How to build a profitable digital product (in 7 steps)

“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company. Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.” – Sam Altman

The future of entrepreneurship is micro-entrepreneurship.

One founder, with a laptop, an audience, an army of robots at their disposal, and a high-value skill stack to help them solve meaningful problems in society, making $100k-$1M/year.

No boss. No calls. No employees.

Ultimate freedom, fulfillment, and meaning.

“There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies.” - Naval

It took humans centuries to get here, but we’re now living in the most leveraged time and the opportunities are infinite.

We now live in the most interesting time of all of history.

You no longer need to spend 4 years and go into hundreds of dollars in student debt to get a degree to learn a new skill.

AI leveled the playing field.

You have the world’s smartest, most talented, most hard-working employee.

Average people are now vibe coding multi-million dollar startups with no coding or programming experience.

With the combination of the internet, AI, and digital products, anyone can now build a profitable one-person business.

I’ve seen many people pull this off. Justin Welsh and Dan Koe are some of the most prominent creators who are making $3M-$5M per year as one-person businesses.

I am someone who has scaled my own one-person business to making 6 figures every year.

How is this possible now?

1) Real risk does not exist

Humans have done a tremendous job at eliminating any real physical threats.

You don’t go walking around scared if a tiger jumps at you.

We either subjugated, domesticated, or killed every other species on this planet.

The riskiest thing you can do is that you lose $500.

Or you leave your job to start a business and your business fails. But if it comes to that, you can always just get another job and you’ve solved your problem.

If you’re not going to die, then it’s not that risky.

2) Abundance of opportunity

I don’t want to make this entire newsletter about AI, but you need to understand that the world we live in is completely different.

We never had such an abundance of opportunities in our hands.

Every unfulfilled human desire we have is a problem that can be solved with a new business or product.

And the cool thing is human desires are infinite. Every person has their own unique quirks and interests which means the number of products we can build is infinite.

Every problem that exists in society is an opportunity to start a business.

Businesses solve society’s problems. It’s how you create, contribute, and distribute your value to the world.

3) Leverage

Humans are now the most leveraged they’ve ever been in human history.

One person can do the same work that took a team of 2 senior engineers, 1 product designer, 5 marketers, and 1 manager all by himself using nothing but a laptop, AI, and no-code tools.

You are now leveraged out of your mind.

You have AI that can code any app you want. You have no-code tools that help you automate your work. Digital products that have no marginal cost and instant delivery (which means high profit margins). You go to social media to attract an audience, get your work seen by others, and get customers for your business.

All of these 3 factors (and more) have helped us reach a point where you can build a profitable one-person business using nothing but a laptop, your unique set of interests and skills, and an audience of like-minded people.

Here’s how you can make your first digital product (as a beginner):

I - How to create a simple (yet hyper-profitable) digital product

“Smart people get paid to be themselves” - Alan Watts

There is a big stigma when it comes to courses.

When most people hear the word “course” they immediately think of a business guru who’s trying to scam you.

But that’s not my experience with them.

I bought courses that genuinely changed my life.

Spending $150 on a course to learn a high-value skill is much more affordable than a normal university course.

Most people can’t see their value because they’re still operating with society’s programming.

In universities, you have professors who have no real-world experience, teaching you theory, and you are tested on your memory.

But with courses, it’s different.

It’s taught by creators who have skin in the game. You learn practical skills (fast), you build real-world projects, launch them, and let free markets decide.

As a result, you gain high-value skills, real-world experience, and make a living while doing so.

The only problem with courses?

Courses are static.

You’re left to figure out how to implement the steps to your unique situation yourself. You can’t speak to the creator directly and ask for feedback.

But with AI, this is now different.

As a creator, you can now have AI-guided courses to help your customers implement your lessons.

The AI is trained on your knowledge, has your frameworks, and your voice. This increases the value of your product and helps people extract more value from your product.

Here’s how you can create your own digital product and make your first $10,000 (I made $150,000 in the past 1.5 years using this process):

1) Sell your sawdust

You have a $100,000 digital product stuck in your head.

Or in your hard drive.

Or in your workspace.

The easiest product you can sell is the one you’re already using (but aren’t aware of).

The creator economy is simply a system’s economy.

Everyone has their own unique systems and processes to achieve a certain outcome.

• If you’re a music producer, you have your own drum kit.
• If you’re an editor, you have your own set of light presets that you use.
• If you’re an email marketer, you have your own unique way of writing an email.
• If you’re a writer, you have your own way of finding ideas and introducing novel perspectives.
• If you’re an athlete, you have your own pre-game routine that helps you get in the zone.
• If you’re into finance, you might have your own way of budgeting, investing, and keeping track of all your expenses.

All of these are examples of products that you can now create and sell.

The cool part?

They already exist.

For me at least, because I write so many actionable newsletters, run cohorts, and create lessons for my clients, I already have them exist in my Eden Workspace.

