In this live coaching session, Nicolas Cole explains why sharing detailed, high‑value content for free is a strategic move rather than a loss. He argues that potential clients need to see concrete value before they’ll hire you, but simply giving them a full solution isn’t enough because they lack the time, skills, and capacity to implement it flawlessly. Cole outlines three core client constraints—time, expertise, and error‑proneness—and shows how an information product (low‑ticket digital product) serves two purposes: (1) it monetizes the education itself, and (2) it educates prospects about the difficulty of execution, prompting them to hire the creator for implementation. He backs this up with a personal anecdote about landing a multi‑seven‑figure consulting deal after giving a CEO a free, detailed strategy. Cole then discusses pricing flexibility, emphasizing that any digital product can sit at any price point; the key is matching the product’s scope to the price container. He advises creators to break large, vague outcomes into smaller, isolated problems that can be fully delivered within the chosen price tier, using examples of $99 one‑pager products versus $350 multi‑module courses. The session ends with a call‑to‑action for a free masterclass on online writing.
Chapters
A lot of people think that if I give away too much, then the negative thing that happens is that the person won't wanna work with me. But it's important to, okay, so if that's one extreme, take the other extreme, which is if I don't tell the person anything, will they wanna work with me? So we know that's not true, right? Like we know, okay, we have to tell them something 'cause otherwise how are they gonna know that we're gonna be able to help them, right? So then like as you start notching your way to the other side of the spectrum, you start to realize that it really doesn't matter how much you tell them, they are still gonna have the same fundamental problems, which is one, this assumes they have the time to do it.
Mm-hmm.
So great, you tell a business owner, "Here's exactly what you need to do." Well, how much time does it take you to do all those things? Right, probably, I guarantee you don't do all of it in like 20 minutes, right? It's a whole project. Takes hours and hours and hours of work. Do you think that the business owner's gonna sit there and go, "Yeah, I'm gonna give up time with my family and I'm gonna wake up 2 hours early every morning at 4:00 AM and I'm just gonna do this myself." No, of course not, right? This also assumes they have someone on their team who knows how to do it. That is also usually not true. So they can say, "Oh, well, I'll just have someone internally do it." All right, well, yeah, you might have a person, but that assumes that that person has some of those foundational skills. Like if you think about how much time and effort and energy you have invested in learning how to create good offers. Have they done that? Maybe, probably not, right? How many hours has it taken you to become proficient in kit? Are they proficient in kit? Probably not. You start going down the list and you realize, okay, well actually I've built a lot of specific skills here that the average person doesn't have. And that's not to say that they can't learn, but then, then if the client goes, "Well, this person on my team can just learn how to do it themselves." Okay, this assumes that this person has time. Do they have nothing else going on? Of course not.
Mm-hmm.
They're currently being employed to do lots of other things. Which means one of two things will happen. Either they will prioritize this new thing, which deprioritizes an existing thing or things inside of the business, or they don't prioritize this new thing, which means it never gets built.
Okay. Right?
Okay.
Yeah.
And then the third thing is this assumes whether it's the business owner or an employee that they will do it correctly. Okay, great. So they have the time, they make the time, they have some basic skills, whatever. But this assumes that they will make zero mistakes. So the first time they set up an email automation, it works perfectly. The first time they write a 5-day educational email course, they executed all the fundamentals. Do you think that that's gonna happen?
No. No, no, okay.
And so when, it's not until you walk through the logic of this that you realize what does an info product actually do? An info product basically pays you to educate them about how hard this will be. That's what an infoproduct does.
Well, never thought about it that way. Okay, that's nice.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah. And just so you know, just real quick side story, this is true at every level. The largest consulting deal I've ever landed in my life like multiple 7 figures, stock options, cash, the whole thing, a massive deal, came on the back of— I went to lunch with the CEO. He's the CEO of a publicly traded company. I went to lunch with him, and I told him the entire strategy of what I thought he should do. Wow. For free. He didn't even pay me yet. I sat down, I had lunch, and I said, "Here is exactly what I think you should do." And at the end of the lunch, he looked at me and he said, "Why did you just tell me all of that for free? Like, you should be charging for this." And I sat there and I said, "Because I know that even if I tell you to do all of these things, you are going to have follow-up questions and you are going to want my help implementing them." And we left the lunch, and 2 days later, he sent over the contract and he was like, I will pay you a stupid amount of money to help me. I already told him the answer. And so this, like, this is one of the biggest faulty beliefs in all of business is like, you have to, you have to remember that education is required in order for someone to take the next action. And some, some group of people, you 20%, even if it's 50%, even if it's 80% of people who buy your low-ticket digital product, they might do it themselves. That's fine, 'cause you got paid on it, right? But 20% of them will go, "You know what? I didn't know. I'm now educated. I didn't know that doing this involved so much work. I'd rather just skip to the end. I'd rather just pay you to do it for me." Mm-hmm. That's ultimately like the double dip on the info products is you're either getting paid to give away the information or you're getting paid to educate the person on how hard it is and then they end up hiring you anyways.
