My guest today is Michal Malewicz who is the founder of the award winning design agency HYPE4. In this episode, we discuss the following: - What led Michal Malewicz to start his own design agency Hype4 - Michal Malewicz's horror story of being micro managed - Why Michal Malewicz doesn't want to build a billion dollar company - Michal Malewicz's journey of becoming a design educator in Poland - How Michal Malewicz got the idea to launch his own design ebook - Michal Malewicz explains the benefits of an ebook over traditionally published books - How Michal Malewicz prototyped the initial version of his ebook - Michal Malewicz regrets not being active on social media earlier - How Michal Malewicz grew his email newsletter to 10,000+ subscribers - Michal Malewicz explains how to make viral content - Michal Malewicz shares the emotional highs of his ebook launch day - Michal Malewicz explains his refund policy for the ebook - Michal Malewicz explains how to sell a PDF/ebook online - Michal Malewicz reveals making $100,000+ selling a design ebook - Michal Malewicz shares tips on dealing with internet trolls - How Michal Malewicz pushes out updates to his ebooks using Gumroad - Michal Malewicz's advice for launching, selling ebooks - How to get in touch with Michal Malewicz For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Michal Malewicz started designing back in 1999, initially for fun, gaming related projects. Back then a web designer was the person who both designed and coded the front-end, so he had to quickly learn to code too. He worked in a couple of agencies and in 2013 started his own design agency HYPE4. He also teaches design at SWPS University in Poland, speaks at conferences, surfs (Baltic sea can be quite fun) and skates in his free time.
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Namaste and welcome. This is Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA. This podcast is a real-life MBA program for designers where we interview design hustlers and learn the skills, mindset necessary for a designer to launch a business venture. You can learn more. Find past episodes and stay updated at designMBA.show.
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Jayneil Dalal: So, basically, Mike started designing back in 1999. Wow! That's a while back. Initially for fun, he worked on gaming related projects. Back then, as a web designer, he realized the importance of also coding because he had to do design and coding both. So, he quickly learned to do that. Then he worked at a couple of agencies in 2013 before he made the leap and started his own agency Hype4. The company started initially as a design only studio but he was really unhappy when clients would take their design and end up butchering it. So, he also trained his developers design and also hired them so that he could design and code both. He teaches design at SWPS University in Poland, speaks regularly at conferences and loves to surf and even skate when he has free time. he wrote the UI design book called Designingui.com. Once again, it's Designingui.com. So, ahead and check it out. It's really amazing. And he's currently working with his developers on the next book which is the Frontend Unicorn, which is FrontendUnicorn.com. Once again, it's FrontendUnicorn.com eBook and also a startup book called ThatStartupBook.com. Once again, it's ThatStartupBook.com.
That being said, Mike, super excited to have you on the show, man. Welcome.
Michal Malewicz: Yeah, glad to be here. Hey.
Jayneil: Oh my God. I was actually just looking at some dumbbells you got in the background and I’m like “Man, he's into this home working out thing.”
Michal: Yeah. Well, we have to be because that's like the only way. I just … actually, I joined the gym three weeks ago and then they closed the gyms, which is basically like the perfect excuse not to go.
Jayneil: Oh my God, man.
Michal: Just went to one workout and then they closed it. So, I probably just shouldn’t join gyms.
Jayneil: Oh my God, talk about like new year's resolutions and stuff.
Michal: Yeah, exactly.
Jayneil: So, you started designing way back, man. From that point, I’m kind of wondering, what made you start your own design agency Hype4 from all these experiences back then.
Michal: Well, the main sort of maybe, let's just go back a little bit even before that, what made me even try to do designing and making websites in the first place before even creating a company was that I was playing Quake which is the very first game from the series and we had a group of friends that we were playing with. And, basically, we wanted to have a website for that group but nobody knew how to make a website yet because it was like ‘98 or something. So, it was like “Yeah, you're probably the best at the computer stuff. So, maybe you should figure it out.” And it was just tasked to me. So, I just had to learn myself and it was all because of the gaming part of it but then after a while of working at different companies, I realized that it's not really right because the approach from those companies to the employees were not really that great and the sort of quality control wasn't really great either. So, I realized that I should probably make a company and try to make it like the exact opposite to how the companies that I worked had operated, so just make like an anti-version of what I used to work at.
Jayneil: Wow! And what were some of the things you did not like that you incorporated in the anti-version which became Hype4?
Michal: Right. Well, first of all, micromanagement. I had a story from like, I think it was 2004, where at the time my boss called me over to his little private room and he told me that they were running some sort of software in the background of every computer and he realized that I wasn't really working all the eight hours but instead, I was going to some websites and doing some stuff. And it was like even Facebook didn't exist back then. So, it wasn't really like scrolling social media because there was like practically no social media … well, maybe myspace … but she told me that she wants me to publicly apologize to the entire company for the losses that it's incurring because of my slacking off.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Michal: Or just take a pay hit. And I told them to just deduce it from my wages and I quit the next week.
Jayneil: Oh my God! That is insane.
Michal: So, that's one thing like micromanagement. They didn't really care if everything was on time. They cared about those little things that don't matter like, okay, be busy, be productive and working but not really like in any way … well, it doesn't make sense. So, we're not really working that way at Hype4 from like day one. We give people projects and if they, for example, have like a project for five days of the week and they start on Monday, if they are done by Wednesday, they have four-day weekends.
Jayneil: Oh wow!
Michal: So, it's just all up to them. And it's not like that they need to like stretch it for the sake of stretching it. So, if they can clearly manage to make something high quality in three days instead of five, then just enjoy the weekend.
Jayneil: That is insane. So, how big is Hype4 right now?
