasn’t this happened already? tons of bad companies still exist – reviews are still too spread out all over the internet in blog comments and forum posts – they don’t have the impact they should, this is one thing I wanted to fix with BuyersVote.com, consolidating reviews into one simple number)

* marketing is what you DO now, not what you say will do.  people will report on what really happened

* if the first couple reviews for a new product on Amazon are negative, it can kill the entire product

* cheap call centers, giving unpaid bills to collection agencies – these steps which companies take to be more profitable are actually going to start hurting them as word of mouth gets recorded online – everyone is a watchdog now, reporting on your actions

* happy customers are the best advertising (cheaper and more effective than Google Adsense)

* advertising is the tax you pay for having an unremarkable product

* negative WOM is an opportunity for you to fix something and show you care

* put a “Tell A Friend” link on every page of your website

* give free food (a weird one) when customers are waiting in line

* remarkable packaging helps start conversations as people carry it around town, make people ask them “what did you just buy?”

* your best WOM customer could be your newest customer, not the one who has been around a while

* every time someone emails you with a problem it’s an opportunity.  Go out of your way to do AWESOME customer support and they’ll tell a few people.  The bar is set pretty low since people are used to terrible call centers.

* You have to become known for something.  Something that is short and simple that people can repeat in casual conversation.  Like “Enterprise, they’ll pick you up” or “go to Joe’s sandwhich shop, they’ve got the biggest meatball sub in New York” or “Have you tried Pandora?  It builds a radio station just for you”.

* Try filling in the blanks about your business: You should really try _______, it’s _________.

* There should not be an ‘and’ in the blank.  Lists don’t work…it’s friendly, affordable, and fun.  It has to be one simple thing, like “they give you free ice cream while you wait”.

* Don’t underestimate the power of doing something silly.  Duct Tape brand has a contest where high schools students make prom dresses and tuxedos out of duct tape.  People talk about it.  Pictures get forwarded around the internet and to relatives.

* Progressive insurance gives you the prices of competitors, even if they’re lower.  Risky right?  Well, no…customers were probably looking at competitors prices anyway, but it’s remarkable they do it so they get word of mouth.

* Don’t be so professional and show some personality, like Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.  Or Facebook let’s you change your language to talk like a pirate.  Be weird.

* Give people a free postcard at your hotel (with your Hotel’s name on it).  They needed to send one to their relatives anyway and will happily use yours.

* On your “tell a friend” form, make sure it allows for multiple recipients.  Also make sure the message comes from the referrer, not your website.  They don’t know who you are, but they’ll open a message from their friend.

* YouTube got popular (at least in part) because on every single page they ask people to “Share This Video” and embed it in their own website.

* Hotmail went from 0 to 8 million users in less than two years.  How?  They included a short line at the end of every email “Get Your Free Email From Hotmail”.  Possibly the most pure WOM product of all time.

* Skype spread by WOM because if you wanted the call to be free, the other person had to install Skype too.  Same thing with Fax machines.

* If you ship products, put something unusual in every box you ship.  Like a bag of M&Ms, or a coupon people will hand out.  Or a note asking if they’ll leave you a review on Amazon.

* If you’re going to give away swag (free t-shirts, cups, etc).  Make them cool and stuff that people will actually use.  Can’t tell you how many free t-shirts I’ve seen that are extra large and I will never wear.

* You should have a blog (duh).  It takes time to build it up, but it’s an essential tool today.  It is the modern day resume.  If people can’t find what you’ve done or what you are doing in your career online, it seems less important.  Choose your name as the domain name, if you are doing anything important people are going to Google you.

* Include “easter eggs” in your products.

Some Ideas It Generated For My Businesses

So as I was reading, I would take a few minutes to think about how each idea applied to my various web businesses.

BuyersVote.com is a naturally viral product because it ranks things.  Whenever you claim something or someone is better or worse, it generates controversy and gets people’s attention.  So I came up with some ideas to help multiply this effect.

• Make an “awards” page with the highest and lowest rated items across the entire site.  You could also do best and worst this year, and month also.  This could definitely generate some WOM if people could say “did you see XYZ was the worst rated company of all time?” or “We had the top rated product on BuyersVote this month!”  If you loved the company you’d go there to defend it.  If you hated the company you’d go there to throw gas on the fire.
• Make some badges, little images, that people could display on their site.  They could say thing “top rated cell phone of 2009 on BuyersVote.com” or something like that.
• Make some swag at CafePress.com like maybe a t-shirt that said “Careful, I’ll be rating your performance on BuyersVote.com”.
• Let people Tweet their reviews out!

