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How to create and sell your first information product — even if you have a small audience

What I learned selling my first products for $250,000+

Author

Matt McGarry
June 29, 2024

DEEP DIVE

How to create and sell your first information product — even if you have a small audience

I’ve sold over $250,000 worth of courses and memberships for the Newsletter Operator brand this year alone.

My first-ever course generated $105,000 in sales.

And I’ve helped clients at GrowLetter sell much more than that.

The point is:

I’ve learned a few things about creating and marketing info products like…

  • Books

  • Courses

  • Masterminds

  • Subscriptions

  • Memberships

  • Coaching programs

Here’s how to create and sell your first info product — even if you have a small audience:

1) Type of products to consider

Here are the most popular types of info products:

  • Digital Product – Products experienced digitally and can scale infinitely with little to no incremental cost, such as ebooks, reports, templates, and SOPs.

  • Subscription – Information and content that is billed and delivered on a recurring basis.

  • Membership – Subscription products that bundle multiple features like community, content, and private resources into one recurring product.

  • Course — Students pay once to access educational content (usually video). Sometimes, the course includes a community and other resources.

  • Live Learning (aka cohort courses) — Educational experiences delivered in live sessions with the instructor and other students. Includes recordings and may include a community and other resources.

  • Coaching Program — A regimented service with 1on1 and/or group access to a coach or mentor. It may include other resources like a course, templates, and community.

  • Mastermind or Peer Group — A vetted and private community dedicated to a specific type of person or industry. It often includes an online community, live events, retreats, small-group meetings, and other resources.

Note: There are more options. But these are the most successful types of information products I see.

What type of information product should you start with?

That depends on what you can deliver and what your audience wants.

That said, there is one category of products you should NOT start with:

  • Recurring information products

Do not make the first product you sell a recurring content or community product like a subscription, membership, mastermind, or recurring coaching program.

This is the #1 mistake I see new founders and creators make.

Here’s why it’s a bad idea:

  • If you are selling your first product, you have no idea what your audience wants.

  • The only way to truly measure what your audience wants is to get them to buy a product from you, consume it, and give you feedback.

  • Subscriptions lock you into delivering a product for months or years.

  • Getting people to commit to a recurring subscription fee is 10 times harder to sell than selling 1-time product.

Creating and delivering a subscription product takes months of commitment.

  • If someone buys an annual plan, you must commit to delivering that product for a year (unless you refund them).

  • All subscribers expect new content every month or week.

I’ve seen dozens of founders launch recurring products that flop.

Then, the founders spend months working to deliver the product they promised to a small number of subscribers, generating insignificant revenue.

A massive negative ROI on their time.

Those founders are usually afraid to shut down the subscription, which would disappoint the few customers and make them look like a failure.

Usually, it takes 4-6 months for the founder to overcome sunk cost bias and shut down the subscription.

Don’t do this!

Instead, pick a simple one-time deliverable for your first product that will take 1-2 weeks (or less) to create.

That narrows down our options to:

  • Digital product

  • Course

  • Live learning

All of these are great. Here’s the pros and cons:

Digital products

  • Best for content that takes 1-4 hours to consume (no one wants to read a 150+ page e-book)

  • Or resources that are immediately useful (like templates, swipe files, lesson plans, copy scripts, SOPs, and more)

Pros

  • Fast and easy to make — Creating a digital product should take less than 10 hours.

  • 0 cost of reproduction — Create once. Sell forever. After the product is created or sold it requires no additional work from you.

Cons

  • Low price — Digital products typically sell for $29-$199. To make $100,000 from a $29 product, you need 3,450 customers. To get that many customers, you need a large audience.

  • Lower perceived value — People perceive digital products like ebooks, templates, and resources as having lower value than courses, live learning, and other info products.

  • Easy to steal and pirate — Sharing a PDF or notion template is easy.

Course

  • Best for content that takes 2-10 hours to consume and requires visuals.

Pros

  • Fast and easy to make — Creating your first course should take less than 10-20 hours.

  • 0 cost of reproduction — Create once. Sell forever. After the product is created or sold it requires no additional work from you.

