The 10-Hour Product: 4 Simple, Proven Ways to Monetize Your Content

Stop overthinking, make your first online dollar, transform your mindset.

Welcome to a paid-subscriber-only edition of The Unstoppable Creator. To get all the other mini-books, click here.

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I launched my first website in 2014. It was a photography blog.

In the beginning, I focused on creating as many tutorials as possible, posting two tutorials every week.

I started using Amazon affiliate links, but I didn’t expect immediate sales. My content was evergreen, so I hoped revenue would build up over time, as it climbed Google rankings.

A couple months after launching the blog, I remembered about the affiliate program. “Let’s check the analytics for the first time”, I thought.

I opened the Amazon Affiliates Dashboard and I still remember the shock. There it was: a little over a dollar in commissions, for my first online sale.

Even now, remembering it still moves me. The magnitude of my reaction feels excessive compared to the amount I earned. But this isn’t the point.

That event marks a turning point in my life:

• Before, money could only come from a salary controlled by someone else.

• After, I had control over my earnings, and they could come while I slept.

I do my best to avoid the hype in my writing. But my first online dollar was life-changing.

Our minds are strange. We can have the most solid and abundant evidence something is possible. But until we experience it, we can’t totally believe it.

Your first online dollar will make your mind believe that it’s possible to earn money from your content. It will provide ammunition against insecurity, indecision and self-doubt.

That’s why I think it’s important to start monetizing as soon as possible.

But perfectionism is always lurking. And it gets stronger when you think about products. The stakes are higher, so you must be even more careful, right?

That was my thinking. And it made me waste so much time. I spent weeks painstakingly outlining, recording, and editing my first video course. My most recent one instead took about 20 hours.

In this mini-book, I’ll show you four proven ways to quickly start monetizing your content. They’ll make you more confident and speed up your growth as a content solopreneur.

The benefits of monetization

As I already told you, starting to monetize shifts your worldview. But that’s not the only benefit. So, let me convince you it’s important to do it as soon as possible.

Better feedback

Money isn’t everything. But it’s true that people “vote with their wallet”.

Think about yourself. Which decision takes you longer: whether to like, share, or comment on an article or whether to buy an ebook, even a cheap one?

The reactions of your audience to your products (or its absence) gives you more valuable evidence to develop your paid offer and also your content.

Freedom from platforms

Too many creators become prisoners of their platforms. They rely both on their algorithms to build their audience and on their payment systems for their income.

Both can change suddenly, and disrupt your journey. Like when Medium, changed its payments formula and a writer I knew lost 80% of his income overnight.

If you have an email list and products or services to sell, you disconnect your earnings from the platform. Your products can even become an acquisition channel. If they're good, people talk about them. And word of mouth is immune to algorithms.

1000 true fans

When your earnings per subscriber increase, you realize you don't need a massive following to make a living from your content. You can limit the time spent on promotion and live the lifestyle you want, without a team or complicated operations.

How long do you REALLY need to create a product?

Ten hours. And yes, it sounded impossible to me, too.

I know why everyone falls prey to perfectionism when building a product, because I’ve been through it. Multiple times.

My first product used the first method in this mini-book, so it was quickly ready. But my second product… definitely a step back. A leap back, I could say.

It was a video course about a post-production software for photographers called Lightroom. I spent dozens of hours finding the right setup, recording videos, re-recording them, cutting out silences and "ums", and adding fancy graphics. The video course did well - it sold for years and made thousands of euros.

But I spent hours every day for weeks to complete it. My most recent course took me 20 hours from zero to launch. And it’s two and a half hours of videos.

I've always been extremely afraid of other people's judgment. Publishing was scary. But in the end, I was helping people for free. The only “cost” on their side was time. With a product, I was asking them to spend money.

I thought my product needed to be invulnerable to criticism, which meant doing a lot of extra work. But I was stupid.

First, because there was a refund option. Which less than 1% of buyers ever used, by the way. Second, because you can never know in advance exactly what other people will think. Our lives and experiences are too different.

The gap between a course creator and his audience is huge. You know a lot more about the topic than your audience, and you live the creation process day by day. You know how the sausage is made, but your customers won’t see the behind the scenes. They’ll be focused on absorbing the lessons, while completely ignoring your glaring mistakes.

On the contrary, I learned that customers even appreciate some imperfections. They make you more human. This is becoming even truer in the age of AI.

Stealing from the lean startup playbook

If you don't let go of perfectionism, you risk spending weeks or months creating the smallest product. If it doesn't sell well, that time is wasted. It's better to find a small problem, create a useful and possibly original solution, and explain it clearly.

Don't overthink your writing or over-polish your audio and video. The sooner your product reaches your audience, the sooner you get feedback. This enables you to improve the product and finally get closer to your ideal of perfection.

By the way, if getting rid of perfectionism feels too hard, there's a simple trick: sell your product for a very low initial price. You'll feel less guilty and make more sales, which leads to more feedback and faster improvement.

That’s how many tech companies have been reasoning for two decades. They started very small. Their first product was an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product.

An MVP is "the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”. Source

In human language, it’s the product with the minimum amount of features a customer would pay for or would use regularly.

It's the safest and quickest way to validate an idea. You launch it after a few days of work, instead of locking yourself away working on a product for months, just to find your users don't like 99% of what you created.

This approach is perfect for creators. (I would argue it's perfect for most new things, period.)

There are many examples of creators who started very small, tested their ideas, then built large audiences and successful businesses. Take Nathan Barry:

• He created an ebook about iOS apps design in three weekends.

• Launched it at $39.

• Made $12,000 in its first month.

• Once the idea was validated, he kept updating and expanding it.

This is an exception. Most MVPs won't have this kind of success. Nathan had a large audience when he launched his ebook, and the topic was particularly hot.

But you don't need twelve thousand dollars in a month to validate an idea. You just need to get going and collect feedback. The motivation, confidence, and data you’ll get will start a flywheel that will keep pushing you on.

All the ideas in this ebook can be MVPs, and they can also be expanded into large products later. Here’s the overview of the process:

• find a small and common problem for your audience,

• find a product that can solve that problem and you can create in 10-20 hours,

• launch,

• gather data,

• decide whether the next step will be to improve the product, improve the marketing or launch a new product or service.

Method one: repackaging existing content