How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales

Last year I was working on my flagship course, The Operating System: Grow & Monetize LinkedIn.

As I was building it, I was thinking through ways of creating additional interest and urgency for the launch, when I had an interesting idea.

I wanted to see if I could generate more revenue by pitching a new product I thought of on the spot, that didn’t exist.

My goal?

Drive $5,000 in sales without spending more than $50 and 10 minutes of my own time creating the product.

Here’s how I did it, and literally, step-by-step, how you can do it too.

Step 1: Find anything on your computer/your social media that already exists and could be valuable.

I was prompted to think about a “swipe file” of my top LinkedIn posts when someone told me they save a lot of my posts but wished there was an easier way to access them. (remember: listen for problems) 

The Swipe File was born.

My top 50 pieces of content, seen 21M+ times.

Step 2: Announce the new product online

I used some old copy from another product launch and updated it to announce The Swipe File on Tuesday, July 20th.

How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales 1

Step 3: Wait to see if people buy

I wanted to see at least $5,000 in sales before I knew the idea was something that resonated online.

It created $7,500 in sales.

How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales 2

Step 4: Find the content necessary to create the product

I went into Shield App and sorted all of my historical posts by impressions, and then simply exported them to a CSV file.

How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales 3

Step 5: Outsource the creation

I went onto Fiverr and found someone who could pull that data into an eBook and made sure to include video instructions of exactly what I wanted.

How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales 4

Step 6: Review and download

I received the completed work 24 hours later and uploaded it to Gumroad to be distributed to the customers on August 4th.

How I Spent $40.93 and 10 Minutes to Generate $7,500 in Sales 5

TL;DR

  1. Find something that already exists on GDrive or social
  2. Promote it
  3. See if it sells
  4. Send the content to someone on Fiverr to put together
  5. Review the work
  6. Distribute to audience

There is SO much value sitting on your GDrive or Notion.

If you are active on social media, you’ve likely already created something that people would be happy to purchase.

Get out there and create.