The most common block to a first product isn't laziness — it's the honest belief that you have nothing worth charging for. Almost always, that belief is wrong. You've just stopped seeing the things you know because they feel obvious to you.
Mine what's obvious to you
- The thing people keep asking you how to do.
- The process you've built for yourself that others fumble.
- The mistakes you made early that you could save someone else from.
Obvious to you is valuable to them
What feels basic from the inside is often exactly what a beginner would pay to skip learning the hard way. Your curse of knowledge is someone else's shortcut. Sell the shortcut.
Sell the Thing People Already Ask You For
The clearest signal of what to sell is already in your inbox and DMs. The questions people ask repeatedly — how did you edit that, what camera do you use, can you look at my CV, how do you stay organised — are pre-validated demand. You don't have to guess whether anyone wants it; they're already asking, just for free.
Spend twenty minutes reading back through the last few months of messages and note every question that came up more than once. The pattern that emerges is your first product. A photographer forever asked "how do you get that warm tone" has a preset pack and a short editing walk-through sitting in plain sight; the demand did the market research already.
This also settles the confidence problem. "I've nothing worth selling" usually means "I can't see it because it's easy for me". The things that are easy for you and hard for others are exactly what people pay to skip — your fluency is the product.
Start With a Template, a Call, or a Checklist — Not a Course
The instinct when starting is to build the big, definitive course, which takes months and often never ships. Start with the smallest useful thing instead. A template, a checklist, a swipe file, a single one-to-one call, a short audit — each can be made in an afternoon and sold this week, and each teaches you what buyers actually want before you invest months.
Small offers also lower the buyer's risk, which matters most when nobody knows you yet. A £15 template is an easy yes; a £300 course from a stranger is not. Sell a "client onboarding checklist" as a £9 download first, and the people who buy it are the exact audience for a £120 onboarding course once you build it.
A live call is the fastest of all, because there's nothing to build — you're selling your time and attention. It also hands you priceless research: an hour with three paying customers tells you what the digital product should contain more reliably than any amount of planning.
Pre-Sell It Before You Build It
The safest way to know something will sell is to sell it before it exists. Describe the thing, put up a simple page with a price and a buy button, and open it for a founding round at a lower price. If enough people buy, you build it with money already in hand and demand confirmed; if nobody does, you've saved yourself months building the wrong thing.
This isn't dishonest as long as you're upfront that it's coming — "founding price, delivered in three weeks" is a fair deal buyers take all the time. With OneSol you can stand up that pre-sale page and take payment straight to your own Stripe in an afternoon, so the test costs you a page and an email, not a quarter of building.