 How to come up with digital product ideas you can sell in your business

Discover key, proven ways you can use to get your business out of the digital products starter blocks and off to a flying start – from a product expert.

Adventures in Products founder Julia Chanteray has worked with hundreds of creators, founders and business owners to help them move from selling time for money to building successful product-based businesses.

But first: full transparency. There might not be quite a million innovative digital product ideas here, but there is a shedload. In this article we’ll explore some of these in-depth and if you’re a “give me the facts, NOW” kind of person, there’s also a checklist of digital product ideas at the end to get you on track to build your digital products empire.

Can you make the switch?

This is all about how to get your expertise out of your brain and into your products and start selling it differently.

This article is for people who want to productise their expertise, move away from the trading time for money idea and pivot to products. You’ll find some innovative digital product ideas way beyond the perceived wisdom of “let’s make a quick ebook” or “I want a side hustle of selling notion templates”.

Curated digital products – a deceptively simple first step

One great way to get going with products is to curate a set of resources for your clients. And brilliantly, they don’t even need to be “your” resources. Because of your expertise, you can sort the wheat from the chaff – the good from the bad – and share only the best resources.

This could be as basic as a book full of website links with little nuggets of expert commentary from you. Or each week, people pay for a new set of resources delivered by email, and you’re galloping out of the digital products starter blocks, developing a library of curated resources.

Because this is likely to be a tripwire or small product, you’re unlikely to be able to sell this for thousands of dollars. But sold at scale, it gives you a pretty nice addition to cash flow and it’s something that can run and run, thanks to its evergreen nature. Once a year, you simply update it and have a new launch for say, Version 3.5, which attracts new customers.

Use it or lose it – don’t let your digital assets go to waste

One of my clients has a library of resources that she has created, that she offers as an upsell to her bespoke coaching work. She says to her clients, “Oh, you can also have this so that when we finish, you’ve got ongoing access to my library.”

Access to her library of resources is £150 per month, which creates a recurring income stream for her long after she’s finished her engagement with the client. It also keeps her front-of-mind for clients, meaning they are much more likely to seek her out for additional coaching services later. It’s an approach that just keeps on giving.

If you have something that’s very desirable, some kind of digital asset, you can create a membership product to allow people access to those assets. If you have some resources, or some answers that other people don’t readily have, you can charge money for membership, so that people can use that. One obvious example of this is my Tate Gallery membership card that allows me premium access – I can just walk in and see any of the paid exhibitions for free anytime.

You might have digital assets or access to particular groups of people that ordinary people wouldn’t have. Instead of just keeping these assets locked up in the cloud or on your hard drive (or in your head, waiting to be written up), think about how you can leverage them. Once you start to see your assets as something you can leverage as part of a digital product, lots of potential ideas start floating to the surface.

Niche has reach

If you have specialist knowledge, you could create a very niche digital guidebook. For example, you’re selling a guidebook of the best paintings and where to see them in New York, aimed at art lovers who are going to the Big Apple.

And you can make this business-to-consumer digital product even more niche by focusing on the best Modernist paintings in New York. An estimated 32.9 million people visit America’s capital every year. And you’re just looking at the subset of those people who are into Modernist paintings. For the right person who already has this expertise, this would be a joy to create.

Harness the human desire to belong

Have you considered digital membership products? These products can offer your customers the opportunity to be part of something, tapping into a very human need for connection. Take

Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She has created a community from her free email newsletter at Ness Labs, born from her original idea behind her digital product ecosystem, which was to work in public as a way of holding herself accountable for developing her own learning.

She now has 80k subscribers to her delightful emails about how our brains work, productivity and mental health. And a small (but significant) subsection of her subscribers has also joined her $49-a-year community, where she invites guest speakers and hosts two online co-working sessions per week. Anne-Laure has a beautiful style of writing and this, together with her deep thought and personal transparency, has created a lot of dedicated followers in what is often a competitive, red ocean space.

And the beauty of this approach is that it can be applied to every interest or passion. The principal is the same. For example, I have a client who hosts knit-alongs. She has built a community where a large group of people are all knitting her patterns, and it works really well.

How could you build your own digital membership product offering? You could go down the membership community site route, or it could just be a bunch of emails offering people the chance to have a drop-in now and again for a meet-up or with you holding office hours.

Authenticity is a powerful foundation

Taking the above to the next stage, can you create a community to help people be part of something by creating a movement? This could be people who all want to take action on something to make some change in the world. Can you do something which is membership-based, based on what people want to have as part of their impact? And ideally, that would be the impact that you want to create in the world as well.

Emily Atkin is an American journalist who, tired of being blocked by publications and websites, launched her own paid newsletter about climate change. HEATED is for “people who are pissed off about climate change”. Chenell Basilio, who does a deep dive reverse engineering of popular newsletter writers, estimates that Emily Atkin is now turning over $600k+ from her newsletter subscriptions alone. And at the same time, Emily is doing a great job of being part of the action on climate change by uncovering all kinds of shenanigans. Two brilliant ideas, brought together in her product.

Giving people the feeling that they’re part of an authentic movement can also be a really powerful marketing move. This could be through all sorts of different courses that you could run, such as live courses, recorded online courses, group programmes, workshops or work-alongs, where people ‘shadow’ you during a virtual session.

And finally…

I hope that you’re now confident to explore some of these digital product ideas further, and if it has sparked inspiration for creating your own digital products, even better. My work here is done (for now). While a million might yet still be out of reach, it’s certainly a highly motivational place to start your own adventures in products. See you on the journey!

Your digital product ideas check list:

Curated list of resources
Niche guidebooks
Asset leverage – different ways for people to access your digital assets
Membership with access to digital assets
Memberships with access to you
Memberships with a live element
Paid newsletters
Free newsletters with sponsorships and ads
Workshops and work-alongs
Super-niche tutorials
Workbooks