65k from an 8 page PDF?

One of the fun parts of my work here is capturing productising success stories. I especially like success stories that are very “ordinary” in some way, where you could see yourself doing something similar and having a great result.

Here’s one of those. It’s from someone we’ll call Daisy.

Like many of us, Daisy was fed up with the trap of trading time for money. She’d already set up her work to be 100% asynchronous and remote so she could have the maximum control over her time and her life. But because she was selling hours of her time to her clients, she still had to be at her computer doing the work.

Daisy was all about being efficient with her time, so this bugged her. She decided she wanted to break free of trading time for money. She thought about what she could share that would be useful for others and realised that many of the folks going into her industry nowadays had no idea how to get clients. Daisy had stumbled upon a method of finding new clients in her early days, and she realised she could help a whole load of people by writing this down.

Note 1

This wasn’t a generic “how to find clients” guide. It was a precise methodology for people who had effectively reached the stage Daisy had reached with her business about 10 years before. It wouldn’t have worked for me when I was a business coach and wanted new clients; it only worked for people who wanted to do what Daisy did.

Note 2

I’m keeping Daisy’s identity secret here, even though she has publicly spoken about this, just because I’m obsessive about client confidentiality.

What happened next…

Daisy went to one of the Greek islands for a couple of weeks. She had a great hotel room and was ready to enjoy herself. For Daisy, enjoying herself included spending three hours per day working on this project and then going out to enjoy the delights of swimming in the hotel pool and wandering around picturesque villages and friendly tavernas.

She spent a few days writing her process and turning it into an 8-page PDF. It was super clear—anyone could reproduce Daisy’s method and succeed.

She then put it on her website and spent a couple of hours wrangling, trying to set up a payment system so she could sell it.

Note 3

Daisy would have done better using software like Sendowl rather than trying to set everything up herself at this stage.

Daisy was part of a few Facebook groups for people in her industry. Because she’d already earned some social capital by being helpful in these groups, she felt she could ask the group owners if it was okay to mention her new PDF. Most of them said yes.

A few sales came in this first week, and Daisy felt good about this. The pdf was £25, so it paid for a few extras on the holiday. But not enough for Daisy to stop her trading time for money.

Where I came in

I‘d known Daisy for a while. She‘d done some work for me and been to a couple of my free workshops. She booked a one-off session with me, and we met in a café in town for a couple of hours. It turned out this was the first of many one-off sessions Daisy and I had – she now comes to see me a couple of times a year or whenever she has a new idea.

I congratulated Daisy on the first stage of her new business model and introduced her to the idea of the product ecosystem. She was highly enthusiastic about the idea of building a bunch of products for her target audience. She definitely had a lot to share. We also talked about how she needed to build her own audience because the owners of those Facebook groups would not let Daisy continuously promote her new products.

Fast forward to eight years later

Eight years later, I was asked to speak at a conference. Daisy was also speaking at this conference, and we had a huge hug before she went on stage.

To be honest, I was astounded when Daisy put up a table of all her different products and how much money she had made from them. The top earner was that £25 pdf – Daisy had made 65k from this. By then, she had maybe a dozen different products, including several higher-priced ones. But because the PDF had been on sale for a long time and because it dealt with a clear problem faced by many of her audience, she’d sold many of them.

I smiled a lot that day when Daisy revealed that 65k was the exact amount she’d used as the deposit on the first house she’d bought earlier that year.

What we learn from this

There's a lot to learn from Daisy's adventures in products. For me, these are the top learning points.

Daisy took time from her usual work on her first product. I love that she made it pleasurable by going to a Greek island. I still need to copy that.

She was motivated to help a specific group of people with whom she already had some connection.

She chose a target market of people a few years behind her in a particular career journey. That meant she had a pretty good idea of her audience's mindset and potential missteps and could talk to them directly and in the correct language. She was one of them.

This first product was pretty low risk. It took a few hours to make and get on sale. It wouldn't have mattered too much if it had been a disaster.

Daisy did not have to learn anything complicated to create the new product. She could concentrate on getting her message across using a medium she already knew. Later, Daisy sold group programmes and courses with more of a learning curve, but she kept this one simple to start with.

Daisy added in new products fairly quickly, so people had something else to buy when they liked the first one.

The biggest learning point

It sounds dramatic when I tell you she made 65k from a £25 PDF, even more so when I add in the (true) part about paying the deposit to buy her first house.

But.

Daisy made so much money from the £25 pdf because it had been on sale for so much longer than any of the other products. She got it out early, so sales had time to add up. It wasn’t perfect. In fact, Daisy has updated it several times over the years. But sales of that little product had added up over the years, so the effect on Daisy’s bank balance was almost like compound interest.

This is, of course, why you should get going with your first product right now. You know where to get the help and support you need. You know how to derisk it and what mistakes to avoid. You don’t necessarily need a Greek island hotel room…but if that’s what you need to get going on this, book your flight right now.