Building Community Before Building Hype with Ramli John, Founder and Author | Ep. 365

0:00Hey besties, welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. Now I'm the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketing leaders. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun conversations with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today I'm joined by Ramli John. He's the author of product-led onboarding and Eureka, and is one of the leading voices in product-led growth.

0:33We talk a lot about marketing software or even D2C products on this show, but rarely books, which is wild because launching a book is basically a masterclass in marketing. You've got positioning, pre-launch demand gen, distribution strategy, bundling, everything. And for me, this one's extra fun. I actually have my master's in publishing. So when I saw how Romley John launched his second book, Eureka, I knew we had to break it down live. Today, we'll dig into what worked, what didn't, and why he took such a different approach the second time around. We'll break down the key levers of his launch, from pre-promotion and demand validation to distribution choices and pricing, so you can apply the same strategies whether you're marketing a book, a product, or your next big idea.

1:20Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Romley, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm excited to be here tomorrow. I'm so excited to have you. As you know, we just launched your second book. So you had product-led onboarding. Now you have Eureka. And we were chatting before the show, and you were kind of sharing how you took two completely different approaches with the book launches.

2:05So I'd love for you to just walk us through what you did for the first book with Wes, actually, and then how you thought about launching the second one and why you made some of those changes. Yeah, the first book, Product-Led Onboarding, I launched it. I was still working with Wes Bush at Product-Led and that was four years ago, 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. It's absolutely crazy that we're saying that it has been four to five years. But that one was really a lot of things that I saw worked. I adopted in this one. Some of the things that really worked, building a community earlier on. At that point, it was very email driven.

2:47So I got an early readers club that had people enjoying to read the book early. And then they were part of the launch team. So they had the book advanced. So when it launched, they had the photos available. I took the best of that and then brought it here all of that and I added on top of some of the things that I've seen really well that we can talk about I did a virtual launch event so a virtual conference on top of that that's more generic about onboarding but the book was really plugged into that that did really well to driving sales and to the book itself and then in terms rather than like hosting the early readers club community in email format I actually used Circle, which I know you're familiar with.

3:33So I created a Circle group. And the third thing that I changed was I actually charged to join the early readers club. So they would pre-order six or seven months before. And I just dripped out like a chapter a week for like 20 weeks. So those are some of the things that changed. I know this is a very high level, but I'm happy to dig into what worked and what didn't. and any of those things that worked, how they performed. Yeah, let's go into the Reader's Club concept because I love that. And I don't think I've heard this exact concept before. I've definitely heard the idea of like what you guys did with product-led onboarding.

4:14So, you know, you sign up to a special list, you get, you know, some chapters, maybe you can even give feedback. But it sounds like you did something more unique here. I've never heard of a community ahead of a book launch. So walk us through like, first, where did that idea even come from? And just give us kind of like the TLDR of like, what was that Reader's Club? What was actually included? How much did you charge for it? That type of thing. Yeah. So for the early Reader's Club, I believe I saw it first with David Spinks. He actually wrote a book about community, which made sense. It's the business of belonging.

4:49I believe that is the book itself. I chose to charge for it. So there's a kid in the game it was pretty much a pre-order rate which is like 40 bucks to get in um they they get the early chapters we did i did a monthly q a um for me to get feedback on what i'm writing so exactly i'm getting live feedback there um they would get the book in advance of everybody else so that was part of it so that they can launch it as part of the community um and the reason why i found that chose to approach it with using a circle or something like that is a book launch is it's really better with a group of folks who are passionate about that topic and a lot of product folks know this product marketing folks know this too you usually launch a feature to a beta group so you would have a beta a beta team or a beta customers and you would test out the product i I took the same product approach to the book, right?

5:52I was like, oh, I got to build this beta group. But some people might not know what that is. So early readers club made sense. And it had a two-pronged purpose to pre-sell the book. And secondly, also to get a ton of feedback from it. I got about 100 or so folks. So that already generated four to five grand from before even the book was sold. and so that helped a ton to build confidence that i'm writing the right topic and i was writing the right chapters um the feedback was invaluable i actually got one feedback from from someone it's like this three chapters they don't they don't work well together and i was like i was already feeling it and i was like you're right it's like this should be one so i just like i completely removed three chapters and put into one like it totally changed the way the book look like because of feedback from an early readers club.

6:50So I think that helped a ton in terms of producing a more quality book than without it. When I first heard you describe the concept of the readers club, I immediately thought of like a beta group testing for product launch. Or, you know, I remember when I was at Unbounce, we were creating content. It doesn't have to even just be products, but we were creating content, this big like conversion benchmark report that we would produce every year. And we even created that report with a group of paying customers as well to A, just like validate what they even wanted in the report. Like we presented a bunch of different insights and we're like, what is more interesting to you?

