Selling digital products: what actually has to be true

The technical side of selling something digital is genuinely easy now. A payment processor, a file, an automated delivery email — an afternoon’s work, and the platform takes a small cut and handles the tax.

That is not the hard part, and the fact that it is easy is why so much of the advice about it is worthless. Anyone can describe how to set up a checkout page. Almost nobody wants to talk about the four things that determine whether anybody buys.

1. The product has to be downstream of something you already do

The failure pattern is picking a product because a market looks profitable, then trying to become qualified to make it.

The pattern that works is inverting that: notice what you have already built or learned for your own reasons, then ask whether the artefact of that work is worth something to someone else. The difference is not motivational — it is that the second route means the expensive part is already paid for. You are packaging work you did anyway.

It also solves the credibility problem, which is otherwise unsolvable. “I made this because I needed it and here is what it does” is a position. “I researched this niche” is not.

The practical test: if the product disappeared tomorrow and nobody had bought it, would you still have wanted the thing it was made from? If yes, the downside is capped at your time and you have something to show regardless.

2. Specific beats good

A comprehensive product for a broad audience competes with everything. A narrow product for a specific person competes with nothing, because nobody else has bothered.

“A guide to networking” is unsellable. “A change-control template pack for network teams running Cisco estates” is a thing a particular person recognises themselves in, and recognition is what makes someone read past the first line.

Narrowing feels like shrinking the market. In practice it shrinks the addressable market and raises the conversion rate by more, because you have stopped competing on volume and started competing on fit. It also makes every downstream decision easier — what to write, where to post it, what to leave out.

3. Distribution is the product’s other half, and it takes longer to build

This is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that decides the outcome.

Something with no audience sells approximately nothing, no matter how good it is, because nobody encounters it. And an audience is not a thing you can acquire in the week before launch — it is accumulated slowly by being useful in public for long enough that people recognise your name.

Which means the order is backwards from how it feels. You build the audience first, by publishing things that are useful and free, and the product comes out of and to that audience. Not the reverse.

The uncomfortable implication is that the timeline is months to years, not weeks. Anyone promising otherwise is either selling you the promise, or got lucky and has generalised from a sample of one.

The mildly cheering implication is that the free work is not a cost. Writing publicly is how you find out what people actually ask, which is how you find out what to build. The audience and the product specification arrive together.

4. Support is the real cost, and nobody prices it in

The seductive thing about a digital product is the marginal cost of a copy: zero. Sell one, sell a thousand, the file is the same file.

The marginal cost of a customer is not zero. Every buyer can email you. Some will want a refund, some will have a question the documentation answers, some will want a feature, and a few will want a conversation you did not sign up for.

This is fine and manageable, but it needs to be a decision rather than a surprise:

• Write documentation as though support does not exist. Every question you pre-empt is one you do not answer a hundred times.
• Decide the refund policy before the first sale, publish it, and then be generous within it. Arguing over small sums costs more than the sum.
• Be explicit about what is not included. “This does not include customisation” prevents a category of disappointment.

A product that generates constant support is not passive income. It is a job with an unusual billing model.

What I would actually do first

If I were starting, in order:

1. Publish, consistently, for six months, on one specific thing. No product. The goal is to find out what people ask you about.
2. Make the smallest possible version of the answer to whatever comes up most, and give it away. Watch whether anyone uses it.
3. Only then charge for something. Ideally the fuller version of the thing that already proved people want it.
4. Use a platform that handles tax. Digital goods VAT/sales-tax rules across jurisdictions are genuinely unpleasant, and the platforms that deal with it as merchant of record are worth their cut on that basis alone.

The honest summary

Selling digital products is not passive, it is not fast, and the technical part is the easy part. It is a distribution problem wearing a product costume.

But the economics, once distribution exists, are genuinely unusual — the thing you made once keeps being worth something, and that is rare enough to be worth the slow start.

I will link anything I actually build here as and when it exists. Nothing yet: this is the reasoning, not the receipt.