Product iteration

Success as a creator is all about the product and the audience.

Most creators fail because they are not growing their audience and/or they are not iterating that product for their audience.

What I usually see are creators putting out the same products that didn’t work the first time, again and again, and getting the same results.

Even if you are growing an audience, it is hard to succeed if you are not iterating on your products with their help.

I will show you the iterative leaps in both my product and my audience over time.

The first product I put on the market was Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. This was my shot in the dark. I had no idea if there would be an audience for it, but I sold the book to a publisher, so I had the confidence to make it at least.

When I finally came to market the book in 2014, I had 162 people who bought it, raising $5,457 on Kickstarter.

The problem with this book, my publisher said, was that it was too niche to make a real splash.

So, for my next book, I didn’t change much. The book was still set in the Apocalypse, but I made the lead a woman and changed up the art style so that it was more commercial, and wrote the story so that it felt more like a Marvel/DC book, though still in a post-apocalyptic setting.

This was iterating on my first idea, and the result was Katrina Hates the Dead, still the most popular graphic novel in my stable, and the reason I was able to build a career. By the time that book launched, it raised $8,780 from 294 backers.

I don’t have mailing list numbers from back then, but I probably had about 500 people on it when that book launched, and had done a few shows since Ichabod came out.

I was talking to people a little bit, but that iteration mostly came from talking with the publisher and my gut, but just that little change really brought in more people to my brand.

Next was the bad times. I had an audience, and with that same audience, I launched three products: A mystery novel, a children’s book, and a sci-fi novel. Combined they raised LESS than the Katrina campaign.

This was bad iteration. I wasn’t listening to my audience, and so when I launched something to them, they didn’t care. It wasn’t what THEY wanted, so they all failed.

Luckily, I realized this early and started iterating again. I asked people what they wanted (monster comics), their favorite fandom (Invader Zim/Lovecraft), and their favorite creators, then I went about creating an anthology filled with those kinds of stories to excite my base.

By the time, Monsters and Other Scary Shit launched, I had over two years of data on what people wanted from me and built my email list from a couple hundred to 2,300.

That book launched to $27,630 from 624 backers, more than double the backer count and triple the total raise of the Katrina campaign.

During that time, I also started work on a second book in my Godsverse/monster hunter series, this time drawn by Nic Touris, who was the most popular artist in my little company. He designed my logo and some prints for me.

We designed the book in the same Invader Zim cell-shaded style as the cover for the Monster anthology, and I bet that another book in a popular style featuring a female character set out for revenge would be as popular or more popular as Katrina.

I iterated the book to look like the Monster anthology, my most popular Kickstarter at the time, and at launch we raised $25,002 from 672 backers, more backers than the Monster anthology and almost triple the total raise of Katrina.

By the time I ran the Pixie Dust book, I had over 8,000 people on my mailing list, too.

Then, finally, I iterated on the monster anthology, asking what people liked and didn’t like, and finally came out with Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, my smash hit anthology which raised $39,246 from 1039 backers.

By the Cthulhu campaign, I had 44,000 people on my mailing list. I asked them and those that bought my previous anthology what they thought, and they told me they wanted a Lovecraft anthology, all comics, all color, and all ages. So, that’s what I gave them, and they responded by backing in droves.

At each step, I iterated my product, redesigned, and came back with something new, which was more in line with the tastes of my audience. The Cthulhu campaign launched in September of 2018, four years after my Ichabod campaign. In that time I had done eight big launches for books, and went from 164 to 1039 people buying my book, all from iterating again and again until I hit it out of the ball park.

It wasn’t the first book, or even the fifth. It was constantly reworking and iterating to find the best possible product WITH my growing audience, so that they engaged in the process with me.

Interestingly, during this time people fell more and more in love with Ichabod, until I finally brought it back last year and raised $16,780 from 501 backers to produce a fifth issue of the book. That book only came back into print because my fans hounded me for years to make more of it, and I told them that I would only make more issues if they helped me fund a reprint of the hardcover first volume.

This is proof that the iteration process works, because as my audience grew, my audience for Ichabod ALSO grew, and since I built my audience from that initial Ichabod campaign, everything I have done for the last five years has been taking that core audience and expanding it out.

By the time the Ichabod campaign launched, I had cut my mailing list to about 20,000, but they were a much better quality of subs who actually opened my emails. Over the last two years, I have had as many as 75,000 people on my mailing list, but generally 10,000-20,000 is where I usually vacillate between.

It’s not enough to keep throwing out the same product, because the same product is going to get the same, or worse reaction.

Yes, you could hit it out of the ballpark on the first try, and then you double down, but otherwise you need to iterate your product so that it captures more and more of your desired audience, while working to grow that audience, so that each time you launch, you are more and more successful, instead of less successful.

With most products, there is a small ember of a spark, but it has to grow hotter, and you do that through iteration until you find the hit in the chaff.

Don’t get too precious with your first, or tenth idea. Even now I’m trying to iterate to grow my audience in new ways. I’ve released novels and merch, and have other plans on expansion, but always with an eye toward capturing more of my desired audience with each launch, and delighting those already in my audience with the things I’m doing.

I just ran a campaign for novels that raised $9935 from 264 backers. While it was a win for me as it broke me even on the universe, it raised from nearly 50% less than the ichabod campaign and barely a fourth of the Cthulhu campaign.

The trend is going the wrong way for me right now, so it’s my job to figure out how to turn the trend around and start it going in the right direction. This can and will happen to you as you iterate, but the goal is to fail a lot and fail faster each time, so that you can find the great idea and pull it out of the good idea.

My last campaign is the same audience basically from the Ichabod campaign in September, but only half of those fans said yes to buying from me again with my novel project.

It’s something I am keenly aware of, and have to learn how to iterate on if I want to succeed in 2020.

Luckily, there is a new Cthulhu book launching in March, and a second Ichabod book launching in September, so hopefully that can recapture some of that audience as I launch new things for them that I know they want.

Even this website is a process of iteration. Originally, the thing I threw out into the world was The Business of Art, my first podcast, and from that I iterated into books and courses and marketing services, before relaunching the podcast as The Complete Creative based on the things that you all told me you wanted to see in a site.

And if this one doesn’t catch on, then I will have to iterate again, hopefully bringing it more in line with the tastes of you all, plus any new audience that I gain.