What is a digital product?

What you're actually making

A digital product is a file that fixes one problem for one person: a planner, a template, a checklist, a short ebook. Your first one exists to prove someone will actually pay you, so it doesn't need to be a course or a brand or anything clever.

Set the bar at one file, under ten pages. Most people never finish because they quietly started building something four times that size.

You're not going to invent this idea. You already have it. You just haven't written it down yet. The thing you worked out the hard way is what someone else is stuck on right now.

Narrow by who, not by what. Listings aimed at everyone sit behind competitors with two thousand reviews. Listings aimed at one specific job sit behind competitors with eight. Narrowing feels like you're shrinking your market, but all it does is make you the only person talking to those people.

Today you write the contents list. Everything after this is just filling it in, which is the easy part.

Keep it under 45 minutes of reading. One creator has sold over three million dollars of courses. His 75-minute one got finished by 45% of buyers. His longer, better, more thorough one got 25%. Long products take three times the work and get read half as much.

Do this in one sitting. It's finished when it's useful to someone, not when you think it's good.

1. One paragraph under each line of your list. Don't edit yet.
2. One real example from your own life in each part.
3. Cut anything that doesn't move the reader forward.
4. Leave the formatting until the very end.

People decide how they feel about your file in about two seconds, and they never tell you why. You don't need a designer for this. One font, one colour, and some room to breathe will do it.

• One font for everything.
• One colour, and only on headings and lines.
• A cover page with the title and who it's for.
• Page numbers, and a footer with your store link.

Claim your name at stakk.store and that becomes your link. Then connect Stripe, because that's the bit people put off for a week.

Stripe pays you straight into your own account, and Stakk never holds your money. Start here: stakk.store

Post the empty store link today, before there's anything in it. Once a few people have seen it, you have to go and fill it. That's the whole reason for doing it now.

Price it somewhere between $27 and $49. Products under $10 are about a third of everything for sale and 0.8% of the money that changes hands, so cheap is the same work for less.

But if you land on $37, it has to feel like $37 when they open it. If you rushed it, put a few more hours in, or price it at $17 and be honest with yourself.

And before you ask why this one is $1: because I wanted to give it to you. It's not a price I'd tell you to copy.

The description is four lines, under 250 characters: who it's for, the problem it kills, what's inside, what they can do within an hour. Then five FAQs, one sentence each.

Here's the bit nobody says out loud. Your first buyer already knows you. This isn't a launch. It's you telling three people that a thing exists.

Once someone buys, ask them one question: what nearly stopped you buying? Fix that one thing, and start the next product. People selling more than one product earn 5.7 times more than people selling one.

What to do next