This last one was quite simple to do, so I actually threw it together and it’s now live on the site.  People can tweet their reviews!  When you’re signed in a little link like this will appear:

For UniversityTutor.com I was thinking about swag I could send to tutors…t-shirts, coffee cups, etc.  But none of these sounded very exciting.  Then I had an interesting idea: what about business cards?

I have a feeling tutors would actually use these because business cards are new and cool for college students (you probably haven’t gotten them before) and if you had them in your dorm room, your friends would probably ask you about them.  I wouldn’t be able to send them to all tutors obviously, but for paying tutors perhaps it would be a worthwhile investment.  How much could it cost to send 250 business cards to a paying tutor?  Maybe less than $10, which is what they pay in their first month.  So it would break even quickly and help generate WOM.  I’d have to investigate this further and see what companies out there could make this process really easy.

Conclusion

The book was quite simple and an easy read.  It didn’t tell me anything earth shattering that I didn’t already know, but at the same time it was very helpful in generating some ideas while I was reading it.  If you’d like to check out the book on Amazon you can see it here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments about WOM.  Which of these techniques do you think has the most potential?  Which have had the greatest effect in your business?

Finally, just for fun here is a picture of my “office” in Buenos Aires where I spend an average work day.  Pretty tough life, right?

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

After all, there were a number of online free eBooks that had come out that I’d really enjoyed and had been successful, like Getting Real, the Recession Proof Grad, and a number of Seth Godin’s works.

To many people it might seem counter-intuitive to release a book for free, but things are changing in the digital age.  Much electronic content can be shared online at zero cost, and the distribution cost of an eBook has come down to zero.  So some authors find it useful as a means to build their brand, spread an idea, etc – things which can be much more valuable than book sales.  And in many cases (Getting Real being one example) it turned out they sold MORE paper copies as a result of releasing the eBook for free.  People liked what they read online and wanted a “dead tree” version to read the rest more easily, mark up with notes, share with a friend as a gift, or just say thank you.

Of course, the biggest problem this presented in my case is that I’d already been selling the eBook version for some time, and people would be upset if I decided to release it now for free.  So I pondered this for a while and came up with a solution that isn’t perfect but I hope will be a valid compromise: if you purchased an electronic copy in the past and would like a refund now that it’s free, simply contact me and I’ll send it right over with my sincere apologies.  It’s been out for two years now and sales have started to slow, so I figured if I was going to do it the time was now.  I also decided it should be done in a totally open and transparent way with a blog post.  To be honest, my hope is that most people who bought it found it worth purchasing a year or two ahead of other people (the emails I get tend to indicate that is the case) but if not I am more than happy to eat the cost for my mistake in not making it free from the beginning.  This was a really hard decision to make actually, and I wish I’d gotten it right from the beginning so this wasn’t necessary.  But I didn’t, so hopefully this will make the best of an unfortunate situation.

On the plus side, this will hopefully make the ideas in the book available to a much wider audience and build readership to the blog over time.  I’ve updated the book’s page on this blog.  And if you haven’t already, please feel free to check it out.

And if you’re upset by this as someone who purchased it in the past, I totally understand.  Feel free to contact me for a refund and I’ll make it right.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

He covers topics that are right in line for readers of this blog, such as How To Build Wealth, How To Do A Startup, and How To Love Your Work.

His articles can be quite long (many of them have been compiled into a book actually).  But I’ve included some highlighted passages below that stood out to me as I was reading.

He is a programmer as well so I was able to relate on a lot of those points.  He built a software company in the 90′s which eventually was sold to Yahoo for around $50 million and became the Yahoo Stores product.  He is now a venture capitalist and started y-Combinator, something I wrote about in the past and was very impressed with (but didn’t know he was connected to at the time).  I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of him until now.  His essays are outstanding (he doesn’t really have a blog but there is an RSS feed for his essays which you can subscribe to).

Thoughts on wealth…

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world…When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians. Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is– and you specifically are– one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it. In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie.

If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That’s been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years.

If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich

If you’re a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully, run upstairs. (Here he is talking about the idea of going after hard problems in business, and how small companies can solve them quicker).

On how to do a startup…

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called “business” if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It’s not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.

…you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like “I don’t know,” “Maybe you’re right,” and “I don’t understand x well enough.”

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

It’s worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you’re riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%. It’s more likely to double your sales.

If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.

Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it’s easier to sell to them. It’s worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can’t outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.

Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don’t. The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren’t. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “if the people lead, the leaders will follow.” Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes “get all the users, and the advertisers will follow.” More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don’t put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.

