~9 min read 20 Apr 2026

How To Turn 1 Idea Into A $2,000,000 Digital Product

AI Summary

Starting with a viral thread in 2020, a $29 Notion doc became the first digital product, earning $400 before being abandoned. The real breakthrough came from Ship 30 for 30, a daily writing cohort that scaled to over $2,000,000 by solving a specific problem for a specific audience: beginner internet writers. The key difference was niching down to a niche-within-a-niche and building around painful problems with clear desirable outcomes, not rushing to sell a generic idea.

Key takeaways

Your first product should be work you have already done. The Podcast Compendium was simply compiled summaries already written, packaged into a Notion doc and sold for $29.

Niching down is non-negotiable. Instead of targeting all writers, Ship 30 for 30 targeted one specific group: beginners starting to write online. That specificity is what made it scalable.

Use a 4-step framework: pick a niche-within-a-niche, list the 10 biggest problems, list the 10 most desirable outcomes, then build a product around the most painful and expensive problem.

Original post

Over the last 6 years, I’ve generated over $20,000,000 selling digital products.

But when I first started out, I had no clue how to turn the ideas in my head into products I could actually sell. Now I’m convinced everyone has a $350 digital product sitting inside their head.

So, here’s my story of how I created my first two digital products—and why the first flopped and the other I scaled to over $2,000,000 in revenue (with a framework to help you come up with your own digital product idea).

Let’s dive in!

Back in mid-2020, I started writing on 𝕏.

I was tired of spending hours every Sunday slaving over a single blog post only for it to be read by my mom and my sister.

So, I set myself a challenge. I would write a thread every day for 30 days, curating my takeaways from all the podcasts I was listening to every morning before my 9 to 5 on Wall Street.

After all, what did I have to lose?

Worst-case scenario, I’d clarify my thinking by writing about my favorite investors, entrepreneurs, and creators.
Best-case scenario, something else would happen to make it worthwhile (this could’ve been anything, I had no idea what to expect).

After 27 days, I was seeing almost zero progress:

Barely any likes
Nearly zero shares
Hardly any comments

I published my 28th thread and went to bed, thinking nothing of it.

Overnight, the thread went viral and I woke up to hundreds of new followers. Naval Ravikant retweeted the thread. And I had a ton of people DM me for the links to my other curations. Which helped me create my first digital product.

Product 1: The Podcast Compendium ($400)

I put all my curations into a Notion document and gave it away for free on 𝕏.

But then I had people DM me & ask if there was a premium version of the podcast summaries.

There wasn’t.

So I compiled all the summaries, created a Slack channel for the community, and put it on Gumroad for $29:

This is how I made my first $400 on the Internet.

It taught me 3 lessons:

You do not need a huge audience to launch a product
Your first product should be work you’ve already done
People pay for organized thinking

But I abandoned it for the next product idea:

Product 2: Ship 30 for 30 ($2,000,000+)

A simple daily writing habit and publishing ideas on the Internet had caught the attention of people I looked up to so I decided it would be fun to help other people do this too.

So, one Tuesday evening, I tweeted this:

I only had a couple thousand followers on 𝕏 back then and I wasn’t sure if it’d get much traction.

But after tweeting about this “accountability group” I was making, all of a sudden 50+ people were paying money to join what quickly became the 1st cohort of Ship 30 for 30. This, like the viral thread, was another inflection point. And creating this first cohort is how I got put in contact with my co-founder, Nicolas Cole, as well as how I earned my first $5,000 as a ghostwriter.

And 12 months later, Ship 30 was doing 7 figures in revenue.

Now, there were many differences between that first digital product (the Podcast Compendium) and Ship 30 for 30.

And one of the main differences is the target audience of the product.

Because most Digital Product Builders think “creating a digital product” is:

Running with the first idea that pops into their head
Recording themselves rambling through some hastily made slides
Slapping it all together into a "bonus" PDF so people can "read it on the go"

They rush the building part so they can start the selling part ****ASAP.

Which is what I did with my Podcast Compendium. Sure, it answered a need but I hadn’t nailed my positioning or created a product to appeal to a certain audience.

