Kill the HiPPO
A newsletter helping small, bootstrapped software companies decide what feature to build next.
Kill the HiPPO in the wild
Hello! Forgive me in advance for a self-congratulatory email today. It's one week since launching Kill the HiPPO, and it has been a great ride so far. The first week has been about reviews and photos. The first reviews have started appearing on Amazon: People have been sharing photos on social media when their copy arrived in the mail. It's such a thrill each time I see one of these photos! Here's Rand Fishkin (founder of Spark Toro and author of Lost and Founder) and Yohay Elam (founder of...
Kill the HiPPO is now published!
Good news, everyone! Kill the HiPPO is now available to purchase in either Kindle or print format on: amazon.com amazon.co.uk amazon.com.au amazon.es and all the other regional amazon sites - just search for "Kill the HiPPO" A request for reviews: Writing a review is the #1 way you can help me right now. If you do buy and read Kill the HiPPO, please leave a review! The book's Amazon page is currently lacking any reviews—as you'd expect—and reviews are so important on Amazon. Getting to...
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...