How to Pick Your First Digital Product

Pick the one you can finish. That is the entire rule for a first digital product, and it will feel like settling.

The reason is unglamorous. An idea that is still on your hard drive has earned nothing, taught you nothing about selling, and cannot be corrected by anybody but you.

Three questions that kill an idea in a minute

Take your six half-ideas and put each one through these, in order, out loud.

Does the raw material already exist? Notes, a spreadsheet you built for yourself, a process you wrote down for a colleague, files from old work, a folder of finished pieces. An idea starting from a blank page is a far longer project than it looks from here, and the blank page is where ideas go to die.

Can you name a specific person who has this problem? By name. Somebody you have actually spoken to, in a group you belong to, at your last job. Small business owners is not a person. If nobody comes to mind, you are guessing about the problem as well as the solution.

Can you describe the contents in one sentence with no ands? A spreadsheet that works out which of your shifts actually paid is one product. A spreadsheet and a guide and some templates and a video is four products, none of them finished.

Cross off whatever stalls. Being down to one or two ideas is progress.

Finish-ability is the whole criterion

An unfinished product earns nothing at all, and there is no partial credit for having started.

The first one's job is to run you through the pipeline once: making the file, packaging it, building images, writing the listing, setting up delivery, and answering the first message from a stranger who paid you. None of that is learnable by reading about it. All of it goes faster the second time.

So choose the idea whose finished state you can picture completely. The actual files, the actual folder, the last thing you would do before uploading. If you cannot picture the final file, you do not yet know what you are making, and you will discover that deep into building it.

Building out of something you already do for work or for yourself is the shortest version of this, and making a digital product from a skill you already use is that route in full.

Weekend ideas and season ideas

A weekend idea has one format, no code, no video, no interactivity, and content that already exists in some form.

A season idea has modules, recordings, an app, a membership, or software you would have to learn before you could start.

Season ideas are not worse. They are worse first, because the feedback arrives so late that nothing you assumed gets corrected while correcting it is still cheap. You want to be wrong in the first week, not at the end.

Two routes sit firmly on the weekend side and are worth looking at before anything else: making a printable people will actually buy and making templates with free software.

Match the format to how you actually work

You are choosing which kind of tedium to sign up for.

• If you think in structure and lists, build templates, checklists or spreadsheets. The tedious part is edge cases and instructions.
• If you explain well out loud, guides and scripted walkthroughs suit you, but the editing is the job and it runs far longer than the talking.
• If you make things visually, artwork, patterns, printables and graphics need the least translation from how you already work.
• If you write, then guides, scripts, message templates and reference documents are the shortest path.
• If you cannot stand answering questions, ship something closed. A print-ready file generates far fewer messages than an editable one.

Pick the row where the boring part is a kind of boring you have survived before.

Make the small version instead of shelving the big one

The season idea does not have to be abandoned. Cut one useful piece out of it and ship that piece.

One module of the course as a standalone guide. The spreadsheet without the dashboard. The first ten of the hundred. The checklist the whole course was going to be built around.

The test for whether the cut is clean: is the small version useful on its own, to somebody who never sees the big one? If yes, it is a product, and it doubles as evidence for the bigger thing later. If it only makes sense as part one of six, cut somewhere else.

Whether anybody wants any of it is a separate question, and worth answering first: testing a digital product idea before you build it.

The developer job, the license tangle and the monthly promise

Park anything that needs a developer. Park anything depending on somebody else's content, footage, music or data unless you have read the license and understood it. Park anything carrying an ongoing delivery obligation, a monthly pack or a membership or a subscription, because that promises future work from a person who has not yet finished a single file.

Park anything built on a platform's interface or rules, which change without consulting you.

Park anything requiring you to be an authority you are not yet: medical, legal, tax, immigration. Those carry real consequences for the reader and real exposure for you.

Some formats are a poor bet however well you execute them, and digital products that are not worth your time is the list to read before committing to one.

Cross off five of your six. Keep the crossed-off list in a file with a line under each explaining why, because you will want it later and you will not remember.