Believe it or not, you have one million dollars trapped in your head, or it's lying around in your Google Drive, or your Notion, or your Cortex.
The point is, you have skills, interests, and some kind of expertise you can package up into a product that sells while you sleep.
What you learn in this video will determine most of your success as a creative, but this video is not just about building a product.
It involves marketing, it involves launching, It involves promotions, all of these things that creatives, creators, really anyone wanting to build an independent income kind of skips over.
They don't learn actual marketing.
They don't learn anything involved with monetization or building an income.
And then they wonder, oh, why am I stuck in beginner help?
It's not as simple as just, oh, I'm going to build a product and hope that my audience likes it.
There's a lot more things that come into play, like how to find a hyper profitable idea, how to create a marketing strategy and iterate with failure, how to position a boring product as something people can't ignore, the five elements of an irresistible offer, how to write a landing page even when you
have never done that before, how to actually build the product and how to accept payment, and last, how to launch the product so it doesn't sit around collecting dust and you don't waste your time.
Now here's the thing, if you want to earn an independent income, you need to sell a product.
We've gone over this many times before.
We're not here to rely on ad platform revenue that's completely out of your control you started doing this stuff you started your own creative work because you wanted to control your income even if it's not that much even if it's just like a replacement for your salary and that allows you to live well
a product will help you do that and control your lifestyle we'll talk about that however most people are like me you start with client work you start to see some success your time gets eaten up and worst of all you realize how much you hate working on other people's projects you left your job because you
hated the work right you wanted to write you wanted to explore your interests you wanted to focus on your craft but now you're back in survival mode working from invoice to invoice instead of paycheck to paycheck but once you have a product that doesn't require your time or labor to earn a substantial
income one hundred thousand dollars is just a matter of persistence and iteration.
It's liberating once you realize that if you can make one dollar, you can make one million if you have a product that is capable of reaching that scale as one person.
Now, if you want to stick with client work and hire a team so that you can scale to one million plus, be my guest.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.
That's actually a very good option.
Many people do that with great success.
But at the same time, even if you do that, why not just create a product so that one, you get more warm leads for your client work.
And two, you just have another revenue stream that comes in without any additional work.
Now, before we start, understand that this isn't some kind of get rich quick mumbo jumbo.
This is learning about product, marketing, and promotions.
Those are skills in and of themselves that any business owner can benefit from and has to learn.
And another thing for perspective is that my first year with building a product, I made around $10 ,000, which isn't that much, right?
You're thinking, okay, $10 ,000, that doesn't replace my salary.
But the thing here is you'll go to school for four years, but you won't stick it out for two years to make substantially more than you could have made with your degree.
I could go on a rant forever about this, about how people just don't have perspective for pursuing their own dreams.
Like really, it takes longer than two weeks to actually build a substantial income for yourself, doing something that is completely unknown, that you have to figure out along the way, that you can see incredible results within one to two years.
But that's all. That's just too much time.
I don't have that much time.
You my friend, you spent 12, 16 years of your life working up to what you could make now, and you won't spend one to two years to make much more than that.
You followed the default path up until now, you're limited to the same salary and results as everyone else that took that exact same path, but you going on your own path for one to two years to get incredibly rare results and irreplaceable results.
Now that's too much.
I don't have the time.
So my first year was 10 ,000.
My second year was around a hundred thousand.
Then next year, 150 ,000, then 800 ,000, then around 4 million.
And then last year was around 2 million because revenue split between myself and Cortex.
Now let's get started.
This is going to be a product and marketing masterclass.
This will have every single thing that you need to know.
If you want to make 1 million in one year, break it down.
1 million divided by 12 equals $83 ,333 per month.
That divided by 30 equals 2 ,777 per day.
So you can reach that by landing one $5 ,000 client every other day or selling 18 $150 products a day.
That's 720 people to a page that converts at 2 .5%.
720 people to a landing page at conversion rate of 2 .5 % is pretty doable, right?
I mean, it's going to take a while to get there, but if you do the math, break down, okay, if i start writing on twitter and a lot of beginners can get if they do it wise watch my other one person business videos in that playlist but if you do it wisely then you can get a hundred thousand impressions
your first month you can have one tick tock or one reel go viral and get a million views and if you get 720 of those people to a page once a day a 2 .5 percent conversion rate split up as much as you want that's how you make a million dollars a year It's pretty feasible not easy by any means, but it's
feasible when you understand the moving parts of business So in order to build this product, we need to have our 1 million dollar idea We need to know what to build and this is a lot simpler than you think now Here's a mind fuck for you.
