The 4 Things People Still Buy in 2026 (Now That Information Is Free)

Information is free. We all know that. But what we need to be focusing on is transformation tools, real feedback, speed, and the hope that your buyers are going to continue paying for. Your job is to continue moving your expertise up that ladder and using your existing frameworks as the raw material for what you're building. Hello. Hello. We are back. For another episode of the Start Tiny Show. And today we are talking about the answer to a question that I have been getting probably most frequently in my strategy calls that I do with people. I recently got to attend an in-person mastermind as a guest speaker for my friend Amber McHugh, and this was a common question among that group too. So I think it's something worthwhile to talk about here on the podcast. And that is the topic that a lot of people are wondering as coaches, creators, sellers of information, right? People who have created a living or make their living off of selling what they know. Things are looking a lot different in that industry here in 2026 with AI, with all these changes happening. And that's what I want to talk about now on this episode is what are people actually going to pay for now that information is free. So we know that anybody can open AI right now and you can ask it about anything that you teach. You could ask it about Tiny Offers and it would probably tell you quotes from me or frameworks or things that I teach, and it would be at your fingertips for free in seconds, 2:00 AM without a checkout page, right? There's the gate that we used to be able to put on what it is that we know, what we teach. That's gone. There's no gate around what it is that we do now. Like, I remember being in a room with my friend Colin Boyd, and he was sharing that he ran a 5-day challenge for his audience, and people were taking the transcriptions, they were creating their own transcriptions, they were uploading them to AI, and they were like, hey, great, this is an awesome challenge. I don't need the program anymore because I just created a framework around what you teach in the challenge by using AI. I'm just going to ask my, you know, custom GPT or the skill that I just created from your workshop, and I'm just gonna go do it on my own. So that person is no longer gonna buy a $2,000 or $3,000 program, right? Because they just got all of the information for free. So the uncomfortable question that I've been sitting with on a lot of client calls this month, last month, if information is now free, how are we gonna keep making money? Like, what are people actually going to continue paying for in this world where everything's changing so quickly, where PhD-level information is available at our fingertips. So the answer that I discovered changed how I build offers, how I coach on my clients, and honestly, it pulled me out of a pretty real crisis of confidence about this whole industry that I was feeling in the last 6 months, the last year. And that's what I'm going to be talking about On today's episode. So if we're honest about the spiral that's happened, we can see that ads are getting harder. They are significantly more expensive than they used to be. Data shows us this, right? If we look at all the different industries, if we compare just typical cost per acquisition for everybody, Meta is simply charging more for ads than they used to. So there are algorithm shifts. They have a new ad update called Andromeda that changed the way ads are even run. And there was a stretch where I genuinely questioned. If what I was teaching was still going to be useful, if Tiny Offers still mattered. And this word useful like kept popping into my head of like, is this useful? Am I still helping people or am I hurting people? So when people buy a course and they don't finish it, that little voice continues to ask like, what am I even doing? Is this even helping people? So I know the, the take of our course is dead, is online business dying. People are pivoting, you know, big, big names that we all know are shutting things down. They're changing what they're selling. And the part that I think a lot of us fear is that it's the beginning of the end, right? Courses that deliver only information, those are in trouble. And that's what I want to get deeper into on this episode, because the information layer is still free, right? The buyer can get the what to do from AI before breakfast if they want. They don't need you to teach them the thing anymore. But the part that people are not taking into account, and the part that I think is wrong, is that buyers are still spending money in this space and arguably more eagerly than they used to. It's just what has changed is where they're spending it. So the market didn't stop. They're not just not buying, but they stopped buying simply information. So when we talked about the last episode, when we talked about selling hope, when we talked about the transformation, The information piece of it is just one part of it, right? Like, I don't know about you guys, but I've got a whole ChatGPT and a whole Claude account full of ideas that I haven't implemented. And that's not really helpful when it's just information in that form. When I'm not taking action or when I'm not, you know, doing the things or putting the actual work in to use that information, I'm not any further ahead than I was before I used AI. So The ingredient of transformation that we can all double down on is how do we actually get people to implement the stuff that we're teaching, the stuff that we know? How do you get someone to truly follow a meal plan if you're in the fitness and health industry? If you're a business coach, how do you get people to get out of their own way and actually do this stuff? If you're a relationship coach, how do you actually get people to have the hard conversations? All of those things are what we're now needing to think about, what we're building, what we're selling. We're not selling just step-by-step courses and PowerPoint presentations anymore because AI can create all of that stuff. And not, you know, not even— it's not even that hard to get it to create a fairly high-quality information product. So the things that people are paying for now has rapidly shifted from a year ago, from 2 years ago, 5 years ago. So