Because if you get the Product Creation part wrong, it doesn’t matter how good your marketing, launch strategy, or tech stack is.

If you build your digital product on an idea that sucks, then when you sell it to customers, it’ll be a huge disappointment.

Which means they will either:

Demand their money back immediately
Or worse—tell everyone they know to avoid your product like the plague

And nothing destroys the business of a Digital Product Builder faster than customers warning others to stay away.

Creating a product people actually need is a skill—from picking the perfect idea to crafting modules that keep them hooked and taking action.

Product Creation 101

So, what’s the secret to creating a sellable (and profitable) digital product?

Niching down.

After all, the cliché is true: “The riches are in the niches.”

So, when coming up with a digital product idea, you need to consider 3 levels of specificity:

The Mega-Category
The Niche within this category
And then the Niche-Within-Niche

Skip this critical step, and your product will be built on generic, watered-down ideas that doom it to failure before it even launches.

(And spoiler alert: This is how you build a digital product based on what you know—even if you think you don’t have a “sellable” idea inside your head. This framework makes it possible for anyone.)

You need to get this specific to build a list of problems your product solves and the desirable outcomes it creates for your customer.

Because nobody wants to learn a random set of information.

People only want to learn if it helps them take ACTION—because action increases the likelihood they achieve their desired outcome.

Learning for the sake of learning is pointless.

But when you clearly define both the painful problems you're solving AND the outcomes you're delivering, creating a sellable product becomes almost automatic. Your curriculum naturally focuses on action rather than endless theory.

Master this, and your digital product becomes irresistible AND builds the foundation for monetizing your product years into the future.

Because this is exactly what we needed when we were starting out—and we thought creating a “digital product” was spinning up a Slack channel and charging people $50 for joining!

We’ve come a long way since then, making over $2,000,000 in low-ticket digital product sales alone—and these frameworks helped us get here.

How To Find Your Digital Product Idea

All you need to do is follow this 4-step process:

Step 1: Pick an industry, then pick a niche, then pick a niche-within-a-niche.
Step 2: List out the 10 Biggest Problems in your chosen niche/industry.
Step 3: List out the 10 Most Desirable Outcomes in this niche-within-niche.
Step 4: Pick the most painful/expensive problem and create a digital product to solve it.

Now, let’s take Ship 30 for 30 as an example.

When we started Ship 30 for 30, the first step was for us to get more specific.

Here’s what that looked like:

Mega-Category: Writing
Niche: Internet Writing (which we later coined as “Digital Writing”)
Niche-Within-Niche: Internet Writing For Beginners

The mistake, and something that would have killed Ship 30 for 30 from the very beginning, would have been for us to say “we help ALL writers!”

That’s not true.

We don’t help Pulitzer Prize winning novelists write their next award-winning book.
We don’t help journalists learn how to write compelling cover stories.
We don’t help writers land their first book deal.
We don’t help entrepreneurs launch writing-related products on Amazon.
Etc.

We got specific, and we said “we help beginner writers start writing online.” (Which, by the way, was a niche-within-niche both Cole and I had personally experienced, struggled with, and where we found creative solutions to our own problems.)

That’s Step 1.

Step 2 is we then listed out the 10 biggest problems THAT SPECIFIC PERSON (Niche-Within-Niche) had and needed help with.

For us, that list looked like this:

Problem #1: Distractions
Problem #2: Over-Editing
Problem #3: Perfectionism
Problem #4: Procrastination
Problem #5: Self-Confidence
Problem #6: Generating Ideas
Problem #7: Imposter Syndrome
Problem #8: Writing Consistently
Problem #9: Choosing A Platform
Problem #10: Finding Time To Write

Now, are there more problems than just these 10? Of course.

The game isn’t to list out “every possible problem” (although, there’s no harm in starting there—if that helps you).

The game is creating a list of the Top 10 Biggest Problems for this specific niche-within-niche.

Once you have your list of Top 10 Biggest Problems, now skip to the end.

