How to Profit from a Digital Product Before You Create it, with No Budget and No Ads

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In this episode, Dan Henry is going to break down how he was able to hit his first $100,000 in thirty days selling a product he had not even created yet. After a failed attempt at pre-building a full course and then trying to sell it, Dan realized that wasn’t the best way to leverage his time or energy… or make any money!

After pivoting to a new method for vetting and selling courses, everything fell into place and then he was able to get the forward traction he was working so hard for.

In this episode, Dan is going to cover:

• How to use a beta launch of your product to gauge whether or not your product will sell, before you start spending money on ads or software
• How to leverage social media to create free groups and build followers very quickly
• How to sell and profit from your product, before you even create it!

So if you want the birds-eye view of exactly how YOU can take the same steps Dan did to get your online course and coaching program up and booming, then listen to this episode and take notes!

If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;)

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— TRANSCRIPT —

Hey everybody. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about how to profit from a digital product before you create it with no budget and no ads.

Do you sell online courses? I want to sell digital products, but I don't want to spend any money on ads. It takes money to make money. Well, sort of, that is a very popular old saying that it takes money to make money, but in this particular case, not so much, you can actually make money selling information online without any upfront money. Now, once you make some money, you definitely want to use that money to get the tools you do need to make it easier, make it faster, but you absolutely can start with $0 million. And I know this because that's what I did. So let me go ahead and walk you through this. So when I first started, here's what I did. I decided that I was going to do a beta launch. And before I created the course, I was going to sell a, like, like a presale, right?

Sorta like Kickstarter. In fact, that's what inspired me was Kickstarter. Basically the website Kickstarter. He, they would, you know, you, you would pledge money and you pay for this future product. And if they got enough pledges and they had enough interest, then they would you know, they would make the product. And if they didn't, they wouldn't. And that's what I did. I decided that I would do this sort of like beta process, where I would do a, a, what I call a whiteboard webinar. And if you want more information on how to do whiteboard webinars, you can grab a copy of my book, digital millionaire secrets. I'll leave a link in the show notes. But I did a whiteboard webinar and I basically just taught some cool stuff, got some people on it and made a pitch. And if nobody bought it, then I was fine because I didn't do any work.

I literally just made up what I was going to share. Not I didn't make it up, but I'm saying I decided off the top of my head, what I was going to share that day. And if people dug it and they liked it and they bought it, well, then I knew I had something, but if they didn't buy it, then I knew that I didn't have anything. And so I go back to the drawing board without wasting a lot of time. Imagine if you spent weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks building an online course, and then nobody wanted to buy it. And I did that once years ago, I tried to create a course on it's called well, what was it called? It was called a launch, something. I don't even remember what it was called. Actually it's in my book.

I had to look it up so that I could put it in my book. Oh, it was called get launched. That's what it was. And it was about how to launch a blog and nobody bought it. I had to, I did this whole thing. I, I spent weeks it out and nobody bought it. And then I had to message people after the launch. And I got, I think I got like 12 people with, to buy it like a 90% discount. Oh, man. It was so embarrassing. So embarrassing. So when I did it this time, I'm like, well, screw that. I'm going to, I'm going to sell it. And if people buy it, I'll simply teach it to them live. So I sold it before I created it. But instead of saying, Hey, I'm going to buy this and then I'll create it. I said, Hey, buy this.

And you'll get to see it taught live for the first time. So that instead of just watching recorded videos, you can, you can be taught it live and you can ask questions. And so by doing that, I framed it as a benefit to them. Because if you hear, Oh, well, pay for this course and then I'll go film it next week. You're like, eh, but if I say, Hey, pay for this course, you'll get a discount, you know, and you'll get to be taught it live. You'll get to learn it live and ask questions. And everybody that buys it after that, won't, they'll just be able to access recorded videos. Then you're like, Whoa, that's amazing. But the same thing. It's just how you frame it. Right. So that's what I did. And when people bought, then I went ahead and did exactly what I said, but what I want to cover today is how I did that process, right?

