Transcription
So, by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to build your first digital product and how to bring it to market. I'm going to show you exactly what to do, even if you have no idea, no experience, and it's the first time you're ever doing this. My name is Sean, and I've been doing this for the past 9 years. I'm the CEO of gemflow.com, and I've sold $300 million of digital products online. And this is what I do for a living. I've behind the scenes helped some of the biggest creators in the world, people that you follow online, do the exact same thing. So everything I'm telling you right here in this video is from my own personal experience and doing this time and time again.
So with that being said, let's jump straight onto my screen. So when it comes to building your first digital product, ultimately there are three core elements that we're going to be breaking down in this video. What you can teach. So what is it that you know, what skills do you have in your life? What life experiences do you have? What can you physically teach another person? Showcase another person, provide value to another person, etc. The second thing is going to be what do people actually want? Because we got to sell people the thing they actually want, so they're going to want to pay you for it. And then fundamentally, what is actually happening in the market today? Because no matter what you're trying to sell, if nobody wants it and that is not how you sell the thing that you're trying to sell, it's not going to work. And then later I'm going to be breaking down for you exactly what is the things you should do to be able to launch your product.
So, let's jump straight in. And look, I'm going to be honest. If you're watching this video on your phone or headphones or whatever, you're going to need to be looking at my screen. You're going to have to make some notes. We're getting into the details.
So, what can you teach? The very first thing to sit and reflect on yourself is what skills do you physically have today? And I've separated this into hard skills and soft skills. So hard skills being like actual skills, i.e., you know how to edit a video, you know how to code or you know how to design. Those are like literal hard skills that you have today, right? Which means then you can teach someone else how to do that. And this is what the whole thing is, right? We're going to sell something. I.e., you've had your own transformation in fitness. That's a hard skill; you know how to exercise, diet, all that good stuff. So now someone's going to pay you for coaching, someone's going to pay you for a training program, hard skill.
So just to give you some examples of that, people have technical skills. People can know how to run ads, create funnels, create content, copywriting, software. There's so many like skills you could have, and people don't realize this when it comes to selling. People think this has to be something which is like trendy. It's like no, it's about the skills that you already possess. And a lot of you like me would have picked these skills up as you're growing up. As you went through school and college, you know the thing everybody hates, like you pick up skills, right? You actually learn some fundamental skills. It's not about the knowledge that you learned and what do you learn in your history class, but what skills do you have? Cuz that now gives you the chance to monetize those skills online by selling digital products. That's super important.
So at the same time, what soft skills do you have? So soft skills would be more how do you communicate? How do you come across? Do you, you know, the way your personality is will allow you to sell things differently versus other things. Um, can present with confidence. Are you good at framing messaging? You know, and an example I would give you, you know, were you the confident loudmouth in your group of friends or were you the quiet one? Right? Because that changes like your success rate in what you're going to be able to sell. Because if something requires a lot of facetime with you and a lot of energy, passion, even let's say if you're a personal trainer and you wanted to sell online coaching, if you have no personality and you can't really inspire people, it's going to be tough because your hard skill needs some soft skills for it to become really good, right?
So, for example, like myself, I happen to have a lot of hard skills. I physically know how to build businesses from scratch, but then I have amazing soft skills, meaning that I can, you know, speak with a 19-year-old creator with millions of followers, or I can speak with, you know, uh, experienced investors about other stuff. Those are soft skills that I've learned because I know how to communicate with different types of people, which then allows me to sell products to different types of people. Today, I have a digital product that we sell to agency owners because I know what they want. I have a digital product I sell to creators. So I have a digital product I said to brand owners, like TDC brand owners, all of those different people because of I have hard skills for all those three groups and then I have soft skills that complement each one of those I'm able to do that. So what I want you to do is sit and think about what skills do I have, and I don't want to hear I have no skills because you do, no matter who you are, even if you're sitting in a village in the middle of nowhere, you still have some skills because everybody does because you went through school you do some, you know, it's maths is maths your skill, you are numbers. Write it down at this point. Just write it down.
