10 Lessons from Selling $10M of Digital Products

our portfolio of writing businesses just crossed over $10 million in lifetime sales so this is not from one vertical this is from the portfolio as a whole so this includes ship 30 for 30 our premium ghost writing academy and our paid newsletter right with AI it also includes some sporadic just pops other products that we launch throughout the year um like for example we did a webinar when Chad gbt first came out a paid webinar showing people how to use it that did over $63,000 in revenue for that little short period of time um we

also do one-off campaigns for things like Black Friday so we've probably done a handful of those over the years incremental bumps to revenue but our portfolio as a whole has cross $10 million in lifetime sales and so what I wanted to jam on today are the 10 big lessons that we've learned selling info products on the internet and the first one is that people drastically underestimate how much work goes into creating these sorts of info products I think broadly the the me category of e-learning or you know when someone says I have a course um

there's a stigma to that and a lot of people think that it's like this get-rich quick scheme and it doesn't take very much work and you just put up a course and it doesn't have to be very good and money rains from the sky and that really couldn't be further from the truth I mean just to give a little context over the past four years so my co-founder Dicky and I we started ship 30 for30 in 2021 and in 2021 we only had ship 30 and then over 2022 and then 2023 we started to explore

building our premium ghost rting Academy 2023 is when that really started to accelerate we also built our paid newsletter right with AI and now we're about halfway through 2024 and for context I have written and Rewritten probably several million words worth of emails curriculum social content landing pages uh up C sequences fomo sequences I mean if you really go through and add all of it up just quick napkin math that is absolutely several million words and in the beginning I didn't know that's how much work it was going to take truthfully I just thought I

have all this information here's a vehicle for me to share it and it's not until you start getting into it that you realize how many things you need to create in order to successfully distribute not just the information but but also create information that's worth consuming in the first place it is a completely different skill and as I've gotten better and better at creating these types of products and making sure that we're able to deliver on promises for students customers uh making sure that we can actually help them move from where they are to where

they want to go I have started to realize how many other entrepreneurs especially more traditional ones small business owners startup Founders they really struggle to wrap their heads around the idea of creating something that is essentially digital air most entrepreneurs uh are more familiar with things like how do I sell a tangible good how do I sell a SAS platform how do I sell a service but selling ideas is a very different skill and personally as someone you know my first business was a ghost writing agency Services scaled that to a couple million in Revenue

but over the years I've also done tons of ghost writing or sales copywriting for hundreds of different companies and startups so I've gotten to see inside their businesses and it has become very very clear to me how when you understand how to essentially sell digital air you understand how to sell people on your ideas your way of seeing the world your problem solving Frameworks when you can create value out of thin air it makes all of those other types of businesses exponentially easier because you start to realize how even the most heavily funded startups struggle

to articulate what is the value of my SAS platform right most of them talk about their features they don't talk about customer benefits well you can't do that with digital air right like if you do that you're not selling any air so all of these skills that you acquire in the world of info are very powerful in the world of info but to be honest I think they're even more powerful in all of these other Industries so again just the lesson the takeaway people really underestimate how much work goes into this stuff and I just

want you to imagine if someone said hey you know you can build a multi-million dollar info business over the next four years but you are going to have to write three million words and again I didn't know that in the beginning so it just it a lot goes into it um lesson number two there's a faulty belief in the world of info education courses digital products that these are vehicles for Passive revenue and as someone who has sold now over $10 million worth of these types of products I can tell you that there is absolutely

nothing passive about it in some way there is an active component so my library of self-published books is a really good example so I've got the art and business of online writing here which if you have Reddit you should grabb a copy this would classify as quote unquote passive income in the sense that I wrote and published this book a couple years ago and every month this book probably makes in the ballpark of three to seven Grand per month in royalties on the surface that looks like passive income but it's really not because what drives

the consistent sales of that book is the fact that it's essentially mentioned in all of our products everywhere and I talk about it on my social all the time and it's in all of our funnels and like there there is so much Active Energy being deployed that brings people back to oh and by the way Cole has a book and so the mistake that a lot of people make and and it's a it's a naive thought and and it makes sense why you have it in the beginning I did too the mistake is starting this