  • Higher perceived value than a digital product — courses can be sold for $97 to $997 or more.

Cons

  • It's more work than a digital product. You have to write the content and then record and edit the videos.

  • You need more sophisticated marketing to sell a higher-priced course.

Live learning

  • Best for content that takes 5-10 hours to consume and benefits from live instruction, student community, live Q&A, and feedback.

Pros

  • Higher perceived value than a digital product and a traditional course. People pay more for live learning. Usually, cohort courses start at $997 and can be priced as high as $5,000.

  • Live teaching can create better content and student participation.

  • Scarcity and urgency when selling. Cohorts have an enrollment deadline and typically only accept a limited number of students.

Cons

  • More time to create and fulfill — You need to deliver the content live, which can take 2-4 hours per week of instruction time. Preparing the course material takes even more time.

  • You don’t have 0 marginal cost of reproduction like with other info products.

  • Most founders/creators only have time to do 2-4 live cohorts per year.

So which should you pick?

Unfortunately, I can't give a definitive answer. They’re all great options.

Most importantly, follow the pro tips below regardless of what type of information product you sell.

Here’s my best advice for selling your product…

10 Info Product Pro Tips

1) Don’t start with a recurring offer

We covered this in-depth above.

Recurring revenue is amazing. But you’ll be better off launching a recurring product later after you have experience selling one-time products.

2) Start with a paid coaching call

Sell 1 hour of your time using Calendly and Stripe/PayPal.

By selling coaching calls, you get to see your CUSTOMERS' problems and challenges.

Use these to identify the focus of your information product.

Talking to people who pay you (customers) and seeing their problems and what they will pay to fix is a better signal of what product you should create than surveys, polls, and interviews.

3) Always, always, ALWAYS — sell then build

Always pre-sell a product before you create it.

Don’t waste weeks or months creating an info product that people may not buy.

Always do a pre-sale to see if people want it. This is the only reliable way to determine what your audience wants.

Surveys, polls, and interviews may give you an idea of what they want. But many times, buying behavior will be completely different!

People vote with their wallets.

Here’s how to run a successful pre-sale:

  • Write a short sales email or page about the product.

  • Allow people to pre-order for 50% off.

  • Make a pre-order refundable and include a 30-day moneyback guarantee after the product is live, so there’s no risk to buy.

  • Tell your audience you will NOT create the product until you reach a certain number of pre-orders. Depending on your audience size, price, and goals, that number could be 10, 50, or 1000.

  • Make it clear that you will refund everyone if you do not reach that pre-order number within a specific timeframe (like 30 days).

  • After reaching the pre-order goal, close the cart and build the product.

  • Deliver the product to pre-order customers, collect feedback and testimonials. Then, release it at the full price point.

4) Multiple digital products can be turned into a subscription, membership, or course.

Digital products are a great way to start because they’re fast to make.

You can create and sell one low-price digital product per month.

If one product sells significantly better than others, you can turn it into a course or live learning experience.

5) Offer a paid coaching call with your product for more revenue.

At check out, offer people 2 options:

  • 1 — The info product

  • 2 — The info product and a 1 hour coaching call

This will increase your average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (LTV).

Eventually, you’ll run out of time and stop doing this. But it’s great for people getting started.

6) Use a sales page with long copy

To sell information, buyers need information about all the benefits and features they get from the product.

Your sales page should be 2000+ words.

7) To sell a $1000+ product, you need a video sale letter (VSL) or a webinar

Prospects need to spend time with you, learn from you, and trust you before buying a $1000+ product.

A webinar or VSL is the best way to do that at scale.

8) Use real scarcity and urgency

If you can have a real deadline or a limited number of seats for an information product, it will make selling easier.

9) Social proof is a must-have

Collect testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your customers. The more, the better. Incentivize customers to share these.

Prospects need to see you can deliver results.

10) Create a turn-key system

Make your info product feel as “done for you” as possible.

People don’t want to learn or work. They don’t want a course, a book, or a coaching program — they want results.

To use an analogy:

People want answers to the test. Not the textbook. Not the study guide.

Your product should deliver the most valuable and immediately actionable information in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

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