Free and useful
A Hundred Times Thank You: My Free Ebook Reaches a Major Milestone
If you want to attract people, give them a freebie. And if you want to make them happy, make your freebie useful.
My ebook Flutter Performance Tips crossed 100 downloads this morning after 5 months on Gumroad. That’s nearly 1 download per day. The ebook focuses on handling laggy animations, reducing memory consumption, and improving overall app speed.
I didn’t really advertise it. There are some links on my personal website and on Medium, so one can stumble across them. But the main reason is probably that I wrote an article with performance tips for Flutter and linked my ebook. That article had a pretty strong January in terms of views.
Gumroad shows the referrer of your sales and about 60% came from Medium. It’s quite nice to see that you don’t need to maintain several social media profiles to get decent results. I also made around $5 with that ebook.
Such results motivate me to produce further products. My current project is a coding course for Flutter beginners and will be finished soon.
Conclusion
You can achieve a lot with free products. Some people make decent money from them. I am obviously not there yet, but success doesn’t come overnight. Roughly 1 download per day is a good start, the next goal is to double that number!
