I want to tell you about a thing I did.
I was trying to figure out what digital product to sell. I had a few ideas but I wasn’t sure which one was right.
So I did what made sense at the time: I went looking for help.
I found a course. $197.
“How to Find Your Perfect Digital Product Idea in 30 Days.”
It promised a framework, a validation process, a proven method.
The sales page had testimonials.
The person selling it had revenue screenshots.
I bought it.
Module 1 was about mindset.
Module 2 was about identifying your passions.
Module 3 was about market research — which was mostly just “look at what’s popular.”
I finished module 3, felt approximately as stuck as I started, and closed the laptop.
Here’s the part I didn’t put together until much later: I had just funded someone else’s digital product business while trying to start my own.
Their product was a course about finding product ideas.
My problem.. not knowing what product to build was the thing they sold the solution to.
I paid $197 to research my idea, and the course was their idea.
Cool. Very efficient.
The Cleanest Business Model in the SpaceI’m not saying the person who sold me that course is a fraud.
The course economy is legitimate. People genuinely want guidance. Some courses are excellent.
But there’s a category of product in this space that I want you to see clearly, because it took me embarrassingly long to see it myself.
The most reliable customer in the digital product world is someone who wants to sell digital products but doesn’t know where to start.
They’re optimistic.
They’re motivated.
They have disposable income and a genuine desire to build something.
They’re primed to spend money on solutions to their problem.
And their problem, conveniently is that they don’t have a product yet.
So the solution that gets sold to them is: a product about how to find your product.
A course about how to start.
A program about how to pick the idea.
The person who doesn’t have a product yet buys a product about how to have a product.
Let me be direct: this is a genius business model.
Hell I even have a product on this site that walks you through everything you need to pick the right product.
Mine just doesnt suck.
What the Course Economy Runs OnEvery course in this category has the same underlying pitch, dressed up differently.
You don’t know how to start.
We do.
Pay us, and we’ll tell you.
The thing is, after you pay and complete the course, you still have to start.
The course doesn’t start for you. It can’t.
Starting is the one thing that cannot be purchased.
So the course gives you a framework.
A process.
A structured way to think about the problem.
You feel equipped. You feel ready. You close the laptop.
And then… the same friction that stopped you before the course is still there after it.
Because the friction was never a lack of information.
It was the discomfort of making a decision and being wrong about it.
That discomfort doesn’t get fixed by a module called “Finding Your Niche.”
The course felt like progress because it cost money. We associate cost with value. So $197 of content should move us forward.
But you weren’t stuck because you lacked $197 of information.
You were stuck because picking a thing and committing to it is uncomfortable.
And consuming a course is a way to feel like you’re moving without actually moving.
The Real Version of What You NeedHere’s what I wish I’d understood before I bought the course.
You don’t need someone else to tell you what your product should be.
The answer is already in your possession.
It lives in the things you know well enough to have figured out and the specific people who are still stuck on those things.
What you need isn’t 30 days and 12 modules.
You need a focused exercise that makes you write down what you actually know, who specifically needs to know it, and whether anyone is paying for something similar already.
That exercise takes about an hour.
It produces one specific product idea, aimed at one specific person, with a basic validation check attached.
That’s the whole thing.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the difference between someone who sells a digital product this year and someone who’s still researching it next year comes down almost entirely to whether they did that exercise.
Not the $197 course.
Not the 12-module program. An honest hour of sitting down, doing the exercise, and picking the idea at the end.
A Note on PermissionOne more thing.
A lot of people buy courses looking for something that isn’t explicitly advertised but is very much what they need: permission.
Permission to say “I know enough to sell this.” Permission to say “my experience is worth something to someone.” Permission to build the thing without a credential or a course completion certificate.
Here’s the honest version: no course grants that permission. It can’t. Because the permission is yours to give yourself.
You can wait for someone to hand it to you for $197. Or you can just decide that you know enough to be useful to someone one step behind you.
You do. I promise you do.
The course was never going to get you there. It was always going to end with you back at the starting line, just with less money.
My version of this — a 60-minute exercise that walks you from “no idea” to one specific product — is here. Product Picker Workbook