It’s finally finished.

After nearly nine months of work (albeit with long periods of downtime), All The Little Things is out the door. What is All The Little Things, you might ask? It’s my book.

That’s right, a full fledged book.

If you have been listening to the bits and pieces of information I’ve released about it over the last few months, you’ll know that it is a book about creativity and building ideas on the web. More specifically, it’s about finding, sorting and processing good ideas into products without losing your mind.

I’ve decided to do a few interesting things with this release that you might appreciate. The first is that the first edition of the book, in all its glory, is being released for free at the All The Little Things website. You can read the entire thing and tell all of your friends to do the same.

For those of you who are willing to skip a latte this week, you can also pick up the PDF version of the book; here is where things get interesting. Over the next several months, I will be actively updating and revising the material in it, going as far as to add new chapters. If you buy the PDF, you will have exclusive access to all the new material.

One way or another, I want you to read ATLT and enjoy it. In the not too distant future, you will even be able to pick up a dead tree version for your bookshelf. If you need just a bit more encouragement, here is a very, very brief sample.

Introduction

Any road followed precisely to its end leads
precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little
bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the
mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
– Frank Herbert

I was born into a generation that has grown up with a mouse in one hand and a modem in the other. We consume more data in a day than our grandparents would have in a month, and all of us noble pioneers of the datastream are looking for the meaning tucked away in the noise. My first substantial introduction to the web was a little piece of software called America Online. If you don’t remember it, AOL was a spam company that used to send out thousands of . . . OK, OK that’s not fair. At the time, AOL was a crowning jewel of Internet democratization, the Time Warner merger was just a gleam in the corner of some underwriter’s eyes and the entire online universe could be summed up in “You’ve Got Mail.”

If I remember anything at all about my early experience with the Internet, it is the excitement of belonging to something so vast.

Signing online for the first time was like stepping out into some great, unknown wilderness. I mean, where do you go, where should you go when all of the world’s information is at your finger tips?

After the Gold Rush

In the many years between my introduction to the web and the day I took my first baby steps towards making a career of it, I’ve witnessed the rapid evolution of the technology from a utility that squawked at you — promising knowledge read from the entrails of some nameless, faceless creature somewhere in cyberspace, to a platform that speaks with you — a living, breathing community. A community not so unlike any big city anywhere in the real world. A community with a culture, an economy and a life all its own.

Even after the “Dot Com” boom of the late 90s threatened to derail the web’s momentum, even after all of the brick and mortar prospectors realized that a product and a guy who knew HTML did not a business model make, even then many of us at the edges recognized a simple fact – we hadn’t seen the last of business on the web. How could we have? There was too much room for collaboration and more importantly, unlike every other industry that has ever existed, the web made it all so cheap to do.

It was this bet, that the web was the next, great untapped wilderness of entrepreneurship, that put me in that coffee shop four years ago . . .

By the way, for the next week, HTSAA readers get 20% off if they buy the PDF. Just use the coupon code IREADHTSAA at checkout.