What sells as a digital product

The appeal is obvious. Make it once, sell it many times, and the cost of the next copy is nothing. That is real, and it is also why the category is crowded with things nobody bought.

Zero marginal cost cuts both ways. It means your margin on sale ten thousand is the same as on sale one. It also means everyone else can produce the same thing for nothing, so being available is worth nothing on its own.

What people actually pay for

Not information. Information has been free for thirty years and your buyer knows it. What people pay for is one of four things, and it is worth knowing which one you are selling.

• Time saved. The work is already done. A template, a spreadsheet that calculates the thing, a document set someone would otherwise write from scratch.
• Judgement applied. Not what the options are, but which one to pick, from somebody who has done it. The selection is the product.
• A specific outcome, in order. Not a library of material but a path, where the sequence is the value and following it produces a result.
• Access to the person. A review, a call, a critique. This is not scalable, which is exactly why it commands the highest price.

The four, as four actual products

Abstract categories are easy to agree with and hard to use. The same subject, employment contracts for a small business, sold four ways.

• Time saved: a set of contract templates, ready to fill in, with the variable parts marked. The buyer pays to not write them.
• Judgement applied: the same templates with a short note on each clause saying when to include it and when it causes problems. The buyer pays for the decisions, not the documents.
• A sequenced outcome: a process that takes an owner from no contracts at all to signed agreements with every member of staff, in order, with what to do at each step. The buyer pays for the path.
• Access: any of the above plus a review of their filled-in version before they use it. The buyer pays to not be wrong.

Four prices, four buyers, four amounts of work from you. The mistake is building the first one and hoping it is read as the third.

What does not sell

• A general course on a broad subject. The broad subjects are covered by people with audiences, and competing on breadth is competing on their terms.
• A product whose buyer you cannot name. "Anyone who wants to learn X" is not a buyer, and the sales page writes itself badly.
• Something that solves a problem nobody has noticed they have. You will spend the whole budget explaining the problem before you can sell the solution.
• A thing you built because you enjoyed building it. Sometimes this works. Mostly it produces something excellent that nobody needed.

Start narrower than feels sensible

A product for one kind of person doing one specific thing outsells a product for everyone doing the general version, at a higher price, with less competition and a page that is easier to write.

Narrowing is a sequence of cuts, and each one is uncomfortable. Worth seeing written out, because the comfortable version is always the first line.

1. 01A course on bookkeeping. Competing with accountancy bodies and anyone with a following.
2. 02Bookkeeping for freelancers. Better, still a category somebody larger owns.
3. 03Bookkeeping for freelancers who have just gone over the VAT threshold. Now there is a specific, dated, painful moment and a person who knows they are in it.
4. 04The last one has the smallest market, the highest price, the easiest page to write, and buyers who recognise themselves in the first line.

The fear is that the market is too small. Early on the opposite problem is the real one: a market broad enough to be comfortable is broad enough that nobody feels the product was made for them. A thousand people who have exactly this problem is a better starting market than a million who have a general version of it.