@richardfliu You have to find a way to make people know about you. Most people will be buying your product because it's you behind it. *You* are part of the product. Now, how do you make people know about you? It's all about going where people already hang out, and helping them. Build a name for yourself in communities where there's already thousands of people online every day. Answer everything you can for free. Then, once you start feeling you can't keep up with the questions, it's time to consider packaging everything you know into an info product. This approach solves two problems: What to make the info product about, and who to promote it to. Of course, I'm sure there are many other ways, but this is the one that worked for me (and for many others).

@sanjrng 1. When I made my first $1,000 a few hours after I released my first product, I knew this was a viable income stream for me. I had no idea what the full upside was, but I had a strong gut feel that this was something I could continue doing for a living. 2. Nothing major. I made few promotion efforts that were too ambitious, that I shouldn't have attempted. For example, once I promised to review everyone's Twitter account if they bought my Twitter course, but I received so many requests at once that I didn't manage to keep up. 3. I don't think it's necessary because I didn't do any of that. But I'm sure it depends a lot on the product.

@hugh_dawkins Almost all my sales came organically from my Twitter account, simply by announcing them. For example, this single tweet directly made over $12,000 in the first 24 hours: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/st... ... Then I kept the momentum up by mentioning my product occasionally. After a month or two, almost all sales start coming from word of mouth (people recommending my products on their workplace's slack, private discords, on podcasts, etc). For new products, I'm also able to email my existing customers, which helps a bit as well. I have an email list of 19,000 customers now. But I still think Twitter is my best way to reach people.

@mike_seekwell A lot. I attribute almost all my income to it. Let's say that if you offered me $500K to shut it down, I wouldn't take it.

@mike_seekwell @dvassallo Heaps of Twitter followers. Some are afraid to rely on social media with the changing algorithms and much rather have a emailing list under their control. Any views?

@youreka I like to practice 'intensity over consistency'. (which imo, is much more in harmony with our nature.) So, I don't context switch frequently. I go all-in on something for a short while (a few days; maybe a couple of weeks) and then I rest. Then, the next thing I pick up can be something very different from the last. When people ask my about what my typical day looks like I never have a good answer because I don't have a typical day :)

@kyleighsmith I'm not a fan of creating habits. I mainly look for intrinsic motivation, and then the good habits follow automatically. Maybe creating good habits is useful for things like keeping my tax paperwork organized, and so on, but for creative endeavors, I never had a problem with bad habits. If I want something badly enough, the good habits emerge on their own. Maybe one "habit" that's been helpful to me is to keep plenty of idle time. It's hard to recognize good opportunities when all your time is tied up in busywork.

@levinunnink 1. I don't anymore. I did a lot of investing in 2010-2019 (and made some good money from the tech bull market), but now I find investing extremely boring. In an effort to simplify my life, I closed all investment positions over the last year or so. There's already a lot of randomness in my life, and I don't want to also be worrying about the stock market. It's been a long time since I looked at the Stocks app, and it's very liberating! 2. Userbase is still there, but it's only like 2% of my income. It's only doing about $400 MRR, which is way below what I hoped. It's certainly a failed bet from a financial perspective, but that's easier said in hindsight :)

@dvassallo Thanks, Daniel! One more question if you have time: Can you elaborate on why you're "bad for the economy"?

@levinunnink Haha, it's a bit of an inside joke on my Twitter, because many people claim that I've inspired them to quit their high-paying tech jobs to work for themselves on something that better matches their preferred lifestyle. Origin: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/st...

@vdemedes I think it's good to have a separate personal email list from a product-specific one. You can be more aggressive with product updates on the product-specific list since you know people signed up for that. On the personal email list you have to be more careful to make sure you're giving something to your audience with every email, and not just promoting your products.

@vijaykrishna_ravichandran I would highly recommend building an audience, but it's not the only way to do it. What's important is that you have a strategy: How will you get people to the top of the funnel? Is it going to be via paid ads, search engine results, content marketing, podcast mentions, word of mouth, etc. How can you get, say, 250 people to see your product page every day? What you choose depends a lot on your product, strengths, budget, spare time, etc.

@trey_cannon Mostly solo. I created my first info product with a co-author, but the rest have been just me.

@daria_kalinovskaya I only had some success from reddit ads, and it was only temporary. I made $17K from an $11K spent on reddit ads when promoting my AWS book. I briefly tried other ad platforms but had no luck and I gave up quickly. I think there's more potential in ads if I had the time to experiment, but so far I've preferred spending my energy elsewhere.

@alexis_llontop Thank you! I made my first info product (the ebook about AWS) with a co-author, so we split the work (and earnings) 50/50. The other info products have been just myself. For my SaaS product, I hired a part-time employee for a while, mostly because I was extremely impatient to get it done :)

@cristian_cisa1 Thank you! And I agree that marketing is the biggest challenge. I attribute almost all my revenue to having an audience on Twitter. I had about 11,000 Twitter followers when I released my first product (the ebook on AWS) on December 2019. That product made about $40,000 in sales in 2 weeks, and over $125,000 lifetime. I've seen many successful info product creators who had no social media audience and simply used SEO, paid ads, content marketing, their personal network, and other techniques. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with those, but it's a viable option for the right product.

@nickvitucci That's the only concrete thing on the roadmap. I hope to start selling those next week or the week after. Longer time, I' thinking of creating another course, focused on 'fending for yourself'. Still very nebulous, but I think I have a good content plan. We'll see :)