3ones

3ones is a product development company for hire. They develop products for communities, consumers, and corporations. Their products appear on Web sites, social networks, desktops, and mobile devices. They created CompleteGuides.net – a destination for technical books.

“Developing on a MindTouch-powered publishing platform has enabled us to not only reduce production time by 350%, but to create a social experience. Volunteers have helped us make better books by proofing, recommending content, and sharing the site with their social networks.”

Patricia Forest, Co-Founder, 3ones

Objective

3ones endeavored to open a new chapter in book publishing for the technical market. They set out to challenge the traditional publishing model for technical writing. In rapidly growing industries, books for dummies and how-to guides are as many as 6 months out of date before they even hit the shelves.

Solution

3ones chose MindTouch for its price and ease-of-use. Real-time collaboration between authors, editors and graphic designers became possible immediately, with no formal user training. Single-sourcing the content and publishing across many channels simultaneously adds value without adding effort.

Outcome

Using MindTouch Technical Communications Suite, authors, editors and graphic designers were able to collaborate in real-time, pushing their first book to print in a matter of weeks instead of months. In the first 6 months since it was published, they’ve averaged over a thousand orders a month. Capitalizing on the social, viral aspect of the platform, their order volume on a single promotion day was so great that it caused Google Checkout to crash.

Real Success

Prior to using MindTouch, 3ones spent 200 hours of book production time (excluding writing time) using a combination of MediaWiki, Google Docs and MS Word. With MindTouch TCS, this effort was reduced to 60 hours (30% of the time). These decreased production costs allow 3ones to sell their books (both eBooks and traditional print) at a third price of conventional publishers. Future editions of their books will take only 10-20 hours to produce, thus adding incremental value over the lifetime of each edition.