📦 Your First Product

John Meese -

If you don’t already have products for sale, it can be overwhelming to make your first sale. If you do have products already, it’s hard to know what your next product should be! Should you create an online course or a downloadable template? Either way, what should they include? How much content is enough, and how much is too much? Most people overthink this.

Bryan Harris introduced me to the idea of “selling the sawdust” by looking around you for things you use every day which could be transformed into a product with minimal work.

How Mike Kim Sold His Sawdust

A friend of mine, Mike Kim, shared his story on how a simple downloadable product quietly made him $9,675 without any major promotion or launch:

When I started my consulting business, I thought back to the early years where I spent seemingly endless hours drafting project proposals. After a while, I started getting enough client inquiries that I found myself just duplicating my previous proposals and changing the terms around.

It didn’t hit me that I had a product on my hands until I realized that I would have paid hundreds of dollars just to have this templatized when I started my business.

These kinds of business forms are one of the few things that consultants and freelancers don’t share with others. I always wondered how other professional service providers drafted their proposals.

Since I didn’t have many for reference, I just created this based on the work that I’ve done with clients over the years.

Since then, I’ve used these same forms to initiate contracts with some of today’s top thought leadership brands, including the John Maxwell Team, StoryBrand, Catalyst, and Suzanne Evans.

Having a product that is always available gives your audience a chance to take action at any time, and also adds to your authority as a creator with a business because you have things for sale. In Mike’s case, he’s never done a formal launch for his Project Proposal Templates, but he has talked about the product on his podcast and blog. As his audience grows, more sales trickle in.

Here’s how to try this yourself:

  1. Identify a habit or tactic you’ve used to solve a problem that your audience has as well.
  2. Turn that tactic into a template, which you can upload to ConvertKit Commerce to sell.
  3. Email your audience with a link to the product, to let them know you created this to help them win.