Stop burying your heads in developing digital products, and get this matter done well first.

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Editor's Note: Nowadays, many people want to start businesses with digital products, but few of them succeed. The root cause is that the product is only a shell, and the real user pain points are the foundation. Don't follow the trend to create products, but first listen to the public's real troubles, identify the demand gap before taking action, which is the key to making side hustles online work. This article is translated and compiled, hoping to bring you inspiration.

I made $30,000 selling digital products online. But my advice is: don't rush into selling digital products blindly.

You will miss a crucial step.

Almost no one mentions this step. But it is this step that can turn a $5 PDF document into a steady source of income. It is also this step that distinguishes those who actually make money from those who are confused and wondering why their templates can't sell.

This step is: solving real, existing problems.

I often see such phenomena on X platform and YouTube: some people watch the creator's videos, see that the creator earns thousands of dollars a month by selling digital products, and get excited immediately. They open the software, make a template, list it on the platform, and then wait quietly for orders to come.

Nothing happens at all.

Then they start to blame the algorithm, say they picked the wrong track, or set an unreasonable price. But the real root cause is: making products first and then looking for demands, which is the wrong order.

Digital products are just a shell. What users are willing to pay for is the content inside the shell, which must be able to solve the practical problems they are currently troubled by.

If you skip the step of digging out real problems, your product will become an empty shell with no core value.

Where to Dig Out Real Pain Points

Real demand pain points can be found from hot topics, focusing on the comment and reply sections. People always like to complain and ask questions in the replies, talking about all kinds of situations that don't work for them. What you are looking for is not novel ideas, but users' pain points. The more specific the pain point is, the higher its value.

When you find many people asking the same question repeatedly in different words, that is a strong signal. They have searched for answers on Google and asked ChatGPT, but still can't get a clear and feasible solution. This demand gap is the foothold for your product.

The Starting Point of My $30,000 Income

Some time ago, I saw a large number of people on the Internet who were very interested in Suno AI and used it to generate music. But almost everyone was stuck in the same dilemma:

The generated music sounds okay, but it can't reach the ideal level. Everyone wants to figure out how to make the songs generated by Suno AI have the texture of professional singers' works.

This is a ready-made demand gap.

I studied Suno AI in depth, debugged the prompts repeatedly, and figured out which writing methods work and which don't. Then I wrote an article to share my research insights.

This article went viral, because it accurately solved the problem that everyone kept complaining about. After that, I organized these experiences into a digital product priced at $5.

It is this $5 product that finally helped me earn $30,000.

If I had just seen the booming AI music trend and made a Suno tutorial on a whim, I would never have succeeded. The reason why I succeeded is that I observed the real troubles of actual users and made products to help them solve the problems.

About the Use of AI Tools

After finding real problems, AI is the most efficient tool to solve them. You can use it to test different ideas, build content frameworks, organize research materials, and generate reference cases.

But AI can't find problems for you, this thing has to be done by yourself. You need to go to places where real users gather and listen to their voices.

The order of doing things is very critical:

1. Find hot topics with a large number of user complaints and troubles

2. Locate specific pain point problems in the topic

3. Use AI to help you conceive solutions

4. Publish your solutions publicly (articles, posts, videos are all acceptable)

5. Package the solution into a digital product

If you reverse Step 1 and Step 5, what you make will only be products that no one needs.

Change Your Mindset Starting Today

Stop asking: "What kind of digital product should I make?"

Instead, ask: "What are people troubled by right now? Can I help them solve it?"

Making the product itself is actually the easiest part. Many tools are completely free to use, and they are right there available. The hard part is to truly understand users' demands with your heart. Surfing the Internet is not for entertainment, but for capturing demand signals. Check the comments under popular posts, pay attention to the same complaint that appears repeatedly several times. That is the real hard work you need to put in. This thing doesn't look like "making a product", so many people are unwilling to do it.

But it is exactly this thing that can turn a small $5 product into $30,000 in revenue.

Solve real problems for real people.

Translator: Teresa