the thing that I am encouraging people to do as, you know, tiny offer creator. So this, this advice applies largely to low ticket upfront. Like what are the impulse, like stop people in their tracks, get them to pull out their credit card while they're scrolling Facebook, those types of products, right? The tiny offer products. But it does also apply to the higher ticket. Higher ticket has always been more focused on transformation, like get in the room, have a community. High ticket's always been more about that, the group coaching calls. So a lot of this information is about lead generation. It's about tiny offers. It's about how do we get people to still want to do business with us when we're starting with a low ticket product. So a story that I have about a client of mine is someone that I'm working with as a private client. Her business does, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars doing placement headhunting, helping people find the right person for the job she's been doing it manually for the last, you know, like last 20 years. I think she's been helping people find the right person to hire, and she's at a point where she knows she can be making money in a different way. She, she's, you know, looking towards the next 10, 15 years of her business, what direction she wants to build. A lot of people come to me when they're at this point, when they're a little burned out on, you know, doing it all themselves. They're— even if they have a team, you know, they're tired of one business model and they want to start making money a little bit more passively. They want to start getting customers that they are coming to them, you know, more of a, a lean out scenario where they're like, I'm here if you want my, my help, my information, here it is. So they're not always out on social media trying to pitch their stuff, always like looking for the next client. It's a much more hands-off process that allows you to continue growing. So she is creating a tiny offer on what originally was a course on how to write job ads. It was a, you know, complete multi-module, multi-lesson course on how to create job ads. And it hadn't been selling very well for a while. So what we ended up doing is taking that information, right? And building her a micro app. So her new tiny offer or, you know, tiny SaaS, if you will, tiny software as a service, tiny app, we can think about it that way because I like the word tiny. So we're building her a tiny offer that is an app. So when you buy it, you answer a few questions and it uses her framework, her methodology, her information, her, you know, AI hands, if you will, to finish their job ad. So it's her same expertise, but the win and the quick win that we focus on with these tiny offers, the quick win that we want people to get goes from watch these videos to get an answer to instead Here is your completed job ad. So another example that I have is a client that had a spreadsheet buried in her program that was gonna project revenue potential. So people could get into this spreadsheet that she had once they were inside of her, you know, like mid-ticket course, and they could get in there and they could put their numbers in and they could put in different, you know, marketing numbers and they could project what their revenue is gonna look like if they hit those numbers. So what we're able to do for her is turn that spreadsheet because You know, spreadsheets are great. I'm a total nerd and I love a spreadsheet. But with AI, you can easily turn that into an interactive calculator and a software that becomes that new front-end product. So people pay some money to be able to get in, but I always back up the software with a walkthrough from the creator. You know, it could be a video of them using it and kind of explaining it. And this is what you put inside of this form field, and this is why this number matters or why you should care about this answer, and this is what this means. So it's still feels like there's information baked in, but the transformation of the tiny SaaS that you can now build yourself, you can be a software engineer, right? Just with the help of AI, those are becoming really cool and interactive type front-end things that people are buying like crazy. The next type of offer that you can create, if it's not, you know, a tool that's gonna do the work for them, a lot of people are paying for personalized feedback and your judgments that you've gained from years of experience. So AI can, you know, tell you whatever the general best practice okay, cool. But it can't look at your specific scenario with 15 years of pattern recognition and say, this is what's wrong with your offer, here's what I've seen working best for other people in your niche, you know, other fitness coaches or other business coaches, relationship, you know, experts. It can't look at what you're doing with that expertise. It generalizes because that's what AI does, right? AI takes the average of everything. And AI also can't see the backend conversion rates for the most part. It can see the average of what it's scanning the internet and it's finding all of the different sites and it takes that and it removes the highs, it removes the lows, and we get the average. That's what it does when it writes copy. That's why AI copy doesn't have the same rhythm and flow as human written copywriting. Side note, so what you can sell instead is access to you. Now, whether that's scalable or not, you know, you could have a team member that's doing it. You could make it like a 20-minute call. You could have AI use your transcripts, your voice, your analysis of other people's offers, and you could put it into an interactive questionnaire where they're, you know, filling in their information and it spits out an audit. It's a lot easier to do things on the front end that used to be very time intensive. You know, before, if you sold a $47 Instagram audit, you would have to actually do the audit. You would have to go through their Instagram. You'd have to read all the captions, find the summaries, could take hours. So it's not, it wasn't necessarily a great front-end offer to do at a super low ticket price because it was very time intensive. But if you're someone that does a, you know, has a done-for-you service or an agency, audits and, you know, overviews and