Kill the HiPPO
Follow our journey creating, publishing and marketing Kill the HiPPO.
Kill the HiPPO's cover design
Hello! I now have the cover design for the Kindle version of Kill the HiPPO. It's feeling like a real book now! The cover is designed to stand out in Amazon thumbnails—Amazon is the main source of sales for this type of self-published book, so it is important to optimise for the buyer's experience on Amazon. The cover design for the print version is still in progress because I overlooked that it needs back cover text. I quickly wrote a draft a couple of days ago, let it simmer overnight, then...
ISBNs, illustrations, proofreading, cover design
Hello! It's looking like Kill the HiPPO will be published by the end of this month, March 2026. Here's an update of all the balls I'm juggling to get there: Acquire 2 ISBNs So far I've got 1 out of 2 ISBNs approved. To sell a book on Amazon, you need an ISBN. Two ISBNs actually: one for the print version, and one for the Kindle/ebook version. And if there's an audio version? That's another ISBN. These cost about $50 each, and have to be applied for from a national agency in the country you...
Like the world's nitpickiest code review
Hello The copyediting of Kill the HiPPO is finished. The copyeditor was extremely nitpicky. Across the 100-ish pages of manuscript, she made 3,000+ suggested revisions! Many of these suggestions were trivialities about punctuation and word choice. Many other revisions were converting our British-ish English into US English - the copyeditor said that in tech books the convention is to use US English. So every prioritise became prioritize. But amongst the trivialities, the copyeditor made some...
We built too many features
Hello! I'm waiting for the finished manuscript of Kill the HiPPO to go through "copy editing" - the process where a professional editor makes sure my text is consistent, accurate, and well-structured. Meanwhile I've been mulling over the fact that of the 10 founders we interviewed, 9 of them told a similar story about the early days: "We built too many features". I'm a founder myself, I put snippets of my own story into the book, and I also built too many features in the early days. So let's...
My software product is better after writing "Kill the HiPPO"
(This was originally a draft chapter of the book. I've removed it from the book and made it a blog post.) It took more than a year to complete the interviews for Kill the HiPPO. We usually worked on a single founder story at a time, from start to finish, before moving on to the next one. Founders are busy people; it would take considerable time to find the right people, get them to agree to be interviewed, and get their input on the draft of their story. That gave me time to reflect on each...
Stop building new features?
I feel that, as founders of software companies, we get stuck in the mentality of having to continually add new features. In our research for Kill the HiPPO, no-one we interviewed ever said, "we decided to add less features" or "we decided to slow down the rate we add features" or even "we decided to stop adding new features altogether because our product is complete". Why do few software products ever move to a "100% done" phase? Is this because our modern software development practices...
Blah blah PRODUCT VISION blah blah blah
I usually roll my eyes when people talk about "product vision". It sounds abstract and wishy-washy. And yet in researching Kill the HiPPO I've found that it to be a critical part of choosing the right features to build in your product. Just as importantly, it helps you identify what features not to build. Consider Ulysses, the writing app, profiled in Kill the HiPPO. Who is Ulysses for? Is it a writing app for everyone? No, that's too broad. This doesn't help at all with deciding what...
“YOU are the Product Manager”: A new chapter of Kill the HiPPO
Hello! There's a new chapter for you to read in the beta version of Kill the HiPPO, the book I'm co-writing on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders. Kieran Delaney was talked out of delegating the product work for his Apple News delivery platform FlatPlan too prematurely—advice for which he’s grateful. So, until FlatPlan becomes big enough to benefit from a dedicated hire, he’ll continue as the company’s product manager. You can read the beta version of this chapter here....
Fix bugs or add new features?
I’m a strong believer in “fix bugs first” - especially in the modern age of “always be deploying” web apps. I was surprised that in our research for Kill the HiPPO - conducted via interviews with bootstrapped founders - the issue of dealing with bug fixes barely received a mention. Are bug reports and feature requests essentially the same? Adding features and fixing bugs fight for the same limited resources. Therefore, argue some people, they should therefore be prioritised in the same way....
I'm not changing the name of my book
Last weekend, I visited London with my daughter. We had tickets for Matilda the Musical, showing in a theatre in Covent Garden. While waiting for the theatre to open its doors, we popped into a nearby cafe called "Kiss the Hippo". Kiss the WHAT??? How nice is that logo and typography? My book is "Kill the HiPPO". The cafe is "Kiss the Hippo". A little bit too similar for my liking. Did I encounter this cafe before (it's part of a chain of stores)? Do I have a vestige memory from a previous...
Follow our journey creating, publishing and marketing Kill the HiPPO.