Forget creating digital products. Focus on this instead
This Made Me $30,000 Online
I’ve made $30,000 selling digital products online. (watch here)
But my advice is not to jump into selling digital products.
That misses an important step.
The step that almost nobody talks about. The step that turns a $5 PDF into a real income stream. The step that separates the people making money from the people stuck wondering why their Notion template isn’t selling.
That step is solving a real problem.
Here’s what I see all the time on X and YouTube…
Someone watches a video about how creators are making thousands selling digital products. They get excited. They open Canva. They make a template. They post it on Gumroad. They wait.
And nothing happens.
Then they blame the algorithm. Or the niche. Or the price.
But the real problem is this: they started with the product instead of the problem.
A digital product is just a wrapper. What’s inside the wrapper is what people pay for. And what’s inside has to be a solution to something they’re actually struggling with right now.
If you skip the problem, the product has nothing to wrap.
👉 Free Download: 20 Types of Digital Products That Sell
Where to find real problems
Real problems live in two places, and they’re free to access.
Reddit. Go to any subreddit related to a topic you care about. Sort by “Top this week.” Read the comments. Look for the posts where people are asking the same question over and over. Look for the posts where someone wrote a 500-word rant about how frustrating something is. Those are gold.
X (Twitter). Search trending topics. Look at the replies. People complain in replies. They ask questions in replies. They share what isn’t working for them in replies.
You’re not looking for ideas. You’re looking for pain. The more specific the pain, the better.
When you find people asking the same question multiple times in different ways, that’s a signal. They’ve tried Googling it. They’ve tried asking ChatGPT. And they still don’t have a clean answer. That gap is where your product lives.
My $30k empire started with this
A while back, I noticed a wave of people on X and Reddit getting excited about Suno AI. They were generating music. But almost everyone was stuck in the same place:
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The music sounded okay. But not great. They wanted to figure out how to get Suno AI songs to sound like real artists.
That was the gap.
I dug into Suno. I tested prompts. I figured out what was working and what wasn’t. Then I wrote an article sharing what I learned.
That article got traction because it solved the exact problem people were complaining about. Then I turned that knowledge into a $5 digital product.
That $5 product is what eventually turned into a $30,000 income stream.
But none of it would have worked if I had just woken up one day and decided to make a “Suno guide” because AI music seemed trendy. It worked because I had watched real people struggle with a real thing, and I built something that fixed it for them.
On Using AI
Once you’ve found a real problem, AI is the fastest tool ever invented for figuring out a solution. You can use it to test approaches, draft frameworks, summarize research, and generate examples.
But AI cannot find the problem for you. That part is on you. You have to go where real people are talking and listen.
The order matters:
- Find a trending topic with real frustration
- Identify the specific problem inside that topic
- Use AI to help you solve it
- Share the solution publicly (article, thread, video)
- Package the solution into a digital product
If you flip step 1 and step 5, you end up with a product nobody asked for.
The shift you need to make today
Stop asking “what digital product should I make.”
Start asking, “what are people frustrated about right now, and can I help them?”
The product part is the easy part. Canva is free. Gumroad is free. Notion is free. The tools are sitting there waiting.
What’s hard is caring enough to actually pay attention to what people need. To scroll Reddit not for entertainment but for signals. To read the replies under a viral tweet, looking for the same complaint showing up three times.
That’s the work. That’s the part nobody wants to do because it doesn’t feel like building anything.
But that’s the part that turns a $5 product into a $30,000 outcome.
Solve a real problem for real people.
I talk about this stuff on my YouTube channel, and I’ve written down my entire playbook in a 50-page strategy guide if you're interested in learning more.