Michal: Well, it really depends if you're counting the sort of people that are working there all the time or like every person that's very strongly connected to the company but not working full-time but we're between 12 and 15 people.
Jayneil: That is amazing.
Michal: And with like a very, very flat structure. So, there's no “I’m the boss and you're down here.” We're talking like as friends to each other. So, there's no really like the hierarchy. Everybody just knows what they need to do and we try not to have this sort of condescending approach to like boss and employee. It's just that maybe we're lucky with having the right people join or maybe even sometimes changing those people to understand our values and work that way. That makes it good because we had some issues initially that some of our employees were trying to abuse that like kind of doing lower quality work because we weren't really that strict but after a few talks with them and, I don't know, maybe explaining to them why we're doing it that way and why they really should do good work. I think that in most cases those people are working really, really great and also having a lot of free time right now. So, maybe we were just lucky, I don't know.
Jayneil: And everybody is remote, right?
Michal: Well, currently yeah but we do have an office in Warsaw and some people actually come to the office when they need like a larger display or when they need some peace and quiet if they have kids or something at the house. And just that the office is always open. So, if somebody wants to come in even if nobody is there, they can still do it.
Jayneil: Wow! And I believe everybody is also a part of the company's, what do you call it, like everybody has equity in the company, right?
Michal: Well, not everybody but a huge group of the company currently is basically co-founders of this sort of new version of the company and we kind of try to boost it into side projects and startups that we're building and including all the people that are working on those things in that as well because we don't treat it as like building a billion-dollar corporation with hanging ceiling lights, fluorescents and whatever and just building a structure of something like a behemoth of a company. We're more like family or friends with an approach to just build good shit and have fun doing it and not really like … We don't really want to have an IPO ever or just … It's just all about having the confidence that after those many years, we actually know that we're doing really good work. And at the same time, we didn't fall into the trap of having to wear a suit at work and having this sort of strict kind of growth pattern. Basically, it's also a trap because if you're growing that fast and you're hiring 50 people or 100 people and so on and then an unexpected epidemic hits or something and you have an office that you're paying 100,000 dollars per month to rent, then you're pretty much screwed because everybody's at home and you still have this cost and some of your customers are not following with the projects because that pandemic hit them as well and it's kind of like a spiraling out of control thing. And our goal is just to have a happy life basically, just doing good stuff but not like in a way that will take our lives entirely. So, I guess, that’s …
Jayneil: What I absolutely love is that when you've made other people co-founders in the company, it's like even they're motivated to kind of like contribute to the future success of the company versus say if everybody was just on like a contract or salary, then it's like they treat that as just a job but I think here they also have skin in the game just like you as a co-founder.
Michal: Yeah. And there were some rough times as well and they could experience them firsthand because it's not all fun and games. It sometimes is some rough times with like customers paying a year late or just even fighting to get a better client or fighting to get another client. So, we're at very pretty stable situation right now that it's all working well but it wasn't really always like that. We had some struggles like almost every company. And, to me, those struggles weren't really that new because I’ve been having my own company for like seven years now and I’ve been pretty engaged in some of the agencies that I worked at and seen their troubles first hand as well but to my co-founders, it was kind of scary sometimes like …
Jayneil: Oh wow!
Michal: … like having those problems that we only hear from people that they're having and now we're really experiencing it but I think that' builds character. So, I think that as long as we actually manage to overcome those problems that it's actually good that we have them because that kind of taught them the lesson that when it's good, it's because we're like all having the same effort of pulling the wagon together and when it's going bad, we also have to kind of together put in the time and put in the effort and the energy and the creativity to get out of it. So, they need to know that it's not easy because if it was easy, then …
Jayneil: They aren’t going to do it. So, I’m going to shift some gears a little bit. So, you are also a professor in Poland where you're teaching. So, tell me about how you got into teaching and then what eventually led you to start building your own eBook.
Michal: Okay. So, the first thing was that I moved to the seaside which is the north of Poland in 2017 and I didn't know almost anybody there except for maybe like a couple of baristas because I was going for coffee quite often. So, I decided the best way to actually get to know some people would be to seek like a digital hub for UX people and designers and whatever. And there is a place like that here. So, I told them that I could teach a free class there for the kind of people there. And I thought a class of like doing a quick redesigning sketch. It was like two hours or something like that. And I did it once and then I did one more with Framer and that was in April 2017. And it was like maybe 20 people attending, each one of them, but somehow the word got out and that university actually reached out to me, they heard that I put this class out and people really loved it and if I’d be interested in talking more about possibly having a similar class at the university. So, I’m not really a professor in terms of like having a PhD or whatever but I’m having a class on UI design that's basically based on my own ideas in a way. So, it's not like … it kind of clashes a little bit with the perception of UX because I’m trying to tell those people that UX as the industry is trying to build up its own importance and it's not really that important because a lot of the sort of experts in UX are people who are using fancy words and like really difficult targets and terminology to actually make themselves feel better and make them feel that “We're so important and the UX is just so difficult. And like all the heuristics and all the customer journey mapping or whatever, it's going to be very hard for you guys to actually be a part of it.” So, I’m trying to tell those people that “No, if you talk about it in just plain simple words, it's pretty easy.” You need some logic and you need a lot of experience with like real-world problems of like apps and websites but it's not really that difficult. I’m trying to kind of explain to them and kind of maybe downgrade UX a little bit in terms of telling them almost anybody can do it and it takes dedication, it takes hard work but it's not rocket science and to be a UX expert and talk on stage, you maybe need two years of being somehow known in design Twitter or something. So, not that difficult. And I think that the main kind of thing with the teaching came to be where I kind of explained to the guy that is running that UX class sort of because it's like a section of class that kind of … it's like a post-grad kind of thing, I think. I’m not really sure how to translate it but the guy that runs it, it turns out that I actually knew him from like way, way before. I also used to do poetry and would be in some bands and stuff like that and 15 years ago, I was debuting as like a poet on stage reading my collection.