journey of going I want to build myself into some sort of Creator on the internet and maybe I want to sell some sort of digital product well you don't really just create the product and then sit back on a beach and hang out like Tim Ferris said in the 4H hour work work week right that that's not what happens what happens is yes you create some sort of object some sort of digital air that is a vehicle to capture value but you need to keep deploying energy in order to capture that value and it's very

rare that someone writes a book or creates a course or whatever digital product and then they create it they put it out into the world and then they don't deploy any more energy and that thing just goes on to make money it might make money for a short period of time you know you might you might get dividends off of that for couple months maybe a year but eventually it's going to fall off a cliff because it's just the the nature of energy right you're no longer deploying energy so it's not going to keep rolling

it's not going to keep moving so I say that because if you're going into this world of I I want to create digital products you should not view it as this I work for a period of time I create this thing and then I never need to work again the game and at least how I think about it and I think about this especially with my library of books but I also think about this with our portfolio of companies and the product that we create the game is to create these different products that are tied

to an infinite game and that infinite game is you sort of Coming to Terms within yourself going I want to write on the internet for the rest of my life like that's that's my truth I know I want to write until the day I die and more and more every day the world goes from being an analog world to a digital world so it's not just I want to write until I die well I might as well write online until I die right so as long as I am writing and I am deploying energy out

into the world I also want to have a portfolio or or at least one but over time you would build a portfolio of products that you can point that energy or attention to it's not you know that is a diff that's very different than someone going I I'm going to challenge myself or push myself to write on the internet for a set period of time six months I'm going to create a course it's going to go live and then I'm going to sit back and I'm going to collect dividends on that for the next 20

years that's not how the game works and again this was one of those things that I didn't really understand in the beginning lesson number three not all digital products and the business models tied to those digital products are created equal so what I mean by this is a lot of times you think that selling an ebook is the same as selling a course or selling a $200 course is the same as selling a $2,000 course course right or selling a monthly membership is the same as a paid newsletter it's very easy to look at all

these digital business models and just think they're all slightly different variations of the same thing and they're really not because each individual digital product first of all is anchored to a different price point in the customer's head right like you can't really write a book and then charge 800 bucks for it because we've already learned as as customer customers we've already been uh educated to price anchor that sort of thing to a price point in our brains right sort of no different where if you were to you know just create a very simple like eight

module text based course you can't go charge 10 grand for that and if you do you're either GNA get a lot of refund requests or you're going to get a lot of unhappy customers or somehow you were one of the outliers that were able to do that but for 99% of people and 99% of circumstances that's not how it works so what happens is when you pick a certain type of digital product you are essentially picking also the business model that goes with it and if you don't understand the business model and you don't understand

the the price anchor that you're that you're essentially tied to when you choose that digital product you're going to make a lot of the wrong decisions right and so I'm going to go through over the next couple lessons these are some of the really tangible things that we've learned about different digital products and different business models that are associated with them so the first one so Lesson Four is there are really only three pricing tiers for selling online courses we've tried a lot of different things for context in the very beginning the very first uh

cohort of ship 30 for 30 was essentially free uh it cost you 50 bucks to do it but if you wrote All 30 days you got the 50 bucks back uh then when we were like okay we can actually charge for this people are getting a lot of value out of it uh we charged like a 100 bucks and then the next cohort we charged 150 bucks and then the next cohort we charged 200 bucks and eventually you know a year and a half later we ended up getting the price of ship 30 all the

way up to about 800 bucks and right I think we did one cohort where we charged $8.99 and right when we moved from you know 800 to 899 right around there is when we started to see the metrics go down and then we went through this with other other you know upsells after ship 30 um for example like in the beginning when someone would complete ship 30 on the back end we would essentially have a more advanced version of ship 30 uh that was another cohort and that we charged more for right so we've tried

a lot of these different pricing tiers and what we've learned is that there's really only three the first one is what I like to think of as an Impulse buy so this is an online course that is $350 or less $350 is that first Milestone where when it's priced above 350 the purchase purchase decision starts to change when it's below 350 it's still the same purchase decision like a lot of people if you if you were to see a course that very clearly promised to solve a specific spe ific problem for you you're the ideal