What does this specific person care most about?
What do they want to achieve or accomplish?
What milestone do they want to reach?
How would their life be different if they solved each of these problems?

Three pro tips here:

Tip 1: The 10 Most Desirable Outcomes in this niche-within-niche should be outcomes you, yourself have wanted, strived for, and/or accomplished. (Otherwise, why are you selling a solution to a problem you haven’t even solved for yourself yet!?)
Tip 2: If you want to make this exercise really easy, just take your list of 10 Biggest Problems and write “the desirable outcome” next to each one.
Tip 3: I encourage you to write these Desirable Outcomes as “I” statements. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer.

For example:

Problem #1: Distractions → “If I wasn’t distracted, I would be so much more productive.”
Problem #2: Over-Editing → “If I wasn’t constantly over-editing, I would save myself hundreds of hours and publish way more often.”
Problem #3: Perfectionism → “If I wasn’t such a perfectionist, I would get out of my own way, publish more, and maybe even live my dream of being a full-time writer.”
Problem #4: Procrastination → “If I stopped procrastinating, I would finally start making progress toward my writing goals.”
Problem #5: Self-Confidence → “If I had self-confidence, I would finally share the stories and insights and frameworks I think are valuable but have been afraid to write and publish.”
Problem #6: Generating Ideas → “If I had a reliable system for generating ideas, I wouldn’t feel so reliant on my intuition and so easily talk myself out of writing anytime I was struggling to come up with things to say.”
Problem #7: Imposter Syndrome → “If I didn’t have Imposter Syndrome, I would stop comparing myself to other people, publish more often, and just generally feel happier and more fulfilled with my path in life.”
Problem #8: Writing Consistently → “If I was writing consistently, my audience would grow faster, my library would grow faster, and I would achieve my goals as a writer way faster.”
Problem #9: Choosing A Platform → “If I knew which platform to write on, I could finally start my journey of writing online.”
Problem #10: Finding Time To Write → “If I had more time to write, I would be able to write consistently, grow my audience and library faster, and feel like I was on the path to achieving my goals.”

Notice how revealing this exercise is!

Especially when written in “I” statements, you really put yourself in the mind of the target customer.

(And again, you’ll be using all of these in your marketing materials later!)

Then step 4 is to pick the most painful/expensive problem and create a digital product to solve it.

Now, here’s where it all comes together.

Ideally, if you picked a specific enough niche-within-niche, you should be able to find ways to help people solve all 10 of those Biggest Problems. (For example, in Ship 30 for 30, we actually speak to, provide education and templates, and do our best to help people solve all 10 of these problems!).

But when it comes to POSITIONING your product, leading with 10 problems doesn’t work.

The whole secret to positioning is to lead with ONE problem.

Want more help building your own $350 digital product?

On April 27th, we’re kicking off Low-Ticket Launchpad LIVE: How To Create & Sell A $350 Digital Product.

This is our Internal Playbook for how we build, launch, and sell our digital products.

It’s everything we’ve learned over the last 5 years about making 6 and 7-figure incomes from digital products all in one place—and for the first time, we're walking you through it live.

We cover everything you need to:

Choose a profitable idea and build a sellable digital product—even if you think your niche is too small or no one would pay you $350 for what you know.
Package and price your product into an offer so good people will be compelled to buy—these are the pricing, naming, and offer stacking frameworks we’ve used to generate over $15,000,000 in digital product sales.
Build the backend tech engine to keep your digital product humming—with recommendations for product hosting, payment processing, and more (perfect for everyone—no matter your level of experience).
Market your digital product—with all our “secret strategies” for attracting tens of thousands of customers organically, on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Sell your digital product—so you can convert traffic into customers and create a profitable revenue stream that pays you dividends for years into the future (think launch strategies, email sequences, and more).

We're so excited about this because we know these frameworks, templates, and blueprints really do work.

In the live bootcamp, you'll move through the material at the same pace as everyone else, with homework between sessions and access to live Hot Seats where Cole workshops student questions, product ideas, and landing pages in real time.

You get the playbook.

You get us holding you accountable.

And you'll have your first product up for sale by the end of week one.