Jayneil: Wow!
Michal: And he was on that stage as well 15 years ago and I didn't even remember it but right then we met and he's running a UX class now. So, it was like a very funny incidence but I think that he liked my no bullshit approach to UX and he said that it might be refreshing to those students to actually have somebody like that because most of the people teaching UX are very UXy in terms of like being very similar to one another. I don't doubt their experience and their knowledge but they're like a stereotype of a UX person. So, I’m like the guy that kind of cheated himself his way into this whole industry, been there 22 years, done a lot of stuff and is kind of bending and breaking a lot of the rules and telling people that “You don't have to do every part of the UX process because sometimes it's just completely unnecessary and you should focus on actually polishing every little bit of your craft up to the actual UI design” because a lot of the people are kind of stopping at some point. I’m not going to be drawing UIs because I’m not a kid and I don't really want to paint with crayons. So, it's like this downgrading condescending approach that doing UI design is not really design and at the same time, design is in many cases very far away from any designing. It's like if I’m talking at a meeting room with people and kind of facilitating a workshop but I’m not really designing anything for years, I can still be a designer. It's kind of like weird to me.
Jayneil: Because you have the eye, you have the eye from the years of experience and training that you can spot like bad design and good design, you're teaching your students how to have that eye for design.
Michal: Yeah. One of the approaches is when they're still starting out the first the first class that I’m having with them, I always show them very well-known apps either here or just worldwide and I point them out that they have bugs and mistakes and visual glitches there and like uneven elements and some really strange flow concepts that don't really make sense. And if you show it to them, they start to see but initially, they just use it and they don't really know that nearly every button has the label a little bit too low or too high on it because almost nobody can vertically center a label on the bottom and that includes like big brands.
Jayneil: And I believe you were taking screenshots of all these apps, you were using and making a Pdf and sharing that with your students?
Michal: Yeah. So, that's how it all started that they asked me to prepare some materials for their reading at home after the class because the class was like a workshop that was very hands-on. So, I was actually designing something on the screen and they were trying to follow along and do their own version of it but they also wanted to have some reading materials, something to actually understand a little bit better what I did in the class. So, I started recording PDFs in Sketch, and I still use Sketch to actually make the books which is pretty funny, but I started making those PDFs because they were that easy to make in Sketch because they were design PDFs. So, I was making elements for those designs that were already done in Sketch and kind of annotating or creating little arrows from every site and adding some text here and there. So, it was just a lot easier. So, I put together the first PDF, it was like 15 pages or something like that. It wasn't really that big because it was like a lot of images. And I sent it out. And the reaction was that some people started asking can they get more of this and I’m like “not currently.” So, after the second class, I made the second PDF and it was 10 more pages. And then some other people started asking “What book is this from?” and I was like “It's not from a book. I just made this for you.” So, they said that “You should definitely put it in a book and add more and create a book like that because it just really works for us.” So, I was like “I’ll think about it.”
Jayneil: Yeah. And what year was this?
Michal: That was December 2018. That was like early December 2018. So, two years ago. And a little after that, I was having a vacation in in Spain in January 2019 and I only had my iPad with me but I started like just for fun and out of boredom sketching out chapter ideas just to think that yeah “Maybe making a book might not make that much sense because it's not going to be a big book. I don't really have that many ideas” but when I started writing down the possible chapters, it quickly grew to like a huge list of things that I actually had in my head right now that I could put into the book. I didn't have to even do any research for it because I only did research to actually confirm what I already was writing in it. So, I put together a newsletter for my 36 or maybe 40 subscribers because they were the people from the class, basically. They all subscribed because they had to unless they didn’t [inaudible] the classes but in reality, they couldn't really fail the class the class was wasn't really graded. It was just way too hard but anyway, it still sounds funny that way. So, they were the subscribers. They were my initial group of people. And I started sending out teasers of what I could write about in the book and it was like early January. And I tried to ask them “If that makes sense to you?” or “What else would you like to see in the book?” like “What would you like to know?” Some of them actually started, during the classes or during the whole course, they started working as a junior UX designer in some companies. So, like “What problems are your companies facing? What is basically like the stuff that is the most unknown uncharted territory for you?” So, I was gathering that feedback and started to put together a little bit more of the book. And then I started writing and it took a long time but it was initially based on the feedback from a very small group.
Jayneil: Oh my God! You literally took the feedback that your students gave you and the motivation that “Hey, there's a niche here and I think I could write a book about it now.” There's a lot of ways to like write a book. You could write a book that's your traditional go to a publisher, publish a book. Now, you on the other hand decided to just directly cut the middleman and sell directly to consumers who are interested. Why did you do that?
