What productizing will look like

Read Time: 8 mins (or listen to this issue)

If you’re here, it’s because you’re part of the club committed to achieving financial freedom.

There are lots of paths to get there. Ours is productizing our expertise into productized services. Courses, toolkits, ebooks, and templates we build once and sell forever… earning additional income streams.

Income that grows, steadily. $100 your first month. A few months later, your first $1,000 month. Then $5k per month… $10k. Then you add a second product, and a third.

In a couple years, your side hustle is out-earning your day job.

Now you have options that don’t look like trading all of your time for money. You get to start saying ‘yes’ to the stuff you really want to do.

I’m part of the same club. And for the past few months, I’ve been building my first productized offer, the Productizer Co-Pilot.

This work is hard. But what pushes me is seeing others do it, despite certain doubts and fears. Their drive and success fuels me to keep going.

And so today’s essential read is a look into what I’ve been building. I hope it offers you a healthy dose of inspiration and practical ideas to build the product inside of you.

Ignoring the inner idiot

My launch deadline is this Friday, May 31, 2024. I set it about 6 weeks ago. You know, when “6 weeks from now” felt like an eternity?

Yet, here it is, less than 1 week to launch and I’ve got loads to do.

Thing is, I could have probably launched the version I had last week. Or even my beta version from 4 weeks ago.

So why am I still hustling to launch a better version?

Fear.

• Fear that my customers won’t love it

• Fear that everyone will find out I’m a fraud

• Fear I won’t make any money

• Fear that all of my time will have been wasted

Oohhh… my inner critic revels in that story! All of my limiting beliefs and insecurities about myself will be true.

“I was right all along,” he’ll say, “I knew you should have just stayed in your lane. Plus, who are you to claim you’re an expert who can sell their knowledge?!”

OK, let’s say my worst fears come true. Say my product bombs… A handful of people might ask for their money back. A few others will reach out for help. The rest will decide it’s not for them and stop using it.

Within a day, they’ll have moved on. In a week, they’ve forgotten about it.

They may not be quick to buy my next product. But they’re certainly not going to lose sleep over it.

Because I’m not going to overpromise and under-deliver.

Instead, I’m going to:

• Use my own product to make sure it works (and build my confidence)

• Price it fairly

• Offer support

• Make continual upgrades

One day, it will be good enough. Shit, maybe it’ll even be damn near perfect. Maybe people will tell me it changed their lives. 🥹

At that point, I’ll stop working on it. And customers will continue to buy it as long as it’s relevant and valuable.

3 years from now, one morning I’ll wake up to 5 Stripe notifications about new Productizer sales and 2 new customer testimonials. 🎉

That’s the reality of how great products are built, evolved, and sold. Everything else, is a story our inner critic invents to keep us from trying. In that sense, the term “inner critic” offers them too much credit. They were dead wrong, after all. With ill intentions to keep us small and stuck.

“Inner idiot” feels more appropriate.

If my doubts and fears resonate with how you’re feeling about packaging and selling your expertise on the internet, I hope you now know you’re not alone. Far from it.

In fact, I dedicated an entire lesson in the Productizer to helping you acknowledge and move past your concerns.

I even shared anonymized concerns from others who have successfully completed the Productizer.

Find any that feel like the same worries rumbling through your head?

OK, enough therapy for one day. Let’s move on to showing you the tools behind my productized offer. Hopefully it sparks some ideas for how you can build your products.

Tool stack

I call the Productizer Co-Pilot a toolkit — a combination of educational materials plus actionable resources. In other words, my toolkit will teach you how to do a thing and then give you the tools to do it yourself.

I thought it would be helpful to show you a behind the scenes look at how I built the Productizer with various tools.

Teachable

Part of the value of the Productizer is that I’ll teach you what I know about productizing your expertise.

The platform I’m using to organize all of that instructional content is Teachable, an online learning platform.

💡 In the post: How to Build an Online Course (part 2), I showed you how to build your course within another online learning platform

With Teachable, I’m able to build out all of my toolkit’s content within a curriculum. My curriculum is comprised of modules, made up of several individual lessons.

For each lesson, I can add various forms of content:

• Text & images

• Videos

• PDFs

• Audio

• Images

• Resources (file uploads)

• Code examples

• Embedded media

You can also add additional items like:

• Quizzes: To help reinforce your course’s learning

• Up-sells: To sell another product you offer (this is how your flywheel builds)

• Bundles: Selling 2+ products together, often for a discount

Beyond hosting the learning experience for my Productizer Co-Pilot, Teachable is a full-fledged creator platform, allowing you to sell your productized services, offer coupons, run reports, and lots more.

Speaking of selling your products, I especially love the ability to offer my customers a pay-over-time option.

In addition to courses, you can also use Teachable to create & sell:

• Coaching offers

• Digital downloads

• Communities

• Memberships

Loom

I used Loom to record all of the Productizer’s instructional videos. I have the pro version, which is $10/mo. So worth it.

For one of the videos, I did some (very) light editing in iMovie. But I intentionally avoided trying to look and sound “perfect” by editing and styling all of my videos.

Not only is it not worth the time investment, but I don’t want to encourage my customers to shoot for perfection when productizing. There are other more important things to focus on… such as choosing the right product to create and niche to sell to.

Miro

Remember above I told you that my Productizer Co-Pilot also offers actionable tools & resources? I used Miro for this job — a digital whiteboard.

With Miro, you can create simple, structured-yet-flexible workspaces.

It’s the place where my customers will take action. It’s where they’ll brainstorm their product offers, and build a go-to-market plan. It will be their living artifact they use to dream, decide, and define what they’ll productize.

Because Miro is not a tool everyone is familiar with, it was a small gamble to take. Maybe I’ll have to answer a few more support related questions.

The safer alternatives would be creating templates in Notion, Google Docs, or printable PDFs.

But I’ve spent years learning how to design fun, intuitive experiences within Miro. I’ve seen how much better and more valuable it is over the alternatives.

And so offering a superior customer experience was well worth the slight risk.

Carrd

I used Carrd for my sales pages.

While Teachable offers a website builder, I’m more familiar with Carrd.

I was able to design my sales page faster, and make it look better than had I used Teachable.

Other tools

Here’s a few additional tools I’m using that I won’t go in depth on:

• Zapier to pass data back and forth and connect platforms

• beehiiv to send emails to new Productizer customers

• Common Ninja for adding widgets to my sales page

Wrapping up

Building a product (productized offer), especially for the first time, can feel overwhelming. There’s a host of to-dos, new skills to learn, and promises to keep.

And those sit in the constant shadow of our doubts and fears… that inner chatter that tells us to stay in our lane.

I’ve not only overcome all of these challenges, I’ve done it all myself… from learning what it means to productize, to leveling up on the tools, and figuring out how to build and sell to audiences.

Guess what? You can too. I’m no smarter or more ambitious than you are.

And so my mission is to support you along the way. Especially with those first, crucial steps of figuring out what product to create.

Have questions? Want someone to tell you you’re not crazy?

✍️ Hit reply and let’s chat.

📌 Ready to start earning multiple income streams?

Use the Productizer Co-Pilot to turn your expertise into a monetizable offer.