You've already purchased a 1 million dollar product You've purchased hundreds in fact if not more.
Do you know what that means?
It means you're probably overthinking it it means that most ideas can be taken to 1 million if you understand exactly what I'm going to say throughout this video.
Now, I'm assuming this is your first product and you are a beginner, so the best progression to follow going into a future of AI would be this.
First, build an audience as a free and high leverage traffic source.
Second, become an authority in your interests or expertise.
Third, is start a personal system digital product that you can test fast.
that's the secret there personal system that's what separates you fourth is persist and iterate until you reach a hundred thousand dollars plus fifth then since you have so much data and results turn that system into something like a software or physical product so the progression build an audience
where the attention is right now that's social media tomorrow it could be intergalactic space just go where the attention is right now again social media go there it's free accessible You can write.
You can grow for free.
And it's a skill. If you aren't growing, watch my last video on seven reasons why 99 % of creators aren't going to make it.
Then you become an authority because you aren't Marcus Aurelius from the start.
These philosophical quotes that you're posting aren't going to do anything until people care about you.
So you build authority.
Again, watch the last video.
Then you build a digital product in a way that you can as a beginner.
So you can generate cash flow.
And then once you have cash flow and an audience, then building your startup or your dream business isn't too far off because you have people and you have money.
Or even by that point, you can just live how you want and you can focus on your craft and you have more than enough money to show up and do what you want every day.
Now, the big question here is what is a personal system product?
In my eyes, it's the safest option to take that can not be replaced by AI.
Sure, AI can help you build the thing, but it's not going to do that thing and take your, uh, audience or your customers.
Now this can be done in the form of a freelance service, coaching service, education product, or software.
As an example, my two hour writer product, just my most popular course is I'm not teaching people writing, right?
That's just super basic.
Nobody would buy that.
Some people would buy it.
Sure. But it's a commodity.
It would be very low price.
I teach people my system for how I write because I came up with it.
I experimented with it.
I started from zero and I started planning out, okay, how can I get better results, put the pieces together, which I'll show you how to do all of this.
But that's what makes it valuable along with every other piece of the offer creation process.
And that's the thing.
It positions writing something which is often perceived as too boring or too academic or that you need an English degree in a way that is desirable to people like my past self.
Now with that, I write a newsletter.
I break that down into a thread.
I break those down into social posts and I cross post those across all different platforms.
It's a very simple system for posting content to all different platforms with less than two hours of writing a day.
Now the thing here is like, okay, well, course, course, course.
Why is this a course?
I could easily turn this into a freelance service or a coaching service or a consulting service or a software like I am with Cortex kind of that outperforms a lot of the freelance and coaching services on the market because it's based on a personal system.
I don't do that because I don't have time and because I just don't like client work and I can help more people in the form of a course.
It's the same freaking thing.
I hate people who gain this like moral high ground of like, oh, I do the hard work.
I have a freelance offer and I work with clients and I build out these projects and like, I'll never sell a course because that's just weird and scam and unethical.
We'll talk about that.
It's just a stupid way of thinking.
So if you want to avoid client work so you don't have to work on other people's projects and you can work on your own projects for as long as you want and you can control how you spend your day, you don't have to fill it with all of these calls, then the only two options left for you outside of freelance
coaching, whatever other beginner business model there is, is either an education product or a software product.
And with the software product, what I'm talking about is how AI is advancing to the point where most people can build an app.
You can go to lovable .com or Bolt and you can have it kind of guide you through creating an app, but that still requires learning.
You still need to understand programming to some extent, and you still need to understand how to create and market an offer.
I don't think that's as good of an option as an education product, as an absolute beginner, as someone who's just starting who doesn't want to learn another skill.
That's why I recommend writing so much.
It's because you don't need to learn video editing or programming or all these things to get started.
That's all this is.
This is a way to get started so that you can iterate and improve the product and change its shape over time.
If you want to build a software after you get started, that's great.
But we're doing something that is extremely quick to build and test so you understand what sells, you make money.
Then you can make it a lot better over time.
Now, what is an education product?
It is, it comes in the form of courses, communities, or cohorts.
And these are often accompanied by certain templates or worksheets or things that add more value to the product and allow people to actually change their behavior.
That's what education products are.