7:27What would you actually want to know more about? What would you action in your work? And then B, to like kind of get them excited. So same as you on launch day on LinkedIn, we had a bunch of kind of influencers promoting our report rather than it just being, you know, from the Unbounce channel. So I love that idea. And I think like marketers can apply it from a bunch of different projects that they're working on. It doesn't just have to be like a book launch or a product launch. I'm curious, what percentage of your book was like written before you launched the Reader's Club versus what was it?

8:00Because I think this is where I get a lot of challenges. Like in product marketing, I'll just put my product marketing hat on. I always want to get users in as soon as possible. I want to talk about it as soon as possible so that I can get that feedback. But you also have to balance this with like, what if this actually doesn't get shipped or what if this changes entirely? So like, I'm just, I'm curious about how you were thinking about balancing the like over commitment, I guess. Right. Yeah. No, that's, I'm, I'm totally with you. Uh, it's like, I'd rather get this. I wrote uh i think i wrote two chapters out of 20 20 i had the description i had a concept in terms of like oh here are my um 20 here are my chapters they're gonna be small i want it to be easy so you know that you can finish a chapter quickly so that you don't lose your spot um i had the chapter headings the sections and then two chapters written and i launched it because I'm totally with you where like hey you know I'd rather get this out sooner there's always an opportunity to refund if it doesn't work out and it's and it was part of the journey would be like hey we're in this journey together and if the output is like oh this book is not gonna happen I mean refund it but like along the way it did shift some of the things that you know for example I mentioned the three chapters that totally changed so I think this applies a ton and you know like just get it get get the feedback quicker because things are moving quickly like these we're seeing this in marketing we're seeing this with with search and organic with brand like how things are moving so quickly that that um i would rather test it with the market quickly and then like oh okay that that didn't work um what's the you know what's the worst that can happen of course you don't want to test it out with everybody like if you're a company that's like adobe right you're like they're a public company and you release this it's like oh my goodness shoot didn't work out let's backtrack but can you do a smaller can we do a smaller test with a smaller group of people that will be honest and give us feedback but will still love us even though we made we had to kind of backtrack with this and that was part of the early readers club was there was some of those people I've they're part of my email list for some time so yeah that's what I was thinking I love that.

10:25And I think so often we are afraid, you kind of mentioned this, that you're afraid as a brand to have any kind of negative feedback. But we also need to know before we invest months or years on something, what that feedback will be. And so what I'm hearing from you is kind of like minimize the risk, right? Like create these little contained spaces where maybe they're super fans, where they'll actually give you feedback. You don't want people to just praise you either. That's kind of the balance I find with some of these super fan environments. It's like you want someone who will give you honesty, but you want it to be contained honesty, I guess.

11:02That's really good. And there's like one like there's one or two folks that, you know, your customer base, they love you, but they will like be honest. And like for me, like they're hearing them say they love it more or they need it's like, OK, that's some kind of validation. I'm totally with you. You want to make sure that the people in that space, that superfan space or early launch, whatever you're trying to launch, whether that's a report or a book or something, that there are some there that you know will be completely honest with you and be like, yeah, this is not working out. I love it.

11:43I mean, so one of the things we think about a lot as marketers is distribution. and you definitely took a different distribution play with your second book versus the first. And I was reading that LinkedIn post that you wrote and I think you mentioned like 77 % of Eureka's sales came direct rather than through Amazon. So tell us a little bit about like how you thought about distributing the second book and what kind of owning your direct distribution channel allowed you to accomplish. Yeah, that's the first book we launched, I launched Productland Onboarding. It was exclusive to Amazon, totally exclusive.

12:19Amazon, and the reason why is when you sign with Amazon, you tell them that it's exclusive, they'll promote it, they'll add it to Amazon Unlimited, and they provide it to people who are a part of Prime. And they can read it for free, and then Amazon would pay you per page that they read. You can provide more discounts. So volume-wise, I did better in terms of number of book sales with Amazon when I launched product-led onboarding. But in terms of margin and connection, I would say direct sales is more valuable. And what I mean by that is that with direct sales, I obviously get a bigger cut. Amazon, I forget how much they take now, 60%, 40 % or something like that, of course.

