Episode 68:The First Thing Bought
In this episode, Nick and Kai discuss the importance of the ‘first thing’ that a customer or clients buys from you (be it a product or a service) and how that transaction sets expectations for the duration of the relationship. Nick and Kai also briefly discuss how to get started with your first product.
Summary
Nick and Kai debate where to start a consultant’s product ladder: Kai makes the case for $19-$49 entry products that get clients comfortable buying before they hit higher price points, while Nick starts at $50 and refuses to run discounts, arguing that cheap prices and sales signal contractor rather than consultant. Both agree the first product should be built from existing material, stay coherent with service offerings, and treat the checkout form as a habit worth training.
Highlights
- Kai argues a 1,000-5,000 word booklet at $19-$49 can filter bad-fit clients, establish methodology, and get a prospect across the first purchase threshold, revenue is secondary to that initial yes.
- Nick prices the Cadence and Slang PDF at $35 and the full book at $50 using a time-ROI argument: if it saves a $100/hr designer 30 minutes, it has paid for itself. The book has sold around 3,500 copies.
- Nick never runs discounts or sales. He wants buyers who are confident the product will help them, and believes a sale signals that you’re a contractor and invites bargain-hunters who shelve the book unread.
- Kai priced his client qualification questionnaire, a 5-page, 6-question document refined over three years, at $19, on the logic that avoiding even one bad-client engagement covers the cost by a wide margin.
- Kai is testing a temporary $1 discount code on a new launch specifically to get subscribers comfortable with his checkout form, reducing friction before future higher-price purchases.
- Both treat existing SOPs, templates, and checklists as the raw material for a first product. Nick bundled checklists into his A-B testing manual and raised the price. Kai assembled his first e-book from templates and outlines already sitting around from client work.
- Kai’s Outreach Blueprint rewrite added 30 email templates, bonus videos, and checklists across pricing tiers. In the four days after soft launch, every copy sold at three times the original price.
Read the transcript
So I’m of the opinion that it’s valuable for consultants to have. A product, something that it’s a PDF, it’s a book. It doesn’t worry it’s a screencast, it doesn’t require you to actually Do client service work, but it’s something people could pay you money for. It’s something that establishes your worldview, establishes your authority. And I don’t think that these necessarily need to be. 60, 70, 80,000 word long books. This could be a 1,000, 2,000, 5,000-word mini booklet that you just attach a price to, and it helps. Inform a prospective client about the type of work you do, how you work, the methodology you use. You could shunt clients who aren’t a good fit. Fit to it, you could promote it, you could bundle it with your service offerings, but I think there’s a lot of value in having a $29 or a $39 or a $49, let’s call it an entry-level sub-$50, very simple product available. With some caveats that we’ll get into in a little bit, but I’m very much a proponent of this, and this connects to a lot of the talking Nick and I have done about The value of adding products into your product orbit or your service orbit as a consultant, I think a great place to start is with Sawdust, pieces of material you already have laying around, tutorials, standard operating procedures. Clean them up, put them into a book-shaped thing, release them to people, make them available. And it might not drive a lot of revenue, but the goal isn’t necessarily to drive a lot of revenue off the bat. It’s to say, I have created my first product. Dear Klein, if you are interested in working with me, you could buy this $29, $39, $49, $99 product to learn about my methodology, my process, my worldview. And then move forward. There’s a self-consistency aspect to it where once somebody has decided to pay you money, they’re more likely to pay you money in the future. So, by having a lower-priced offering, you’re able to get people across that threshold and have them prime to say, Oh, yes, I enjoyed buying that $29, $39 product. Let me buy that $59 or $99 product next. Let me buy that thousand-dollar service offering and move themselves up your service and product ladder. But I think it starts from defining a small initial offering and making it available for sale.
Yeah. I’m a little wary about products that are that cheap. And I know I probably shouldn’t be. It’s weird to say all of this. I it’s also doubly weird on a podcast where our about page costs a staggering five dollars, right? Can we raise that? Probably, I mean, yeah, it was like editing three numbers in Stripe, man. It’s pretty easy.
The conversion rates we’re getting, I tell you, we will keep money online.
