How to build a digital product

With the increasing digitalization of different aspects of human life, we see a rush of people looking to get into this space. Anyone can develop a digital product, but the success of this product lies in different factors, including having a dedicated development team model.

The world’s wealthiest people can make money in their sleep, having their products work for them; However, there is a vast difference between the everyday man and the top 1% of wealthy individuals. Creating digital products has been a reliable way of earning passive income over the years, allowing individuals to earn income from different sources. In this piece, we look at what a digital product is and how you can create a successful one. But first, let’s understand what a digital product is.

What are digital products?

Digital products are products that are purchased online for online use. You must have come across one form of digital product or another; we see ebooks, online course packages, podcasts, and music content, all being sold online. From its meaning, we can tell this is a huge market, with Statista estimating the digital commerce market could reach $5.59 trillion in 2022, while the annual transaction value could reach $9.24 trillion by 2027.

Why do you need a digital product?

Digital products have shown their importance in one way or the other in our lives. However, creating a digital product for a business opens it to more opportunities at a much larger scale than offline means. Some of the ways digital products can be useful to us include;

Scalability

With digital products being online, your business is exposed to a much larger audience, saving you the cost of physically marketing your product to a larger audience. A typical example of such a product is a chef creating an ebook with cooking recipes, allowing the chef to reach a larger audience while having their physical business.

Passive income

People are becoming more financially responsible, finding better ways of managing their finances, and looking for ways to improve their income without significantly compromising their everyday lives. As a solution, people create multiple streams of income. One of the benefits of digital product creation can be seen when creating new income sources that require less monitoring while having a low running cost.

Low startup cost

As we all know, starting a business requires capital, and each business varies in how much would be needed to start. Digital product creation provides a low entry barrier as it costs significantly less to create your digital product than to start a physical business.

Easy automation

When dealing with digital products, most effort is put into the marketing of the product, while other areas, such as membership and payments, can be easily automated.

How to build a digital product

Before creating your digital product, it is important to understand the different products that can be digitalized, have a good business model, and also understand what creating a good product means. In today’s world, pretty much anything can be digitalized; with that, some products you could digitalize include;

• Ebooks.
• Podcasts.
• Online courses.
• Video streaming services.
• Newsletters.
• Audiobooks.
• Templates.
• Photos and presets.
• Webinars.

The above list does not limit the kind of products you can digitalize. Now that we have an idea of products you can digitalize making them alone does not guarantee the success of your project.

Creating a product destined to succeed requires the product to provide value or a solution to a problem experienced by people. Other than providing solutions to problems, a product can be successful if it is in line with the market demand. Therefore, building an economically viable product can determine the success of your product. With the above, we can categorize these models as;

• Product-market fit: Digital products created to fill in high market demands.
• Problem-solution fit: Digital products created to provide solutions to problems in the market.

Now let’s take a step-by-step look at how you can create your digital product.

1. Identify problems your product can solve: As earlier stated, a product solving particular problems is more likely to be sold. Therefore, creating a product that solves problems or provides high value on in-demand trends is key to product success.
2. Learn about the market you wish to enter: one thing that helps is learning from established businesses in your chosen niche to understand how they navigate the market and ways you can improve on that.
3. Identify potential customers: knowing your potential target helps determine the suitability of your product for the market. Identifying your target customers also gives an insight into the products they want.
4. Expand your network: This helps make the marketing of your product easier. You can easily expand your network through guest posting or communities in a similar niche.
5. Create a minimum viable product: all research carried out in the market culminates in the creation of an MVP which allows you to input focused work into your product concept, letting you test how it fares in the market.

While the above steps give a concise guide to creating your digital product, using services like custom development companies provides several benefits, such as access to better expertise, faster time to market, and flexibility.