You know, the ones that line Alex Hormozy's portfolio, because he knows that where those are going to go in the future he's taking a bet on them they're the info products that people love to pin in a bad light as if education isn't the most important aspect of your development or what will prepare you
for a future that schools won't be able to keep up with a good education product can change someone's life 10 times more than a physical product or software could any day creators are decentralized teachers they are the new school system on the internet creators not content creators, just people who create
their life are those who forge new paths and pass down the esoteric information that allow you to take advantage of new opportunities.
As long as people buy books, they will buy courses.
This is one thing that I don't understand.
People will shit on courses and then they're selling a book and you don't understand that it's the exact same thing.
The courses are just organized in a way that is easier to retain.
They're arguably more valuable than a book but it's like oh i wrote a book that's some magic i've written a book i understand how it feels it feels cool to have like a book but think straight think clearly stop regurgitating what all of these anti -gurus have put into your head conditioning your mind
to only see half the picture of education products is as stupid as you think courses are you don't whine about there being 129 ,864 ,880 books in the world most of them bad because anyone can type on a keyboard so if you can't come to terms with info products you're in for a bad time now i want to add
a bit of nuance here and i'm spending way too much time on this specific topic but of course a bad info product is bad but what you don't understand is that everyone starts out bad am i telling you to intentionally put out a terrible product no i'm telling you to put something out so you can fail in public
and potentially get criticized so that way you improve it so that it becomes a good product.
Now, the last objection that I'll go over here is just, but Dan, people are just teaching others what they do themselves.
Like I teach what I do.
It's like, no shit.
That's what the market wants.
And that's what people are qualified to teach.
That's arguably the only thing that people are qualified to teach.
If you aren't teaching what you know, then you're a liar.
I teach writing positioned a specific way because that's what people find most valuable.
I could just teach I could teach some writing that didn't have to do with social media, but social media and the creator economy is so freaking large right now that that's what everyone's doing because creators are small businesses.
It's a B2B business to business or C2C creator to creator.
Everyone's selling to creators because there's so freaking many.
The BDB market is huge.
The creator to creator market is huge.
You think it's like everyone's just selling to creators because that's like everyone's just hopping on the bandwagon.
to note. It's because that's a massive market.
The point is, you're going to build an education product as your first product.
And if you don't, you're going to waste a ton of time unless you have a lot of money and experience already.
So that's what the rest of this letter is focused on.
So how do you turn what you do into a product idea?
The best education products are the ones that solve a specific pain point, give people a system to get results, provide clarity on everything involved with performing the system.
First, we need to decide the topic of the product you want to create.
Then we'll get into the fun stuff of how to market the product.
So first think of an area that you have the most experience in.
Something that you've taken the time to study or implement in your life.
You don't need the personal system part just yet you just need the topic.
So here's a list to spark some ideas.
Writing, video editing, speaking, social dynamics, relationships and dating, productivity, web designer development, artificial intelligence, mental health, weight lifting, running nutrition, learning faster, knowledge management, managing finances, landing job interviews, and really anything that you
can find on social media or the topic of a booked or something that people buy because it's valuable.
So here, simply think of one thing that you're above average at and write it down.
Now, second, we need to research products and marketing ideas within that specific topic.
Our goal here is to find the intersection of what works and what you can do better.
So write down at least 10 to 20 ideas here.
Here's how you find these ideas.
Search your topic on course sites like Masterclass, Udemy, or Skillshare.
Search Reddit for course reviews like best training programs in the health topic or any topic.
Dig through accounts you follow, join their email lists, and identify what products they sell on their site and in their funnel.
Remember products you've bought in the past and resurface them.
Find X accounts within that topic.
use TwemX to see their top performing tweets, search for keywords related to your topic, and save posts that you can use as ideas for the product or marketing.
Find YouTube accounts within that topic, filter their videos by most popular, and write down popular video titles that could turn into a product.
Now, if you want to do this in something like Cortex, first just create a document titled Your Product.
Just say product. And then as you're doing research, you can open up Capture as you're doing the research.
On YouTube, you press option C to open up Capture and then connect to that document.
So type at product in Capture to save and organize those little ideas that you can open on the side.
And then as you actually build out the product, you can add sub documents under the main product document.
So let's imagine that you want to build a business around social dynamics.
You could go to the Charisma on Command YouTube channel and filter their videos by most popular and just look through them and see what you could turn into some kind of product that people would want.
So here's a screenshot of just the Charisma on Command YouTube channel.
You can see these get an insane amount of views and you can see that each one of these titles could probably be turned into a course in and of itself.
Now we don't want to take what's free and make it paid.
We want to create something new.
