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Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
919: How a $29 Digital Product Made $288,405
00:43:43
When I put this product out there, I had no expectations of how it would perform. I was just excited to make it and use it myself and then share it with the world.
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Abigail Pumphrey
I want you to be thinking about who is this really, really, really, really for? And how can you give it a bit more broad appeal than that, but not so much broad appeal that it feels like it's for no one. Like it still needs to feel like it was for someone. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee When I first launched this $29 digital product, I didn't expect for it to become one of my highest earning offers. But here's how I made $288,405 and how you can do the same with your next entry point digital product. So I want to set the stage a little bit and talk a little bit about what inspired this idea. So the first thing you need to know is that when I put this out here, I was just excited about it. I had no expectations of how it would perform or what it would do for my in fact, I was just really excited to make it and actually use it as a resource inside of my own business. And it just only seemed helpful that I would then share it with the world and give people access to the thing that was working for me. Honestly, I think some of the best digital products are resources you've built for yourself and then you turn around and give away to other people. I think it's a way to really grow your impact but also ensure that you know it works because you've tried and tested it yourself. You are your own case study until you have other clients who've gone through the same process. Now, there really was no rhyme or reason to why I chose $29 other than I just felt right. It felt good. It Felt like a solid number. It felt like one of those numbers that was just high enough that I knew it could be profitable, but low enough that I thought no one would really question it as a business expense. But it wasn't so inexpensive that people would think it was junk, if that makes sense at all. But beyond it just feeling right, there wasn't a lot of science to this. It was just a number I was willing to try. And when it worked and worked so well, I never changed it. It's been years and it's the same price point. And at this point the only reason I still have it up is so that people like you who are just curious and want to see can go through it. I don't intend to sell it to anyone who plans to actually use the product because at this point it's outdated. But if you're just curious about how I set it up or what my initial looked like, it's a pretty raw and real take. So Trello for business, in fact does still exist. If you have ever sat and thought a low price product could never generate real income, I'm confident this story is going to prove you wrong. Okay, let's get into the backstory of what went down before I even launched and put this out into the world. I think the first thing we have to talk about is the problem that it was solving. Because for anyone, this is perhaps the most important thing you have to address because you need to fully and completely address a problem for your ideal client. But it has to be a problem that is valuable and something that is of necessity. But we're talking one problem, not hundreds of problems. We're talking one specific area that you are going to provide a full makeover in. And I think it's important to note timing here. So the problems that people decide are top of mind for them are not just problems that people universally experience. While that is true, there is a lot more trends at play than I think people realize. And I think it's important to note that being one of the key reasons why this worked as well as it did. I was solving a problem fully and completely, but I was solving a problem that was popular. I was solving a problem that was popular for a broad audience and taking advantage of a network of people that already were in this world. Now let me explain. When this product came out, project management was like the thing that people were talking about. How do you manage your projects? How do you keep yourself organized? What is your process like? How are you doing this? How are you doing this online and A big reason this was coming up was in the world of small business at the time, because time is everything, there were not project management solutions designed for the small business owner. Every project management solution out there had been designed for businesses with hundreds of employees and multiple departments. Or it was designed fully and completely for one person in a very siloed kind of way, like building out a grocery list kind of thing. So I could have looked at this problem and thought, I am going to go out and I am going to build the next project management software that is specific to my industry. I could have started a SaaS company. And I thought about it. It was actually something that went through my mind as a possibility and stuck in my mind for a long time. We had a secret confidential file in. I don't even remember if it was in Dropbox or Drive, it doesn't matter. But we called it Beyonce. The, the confidential file was Beyonce. And when we were talking about Beyonce, it was this potential SaaS product that we were going to develop and company that we were going to build. But if I am anything, I am a hacker, okay? I love to hack together solutions. And especially early on in business, I wanted to hack together solutions that were cheap or free because I didn't want to invest in these super expensive softwares that were designed for businesses much larger than mine, with much bigger budgets than mine. I wanted things to just work. Now up until this point, I had been completely a paper person. I planned out my projects on paper, I wrote my notes on paper, I put all of my to do lists on paper. Everything was in a notebook. It wasn't in one notebook, it was all over the place. I had notebooks and post it notes and all of the things strewn all over my desk. And every other small business owner I knew had the same problem. They were tired of trying to track down the list or they were out to coffee and they wanted to look something up and it was on their desk at home. This was something people were universally experiencing. Now here's the part where you take advantage of trends. At the time, the new kid on the block was a software called Trello. Now, Trello