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 ghostwriting Academy, and our paid newsletter, right with AI. It also includes some sporadic just pops, other products that we launch throughout the year. Like, for example, we did a webinar when ChatGPT 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. 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 crossed $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 mega category of E learning or, you know, when someone says I have a course, 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 Dickie and I, we started ship 30 for 30 in 2021. And in 2021 we only had ship 30. And then over 2022 and then 2023, we started to explore building our premium ghostwriting 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 and for context, I have written and rewritten probably several million words worth of emails, curriculum, social content, landing pages, upsell 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 gonna 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 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, 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 are more familiar with things, things like how do I sell a tangible good, how do I sell a SaaS 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 ghostwriting agency. Services scaled that to a couple million in revenue. But over the years I've also done tons of ghostwriting or sales copywriting for hundreds of different companies and startups. So I've gotten to see inside their businesses and, 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 SaaS 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 multimillion dollar info business over the next four years, but you are going to have to write 3 million words. And again, I didn't know that in the beginning. So it just, it a lot goes into it. 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 haven't read it, you should grab 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 it's a, it's a naive thought 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 Ferriss said in the four hour workweek. Right? 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 a couple months, maybe a year, but eventually it's going to fall off a cliff because it's just 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 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 products 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 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 diff. That is very different than someone going, 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 or selling a monthly membership is the same as a paid newsletter. It's very easy to look at all of 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 customers, we've already been 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 just create a very simple eight module text based course, you can't go charge ten grand for that. And if you do, you're either gonna get a lot of refund requests or you're gonna 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 cohort of ship 30 for 30 was essentially free. It cost you 50 bucks to do it. But if you wrote all 30 days, you got the 50 bucks. Back then when we were like, okay, we can actually charge for this. People are getting a lot of value out of it. We charge like a hundred bucks, and then the next car we charged 150 bucks. And then the next cohort, we charge 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 upsells after ship 30. 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 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 decision starts to change. When it's below 350, it's still the same purchase decision. Like a lot of people, if you were to see a course that very clearly promised to solve a specific 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 buys the product. And what we've seen in the data is, is that people who buy, especially afterwards when we would do 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 and 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 buy, 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 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 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 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 an online course from the tier 1350 and below to tier 2350 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, 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 going 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 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 $10,000 and above and above ten grand is where you start getting into Masterminds typically. And that's usually a very different purchase 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 ten 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 product that is above the thousand dollar threshold, so you're above tier 2, but you're not quite tier 3. That is not a great place to be. So if you're charging 1,500 bucks or 2 grand or 2,500, right. You're not quite tier 2, but you're also probably not including all of the, all of the other things, the next things you're going to need to be seen as Tier 3. 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, 1500, 2 grand, 2,500 range. Because what you would rather do is instead of having an overpriced tier 2, right? So say you had a cohort based course, but you charge two grand for it, you would be an overpriced tier two digital product or program. And instead it's a lot better to aim higher and go, how can I add more here to make this tier 3 and the difference between tier 2 and tier 3? So as soon as you get up into, you know, charging three grand or above, with a hypothetical ceiling of around 10 grand, as 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 most importantly, there usually there are exceptions to the rule, but there usually has to be a price anchoring to, 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 5. 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 monetize those frameworks. I want to put them out into the world. I want to share how I think about them, this problem and how I solve it and the different action steps that I would take and how I would walk someone through it. 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, maybe 50 bucks for a super ding dong hardcover. 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 and 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, ten times more. And as this has started to click for me, it's made me realize that books are really only good for either 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 nonfiction. And then the other category of nonfiction is that's entertaining, right? So think of like the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. It's a great example, very entertaining. But you don't really read 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. 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, we are in all these group chats with all of these digital different creators and we're always sharing ideas. And 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 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. And because first of all, if you truly believed that your products could help people, you would pitch the absolute shit 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. I will save you the six painful years I spent trying to figure this out on my own. 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 outcome that you want is you either want someone to subscribe and, and then go deeper into your ecosystem, become a customer, become part of what you're building, right? Or unsubscribe, go away, 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 really is a pointless metric to pay attention to the other reason. 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 X, Y, Z. No one wants to learn, right? It's like saying, I will, you know, we're going to go to the gym. And I 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. So no one actually wants to learn or consume your 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 what that is on their own. And so again, I see a lot of creators make this mistake where they, they make 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 an investment in themselves. Lesson number seven, monthly memberships are probably the next most inefficient vehicle for monetizing your knowledge. And this one is tough. There's a lot of nuance here because, you know, for example, I'm a huge Hormozi 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 Dickey puts this, which is, 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. Like, imagine I had this set up. I have, I have a school and I'm like, when you join this school, it's a hundred 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 hundred bucks, you now have access to all of them. And now your bottleneck is, well, now I gotta go through all of these, right? And so the faulty belief that the creator has is they think, Well, I have 10 courses in there. Someone's going to 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 hundred 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 change the business model. You just almost doubled your revenue. Right. And so 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 or. Right. 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 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 buy 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. The recurring revenue, to be honest, is not. It didn't feel really any better than us selling the one off programs and products, especially because those were ever like we had set it up, those are evergreen. So I don't think that it's worth it personally. But sometimes you have to learn this lesson the hard way. Lesson eight, this is a really, this is a more advanced one. But the broader your front end product, the harder it will be to build a high converting backend product. So what that means, need to re up on some coffee. What that means is if your front end 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 back end. 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 create an offer, a backend offer that speaks to each of those individual people with resonance. 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 were 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 ghostwriting. And all we are going to do is show you how to build five day educational email courses, ghostwrite them and sell them as a premium asset. That is it. And in the beginning, it felt painful because of how specific that was. First of all, PGA outgrew ship 30x5x. 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? How do you build yourself into a one person agency? You're a one person agency. How do you start hiring? How do you build a small boutique ghostwriting agency? Right. All of the backend offers just write themselves because the front end is so specific. So again, 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 wish we would have known earlier in the journey. Lesson 9 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 in 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 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 nonfiction 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. 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 these extremes. They either go 100% actionable, zero belief, and 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 Tony Robbins 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, 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 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 gonna come up. A lot of objections are gonna 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 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 gonna 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 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 have everything I need to be successful here now. And then, just a couple final thoughts. Those are the big lessons. I'm excited. 10 million in lifetime sales is amazing. My personal goal is I'd like to see 100. So we'll see when we get there. 100 million in lifetime digital product sales would be epic. But a couple just final thoughts. In the world of info, 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, 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 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. It doesn't necessarily mean that your customers are unhappy and they hate you or your product is terrible. 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 been a big thing for me over these past few years is just really internalizing that. 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 you enjoyed this. Just, you know, some. Some final comments. This is a new series that I'm gonna experiment with. I'm in my new home office. I just moved to Arizona. Really excited about it. Still have some work to do. It's a little echoey in here, so I gotta soundproof it. 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. It's been going well. I want to experiment more with it, but really the biggest feedback that I've gotten is people just want to hear me riff about writing, you know. So my goal with this podcast and this video podcast on YouTube, Coffee with Cole, 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. This is where I can do that at scale. So as many times as I feel inspired and 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. Could be business updates, could be where I see the digital writing world going, ghostwriting, self publishing. And I'm also really open to questions. So if you have any specific questions, please drop it as a comment. Send me an email. Send me a dm. This is my vehicle to have coffee at scale. So I'm really excited about it. I hope these 10 lessons selling $10 million worth of digital products was helpful. And I will see you in the next episode.