Three questions, in this order
- What do people already ask me to explain or do for them?
- What could I write down in one sitting, without researching a field that is new to me?
- What would I still answer questions about for a year without resenting it?
A week of notes
- For seven days, write down every question anyone asks you, in the words they used.
- Mark the ones that repeated. Repeats are demand; the rest is conversation.
- Beside each repeat, note what you would put in a file to answer it once and stop repeating yourself.
- At the end of the week, pick the question with the clearest answer that you could produce in a weekend.
- Write that answer for yourself first. The product is the tidy version of what you just wrote.
Why not the interesting idea
The project you would most enjoy building is usually the one furthest away from what anyone asks you for. Interest carries you through the middle of a project; demand is what carries you through the fourth month, when the file exists and nobody has found it yet.
The safest first file is small, specific and boring in the useful sense: something that removes a task the buyer dislikes. Boring files get finished, and finished files are the only ones that can be read by anyone else.
- Write the answer before you design the cover.
- If you cannot describe the buyer in one sentence, the file is still too broad.
- A weekend of work is the right size for the first one. You are testing the process as much as the product.
Work out the money shape early
The price follows three things: the work that went into the file, the fee the store takes, and what similar files charge. Not what you would like it to be worth. The free calculator for payouts takes a price and a fee rate and shows what actually arrives after the store's cut, so the number becomes a decision you made rather than a discovery you had.
Run it before you announce anything. A price you have to change in the first week costs you the confidence of the people who already bought.
- Look up the current fee rather than trusting last year's blog post. Fees change.
- A lower price is not a strategy. A clearer file is.
- Plan the page that explains what the file holds, because that page does most of the selling.
The free tool for this
What a store actually leaves you - What a store actually leaves you. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
Launch Kit walks the first product from picking it to publishing the page: proving someone wants it, building it in a day, pricing above the fee floor, and marketing it without lying. Launch Kit is $24. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
How long should the first file take?
A weekend to a fortnight. Anything longer and you are building a business before you have tested whether anyone wants the thing.
What if something like it already exists?
Everything like it exists. Yours exists in your wording, for your reader, and that is usually why someone buys the third version of a file rather than the first.
Read next
How to launch a digital product step by step, Where to launch a product for free, and in what order.