# How I'd Build a Digital Product From Scratch (After Making $32 Million)

Channel: Richard Yu
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxg_sn2vJm8
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 3247
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/kxg_sn2vJm8

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[0:00] Over the last few years, I've made over $32 million selling digital products, PDFs, guides, tools, courses, and mentorships. And the single biggest thing that separated the products that sold from the ones that flopped, it's one key decision made before anything else gets built. And it's the decision that almost everyone gets wrong. You see, they rush off and they go build something, and then they wonder why it gets no sales. Meanwhile, ordinary regular people with zero audience, no expertise, and no experience are quietly building simple digital products that actually sell. Agulla, a 9-to-5er who is also going to graduate school, she made $127 ebook, and she's made over five

[0:35] figures in sales, completely faceless. Or Will, a Uber Eats delivery driver, made 8,000 in his first 14 days. Or Matt, who made 7,000 in 30 days while working his 9-to-5 job. None of them were experts. None of them invented anything new. They just got that one decision right. And in the next few minutes, I'm not just going to tell you how you're going to make it. I'm actually going to build three real digital products live right in front of you. A PDF, an app, and a done-for-you product. So, you can see with your own eyes that there's nothing complicated about this. So, here's how I want to do

[1:05] this. Forget that I've made over 32 million online. If I had to start over from scratch today, here's exactly what I'd do. And real quick, because some of you are landing here from one of my other videos, this is part one of a free four-part series that I'm pushing out. Part one is the product, which is what we're covering right here. Part two is going to be building your website. Part

[1:23] three, how you actually get customers. And part four, the entire full system that puts it all together. This video stands completely on its own. You'll walk away today able to build your own product. But here's the part I want you to hear. Each of these four videos builds on the last previous one. And the fourth one ties everything together and reveals something that's going to change

[1:40] how you see this whole business forever. And by the way, when you watch all four videos in this four-part series, at the end of video four, you are going to get a free bonus valued at over $1,000 for completely free, no strings attached. Let's begin. Okay, the The The reason most people never get to a sale is three sentences that they tell themselves. One, I'm not an expert. Two, I don't have an audience. And three, I don't have a genius idea. And here's why all three of them are wrong. You do not need expertise because the product comes from a problem that people already paid to solve, not from your resume. You

[2:11] don't need to build an audience because people are searching for solutions every day whether they heard of you or not. And a brand new idea, that's usually a red flag. If nobody's selling it, it's normally because nobody's buying it. You want proven demand, not originality. So, the question was never are you qualified? It's three smaller ones. Which product do you want to sell? At

[2:29] which price point? For which person? Answer those three and you've made the decision. Now, let me give you all three and I'll show you every single one live so you can just copy [music] this immediately. Start with a person because it makes everything else after that easy. You're not picking a general topic like fitness, money, productivity. Those are way too big to sell to. You're picking a specific person with that specific [music] problem. Not fitness, but busy dads who want to lose weight in the gym. Not productivity, but remote workers who cannot focus at home. The narrower the person, the easier the product and the more they'll pay because

[2:59] it feels made for them. How do you know that person actually has a real painful problem worth paying to solve and isn't just in your head? [music] You go look. I'll show you exactly how right now. I'm going to open up Claude and this time I'm going to turn on web search so it pulls live information off the internet. I'm going to type, "Search the web and tell me the biggest, most common complaints and frustrations remote workers have about staying focused at home. Pull from real discussions and tell me what people are actively looking for help with." Look at this. In a few seconds, it comes back

[3:26] with the actual pain points. Real people's words, "Can't stop getting distracted, can't separate work from home, lose hours on their phone, can't build a routine." That's the market telling me directly what it's struggling with. If you want to see it with your own eyes, go straight to where these people talk. Jump onto Reddit. Search a subreddit for remote workers or go on Instagram and look at the comments underneath productivity reels. You will

[3:47] see the same complaints over and over. Hundreds of people describing the exact problem you're about to solve. And when you see the same pain show up again and again, that's your green light. [music] Now, I want you to flip how you think about this because most beginners see other people already making content and products about this topic, and they panic. "Ah, if it feels so crowded and competitive, then I'm too late." It's actually the exact backwards. All that activity isn't the bad news. It's the validation that thousands of people are already talking about the problem, and they're buying stuff already to fix that problem, which means there is a hungry

[4:15] market with money to spend. The actual risk is doing the opposite. Picking some brand new problem that no one's talking about and hoping you're the genius who saw it first. You don't want to be first. You want to be where people are already paying attention. So, that's step one, done live in front of you. Pick the specific person, and then go confirm the problem is real with Claude, with Reddit, and with a few comments on Instagram. A few minutes of looking literally saved you months of building something that nobody ever wanted. And now, what you actually build for them. A digital product isn't one [music] thing