customer archetype if that course is $150 or $250 it actually doesn't matter you're still in the same territory of pricing and whenever I explain this of course there are people that go that's not true if something was 250 I wouldn't buy it but if it was 150 I would buy it well first of all it's very easy to have an opinion when you're not an actual customer right the real vote is who is who buys the product and what we've seen in the data is that people who buy especially afterwards when we would do um

like surveys or we would get on Zoom and talk to people get feedback on pricing and things like that all of the decision it's the same decision in that tier and so the mistake in what happens for a course that's like 350 or less is that a Creator takes the time to build this product and then they think the lower the price the more customers I will get and that's actually not true if you have a great impulse by you know text and video course that's that's really what the expectation is it's text and video

you're going to help me solve a specific problem you're going to help me unlock a specific outcome doesn't really need to be more than that when you do that at that price point the thing that the customer really cares about is are you giving me the information that's that's really all you need to give them right and so it's a faulty belief to think well if I charge $50 for it I'm going to get 10 times more customers no because it's actually the same purchase decision and what ends up happening is if you just realized

that you could charge more in this tier yeah you might have less customers but you would make more money and so I this is a mistake I see a lot of creators make where when they go to launch their first online course they default to how do I make this as cheap as possible when really the game should be how do I warrant that the top of this first tier how do I warrant charging 350 what are all the things I need to put in it because you can right there's no reason why you can't

charge 350 that's just the ceiling of that tier and as long as you sort of stay under that ceiling it doesn't matter if it's a 100 bucks 200 bucks or 300 bucks it's the same purchase decision the second tier is right around $350 to about $1,000 this is something that we experienced firsthand building ship 30 in this pricing tier this is where a customer expects more than just the information so what really separates uh an online course from the Tier 1 350 and Below to tier 2 350 to $1,000 is that you go from information

to experience so this is where you see it's very common for people to go I'm not just going to do a text and video course I'm going to do a cohort-based course for example and the reason people are paying more is because it could be the same exact information but they're paying more because they want it to be an experience right they want to interact with you or they want to go out into breakout rooms or they want to be surrounded by a community of people that are doing it with them so if you're going

to price in this tier right this is this is why understanding these is so important you have to make sure that you are delivering a great experience because the mistake would go well I'm G to I'm going to make a text and video course but I'm going to charge 500 bucks for it well you don't actually know what tier you're in now right and so a lot of times what creat creators will do is they'll just randomly throw a number in the air and go this is what I'm going to charge for my online course

and then they don't really realize what tier they're in and they don't understand what the expectations are from the customer for that tier right so that middle ground is really all about experience tier three is around $3,000 to $110,000 and above and above 10 grand is where you start getting into masterminds typically and that's usually a very different Pur decision like a mastermind is typically selling to some sort of already moving business owner and the way that they rationalize that cost is very very different so we're going to call tier three around three grand to

10 grand now what's interesting about the difference between tier two and tier three is that the purchase decision between $1,000 and $2,000 is sort of this weird no man's land where a a product that is above the th000 threshold so you're above tier 2 but you're not quite tier three that is not a great place to be so if you're charging 1,500 bucks or two two grand or 2500 right you're not quite tier two but you're also probably not including all of the all the other things the next things you're going to need to be

seen as tier three so something that we've thought a lot about is we don't want to create products or programs that are in that you know 15 00 2 Grand 2500 range because what you would rather do is instead of having an overpriced tier two right so say you had a cohort based course but you charged two grand for it you would be an overpriced tier 2 digital productor program and instead it's a lot better to aim higher and go how can I add more here to make this tier three and the difference between tier

two and tier three so as soon as you get up into you know charging three Grand or above with a a hypothetical ceiling of around 10 grand soon as you get into tier three that is where it really goes from being a product to a training program okay so anytime someone is going to invest a meaningful sum of money with you first of all it has to be in some way Hands-On there has to be a coaching element there has to be an accountability element and and most important there usually there are except exceptions to

