He decided to make a course. Two months of work: forty lessons, slides, editing, a sales page, a logo. He launched it on a tidy date and published a video about it.
Three people bought it, one of them a friend.
The painful part is that months earlier, in the comments of one of his videos, twenty people had been asking one question in different forms: where do we get music from? Had he made one file answering that question, it would have sold more in a week than the course sold in a year.
A product starts from a repeated question, not from an idea you like
That distinction is everything. A product that works does not come out of your head, it comes from your audience, and it is sitting in front of you in three places:
- Repeated comments. The question that turns up under nearly every video is your product. Search your comments from the last three months and write down every question that came up more than three times.
- Direct messages. What people ask you privately is what they are actually struggling with, because they paid the price of embarrassment to ask.
- What you already made for yourself. The template you built to save your own time, the checklist you run before every shoot, the file where you keep your settings. These are half-built already.
And if you do not know what your audience wants in the first place, the practical ways to find out are in how do you find out what your audience wants.
The smallest-format rule
Every problem has several formats that could solve it, and you pick the smallest rather than the largest. The test: the smallest thing that solves the problem completely.
"I don't know how to organise my files" is solved by a folder of ready templates, not a course on project management. "My scripts are boring" is solved by a ten-page guide with four structures, not twelve hours of video.
The reason is practical rather than philosophical: a small product takes a week to build, you know its result in a fortnight, and you can revise or drop it at no loss. A big course takes months, and you learn its result only after paying the whole cost.
Four formats that actually work
1. Templates and ready-made files. A prepared edit project, a thumbnail pack, a planning sheet, a colour grade preset. The easiest to build and the least argued with, because the buyer sees the value in the first second.
2. The short written guide. Ten to thirty pages solving one problem completely. Writing is faster than filming, and updating is far easier.
3. An asset pack. Footage of yours that others can use, sound effects you recorded, fonts you designed. Worth considering if what you make is visually or sonically distinctive.
4. The service before the product. A review session, a script read, a channel audit. Not a digital product strictly speaking, but the best possible start: it pays you more, and it teaches you exactly what people need, so the product you build afterwards rests on twenty real cases.
Anyone advising you to start with a course on your first attempt is advising you to take the longest road. And the four ways of earning outside platform ads are set out in ways to earn from your content beyond platform ads.
Test before you build
This is the step everybody skips and the most important one here. Before you build anything:
Write one page explaining the product: who it is for, what it solves, exactly what is in it, and the price. Then put it in front of your audience and ask anyone interested to leave their email or buy at an early price.
If nobody moves, you have saved yourself two months. If a reasonable number move, you are now building a product for buyers who exist rather than buyers you imagined.
And the truest channel for that test is your email list rather than the platform, because someone who gave you their email has shown more willingness than someone who liked a video. What to send on that list is the subject of your newsletter: what do you actually send.
Price: choosing the first number
Do not try to arrive at the correct price, because there is no such thing. Start from two principles.
The price matches the time it saves, not the effort you spent. The template you made in three hours may save its buyer twenty hours, and that is what they are buying.
A very low price hurts you twice. It reduces your income, and it tells the buyer the product has no value. And free buyers ask for more support than buyers who paid a real price.
Start with a lower launch price for a fixed period; it gives the keen ones a reason to buy now, and gives you your first real numbers to build on.
The technical setup: the least that works
Do not build a website or a membership system for a first product. You need three things only:
- One page explaining the product with a buy button
- A payment method that works in your audience's countries
- An automatic delivery: a download link or a message with the file
And check one thing before anything else: does the payment method you chose actually work for the people you are selling to? Many selling attempts in the Arab world fail here rather than on the product or the price. Run a complete purchase yourself from your top audience country before you open sales.
What stays yours
A digital product is not only income, it is the first asset you genuinely own: the buyer list, their emails, your relationship with them. The platform may change its algorithm tomorrow; it will not change your buyer list. That is the whole idea in don't depend on one platform.
Mistakes that keep happening on a first product
- Building the product first and asking the audience second.
- Giving the product a clever name from which nobody understands what is inside.
- A sales page that talks about you rather than the buyer's problem.
- Launching with no fixed date, so it stays "coming" for months.
- Announcing it once in one video. Most of your audience never saw that video.
- Not collecting buyers' emails, losing the easiest next sale.
Start here
Sit down now, open the comments from the last three months, and write the three most repeated questions. Pick one, write a page explaining how you would solve it in a single file, and show it to the people who read you. If they move, build it in a week. That is the entire plan, and it is much shorter than the subject makes it sound.