[4:42] you pick. It's a ladder. Three levels, and they stack. Each one funds the next. Level one, the low ticket around 27 bucks. This is not where you get rich. The only job is to turn a stranger into a buyer. A cheap, fast to make, nearly zero risk for them to say yes. Level two, the mid ticket, somewhere around $197. This is a real step up, not the same thing repriced. If level one is the guide that tells you what to do, level two does it with you. The video walk-through, the templates, the already built for you, the done with you version. Level one is information, level

[5:10] two is implementation, and people happily pay 10 times more for implementation. This level also exists so your top offer never feels like a cliff. Level three, the high ticket product, [music] $2,000 and up. This is where the profit actually lives, but you never actually sell it cold. You sell it to people who already climbed up the first two levels, already got the results, and already trust you. By the time they're here, it's easy because you earned it. [music] A stranger buys your $27 product, climbs the $197, and the ones who want everything come to the high ticket. You're not picking one

[5:38] level. You're building the whole ladder. Okay, Richard, sounds great, but I can't actually make any of this. [music] So, let me kill that excuse right now live three different ways. There are three key formats, and I'm going to build each one in front of you. The first format is a classic, an info product, a PDF, a guide, a template, a mini course. This is where almost everyone should start. And people think it's the hard part. Watch how fast it actually is. I'm going to open up Cloud right now. This is the free version. You do not need to pay for anything to do this. And just like I talked to a person

[6:04] in a casual setting, I'm going to type, "Write me a complete professional ebook for remote workers who struggle to focus at home. Give it a clear title, an introduction, seven chapters with specific actionable strategies in each one, and a simple daily focus checklist at the end. Then, [music] build it into a finished PDF that I can download." That's it. That's the whole skill. I described who it's for, what I wanted, in plain English, the same way that I explain it to [music] a friend. And

[6:28] watch as it writes this entire thing. The title, the intro, the chapter, chapter one, chapter two, the real strategies, no fluff. Because I asked it for a PDF, it's packaging the whole thing into a finished document right here that I can download in one click. How crazy is this? Now, I'm not telling you to take whatever the AI spits out and sell it blindly. This is your starting point, not your finished product. You need to read it through, do some quality control on it, add your own voice, add your own examples, little frameworks and tips that actually make it your own personality, the stuff that only you would think to include. The AI

[6:58] did the heavy lifting, got you 90% of the way there in 2 minutes or less. You just need to add the final 10% touch that makes it real. If you want it to look premium, you don't need a designer for that either. Just take it [music] to Canva, which by the way is also free. Drop it in a clean cover, match the colors, and make it look like something that you actually pay for. A few minutes in Canva and boom, this $27 product suddenly looks like a $97 one. Stop and let's just think about what happened

[7:22] here. A few minutes ago you had nothing. Now you have a real downloadable product with a specific person and a proven problem, polished with your own input, and it cost you $0 and zero prior writing experience. That's level one of your ladder built live from nothing. Now, the second format. And this is one

[7:37] almost everyone sleeps on, an AI app. Now, before you click off this video and you say, "Well, I can't build an app. I don't have any technical experience." That's exactly why this is the opportunity because everyone is thinking that right now. Here's why an app is special. You see, with a PDF, someone pays you one time. With an app, it will pay you every single month automatically

[7:55] for as long as they keep using the app. You build it one time and it can keep paying you for years. One app at $27 a month is over $300 a year from the same customer. This is what we call monthly recurring revenue or MRR for short. And no, you still do not need to code. I'm

[8:09] going to open up a tool called Base 44. I'm going to leave you a special link in the description that you can click on right now so you can follow along as I build this. Click on that and by the way, that special link is going to get you 30% off all annual plans. And so, I strongly recommend you click on that link right now so you can follow along along this exercise. Base 44 is very similar to Cloud because I can describe what I want in plain English and it will actually build a real working app for me. So, for the same person that we're

[8:32] speaking to, the remote worker, I'm going to tell it to build a simple focus [music] app. Something with a daily timer, a place to write your top three tasks, and a little streak tracker so people come back every day. I'm going to type this in basic plain English and then I'm going to hit go. And watch, it's building an actual app, the screens, the buttons, the layout, the real thing that people can log into and use. And I just described it in a few sentences and within a few minutes, we've got a working app that we can literally charge $27 a month for. Now, I'll be straight up with you because I