And I'll say this because, for example, June, you who's one of our one of our creators um and a co-founder of um credit college with me, you know, his hard skill was he was amazing at studying, and his soft skills was that he was really well spoken. So we created a guide, a digital product on how you can study and sold half a million dollars of it. Everything is monetizable. Anything can be turned into a digital product. I sold a digital product on how to make slime because I worked with a YouTuber. She had a new hard skill that she learned how to create slime herself and how do you then make amazing like shapes out of it. It was a skill. We monetized it. She sold a digital product. And there's so many examples that I can give you that you it's all about what do you know that you can sell. That's the first step. So I want you to write that down, you know, um write down all your skills. Obviously, here you can see is there blue skills is like mine and then some white skills of like you know your soft skills as in the boxes.
Um, but then on the flip side of it, you need to start thinking of, okay, so even if I have those skills, who is my target audience, right? Who can I go and help and why? And ultimately, you want to start creating personas. So you call them personas, right? Like ideally, you want to have three personas. The types of people that you are going after, like who are they? So here's an example of if you are a small creator, what would how would you trying to figure out who your target market is? So let's just say you're somebody that has 300,000 on YouTube, 40,000 Instagram, and you have 3,000 people in email list. And this is the type of content you know they create right now on their socials. And you know, here's your skills; you're friendly, charismatic, natural, you know, um, and there's opportunities that you could learn, right? What skills can you learn to grow, right? Because you may not know something. And I get it.
So, going back to even though I said yes, everybody has skills, but it's very easy to also learn a new skill. So, then you learn to monetize it. I.e., being able to use AI today, it's a massive thing. If you learn that, you'll be able to monetize that because it is in demand. Um, but it still needs to be like towards your natural interests and things that you know and we'll come on to that. So anyway, um, so who would be, you know, such creators' audience if that's you? Young people, students, young content creators, they probably have less followers than in this example. H but you know they have low purchasing power. Their pain points are they have limited time and resources. They lack consistency and efficiency. Struggle to understand how to use AI tools. Feel currently overwhelmed. The point is you're starting to think like, okay, I have these skills, but how do I position how would I position those skills, i.e., turn into a product and sell it? So I need to first think, hm, the people I'm going to try to sell this to, what are their pain points, because whatever product you create is the solution to that. Another way to think of that is obviously I'm saying problem solution. It's the same thing as seeing like, you know, problem opportunity for you. What's the gap? What's the problem? AI tools often seem complicated for beginners and non-technical creators, right? So you're a small-time creator in this example; you're trying, you're figuring out who would I sell to and then what would we sell. So the problem or potential gap in the market is that obviously AI tools is complicated. A gap would be I can create a step-by-step simple guides to show them how to use AI tools, or creators don't know how to use AI and save time and streamline their content process. Interesting, right? So okay, maybe I talk about how to use AI to write scripts. Interesting. Teach graders how to set up simple workflows using AI, such as automated repetitive tasks, provide templates, checklist, whatever. A lot of AI tool reviews don't actually mention the downside of the cost or how to physically even use this stuff. Share honest pros and cons or whatever. The truth is this is where your content comes from too, right? Because if you're going to sell something, your content is going to have to be correct, too. But so you're going to use this, you know, this thinking in step one, right? Cuz all we're trying to figure out now is what can you teach? But you know in this example we figured out that okay we're going to learn some AI skills which complement our current hard skills and soft skills and we're now going to um now we're figuring out how do we turn that into a product in this first first step. Creators want to know how to stay relevant with new trends, provide regular updates, etc.
Another example, let's say over here it's um is a person 70,000 followers, 20K on YouTube. This is what their content looks like; like they're doing a lot of like businessy content. That would be you. You're a personal branding expert, you know. Um, you're not natural on camera, but you're good at writer. Um, you could start to learn a bit more sales, a bit more this, a bit more that about yourself, trying to like how to become more authoritative. Your audience is slightly older people already building personal brands. You're already professionals, business owners, etc. I'm sure that's a lot of you right now. Pain points are not knowing how to break out of the 100 likes jail. So basically like you're having some success, they're having zero success. What would you say to them? Right? This could be about anything. It, you know, I'll just tell you, so maybe you're amazing at cold email, right? So the opportunity is to tell other people, hey, you're having these pain points. Maybe I can help. Or what are those pain points? I want you to write down because they're trying to figure out how to build ideas product. Or it could be, you know, you're an amazing designer, you're an amazing editor, right? All those guys that DM me, hey, I can edit your video and get five times the views. You know, um, what's the pain points? Paid ones would be edits are not good enough or they're not YouTube's not growing fast enough or you know they're not satisfied with your whatever, and those are the pain points, right? Because it's important because why have we got to fill that gap? We're going to fill that gap with the thing that you're going to sell.
