SaaS Playbook

Rob Walling, founder of Drip and host of Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, decided to write a comprehensive guide to building SaaS businesses. With an established audience of approximately 125,000 people across YouTube, podcasts, and email lists, he had the platform to reach potential readers. However, he approached the project with an important mindset: the book needed to be genuinely excellent to generate sustained sales beyond his initial audience.

Walling self-published the SaaS Playbook and sold approximately 3,500 copies through a Kickstarter campaign, followed by another 2,500-3,000 copies in the first month or two after launch. The initial estimate was that he would sell around 6,000-8,000 copies to his core audience, but the actual results far exceeded expectations.

The breakthrough came through word-of-mouth and organic sharing. Walling set up monitoring across multiple platforms and receives regular alerts whenever someone mentions the book on Twitter, Reddit, podcasts, Quora, and other platforms. "That's really what makes a book like this that is self-published. And aside from my audience, there is no marketing engine behind it... the reason that it's about to hit 30,000 is very much because of folks like you who read it, who like it, and who share it."

The sales breakdown by channel reveals the power of distribution diversity: Amazon accounts for 35% of sales (split nearly 50-50 between paperback at $25 and Kindle at $10), Audible 26%, Kickstarter 25%, direct sales from sasplaybook.com 11%, and Apple Books just 1%. By format, audiobooks lead at 43% of sales, followed by print at 29% and ebooks at 28%.

Top-line revenue is estimated at just under $400,000, with approximately $275,000 paid to Walling as royalties. Importantly, the profit margins vary dramatically by channel: Kindle sales generate $7 per $10 sale, paperback around $15 per $25 sale, but Audible takes 75% of revenue (or 60% if given exclusive rights), leaving Walling only 25%. Direct sales through sasplaybook.com with Stripe payment processing only cost 3%, making it the most profitable channel per transaction.

Walling emphasizes that the sustained success came not from aggressive marketing, but from the quality of the product itself. "If you are going to write a book, obviously having an audience will sell some copies in the early days. And then what leads to recurring sales where every month you're selling X amount of copies really is having a good book that people want to share." He's now working on his next book project—a co-authored work with his wife Dr. Sheri Walling about the psychology and mindset of selling a company, with pre-sales expected in November.