What we need are fewer customers. I really don’t. Okay, so just to lay it all out on the table, the cheapest product that I have is $35 for Cadence and Slings PDF. And it’s only the PDF. That’s it. After that, you’re basically in $50 territory for the full book. If you buy just the PDF, you get a link from me to buy the book for $15 plus shipping. That’s good for life. Because I don’t believe you should have to pay twice for the same thing. The reason I have cadence and slang priced at $50, I have said this in so many bars in so many parts of the world. Is that if you are a designer or developer and you read cadence and slang at a pretty average pace, it takes you about two hours to read. If it saves you a half hour or two and a half hours of your time, So like a quarter day of your time, it has paid for itself. If you’re like billing out at $100 an hour, right? And when people start to see the calculus of it, they’re like, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. then I see all these other people in the design industry billing their books out at $15, $20. And I think the reason that they do that, and part of this is a factor of my background, to be clear, this hesitation I think part of the reason they do that is because the book is the portfolio piece for them. And they just want to flag as somebody who has a dope book. But what happens in that situation is you get customers that don’t fit your positioning quite as well. And the customers that do come in are less likely to take you seriously. People who read Cadence and Slang they generally, when they buy it, they actually read it. There was a long time when Cadence and Slang cost less money and people bought it to put it on their bookshelf so that they could look cool. I didn’t bust my ass for two and a half years on this book, and then again for another half of a year on this book, so that you could go ahead and do that. There is a time and a place for objects like that in one’s home. It won’t be mine. I physically mail every single one of them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, towards that end, I make sure that the price is high enough that you feel at least a little bit of pain about it. There’s that. That’s one thing I do wrong. Another thing I do wrong is I don’t really provide sales. There might be launch discounts. And I might bundle things together and give you a slight discount, but there’s never going to be a situation where I’m like, suddenly, hey, cadence and slang is $10 off this week only, go and buy it. That’s the thing I do really horribly wrong because it probably harms my sales really significantly. Why do I do that? I don’t want people to be coming in with a bargain hunting mindset. I want them to be coming in saying, I want this thing. I’m confident. I know that it will help me in my business. And I know in reality, humans are way weirder than that, right? So in practice. People want the bargain, and then you sidle them with the thing, and then they’re like, Now I have this great thing, and I got a bargain. They feel good because they got a bargain. You feel good because you sold them a thing, right? I could hike Cadence and Slank’s price to $60 and dock it to $50 all the time and have a running discount. But then I flag as the type of person who has discounts. There are numerous and the reason I the fundamental reason I do this is because I am not a contractor, I am a consultant. And designers get horrendously underpaid still in the year of our Lord 2017 and horrendously undervalued. The way to solve that as a designer is to position yourself as a luxury good, as a prize to be had. And you do not do that by throwing a fucking sale. You don’t. People take you less seriously.
I completely agree with that. And I love your point about the time-based return. If your book takes a couple hours to read and saves somebody X hours of their time. It’s a mind-boggling return on investment. And I use that same argument when it comes to like a $19 or a $29 product, but when you run through the equation, it needs to save somebody less time. So for example, I released a product recently to my mailing list, my client qualification questionnaire. And it’s the questions I ask every prospect who I get on a call with to determine whether we’re a good fit, what the project is, what exactly they need help with, what outcomes they’re searching for, and why exactly do they want to work with me? Why not somebody more affordable? And it took me about three years of iteration and research to arrive on these questions that I asked. And so I packaged it up and I was thinking, and I was like, wow, you know, if somebody reads this and it saves them one client. It’s going to save them hours of time. It could save them hours of bad email exchanges. And I wanted to make it available as a More affordable product, even though the price is there, so or the value is there. So I priced it at $19 because, again, it’s short. It’s through remark, I think it turned out being a five-page document. It’s centered around these, I think, six essential questions. And just knowing the questions gives you the ammunition to protect yourself from the bad clients that are out there. Consuming the information isn’t going to take a lot of time. If somebody’s able to spend $19, buy this product, spend 10, 15 minutes reading it and taking the questions and putting it in a swipe file that they could reference. They’re going to get a mind-boggling return on investment just from that small purchase. And again, we circle back to that consistency. I want people