Michal: Yeah. Well, initially, we actually were considering a publisher and we reached out to one company that is famous for standard hard cover books about education, mostly like a lot of different courses in education like “How to code in C++” and “What is HTML?” and things like that. And their reaction was that it actually might be a good idea but they were very picky about like they would release the Polish version but then if we wanted to do an English version which obviously had a lot more sense in terms of having more reach, they wanted to own it as well and that was like …
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Michal: … why would you own want to own an English version if you're a Polish-only yeah publisher? So, it was like basically … it wasn't even about the money because they had a network of ways of possibly marketing the book. So, it probably would sell still even excluding their own cut and whatever but I was like “Yeah but I want to do it in a certain way” And they were “Okay, we're listening.” – “All right. Well, I want to do updates.” – “What? Updates? Like how?” and like “Okay. So, even if you have a hardcover book, we could get some sort of website code or whatever in the book that you could log into and have the updates delivered online to you.” – “Well, we don't really do things like that because it doesn't make sense. We could release the updates later as a separate book and charge for it or whatever.” That sounds kind of boring yeah and that sounds kind of unimaginative. I really wanted to do something I know different in terms of kind of like … Actually, I think I was inspired by Sketch maybe. I can say it right now. I wasn't really like officially inspired by Sketch but I was kind of inspired that you pay once and then you get updates for a year. And I think that business model is really good because you can still use the content even if you stop paying after that one year, you can still use it, you can still work with it but you won't get any additional updates after the year. So, it makes total sense. You pay for something initially but you get a lot more over the course of time. And you can then pay a little bit more to get even more.
Jayneil: Correct.
Michal: So, I just wanted to do it this way. And also, I wanted to have like total control on the cover, the visuals and things like that. So, going with a publisher would actually be … a lot of those publishers have templates for their covers. So, even if it's like a design book or a C++ coding book, they have the same general style, very similar style of illustration. Obviously, it kind of fits the theme of the book but it's like if you put them side by side, you kind of know that they're from the same publisher but it's like it doesn't have any, I don't know, any soul of its own. It's just another copy of a copy of a copy of a pattern that they're used to selling. So, we wanted to make something entirely on our own. And we actually even kind of researched on our newsletter once it grew to about 100 people. We researched a couple of potential covers for the book and whether they like illustrations or maybe something a little bit more serious and we ended up with the current cover also after doing a little bit of research on a pretty small group but still it was all we had. So, I had to do it that way but I wanted to have this book really tailored to some real people, real people that communicated real problems. And also, we noticing that there are real problems like there's a lot of people designing and not really getting that … well, that simple problem that I’m mentioning all the time is the badly aligned labels on buttons. This is like kind of my mantra right now because almost nobody does it right but if you look at a button and there's like this rectangular shape, the label inside is usually too low or too high and it's like 80% of all interfaces. If you go to the big websites, big brands often, it's always the same mistake. And a lot of those people don't really see that anymore because they kind of get accustomed to it or used to it. So, when you point it out and when you point out a couple of potential ways to fixing it, the simplest one having … making sure the height of the button is the same kind of number that the height of the label is because if one is odd and the other is even, there is no way that it's going to be in the center because there's going to be always one point up or down. So, just simple math and you might be able to solve this. So, generally trying to communicate that there are problems that are very easy to solve and we really wish that they were solved because we're also using those products ourselves. So, I don't want to use ugly apps. So, I want people to make better apps.
Jayneil: So, you had 100 subscribers at that point. How many pages in the book did you have at that point? Because I’m trying to figure out like how did you eventually come to this belief that “You know what? I can sell it myself. I don't even need to go to Kindle self-publishing but I can just directly sell it from a website, this PDF book.”
Michal: Right. So, I think we had 100 subscribers after two months of starting the newsletter. And with 100 subscribers, we had the first chapter which basically was the buttons chapter. And that was 26 or 25 pages or something like that. So, the first thing that we did was to actually release the chapter for free right away to all those people and to get their feedback and also to kind of get them to spread the word because having something tangible that you can download is giving people incentive to get more friends to download it as well. And actually, so far, that free chapter has been download like over 10,000 times which is pretty good. We didn't have like … because the thing is that I probably kind of messed it up because I wasn’t active online for like many years but I only became like really active on Twitter and Medium and whatever and like all those other channels last year because I was just working on projects, doing stuff since like … well, 22 years ago I started, right? So, I’ve been working a long time in this industry but I wasn't really active in being a part of it or like an active part that would allow me to be more popular and have like a huge following from the start. And maybe I didn't really need that like initially because I didn't have a product to actually work on but it's like … I think there was a big risk but at the same time, it was motivational that … well, first of all, I do have that experience. I have those 20 something years of experience but I don't have any following like a real following. I do now but it took a year or so to do to build that. I think that I was kind of thinking from the perspective of first doing something really good and then trying to get the people instead of …
Jayneil: The other way around.
Michal: … being popular for the sake of being popular, maybe posting design memes for the last eight years and maybe having more followers on Twitter but I wanted to actually be known as not the guy that was popular and then released something to sell but rather some pretty unknown guy that actually made something that's pretty good.
Jayneil: And got popular because of that.
Michal: Well, I wouldn't really say that popular but it's growing, it's growing steadily and we're getting really great reviews and I’m getting emails that are like really heartwarming to just see how people got promotions at their jobs or solved like a complex problem with their product and released it faster and whatever. It just makes me feel good. And I think it's worth more than the numbers of the followers and the likes or whatever.
Jayneil: So, pretty much it seems to me that one of your marketing strategies was to grow that email newsletter. So, how big is the email newsletter now?
Michal: Okay. So, when we started, it was just the 30 to 40 some people. And it started growing when we released the first free chapter because basically, the sort of prerequisite to get it was to sign up. And when you signed up, you got a welcome email with a link to the PDF. And, obviously, some people hacked it and just sent the link to their friends but that's fine because there was a newsletter sign-up information in the PDF as well because we were smart like that but it kind of quickly grew to I think 900 people by July or something like that but it wasn't really that fast but it still meant maybe like three people per day or maybe five. So, it wasn't really like a lot of people joining but it was like a steady growth of people that are really interested in what we were planning to create here. And we were sharing more and more from the book with them. So, it was like “Okay, next chapter is going to be about this and here is one tip from that chapter for free.” So, we got them pretty engaged, I guess. And I think that it kind of went through that slow growth but then I got lucky because I got accepted to the UX Collective. And I was actually meaning … because I’ve been a writer most of my life in some form, I’ve been writing poetry and actually got some of my poetry published before and then I stopped and writing is something that I really like doing and I like doing it both in English and in Polish. It just doesn't matter but I was really afraid to actually send my first post to the UX Collective and I was like “Yeah, I maybe need something a little bit better than this, maybe some better idea” or whatever but then I kind of … I think it was late August of that year, I decided to give it a try and …
Jayneil: This is August of 2018, right?