This is an example of some lessons about branding that I created when delivering my cohort.

Then all you need to do is click on that board and turn it into a product that has AI built into it to help your customers implement your lessons.

And if you’ve got other lessons in other boards, you can easily add them to your product.

2) Create your Dream Customer

To sell your product, you need to know who you’ll sell it to.

Spoiler: Your product isn’t for everyone.

If you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one.

You need to be comfortable with the fact that not everyone will buy your product.

You need a Customer Avatar.

Even when you try to “sell to your previous self”, as many people tell you to do, you still need a Dream Customer Avatar.

Because there are multiple different versions of you.

I’ll use myself as an example here.

• 4 years ago I was a broke college student.
• 3 years ago I struggled to build an audience.
• 2 years ago I was a ghostwriter making $4,000/month, but I hated it.
• Last year, I had an offer, but sales were inconsistent.

Each of those versions of myself had a different problem, a different skill set, and a different level of what kind of products they were able to buy.

3) Write your promise

Specificity sells.

I see far too many creators try to hide behind vague promises because they’re too scared to deliver on their promise.

But the truth is, if your promise is vague, fewer people will buy it.

At first, you’d think it’s counterintuitive, but it’s not.

Think about this for a second.

Let’s say you’re trying to plan a trip and you have 2 options.

Option 1) A $1,000 mystery trip.

It could be the best trip of your life, or it could be the worst trip where you go to an underdeveloped country, a 1-star hotel, with the worst airlines possible, the food is horrible, and there are no hot showers.

Every bad outcome you can think of is there.

There is nothing good about it.

Or...

Option 2) a $10,000 trip.

You’re going to your favorite country. The best airlines possible. A 5-star hotel. The best restaurants. Transportation is handled.

You don’t need to think while you’re on that trip because everything has been taken care of for you before you even step out of the door and you know exactly what’s happening at every hour.

Which ticket do you think will sell more?

The second one.

The reason is simple. It’s specific and it reduces uncertainty.

That’s what your promise should do.

It gives people certainty of what they’ll buy.

Don’t write “Grow an audience”. It’s too vague.

A better promise is something like this: “Grow by 1,000 followers per month using the MAGNET framework”.

I’m awful when it comes to coming up with names for frameworks. But you get the idea.

Here’s a formula you can use:

The Promise Formula: “Helping [WHO] go from [HELL] to [HEAVEN] so they can [BENEFIT(s)]”

This is an example of a promise from a cohort I bought last year:

Example: “Turn your knowledge into a quality product to unlock more freedom & impact in your business”

4) Create your curriculum

Your curriculum is the steps your customers are going to take to achieve the transformation.

The problem with courses is that they’re static.

If the person who bought gets stuck on a concept, or tries to apply what is being taught, they can’t get feedback.

It’s not like you can ask the creator and they’ll respond.

But with Eden, you can add your knowledge to it and have an AI version of yourself teaching people the course.

This does 2 things:

1. It increases the perceived value of your products. Because now you have an AI component to it.
2. It helps your buyers to apply what is being taught properly. So they get better results. Which means better testimonials for you. Which means you can get more buyers (because your product works).

So how do you create your curriculum?

Go back to your promise and ask yourself:

• What are the 3-5 major milestones your customer needs to reach to achieve the transformation? These will be your course modules.
• For each major milestone, what are the 3-5 action steps they need to take to achieve it? These will be your module lessons.

Here’s an example of myself:

Important note:

There is a fine line between overdelivering and overwhelming your customers.

You overdeliver when you deliver on your promise and nothing more.

You overwhelm when you do too much.

5) Become your own case study

Contrary to popular belief:

You can skip the free client work if you can get yourself great results.

When I started ghostwriting, I didn’t have any prior experience.

I didn’t have a wall of testimonials of people going viral.

I just had my posts. But because I was able to make myself go viral, I can promise people that I’ll write them similar posts.

This is harder?

Not really.

Because the idea of doing free client work is to show competence. That you can actually deliver on the promise.

So if you can deliver great results for yourself consistently, then people will pay to learn from you.

Be so good at what you do that people can't help but pay to learn from you.

6) Write your sales page

Writing a sales page is relatively easy once you have done the previous steps.

And no, you don’t need to be a professional copywriter to write a good sales page.

You just need the right structure and AI by your side.

I’m still learning about copywriting. Everything I learned when it comes to sales copy, I learned directly from writers who made $10M-$50M writing copy.

Now, there are many different structures you can use, but here’s how I structure my pages and offers:

In Eden, it’s very simple to create a sales page.

Most of this is already taken care of for you and you just need to write and fill in the different sections.

1) The Promise

The promise is the transformation that your customers will get after buying your product.

The most common place you’ll see it is in the headline and subheadline. They both condense the value of your product and the transformation.

I’d go so far as to say that your headline and subheadline are the two most important pieces of your sales copy.

This is what I had for my newsletter course:

Good headlines sell the outcome. Not the product itself.