Um, so obviously that makes sense that essentially is step one. Step one is what can you teach? What hard skills do you actually possess today, meaning the things that you actually know physically that you can do, i.e., design, copyright, edit, etc. And which complimentary soft skills do you have? Meaning communication, your presentation skills, your general way of operating, how operationally good you are, and that will help you figure out, okay, so I you make a list of those, then you start to say, okay, let me figure out what pain points my audience is having, and then I'm going from there figure out try to think what how I'm going to plug that gap, that pain point, solve that pain point through my skill, and we'll come on to how that forms a digital product shortly. The second part is to go further down into what your audience wants. So even though we've talked about problems and pain points, you know that's like high level, right? High level it's your assumption, but we don't want to do things for assumption. We want to know find out exactly. So second point, audience pain points, questions. Ideally, we need to survey people. Obviously, if you have an audience today, this is so easy because all you got to do is put a survey out. But let's say you don't have much of an audience today, then you're going to have to start doing some more market research to get to the same point. Also, if you have clients today, you can ask them. You can ask people cold. Anyone can ask enough people to figure out a bit more about are these problems really the problems that I think are worth solving for me to make money. So, you're coming out with a new training program today and fitness. You actually need to understand what are you trying to solve? Because if you're another person selling another transformation program, it's not really going to work, right? You have to figure out the angle. What's the exact problem? Are you say are you helping people save time? Is that the angle? Is it cost-efficient? Is it powered by AI? Like what's the angle? Because this is all about when you even have your product to know how to sell it, you got to know what's different about it, what's better about it, right? So that's why anyway, so what do you want to do? We want to do an audience survey. We want to sit and start thinking what are the top challenges you're currently facing? You know, how what do you struggle with XYZ? And ultimately, we're trying to figure out about them as much as possible because the other thing we want to start doing at this point in time, we want to start putting together essentially like psychographics and demographics in more detail, and that's what hopefully this survey or your research will help you provide. So demographic is, you know, um, where are they? What are they doing? What stuff are they interested in? What are the current pain points? What are the key motivators? How much money do they make? Are they working? What are they doing? What skills do they want to learn? And what type of content consumption method do they like? This is important because this will help you figure out the way you want to do your product, right? Because is it very video-led? Is it calls-led? Is it a PDF? Like the your content experience needs to match to what people actually want. That's how you're going to make the most money.
So I think just to recap, right? So in this first step, this is more you. You are brain dumping everything that you think. But then step two is this is what a lot of people miss. We actually need to find out from people. So as you start to do phone calls, surveys, go on the street or whatever you need to do. Read comments of other people's YouTube videos to see the sentiment, see what people are asking for. Go to Reddit, review, read reviews of other people's products, and you'll start to get a feel for like, okay, here's the that I think people want. And start to do it in this way where you're like, okay, I know I'll give my own example now. I know people want to sell digital products because everybody wants to make money online today; it's a fact, and I also know people don't want to like quit their job and go all in or they're trying to be multi-millionaires. No, if that happens, that's amazing. Initially, people just want to prove to themselves they can make one, five, 10,000 extra, and then from there they want to be able to take that forward. So one of my personas is is I guess, you know, business owners and professionals um and small creators who are trying to make it work. And so for them all of these things are the same thing. I know they're interested in content. They're watching people like me and others. They have so many pain points. They don't know what to post, and they don't know how they're going to sell a product. They don't know how to set up a landing page or funnel and whatever. They want to make some money. um and you know they want to learn more skills. They want to get better at what they're doing is why you're watching this video hopefully. And my second persona would be um is an actual creator who's like full-time and they've been doing it but they're not scaling. They're only making 10, 5, $20,000 a month and they're making $100,000 plus a month and they don't have a million dollar plus creator business. I've made 70 plus millionaires with Gemflow, my agency, because this is what we do. And look, if you're here and you're watching this, you want help with digital products, you want to launch your own stuff, just book a call with us down below and um you know, maybe we can help you do the exact same thing. So, we have calls. It's completely open. If you can find some uh time, speak to my team and maybe we can help you. And that exact because my second persona is more established creators, and this is what we do, and we can help them scale an already existing business. So, because I know all this stuff, I know exactly who I'm going after. That's why I'm making this piece of content because it attracts to those two types of personas. And that's how I know that's and you do that because you're trying to sell a digital product. And full transparency, we sell digital products to creators, business owners like yourself. That's what we do. It's one of the things that we do alongside all the other stuff that we do.