For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. The Aeron came out during the Bubble and was very popular with startups. Especially the type, all too common then, that was like a bunch of kids playing house with money supplied by VCs. We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.

The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do. To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind. They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space, and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse. But worst of all, they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone’s office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have a meeting about it. So the fewer people you can hire, the better.

If two companies have the same revenues, it’s the one with fewer employees that’s more impressive. When people used to ask me how many people our startup had, and I answered “twenty,” I could see them thinking that we didn’t count for much. I used to want to add “but our main competitor, whose ass we regularly kick, has a hundred and forty, so can we have credit for the larger of the two numbers?”

Avoid starting a startup to sell things to the biggest company of all, the government. Yes, there are lots of opportunities to sell them technology. But let someone else start those startups.

On reaching “ramen profitability“…

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses….A morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup, because the moral weight of running a startup is what makes it hard. Startups are still very rare. Why don’t more people do it? The financial risk? Plenty of 25 year olds save nothing anyway. The long hours? Plenty of people work just as long hours in regular jobs. What keeps people from starting startups is the fear of having so much responsibility. And this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear. Anything that takes some of that weight off you will greatly increase your chances of surviving.

On finding work that you love…

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn’t think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends…This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren’t tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are “just trying to make a living.” (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn’t thought much about what they really like.

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it’s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial.

Definitely check out Paul Grahams’s site to get a taste for his articles or (for an easier time reading them) get his book.

By the way I’m working on a new design for StartBreakingFree.com (you can see most of it is up already).  More details on this coming up soon and other changes I’d like to make to the site.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Today I’m going to teach you how to get your own free books that you can give away. This is a great technique to generate leads in any business, whether it is subscribers to a blog, or just to get email addresses of people who may be interested in your product.

Some people have asked, “How are you able to give them away?”

The answer is that these books are either in the “public domain”, which means the copyright has expired, or they are under the “creative commons” license, which means you have some freedom to use them.

One of the best places I’ve found to get these types of books is Scribd.com.

Supposedly they are one of the top 300 sites on the internet (that no one has heard of), receive 20 million visitors a month, and have 17 billion words in their “library” of uploaded documents.

I suggest you take some time to browse their site and see what pieces of content might be useful in your niche. They have other types of content besides books as well, such as sheet music, art, slides, and essays.

What material can I give away for free?

Copyrighted material is the strictest: you can’t use it without paying. Public domain works are the most open: you can do whatever you want. Creative commons is somewhere in the middle.

As you browse the different documents on Scribd you will see little icons that tell you what the copyright situation is. Here is what each one means (it can get a little tricky):

Public Domain

Public domain works are the most wide open. You can download them right off Scribd and distribute them on your own website. You can even edit them however you want and sell them.

According to Wikipedia:

In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain…

The Creative Commons License

The next four are all more specific versions of the creative commons license. Under all of them you can still give the book away for free.

Attribution

This means you need to give credit to the original person who created the document. Most commonly, by leaving their name or website intact inside the work to show they were the original author.

You can still do whatever else you want with it though, including giving it away, selling it, or editing it.

Non-Commercial

This means you can still give it away for free, you just can’t sell it.

No Derivatives

This means you can only give away verbatim copies of the work. You can’t edit it.

Keep Same License

You can make derivative works (edited copies) but they must be distributed under the same creative commons license that the original used.

Conclusion

You can read more about the creative commons license here, but as you can see, under any of the creative common licenses you can still give the book away for free (which was my main goal). Just keep the author’s name in there and don’t edit it and you should be fine.

I don’t really recommend trying to sell public domain or creative common works (although some people do this). Instead, give them away for free to generate leads.

There really are some great books out there. I read and paid good money for both Think and Grow Rich and The Richest Man In Babylon when I bought them in paperback years before this website. It wasn’t until much later that I realized they were available to distribute for free.

So there you have it. Go to Scribd.com and check out some free material that your potential customers might really like. Then give it away to them in exchange for their email address to build leads for your business.

Most people don’t buy anything the first time they come to your site, and if they leave you will never hear from them again. But if you give them some instant value in exchange for their email, now you can follow up with them at some point down the road to build trust and a real business relationship.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Some of them are pretty inspiring…and it’s amazing to see the VARIETY of people who all share the same desire to be free from a job (from doctors to 15 year olds).

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did…

Hey! I just finished your book, and although I’m not writing to thank you for the vast changes it has brought up in my life JUST YET- I feel the need to tell you that I completely enjoyed every sentence of the book.