to be comfortable buying my products because they had a good experience buying my products previously. And so. Having these small, tiny, self-contained products at $19 or $29 each that eventually get bundled up into a larger $49 or a $79 product, and then bundled up again to a $299 or a $499 product. People feel more comfortable buying from me because they were able to sample the waters at a lower price with a smaller fix and then move up at their own pace to a larger fix that provides more value at a higher price point. So, my logic behind it is: I want an array of offerings that straddles the two, the three, and the four-figure price points. And the two-figure price points become an opportunity for somebody to come in the door and start working together. Buy a thing and have a good experience with it. From there, they’re more likely to buy, you know, the upper end two-figure, the lower end three-figure, and from there, the upper end three-figure, lower-end four-figure product. But it’s training them for that self-consistency. I bought the thing, I received value, I enjoyed it. Kai is a nice person. I’m going to buy the next thing next time it comes
Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s definitely something to be had for getting people in the habit of paying you and starting it in a low risk way makes sense. Like I agree with the conceit. I think that I do a similar thing in terms of my product ladder. I just start you at $50 instead of $30. And where you choose to start that is, I think, a philosophical matter that You have to spend a lot of time settling on. It’s not something that just you figure it out and it’s okay. Yeah. For me, I also kind of start people by teaching them with my free stuff. Like, you can learn a lot from my free stuff. And we’ve talked a lot about that. But again, they’re not going through the process of my checkout form, right? I want to get people very used to entering their credit card details in my checkout form.
Right. Yeah, same. And one thing I’m about to start playing around with, I think as we record it this week, it should be launching this week. I’m launching a product to my list, and I want people to become more comfortable with the checkout form. So I’m offering two options: you could buy it for $19, or here’s a discount code. It’s going to vanish in a couple of days, so you only have a short window to use it. You could buy it for a dollar. And I’ve explained this idea to a couple of people, you include, and people are like, that’s weird. Why are you doing that? And it comes back to that main point we just discussed. I want people to become comfortable going through my checkout form. I want people to become comfortable with that process of buying a thing when I launch it. I don’t want them to be like, this is new. I’ve never clicked here. I’ve never seen checkout before. What’s this? There’s a testimonial. I need to read this. I want them to be like, ah, I’ve done this before. Credit card information to save. Let’s do it. Let’s buy the thing. I’m so happy about this. So, by launching these smaller things at a lower price point, even in testing the waters with this weird, strange tactic of it’s a dollar for this short amount of time. I’m seeing if it increases the number of conversions and gets more people more comfortable with the process of paying me money through my checkout system. Maybe it’ll be a success or maybe it’ll be a failure. But the cost to me to do that is really, really low. And it feels like the upside of making people more comfortable with spending money on my website has a huge potential upside to it.
Yeah, you want getting people into that habit is one of the biggest challenges. And whatever you can do to facilitate that I mean, that’s basically what conversion optimization is, right? Like you’re removing the friction points in the places where somebody may happen to be leaking revenue. doing what you can to try and accommodate them and doing it in a way that is still honoring your own principles.
Right. Yeah. I think one important point that we both agree on here is there’s a lot of value in having pure product offerings or a base product offering. That doesn’t require you to do any service use, something like Gumroad or Get DPD to handle the delivery, but you don’t necessarily need to do the consulting part of it. And I’d say you. That first product can be smaller than you expect it to be. It doesn’t need to be 30,000 words. It could be 4,000 words. That teaches somebody something that saves them two or three hours of their time. And that can provide a huge return on investment for that buyer. And it could be easier to create something like that than you think. The first version of my first e-book came from me taking sawdust from four or five different projects I was working on: templates from one thing, an outline from another. Refining it and working it together and saying, Oh, cool. This is, you know, it’s short, but it’s valuable and gives direction. I’m going to release it as a product. And from there, it’s growing and growing over time. But It started for me just picking up some things I had lying around and saying, hey, I could sort of put these into a product shape thing. Let’s see what happens if I launch it. If people will buy it, people bought it, and it moved me forward in that direction. So I think. Just taking those pre-existing components and making them available for sale can be a huge level up and suddenly make it so you have extended your product offerings to include lower-price, no-touch things that people buy.