Michal: 2019. So, that was like my first article. It didn't really go that well but they liked it but then in September of 2019, I had my first, let's say, viral hit which was a story about how UX has pretty bad UX. And this is something that I’ve been telling my students for at least the last two years. So, I kind of put it together in the form of like a rant of somebody who's been in their industry for so long and just a little bit frustrated. So, I’m not really that proud of it anymore because it was kind of negative in many ways in terms of like … right now looking back at it, however, I see that I had most of those points right and it all came true in some form. And actually, the whole pandemic kind of accelerated some of those processes of getting rid of the unnecessary stuff from the UX process that kind of loads it and makes it more expensive for no reason other than making more money but it was a rant but it kind of got the attention of a lot of people. And then those people started to check out what I’m doing like if I’m bitching about UX that much from a perspective of some guy that knows a lot, then let's see what he does. And that kind of led to people finding the book, finding my company, finding my projects and basically that kind of started this whole thing. So, that was, let's say, a little over a year ago. And we quickly went to like 5000 people in, I think, a month.
Jayneil: The email newsletter subscribers?
Michal: Yeah.
Jayneil: Wow!
Michal: And right now, we're close to 10,000, I think.
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Michal: It kind of shifts every now and then because we're not that active in the newsletter anymore. It mostly is a way to communicate some deals that we're going to have or if we're going to release a new book, you can get a discount code in there or something but it's not really like … it's not that same newsletter that we had before and we might actually bring it back. So, it's not really that useful anymore in terms of if you want to learn something from it because you cannot learn a lot from the book right now and I don't really want to repeat everything again. Sometimes I try to give out some links to some free videos of me redesigning something and explaining or whatever but it's not really that essential for us anymore because it's more of like a communication tool to people who either got the book already or they are considering getting the book.
Jayneil: But then your Medium articles have, what is it, more than half a million views. So, in those articles …
Michal: Yeah, it's actually 1.5 million right now.
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Michal: Yeah, I’m getting steady numbers of like … that first article, I thought that was like, to me at least, because … actually let's … I’m going to be like a little bit random with some thoughts that I bring up here but I think that it kind of makes sense because I think virality in terms of like writing something or creating something and then it gets that viral status is pretty weird because, I would say, that that first article getting a hundred thousand views in, I think, two months would be like a viral thing but then I kind of remembered that in 2010, I actually made a YouTube video where I had a mouse mat, a mouse pad with like a foamy thing and then I cut out the middle of it that kind of had this little frame of the mouse pad and put in some printed black and white images behind that and only enough … that was basically two days after Steve Jobs announced the iPad. So, I had this little mouse mat here that kind of had a cutout look just like the iPad and I was holding it like this and had like a spoof video of me that “you can play games on your new iPad” and had a paper with a pen and playing tic-tac-toe with like real drawing stuff. And that had 100,000 views back then.
Jayneil: Wow!
Michal: So, it was like … but I didn't monetize on it. So, in a way, it's kind of virality that you kind of sometimes forget about but those 100,000 views with the iPad mostly were negative because people were expecting the real thing and they were getting a spoof. So, that didn't help me a lot or at all but at the same time, those 100,000 reads of an article that is … well, it's a lot more thought process going into it than just making fun and making like some arts and crafts with a mouse but it kind of bring me to a level where I think that I might have a voice that I can kind of try to use to communicate some of those ideas because I have ideas around the UX industry that are, let's say, not well received by the industry because I think that it's too big and it's too complex in many ways and it has too many processes designed mostly to get more money from the clients but not necessarily get a better quality result. So, I’d like the industry to be more honest and more, I don't know, quality focused. So, I have a lot of thoughts on that. So, I decided to write more on basically myths of design or how to basically just, I don't know, understand it better, understand the industry like what does it mean to be senior in the industry, what does it mean to have, I don't know, strong opinions on something like everybody loves Figma right now and I don't like Figma. So, should I kind of not say anything or should I point out some things in Figma that I think that are bad? So, I’m just doing things like that and it seems that people are starting to notice that, I don't know … Maybe it's like my approach to it is not as serious and I think that's kind of the thing that I’m going for here. It's a little bit comedic or at least maybe like a very dry kind of humor but it's making fun of some things that we all do like I just recently wrote an article about how all the apps are kind of increasing the saturation of their app icon colors, so they're kind of jumping out at you and having those crazy gradients but at the same time, my profile picture has a crazy gradient in the background. So, it kind of jumps at you. So, I’m making fun of this entire industry doing this and at the same time, I’m poking fun at myself like …
Jayneil: In the process …
Michal: Yeah because this is really bad but I’m also doing it, by the way.
Jayneil: So, how many articles have you written for medium so far approximately?
Michal: Well, I think there might be a hundred right now.
Jayneil: Oh wow!
Michal: Because I’m trying to actually … I’m trying to actually do one article every week and in most weeks, I managed to do that.
