How To Turn 1 Idea Into A $2,000,000 Digital Product

Over the last 6 years, I’ve generated over $20,000,000 selling digital products. But when I first started out, I had no clue how to turn the ideas in my head into products I could actually sell. Now I’m convinced everyone has a $350 digital product sitting inside their head. So, here’s my story of how I created my first two digital products—and why the first flopped and the other I scaled to over $2,000,000 in revenue (with a framework to help you come up with your own digital product idea). Let’s dive in! Back in mid-2020, I started writing on 𝕏. I was tired of spending hours every Sunday slaving over a single blog post only for it to be read by my mom and my sister. So, I set myself a challenge. I would write a thread every day for 30 days, curating my takeaways from all the podcasts I was listening to every morning before my 9 to 5 on Wall Street. After all, what did I have to lose? Worst-case scenario, I’d clarify my thinking by writing about my favorite investors, entrepreneurs, and creators. Best-case scenario, something else would happen to make it worthwhile (this could’ve been anything, I had no idea what to expect). After 27 days, I was seeing almost zero progress: Barely any likes Nearly zero shares Hardly any comments I published my 28th thread and went to bed, thinking nothing of it. Overnight, the thread went viral and I woke up to hundreds of new followers. Naval Ravikant retweeted the thread. And I had a ton of people DM me for the links to my other curations. Which helped me create my first digital product. Product 1: The Podcast Compendium ($400) I put all my curations into a Notion document and gave it away for free on 𝕏. But then I had people DM me & ask if there was a premium version of the podcast summaries. There wasn’t. So I compiled all the summaries, created a Slack channel for the community, and put it on Gumroad for $29: This is how I made my first $400 on the Internet. It taught me 3 lessons: You do not need a huge audience to launch a product Your first product should be work you’ve already done People pay for organized thinking But I abandoned it for the next product idea: Product 2: Ship 30 for 30 ($2,000,000+) A simple daily writing habit and publishing ideas on the Internet had caught the attention of people I looked up to so I decided it would be fun to help other people do this too. So, one Tuesday evening, I tweeted this: I only had a couple thousand followers on 𝕏 back then and I wasn’t sure if it’d get much traction. But after tweeting about this “accountability group” I was making, all of a sudden 50+ people were paying money to join what quickly became the 1st cohort of Ship 30 for 30. This, like the viral thread, was another inflection point. And creating this first cohort is how I got put in contact with my co-founder, Nicolas Cole, as well as how I earned my first $5,000 as a ghostwriter. And 12 months later, Ship 30 was doing 7 figures in revenue. Now, there were many differences between that first digital product (the Podcast Compendium) and Ship 30 for 30. And one of the main differences is the target audience of the product. Because most Digital Product Builders think “creating a digital product” is: Running with the first idea that pops into their head Recording themselves rambling through some hastily made slides Slapping it all together into a "bonus" PDF so people can "read it on the go" They rush the building part so they can start the selling part ****ASAP. Which is what I did with my Podcast Compendium. Sure, it answered a need but I hadn’t nailed my positioning or created a product to appeal to a certain audience. Because if you get the Product Creation part wrong, it doesn’t matter how good your marketing, launch strategy, or tech stack is. If you build your digital product on an idea that sucks, then when you sell it to customers, it’ll be a huge disappointment. Which means they will either: Demand their money back immediately Or worse—tell everyone they know to avoid your product like the plague And nothing destroys the business of a Digital Product Builder faster than customers warning others to stay away. Creating a product people actually need is a skill—from picking the perfect idea to crafting modules that keep them hooked and taking action. Product Creation 101 So, what’s the secret to creating a sellable (and profitable) digital product? Niching down. After all, the cliché is true: “The riches are in the niches.” So, when coming up with a digital product idea, you need to consider 3 levels of specificity: The Mega-Category The Niche within this category And then the Niche-Within-Niche Skip this critical step, and your product will be built on generic, watered-down ideas that doom it to failure before it even launches. (And spoiler alert: This is how you build a digital product based on what you know—even if you think you don’t have a “sellable” idea inside your head. This framework makes it possible for anyone.) You need to get this sp