strategic what feels like one-on-one strategic feedback, you can now automate a huge chunk of that. And the cost or time to put that together is much lower than it used to be. So it can become more scalable. You can use different features of AI and analysis and, you know, put it together into a system and a flow where you can get a lot of these front-end audits done a lot more quickly. And people love those. People love a behind-the-scenes view of what you would do or change. On their business based on your expertise. I've been selling a lot of 20-minute calls because I think it's fun. I like to get on with people. I love to meet people. I love to see what they're doing in their businesses. But what I learn about my audience or the people buying these 20-minute calls is I'm starting to see a lot of patterns. I'm starting to see a lot of questions that are similar amongst the calls. And one of the things that I hear the most as the Tiny Offer person is I just, I just want your blessing. Like, I just want the green light. I just want you to look at this and I want you to tell me if it sucks, right? So I'm thinking like, oh man, like I could build a software where it takes my frameworks and it takes my like kind of my mental checklist of is this offer gonna work or not? And I could turn that into a front-end questionnaire that I sell and I can give them the green light of like, hey, you know, that offer's probably not gonna sell because it's too general. The copy is written with AI and it doesn't really grab their attention. Like I could come up with my own, you know, 25-point checklist of if I think something's gonna sell or not, and I could build something that feels like personalized feedback and judgment and sell that as a front-end offer. The next thing that people are always willing to pay for is speed and certainty. So the third thing is knowing that people will pay to skip that figuring out stage. So if there's a finished asset, a plug-and-play system, a decision that's made for them, something that's got proof behind it. Some— I, I met a woman named Leah Gervais at Social Media Marketing World this year, and we met, and I was like, what do you do for a living? And she's like, oh, I teach, I teach moms how to sell low ticket. And I was like, funny, I also teach people how to sell low ticket. And I asked her about her offers. I was like, okay, well, what are your front-end offers? Like, what are you selling right now? And she told me that her best sellers are PDFs of like kind of behind the scenes walkthroughs of her launches, her products. And then she has this PDF that she creates and she does a Loom video explaining it of like, this is why my last launch did so good. Here's the breakdown on the numbers. Here's the breakdown on the emails that I sent. So it's really just her screen sharing something that worked well for her, which think about that. Like you could apply that same framework to a test testimonial that you have or case studies. Like, people love to pay for certainty. That's why we spend thousands of dollars to get in masterminds, right? We want the behind the scenes of what's happening for other people. We want behind the scenes of, you know, this, this is why I sent this email instead of this email. This is why I put this, you know, one-time offer in this spot instead of this spot. Like, we want the dirt, we want the tea on what's working behind other businesses. So if you can sell a tiny offer that is a walkthrough or a breakdown or behind the scenes. Like, people are really loving those kinds of things too, because AI doesn't have that information either. AI can't tell, this is why I made, you know, $80,000 from this email instead of this email. AI can't break it down like that. So people are still paying for that kind of that secret curiosity of this is what works, this doesn't work. People pay for that all day. The final thing that I'm seeing work really well, which is Related to the last episode about selling hope is when someone plugs their numbers into like an interactive calculator and they can see what's possible for them. This kind of goes hand in hand with the first thing that I was talking about of creating a SaaS or creating a tool that people can use. When you can make hope tangible, that's something that people are paying for. So if the tool can show a specific or personal outcome that sells possibility, that's gonna work way better than any, you know, mini course or, you know, I used to teach tiny offers only as courses for a long time, but there's a whole new interactive component to them that is gonna be really, really important in 2026 and beyond. So let's talk a little bit more on, now that you know some different ideas or different ways to take what's maybe been working for you. I mean, it could be taking a freebie that's done really well. That's something I recommend to people a lot is like, what's a freebie that's just cross-ship for you. And how do we turn that freebie into something that's paid by either adding that interactive component or adding a behind-the-scenes walkthrough video to it. So it's no longer just like a free PDF opt-in. We've gotta bulk it up a little bit. And there's a lot of really cool ways to do that with some of the things that I have talked about so far on this podcast. So what I would do, cuz I always like to make these episodes actionable, right? I'm not just gonna throw information at you, but I want you to be able to apply it to your own offer this week. If you look at your current offer, think about asking yourself, does this do the work or does it just describe the work? So if every module, every template, every bonus, if it's only teaching, if it's only describing something, that's gonna start competing with free and it's gonna slowly stop working if it hasn't already. So if you can take your single best framework, like let's think in frameworks, methods, blueprints, like we, we need to think about those dopamine words, right? The things that Like all of my offers have that word at the end of it. It's Quick Start, Framework Blueprint. I have a whole naming tool that I can drop in the notes that you can take a look at because it always follows a framework on how to name your product so that it feels like a framework. So if you have a framework that a lot of your clients are