Four products from a folder of old notes

Every person who has worked at a desk for a few years is sitting on a folder like mine. Plans, playbooks, calculators, checklists — things written once for a real problem, used, and then left. Seventeen of them, in my case, spread across a year.

Last night I went through all seventeen and asked one question of each: would a stranger pay for this? Four of them, it turned out, would. This is what separated those four from the other thirteen, and what I had to change before any of them could go on sale.

The test that actually sorts them

A document is a product when it passes three filters at once. Miss any one and you have a nice document.

One: it survives losing you. My notes are full of things that only work because I know the context. A plan that says "chase the usual suppliers first" is worthless to a buyer. A plan that says "send five messages between 9 and 11am, then wait an hour" is not. If the reader would have to ask you a question to use it, it is not finished.

Two: it has a stranger. Not "someone might find this useful" — an actual person you can describe in one sentence. A freelancer who wants to sell websites to local businesses but has never sold anything. That person exists in large numbers and can be reached. Compare it with a finance manager at a mid-sized trading company who wants to defend margin: also a real person, but there are about eleven of them and I know most of their names.

Three: it is a system, not an opinion. The four that passed all contain something mechanical — a template you fill in, a script you send, a calculator that computes, a sequence you follow. The thirteen that failed were mostly thinking: good thinking, but a buyer cannot run it.

By that test, thirteen of my seventeen documents were strategy notes for one specific business — mine. Useful to write, not sellable. That is a normal ratio and it is worth knowing before you start, because the temptation is to package all seventeen.

What had to come out

Everything that passed the test still failed a second one: it was written about real people and a real business. Turning a working document into a product is mostly deletion.

• Every name. Client names, business names, contact names — even in an example. A "sample" prospect that is a real business is not a sample.
• Every real phone number, including my own. The scripts now carry {YOUR_NUMBER}, and the reader fills it once.
• Every currency figure. My prices are set for one city. A buyer in Manchester or Lagos reading "AED 1,800" learns nothing except that this was not written for them. All four products now open with a page that sets their numbers, and every script downstream reads from that page.
• Every claim I could not defend to a buyer's face. The launch plan originally carried a revenue number in its title. It does not any more. What it carries instead is the arithmetic, three scenarios wide, and a sentence saying plainly that nobody can promise you the top one.

That last deletion was the hardest and it is the one I would insist on. A product with a number in the title sells better and refunds harder, and the refund is the smaller cost — the larger one is that you cannot say the sentence out loud to someone's face.

What four looked like at the end

Roughly four hours of work, most of it deleting. None of the four is a new idea. All four already existed as things I use.

The part I keep having to relearn

I did not write any of these documents in order to sell them. That is exactly why they are worth selling — they were built to survive contact with a real problem, which is the one quality you cannot fake while writing a product on purpose.

So the honest advice is not "go write a digital product this weekend." It is: go read your own folder. The work is already done. What is missing is four hours of deletion and the discipline to throw out the thirteen that did not pass.