Why all this “creator porn” will make you go blind
It’s about time someone told the truth about digital products. Julia Chanteray, founder of Adventures in Products reveals the mistakes you need to avoid if you want to make money.
Everyone’s talking about the creator economy, encouraging you to side hustle, and suggesting selling products you can make in a weekend to make four or five figures a month.
Suddenly, I’m seeing this “creator porn” everywhere. And it’s making me mad.
Like regular porn, these articles are juicy and enticing…they lure you in. But once you’re in, the experience is flat and false. If you follow their advice, you risk putting a ton of effort into something that will give you a sudden spurt followed by emptiness.
I’ve worked with hundreds of creators, founders, and business owners to help them move from selling time for money to building product-based businesses.
This article tells the truth about creating products, selling products, and what it takes to develop a good income stream. It does not contain any tips about products you can magically whip up in a weekend and expect to get 5k a month from selling them.
Because that’s an imaginary world of fantasy.
This article contains some brilliant ideas about product ideas you will never have thought of before. And some sound business practices to use to get them to market and sell them.
Sorry, no porn. Just real-life experience and notes from many iterations of hard work by me and my clients.
What kind of online products are most profitable in the real world?
We need to apply some essential business thinking here. Whether you’re trying to create a million-dollar turnover or just have enough from your side hustle to be able to pay your heating bill this winter, thinking of this as a business first will pay dividends. Actual dividends that go into your bank account.
Let’s look for the blue ocean
Avoid the highly competitive red ocean where you’re selling the same as everyone else. You may have the most beautifully designed printable affirmation cards on Etsy, but you’ll be competing in the red ocean with 7250 other sets of cards. I’ll probably never even see your listing.
Real life example – Nick Parker
Nick Parker has a brilliant spin on affirmation cards with his Get The Fuck on With It cards. But note that these sell for £18 – twice the average price of affirmation cards on Etsy. I even had to think about whether they were affirmation cards – Nick calls them productivity cards, pulling them into a very different league. And making them into the Purple Cow, standing out in the red ocean of affirmation cards.
Nick doesn’t sell his cards on Etsy. The cards are a tiny part of his product ecosystem, and he’s created a brand and a tribe around his work. People come to his site because they like his interesting content, and they buy the cards because:
- They’re funny
- We all need to do exactly what it says on the cards
- They like Nick and his brand
Finding your tribe
When you’re selling digital products, you have a potential audience of the 4.9 billion people who have internet access worldwide. That’s huge.
You only need a tiny fraction of that audience to buy from you. So, you can afford to forget about most of them; they’re not the right customer group for you. Instead, think very, very niche. Superniche.
Once you’ve found your tribe and the problems you can help them to solve, you can move on to the type of products that solve those problems for them.
It’s easier to start with the people you want to serve and then work out how you can solve their problems for them through products. If you start thinking about the products first, you end up making the product you want to make. For you. What we want is a product that your audience wants to buy – one which makes life easier for them.
Make helpful tools
Start with some tools which directly help people to solve their own problems. You’ve often got the start of these on your hard drive already because you use them in your client work.
What are the best Types Of Tool-Based Digital Products To Sell
- WordPress plugin
- Reckoners – spreadsheets to calculate something complicated
- A widget – sell widgets or calculators someone can put on their website
- A process map for making decisions
- Spreadsheets to put data into and organise it to do a task
- Checklists for tasks
Increase perceived value so people will pay more money
Years ago, I saw someone speak at the Professional Speakers Association. I’ve completely forgotten this person’s name, so apologies if you are she. An excellent talk.
At the end of her speech, she had sign-up sheets for people to join her forthcoming masterclass, and I saw quite a few people filling them in with their credit cards (on paper!) there and then. It looked like she made her living from speaking, but mostly she sold information products.
And she gave away one of her secrets which stayed with me. It was something like this
“You can sell a book for ten dollars. But if you call it a workbook, you can sell it for 175 dollars.”