Jayneil: Oh my God. So, it's like this consistent practice you had. I think what I see from your, and this is a thing you shared with me in our last conversation, you said it's basically this ability of showing up when you have no followers or you don't have anything. And I see that you consistently have been increasing that newsletter towards like 10,000 plus subscribers now, the Medium articles like 100 articles plus you have 1.5 million views now. So, that has essentially helped you market the book better. And I’m kind of wondering at what point did you feel that “Okay, I think I have enough Medium views and I think I have enough email newsletter subscribers that I can launch the book.” When did that big launch moment happen where you're like “Okay, I can just sell this now?”
Michal: That's actually funny because I started doing the newsletter and started writing on Medium without like a foolproof plan ahead. I wasn't really like “Okay, my plan is to get to a certain number of subscribers and certain number of views and then I’m going to launch the book and we're going to use those people.” I actually kind of did most of this instinctively. So, it wasn't really planned almost completely. And the funny thing about the book launch is that we actually planned it for December 2019 and it was announced in the newsletter but I had some, well, let's say health issues of my own during that time, so I had to resolve those and it took a little bit longer, but the plan was to actually release it when it's ready, so “I’m going to take as much effort and put it as … put in as much effort and take as much time as I need to have it” but I’m not going to plan as per specific date for it like I’m going to say that it's going to be released a month after I’m done with it because I need to do some other stuff to, I don't know, promote it. So, I was like “I’m likely going to be done with it in early March. So, expect a March release.” And the people said “Fine, that's perfect.” And I was done with it in early March as planned or like as a second plan because it was kind of like the December deadline, we didn't make it. So, I wanted to be a little bit more on the safe side of things. So, I said March and it was done in March. So, I just released it. And there was kind of like, I think, Jack Butcher says that it's that feeling of making one dollar online that kind of changes everything even though you're making money as a CEO of a company that is making pretty good projects sometimes but it's like … it's not the same because you need to invoice those people and you need to do a lot of work that you do with them …
Jayneil: This is like passive income.
Michal: … it takes a lot … yeah, it takes a lot of time and then you wait for the money and whatever and you just … when you have a product like this, you just upload it, you create it. And after I released it, I was like “Okay, let's see what happens.” I sent the newsletter and for the first 30 minutes, nothing like zero sales and I was like “Okay, maybe my mom will buy it, hopefully” but she wasn't interested because she's not really into design, she doesn't even own a computer. She has an iPad and that's fine for her but after the first 30 minutes, I decided to go for a walk because I was like “Okay, I need to just, I don't know, do something to get that stress off” because for … like it wasn't really the stress of not having any sales yet but mostly that kind of fading stress of putting 15 months into something and finally having it out and I don't really have to work on it anymore unless you mean the updates later but updates are going to come in April. So, I went to the beach and had my phone with me and then it started just buzzing with notifications because I had some of them on for the time. So, I pulled it out and I was like “Oh, 10 sales in two minutes. Wow! That's nice.” And then it kind of went to … I don't really know how many sales we got initially but it was a number that was significant enough to understand that we did something right. It wasn't like a huge amount of money. I think maybe we get like 4000 dollars on that first day. So, it wasn't like … it wasn't really life-changing in terms of working 15 months for getting 4000 dollars but still it was substantial enough to know that … because maybe the biggest here was that okay, some students said the PDFs were good and some people said the free chapter was good, okay, but if you actually have to pay for something, and we actually charged quite a lot for it because the point was to always position it as a high-quality product because it's really big and it's like really big, it's 511 pages right now.
Jayneil: And how much are you charging?
Michal: 75 is the full price. There are various discounts, yeah. There are various discounts and we're actually bringing the price up to 90 because it was promised that it's going to be 75 for some time only and we actually stretched it for most of the year but we're bringing it back to 90 because it's grown so much right now that by the end of the year, it's going to have 550 pages. And, I guess, for that size, I don't think that there ever was a book like that, that big but I think that the main sort of fear was that people are going to start requesting refunds and like “What did I just buy? I don't really like this. It's not worth it” but so far, we only had two people maybe requesting refunds and one was the person who bought it by some sort of accident and I don't really know how you can actually follow a checkout process by accident but I decided that “Yeah, sure, just this one time I’m going to allow this” because I didn't have like a proper terms and conditions. Then I wrote that “You can get a free chapter. You can see what it's about before you buy it and we can't really do refunds on PDFs because you can request the refund and keep the PDF and it kind of makes us chumps.” So, be sure that you really need that and you really want that before you buy it” but then the other time was somebody that bought the book and then got fired because of COVID wrote like a very, I don't know, heartfelt letter about his situation and problems and whatever and I just told him that it's not a refund, it’s more like my investment into his future. So, “I’m just helping you out. You enjoy the book. You're going to get all the updates and just use that money to do something productive or constructive or just help yourself” but it's not really a refund because, as I said, we don't give refunds on PDFs because that just is … it's a little bit weird but we didn't really have people complain about the book. We have one four-star rating and all of the other ratings are five stars. So, basically, we have 5.98 … sorry, 4.98 average of score.
Jayneil: How do you sell the book? Is it through Gumroad or it's like if I go to the Design in GUI website, what's powering the e-commerce in the backend?
Michal: Yeah, the e-commerce is on Gumroad and the main reason for this was that, first of all, they handle all the receipts for all the other countries that basically … it’s not as easy. We're in the EU which is pretty easy to sell to everybody in the EU because it's just one type of invoice or one type of receipt but if somebody from South Africa, for example, decides to buy the book or Australia or Indonesia because we had a lot of sales from there as well, then we don't have the sort of financial economic capacity to create a special invoice or receipt for that country because it differs. There's like different tax brackets, different trades, different agreements between the countries. So, you need to add some VAT tax in some countries and some you don't and it's just a complete mess. So, we needed somebody that can take care of that and Gumroad does it pretty cheap. They have some pretty nice features as well. Obviously, my ideal approach would be to just build a platform like that myself but then the main problem wasn't really the platform. The main problem was the financials. The main problem was having to have either a tax presence in every country in the world in some way that you can actually be able to do those receipts or have a legal team big enough that can handle those problems if they arise. So, we don't have either.