So you're going to keep these in mind to help position your marketing as we create your actual offer.
So looking at those top videos, you can instantly see that people want to be interesting and confident and less insecure.
And that's all you need to know in order to start creating a product that will sell.
You now have a list of successful product and marketing ideas that you can combine, add to, simplify, or make unique.
We'll do that next.
For the courses you find, buy them.
Don't cheap out now.
If you don't know how to structure a product, then you need to use a few as a reference point for inspiration.
You don't need to know exactly what you want to create just yet.
For brand, tell a story.
For content, make a map.
For product, enforce a habit.
Now we need to learn how to market and build the product because most people waste two to three months building a product just for it to never be launched or worse, never make any sales.
We're going to do the opposite.
You're going to make money before you even start building the product.
That way, if you don't make money, you can pivot fast and try again.
Once you strike gold, you give it everything you have.
Build it over the course of two to three weeks and launch a successful product.
This is yet another reason why education products are superior.
You can test and iterate fast.
You can turn them into a software or another product.
They are genuinely helpful to those who purchase them if they're good.
In other words, most products should start as an education product and most founders could create a new revenue channel simply by adding some form of education, even if it's just an ebook.
Now the first step to any kind of marketing is just choosing a target persona.
So that's what we need to do.
But people get stuck on this part way too much.
So let's just simplify it, make it super simple.
You need a target persona who you're positioning the product toward so that your marketing is specific and tangible.
That's it. The thing is, there is a much larger market of people who will also resonate with your marketing, especially if you are marketing with social media.
You don't want to be too specific or else your content won't get spread to more people.
So personally, I think you should choose from two options here.
One is target yourself or your past self.
The reason behind doing that is because you're familiar with your pain points.
You're familiar with your experience and your story and your results.
You are a customer avatar that you can research and interview at any time with self -reflection.
The second one is target people who have a lot of money.
So founders, executives, or those with high paying jobs.
But the problem with targeting people that have a lot of money is that you often don't understand them.
And if you're doing something on social media, they're few and far between and it's harder to get in front of.
So if you're building something like an agency or you're doing direct sales or something like that, that Alex Hormozzi can help you with and talks about this all the time, then go and target those people and you can build a very good business doing that but i personally i want the fulfillment i want
the soul in my work i want to help people who are like me build a community of those people so that i enjoy my work and i enjoy who i work with and i enjoy who i help now that's all you need for now you just need a vague idea of who you're targeting now we need to create the actual offer for that person so we're
taking the topic that we came up with earlier and now we're going to make it irresistible.
You don't start with the product.
You start with the marketing because if you get the marketing right, you can build the product around what works.
It's a lot easier to build a product based on good marketing than it is to create marketing based on a bad product.
Now take your topic, all of the ideas you've gathered, and write these down.
One is the big problem.
This is the most important thing that needs to be nailed down.
what is the big burning problem related to the topic.
Where are people right now?
And if they don't change, where will that lead?
So this is more about just the big problem.
It's the big problem and the negative outcome of that.
The problem is the starting point of their transformation.
The problem should be relatable.
So they have to be able to feel and experience the problem.
Needs to be relevant.
The problem has to be important and worth solving, and it needs to be research -backed.
You have to make sure that you aren't just making up the problem.
Now, most burning problems fall within the health, wealth, and relationships categories.
So if your topic is weightlifting, the problem could be a few things.
So a health example of the problem could be, without resistance training, you're more likely to develop chronic disease and have difficulty moving around as you age.
The wealth example of a problem would be, if you don't look good, people won't respect you because your body reflects your discipline and commitment.
You're less likely to get opportunities, promotion, and trust from high -value people.
A relationships example of the problem is you lack the confidence to go up and talk to a stranger, or you feel insecure when you take your shirt off around your spouse, leading to a poor sex life, which creates little problems in other areas of the relationship.
Now, surprisingly, with weightlifting, the most burning problem here isn't the health aspect of it.
The burning problem is being perceived as high value so that you can get what you want out of life and stop feeling so sorry for yourself.
Now, if you wanted to amplify that problem more or come up with a negative outcome, you would talk about how a lack of social opportunities leads to a feeling of loneliness.
That affects your mental health that makes it harder to act with discipline in any other area of your life.
You get stuck in a specific job and environment and have no idea why you can't get out.
Now, a tip with all of this, as you're brainstorming these marketing ideas and your offer, none of these will be perfect the first time around.
This whole product thing, it isn't formulaic.
You don't just write everything down and then expect to make a million dollars.