How I made money with a beta and how I'm teaching my clients to do it. We have a ton of clients in my in our digital millionaire coaching program that, you know, they'll, they'll pay for the program. They'll come in, they'll do a beta and they'll make their money back on the program. And then some prior to ever creating their program. In fact, one of our clients Tin Man Lee, that's actually his real name, Tin Man Lee. He launched he was in the program for a couple of months and then he launched a beta on a course on how to do outdoor action photography, where he, you know, he teaches people how to take pictures of like flying birds and stuff like that. And he did six, I believe it was $65,000 total when it was all said and done in about a three day period.

And not a three day period. Cause obviously he was working on his stuff prior to that, I'm saying the launch, if I remember correctly, he did two webinars, three days apart. And I know he's made more since then, but I remember we interviewed him on the blog about it. Cause I just thought it was amazing that he, he sold, he sold all that in, you know, taking pictures of birds. It's just fantastic because people want to learn that, you know, so you can definitely make a lot of money doing a beta now, where does the no budget, no ads come in all that. Where does that come in? All right. So when you build an audience to get on that initial whiteboard, whenever you have to have some sort of audience, right, you got to get them from some, they were going to drum up interest somehow to get them on that whiteboard webinar.

And then once they're on, you only need a whiteboard and your phone. So that's not really costing you any money. And then you can send them to an order page. And you can PayPal, you can use Stripe and you could, you know, get a landing page software if you want it and spend money on that. But you could just use Stripe or PayPal or whatever, and that's all free to use and people can buy that pre-sale course right through there. And at no point in that process, did it cost money? I mean, as long as you have a phone, something to write on there's no money now where the, where the time comes in is building that audience to get on that webinar. And here's how I did it. So what I did was I just went in, I found groups like Facebook groups, forums, just places online, where people that were talking about my subject matter we're and we're hanging out and we're discussing it.

And I just started being helpful. And so I'd go into Facebook groups and somebody would ask a question about the, you know, what I was talking about. And I would not only be helpful by answering their question but every single time I answered the question, I would ask another question. I keep the loop open and then people would respond and say, Oh, that's cool. So are you from, I might even just ask where they're from or how they're liking the weather or whatever, but I obviously try to keep it on topic, but I would say no matter what, I would ask an open-ended question, why? Because it would continue the thread and it would make that thread or that sub-thread popular. And then sometimes I would just post my own thread where I was giving advice and over time. And when I say over time, I'm talking, you know, hours or days, not weeks or months, Very quickly did this happen.

People would get value out of that. And they'd be like, Oh, who is this guy? That's, that's pretty helpful. And when you see somebody online that says something that's helpful, what's the first thing that did that. You do, you, you check out their profile, you creep their profile, you click on their name and you check out who they are. And so what I did was on my Facebook profile, I put a link to my Facebook group, and eventually, I had a cheat sheet where I had this like a PDF cheat sheet. And I got them on an email list. And either way, it doesn't matter the idea is the same as you, you post valuable info, people check you out. And when they go to your profile, they see that you're promoting this offer, and the offer could be to join your Facebook group or get on your email list by downloading a cheat sheet or PDF guide or whatever.

And the idea is that, you know, the more you help, the more people check you out, the more people start following you. And that's exactly what I did. And I was able to build a little Facebook group and just followers on my Facebook and friends. And, you know, the friend requests you and all that up of about 200 people in less than a week, you know, cause I was just always on there posting and being helpful. And it went really, really quickly. Now think about it. Most of you listening to this right now, if you, if you were to download the screen time app on your phone and you were to actually check how much time you spend on social media, you know, talking about sports or just random stuff, arguing over politics, whatever it is, it's a lot of time. So when you say, I don't have time for this, I call BS.

I do because you have time, you could take the time that you spent arguing about politics, arguing about, you know, whatever talking about sports or whatever it is. And you could instead use that time to do the same thing but to do something productive with it and share your knowledge and help people. And people will start following you very, very quickly. And then you get them on an email list or you get them in your, in your Facebook group and then you just keep helping them. And then you go, Hey guys, I'm going to do this training on this day. Boom, that's where you do the whiteboard webinar. You do the whiteboard webinar, you share some awesome stuff. You pitch boom, that's where you make the sale and now you've made some money and now you can take that money and you can use it for things like, you know, landing page software, maybe even Facebook ads.