You can make a workbook faster than you can write a book. Workbooks have more boxes and fewer words. The return on effort (RoE) is much higher because customers perceive a workbook as more valuable than a regular book.
You can increase the perceived value of many of the products you might have thought of already:
- Add video talk-throughs to a tool-based product
- Create a premium version where customers can message you for help or get an hour of your time to talk through their results. This changes it into a simple productised service
- Spend more time coming up with a powerful brand for your product, and it looks more valuable
Most people are so in love with the product that they spend 80% of their time making it. But, I’ve noticed that successful product builders spend more time on the brand and marketing their products than they do in creating the products. They spend 20% of their time on the product and put 80% into marketing.
Online courses (and alternatives to online courses)
You’ve probably already thought of an online course. But you know what I’m going to say now – can we increase the perceived value of your online course, so you can charge more money for it?
You can increase the value of an online course by moving as far as possible from the Udemy model. I love Udemy courses – as a consumer. For £19.99, I can learn tons. But as a course creator, that’s not a great model – you have to sell thousands of courses at £19.99 to make enough money.
Try making your course into a membership. Or add in live workshops or one-to-one sessions. This way, you can change the pricing from £19.99 to £999. Or 10k if you can spend 80% of your time on brand and marketing to increase the perceived value.
Alternatives to online courses
Here are some alternatives to online courses:
- Paid webinar – simple, easy
- Mini email course as a freebie lead magnet
- Live delivery of regular workshops to a paying group
- Drip feed course – make your course modules as you go along
- Small groups – more participatory workshop-based learning sessions
- Membership – with drop-in learning sessions
- Paid email newsletter
These alternatives to online courses are way more powerful
You can launch these digital products much more quickly. Set up an online booking system and a marketing campaign in two or three days because you’re using the minimal viable product approach to develop momentum. And use the “develop the course as you go along” or “just in time model” to record and develop assets you can sell multiple times.
And the extra added bonus here is that if you then end up making an online course, it will be so much better because you’ve improved it at every iteration.
Digital products when your clients need to go through a process
Sometimes the work we do involves going through a process with clients. The nature of the work means we can’t just give them a tool and let them get on with it or provide enough learning to go through the process themselves. Or maybe some of your clients want you to do the work for them, rather than them learning to do it themselves.
Your process might be something technical you need to do for clients, such as data analysis, search engine optimisation, or environmental audits. Or it might be a transformation process such as my business coaching, Ella Jaczynska’s mindset transformation, or Jacqui Lofthouse’s work to help authors develop the courage to publish their memoirs.
To achieve this, we either need to productise your service or be able to work with a group of clients at the same time. Possibly both.
Let’s look at productised services
Productised services are when you simplify what you do for clients, break it down into set processes that are identical for every client and then offer this as a product.
But, can we productise this even further?
Productised services are one option for scaling your business, and you can definitely work with more clients and be more productive and profitable when you go down the productised services route. But maybe you want to take it to the next level on this graph…
Fancy a bit of client stacking?
We could stack clients together so that everyone goes through the same process simultaneously. You might create a group programme, a mastermind group, bring everyone together on a retreat weekend or create a membership programme.
How Jacqui Lofthouse moved from productised services to client stacking
When writing coach Jacqui Lofthouse got busy, she developed a productised service and brought in more writing coaches to work with her clients. But as the brand developed, she moved even further, creating a membership programme Inside Story so she could work with more people at the same time. Brilliant. Jacqui is a client from a long time ago, but she came up with this idea on her own.
Data-based digital products
Some of the most successful product creators I’ve worked with have made digital products based on data analysis and assessment tools. These take more time and effort to develop, but regularly generate high levels of monthly recurring revenue. If the thought of data analysis immediately turns you off, remember that you can outsource the technical parts to someone else who will bring your idea to life.
What are data and assessment digital products?
Interpreting data to make informed choices and decisions is a significant growth area across the business world use. I’m talking about small-scale digital products which are within your grasp, rather than the all encompassing intrusions of mega-corps like Amazon and Facebook.