Yeah, yeah, okay, I got it now. Thank you so much because it was a great reframe for me as well to think about the low-ticket product this way. One follow-up question I have is, I don't know exactly what you have in store for us in the remainder of the low-ticket sprint, but do you think that putting the full framework for actually writing an EEC in a $99 product, is it too much? Or should I— because I know that we are going to end up with a $350 or something like that dollar as digital product, do you think that giving away that much of a process of a framework for my niche would be more suited for a higher ticket? Because then, yeah, it's kind of a different question. So we can also tackle that another time if we have other people.
No, it's a good question. So here's, I wanna say back the question for you and for everyone, because this is a really important nuanced piece of the puzzle, which is what you're asking me is, Cole, is my idea for a product too valuable or too big for this price point and should I charge more for it? And that's, to me, that's actually the wrong way of looking at it because the truth, and we talked about this on one of the previous live sessions, is the truth is that any digital product, period, can really sit at any price point.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Like, 2 years ago, Dickie and I signed up for a really advanced mastermind that was really focused around sales. It cost $68,000. It was not cheap.
Not cheap.
$68,000. And a lot of the materials inside of that could have very easily been a $350 digital product. It's like, okay, we signed up for this mastermind and we get all these different Google Docs and all these different playbooks and things like that. Could the person have just broken them out and sold them as $350 digital products?
Yeah, definitely.
Could the person have taken all of them and put them inside of a $99 school community? Yeah, definitely. A lot of it is just subjective choice. Now we got lots of other things in addition. It's not like we paid $68,000 and just got Google Docs, right? We got—
Right.
We got like a coach to talk to and we got to go to in-person events and there was all sorts of other stuff. But my point is the challenge with digital products or info products is that they really can be whatever you want them to be. You could give it away for free. You could use that, you could give away a ton for free and give that as just a lead magnet. So it's a very subjective decision.
Okay.
The more helpful way of looking at it is not, you know, oh, is this thing that I'm explaining so important or so valuable that I should charge more for it? That's not the way I would think about it. The way I would think about it is at this price point and in the container of this price point, so like $99, it's a one-pager.— so it's an advanced one-pager, it's a handful of templates, right? The question to ask is, can I successfully deliver on the thing that I am promising in that size of a container? Like, do you really think if someone has zero knowledge that you could walk them through how to write and set up and automate and create an entire EC, for example?
Yeah.
In a one-pager?
Okay.
Probably not, right?
Absolutely not, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because it's too many things. You're like, "Oh, well, you gotta know this thing and you gotta build this skill and you gotta do—" right? And then even as like a $350 digital product, it's like, could you do that maybe over more modules? Maybe. But there's a reason why in PGA we focus on building EECs because it's not just— it's actually a big thing. Right? It's not just the information. It's also like, and you're gonna have these questions and you might need tech support as you do this and you're not gonna know how to connect this platform to that platform. And like, there's a reason why we pair that information with a coaching component because it involves more, right? So when you're thinking about digital products, you wanna think like, what is a smaller isolated problem that I could help someone with? You know, and so if you want it to be ghostwriting, it's like, what is a smaller problem that you can 100% deliver on inside of the size of that $99 digital product?
Yeah, then I think I need to rethink a little bit the structure of my digital product because it's definitely trying to do too many things right now. So I'll go back to the drawing board and, you know, Try to resize it a little bit, but this was really, really helpful. Thank you so much, Cole.
Good.
Yeah. Keep you posted.
Do, yeah, take a second pass and then bring it back and let's workshop it.
For sure, I will do that. See you next Monday then.
All right, thanks Giovanni. Yeah, and by the way, just so everyone knows, this is the problem that everyone makes. Like, especially with digital products at any price point, at any size, almost always the core problem that I see is that people lean toward really big, and then as a result, really vague problems or really big, really vague outcomes. And it's a skill to sort of rewire your brain to think, let me focus on smaller isolated problems. Real quick, if you wanna write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com. This is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work, and little growth hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass, and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online. Thank you.
