This Part is one of the most important in your digital product journey.

Many make the mistake of launching a single product and leaving it at that.

If it works: happy days, until momentum dies down and sales peeter out.

If it didn’t work: “digital products are rubbish, I’m never doing that again”.

Both bad.

Instead we want to keep launching potential products and doubling down on those that work.

By doing so we start to grow our knowledge, customer base and profitability of each launch.

1. Width vs. Depth

There are two basic ways we can scale our product offerings.

First we can scale vertically for depth. This is taking our existing products and adding more depth.

We’ve been building up to this by designing tiered products. We can add scale by filling out our tiers.

The price of the product bundle goes up with each tier - allowing us to generate a higher average revenue per sale.

The second way to scale is horizontally for width. This is basically adding more products.

Specifically it’s adding more tier 1 products, rapidly, to see which ones resonate with the audience.

We did audience research early on but product launches will always be a bit unknown. We don't truly know how the audience will react until we launch. They might say they are ready to buy but until people get their credit cards out we don’t know!

Because of this I’ve designed the product launch process so that you can rapidly deploy lots of tier 1 products. In earlier Parts we generated lots of ideas - very likely you had a few that were interesting. Horizontal scaling is building and releasing these products.

We’ll now cover both methods.

2. Horizontal scaling for width

This method is releasing more products.

The process here is simple. Just go back to Part 1 of this guide and work through the steps again.

The good news is that this process gets easier and easier each time you did it. First time is always the hardest.

You’ll also have some additional benefits:

• You have reviews of your first product. Leverage these in your product description in a “what people said about my other products” section.

• We have customers who purchased already. These people will be likely to purchase your second product if it’s the same niche and not too much of an overlap with the first. Set up a Gumroad post to announce the new product to make sure all existing customers know.

The goal here is basically to continue to launch products until you find one that hits.

What’s a hit?

How many sales this is depends on your niche - some niches are just higher volume than others. So I can’t give you a number like 10, 100 or 1000 sales here.

Instead it’s when people start to share your product link around themselves and sales begin to snowball. It’s when it doesn’t feel like you are bleeding and sweating for every last sale. People are raving about it. You know that you’ve created something valuable for the audience.

Once we have a first sale that clicks we can double down and focus on depth by fleshing out the tiers of that successful product.

We should not stop with horizontal scaling though - continue to release new tier 1 products on a sustainable schedule to keep bringing in new customers and maintain momentum.

3. Vertical scaling for depth

Vertical scaling is expanding from tier 1 to tier 2 to tier 3 and even beyond.

We already designed a 3 tier version of each product. So we know the rough pathway to follow.

We know complete the remaining steps to complete the components of the tier.

Generally these components will come in other formats - like video. I’ll talk about this shortly.

Remember that the product is still solving the same problems as before.

A lot of the material in further tiers may seem redundant. For example we might have:

• a one pager cheatsheet

• a checklist

• a flowchart

• a Notion guide

• an eBook

• an audiobook

• a video course

• a piece of software

All focusing on helping people to integrate AI for low cost in their business. All will hit basically the same points, using similar frameworks and systems, just in different formats.

Does this make it less valuable?

Not at all. Because:

• People don’t act immediately - if they did we could give them a single sentence on a big problem like losing weight (eat less, only nutritious food, move around more) and they’d go ahead and do it. Humans don’t work like that - we need more handholding.

• People learn differently. We all have different preferred formats. Mine is reading. For others it’ll be video. For yet others audio. Converting our product into different formats lets us hit different customers

• Multi-format information. Having the product in multiple formats lets customer to access the value in multiple ways.

If in doubt always just think about what will best solve your customers’ problems. That’s the keystone here. They are at A and want to get to B. How do you help them do this?

4. Producing components in different formats

The above is all well and good but how do you actually go about, for example, creating a video series to add to your course?

Or an infographic? Or a piece of software? Or a chatbot?

Each of these different product outputs could be its own Prompt Playbook. In fact I have produced already!

Regardless of the format the process is basically the same.

First use the same steps to produce the structure and outline of the component. This is the same for eBooks, video courses and even software (GPT-4 can write code for you).

Second you have a choice:

• Upskill and create the product yourself. Look for one of my Prompt Playbooks or come ask in the community for signposting.

• Outsource the work on Upwork or a similar site.

If you want to continue your learning I’d recommend the first.

If you want to quickly develop and deploy I’d recommend the second.

As a general rule (unless you have the skills) I’d recommend outsourcing coding work as well as high end design work.

And the second is now possible because we are only scaling vertically once money is coming in from the first sale. We reinvest that cash into developing tier 2 and beyond.

5. Premium Prompt - Adding a Service Bolt-on

This Prompt Playbook has specifically been about Products rather than Services.

However, as you add tiers you might want to throw a service offering into the mix.

Services allow you to increase the price dramatically and work well in tier 3 and beyond. These customers have proven to be interested in your value as well as willing to spend to obtain it.

Use this prompt to generate service ideas:

Act as an expert business strategies and product designer

Refer to the Tier 1 2 and 3 products

Design 10 potential add on services I could offer. Write descriptions, hours required and use my hourly rate of [rate]. Price at total time * hourly rate * 5x profit margin

Provide all 10 services in a table

Use this prompt under the Tiers you generated back in Part 1 of this Playbook. This will use the previous tiers to construct service ideas.

Put in your hourly rate to run cost calculations. In the example below I used $100/hour.

Prompt Output