All of this, all of business, content, product, brand, whatever, it's all iteration.
If it were as simple as a list of steps that I could give you here, everyone would be a freaking millionaire.
They're not. The people who follow the rules, then break the rules, then create their own rules are the ones who see success.
These are just my rules that I've both created and taken and merged into one into a way that has worked for me.
So if you can find inspiration and something to experiment in with that, do it.
Now, the question there is like, okay, well, how do I refine and iterate on the marketing strategy?
Well, you read books on the topic.
You watch YouTube videos on the topic.
You open up your product document that you made in Cortex.
You open up Capture and you connect the ideas to that.
You highlight things.
You connect things together so you have it all there when it comes time to create the actual product.
Another thing is you just talk to more people with the problem.
You write about it more on social media and see what people actually resonate with related to the product.
You get all of this data with everything that you do and merge it into one.
Now, the second step after the big problem is the desired outcome because people want a transformation.
That's transformation self.
That's the only thing that sells is a transformation.
I'm here. I want to be here.
What's going to help me get there?
This product. And if your product can't help them get there, or it doesn't tell them that it will help them get there, it's not going to be perceived as valuable.
Now the thing here is that if you don't nail the big problem, then the desired outcome isn't going to be something desirable because it's based on a problem that isn't that valuable.
So that's another reason to take your time with the marketing to write about it more on social media, see what gets picked up, talk about the problem a lot, different problems, health wealth relationships, all of these different angles, test them.
So if our problem in general is a lack of confidence or feeling insecure or not wanting to take your shirt off around your wife or husband or whatever it may be, then the general desired outcome of the weightlifting example that we've been going over is just having a body that commands respect.
Now we need to make that more relevant, relatable, and research -backed.
What do people actually want?
Why do they want it?
For men, they want visible abs, a decent jawline, broad shoulders, and to feel confident in their own skin when it's time to talk with other people or get naked.
For women, I can't really speak to this but I'd assume they want an hourglass figure, a nice butt, visible abs, and to feel hot and sexy they want their man to fawn over them.
To make this even more potent and to just flesh out your marketing even more, you can also tack on a big benefit to the desired outcome.
So why do men want chiseled abs?
Why do women want a big butt?
Remember here that a lot of this stems from the target persona.
So if I were to think for myself, why do I want abs?
Mostly to look sick when I take off my shirt.
That's what everyone wants.
And I guess an esoteric tip there with that is you should usually start pretty surface level because beginners, they're not looking for the depth.
All the spiritual people in my audience, myself included, with going deep and like kind of getting annoyed when people don't appreciate the depth of something, it's because they haven't even started.
They, you have to start on the surface before you go into the depth.
So with something like fitness or health, you're usually starting with things that are superficial and then you're introducing them.
It's people start in the gym for vanity and stay for the therapy.
They don't start for therapy and stay for the vanity.
That's most cases. So you talk about the abs, you talk about the big butt and them getting that.
And then in it, you ease them into the depth of like, do you see how rewarding it is to continue going to the gym and making these tiny gains?
Do you see the parallels between life and weightlifting?
So on and so forth.
But that's not something that's going to attract a lot of people and help a lot of people on the front end.
So we have the big problem, desired outcome.
Now we need a believable time frame.
How long is it going to take for them to get from the big problem to the desired outcome?
Because time Timeframes supercharge your marketing.
30 days, 3 to 6 months, 6 weeks, 2 hours.
All of this can be used for content as well because your videos, your posts, whatever they are, they're an offer.
Timeframes help make your product tangible.
They are a reference point that sparked desire in the reader.
Timeframes also help compress what you put into the product.
A lot of people just throw everything they know into one product rather than only putting in what is valuable to solving the problem and reaching the desired outcome.
Now let this sit. You may not know how long it takes or what time frame you want to put on it, but it may help to come back after we create your personal system.
So that's step four is creating a personal system.
You have the big problem, desired outcome, you have a time frame for how long it takes, and the personal system is the thing that takes you from point A to point B.
It's the thing that sparks the transformation.
The thing here is you could copy someone else's product and you could exchange their personal system for your personal system and it will probably sell pretty well and do pretty well.
Now, you probably shouldn't do that because you're copying a lot of other stuff over.
But it helps to look at people's products who have done well, think, OK, what's my personal system for doing this?
What's my burning problem that I'm helping people overcome?
What's the desired outcome?
Now, how am I going to structure this in a way that people actually want.
Now how do you create a personal system?
