Table of Contents
- What is a Digital Product?
- Six Advantages of Selling Digital products
- 7 Digital Products You can Build in 2024
- 1. Curated lists
- 2. Online Courses, E-Books and Guides
- 3. Website Templates
- 4. Newsletters
- 5. Notion Templates
- 6. SaaS Starter Kits/Starter Templates
- 7. Plugins for No-Code Platforms
- 9 Digital Products that are making revenue in 2023 -2024
- 8 Platforms to sell Digital Products
- Where can I get digital product Ideas?
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What is a Digital Product?
Digital products have long been a popular source of revenue for solopreneurs. Technically, a digital product is any product that isn’t physical and sold online such as e-books, graphics and gaming assets, online courses etc. Digital products are relatively simpler to create, the initial cost is low, simpler to manage and easier to scale.
Beginners often get confused in info. product vs digital products. Info Products are a type of Digital products. While Digital Products include Templates, StarterKits, Scripts etc, Info Product mainly comprises of Ebooks, PDF etc. This post is about building and selling digital products that can be profitable. See Building SaaS Startups for ideas with examples for building SaaS and micro-saas
Six Advantages of Selling Digital products
- Selling digital products lets you reach a global audience increasing your market reach without the inconvenience of conventional businesses requiring physical presence
- Can charge recurring money also for yearly licenses: By charging a recurring fee for yearly license, it’s possible to have predictable revenue stream.
- Can sell from Multiple platforms too: Most of the time, same product can be sold on your own website or via third-party platforms and marketplaces. This help in reaching out to a diverse user base.
- Multiple opportunities to up-sell new digital products. One key advantage of building digital products is that you can once you’ve an audience it becomes easy to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers by offering a premium version or offering a complimentary product.
- No need to maintain infrastructure and no need to worry about scaling issues: A there isn’t any physical infrastructure involved, it’s easier to scale and grow user base without the additional overhead in most of the cases.
- You can own multiple Digital products if support is not a major issue: Owning multiple digital product is easier as compared to selling services or apps where providing continuous support is a major concern.
7 Digital Products You can Build in 2024
1. Curated lists
One of the biggest advantages of curation lists/content is it draws a highly interested audience for a given topic. This is also a part of the “Building Audience First” strategy.
By working on curated content/lists that interest a niche audience, you are building the biggest wealth of ‘audience’. If these audiences are happily paying for your lists/content that is curated, then there are high chances that these audiences could turn your paying customers for some other product later. Moreover, attracting sponsorships would be much easier as you have a niche audience interested in a specific topic.
You can make a list of experts in a given field who can do a specific thing. For example, making a list of people who can build SaaS products and looking for a marketing co-founder. Making a list of ‘Technical content writers’ and connecting this list to SaaS companies who need technical content will help both the content writers and companies. You can charge money for the list. Some more examples, are ‘Making a list of React developers or Javascript developers interested to work remotely’, ‘Making a list of virtual assistants’. You can aslo make a curated list of Affiliate products, list of companies receiving funding, list of B2B companies in a specific niche etc.
You can also make Swipe Files for ‘X’. Swipe files are extremely popular in the marketing, advertising, and copywriting world. Analyze how companies are improving on marketing, advertising, and copywriting and in turn improving user acquisition and sales. List the techniques in an Airtable sheet. Bonus points if you can show examples of companies using these techniques and seeing results. You can extend this to pretty much anything - ‘X’. You can extend this swipe file concept to create ready-made techniques for a lot of other things too. For example, you can create a swipe file for ‘writing and improving newsletters’, ‘starting with Twitter zero followers and growing to thousands of followers on Twitter. The concept remains the same. A list of proven techniques to improve certain things in a given niche can be curated in the form of a swipe file. Create a Swipe file, put it on Gumroad, market and sell it to the related audience.
You can tools like Airtable or Google sheets to build the list. You can also use no-code tools like Flezr.com to turn these lists into directory websites.
2. Online Courses, E-Books and Guides
Educational materials are always in demand whether they are in the form of online courses, e-books or guides and tutorials. There are many inspiring examples of individuals earning good revenue by selling info. products. We’ll cover a few of these success stories later in this post.