13:02But I think the most valuable thing is that when people pre-order through Amazon or buy through Amazon, you don't get that customer connection. I don't see who. I don't see the email address. I don't see where they came from and how versus with Direct. When they purchase, I actually get a Slack ping. I was like, oh, hey. Yesterday, I had a call with somebody, and they bought it beforehand. And then I was like, oh, thank you for purchasing my book right before the call because I have visibility into that. And I have like an email sequence like when they purchase the book, if they have any bonuses they got, like the audio book, they'll get that.

13:46But also I can request for feedback or they can, you know, they're now part of my email list in Kit that I can continue their relationship with that I don't get through the other way through Amazon. So I think that was really valuable for me to, you know, like really connect. And those people that bought directly or pre-ordered directly, I invited them to the free launch party, the virtual conference that I wouldn't have been able to if they bought it through Amazon. So really, it's about that relationship and connection that I was able to gain through direct. I love that. I actually think, I love how you just like put this element of community into your entire book launch and not just the launch, like leading up to building the readers club, but actually thinking about how you continue to engage with your customers, readers.

14:40I often think of a book as a bit of an impersonal thing. Like so many people have asked me, are you going to write a book? And I was like, well, it's not really top of mind for me. Like I love my newsletter because for the exact reasons that you mentioned though, which is I write my newsletter, A, I can write it and get real-time feedback, kind of like you mentioned your readers club. But B, like my subscribers will like message me back all the time every Sunday and be like, oh, what about this? Or I love this. And this, you know, relates to this part of my life. And I feel like I have a real relationship with many of them.

15:12And then, you know, if I see them at a conference or I see them on LinkedIn or they schedule me for a call, yeah, to your point, I have all this context of, oh, we were chatting about this topic from four months ago. And I feel like a book doesn't have that. Up until now and you've kind of like reframed how I think about books now. Yeah, no, that's I never saw it that way where it's hard. Like somebody buys it like from a bookstore and like, did they buy it? Like, who was it? Like, where did they come from? Where do they work? Like, how can I help them more? And I don't see that visibility if it was through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or somewhere else.

15:50Nice. One of the reasons I really wanted you to come on the show is that, you know, Book marketing might seem different than what we usually talk about, but so many marketers are being asked to promote, whether it's a book or just longer form content for their founders or for their executives. And so I think this is a really top of mind subject for a lot of marketers. And one of the things I think we could learn from you is how you went just beyond the book with some of your bundling. And I'm going to call them value ads, but I think it makes a lot of sense for companies who wanted to put out thought leadership.

16:27They want to put out a book because it does give some credibility, but they also want to make that book actionable. So can you walk us through maybe some of like the templates and the different bundles that you created as part of launch? Yeah, I definitely wanted it to be practical. And like, what is the transformation that I want people to achieve through the book? I want them to have better onboarding, but chances are they're going to read the book and they're going to they're they're going to be happy and then they're going to put it down like how do i make it the quickest time to value the quickest time to action for them and templates is one of them so i created a bunch of templates that you know if you get the book um you there are some free templates available but there's also some premium templates that they can get that i created in in miro and fig jam that they can run some of the workshops in and i kept thinking like what else what what else can be valuable to that end reader or that that read the person who's who wants to try to make this transformation i was thinking about like so what about swipe files okay that's cool what about people who hate reading but they bought the book i'm like audio looks great but like okay they it's audio but some people like see the face so i created a course with it too so okay so there's a pre-recorded course that i i walked through the framework um and that's part of them i say okay so all of this that's great but what if they still have questions and that's when the highest tier on the scale bundle where you know you can buy the book for your team and i i can come on and do a q a with your team so i started i guess i i was thinking a lot about like how do i make this experience for the end reader or this customer this customer um really great so that if they if they know it's not going to work out like is it templates is it is it the course is it the swipe files is it the one-on-one call would that would really help them and my my end success is like i'm hoping that they people who get this will actually build a better experience for their customers in their onboarding experience.

18:36And that's all I was thinking about. How do I make that happen for them? Because I don't want them to just get the book and like, okay, it collects dust or they don't open it out. I love that. It sounds like what you were actually focused on was marketing the transformation, and you were less committed to the format to deliver that transformation. And that's opposite for many books or content marketing. Like I'll even just go back to this like report again, just because it's like fresh in my mind from when I was at Unbounce. It's like, okay, we had this large report that we spent many months on.

19:12We were so focused on like getting the report, getting people to download the report versus being like, what do we want people to do? We want people to understand the mechanics to increase their conversion rate. How might people do that? Yeah, some people want to report. Maybe some people want an app. Maybe some people do want a premium call. Maybe we could have offered something like that for our enterprise customers. So I love that because I think we could apply that to a lot of things. As marketers, we often just get so stuck on the delivery mechanism versus what we're actually trying to deliver in the first place.

