How to Build Your First Digital Product

Read Time: 11 mins
(or listen to this issue)

Today’s post is part 2 in the Your First Product Series, where I’m helping you turn one of your premium services into your first do-it-yourself digital product. It's a move that’s going to help you expand your audience and strengthen your credibility while generating a new, passive revenue stream.

To do that, I'll share the process I used to build my first digital product — The Problem Framing Toolkit, which has been a game-changer for scaling my service-based business.

You’ll learn the step-by-step process and tools I used.

By reading today’s post, you will:

• Get an inside look of how I did it

• Save dozens of hours researching tools & platforms

• Avoid pitfalls that I made

• Have a playbook to start building

We’ve got a lot to cover!

Setting the stage

Before we dive into the actual building blocks, it’s important to note that the best first digital product to build is a digitized version of a service you’re already offering.

Here’s why…

Say you’re currently delivering your premium, done-for-you service. You’re proud of the results and your customers are delighted. Their referrals fill your funnel with a healthy supply of new work to fulfill. And still, you’re leaving money on the table.

Thing is, no matter how good you are, you’re only capturing a sliver of the market. There's a whole world of potential customers who aren't quite ready to invest in your premium service offerings.

By digitizing your services into an online course or a digital download, you’ll capture the attention of these future customers while still generating revenue.

These kinds of growth loops turn your marketing from cost-center to profit-center.

For more background on digitizing services and additional foundational steps to take before building, read part 1 of the Your First Product Series: How to Prep for Your First Digital Product.

And now that the stage is set, let’s walk through the steps to follow for building your first digital product.

The building blocks

Here are the actions I took to build my first product, the Problem Framing Toolkit — a combo online course + digital download.

The toolkit is used by professionals working in Product Management. They use the toolkit to learn and apply a product discovery technique called, Problem Framing. Naturally.

Let’s take a look at the 5 components that went into building my toolkit:

1. Worksheets and templates

2. Instructional videos

3. Written guide

4. Additional supporting resources

5. Creator platforms

1. Worksheets and templates

If you’re planning to build an educational product such as an online course or toolkit, downloadable materials such as worksheets and templates are a great idea that your customers will appreciate.

Worksheets and templates enable your customer to put theory into practice.

Let’s walk through each one so you know what they’re about and how to create them.

Worksheets

Worksheets are fairly simple for you to create, and for your customer to use.

Think about that accompanying PDF you got from a recent book you purchased. It probably included prompts for you to consider and empty space to answer. That’s a worksheet.

Worksheets are perfect for helping your customer learn the material at a deeper level, draw their own conclusions, and commit to next steps.

Tools

• Word / Google Doc: As simple as it gets. Once you’ve created it, you can make it available as a standalone .docx/.gdoc, export to a PDF, share online access, or all of the above

• Notion: Notion-created worksheets can be comparable to Word/GDocs, but come with more flexibility; e.g. foldering, styling, adding attachments

Templates

Templates tend to be a bit more involved in creating. They also go further than a worksheet in solidifying your customer’s learning by putting it into practice.

Some refer to templates as swipe files. They’re files they’ve used and refined and then make available to their customers, who benefit from not having to start from scratch.

Templates are typically designed and blanked out grids of a lesson or activity that you taught in your course/toolkit. Your customer uses them to recreate that lesson/activity, on their own or with others.

To set your customer up for success with the template, I suggest including detailed instructions as well as a completed example — which help them see what good looks like.

For my toolkits, I chose to build them in the same online collaboration tools that my customers work: Miro, Mural and Figma.

Alternatively, you can keep your templates simpler by creating them with the same tools you use for worksheets: Word, GDocs/Slides, and Notion.

If you’re just getting started or don’t feel comfortable creating templates, go with a worksheet. But no matter which format, I recommend you include at least one.

Why start the build process with these materials?

By starting with the materials, it forces you to create DIY (do-it-yourself) materials that can stand on their own. In other words, starting here constrains you to consider the must-haves to include for your customer to be successful.

Additionally, once you have the materials, they’ll serve as your blueprint for the instructional videos you’ll create next.

2. Instructional videos

Now that you have your worksheets and templates, you can reverse engineer the core educational components of your digital product.

I used videos for my toolkit so that I could show my customer what they were learning, how to apply it, and what the results would look like.

I want to stress that before I created my toolkits, I had recorded and edited a total of zero videos. I learned everything along the way, and spent less than $200.

Since then, and thanks to the surging creator economy, there’s been a tidal wave of affordable innovation to the tools and tech available.

No matter your age, gender, profession, or skill set, learning how to create video content is a skill that will provide exponential ROI for years to come.

Setup

Let me give you a complete breakdown of my video recording and editing system: