If I had 90 days to make $10k from one digital product, here’s exactly what I’d do

I have built a lot of digital products over the years, and lately I’ve been thinking that we are still building them like it’s 2022.

Not necessarily the products themselves. The process of making them.

A few years ago, I could have an idea for something I wanted to sell and then spend the next several weeks turning that idea into an actual thing. First I had to figure out exactly what it was. Then outline it. Write it. Design it. Figure out what to call it. Write a sales page. Make a freebie. Build whatever funnel was going to deliver the freebie. Write the emails. Figure out what content I was going to use to sell it. Inevitably change my mind about at least three things halfway through and redo them.

None of those jobs individually felt particularly enormous. There were just SO MANY OF THEM.

Which is why, if I told myself today that I wanted to create a brand-new digital product with the goal of making an extra $10,000 before the holidays, I genuinely don’t think I’d give myself more than a nap time to build the first version.

And I don’t mean that in the very internet-marketing way where I’m about to tell you ChatGPT can spit out a 47-page ebook in eleven minutes and then strangers will mysteriously appear and give you $10,000 for it.

I mean I would give myself two-ish hours to take something I already know, turn it into something useful that solves a very specific problem, get it into a form another human can actually buy, and start selling it.

Because the part that has changed isn’t that good products suddenly require no thought.

It’s that I no longer have to personally do every tiny job between having the thought and putting the product up for sale. Nor do I have to pay astronomical amounts of money to outsource any work, because ChatGPT is free :)

I actually did a version of this recently while I was playing around with a product for Little Mama on the Daily.

The idea was not particularly groundbreaking. Moms hate figuring out what to make for dinner. I am a mom. I also hate figuring out what to make for dinner. There seemed to be something there. 😂

But I didn’t open ChatGPT and say, “Create a digital product for moms about dinner.”

We talked.

I told it what I was trying to do with the account. I explained that I didn’t want to turn Little Mama into a recipe page. I talked through what kind of woman was following me, what I thought she might actually pay for, what I personally hated about figuring out dinner and what I definitely did NOT want to spend the next month creating.

We went back and forth on the product itself. We talked about pricing. We changed pieces. We figured out what should be free and what should be paid. At one point, the freebie was going to be another dinner-related PDF until I realized that made absolutely no sense because I was basically giving people a smaller version of the thing I wanted them to buy. So we changed it to a set of ChatGPT prompts that could help someone figure out dinner immediately while still naturally leading into the bigger system.

Then we kept going.

The product needed a Stan Store listing, so we made one. It needed a delivery email. Then the freebie needed its own page and delivery email. Then I needed a ManyChat automation. Then five follow-up emails. Then content that could sell the product without turning my entire Instagram account into me standing over a crockpot.

At some point I realized I wasn’t really using ChatGPT to write a digital product.

I was using it like the little team I would have needed to build the entire business around the digital product.

And that is a much more interesting use of AI to me.

So if I had one nap time, one decent idea and a goal of making $10,000 from it before the holidays, here is exactly how I would do it...