There were many parts where I couldn’t help but smile because it was clear how you genuinely wanted the absolute best for the reader – you weren’t worried about how silly things might sound as long as you got your point across or as long as it worked (like punching the little ‘self doubt creature’ off your shoulder hahah). I also loved the stressed importance of not ripping off your customers or ‘being evil.’ You seem like a great person and I’m genuinely happy that you’ve reached this success because you seem like you totally deserve it.

Take care!
Juliet

Hi Brian,

Big fan of your blog. Bought your ebook a couple of days ago and I think it’s great! Congratulations for a job well done.

One of the posts that I find very inspiring is your “From Idea to Launch” post series. Mainly because it shifted my paradigm that online business = information products.

[Specific question removed]

-Carlo

PS. FYI, in “Breaking Free”, Afterword was spelled Afterward (don’t know if that was intentional) and you have a typo on page 229 for your email address :D Yes, I got to that within just a couple days of reading.

Dear Brian,

I am a doctor, and this was the only way I could see myself functioning in this world.

You gave me the courage to “start breaking free” away from the path, which no longer was led by my desire, but rather by inability to turn back on something into which I have invested so much. I am not sure this mail will reach you, but I want to thank you and wish you success in everything you do.

– Kind regards,Katie

Hey Brian,

I actually thought this was a pretty good book. This is the first full eBook that I have bought, and I have to say that I was very impressed.

The concepts are well thought out and presented in a very clean manner that helps for easier understanding and retention.

I bought this book at the same time as 4-Hour Work Week (by Timothy Ferriss) and these two books are now two books that I am recommending to people over everything else.

I think the ideas presented in your book are very reasonable and there should be no problem implementing them, especially using the “small steps” guideline.

Thanks for a good read and plan for “Breaking Free”..
Tom

Brian,
I finally finished Breaking Free last night. It was good; I liked the no-nonsense advice. The message I especially took away from it is: “this is not that hard to do.” I just wanted to share with you some of the things that I’ve started doing as a result of your book and some of its spin-off activities:

[goes on to list 9 activities...]

Anyway, thanks for helping me get started on this path; I’ll let you know how I’m progressing. Let me know if you’re ever in Boston!
- Dave

Hi Brian,

I am half way through the book so far (probably need to take you up on that speed reading suggestion) and have started playing around with WordPress. Thank you so much for putting the info out there that you do. I am at a point in my life (I turn 30 in November) where I know I need to start working for myself–the employee world is just not for me. It is exciting but scary. I am still working on pushing myself harder.

I am really glad blogs and e-books like yours exist! They do wonders for encouraging me. One of the things you wrote that really set off a bell was the “no matter what” ;-) I have two Masters degrees and kind of just followed a path for a while of getting a good education and going to work for a co. with benefits–blah, blah…it’s not my destiny. I know I cannot waste my whole life dreading work in the morning.

Thanks!
Christine G.

“Hello Brian,
I met you at the after hour networking event with Jon King and bought your book. Enjoying it!
This information is such valuable stuff especially for the new business builders. Thank-you so much for sharing!
- Faye DeSilva

Hi Brian -

Just writing to let you know that I really liked the book. It is quite a value for the money and it had some helpful advice I had not encountered before. (and I’ve read a lot on the subject)

I’m in the process of trying to break free right now. I’m a very successful engineer at a top company, published author, and I consider myself a smart and capable guy. Starting the process is difficult at times, but reading the experience of someone who has broken free has been very inspiring.

Thanks
Addis

Hey dude, love your book. (im 15 by the way). I want to have my own web designing company but I really wouldn’t know where to start. Its really good from the beginning on how you started out. I can feel the experience myself though because im more of a business person too.

Looking forward to speaking with you once more and maybe in reality!

-Jarod B.

Your eBook is awesome! More people need to hear your story.
- Jason

“I found this book online by accident and bought it at a time that coincidentally I was getting sick of working for someone else. The book is very motivational and a must read for anyone who wants to “break free”. The book offers a step by step approach to quiting your job and becoming financially independent.
The author of the book, Brian Armstrong, writes from his own experiences and shows how anyone can follow in his footsteps…making breaking free seem a lot more possible.
-by A. Lehrer, New York, NY

Brian,

I am loving the book for its inspiration as I have been contemplating quiting my job. I have more than sufficient $ to take some time off, so last Friday I went ahead and put in my two weeks. It’s a scary feeling to do this especially without a side business already up and running, but I can afford it. I know that taking some time off will help give me a level head and aid in my pursuit to find my passion.

Best,
Aaron V.

To read more about Breaking Free and get your own copy of the book (either PDF or Paperback) click here.