You experiment on yourself or someone else who is willing to help you and fits your target persona.
This also gives you results that you can show for social proof if you are a beginner.
So here's what you do.
One, open something like Cortex to write this down.
Two, remember the problem and outcome.
Three, write out a list of steps they need to take over the course of the time frame.
Four, these steps should involve everything related to reaching the outcome.
With something like weight training, nutrition usually has to be touched on as well.
Five is test it on yourself or your target persona for that timeframe.
Six is write down places that it can be improved.
Seven, rewrite the list of steps and test it again.
Eight, repeat until it can get results for more people.
Then slap a name on your system.
To reiterate on that, you have burning problem, where they are now, point A, desired outcome where they want to be point b now write out every single step as many steps as possible in between the two how do you get to the other one what do people need to know what skills do they need to acquire what steps
do they need to take write it all out then you take that you test it out on yourself or someone else you refine it you notice what isn't getting good results and then you change it out until it gets results in the gym this could be a training program it could be a nutrition protocol.
It could be a writing system.
It could be a video editing system.
It could be how to weave a basket.
It could be how to grow plants.
If those are accompanied by a burning problem and a desired outcome that people actually care about, then you can sell anything.
If they don't sell, then the problem isn't burning enough and the outcome isn't desirable enough.
For something like weight training or health, you see this all the time.
Intermittent fasting.
That's a personal system that has gotten, it's gained a lot of popularity.
Strong lifts five by five.
If you're a beginner in the gym, you've probably heard that before because it's the go -to for most beginners in the gym.
Now with this personal system, if you bake other aspects of your marketing, like the timeframe into this, then you get something like two hour writer or the system inside of there is the two hour content ecosystem.
Your personal system is the thing that makes people think this could finally solve my problem because it probably will now a step in between there step 4 .5 is education right you have the personal system you have the list of steps that people need to take but what's the accompanying thing that people
need to know in order to do that well that's where your curriculum comes into place think of like if you're writing a book outline what's the the nuance the in -between all of the education that people need to understand write that out as well now step five is features and benefits so we have pretty
much the outline We have point A, point B, the steps in between, the education that people need to have.
Now we need to turn those into features and benefits so that they fit in the marketing.
Because the thing here is that most people only list out the features of their product, but that's not persuasive.
People don't care about the product.
They care about how the product changes their life.
This is just marketing 101, but even the most advanced marketers get tripped up here.
We all forget and don't remind ourselves of the fundamentals.
So when you list out features, like a five -week training program, cookbook with 20 recipes, or learn the top five exercises for chest growth, pair them with a compelling benefit or completely exchange the boring feature for the benefit.
So it could be a five -week program so you know exactly what to do when you step in the gym, no more feeling lost, a cookbook with 20 filling and low calorie foods so you can feel stuffed without the guilt, the top five exercises for chest growth so you don't waste years without developing shirt splitting
pecs. There's a common theme here.
When you're writing benefits, you usually bridge the feature with so you can or with the word without.
So so you can and without.
So from here, you take all of the pieces from your education and personal system, all of the steps that you wrote down, and you turn them into features with accompanying benefits.
On your landing page, this is where you introduce the offer.
Like when people are actually reading, okay, what's included in the offer, this is it.
Now, step six is the delivery mechanism.
How are we packaging all of this up and giving it to the customer?
Before we understand that, let's just recap with an example based on something else that isn't the fitness or weightlifting.
For the topic, let's do productivity.
For the target persona, my past self, an 18 -year -old who wants to balance study and building a business.
The big problem and negative outcome is that I don't want a traditional nine to five job, but I'm falling behind in classes and my business has taken a backseat.
If I can't study for long periods and work on my business for long periods, I'll get stuck in a comfortable job and it will be extremely difficult to get out.
40 years later, I would wish that I took the time to study.
The desired outcome here is deep focus for 12 plus hours a day without Adderall.
The believable timeframe is 14 days.
The personal system I would call the attention Marathon, a training program for your mind to run a marathon.
The education is everything about the flow state, dopamine, workspace setup, avoiding distractions, etc.
And I know this is a validated idea because I could research YouTube and find this, which is a video with 14 million views.
It's how I studied for 12 hours a day over a year.
That's validation enough that this can work if I iterate and test enough.
So now that we have the plan and an offer outline, we need to decide how we're going to deliver the actual offer.
And there's a few options here.
The first is an ebook, which is quick to make, but hard to charge a lot for.
There's an email course, which is structured learning, but most people fall off.