still exists, Trello is still a huge software and it's since been sold at least once, if not multiple times. But this was back in the day when Trello was new and still in development. And primarily Trello was for people in the development space. So it was built to run those kinds of departments where people were fixing bugs and looking at certain lines of code and like it was still collaborative, but it was basic, and it was essentially the equivalent of virtual, post it notes, which is why I loved it. Now people started using it. I was not like the first to market to, like, say, you need to use this thing. It was already gaining traction all on its own. People were already using the product and it was gaining traction in the small business arena already all on its own, without my help, without me having to do much with it at all. But because it was like virtual, post it notes, the majority of small business owners were just recreating the chaos that was their desktop into their virtual desktop. They were just translating that chaos from one place to another. There was no organization, there was no process, there was no flow. There was no system. And your girl loves a system. I so love a system. If you were to see my house today, Everything has a home, Everything has a place. I could tell you exactly where everything lives. What cabinet, what drawer, what department, that kind of thing. Department. You don't have departments at home. What am I talking about? Container. There we go. What container it is. And on what shelf? In the closet, all of that. Everything has a place. Everything has a system. Including, like, when we run out of milk. There is a very specific place that you write that down. And that system has been working for me for years. Nonetheless, back to the story at hand. So because everyone had just recreated the chaos, I was determined to figure this out. I wanted to create a system that worked for me and my brain, which was creative, but also I wanted to keep things simple and just be able to move on to the next thing. But I also found that I was repeating a bunch of things over and over and over again, but forgetting small tasks related to that specific kind of project. For example, I would go to set up a webinar, which back in the day was not as simple as making a meeting in Zoom. It was a lot more complicated than that. And I. I would go through the process, but I would forget a step or multiple steps and something wouldn't work or it would cause a problem later or whatever. And that got to be really frustrating. So I was looking to solve two things for myself. One, how do I create, like a daily, everyday system that makes sense for my brain? So I know what I need to work on when I get to my desk so that I'm not guessing what needs to be done and making it up on the fly that I already have a to do list and I already have it ready to go and I can just flow. So I needed that. But I also needed to take the things that were Kind of reoccurring processes. People have since called this sops. SOPS in the world of small business was not a thing at the time. Okay, that wasn't a big business kind of word that you used in corporate. You didn't talk about SOPs in small business. You just didn't. Anyway, I essentially needed that, but in checklist form. Like, it needed to be simple. I didn't need a huge document. I didn't need a video walkthrough. Cause I wasn't gonna watch my own video back. No, that wasn't happening. I just needed, like that quick checklist of things to make sure I had done it right, to make sure I wasn't skipping a step. Because I like to get ahead of myself. So Trello for business was born out of me figuring this out. I tamed the chaos. I stopped using paper, which for a designer and a paper girly is actually so sad. Like, I love, love walking into a stationery store and it pains me that I don't use paper anymore. Like, almost at all. Almost at all. Like everything that I can get virtually delivered or paperless, everything. It's all that now. But this was a really big transition for me back in the day. But this worked so well. I always knew what I was working on. I always knew what I needed to do on a daily basis. I had processes I could come back to. I was able to track my goals, my analytics, the things that were working. I was able to have records. God forbid you want to go back and do the same promotion a year later. I knew where to find it. It was revolutionary. It was incredible. And it was simple. I cannot articulate enough that it was simple. Okay. People were craving simplicity because that's what a post it note is. It's simple. But they definitely wanted a system that made them feel like they were a more legit small business owner, not just someone playing business online, which for a lot of us felt like what we were doing at the time. So, yeah, I had noticed that the majority of my audience was just like me. And they had started the process of migrating from papers cluttering their desk to essentially a bunch of random notes online. And they needed help. They needed a process, but they did not have time. Could they have figured it out? I think the majority of them could eventually. Not all of them, but a lot of them could have figured this out eventually, but they did not have time because they were running their business. They had clients. They were fully booked out. They needed a system that was just going to plug and play and work for them. That's what Trello for business was. It was a collection of templates that someone could quite literally install into Trello, which at the time was an incredibly popular project management system, but was still new and still gaining traction. And there was no other competition for small business project management resources. I was definitely very, very early to this game. It allowed someone to not only copy the content I had spent time developing, but I took the time to walk them through how I organized my whole business. And when I say that, that makes it sound like too big of a problem, but I'm promising you, like we're talking about a five minute walkthrough for how the board worked. Like, this was not crazy. This was simple. It walked someone through what that looked like, how they could utilize it themselves, how all of these things work together. Because they weren't just. It wasn't just a single board. Like, it was a collection of boards that all work together so someone could manage their business and their clients and their social media and the content they were putting out, like all of it. And