So once you know that, the third part is essentially you got to figure out like what sells. And this is about this is the kind of stuff I guess I'm a bit of a nerd. So this is what I sit into. So we have a brand called Creator College, which is our business that I own, and this is the research that we did for that as we were putting that digital product together. So we went and looked at every single other person that's currently selling something to the same people. So your target customers today fundamentally are buying stuff from other people, and you have to stop them, right? Because you have to say to them, don't buy from that guy, buy from me. So you need to know exactly how to message, how to angle, how are you going to convince them, and how you going to solve their problems fundamentally so they would come and buy your digital product from you. And that is the whole thing of researching and figuring out your messaging so you can get a ride so you can make the most money. Anyway, so this is the research what we did. We went and looked at every single person, and this is literally mapping them out. Look at the words everything you need to get started on YouTube. Interesting. And I think just for great context, sorry, this is create a college. So this is my business, and essentially we help creators um you know build um and get essentially build their audience and then monetize it and um you know it's like 10 it's a whole massive digital product. You get lots of digital products, lots of templates, and there's a lot of coaching calls whatever, but to launch that we went through the same thing. We figured out what skills do we have? We had a bunch of skills at Gemflow. We know editing, we know scripting, we have all these skills. Great. We then know exactly the type of people we want to target. We then sat and did audience surveys to know that even
Further. We then did full mapping of every single thing here. So we know the psychographics and demographics and all the details we cared about. We knew then, okay, here it is. This is literally the board that my team made for that task.
Um, we sat and started looking at everybody else. Hey, you monetize your content in the ecosystem. Evergreen digital products cause program. Here’s this—this is what they’re selling. Then you know, here’s another business; this is what they’re selling. So basically, from that, it became very clear how other people do it, what would be the real difference of us bringing our thing. And transparently, when we launched this, the biggest difference between this and what people sell—nobody really has a thing which is so diverse. Most people sell their own course, and that’s it, right? This is like touching upon—there’s many ways to make money. You can make money selling digital products, which we’re talking about. You can make money in brand deals. You can make money as a part-time BGC creator. You can make money as a TikTok shop. So, ultimately, you can make money in so many different ways. We were being diverse because we’re not like, “get rich, get rich fast.” Um, and that’s the only thing that matters, but more about holistic building it slowly. You don’t need to do it full-time. And then we want to give you as much real, actual stuff you can take away. But then we do something very different—we do calls. We do two calls a day for four weeks, and it’s super intense, and there’s only 100 spots. So basically, we figured out how to sell a digital product better than everybody else. Ultimately, you can even copy. There’s just no harm in that. A lot of the stuff I—that’s on this page—um, we would have seen from somebody else because you realize, look at this, someone bought this, and look at the growth. But you know, you realize from other people, “Oh, this is what’s working,” because you’ll see the testimonials; read the testimonials; you’ll see this. So you—all of that. So you’ll sit, do your map, and you’ll start to really figure out what is the thing. You know, it’ll start to become obvious to you because the moment you start looking at all of it, you’ll be like, “Okay, I know how I want to do this. I want to be exactly like this guy. That’s it. As long as I can be like this guy, everything is good.” But in my own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because you’re talking about here selling your first digital product. So it’s all about getting it done, getting it live because that’s the most important thing.
So just to recap, you have figured out your own skills that you can potentially use to solve people’s problems. You’ve then gone further, deeper into knowing exactly who are you helping with what, right? So if you’re amazing at design or you’re a mindset person because that’s your thing—you—you’re really good at figuring out mindset and getting people into the right, you know, mental shape or form. You know people’s pain points. You know exactly what they’re going through. People are struggling because you know they’re still trying to figure out, trying to make their parents happy; they’re still trying to do this or that or whatever problems they’re going through. Great. Then you go and look at everybody else, and from that, now you’ll get an idea of what your product should be. And look, in another video, I will cover more of the detail of like the physical creation of a product. Um, but this is more high-level of what that looks like. I’ll even talk you through a little bit of that.