Jayneil: So, basically, I can just link my bank account to Gumroad. And then every time a PDF is sold, Gumroad would take their commission out of it and then just deposit the remaining to my bank account.
Michal: What they do is that, I think … maybe you can do it on a bank account but we have people there and they can specify the sales to either be once a month or once a week. So, I guess, it's just personal preference. So, it doesn't give you the cash right away from every transaction but it just kind of groups them into larger chunks and then kind of sends it your way.
Jayneil: And approximately, to date, how many copies has the book sold and, I guess, how much money has the book made?
Michal: Okay. So, we're approaching, because we're selling it at Gumroad but it's not the only way to sell it because some larger corporations and companies actually requested a sort of personalized version of the book for them, which basically means that it has a special license for that company and we are selling multiple copies to those companies but in total we've made, I think, through 1800 currently which is like almost 2000, it's pretty good. And I think we surpassed 100,000 over a while.
Jayneil: Wow! That is insane. That is really insane, man. Congratulations.
Michal: It was risky and it was like … I think it was a little bit reckless as well from our side because we had some episodes of being reckless before releasing a mobile game for iOS without doing any marketing and being like “Why is it not selling? It's really a good game.” I’m like “Yeah but we didn't do any marketing for it.” So, this time, we did some marketing but it was like not really a planned thing. It wasn't like that we had like a checklist of things that we needed to do. I was like “Okay, maybe I should start writing some blog posts because I have a lot of ideas in my head that I want to share.” So, I started doing it but it wasn't like “I’m going to be writing those posts to build the following to someone.” It was more like “I’m going to write a little bit and maybe some people will know about it” and I wasn't really expecting hundreds of people or thousands of people to be interested in what I do that much. So, it was more like … I was still hoping for the word of mouth mostly like those people that got it would recommend it to other people because they liked it. And I think this is in a way what's happening here but at the same time, I kind of got addicted to writing weekly because it kind of gives me that outlet of, I don't know, just putting things on that virtual paper and putting it out and then having some angry people tell me that “No, Figma is better than Sketch. You're wrong, completely wrong. You don't know what you're talking about.” And I don't even read those comments anymore. So, that's … at least, that's the comfort that I have that I’m trying not to get into the comment section of anything because if somebody wants to have a discussion with me, they can just email me and let's talk but …
Jayneil: I have the same idea.
Michal: … commenting is just really … it's not the thing because at some point, you'll end up having arguments on the internet with people that you don't know. And in many cases, when you actually would have met those people face to face, you would be able with just that kind of emotional perception because when you're seeing somebody's face, you can read them a little bit better, you could actually quickly get to an understanding with those people and without violence really but then a lot of those comments get violent because you don't see the other person, they don't see you and they think that they can just throw stones at you and it doesn't matter because it's just an internet comment, who cares, but the funny thing is that we didn't get any hate for the book itself but I got a lot of hate for my controversial views on the industry.
Jayneil: Okay. I’m kind of curious about … you mentioned about sending out updates periodically when the book is updated and if somebody bought it. So, is Gumroad also handling the updates or there's a different mechanism that takes care of it. If I bought a book on Gumroad and you released another updated version, do I automatically get it through Gumroad to my email?
Michal: Yeah but it's not really … Well, Gumroad wasn't really designed for this. They actually kind of were designed that you can add files to that sort of section where you have your digital goods. So, you can upload files and you can then add some files, for example, or maybe if you had some bug in the file like you had, I don't know, something that you were selling that wasn't really quite right and you had to fix it, then you can replace it. So, we're basically using re-uploading as a means to create updates. So, the book has a version and currently where we're at 2.6. And when 2.7 releases, 2.6 PDF is going to be gone and 2.7 is going to be in its place. And everybody who got the book also gets a license number that is tied to the update process. So, they get an email telling them that if they go to Gumroad again and go to the ‘downloads’ section, they will see new files there.
Jayneil: Okay. And all this license number you're generating, is there like a tool you're using to keep track of all this?
Michal: Yeah, Gumroad is actually doing that.
Jayneil: Okay, I see. So, that's how all this …
Michal: And this is pretty useful because we're exporting those numbers to our own database and we're actually having those numbers instead of emails for privacy purposes because all we really need if we want to move away from Gumroad would be those license numbers. We don't need those emails because people can register. Most of those people are actually in our newsletter anyway.
Jayneil: I see.
Michal: So, their license number would be their way to redeem every future purchase from us that would be connected to that number. So, if we release something else outside of Gumroad, they can still use that same Gumroad number to claim it but we're not moving away from it yet because … well, that's the main thing. If we could handle the multi-country financial things, then we probably would because the thing is that I really like building things in terms of like even at Hype4, we're building startups all the time, creating like a little project here, a little project there, creating something. And we have some developers at the company who are very keen to actually do stuff like that as well sometimes after hours, sometimes in the hours. And if we had an idea to create a better Gumroad that is suited to us basically like the way that we want to do the book because it's not the standard book because it has updates, for example, we could have done it ourselves because the updating part and PDF stamping and whatever, this all could be done but the only thing is basically out of reach for us little people that are just builders or makers. We need those lawyers and accountants and whatever to actually make this work. So, building a platform that kind of is for the book like a dedicated e-commerce, that would do exactly what we wanted to do and have even more features that we could come up with. We could be more creative. We could make mini updates or some like additional bonus materials that Gumroad doesn't really let you upload because it doesn't work in terms of file types or how you deliver those files like maybe we could do even like an mp3 file with some audio content for them and have them sent just that file, not having them download everything again. So, a lot could be done differently but I think Gumroad is pretty good in terms of that. It kind of tries to adjust itself to all the possibilities. And then we kind of banded its own rules again by updates. And we're actually sending through Gumroad those thousands of emails every month with a new update. And I don't really think that they were actually prepared for that because sometimes those emails don't really get through and we need to communicate that again in the newsletter that those people finally get those emails because … I think that the update part of Gumroad was basically just like a feature that's nice to have but probably nobody's going to use it and then we're using it extensively.
