This is “Part - 1” of how Info Products are making thousands of dollars in revenue.

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This is “Part - 1” of how Info Products are making thousands of dollars in revenue.

No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

This is “Part - 1” of how Info Products are making thousands of dollars in revenue.

The ‘Creator economy’ niche is growing rapidly and there has been no better time to start creating content. If possible ‘create content’, if not ‘curate content’.

(This isn’t completely about Micro SaaS but still about profitable niches)

One of the biggest advantages of courses/ebooks/curation lists/content is it draws a highly interested audience for a given topic. This is also a part of the “Building Audience First” strategy.

By working on courses/ebooks/curated content/lists that interest a niche audience, you are building the biggest wealth of ‘audience’. If these audiences are happily paying for your lists/content that is curated, then there are high chances that these audiences could turn your paying customers.

Attracting sponsorships would be much easier as you have a niche audience interested in a specific topic.

Some thought-process when you want to build/curate content.

• Supporting project for your SaaS: One-time curation effort that will help build an audience for your SaaS business.

• One-time revenue + building audience: Need one-time curation effort

• Recurring revenue + building audience: Needs recurring effort in curation

• Free list + Sponsored revenue: You create a curated ebook, list, document, and provide that for free while your Sponsors pay you for ads. For weekly curated content models, you can work with sponsors for weekly ads.

See more here for some inspiration

Tip: Increase the dollar value of the sale by also creating a community around the niche you are serving and providing access to the community for a little extra price. Make sure the community is active enough so that your users can spread word of mouth.

Tip: Create multiple lists in the same niche and try to bundle multiple curated books/lists into a single sale. For example, if you are selling one curated list for $49 and another curated list for $39, try to combine both and sell for $69

Negative Nancy says - “It’s better to build a SaaS and make revenue recurring than working on an info product”.

Me - SaaS takes relatively more time and is not for everyone. Making a profitable Info product also gives you a good runway with a little bit of cash when you want to build your SaaS as typically SaaS needs more time and money. Also, not all info products are one-time revenue generators. Once you have enough audience for your info products, you can upsell other products, sell your consulting time and build a SaaS product too for your audience who purchased your info product. This way info product can act as pre-validation too for your SaaS.

Negative Nancy says - “Info product needs a lot of knowledge on the domain”

Me - Pick whatever you are comfortable with. For example, if you are a beginner in ‘Machine Learning’, make an info product for beginners. Your probable audience would be at all levels but you can niche down to ‘Beginners level’. Above all, in most cases, you can acquire specific knowledge in a few months (except in extreme cases) and build your info product too. If you are creating content for ‘Cloud Developers’, you don’t have to target everyone. You can niche down to one of the cloud providers like AWS, Google, or Azure. There are endless possibilities and you need to pick the right one.

Deep-dive & Some niches

Why should you do this? As mentioned earlier, this not only gives you money but also gives you an audience and a platform to build products by talking to your subscribers. Let’s see some of the info products that you can think of. Note that info products could be both one-time purchases and recurring revenue too. For example, info products like newsletters give recurring revenue. Info products like books give one-time revenue.

Below are a few success stories that can inspire you to start creating info products.

• The Good Parts of AWS: Daniel created this info product primarily an ebook around AWS and this made more than $100K in sales for Daniel. Daniel quit his full time at AWS (Amazon) and wrote this info product with his knowledge. He has done a lot of experiments with Reddit ads and was able to make good money.

• Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience: Another info course (ebook + video) created by Daniel that made more than $100K in sales. What is more important is Daniel built this content in just 16 hours. With a few info products, Daniel is making anywhere between $25K to $50K per month with a lot of experiments around ads, perfect pricing, deals, always sharing insights in public.

• Doing Content Right: Steph made $130K with an ebook and is now built working on a course that she created in 20 days. Check both Unlocking Hidden Hours - Doing Time Right and Doing Content Right. But note that Steph considerable amount of time helping people, writing a lot of content for ‘TheHustle’, and building an audience before creating the book and the course.

• NewsletterOS: A guidelines and management document to create and publish. Newsletters. Created by Janel, this has made $35K in revenue in one year. Janel spent a lot of time writing newsletters and created a repeatable system to make newsletter publishing easy and started using the system by herself. Then she created a formal Notion document and started selling the info product.

• Product - Market Fit Ebook: Nico from Failory created an ebook around Product-Market Fit and made $1000 in pre-sales even before releasing the ebook. The power of having an audience - Nico’s product Failory has 50K visits per month serving content around startups.

• Programmatic SEO: A book created by Preetham around Programmatic SEO has made $6K sales in just 5 days from the launch. Programmatic SEO is a new technique to create hundreds of pages programmatically for SEO purposes. This is one of the most successful techniques implemented by companies like Airbnb. Preetham made a video/ebook course on this and made huge sales from this.