And that's how I actually grew to a hundred thousand dollars in that first month is I did a beta and I made several thousand dollars. That didn't mean it was anything crazy, but it was several thousand dollars. I took that money and I put it into ads and some additional tools. And over the next 30 days was able to generate a 50, sorry, a hundred sales about 50 each per webinar that I did for the full price. So to recap, I sold a pre-sale of the course for a very, very discounted price, made a little bit of money, took that money, put it into ads to hype up the eventual launch of the refined, full-price program. And while I was hyping it up, I worked with those initial students. I recorded the videos. I helped them out, making sure the program was good in this home.

This happened very quickly over a couple of weeks. And then I did live webinars with actual slides. You know, I was able to show testimonials from the people that got in on the beta because they got in, they were excited. They got some quick results. They were talking about how great the program was. And so I was able to now charge full price, did two webinars, 100 sales, nine 97, boom, a hundred grand. And it was all started with me just going on and helping people and getting them to follow me and then making an offer done deal. And then from there I made a little bit of money, was able to buy some tools, email software, landing pages, software, Facebook ads, and turn that into a hundred thousand dollars a month right out of the gate. And that's with no initial investment.

I just reinvested what I made off of that beta. And then I took that a hundred grand and turned it into a $13 million, but we’ve now done well over eight figures, $13 million to date in sales for my own products. And it's just incredible because how many businesses do you know where you can make $13 million on a $0 million investment, nothing more than your time. The time you're already spending, messing around on social media, doing nothing, nothing of importance arguing about whoever the president is or arguing about why, you know, you don't like this show or this sports team, or, you know, arguing over whether or not Tom Brady is a cheater, like just stuff that doesn't matter, man. It just doesn't matter. And instead of using your time to do something that does matter and build something great. So look that is in a nutshell, the 30,000-foot view of how I did that first a hundred thousand dollars a month and how I was able to, to do it and, and, and sell and profit from it before I created the actual product and why that's a, it's a great product because I was able to get that initial beta round in and make sure the product was great.

And then when it launched for full price, everybody loved it because I knew they loved it. Cause that initial group gave me so much feedback during that process. Now, if you want a day by day literal day by day breakdown of each and every thing I did every day, like right down to when I had coffee, like literally what I did every single day for that 30 days I have in my book, digital millionaire secrets, the 30 days to 100 K blueprint. And that is in the book. You can read it. It's an actual plan in the book and you can't, I'm not saying you're going to make any amount of money. All right. I'm just telling you what I made when I did it. Now I've had people do this process. They've made a few grand, they've made a couple of hundred bucks depending.

Maybe they didn't do that good of a job, or they didn't, they didn't really see it through. I had made people that made zero because, you know, they, they did like half the work or they skip days or whatever. So I can't tell you what you're, what you're gonna do. But I have had, I had one very, very nice woman named Eileen who, whose client who did this and did 97,000 her doing this beta. And I believe if I, if I remember correctly, that's probably the best result I have from somebody who took this process, did it and made money before creating the product. And if there is somebody that, that used it, read this book or use this process and made more well email me, because I don't know about you. And I would love to like interview you or share your story of my podcast.

But anyway, that it is. So if you want to grab a copy of my book and see that, that blueprint for yourself, then you can go ahead and grab a free copy, just pay for shipping. I'll leave a link for that in the show notes. But in the next episode, we're going to talk about the next phase. All right. So, you know, up until this point, I talked about, you know, the overall, how I built an eight-figure business, selling my knowledge, or as I like to call it thin air how or why anybody can make money from digital products. And today I talked about my journey in that first month and how I did what I did in this next episode coming, I'm going to talk about how I scaled it and specifically how I scaled it with high ticket premium offers. So you absolutely do not want to miss that. I will see you in the next episode.