In November 2022, I sold my first digital product, the launch email sequence. I sold it the first time I posted on LinkedIn — it was $10 back then. One post = one sale.
Better yet, my LinkedIn audience at the time was mostly made up of former college colleagues and work colleagues. Cool, right?
This is just the beginning of the story, though. I’ll tell you the rest after we welcome today’s partner:
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Now about that product I sold so “easily”: I still remember the name of the person who bought it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
I was elated for days even though this was not my first rodeo.
Before that, I had made multiple six figures through my agency. Still, that $10 changed everything for me. It was my first digital product and IT SOLD.
I was hooked.
Hooked on how easy it seemed to sell digital products. The client bought it and, unlike in services, I had nothing more to do.
Not hooked enough to kill my agency, though.
I know that selling something, anything, the first time you try sounds like a smashing success story, especially given the size of my audience back then.
But here’s the full story: it took me 2 months to make another sale! 60 damn days.
Now, I’m good with personal finances but even I can’t stretch $10 for that long.
Digital products are the dream because we think we don’t work for the sale. It can happen while we sleep and that’s a powerful motivator. In all honesty, I love this part too.
I make sales while I sleep (gotta love different time zones for this), while I’m at the gym, eating, or doing anything other than selling or fulfilling the order.
However, the fact that we don’t work for these sales is a myth. It took me more than a year to sell enough email sequences to offset the time I invested in putting it together, writing the landing page, and promoting it.
That’s OK because this tiny product was never supposed to buy me a yacht.
But you can’t survive on this.
Everyone’s in a rush to sell products, not services these days
I get it. Truly.
You want to record a course or create a PDF and sell it (almost) automatically.
There are a lot of courses and programs (the irony!) on how to get passive income with info products. They used to work up until mid-2022 or so.
Not anymore.
I wrote about why the haste to productize stuff is a mistake here.
The TL;DR: in services, the bulk of the work happens after the sale — you work to deliver the service. In products, the bulk of the work happens before — it’s getting harder and harder to sell on-demand products, so you need to work extra hard at it.
Much as people seem to hate services, they’re still the fastest way to generate significant revenue — in any industry and any setup
People will always (always!) pay more and more easily to have someone else fix the problem for them rather than to learn how to fix it themselves.
So if you need a cash influx NOW, your safest bet is a service, not a product.
Exception: you have a large audience (over 100K engaged members with a history of purchasing from you).
One of the best things about services is that you don’t really need anything to get started. Sure, having a website helps, social proof helps even more.
However, while you build these, you can easily strike up conversations on social media for exactly $0.
Better yet, providing services for a while helps you build better products.
This is such an underrated benefit service providers have! When you work closely with a client, even if it’s just for a month or so, you get to have many in-depth conversations.
You get to learn more about their pain points than any poll or survey can tell you.
For example:
- If you’re a fitness coach, your clients might tell you they also struggle with nutrition → you can sell them personalized nutrition plans or a course on how to build their own.
- If you’re an email copywriter, your clients might tell you they also struggle with email automation → you can sell them a course, a cheat sheet, or a new service.
- If you’re a social media expert, your clients might tell you they struggle with audience growth → you can sell them a course or another info product on this topic.
These examples only mention cross-selling opportunities. When you work 1:1 with clients, you will also uncover which services can be productized and which cannot, something even more valuable.
If you’re struggling with selling products, I have a handy way for you to figure out what is your best bet right now.
What’s selling these days?
Let’s say you’re a social media expert whose promise it to help clients build a relevant audience on social media. Assuming the price is the same for all of the formats below (this never happens, I know, but bear with me), this is what your audience is most likely to buy:
There’s nothing definitive about this and, of course, there are hundreds of exceptions. But this is what you can sell, rank from easiest to hardest.
Why doesn’t everyone just buy services, you ask? Well, for two reasons:
- Some people truly want to learn to do stuff on their own
- Services are more expensive than anything else
In fact, you’ll see a three-pronged relationship in this pyramid: the lower you go down the pyramid, the cheaper the products are AND the less involved you are.
Time is the scarcest resource so this is perfectly normal.
Plus, you can only take on so many clients that you serve directly.
Should you kill your products and just sell services? Absolutely NOT!
The pyramid above lies on the (wrong!) assumption that everything is priced the same way.
Having a series of products and productized services in your offer stack helps you reach people who either don’t have the budget to hire you or want to learn how to DIY things.
Plus, they’re an excellent chance to overdeliver and upsell them to your high-ticket offer (usually a service). With time and the right audience, they might turn into a sizeable revenue stream.
They did for me — I’ll tell you exactly how much my products made in the last year in next week’s anniversary issue.
But, spoiler alert, the revenue from products is nowhere near that from services.
My advice to you is to diversify as much as possible. We don’t know what next year’s economy will bring, so having a well-balanced portfolio of premium and affordable offers is a smart bet.
You can (and should!) do both services and products. Just make sure your expectations are realistic
The service industry can be exhausting. I know it firsthand — my agency sent me into deep burnout at least twice.
So I understand the need to go “screw it all, I’ll just sell products and never have to deal with another revision request again”.
Still, remember that there will always be greater demand for services than info products. No plumber ever went out of business because of YouTube videos that show you how to fix your own sink.
The $10 that changed my life didn’t blind me. Much as I like building and selling products, I understand the need for a well-diversified offer portfolio.
So, before you fall for the “stop trading hours for money” crap, take the time to understand the clients you’re serving — DIYers are very different from those who buy services. Then figure out which of your services can be productized or semi-productized.
And go in with realistic expectations: you will still trade hours for money. There’s no such thing as an autonomous business. The only difference is what you do in those hours: sell a product or deliver a service.
It’s up to you: do you prefer selling or delivering a service?