Jayneil: I see. So, what advice would you give maybe me or anybody else who's listening who wants to at some point launch a living eBook, like you mentioned, something that's going to have updates along the road? What advice would you give them?
Michal: Don't do it. No but really, if you plan to actually make a book that's going to be alive, the main thing is to not just subtract content from it to have more content to add later. Write the entire book and then figure out what you can add once you're done but not like with some computer games just cut out the part of the game and then sell it as a deal. No, just create the whole book and it needs to be a whole experience. So, you can't really take out chapters that are essential for the book to make sense because that's the wrong approach. It needs to be like a cohesive sort of whole thing in its own. And then you can figure out by asking the people, if you have like even a little community of people around it, you can start asking them what else would they like to see. And we are doing this, I think, since the launch because we're having … right now, we're having a Slack community, we're having those newsletters. So, various means of … or YouTube. So, we're kind of reaching out to people and asking them like “What are the biggest issues that you're having?” or “If you already got the book, what do you think it's missing? What would you like to see as the next chapter?” And we're trying to gather the most popular requests and figure out the way to write about them in a way that is, well, something new so we don't really need to repeat ourselves or repeat somebody else. So, the point is to always ask the people. So, it's not that we're adding chapters that we think are going to be useful but rather trying to figure out what people will want. And you can actually get that information once you've already given them a lot of value from the main book and it covers like a very wide array of things. And then it's a lot easier for them to identify what's possibly missing. If you have that much stuff, you’ve read through it and you kind of understand that it's like “Okay, I got the basics now but then I’m launched into a real-life scenario of designing something and, okay, I know the color theory, I know the typography it creates. So, I’m starting to work on something and then this hits me that I don't know how to do something.” So, people are asking us those questions and I’m actually giving them feedback like all the people who got the book are also getting free feedback from me at least for some time on their own projects because I just like those people. It’s just a fun little community that we have that is connected in terms of like … I’m really happy to see them succeed. So, just as a thank you from me for buying the book, if they have a project, they send it to me and then I kind of give them feedback but also, I have my own feedback from it that like “Okay, this is the fifth project with that little mistake. So, that means that maybe we should add “how to avoid that one mistake in your future projects?”” So, I’m collecting that feedback but also trying to kind of distill what people can get from the next chapter that's going to be helping them avoid that problem altogether.
Jayneil: Awesome.
Michal: And it's been working pretty well, I think.
Jayneil: No, it definitely seems like it has. How can people find you, Mike? How do people get in touch with you?
Michal: Well, I think the best and easiest way would be through Twitter because I started to be active there. I was pretty inactive for most of my time there but the last year, I finally kind of started to be more active and my DMs are open. So, people can just reach out to ask for the community invite or to ask for some feedback or whatever. And even if they don't have the ability and I have some time, I sometimes give a little feedback to people anyway because I don't really feel that I need to sell my time on like super pure or something to tell somebody “You need to fix the grid and alignment on your layout” because I can look at it and right away tell you “Okay, just fix a couple of things, this, this and that and you should be fine.” And, of course, if they bought the book, I could give them more precise examples of what and how to fix but I try to help everybody because we have some really, really awesome examples and I’m not going to tell the names of those people because it would be embarrassing for them but we have a couple of examples of people who were sending their projects in April of this year and they were not great, to say the least, really like … It maybe it showed some potential but it was like “Yeah, there's like a long way to go” but those people right now are just kicking it, completely making amazing things and it was like mind-blowing to me that it took them a couple months to … well, I might take some little credit for a little bit of guidance there but I think it's also the hard work and education that they kind of got from the whole thing because my main point also is, in the book as well in many pages, that you can learn all those things but it's all about practice. So, you need to practice every day. Just delete Netflix, delete YouTube or whatever, block yourself from Instagram and just design every day because that's the way to get better. And some of those people actually did that and their progress is just amazing. They've done more progress in the last five months than I did in 10 years of my design career. So, this is just amazing. I’m going to be buying their book in a couple of years.
Jayneil: Everyone, once again, go to DesignInGUI.com and check out Mike's amazing book and improve your UI design skills to the next level. With that being said, mike, thank you so much, man, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom on how to launch a living eBook.
Michal: All right, thank you. Thanks for having me. And if you plan to launch a book and you need to talk to somebody and get some feedback on that, I’m available to answer some questions because some people are actually asking me like “How did you do it? And how did it work?” It's not really that big of a secret. So, if somebody wants to ask me some specifics, it's likely that I’ll respond because I don't really think that launching the exact same eBook again like the one that we did is going to really be helpful to you but … also, a funny story, we've seen somebody copy the entire business model recently on a book of a similar type but it's in Poland only. So, it's really good to see that people are doing it and we're happy to share it.
Jayneil: Absolutely. Mike, I’ll definitely reach out to you when I plan to launch a book but for like different area but thanks so much again, man, for coming on the show.
Michal: All right. Thank you.
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