the rule but there usually has to be a price anchoring to the outcome that they're going to get or the value of the skill they're going to acquire if you aren't able to price anchor to the value of the skill that they're going to acquire it's very hard for someone to rationalize spending four grand five grand six grand Seven Grand with you right because they need to view it as an investment in themselves so just to recap tier one impulse buy 350 or less tier two $350 to $1,000 it's information plus experience tier three is

information usually some sort of experience and Hands-On coaching training accountability mentorship with the asterisk of and ideally price anchored to the value of the skill you're going to acquire to unlock a more valuable outcome lesson five uh this one is painful for me because I am a Serial author I love writing books I love the craft of writing books but a painful lesson is that books are probably the worst business model for monetizing information so what I mean by that is let's say you've created some really unique Frameworks in a specific industry and you think

to yourself I want to write a book where I where I monetize those Frameworks I want to put them out into the world I want to share how I think about this problem and how I solve it and you know the different action steps that I would take and how I would walk some through it right think very actionable how to sort of nonfiction well if you put that in a book how much can you charge for that you can't really charge more than 20 bucks 30 bucks right maybe 50 bucks for a super dingdong

hard cover right but you're not going to charge $100 for your book you're not going to charge $200 you're not going to charge $800 right but what's interesting and this is coming from someone again I've written 10 books at this point I've written probably 10 different curriculums I've Rewritten those different products in curriculums who knows how many times millions and millions and millions of words and I'm telling you the exact same way that you would write it in a book is how you would write it in a module of a course the difference is when

you call it a book your pricing is capped and when you call it a course you can charge five times more 10 times more and as this has started to click for me it's made me realize that books are really only good for either uh content that is quote unquote interesting it's just like oh I I can't really do anything with that information but yeah that's really interesting to think about right that's one category of non-fiction and then the other category of non-fiction is that's entertaining right so think of like the subtle art of not

giving a by Mark Manson's great example very entertaining but you don't really the book and then go do something right you read it and you're like that was cool and then that's sort of all you do with it right but so the art and business of online writing is actually a great example I didn't have this framework when I wrote this book this is a very actionable how-to book and in hindsight this was not the best way to monetize this information I could have charged a lot more by putting it into a digital product instead

and so the way you sort of can get around this problem if you want to write a how-to actionable book is yeah you can write the book but then we essentially double dipped and took all of the underlying Frameworks in this book and made that the foundation of the experiential product ship 30 so a lot of the ideas that we cover in ship 30 are the same ones that I cover in the book the difference is that people aren't really paying for necessarily just the information anymore they're paying for an experiential element right and then

you can get around it further by going I'm going to add more examples I'm going to add new Frameworks I'm going to add case studies I'm going to add templates so you can take the same information but surround it with other benefits to the customer and then all of a sudden you can double dip a little bit but still as you know this is sort of me working in hindsight moving forward when I have very clear actionable how-to information the first business model that I run to is not going to be a book I could

take the exact same content drip it out over 30 emails make it a paid newsletter and charge 10 times more right I could do the same thing break it apart into modules add videos call it an online course charge 10 times more so it's important to understand when you're sitting there going Which business model do I pick you know what are the pros and cons of those different business models lesson number six if your digital product isn't selling there's usually two very clear reasons why and I can tell you you know we are in uh

all these group group chats with all of these different creators and we're always sharing ideas and one of the one of the things that I see most common in other Creator businesses is this fear of pitching your list and the rationale that creators use is they go I don't want to pitch my list too hard because then people are going to unsubscribe and you have to realize that as a Creator first of all your email list is the engine of your business okay so that is what powers all of your Revenue essentially because most people

don't just buy you know they don't see something once on Twitter and then go buy your course right they usually consume your content on Twitter and then they subscribe to your email list or they opt into an educational email course or something you nurture them over a period of time and then eventually they convert later right we did a a post analysis of all of our ship 30 cohorts where we looked at you know the average number of emails it took before someone decided to buy and it wasn't one email it wasn't two emails it

was 20 emails and so what happens is when you're afraid to pitch what you're essentially saying is the vanity metric of the number of people on my email list not paying me is more important than the number of people paying me which makes no sense and if you're a Creator who wants to build a digital business right that is a faulty belief that you need to unroot in yourself because first of all if if you truly believed that your products could help people you would pitch the absolute out of them right that's why I have