because it was new, I was also adding in tech tutorials. So when new features came out for Trello, I was training people on how to utilize that tool and integrate it into their system. And I was adding those down the road and people were getting regular updates to the product they had purchased. But, like, this was not something that took forever, I would say, and it's been so long, so I don't know for sure. But if I were to bring myself back to the time in which I was working on this, I would say development took a couple of weeks to make the system for myself, for me to use it. I used the system for a while and then I was like, other people need this. This would be great. And because I had already made the system for myself, because it was already working, it was like a few days to clean it up, to make it so that it was generic enough that it could work for a vast majority of people. And I could then create the video tutorials to walk someone through the process. And then the tech stuff, I had some of it at the beginning, but that was something I added to over time. So, like collectively we're talking about maybe three weeks, but two of those weeks I had spent a long time ago, long time ago being super relative, maybe a month prior, and was utilizing the thing and it was working. And so then I turned around and taught it. And that was what I was best at. What I was best at was learning how to do something that was complicated. Simplifying the process down and turning around and teaching other people how to do it. That is literally my entire job. In case you're unaware. All I do is take complicated topics, break them down so that they're not so complicated anymore, and then teach people how to do it. That is what being an online educator is in the most basic sense. But in terms of like development, this was simple. Like I made the boards. Trello already had a built in way for you to share boards so people could copy them. So I had that built into the software and then I recorded video tutorials to walk them through it, which were screen shares essentially. And then I needed a host, I needed a place to put the actual training and I did a ton of research and I ultimately went with Teachable. And I've been with them since. It's been eight, probably approaching nine years now that I've been with Teachable. I have been approached by so many competitors, I haven't even been tempted to move. Okay. It has been legit. So if you're interested in trying Teachable for yourself, you totally can. Go to bossproject.comteachable and if you want, help me walking you through this process of creating your own entry point digital product. I'm doing all of that inside of a one day challenge, which I know sounds crazy to do all of this in a single day, but the difference is instead of you building the product before you sell it, I'm going to help you validate the product. Sell it, I. E. That's how you validate it and then you're going to build it. So that is why it's possible. I wanted this offer that I was spending my time and energy on to feel like a no brainer. I wanted to make it affordable enough that it would remove any objections, but valuable enough that people who had been through the product felt like it was a steal. Have you been wanting to launch a digital product but you don't know where to start? Perhaps you're struggling to pick the right profitable idea. Is the idea there? But you just need to get the ball rolling again. I got you. I want to help you go from idea to launch in just one day. I partnered with Teachable to bring you the one day launch challenge. So far we've helped 6,786 people do just that inside this challenge. We're helping you pick the right idea, getting all the tech set up. Heck, you could even collect your very first payment the same day. It's all loaded up for you and ready to dive in@bossproject.com launch. Don't wait until you're ready to sign up. We got pre challenge goodies ready and waiting for you. Including 100 profitable digital product ideas. Just head to bossproject.com launch and get started today. Hiring with Indeed. Your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire when we've hired. In the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets. And listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit. To get your job's more visibility at indeed.comstrategy hour, just go to indeed.comstrategy hour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. You need Indeed. It'd be really easy to sit here and tell you that I had this elaborate launch strategy and that it was so complicated and I did all of these emails and all of this social media and all of this going live and no, this was so simple. I don't necessarily know how many emails I sent or how many social posts I put out, but like, I just told people it existed. I told people I was excited. I told people it was working for me. And people listened. They could hear my enthusiasm, they could feel the kind of impact it could make for their own life and their own business. And it built excitement for the product. My enthusiasm, my excitement is what got other people excited. So. So if you're not excited about what you're selling, you're gonna have to reel it in and try something else. Cause you have to love what you're putting out into the world. It's your baby and you gotta be able to show it off and you gotta be able to talk about it. It's cooler than someone baking bread for the first time, which I love a good loaf of bread when it's like right outta the oven and it's warm and anyway, I'm clearly hungry. Most of my initial sales came from a warm audience and this was scattered like I was not a build it all in one place kind of Lady, I had an Instagram with some followers. I had a social media or an email list rather that I had started. It wasn't huge, but it was growing. And I had a Facebook group that I was not necessarily marketing as like my Facebook group, but rather a place where the people in my industry could gather and everybody was utilizing the group and it was frigging fabulous. But because we owned the group, it definitely was a tool and a place that we could market. Selling an entry point digital product should be easy because you're solving a problem that people are craving a solution to. Now it'd be really easy to say, well, everyone's already solved these problems. There's so many solutions that already are out there. Sure, no doubt there are tons of solutions. There are tons of people offering digital products, but you're you and how you teach is how you're going to teach. And some