¡Viva Digital Products!

I made over $7,500 in exchange for just 10 minutes of work.

That might sound like some clickbait YouTube thumbnail, but it’s legit. And ever since, I can’t stop thinking about my latest obsession: digital products. Let me explain…

I began “building in public” way back when we first launched the business.

I routinely share updates about the business, behind-the-scenes stories, and strategies. Just last week I shared the milestone of us surpassing $2M MRR, along with a mega-thread of insights and tactics for other founders to copy.

That post did numbers by the way – almost 4M impressions (but who’s counting).

Anyway, I took this “building in public” thing to a whole new level when I launched this very newsletter a few years ago (on beehiiv, of course). Not only does a 1,500 word essay allow for a lot more depth, but it doubles as an opportunity to build a successful newsletter using the platform that I’m building.

It’s like build-in-public inception.

I also started to record videos and document some of the ways I was using the platform to share strategies and tactics with users. If you visit our YouTube channel (which you should subscribe to), you’ll see an entire playlist called “Building with the CEO.”

Last November, we launched Digital Products as part of the Winter Release Event (our livestream product event where we dropped 10 new features). Digital Products allow users to monetize their expertise by selling templates, guides, eBooks, or live sessions.

I didn’t think I had anything to sell, but I wanted to create a video showcasing the feature. So I dug up a 60-slide presentation that I gave for a webinar last summer and converted that, along with a video recording of the session, into a simple playbook.

The Newsletter Playbook for Founders was born. It covers how to “build in public” along with the exact tactics I used to scale my newsletter to 100K+ subscribers.

I launched it on beehiiv as a digital product for the purpose of recording a how-to video 👇

Again, the purpose was to educate users how to launch a digital product, not about the product itself. Of course I mentioned the playbook, but I genuinely didn’t expect anyone to purchase it.

But shortly after the video went live, a few dozen sales came in. Then I got a few emails from customers who had purchased it and were posting on X about how helpful the playbook was.

I decided to lean in and post on X and LinkedIn to promote it a bit more intentionally. The result? My inbox was unusable for a full two days from all of the purchase alerts.

I ended up selling more than 750 playbooks. That’s more than $7,500 for something that legitimately took me a few minutes to launch. And beehiiv is one of the few platforms that doesn’t take a cut of revenue, so I got to keep all of those earnings 😏.

Meanwhile, adoption of the feature had been growing exponentially week over week (even without any sort of dedicated promotion). Users were organically launching and selling digital products in droves.

That’s all the signal I needed:

In addition to being the CEO, I also run the product team here at beehiiv. I took that signal and pivoted a ton of our resources to making digital products 100x better.

Well, that’s what we’ve spent the past six weeks working on. And yesterday we introduced Digital Products v2. This newsletter isn’t meant to be a product update, so I’ll spare all of the details and just hit you with the highlights.

We launched a beautiful new product page that’s optimized for conversion. We also launched product reviews that you can automatically collect from customers and display on your page.

We launched support for 10 international currencies, and introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay for frictionless mobile checkouts.

But where I think digital products really shines is around how seamlessly it fits into the broader beehiiv ecosystem. With a simple backslash command you can add products directly to your newsletter, you can launch automated journeys when someone purchases something, and you can use the website builder to design your pages to match the rest of your brand. Here’s mine:

Oh, and did I mention that beehiiv is one of the only platforms in the industry that doesn’t take a penny of revenue from its users?

The other benefit of dogfooding your product as a founder: you are the feedback loop. During this whole experience, I have been drowning the team Slack channels with feedback on ways to improve the experience for both customers and users.

But what genuinely excites me the most: the near-unlimited possibilities this unlocks for our users. There is such a diverse range of expertise currently being monetized on the platform:

I can’t teach you how to play the flute, but as a part of my most recent video, I showcased how easy it is to launch coaching sessions on beehiiv. And true to fashion, I plan to open up an hour each week for a 1:1 founder session.

If you want to chat for an hour about startups, fundraising, storytelling, GTM, or anything else, you can now book time with me directly on my website (all thanks to beehiiv).

¡Viva Digital Products!

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/viva-digital-products

Shoutout to Erik for the reader submission.

Let me take a moment to say that I have been very pleased with the quality and quantity of reader submissions lately 🙃.

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