no problem talking about our programs and products and books I will promote my stuff all day long because I talk to writers all day long and I know all of their problems and I know exactly why they're stuck because I was stuck there too and so I don't mind going you should join this program because I give you all of the answers right I will save you the six painful years I spent trying to figure this out on my own right so if you truly believed that you could help someone why would you not Pitch

it over and over and over again right second of all is having a million people on your email list that don't buy anything from you is pointless it doesn't matter it is a meaningless metric the the outcome that you want is you either want someone to subscribe and then go deeper into your ecosystem become a customer become part of what you're building right or subscribe go away I I can't help you or you don't want my help and that's fine I want you to go subscribe to someone else who can help you so that's why

it it really is a a pointless metric to pay attention to the the other reason you know if you have a digital product that isn't selling the other reason is usually because the digital product isn't price anchored to a valuable outcome or a valuable enough outcome so you can see this mistake really clearly when someone goes you know my course will help you learn XYZ no one wants to learn right it's like saying uh I will you know we're going to go to the gym was like I don't want to go to the gym right

everyone just wants the result of going to the gym they just want to look great for summer and have six-pack abs okay so no one actually wants to learn or consume your information they're not excited about the learning they're excited about the outcome of the learning and if you haven't taken the time to really think through what are the tangible objective specific outcomes that I can help someone unlock if you don't know what that is and you don't know how to speak to it then of course someone's not going to buy because you're leaving them

to Intuit it what that is on their own and so again I see a lot of creators make this mistake where they make the you know the outcome like you're going to have a great time or you're going to learn tons those are not valuable enough outcomes you have to get to the root of what is specific what is tangible right what is objective you are here I'm going to help you get here and the more specific and tangible and objective that you are about that outcome the more likely someone is to go this is

worth me spending money on because they view it as a an investment in themselves lesson number seven monthly memberships are probably the next most inefficient vehicle for monetizing your knowledge and this one is is tough there's a lot of nuance here because you know for example I'm a huge hormos fan I study his content religiously I really like what he's doing with school and I think that that can be a really great entry point for a lot of people into this world but as someone who has used lots of different business models to sell digital

products there are a bunch of problems that come with a monthly membership that I think are very hard to solve as a beginner and yes you can make a monthly membership work but it requires a more advanced skills and B it usually requires some sort of library of content so let me explain sort of the rationale why so many people think a monthly membership model is great so first of all they think oh a monthly membership means I have recurring Revenue well I love how my co-founder Dicky puts this which is uh everyone wants recurring

Revenue until they realize that they're signing themselves up for recurring work because what happens when someone joins your membership imagine you say you know you join imagine I had this setup I have I have a school and I'm like when you join this school it's a 100 bucks a month and I have 10 different writing courses in here that you can binge and go through well the moment you join that school the value of all 10 of those programs just goes to zero because you paid a 100 bucks you now have access to all of

them and now your bottleneck is well now I got to go through all of these right and so the faulty belief that the creator has is they think well I I have 10 courses in there someone's going to say stay subscribed forever because they're going to want access to them all and usually the opposite happens usually after like a month or two the consumer the customer goes I actually don't have time to go through all of these and I went through one and I haven't implemented all the info yet you know what I'm just going

to pause and stop and so the math you actually have to do is if you've already launched a membership how much are you charging per month and what is the average churn so let's say you charge a 100 bucks a month and the average churn is the customer only stays for two months well the LTV of that customer is only $200 which begs the question what would the math of your business look like if instead of using a monthly membership if you just took all of the same content but put it into an Impulse buy

online course and you charged 350 well if the same number of people buy you just changed the business model you just almost double doubled your Revenue right and so the the challenge with monthly memberships is that the way you retain people is you're constantly creating new things so again the faulty belief is someone goes I have an online course and my life will be easier if I move to a monthly membership model because I'll have recurring revenue and I can lower the price and more people will take it right they they think these are all