Thanks,
Brian

Probably one of the top three book on building wealth I’ve come across, and as you know I’ve read (or listened to) a lot.

He gets into all sorts of topics in the book, but here are three ideas that stood out in my mind.

Hopefully you will find them as insightful as I did. They may even challenge some closely held ideas that you have!

1. Having Lots Of Money Doesn’t Make You Rich

   Being rich is much more about your mindset and your financial intelligence than it is about how much money you have.

   Take Richard Branson for example. The man is a billionaire, but if you took all that money away from him he would still have all the knowledge. He would still know how to start businesses, invest wisely, etc. In fact, if he had to start from zero today I’m quite sure Richard Branson would have lots of money again in less than five years.

   Take the opposite example though: what about a person who wins the lottery but doesn’t understand how to be rich? Is it any wonder that 1 in 3 lottery winners are flat broke in five years? Even though they had all the money in the world, they still had the mindset and financial intelligence of a poor person, so they lost their money. They were not “rich”.

   If you understand how to build wealth than you are rich, no matter how much money you have.

   A person who make $100,000 a year and spends $100,000 a year is not rich. They are thinking like a poor person and remaining stuck in the rat race. In fact, a person who makes $40,000 a year and invests $20,000 is richer.

2. The Longer You Can Go Without Working, The Wealthier You Are

   As alluded to in point #1, rich people save and invest a portion of their money. What do they invest in? Passive income streams that pay them whether they work or not.

   If you have no savings, then it doesn’t matter how much money you make per year; you aren’t wealthy. If you stopped working today, how long could you continue to pay for your current lifestyle? A month? Six months? A year?

   The longer you could go, the wealthier you are. And the wealthiest people are those that are financially free. That means their passive income streams are enough to cover their expenses. Effectively, they could go on forever at their current level of living without working again. Thats why I set a goal this year to get to at least $2,000 per month in passive income buying real estate.

3. Rich And Poor People Focus On Different Types Of Income

   According to Kiyosaki, there are three types of income: (1) earned income from a job, (2) portfolio income from stocks or bonds, and (3) passive income from real estate or other income generating assets.

   Poor and middle class people focus on earned income. There are two problems with this.

   First, you only get paid when you work. And there are a fixed amount of hours in the day, which means there is a cap on how much money you can make via earned income. The second problem with earned income is what Robert Kiyosaki calls “50% money”. Essentially the government takes 50% of every earned income dollar you make. Money is taken out of your paycheck before you ever get it, and then more money is taken out when you pay taxes.

   Poor and middle class people focus on earned income, and try to get rich by working twice as hard.

   Rich people on the other hand focus on the other two types of income, portfolio income and passive income. These are not dependent on the number of hours in a day, so they grow indefinitely, and they are far better in terms of taxes too. The highest capital gains tax rate is 15% and in real estate you can often pay zero taxes or defer the taxes forever.

If you get a chance, check out Choose To Be Rich. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

What other favorite books do you have on building wealth? Leave me a comment below.

I was just listening to Brian Tracy speak in The Psychology of Achievement, and he phrases it better than I could have:

Every single peak performing human being, every single high achieving man or woman, has been a person who has thrown off the natural tendency to play it safe and stay within the comfort zone, and has continually tried to exceed their previous levels of accomplishment, has continually moved forward into the risk zone, to try something more and bigger and better and more important. Every single accomplishment in the history of man, has come from men and women who have had the courage to take the risks, to step out even though they had no guarantee or assurance of success.

I would go as far as to say that it is IMPOSSIBLE to reach your full potential as a human being while spending a third of your life working for someone else. Make a quick list of people who really changed the world, helped others, and were wildly successful. Did they have a 9-to-5 corporate job?

I also love what Brian Tracy has to say about failure. Most people don’t try, and those that do give up after the first or second time.

In studying the lives and stories of the most outstanding men and women of all of history, we find that every single one of them has been a great failure. People do not understand the importance of failure in achievement. The fact is that it is impossible to succeed without failing, that failure is an indispensable prerequisite for success, and that all great success is proceeded by great failure…Every single person who has tried to accomplish something outside the ordinary has suffered setback and obstacle and defeat and adversity and disappointment and heartache over and over again as they have moved toward their goal. There is no record of anybody ever having achieved any kind of success without having failed over and over again. The only difference is that the winners continually pick themselves up and carry on knowing that ultimate success is inevitable as long as they keep on going on…your persistence is your measure of your belief in yourself.

Brian Tracy is awesome. If this interests you check out The Psychology of Achievement on audio book.