Yeah, I think there’s something to like what the first thing bought is, right? And that sets the tone. So was it on a discount? How much did it cost? What value did I receive from it? What um what content was it? How does it fit with the other things that he has, or she? And so there’s that’s the bigger question than necessarily a $29 product. Because first off, you’re hemming yourself into a $29 product. All right, the last thing I want is for everybody listening to this episode to go out and make a product that costs exactly $29. You want a product that makes sense as a good entry product. You want a product that it could be $10, it could be $50, it could be $30, you don’t know, right? But be careful and intentional about what that thing is, because it’s the thing that’s hopefully going to get bought the most frequently.
Yeah, it needs to be coherent with your other product offerings or service offerings. So like let’s take the example of Draft for a second and say, okay, we could launch a Service offering for draft or a product for draft that’s like your essential consulting checklist, the 10 things you need to do to grow your business. It’d be valuable, it’ll teach people things, but it wouldn’t ladder up into your other service offerings. But something like draft analysis, where it’s teaching people the fundamentals of effective conversion-based design for e-commerce stores. That’s an effective thing for somebody to come in the door and say, Oh, this will teach me things. This will help me save time. This will help me learn what I need to do to get more conversions on my website. This will give me ideas to start testing from. then they can actually ladder up into the AB testing manual, Revise Expressed, or Draft Revise Engagement, because there’s that coherence in theme and topic across these different materials.
Yeah. Yeah, and your we’ve talked a lot about the value of a product ladder on that front. So it’s no one probably One is going to be buying my book, anything that I own, or anything that I have on offer more than my book, right? Cadence and Slinger sold around 3,500 copies as of right now, and that’s amazing. But I also am pretty clear-eyed about the fact that You know, there aren’t 3,500 draft revised clients. There aren’t 3,500 draft analysis customers. So, so yeah. I think those are the important things to be thinking about when you’re doing kind of an entry level product and what it looks like.
And yes, and echoing on in terms of what it looks like, the most valuable areas I’ve seen entry-level products come from have been taking standard operating procedures you’ve defined. Cleaning them up and turning them into a thing. Even if it’s just like, here’s the 15 things you need to do as a checklist. That’s valuable. I don’t need to find that myself. Thank you. If there’s common advice you give in reports around a topic, like these are the 10 things that every site or every business needs to be doing that they aren’t doing, you probably should be doing them, that you essentially can just copy and paste between engagements because it’s usually the same advice. That should be split off or could be split off into its own product. Anything where you were delivering the same type of advice of advice again and again can become its own product and will be, by definition, coherent with the other service offerings you have available because it’s in a sense split off from those larger service offerings.
Yeah. Yeah, just bundling a checklist, like bundling something really simple. Like I added a bunch of checklists and to-do lists to the A-B testing manual and boosted the price. It was as easy as that. People pay for checklists and toolkits all the time. If you’re a designer, package some icons together. Package some standard operating procedures and templates together. Those are so valuable.
I just went through a slight rewrite of the Outreach Blueprint. And for folks that aren’t familiar with it, it’s my book on how to email anyone and get a response at outreachblueprint. com. And I split it into tiers. And in the middle tier, I added another 30 email templates covering like sales outreach, market research, marketing outreach, referral outreach. Another two bonus videos, a couple procedures and checklists, like additional valuable content that people had requested and that I had lying down or lying around. And in the four days since I’ve soft launched this, I haven’t even announced it to my list yet. Every single copy that is sold has sold at a price point three times the original price point. And it’s A, the power of tiers, because tiers really work well with information products, and B, Because I was providing these additional off-the-shelf resources. It’s a larger template library, which was easy for me to create, but incredibly valuable for anybody that says, I want to do an outreach campaign. I want to do an outreach campaign to get referrals from my past clients. What do I say? Here’s literally the six email sequence I endorse and advocate. Get started with this today. It provides so much value to have those SOPs or those checklists or those templates or those resource libraries just bundled in. Or even just available as a standalone product. One thing I haven’t made available yet, but really want to, is, you know, Kai’s collection of template library or Kai’s Universal Template Library. Get started with this and email for any situation you need. It’s all off the shelf. It’s all valuable. It solves pains that I know people are experiencing. It’s just bundling it together and making it available as a product.
And there you go.