Next is a cohort, which is a four to eight week curriculum with calls in a community, and it only opens for enrollment four times or so a year.
It's good for scarcity and perceived value, but they're often expensive.
Then there's just a normal course, which is an evergreen product that can be promoted at all times, but you need a lot of traffic.
Then there's a community with monthly recurring revenue, but that equals monthly recurring work.
It's harder to sell, but it's a huge payoff if you commit to it.
A lot of people are starting school communities and all of these things based on monthly recurring revenue.
And while they're a great thing to do, I've done them multiple times.
And it's very similar to client work where eventually if you're not enjoying it day in, day out, it's a lot of work on your plate.
It's not monthly passive income.
It's monthly. I'm working hard in order to get more people into this because people are skeptical with buying recurring subscriptions, especially ones that are high priced.
And you probably don't have a traffic source that's going to fuel that enough for it to gain velocity.
And then the last is software, which takes longer to build.
It has higher chances at failure, but can pay off big time if you dedicate five to 10 years to it or land the viral jackpot fast.
Now to make any of these a bit more valuable, you can add templates or worksheets or trackers in something like Notion or Cortex.
And that alone sometimes makes the education product worth paying for.
That's what makes it more valuable than something like a free video or a book or something else that's lower cost.
Now, I can't really tell you which one to choose.
All of them work. You can make any of them work.
Some are harder. Some are more easy.
Some just try. But a good beginner progression could look like this.
So start with a $27 e -book on a specific topic, like focusing 12 hours a day, and then turn that into a module of a larger $150 course with a focus hub template to plan their study and work blocks, and then expand that into an even more comprehensive $399 cohort on living in flow.
You can promote the ebook anywhere that's top of funnel, and then you can promote the course on back -end emails or in YouTube descriptions, and then the cohort only happens four times a year.
So that's easier to launch those four times a year and usually leads to a big spike in revenue.
Now, after you've outlined everything, you just did everything in that entire section, it's time to make your first dollar.
I want to reiterate that this is the best route for beginners.
You can't do what we're going to talk about with almost any other type of product.
In the past, digital products weren't really a thing.
You would spend a ton of time building a product that may or may not work.
You pour money into product development, set up manufacturing and distribution, and then launch.
And there's some statistics circulating in the space of something like 95 % of businesses fail within their first year.
The thing about building an audience and digital product is that you can pivot.
You can test ideas daily in your content.
You can turn those ideas into a marketing strategy.
You can build a landing page, add payment, and launch pre -orders.
If it doesn't work, you can scrap it and try again an infinite amount of times until it works.
In other words, it is impossible to fail if you persist and iterate.
And when it comes time to turn that into a startup or more demanding physical product, you already have so much data that the likelihood of success is much higher.
So again, another point, if you want to even build a software or build a physical product, just start with the education product first so that you can get the right angle out.
If you want to go and sell a planner and don't know what to put in the planner or market the planner, create a digital planner first, sell that, iterate on it until it's good, and then turn it into a physical one so you know that it will do well.
So we have our marketing strategy.
Here's what we do next.
We're going to create the landing page first, and you can do this on something like Stan, right?
Stan .store. Link in the description to try them out.
If you haven't watched the podcast that I did with the co -founders of it, go watch that.
But on Stan, they allow you to host really any type of digital product.
You can schedule coaching calls.
You can have a lead magnet.
You can have a course.
You can have a digital product.
You can have whatever it may be.
And the landing pages are super simple.
You don't need to learn design.
You don't need to learn anything.
It's just text. And from Stan, they arguably have the highest converting landing pages on the market because it's just so quick to get through them, understand the gist, press buy.
Once you have the landing page, you're going to launch the product.
You're not going to build out any portion of the product aside from the outline before launching the product.
Now to do this, you have to tell the customers that it's going to release on a specific date.
So if I start promoting it four weeks ago and I need to tell them the course comes out today, the digital product comes out today, inside of Stan, what you can do is when people sign up, once they pay, they get added to a course platform and then the only thing there, it gives them information on when it's
going to release and what they should expect.
Now, once you make the first sale, the pressure is on.
You can't quit now.
You have to focus and build a good product or else you just stole people's money.
Now, with this, writing the landing page, copywriting is easy once you have the marketing strategy in place.
You just need to learn how to structure it because the entire point of copywriting, if you don't know what copywriting is, I'm not talking about copyright like the legal intellectual property law.
I'm talking about copyright, like writing, not right, right side of the hand, right?
