Digital Products are great because they have 100% profit margin, instant delivery, and are easy to scale. It can range from the low-end of monetization (Kindle books), to the upper end in the form of courses (like the course you’re currently taking).
I personally think the course is the best info product right now. On the learners end, they can work with a community of peers and they can get instant feedback from their instructor. And on the product creator’s end, you can charge considerably more for it and you can have drip-feed your content. This last point means that it’s even less work to setup than a kindle book.
The MVP just involves writing a sales page and a course outline. Before you do that however, you need to answer the following questions:
- What needs to be taught, and in what format(which is covered in the survey-based MVP page).
- Are people willing to pay for the course?
What Needs to Taught, and in what format?
The easiest way to figure out what need to be taught is to survey your audience. Once you get the results, figure out how much work it will be to create this course, and how much money you’d want to receive in total for doing this. This is your Success Criteria.
Are People Willing to Pay for the Course?
All you need to do is craft a sales page. The sales page is simply a course outline with a price.
I’d recommend that you be transparent with your audience and let them know you are creating a course, and they’d be on the v1.0 version of it. You’ll send out new content each week, and because it might not be as refined through iteration, you will be offering a massive discount off of the regular price.
Let them know that the benefit of them getting in on the ground floor is that you will be much more personally involved – there will be no VAs or customer service team, just little old you answering all their questions.
I simply create a sales page to this affect (Leadpages is fastest), hook it into payment processing with Stripe or Paypal (I recommend Stripe), just change the buy now button to open up an external link, and setup that link in stripe/paypal.
Then simply wait and see if the numbers hold up to what identified as your success criteria. If they do not, simply refund your customers, letting them know there wasn’t enough interest, and offer them a lil something extra to make them love you.
If they do hold up, then congratulations, you’ve validated your MVP! Next, you actually have to create your course (which is much more than this post was designed to handle).
Where to go from here?
If you’re considering moving up the monetization value chain by creating a product, congratulations! There are tons of benefits to product creation, and if you approach it intelligently, you only have to put the work in once you know you’ll be paid for it. I’d suggest you check out what an MVP looks like for my three favorite products: an online course, a productized service, and lead sales.