In the subheadline, that’s where you add the other parts.

• The timeframe
• The unique mechanism
• Numbers & social proof

Since I didn’t have a name for the method I use to write my newsletter, I just didn’t mention the unique mechanism.

2) The Problem

Traditional copywriters call this section “The Lead”.

I won’t act like I’m a copywriter, so I’ll just take their word for it.

But a problem I see most people make when it comes to this section is they state the problem, then they write “Keep reading if you’re...” then throw a ton of bullet points hoping that something will stick.

Don’t do this.

It just screams that you don’t know who your Customer Avatar is and you’re hoping that someone buys your product.

Be specific. Call out your Customer Avatar’s problem and make them a promise.

That’s all what you need to do.

Don’t overcomplicate it.

3) The Process

Here, your goal is to show people why your way of doing things is different from everyone else and why your way of doing things is better.

You can lead with your story and show people how you came to your solution.

Let’s say you’re selling a LUT pack for the average Instagram user who just wants to upload high-quality images to their feed.

You can write about how you wanted to upload high-quality images to your Instagram feed but every course or tutorial you watched just made the process more complicated.

Then you learned how to use editing apps (like Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom), but you hated how you always had to start from scratch.

So you created your LUT pack presets to help you quickly edit photos and make them look cinematic without going through the hassle of learning editing apps and using nothing but your iPhone.

If you can add an illustration to breakdown the process is even better.

4) Features + Benefits

This is very straightforward.

You will tell people what’s inside your product.

The easiest way to do this is to write bullet points for each module.

To write effective bullet points, say what they’ll learn + the benefit.

It helps to think of it as the opposite of pain points.

5) Proof

This depends on where you are.

If you have social proof, use it. If not, you can use yourself as a case study.

That’s what I did with my last cohort. It was the first time that I launched a product that was focused on Substack

But because I used myself as a case study, I sold all 20 spots.

If you don’t have proof, go generate some.

Either for yourself or for others.

6) Price

Pretty straightforward.

Mention the price of your product.

7) Guarantee & Refunds

If you’ve got a guarantee, write it.

A guarantee helps make your offer easy to buy. It’s extremely rare to have someone come to you asking for a refund.

I have 200+ customers and made $100,000+ in revenue, and during that time I only had 2 people asking for a refund.

A guarantee just shows you’re confident about your product.

8) Call To Action

At this point you’ve walked people through the entire sales page.

The only thing you need to do is write a quick recap.

• Restate the promise
• Show proof
• Mention the price
• Cost of not taking action (hell)
• Cost of taking action (heaven??)

Lastly, you can have a price card where you again mention everything that’s included with the price.

Price card looks something like this:

Again, with Eden, this is pretty simple. You don’t need to code. You just write what you want to be included and it’ll do the work for you.

9) FAQ

Most people skim your sales page and immediately go to your FAQ to get the gist of it.

Some questions to answer:

• What is the product? → Sum up the offer one more time
• Who is this for? → Describe your Customer Avatar
• When can they expect results? → Set expectations
• Objection 1 → Answer the objection
• Objection 2 → Answer the objection
• Objection 3 → Answer the objection
• What if they don’t get results? → Refund policy

Then finish off with one more buy button.

7) Send traffic

If you’re not making the monthly revenue you want, then you need more traffic.

The biggest mistake I see creators make is that they create a product and think that people will magically find their products.

Spoiler: They won’t.

You need to deliberately send traffic to your product.

More traffic = more sales.

So how do you increase traffic?

2 ways:

1) Increasing the frequency of your promotions

The cool thing about this is you don’t need to change anything.

You don’t need to change your offer, your content strategy, your funnel, or anything.

All you’re going to do is increase the frequency of your promotions.

You need to always remind people that you’re selling something.

Drill this in your head:Sales don’t come out of thin air

You need to be intentional with how you direct people.

You need to be clear on what products you have, what they need to do, how they can buy them, and when to buy them.

The chances of someone clicking on the link in your bio and buying from is astronomically small.

2) Creating more content

Creating more content gives you more in-between moments where you can promote your products.

This sounds obvious, but the more content you create, the more opportunities you’ll have for CTAs.

If you only post 7x a week, a weekly promotion post becomes 14% of your content.

People will get sick if you promote a product every time you post.

But if you’re posting 90x a month (which is 3 posts a day), and 4 of your posts are promotional posts, that’s only 4% of your monthly content as promotions.

More content = more opportunity to sell (without being annoying)

You can still provide value, create content you love, and build an audience, but you also get to make more sales because you simply have more CTAs in your content.

Promote your products like you’d promote a sponsorship.

That’s all for today.

Thank you for reading.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Hussain

P.S.

The tool I was showing you is called Eden.

It’s the software I’ve been using for all of my writing, content creation, digital products, and coaching.

If you’re serious about starting and building a one-person business, you need to get Eden.

You can get started today for free.