Like writing. It means persuasive writing.
The entire point of copywriting is to illustrate the offer in a persuasive and clear way.
So that our marketing strategy is clear.
We just need to put that into writing.
Now there are many ways to do this, but here's just a general landing page outline that we're going to go over.
So at the top you have headline, then sub headline, then a button.
You can't do this on Stan, but if you're building your own custom landing page, then that's where I would put the button.
Then you illustrate the problem and negative outcome.
And then you talk about the desired outcome and personal system.
Then you have social proof.
Then you introduce the offer with the features and benefits, and then you can have an FAQ if you'd like.
So if we start with the headline, your headline and sub headline should be a condensation of all of the value inside of your offer.
Your job is to combine the most potent parts of the big problem, desired outcome, personal system, time frame, and potentially the target persona in this section.
For my productivity product, the headline could be study for 12 hours a day without Adderall with a 14 -day program.
Now, if you want templates or guides for any of this, check out mental monetization link in the description.
Now, in the sub -headline, you're going to add the other parts that you didn't put in the headline.
So, since I included the desired outcome and time frame in the headline because it was the most potent, I could make my sub headline use the attention marathon system to avoid a low paying nine to five and conquer cheap dopamine.
So there I put in the personal system, the big problem.
And I even tossed in a high performing topic like cheap dopamine to just capture attention more.
Now in the next section, if you know what a landing page looks like, it has the headline, the sub headline, and then it goes into kind of like a wall of text that's called the lead.
And this is where you illustrate the big problem and the negative outcome.
You illustrate and amplify the problem.
When you start with the problem, you increase the reader's awareness around the problem.
You give them the belief that their life can change, because it can, by using a system that helped you.
Now, personally, I like to include a few short sentences that state the problem, then follow that with a bullet point list of pain points that stem from that problem.
You can visit any of my landing pages to see this in action.
I do it for all of them.
Now, if you don't know what to write here, just use a personal story.
Where did you start where were you before this why did you want to change and what did you try that didn't work so we have headline sub headline lead that illustrates the problem with a personal story so you talk about where you were etc and now you transition into the personal system so this is the transition from problem
to okay here's what we do differently so in the section continue the story what was the turning point in your story how did you discover and create the personal system why is it better than most other solutions on the market.
And if you can add a graphic here to help explain the system even better after the personal system is where I like to just put results or testimonials.
So this can be images.
It can be text. It can be your own personal results.
You just list out as much social proof as you have here.
And if you don't have social proof, then you either need to list your own.
So you need screenshots or you need pictures of yourself.
If like you have a six pack and that's what you're selling or show you at a desk, you need to show something to show that it's believable.
You'll get testimonials as you get customers, but you can also reach out to your friends and network to see if they will go through it for free and give you the testimonial.
Now, after that list of images or screenshots or social proof, now the next section is the features and benefits section.
It's the offer introduction.
So you have a headline that's like introducing name of the product and then you go into each feature and how it's structured and then each feature has an accompanying benefit.
Now soon after this section you have a call to action and this is the main call to action that asks them to buy.
What I like to do here is some kind of comparison.
Usually I like to compare where you were at before the program, where you'll be at after the program.
So that brings up the problem again, it makes them aware of it and then reminds them of the main benefits.
And then after the call to action section, you can have an FAQ section.
But if you're building on something like Stan, I would just get straight to the point and leave the FAQ section out because it just increases the amount of time it takes for people to reach where they can pay.
Now, once you have the landing page, just the MVP of the landing page, bare bones, you don't even have the product built yet.
Launch, launch, launch.
It shouldn't take longer than one to two weeks to create the actual landing page.
If you're a beginner, it can take one day if you've done this before, but once you have it, launch.
Set the release date three to four weeks out from your first promotion.
Promote in your newsletter every week.
Place the link everywhere in your bio and descriptions.
Write threads, create carousels, or film reels, or whatever other kind of content you make around the main topic your product is about.
Include small plugs or call -to -actions, like if you struggle with pain points, the product goes live on date use the elements of your marketing strategy from above every time you promote when you are one to two weeks out from launch start increasing how often and how hard you promote it helps a lot
if you have some kind of early bird discount for those who pre -order and for the sake of brevity i'll leave that for this video like subscribe links in the description for two hour writer mental monetization my book cortex a writing software in place to do all of your product planning if you'd like.
And for those who are still watching, please comment letting me know what you want to learn about next relating to business, human potential, whatever it may be.
Thank you again for watching.
Bye.