Um, fundamentally, from all of that, what I would want you to start doing is brain dumping everything you possibly teach, to talk about, because now you should get an idea. Then you should start structuring that into modules and lessons, like a content page of a book. Then start toplining each module and lesson and what you teach. And that should be solving all those problems that you have figured out and all the stuff that I’ve told you. Then you start to script it and create it and put it together. That’s essentially how you go from like zero to having a product which you can then sell. The whole thing about which business model, which platform, which whatever, honestly, is not that important. What’s more important is what is the actual thing that you can sell. And before some guy is going to tell you, “Use AI to make a digital product, and it’s done for you,” or some other—it’s not. You actually have to base it around you. You can’t start a faceless YouTube channel and going to sell I don’t know what because some AI software gave it to you, and then you’re just going to try to find the right words or funnels to sell it. No, it has to be all about you and what you actually know if you want to do it properly. And again, how do I know that? How do I know that? I’ve been doing this for nine years. This is what I do with my life; is my life’s work. Literally, I saw one of the first digital products in 2014, and this is what I’ve been doing ever since.
Um, just to move on to I guess the final, final thing I wanted to cover, which is the truth is though, not all of you can sell the exact same product because it’s actually about where you are today. So if you’re someone today that has no audience and you have no skills or very low skills—sorry, school skills that you learned in school, that’s the only thing you know—the truth is you should not be selling a digital product today. That is not your next step. Your next step is to start creating content. Prioritize audience building by giving free value. Document your journey. Start sharing with people what you’re doing. Don’t try to be the expert because you’re not an expert. You have low skills. And then start to launch like lead magnets and an email list to start to nurture people. And as your audience starts to grow, you will then go into the top left-hand corner. And then you’ll be able to start working on your first low-ticket product to solve your own problem and share that solution. I.e., I didn’t know how to study. I have now figured out how to study. I’ve been documenting for the past three months. Now you can buy my thing. I’m unhealthy. I’m figuring out how to eat healthier. Look, I have now become healthier, lost weight. Here are my recipes. Buy it for $27. Do you see how that works? What doesn’t work is that you have nothing. You have low skills, and you’re now becoming this mindset expert at 23 years old, and you’re thinking that people are going to hire you as their coach. It’s going to be tough, right? You have to first show people how you have leveled up because of your own mindset. If you went—if you say, “I was scared to speak on camera, and now I filmed 92 reels, and that’s because I fixed my mindset,” then people be like, “Oh, wow. And I grew my followers by 10,000.” Then you can go and sell a low-ticket product. You actually got to do it first in public so people believe you. Otherwise, you can’t sell. And that is how you build an audience because once you start sharing, you’ll build an audience. Once the audience comes, you’ll be able to sell.
But let’s flip to the other side. Some of you will be business owners. You don’t have an audience. You’re not interested in being an influencer, a creator. Like, come on, man. I just want to make money. I want to have businesses. I get it. So, what should you do? You’re someone with high skills, lots of skills. Great. But now, you got to bring those skills to life, right? So, what you should be focused on is solving domain-based problems, like real domain-based problems, um, for people. And that is what your content should be about. And then your first product that you’re selling should be a high-ticket product, and giving people that one-to-one access because you’re a true expert, and you’ll be able to charge for it because if you are a genuine, gen expert, people will pay you good money to get your advice, and that’s what you shouldn’t focus on. So your first digital product should be an expensive digital product because you have expertise to share, and ultimately, you want to be here, top right. You want to be someone that has a big audience and has a lot of skills. And that person is going to be very rich. And these are, you know, at Gemflow, I excel in the top right corner because I’ve helped 70-plus people become millionaires because I’ve moved them or got them to the top right corner and then helped scale them. And that’s exactly what I do because then you’ll have a mix of low-ticket products, high-ticket products. You’re solving lots of problems for lots of different segments of people in your audience. And that’s how you scale a big business because you essentially start solving lots of different problems but through your products for lots of different people. Um, it’s probably not the best example, but even that’s how you scale a business, right? So Apple is selling headphones—solves a different problem—to a phone—solves a different problem—and that’s the whole thing—you—you create multiple different products solving for different people’s problems and ultimately build a bigger business.
Look, that is everything I wanted to cover in this video. Hopefully, this gives you an exact overview of that. And look, as a thing, I’ve helped some of the biggest people in the world sell digital products. You can see more on our website. Put a call down below if you want some one-to-one help from me and my team. With that being said, I’ll see you in the next