Liftoff! A course for all the creators and makers

On October 9th, 2019, I opened up a text document on my MacBook and started typing out a bulleted list. I typed out everything I could think of that was necessary to launch and grow a successful product business — something I had learned myself over the course of a decade.

I knew it was a lot of work, but it wasn’t until I typed it all out that I realized just how much it could take to run a product business, especially for independent creators. It also helped me realize how much I had learned over the years, and how many of those lessons I couldn’t have learned from a quick Google search (and I’m, like, really good at Googling).

As it turns out, creating products is (kind of) the easy part! The hard part is figuring out how to bring it to life with a persona, marketing it genuinely, turning customers into repeat customers, and building a passionate audience along the way. It’s all of these skills that ultimately turn ideas into products and products into platforms.

Why digital products?

If you’re not familiar, a digital product is an intangible product or service that can be sold and distributed online. These products, or “goods,” often come in downloadable or streamable files, such as eBooks, online courses, audio files, fonts, website templates, design tools, and more. These kinds of products end up being some of the most valuable yet affordable tools we use in our day-to-day because of their nature to solve specific problems.

Sometimes digital products are given away for free as a lead magnet to attract subscribers to an email list. Sometimes they are sold for a one-time fee or a recurring fee. Sometimes you are the digital product, and you sell customers access to your expertise. There are just so many niches and different kinds of products within those niches that make for great digital products.

Digital products have many advantages that make them uniquely attractive to digital creators:

• They are easier to create and distribute than physical goods
• They are substantially cheaper to produce
• They have much higher profit margins
• There is virtually no limit on how many you can sell

And while there are plenty of resources out there teaching creators how to create the many different kinds of digital products, I couldn’t find a dedicated place to learn everything else.

• How do I find valuable digital product opportunities?
• How and where do I sell digital products?
• How do I price it and market it?
• How can I start generating reliable recurring revenue?

I found a problem to solve

In my conversations with peers and folks in my audience, it was apparent that there wasn’t a go-to resource for these questions, even though every industrious creator will have to tackle these topics on their way to generating money from digital products.

I couldn’t find a course that taught how to think like a designer and create human-centered digital products that solved problems. I couldn’t find a course that showed you how to craft a customer experience that keeps customers around for years. I couldn’t find a course that showed you how to build an intelligent, automated digital operation that lets you scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue with a relatively small web footprint.

So, naturally, I created it.

I created the Liftoff Course to help you figure out the hard part. I created it to give you a 10-year head start running a kick-ass product business that people love talking about and sharing with their peers. I’ve documented everything I learned about growing my own digital products business to millions of dollars in revenue.

Course breakdown

Liftoff covers all these topics and more in great detail.

• Product Design
• Product Philosophy
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Product Pricing
• Selling Digital Products
• Recurring Revenue
• Launching Products
• WordPress as a Platform
• The Freemium Model

We’ll also chat with some fantastic and diverse creators who blazed their own trails in the digital product world and learn from their successes, failures, and happy accidents.

And it’s not just a course

The course itself is super valuable and jam-packed full of unique content and actionable advice, but I’m also pairing it with some killer add-ons like an audiobook, video tutorials, a member directory, and curated tools and resources.

Liftoff is shaping up to be one of the most unique and valuable projects I’ve ever taken on and I. can’t. wait. to get it into your hands! As we speak, I’m wrapping up the course’s final chapters before I send it off to an editor. We’re almost there!

While I work on that last 20%, I’ll be sharing the process of writing and launching a book and course project like Liftoff. In the next update, I’ll share some thoughts about writing as a non-writer and explain the thinking behind refining the course from a WordPress-centric course into a more focused digital product course.

Hop on the newsletter below, and I’ll send you an email when the course is almost ready! I’ll also be sharing behind-the-scenes secrets of creating a course like this (if you’re into that kind of thing).