people could try to learn from other people and it could feel like it's in a completely foreign language because they don't click with that person. You are going to show up in your own unique way. So sure. Are you going to get more traction if you can come up with a more novel idea and take advantage of trends and timing and all of those things? Yeah, duh. Like for sure. That doesn't mean that a product that's similar to 15 other people in your industry won't work. You do have to figure out your differentiator and how you make it uniquely different, which I'm going to be talking about more in my next episode. So definitely make sure you're subscribed. We're going to talk about how to make your ish a no brainer. So be ready for that. I think one of the biggest untapped secrets to all of this is really taking advantage of someone wanting to use your product immediately. Because the more people who use your product, the more people who are going to benefit from your product and the more people who benefit, they're way more likely to share themselves. And so because this was a burning problem, people would pause everything about their lives to go through this program and they would implement it and they would be shocked that they could get through the content in a couple of hours and they could get it all set up and in maybe two days. And then at the end of those two days, some people even less time than that. They felt like they had the whole new lease on life. Everything felt different. Everything felt like a breath of fresh air to them. And because of that, yeah, I continued to market it, I continued to Send traffic. I continued to pour time and attention into it, but I had people who loved the product, and because they loved the product, they told their friend, and then their friend would use it and they would love the product, and then they would go tell their friend, oh, my God, you need to do this. Because it just changed everything about my life. It was so impactful that I had other people blogging about my product, sharing about my product on their social media, sharing about my product on podcasts. I didn't ask them to. There wasn't an affiliate program. They weren't getting paid to share it. It was simply that helpful that everyone felt the need to pass it along. Now, I will say I have not necessarily been able to recreate the virality that that had. It definitely was a right time, right place, right timing, right product, all of the things. But I've made more than $3.4 million off of digital products, and this was just one of them. So it is absolutely not to say that other products haven't been profitable. Heck yes, they have. Heck yes, they have. The difference in that is that for many of those other products, I did have to spend more time focusing on sending traffic than I did for this one. Because in a lot of ways, this product continued to market itself. But I think it's really easy to say that, like, it was all an accident and like a huge fluke and it only worked because of those things. No, I was also really intentional about it. Comparative to many other products, I have been the kind of person that develops one thing because I was using it and it was working. I turn around and teach it, and then I learned something new, and then I turn around and teach the next thing, and then I learned something new, and I turn around and teach the next thing. And it was really easy to just move on. But I think one of the secret sauces was that I didn't shut up. I talked about this thing for years. It was perhaps the thing I shared the most about on every platform, on every interview, on every article that was ever written, I couldn't shut up about it. It was in my own bio for a long time. And I developed a system to regularly promote it. So a big part of that at the time, which definitely isn't a strategy I'm using right now, but the same concept I'm using right now for sure is we came out with a YouTube channel that would have trello specific content, and every single piece of content also got duplicated over to the blog. And so we had all of this SEO Rich stuff for super searchable topics like how to do this very specific thing in Trello. We taught them how to do it. They're like, that was so helpful. Oh, you have a whole program that teaches all these other things done. That's a no brainer. Why didn't I think of that myself? So it'd be easy to say it marketed itself and it was like, no. We were so hyped up about it, we committed to consistently creating content around this topic and never shutting up about it. So yeah, I've done that around a lot of topics. But I promise you the topics that I don't shut up about are the ones that sell the most. Which is not all that surprising if you really think about it. The lifetime sales for this $29 product which has sold over 10,000 units was 288,405. Now if you were to divide 280,405 by 29, it is 9,900 and something. I think maybe 800 and something. I have, I did the math yesterday, I don't remember. Anyway, there has absolutely been times where we gave it away. So that's really the biggest difference. But over 9,000 paid purchases for sure. Over 9, 500 paid purchases for sure. I think 10,000 and 200 or something people have access. I think it was like bonuses that we gave away at some point. Couldn't tell you. It's been a lot of years, it's been a lot of promotions. But I want you to think about this one. Don't get caught up in how much of like a perfect case scenario this all ended up being. The thing you need to be paying attention to is that this was a problem. It was a common problem amongst many, many, many, many people. It was a pain point that was causing people stress. People wanted a solution but didn't have time to build out the solution. And this pricing felt accessible but valuable. And we had a simple and repeatable marketing strategy. That's it. That's it. Solve a real problem, a small one. Solve it quickly. Give them the quick win. Give them an easy yes with the price point. Make it valuable. Keep showing up again and again and again. Now the funny thing when I think back about like and really reflect on this product, we built it for small business owners, but more specifically, we built it for creative small business owners, which really meant people who were already in the marketing space and running their own creative agencies. So in the grand scheme of things, this product was designed for solopreneurs who were running website design companies, copywriting companies, maybe their own social media agency. It was pretty niche, but