raving about, that could become interactive. So it could be calculator, an answer generator, a quiz that outputs a personalized plan, an app that takes their inputs and hands back a finished asset for them, you already have all that information, right? You already have that IP for free. We're just repackaging what you have using an AI builder to add a new spin on it, make it interactive. And the coolest thing is that you can get this done in hours instead of months and a dev team. I used to have this thing that I called the offer wheel that I just loved because it taught people how to think about offers by adding different elements to it. So instead of just having a PDF, you've got a PDF with videos and maybe it's got a spreadsheet or a tracker of some kind. There's a free Facebook group, a Trello board, Notion template. Like there's all these ways to make a tiny offer feel like it's super valuable without making it take a ton of time to build. I always want people to go to market as fast as possible so they can get proof if it's working or not. So I created, I also created a new PDF that I'll put in the show notes about how to do this. Like how do I take my offer wheel? And apply it to 2026 with AI. How, what are all the new ways that you can use AI to bulk up your offers so that they feel like they're worth, you know, more than free by selling them for a low ticket amount, making that feel like it's worth the person going to get their credit card and buying your product because it's got these different AI elements in it as well. So I'll drop that in the notes and you can see, you know, how I've adapted my offer wheel. To apply to, you know, business in 2026. So the opportunity that a lot of people are not talking about is that a lot of these tools are about to sit there and like, I've talked to a lot of people who are doing what they're calling vibe coding, right? They're creating these softwares, they're building these really amazing solutions for people, but they're not marketing them. They're, they're just sitting there invisible because the builders don't know how to sell them. So there's a lot of people out there, if you're not comfortable with AI, start looking at people who are in these vibe coding groups and see what tools they have. And then you can learn, you know, see where it fits in with your expertise and maybe you partner with them to sell as a low ticket that comes, you know, brings people into your coaching world. So the real world proof that this is working is that this is the shift people are starting to go through in all sorts of different industries. So a lot of creators are also launching low ticket communities. I'm doing it myself with my $33 a month offer. I've got a community that's going to feed into my own micro software tools. And I've watched marketer, one marketer go from a $7 community to her own AI ad creation app. That is, she's bringing people in with this idea of her community. It's $7, right? And then she also has an app that she's marketing that is software. Service. I think it starts at $47 a month up to $97 a month, and it's just a software that she's selling that is useful. It's something that her audience needs, and it helps people create ad creative. It's using AI to help them create massive amounts of ad creative because that's, you know, something that we need with the Andromeda update. We all need more creative. So a lot of the biggest names in funnels and community building and selling low ticket online, they're starting to not just sell what they know, but they're getting people into an app that they've built. They're getting people into these micro communities just to start collecting their buyers all in one place. And this is the direction that the whole industry is going. And the cool thing is that us small creators, we can move faster than a lot of other people because we don't have, you know, we're not like trying to get an entire ship to pivot. We're not trying to turn the Titanic. You can build one tiny tool, add it onto your sack, and start seeing how those those little payments add up. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of people moving in that direction. So to recap, information is free. We all know that. But what we need to be focusing on is transformation tools, real feedback, speed, and the hope that your buyers are going to continue paying for. Your job is to continue moving your expertise up that ladder and using your existing frameworks as the raw material for what you're building. You can get on ChatGPT, you can get on Claude, you can start sharing these ideas and asking, how would I add an app? How would I build a software? How would I start selling something that is not just information, it's more interactive? And that is the work that I want you to do after this podcast. So this week, write down your best frameworks and think about one way that you could build it into a tool instead of just a lesson that somebody's going to watch. How do you make it interactive? How do you make it something completely immersive that your audience can log in. They can get a result in that moment because people just are not wanting to buy courses anymore when they can get the information in a completely different way and it's at their fingertips. So I'm gonna drop those links that I talked about in the chat so that you are not— not in the chat, there's no chat— in the show notes so you can get access to those. And if you're interested in joining my community where we're talking about things like this, I have The Tiny Offer HQ, it starts with a 7-day free trial and then it goes to $33 a month. If you wanna jump in and get weekly coaching from me, that's $287 a month. If you want a one-on-one Zoom call with me to help scale your business, you can get access to that level of the school membership for $14.97 a month. So I'm loving the conversations that we've been having on this podcast. If you wanna leave me a review, if you wanna send me a DM and tell me like, hey Allie, I would love if you talk about this on the podcast, let me know. I have people sending me ideas all the time, and I love them because, hey, who doesn't love a content idea, right? Amazing. All right, I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for listening. I love you all, and have a fantastic rest of your day.