19:43Oh, that's good. Yeah, they're so focused on the deliverable that they forget about the transformation they want to deliver to the customer. Exactly. I love that. And I think it's probably allowed you to learn a lot about that customer through engaging with them in different ways, right? Yeah, no, that's totally like it's that one-on-one and that community and that, you know, different things. It keeps coming back to like, what else do they need in having that community and space? Like, so what else do you need? You got this? Like what are other things that could be helpful for them is where I'm getting a ton of feedback from.

20:21I love that. So obviously you used a bunch of different levers to launch this book. If you had to strip it back just to like a minimum viable launch, as I'm calling it, what would you actually like really keep now in hindsight versus what were the things that maybe you tried and weren't as effective? Yeah. What did it work? I can go start with what work. It's like if I had to launch another book, I'd 100 % do this. The community is definitely one. That was a ton. Great feedback. Great space for testing the waters in terms of the viability of the book. The other thing that was helpful was doing an event.

21:07I think that was very helpful to build hype and anticipation for it. it's like oh my book is launching my book is launching in seven seven days like that that is not as i said cool you're launching a book how does that help me how does that help like if i was like here here i am i'm trying to do my job i'm in product or customer success or marketing and my conversion or a free trial sucks conversion rate sucks books like i don't have time to read that book so so the event was like coincided with the book and it was like a six hour event um right on the same day of the book launch i invited some folks who are experts in the field like um you know andrew kaplan and kate suma and west borscht a bunch of folks that spoke and shared what worked and what didn't for them and people signed up and they invited their colleagues I noticed like, you know, people were signing up and from the same email address from the same company.

22:10And majority of those, I would say like 95 % of those people have not bought my book at all. It was not in my email list at all. So they joined because they wanted to learn how to improve their product onboarding. And it was a product onboarding summit. and to get the recording of the event and which includes my book it was 47 for a vip access which is not crazy but you know to buy a 47 book that's expensive like if i went to amazon or to um barnes and noble and 47 for a book that's crazy right right and by bundling it with with the recording and some of the templates and the book itself um i got a ton of sales on the book launch i think it was about three to four grand from the book from the book launch day itself because of this so i think looking back that's like man this worked and i enjoyed it it gave me a ton of energy like if it was like oh my goodness that tired me out a ton after that six hour session i was like man this is gonna be long but it gave me a ton of energy i would suggest If they were thinking about hyping up something like a report, matching it with some kind of live event would be helpful, especially that people are looking for that connection.

23:35And yeah, I would say that's something that I would do it again. What didn't work as well? I didn't think about international shipping as much. So that's one thing that this might be more book related where if you're trying to send a physical book to Europe or even in Canada, because my publisher was in the US, the shipping cost was like$50 to$70, which is like, what the heck? Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, that didn't make sense because it was direct, right? It was like two or three times done the book, which didn't make sense. And so in those cases, I would have pushed like an Amazon pre-order much earlier, which is a lesson learned.

24:17I also, yeah, I think that's one of the biggest like lesson learned from what didn't work out. Yeah, I love that. And I think shipping is crazy. I've even had this myself. Like I supported someone else's book launch. I bought a bunch of copies of the book to send to campers in the PMM camp community. And I was shocked by how expensive it is to mail a book across borders. So I've definitely learned that. But again, what strikes me about what you said did work is, again, I feel like you have this uncanny ability to nail perception of value and actually understand what is valuable. Like every story that you've told me about the book launch is about how to make the reader more successful.

25:04It's actually not about how to promote my book. And I think that's really important and worth calling out. Again, so applicable to anything that we are launching or marketing, whether it's a product, a piece of content, a book. It's like, we're so obsessed with it because we've probably spent three months, nine months, two years thinking about it, right? And like, it's, we hold it so close to who we are. We have all these feelings and attachments about it. But at the end of the world, it's like the market, our customers have not thought about it once. They need to be told what's in it for them.

25:39And I love how you were like, I didn't even host a book launch. I hosted like a summit about the topic of my book in which my book would be a great takeaway to continue the learning. Because think about it, I don't know how many attendees you got, but like, I bet you it would have been a fraction of the amount if you had said, here's my book launch. Exactly. You know, some friends would have shown up, of course, we want to support you. But that's completely different than saying like, wow, I'm going to go spend six hours learning about this topic. I'm going to be able to apply it to my job immediately.