the way in which we wrote the sales page was much more broad. We marketed it to small business owners in general, but targeting the very specific needs of a smaller group, if that makes sense. And then when it started selling, it definitely started selling initially to the super niche group, and then it started selling to a wider group than that. And by the time it kind of like hit its peak virality, it was being bought by the marketing department of some much larger company. And then they were using it as a training tool and people were buying multiple copies for their staff. So they could be like, this is how we're going to use this project management tool. But that's not where I started. And that was not the initial objective. So I want you to be thinking about, who is this really, really, really, really for? And how can you give it a bit more broad appeal than that, but not so much broad appeal that it feels like it's for no one. Like it still needs to feel like it was for someone. And I think one of the ways we did that, even though we talked about it being for small business owners in general, the copy was very creative. Like, the copy was almost funny in kind of a girl bossy kind of way. I don't know how else to describe that, but it was quirky, it was cute, it was snappy, it was a little sassy, which definitely fit the vibes of everything else we were doing. And when we put it out there, we didn't have testimonials obviously, so I felt like we needed to say something. And so one of the things that we did early on was we added testimonials. One was from my dog, which I know sounds so goofy, but it just fit the vibe like it just fit the leg. I know this is legit. So much so that I'm going to tell you my dog said so. And people loved that. And we had so many people tell us that was the reason they decided to check out, because they thought it was funny. And that dog stayed on that sales page for a very, very long time. And then we ended up ultimately building out like an entire testimonials page that was totally separate from the sales page. Cause there was just so many of them. And it was just like pages and pages and pages of love, which is great. Love it. When I really look back, I realized that this product worked because it gave people an amazing immediate win at a price point they didn't have to think twice about. That is the magic. An immediate Win an immediate win. I know that all of this is possible for you and you do not need to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to come up with a totally novel experience. And here's what I mean by that. Like, okay, sure, yes, I had timing, right? But is project management a new concept? I didn't invent project management. I didn't even invent this software. It was just a popular software. I just took advantage of the fact there was a popular software doing things that people already understood and I gave people an experience that sped up their results. You don't have to come up with a totally brand new thing. I just want you to package up your expertise in a way that's quick and accessible, easy to understand, easy to implement fast. Your price should feel like a steal and not so low that it devalues your product. I'm going to spend way more time on that in the next episode though, and specifically talk about pricing because I want your offer to feel like a no brainer and I want the value to make sense. I believe in creating a simple and duplicatable marketing system that works for you, one that keeps this running. I love putting things in what I call maintenance mode where you just keep it going, you keep doing the things. Do you think I got to 900 and something episodes on this podcast by reinventing the wheel? No. I got to 900 and something episodes because I committed to showing up consistently and I've shared very similar types of content for years and I kept doing it. If you're bored, it's either because you're making it boring, like it's a topic you're passionate about, but you're making it too dry. Make it more fun, make it more fun to consume, make it more fun to talk about, or you're doing it about something you feel like you have to talk about, not what you're truly passionate about. I think you being passionate about what you offer is an essential piece of this puzzle. And then when that falls into place, you're going to create offers that you can't shut up about. And then you're going to be able to make this simple cycle where you can keep marketing your business. Your long term success with low ticket products is about consistent marketing. It's not a set it and forget it. You keep talking about it, you keep adding to it. It doesn't mean that you have to keep changing your product or keep adding to your product. That's not what I mean. But you can keep showing up and you can keep sharing new insights and you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest. If you've been holding off on launching a digital product because you think it needs to be perfect or you think it needs to be expensive, let this be your sign to start small and just watch what happens. I want to help you launch your first or next digital product. It won't be the last one you ever make. It probably won't be the most profitable one you ever make. And that's okay. That's not the goal here. The goal is to teach you how to use the muscle that allows you to get this out there quickly. Speed to market is a skill that is going to help you so many times over. The challenge is free. There's literally no reason not to sign up. You just go to bossproject.com launch. If you've been through it before, let this be your sign to go through it again. I would love to have you. And then I want you to share your biggest takeaway. Because I definitely talked about I've talked about Trello for business before many times, but I'm curious if the way in which I talked about it today was different and something clicked different for you. I want to know your biggest takeaway from this episode, so I want you to send me a DM over at Abigail says on Instagram. You're going to find my profile by going to OSS Project. Click on my name, send me a dm. I'd love to hear from you. And in our next episode I'm going to be talking about no brainer pricing and how you prove the value of your intangible product to potential customers. So make sure you're subscribed so you never miss a future episode. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it, and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says, and bossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.