The interesting trend here for product makers is that the cost of this kind of data analysis has dropped dramatically now you can access powerful software for a small monthly fee.
Which I love because it means that even tiny businesses can make these kinds of products.
Examples of data-based digital products:
- Benchmarking reports
- Trend reports
- Data visualisation dashboard
- Lookup tables
- Data analysis reports
- Surveys
- Lead generation quizzes
Switching from services to products – an SEO company’s story
Let’s imagine you run a small SEO agency. You’ve been doing this for years, built up some skills, and helped a bunch of clients. You’re the MD and have four skilled staff working their spreadsheets.
But you’ve got a bit bored now; you’re having the same conversations with every client. Although the content is different every time, the spreadsheets are pretty much the same.
You meet some crazy woman with glasses who bangs on about the adventure of building a product-based business. (That’s me, by the way). You think about developing some online courses but realise that this has been done to death in your industry – there’s no need for another DIY SEO course. Then you sign up to go on an adventure with the crazy glasses woman and realise that you can do the whole thing differently.
You build a highly productised service company instead. When someone comes to you for SEO help, you do the same initial analysis spreadsheet work for them. But you also sign them up for a monthly service where you send them detailed personalised reports of how their SEO is improving and recommendations for their next steps.
This takes six months to set up. It costs you 10k for a developer to do clever things with APIs and Business Intelligence tools. You’re already impressed when you notice that the data analysis tools can do the initial spreadsheet work in minutes when it used to take one of your team two days.
How this data-driven approach changes profitability
Most agencies go from one project to the next and forget about the client after the project. When you add the monthly recurring income from your customers, you’re effectively adding little chunks of turnover every month. And the effect on your profits is cumulative over time.
More impact and more sales? Hell yes!
Most of us are only partly in this game for the money. We’re also here to create an impact in the world by doing great work for our clients. We want to be of service, helping people, and in turn, helping them to make their impact in the world. I did say cumulative, didn’t I?
The exciting part is that the agency that took this route noticed something different about their clients. They were getting results. Big results. Because they had these detailed, data-driven insights and recommendations every month in an easy-to-understand format, the clients were taking action to improve their SEO. And this paid off for them.
This is an anonymised story, they weren’t an SEO agency, but I asked them if this graph of impact for clients was accurate. They said yes.
Express yourself with your products
If you don’t enjoy writing, are dyslexic, or English isn’t your first language, you might not want to create a written format type of digital product. If you have a block about appearing on video, as I did for years, you might not want to make a video-based product.
Compensate for your weaknesses and develop your strengths.
My top tip is to find other people who complement you. If you want to build a written product, but have challenges in writing, find a co-writer or paid writer and use recording or diagramming to get your thoughts out of your head.
If your video block is about seeing your face in the video, start with recording videos where you talk over slides rather than talk to the camera. That’s how Ramit Sethi made his first courses; they don’t show him at all. And interestingly, he’s still selling those courses, thirteen years and $25m later.
For the more specialised digital products, such as data-driven dashboards, widgets and web apps, if you can visualise and communicate how you want them to work, find the right supplier and invest in paying them to make the product for you. But, ensure that you’ve tested the market by developing a minimum viable product, even a simple mock-up, before spending tens of thousands on developer time.
My best advice
When you’re tempted by all these “creator porn” articles, my best advice is to stop and think. Look at some of the people who have written honestly about their journey. The folk who report putting in a helluva lot of effort to create products but ended up making three-figure incomes, not six.
And then think of your creative juices going into your products and developing your business. Get creative with all those delicious audience-building activities at the same time as making your products. I call this the twin-track approach.
Think about your product ecosystem and take your pricing seriously.
And then build exceptional blue ocean products which solve problems for your niche audience.
Julia Chanteray is founder and mission controller of Adventures in Products, supporting people to escape the trap of trading time by creating beautiful ecosystems of products.