• Ebook around Startups, Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship: Arvid Khal created ebooks around startups, bootstrapping, and entrepreneurship and made thousands of dollars in sales. But the best part is he writes his books in public sharing his thoughts/insights on Twitter, Podcasts, and his newsletters as well. Now he is writing a book about BuildingInPublic by writing it in public.

• 🔒 👉  [Get access to 800+ additional ideas and more additional ideas in this niche and across all niches from Pro version with data points, revenue information. The pro version also comes with community access].

Technical chops

You don’t need a lot of technical chops to create successful info products. All you need is good knowledge of a subject and should be able to create content of it. Pick whatever you are best at and see to create a one-time purchasable ebook/course on it. Once you see good sales, improve your tech stack and build a simple logged-in-only access portal for your content and then build a community around your audience using tools like Circle, Tribe, Edition, etc.

You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to build and sell curated content.

• If you are selling info products like ebooks, you need a few of the below tools.

• If you are selling curated lists in the form of Airtable lists, Google sheets, Notion docs, you can accept payments on the below tools and send private access to the users.

• If you want to write recurring newsletters, content with daily/weekly/monthly curated content, you can use tools like Substack, ConvertKit, Gumroad, etc to compose content right inside these tools and send from these tools without going outside the platform. In most cases, you can also accept payments from these tools directly.

Tools:

1. Gumroad - Accepts Paypal, cards, Apple pay

2. Flurly

3. Stripe

4. Substack/Convertkit

(And Yes, you don’t need to have any coding knowledge)

You can also think of using PayTable to sell curated lists from Airtable. PayTable helps you set up the entire workflow.

Marketing chops

So, the biggest question is where to start promoting your info product?

Follow the same approach how people do for a Micro SaaS product.

• Start building an audience first by creating a simple landing page with email signup to capture the leads. Use a custom domain if possible. If not, you can use the free Gumroad landing page too.

• If you need some kind of inputs from your prospective audience, you can start sending emails and ask for quick meeting calls. Don’t take a lot of their time. Start with a 15min call.

• If you are confident and started working on your product, send sending quick glimpses of your work to the folks who signed up via email.

• When ready for sales, start with a discounted price and send an email to your subscribers. Make sure you mention that the discounted price is only for the first 20 people or so and this creates a sense of urgency for your email subscribers.

• Once you start seeing the sales, capture the screenshots and share them on social media and other communities (more on this below).

• Don’t lose the momentum.

Make it an easier choice for your audience to pay.

• Provide community access with the purchase of the info product. Setting community is easy with tools like Circle.so, Tribe.so, etc.

• Provide option for consulting too for questions/strategies around the content purchased. This gives more confidence to users and generates extra revenue per purchase.

“How do you sell your curated lists/content?” - Selling one-time purchases like these is relatively easier than selling SaaS subscriptions as there is no overhead of recurring payments for the end-user.

Start with submitting your website to BetaList. Post to IndieHackers (make sure to select the appropriate sub-group).

See 50 communities to promote your list. Don’t spam.

Some more places to promote your curated lists.

In most cases, you should be able to find a bunch of subreddits and Facebook groups around a given niche. For example, if you are building a curated list for marketing techniques, look for growth marketing groups on Reddit and Facebook. If you are looking to create a list of VCs, Funding companies for Founders, see for various Reddit groups, Facebook groups who might be interested. Also, you can find more founders on Twitter and IndieHackers too. But this purely depends on your chosen niche.

Go to this list to see 2000 Slack communities around various niches from animation to marketing. Find required Slack groups based on your niche and join Slack. Don’t spam Slack groups. Start interacting with users and provide value before selling the product.

Provide a sneak peek of the list by showing a few entries from the list. Put a price and discount. Once your product starts gaining attention, launch it on ProductHunt.

Newer communities that help content creators

• Gumroad also recently started a community to help creators.

• ConvertKit creates multiple challenges to get you started with creating your content. See the community here

Cost Analysis for 100 customers

Literally the cost for this is $0 and that is the beauty of Info products typically ebooks, Paid Access to Airtable data, Google sheet etc doesn’t cost a lot of money.

The cost for products like this is almost always zero. Build your curated content in the form of a Google Document, Notion Doc and put it for sale on Gumroad.

If you are selling curated lists, make a list using Google Sheets or Airtable or Notion or Coda and provide private access to the sheet on each purchase.

All of these tools are completely free or have generous free tiers. For selling the lists, you would need to accept payment, and below are a few tools that help you set up payment without writing code.

• Gumroad

• Flurly

• Stripe ( Stripe has a new feature to generate payment links without having a website)

These tools charge you only a small share of the sale amount. So, you don’t have to pay any money upfront. All you have to do is build the list put it on these payment tools, market, and start selling. The infrastructure cost is $0 and you would only pay a small share per sale.

Must read - If you are picking this idea, below is a list of must-read articles.

• How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet

• Steph Smith on making $130k w/ an ebook, creating a course in 20 days

• Programmatic SEO made $6K sales in 5 days

• From an Airtable to $9.2k in Side Income

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