[8:59] cannot stand the hype that you see online. This does not run itself and money does not fall out of the sky. [music] You still need to show up and you have to help people. But this that you're seeing on the screen is a real piece of software that bills people every month built by someone, me, right now in front of you, who doesn't have any coding experience [music] in less than the time it takes to sip a coffee. That's the recurring product on your ladder live from nothing. If the app is something that resonates with you, use the special discount as one of the links in the description to sign up

[9:26] for Base 44. It's such a powerful tool that I strongly recommend. And the third format is the high-ticket offer itself, coaching, consulting, mentorship, and done-for-you you In plain terms, this is you packaging up real help. It might be a full video course that walks people through everything step-by-step, the templates and teaching documents that you hand them. You don't have to figure it out alone. And the live Zoom calls where you coach them through it directly. People pay $2,000, $5,000, more for that level of access and hand-holding because

[9:55] you're not selling them a file anymore. You're selling them the result and your time. [music] That's level three of the ladder. You build that on the trust from the first two levels. And exactly how you sell it is what I'm going to cover in this final video of the series. That's all three formats built live. But I can still hear some of you saying, "Richard, I don't want to build anything at all." Good news. There's a fourth version of this where you create absolutely nothing. And I'm going to show you that one live, too. [music]

[10:16] It's called AI product arbitrage. Instead of building your own product, you sell someone else's product that's already made, already proven, already converting, and you keep a generous commission on every single sale. The product already exists. The sales page and the website exists. You're simply the bridging the gap between the product and the person that needs it. Let me show you exactly how. I'm going to go over to allen.store, which is a marketplace of done-for-you digital products. And I'm searching for something that fits our person, the remote worker who needs focus. Here you go. Here's one. This is a product called high-performance training. It's an already-built, professionally-done

[10:46] course, and it's all about helping busy professionals get more productive, which is a perfect match for the exact audience that we picked from the start. Now, look at the numbers on this. It sells for $197, and you keep 90% commission. That means you make $177 in your pocket on every sale for a product that you never created, you didn't have to write, and you don't have

[11:06] to handle any of the customer service. So, you grab the link, you put it in front of all the remote workers that we already confirmed they're spending real money, and every sale pays you $177 in profit. So, look at where we [music] are. You can build nothing at all, and you can sell a proven product with arbitrage. And here's something that most people miss. The smartest sellers do both at the same time. You should have your own $27 guide bringing buyers, and you could also be arbitraging someone else's product to the same people on the same day. Remember that student I mentioned at the start? She

[11:33] didn't pick just one lane. She ran her own $27 product and she also sold other companies' proven products alongside of it. That's [music] the move. Now, let me tie this all together with one example so you can see the full picture as a business, not just separate pieces. Level one, the $27 focus guide that we built with Claude. The on-ramp that turns a stranger into a buyer. Level two, the $197 offer. This is not the

[11:54] same guide with a bigger price tag. Nobody pays [music] for that. This is a real step up in what they get. The $27 guide tells them what to do. The $197 version does it with them. [music] Video lessons walking through each step, the actual templates and trackers filled in and ready to use, maybe a private community or a monthly check-in, or it's that focus app that we built in Basecamp 44, a tool that solves a problem for them every day instead of just explaining it. Level one is information, level two is implementation. That's why it's worth 10 times the price. And level three, down the line, you don't have to

[12:22] do this right now, but definitely consider building a high-ticket offer, working with people directly to set up the whole thing. And if you don't want to build any of it, you can just arbitrage the High-Performance Train product and keep $177 on every sale, 90% commission. And that right there is a complete business. And notice, not one piece of it requires for you to be an expert, have an audience, or invent something new. But let me tell you where this goes wrong because I've watched

[12:45] this happen to people over and over. They do everything that you just learned. They build a genuinely good product and then it just sits there. Nothing happens. And they assume that the product was bad, so then they give up. When the real problem was they just had nowhere clean [music] to actually sell it. The product was not the issue. It was the fact that they were missing a storefront. [music] And right now, that's exactly where you are. You just watched me build a real product from nothing, but it's sitting on your computer. It's worth nothing. In part two, I'm going to build the entire storefront live in front of you. A

[13:11] clean, simple website with a checkout that can take payments immediately, and I'm going to show you how you can build all of this in less than an afternoon with no code and no technical experience. And I'm going to show you the one setting that almost everyone gets wrong that quietly kills sales before they even get to make one. And if that video is live, it's going to be right here on the screen. Go watch it and tap on this right now. And if it's not up yet, just hit subscribe so it lands in front of you the second it drops. So, tap right here and I'll see

[13:35] you there.

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