the benefits in reality what you basically just did is you took your likely higher priced online course and you just swapped op it out for instead of a one-time buy now you have to create quote unquote mini courses every month or every other month or every quarter to retain all these people on membership and when you do the math usually especially for beginners that are just stepping into the world of selling digital products usually the LTV of a monthly subscription customer is less than the LTV of someone buying an Impulse by uh online course or

buying a cohort-based experience or especially like a higher ticket program okay so you can make monthly memberships work but truthfully you know we tried doing this for about a year and a half it was the hardest vertical in our business uh the recurring Revenue to be honest is not it it didn't feel really any better than us selling the one-off programs and products um especially because those were ever like we had set it up those were Evergreen so I don't think that it's worth it personally but uh sometimes you have to learn this lesson the

hard way lesson eight this is a a really this is a more advanced one but the broader your frontend product the harder it will be to build a high converting backend product so what that means need to reup on some coffee what that means is if your frontend product your lower ticket one makes a broader promise to a wider number of people it's going to be harder for you to come up with how to help all of those different types of people with the next step which is the natural progression of going from lower ticket

front end to higher ticket backend so for example ship 30 ship 30 is an amazing front-end product it attracts lots of different types of writers you get everyone from I've never written anything before in my entire life to someone who's gone you know I've been writing for 20 years I just want to sharpen my digital first writing skills you get everybody the the benefit of that is you know ship 30 grew really quickly and it makes for a very diverse group of people and it's an amazing front-end product the problem is because there are so

many different types of people it's very difficult to to create an offer a backend offer that speaks to each of those individual people with residents when we started building our premium ghost Trading Academy we did something very different we made the promise of PGA hyper hyper hyper specific we like this is for Freelancers that are stuck between 3 and 6K per month or this is someone who's been thinking about freelancing on the side wants to get into the world of writing online ghost writing and all we are going to do is show you how to

build 5-day educational email courses ghost write them and sell them as a premium asset that is it and in the beginning it's it felt painful because of how specific that was first of all PGA outgrew ship 30 by 5x so the idea that being more specific means that you're narrowing yourself is not true second of all by making the front end so PGA more specific it makes the back end that we're building so much easier because what's the natural progression where someone goes hey I landed a client that paid me five grand to build an

educational email course now what do I do well that problem is so specific that we know exactly what to build to help the person get to the next level oh you got one client how do you scale to five oh you have five clients how do you build yourself into a oneperson agency you're a oneperson agency how do you start hiring how do you build a small boutique ghost riding agency right all of the backend offers just write themselves because the front end is so specific so again this this is one of those things that's

a little hard to understand building your first product but if you continue down the path this is one of those things I I wish we would have known earlier in the journey lesson n the best digital education products are 50% education and 50% belief breaking so one of the mistakes that creators make is they will build a course that is just pure information they're like here's how to do it and that's fine but something that took us a long time to learn is that every time you explain here's how to do something or here's why

you should do it the person's biggest bottleneck the student the customer's biggest bottleneck is actually some sort of faulty belief within themselves so they either think like you could be as clear as possible and saying this is what you need to do but the bottleneck is the person going I understand but I don't think it's going to work for me or I understand but I've tried that already or I understand but I don't think that works for for my industry or I understand but and so what we've learned is that inside all of our products

and programs I think about this a ton writing non-fiction books now is whatever thing you're explaining all along the way you need to get ahead of whatever the potential objection is in the person's mind so you're like you should do this okay what's their objection to that address it then you go okay we've addressed that now here's the second thing you should do and then they're going to have an objection then you go okay let's address that so you have to really handhold people in the best way and the you know what happens when people

are building these digital products is they usually over rotate to one or two of of these extremes the either Go 100% actionable zero belief and in that in that case the information's great but the bottleneck is the person going you know I'm getting in my own way I can't even implement it because I don't believe in myself or I don't believe it'll work for me right on the other end of the extreme you have people that create info products that are all belief breaking but then there's nothing actionable so then the customer the student is

left going well thanks very much for helping me get out of my own way but now I don't know what to do and then you feel like I just attended a you know Tony Robin seminar and yeah I'm motivated for three days but like where do I go from here and so the best digital products are really that sweet spot between these two it has to be actionable and belief breaking simultaneously and then lesson number 10 um I have learned there is absolutely a recipe to the perfect course module so when you are building digital