Online courses can be self paced or cohort based. Cohort-based courses are nothing but teaching what you know in groups.The average price of cohort-based courses is always several times higher than that of self-paced courses. Name it a boot camp, workshop, cohort-based course, or mastermind group - all are nothing but learning together with a predefined timeline/schedule. While self-paced courses are more towards passive learning and low engagement, cohort-based courses are more towards active learning and higher engagement and are often time-bound. The audience is forced to perform better with limited timelines by making things time-bound. With a group of people learning together, cohort-based courses bring implicit accountability. Also, cohort-based training is not just video courses; sometimes they involve workshops, assignments, tasks, etc., to make it more interactive.
Both self based or cohort courses have good potential for generating good revenue if you focus on topics you’ve expertise in. Platforms like Maven, TeachFloor, Udemy etc make it simpler to develop and sell online courses. There’s another advantage of building info. products. Once you have enough audience for your info products, you can upsell other products, sell your consulting time and build a SaaS product too for your audience who purchased your info product.
3. Website Templates
Creating and selling website templates can be a good online business opportunity. You can develop templates for blogging platforms, such as WordPress or Ghost, as well as e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. Additionally, no-code website builders, including Webflow, Framer, and Wix, present further opportunities for template creation. Some platforms have built-in market places, simplifying the selling process. Additionally, there are third-party market places as well like ThemeForest that make it easier to find customers.
4. Newsletters
Newsletters can be a good source of revenue and it’s easy to start one without even having a website. The easiest one to get started is to use Substack. It's totally free, and you can start writing your newsletter in less than 5 minutes. It also has a feature to enable paid subscriptions so only those who paid can read your content.
There can be multiple ways newsletters can be profitable:
- Paid subscriptions - Charging users for accessing the content. A paid newsletter subscription provides you with a recurring revenue stream and ensures your readers don't have to see advertisements - providing a better experience for them. Many Newsletter providers like Revue, SubStack, Beehiiv, etc., provide this option that runs on Stripe. You can use Gumroad or Flury to charge users if you have no Stripe.
- Ads/Sponsorships - You can place ads in your newsletter and look for sponsors who want to pay for ad slots in your newsletter. These two platforms can help you get started with getting sponsors for your newsletters - Paved and UpStart
- Affiliate Links - Affiliate Links are another source you can try for generating revenue from Newsletters. AffilateCorner.co is one place to help with picking the best affiliates.
5. Notion Templates
Notion is a verstalie productivity and collaboration app tha's a mix of documents, tables, wiki, task manager, notes. It has more than 20 million users. Notion is highly customizable and Notion Templates can be built for specific use cases like lesson planning for teachers, tracking job applicants, shift tracker for employees, meal planning etc. Check out this official Notion templates gallery for some inspiration.
6. SaaS Starter Kits/Starter Templates
SaaS Starter Kits/Boilerplates are programming replacements for what templates used to be for HTML pages. With web development starter kits, SaaS founders can save hours by not spending time developing common features like user profile, billing, authentication, etc.
SaaS starter kits are getting increasingly popular and generating thousands of dollars in sales. SaaS Starter kits currently range from $100 to $1000. Even though most of these are one-time sales, they are still generating a huge chunk of profits as there is no cost in the starter kit business (except for the development efforts). So, the profit margin is close to 100% in most cases. As the actual code runs on the end customer infrastructure like AWS, Vercel, Netlify, GCP, or Azure, there is no cost associated with you whether you have 100 customers or 1000 customers. With a model like this, the profit margin is close to 100% as there are no running costs as the customer base increases.
7. Plugins for No-Code Platforms
You can make platform specific plugins for no-code platforms like Webflow and Bubble.
Webflow empowers designers to build professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code. Webflow also has inbuilt CMS to create hundreds of pages dynamically - all without writing code. Webflow is also an extremely popular CMS system with about 300K searches per month on Google. Webflow provides an option to embed code and users can add the scripts (provided by you in the form of widgets/plugins) using the ‘embed code’ option. Advanced filtering, advanced search solution for Webflow CMS data, pagination, etc are some of the popular needs for Webflow users.
Bubble is a popular platform for no-code builders to build simple to complex apps. About 1M no-code builders are building apps without writing code. The plugin market for Bubble is huge. There is a requirement for different kinds of plugins. While you can build most of the functionality right inside Bubble, it is not often easy to build everything. For scenarios like these and for scenarios like where Bubble cannot support, you can bring in external plugins that support a certain functionality or makes it easy to build a certain functionality.