26:08And I'm going to have this amazing like reference product that I can keep looking at as I like kind of get the learnings in the next few months. Yeah, no, that's actually funny enough. How I define product-led growth, like, oh, what is product-led growth? it's just a quote that Wes Bush said that's like man that's so good it's our customer success becomes our success so if we can make our customers as successful as possible then they're like gonna look at us it's like they're gonna stick with us it builds that trust and relationship so that's um that's what I guess that's how I was thinking about it and you're right it applies to so many things like content report like how is this gonna make that transformation make my user or customer or my whoever I'm trying to share this to be successful with this thing and think about it from their point of view than from our point of view.

27:05Exactly. Because it's like so often we're like, great, we want, why are we doing a report? Well, we want people to put their email in so that we can market to them later. Great. And then, but this, you know, this is the, this is what happens, right? We're sitting in a room like, great. What would something, what would be so valuable that someone would give us our email? Oh, conversion insights. Great. And then that's the conversation. Instead of the conversation being like, wow, how can we make our customers more successful? Helping them understand what converts. Great. What's the best way to teach them what converts?

27:34Great. Do you know what I mean? It's like the scaffolding is just a little different in both of those conversations. Yeah, you're right. It's like, and I don't know about you, but I feel like that sometimes comes from the top from sometimes the founder or the CEO were like, okay, we need to sell this versus like, how do we get it from the point of view from the CEO? And as marketers, like I feel like sometimes that requires some re-education, like, you know, even asking the pointed questions. So what is our customer going to get out of this? You know, even maybe even asking the product team or, you know, other people that we're working with, like really asking that question.

28:13Like, what is in it for our customers? You know? Yes. Yes. Speaking about what's in it for our customers, I also want to chat about ROI in general. Because, again, I think books are valuable, but books are a lot of work. They're time consuming. you oftentimes, especially if you're like thinking about in the context of maybe you're a founder or an executive and you want to write a book and publish it for thought leadership for your company, a lot of questions might be around like, well, how do we get the ROI on this? So like, I'd love to just hear your thoughts on how you think about even tracking ROI on a book and how might a marketer explain the ROI of, you know, publishing a book if that is like a lever they're wanting to pull.

29:04Yeah. Um, I can speak of it from the point of view, uh, as a business owner myself, then from like a marketer as a business owner, like obviously their sales was great. Um, I shared on LinkedIn, I got 16 ,000 just from that month, just from book sales, which is like, it's amazing. And the other good stuff, and I think this applies to marketers as well, is that I know it's a huge hypothesis and it reflects on me. It's reflect on our, uh, friends that we um like our our circle of friends like april dunford and west borsche like multiple times in the last like few weeks somebody would come into a sales call with me and like hey here's your book and it's the book that i just published and it was like cool good like you know like even um uh you know somebody from actually i i didn't tell you this until now somebody from your email list you mentioned my book reached out yes and scheduled a call with a sales call and she was holding my book it was like amazing i think that's that's the power of like writing a book especially now um you know i can talk about ai i can talk about like all these things happening to our world in marketing and like having that that sense of credibility and now it's like a discussion starter for for sales it's like oh i just i have your founder's book here and they're holding it in the sales call.

30:28Like, I love this. Like, you know, it would be awesome to work with your product or your service or your company. There's that. And also, I think it opens up opportunities to, like, do partnerships, like co-marketing with other, you know, like, you know, with different companies or different communities where you would come in to do a webinar or you would get on a podcast. So it's a lot easier there as well. So I think there's a lot of the ROI. You're right. It's harder to track. But like now I know, like when I jump on a sales call and they brought my book, it's like, okay, I can kind of attribute it to that.

31:06I'm sure, you know, attribution is hard. It's like, oh, it's definitely just a book. No, there was a lot of things that happened. Right. But that was one of the touch points. And the book, you know. And the book, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, you and I were even chatting about this before the show. I think in a world where AI is making it easier and easier to learn almost anything, human POV is so important. And I feel like that is what a book is. It's like, this is my personal point of view on this topic. These are my stories about how I've implemented my beliefs, my frameworks, and no one can replicate that, you know?

31:49And so I think it does create a relationship where a relationship might not exist if they were just, you know, getting your response from a blog post, for example. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think you're right. It's that opinion and that human, like, you know, there's, hopefully there's stories in there. It's not, you know, hopefully there's not just like, oh, here's some tips and advice, all one on it. But so like it's as much as people getting to know you and like my book is about onboarding, but I shared stories about how my dad taught me how to fix a sink. And I was using the wrong tool. And I brought that into an analogy to, you know, you can have the right, if you have the wrong tool, it's not going to work out.