products your goal is you really want to get to a point where by the time someone finishes it they don't have any lingering questions they know exactly what to do they know why they've been getting in their own way they know they know how to overcome that faulty belief they have a very clear do this this and this and so the stack that I've assembled for myself I'll share with you here is every time I'm writing a module or a chapter of a book these are the pieces that I look to add so the first

the beginning part is reasons why so why are we going to do this what are the benefits of doing whatever thing that I'm going to that I'm explaining to you the second piece is what are the mistakes that you need to avoid what are the problems that you're probably going to run into what are the problems that maybe you've run into in the past the third is steps so okay so you understand why we're going to do this the benefits and you understand the mistakes to avoid okay so now here's what to do steps action

step clear do this then this then this after that we need to pause because a lot of faulty beliefs are going to come up a lot of objections are going to come up so then we need a section of commonly asked questions so when you explain this to people what are all the things that they say and and in in our products and books I've started using this as like a trigger to myself where I frame it all as but Cole right but Cole I don't think that's going to work for my Niche let's address

it but Cole I've tried that before let's address it so you need a whole section where you are just dismantling all of the faulty beliefs and all of the objections that would that would have someone get in their own way and then finally you need some sort of walkthrough example so this is what really pushes it over the top is you go I've explained all this to you I've helped you get out of your own way you know exactly what to do now just to prove that this works watch me do it and that's what

really completes the loop for the person so they should walk away from there going I I have everything I need to be successful here now and then just a couple you know final thoughts um those those are the big lessons you know I'm excited you know 10 million in lifetime sales is amazing um my personal goal is I'd like to see a 100 so we'll we'll see when we get there 100 million in lifetime digital product sales would be epic um but a couple just final thoughts in the world of info um it is one

of those games where sort of no matter how hard you try you are always going to have customers asking for the opposite so if you make the content too prescriptive they're going to say they want more optionality if you put too much optionality in the content they're going to say this is too many choices just tell me what to do that's a really simple example but that summarizes a lot of the problems and so as you build these types of products you just have to keep reframing to yourself you know every time a customer complains

to me about something uh they're complaining because they care and they're complaining because they're trying to show me what else they need or maybe a different variation of what they need so for example this is why in some of our in some of our products and programs we've started creating different tracks it's like hey are you someone who just wants to binge this and go as fast as possible take this track are you someone who wants to take the scenic route and more understand the thinking that goes into all of this you want all the

interesting information take this route right so these are all just options um it doesn't necessarily mean that your customers are unhappy and they hate you or youru is terrible uh they're usually just pointing out other variations that you can create or add you can either add them to the core product or you can double or triple monetize them and break them into other products so that's that's been a big thing for me over these past few years is just really internalizing that um there's always going to be things that customers ask for and that's okay

you know it's all an opportunity so I hope uh you enjoyed this just you know some some final comments um this is a new series that I'm going to experiment with with I'm in my new home office um I just moved to Arizona really excited about it um still have some work to do it's a little echoey in here so I got a soundproof it um this is my first test run doesn't look too bad on camera I'm sure we can make some upgrades if you have any suggestions or recommendations please comment I'm very open

to how to make this space even better but you know we've been doing some of the highly produced stuff on YouTube um it's been going well I want to experiment more with it but really the biggest feedback that I've gotten is just want to hear me riff about writing you know so my goal with uh this podcast and this video podcast on YouTube coffee with coal is these are all the things you know if you were like hey Cole want to grab coffee I want to pick your brain about XYZ uh this is where I

can do that at scale so um as many times as I feel inspired and I will I will keep that inspiration flowing I'm going to make some coffee and we're just going to sit down at this table and I'm going to share whatever framework I'm currently thinking through um could be business updates could be where I see the digital writing world going um ghost writing self-publishing uh and I'm also really open to questions so if you have any specific questions please drop it as a comment uh send me an email send me a DM uh

this is my vehicle to have coffee at scale so I'm really excited about it um I hope these 10 lessons selling $10 million worth of digital products was helpful and I will see you in the next episode