You can also acquire a digital product or a SaaS instead of building from scratch. See our guide on buying a SaaS business and SaaS metrics that offers some good insights and tips.
9 Digital Products that are making revenue in 2023 -2024
- ZeroToFounder: An info product that crossed 100 sales with an average price of $64 within 3 months of launching on Product Hunt
- Deployment From Scratch: Josef started writing Deployment From Scratch to help people learn how to do deployments and build deployment pipelines. It helps users learn the core transferable skills of setting up Linux virtual servers and containers and also explains the provisioning of web servers and databases. More info on the journey here. Made $30K USD in revenue.
- YoutuberAcademy: Cohort-based training on how to grow your YouTube channel from 0 to 100,000+ subscribers and transform it into a sustainable, income-generating machine without quitting your day job. Makes more than $30K per month with Youtube and related cohort-based courses.
- NotionPack: Ben created NotionPack to help freelancers. His product NotionPack consists of all the documents typically freelancers need for handling client projects. This pack built on Notion apparently save hundreds of hours with the prebuilt templates and can be set up in minutes and easily customizable to clients' brand. Ben made $16000 from this info product within just 2 months of the launch.
- Easlo made $20000 USD in less than a year selling Notion templates. See the Notion templates at Easlo.co. Now after making $20K USD from his templates, he doubled down on Notion and created a Notion course to help people create Notion templates and he already made money out of this new course by leveraging his previous buyers
- JavaScript in the Industry: Simon created this ebook on ‘how to write javascript’ and a price tag of $29; this book made USD $7K within 7 days of its launch. Even now, the ebook is giving $2K per month. Simon spent 16 hours writing the actual book but more time marketing the ebook. See more about this story here.
- BetterSheets: Andrew made $200,000 revenue in 3 years from BetterSheets. His spreadsheet products teach users how to better utilize Google sheets so that the buyers can sell their spreadsheets or use spreadsheets a better way.
- NewsletterOS: A guidelines and management document to create and publish. Newsletters. Created by Janel, this has made $35K in revenue in one year. Janel spent a lot of time writing newsletters, created a repeatable system to make newsletter publishing easy, and started using the system herself. Then she created a formal Notion document and started selling the info product.
- Hailey Ellis-Kelley had a $30k exit from Podcast Production School, a digital course + membership community.
8 Platforms to sell Digital Products
- BeeHiiv - Beehiiv is a newsletter platform that lets you monetize your newsletter with paid subscriptions as well as sponsored ad via their own ad network. It offers API access, full customizable emails, an Integrated referral program, an Ad network, advanced segmentation, A/B testing, and a website.
- Podia - You can sell courses, coaching, ebooks, webinars, and workshops. Podia takes care of hosting products, taking payments, and getting products to your customers.
- Kajabi - You can create online courses, coaching programs, podcasts, memberships, and more. It has built-in CRM and enables to collect payments with Stripe and Paypal integrations
- Thinkific - all‑in‑one platform for building an online course, whether self-paced or live.
- Disco - Disco brings together community and learning on one platform with all the tools you need to build, operate, and scale. You can design cohort-based courses, and offer live events, training & paid workshops.
- Gumroad - Gumroad offers a simple solution for creators to sell all kinds of digital products, including an individual blog or list-based post and charge one-time or recurring payments.
- Lemon squeezy - Lemon Squeezy is another platform that makes it easy to sell digital products. It handles tax compliance as well.
- PayTable - Paytable lets you easily add a members area to your site to sell secure access to Airtable. Purpose built to monetise Research & Info products.
Where can I get digital product Ideas?
A few places to get inspiration:
- Our newsletter ‘Micro SaaS Ideas’ is a good place to start. Although it’s primarily focused on micro-saas ideas, we do cover ideas for digital products regularly.
- List the marketplaces and platforms for selling the website themes, Notion themes or plugins. Browse these websites for identifying trends and find a niche that you can focus on.
- Join the communities related to the topic you’re interested in. Understand your target audience on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook groups and try to identify the topics that they are finding challenging to learn.
- Gumroad can also be a good source for finding ideas for building digital products.
- Finally, explore the newsletters on Substack. If you notice any content gap, it might be a good opportunity.
You can read more about Tech Startup Ideas, B2B SaaS ideas, SaaS Ideas with Examples and Micro SaaS Ideas and Niches.
