Create & Launch Your Own Product
Over the last 10 years, I've been involved in countless product-based businesses from ecommerce to ebooks, online courses, software and SaaS. I've created and launched more than a dozen products and I've made my fair share of mistakes. On ActiveGrowth, I write about all the lessons learnt along the way, so that you have guidance for your own product creation & product launch.
The ActiveGrowth approach to product creation is different in several ways:
Idea Validation
A common mistake entrepreneurs make is to spend months (or years) creating a product, only to find out no one wants it. Pre-launch idea validation is the solution to this problem.
Value Based Business
A Value Based Business is at once the simplest & the most effective model to implement. It is based on a direct exchange of value between you and your customers.
Product Launch
Follow the right steps to get your product off to a good start. All without having to use pushy hard-sell tactics or obnoxious hype.
Check out my best posts on these topics below:
Idea Validation
Learn how to come up with a killer product idea & ensure that there's actually a market for it.
Value Based Business
Learn how to create a value based business, following these principles & case study examples.
Product Launch
Articles & videos about how to (and how not to) successfully launch a product.
Course Craft: Build an Online Course Business
Over at my other business, Thrive Themes, I released a course that teaches my entire, start-to-finish system for creating an online course business. If you have something to teach and you want to turn your expertise into a thriving online business, this is the course for you.
Product Creation vs. the Shortcut Business
Creating & selling your own product can seem intimidating, especially to someone just starting out as an entrepreneur. There are the technical challenges of creating, delivering and getting paid for a product, but there's also the fear every creative faces: if you create something of your own and put it out there and it gets rejected, that's painful.
Every year, countless people become interested in earning a living online and most of them opt for something that appears to be simpler than creating your own product. Perhaps you can try to become an influencer, instead. Or you read about some much more impersonal and hands-off kind of business like fulfillment by Amazon, where you aren't creating your own products - you're just re-labeling existing ones and trying to game a search algorithm.
Basically, a lot of people are looking for a shortcut. Something that will make money, without too much effort, personal involvement or risk.
There's only one problem: such a business doesn't exist. Not outside of people's daydreams, anyway.
Yes, there are people who successfully game Amazon and make good money selling drop-shipped plastic spatulas or something. And yes, there are indeed social media influencers who get paid a lot for a picture of them posing with a handbag.
But starting and running such a business is inevitably more complex, more risky and less lucrative than it seems from the outside. What seems like a "shortcut business" turns out to be a detour to success - or a dead end - more often than not.
Avoid the Common Path to Failure
I don't know if product creation is the right thing for you. It's not for everyone. But I do recommend that you don't dismiss it as too difficult or too intimidating.
I love creating digital products - and I recommend this business model - for 2 big reasons.
- Seeking an easier shortcut to creating an online business is the most well-trodden path to failure.
- Creating & selling your own product gives you more leverage than any other business model I know about.
This is something most people don't realize: it's way easier to sell your own, unique product than it is to sell something as an affiliate, to sell a drop-shipped, generic product or to try and turn an audience into advertising dollars.
For a more in depth look at this, check out this post about 15 reasons you need to sell your own product. In short: creating your own product stacks the deck in your favor.
And not least, creating and selling your own product is far more rewarding and gratifying than only advertising other people's products or trying to scrape together sponsor offers.
If you're ready to turn your expertise into an online course, you want to scale up a service based business or you want to start building a software product company, I hope the articles on ActiveGrowth will help you avoid pitfalls and reach your goals sooner!
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