I'm Daniel. I made $404,473 selling an ebook and a video course on the internet. AMA π
Daniel Vassallo
76 replies
2.5 years ago I decided to quit the rat race and I left my career in big tech to go work for myself, on my own terms. Initially, I was going to focus all my attention on building a SaaS, but I quickly realized I didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket. Fast forward to today, I make and sell educational info products, do some contracting (working quarter-time at Gumroad), run a SaaS business, and at the end of this month, I also plan to get into selling physical products.I made $550K+ in revenue since I started working for myself, with over $400K coming from info products. Ask me anything!
Replies
Jon James@jondotjames
What do you know now, that you wish you'd known before you started?
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Userbase
@jondotjames tl;dr: Don't focus on one project. Do many at the same time.
Long answer:
That there are two very distinct types of "work":
- One where the payoff follows a normal distribution (doctor, programmer, plumber, etc).
- The other where the payoff follows a Pareto distribution (musician, author, startup founder, YouTuber, etc).
If you want to work in the Pareto world, you canβt treat work the same as a normal job. Unlike a normal job, you canβt rely on focus and hard work to increase your odds of success, because the Pareto world is extremely competitive, random, and highly unpredictable.
To make a living with the Pareto world, you must behave like a venture capitalist, a book publisher, or a film studio. You must have a portfolio of enough things such that you can expect a few payoffs to happen regularly. You can't just focus one one product and hope it works. You have to build a portfolio of small safe-to-fail bets.
CookieJar
Which came first the product or the community of followers? When you started selling how many followers did you have?
Userbase
@kensavage The followers. I had about 11,000 followers when I released my first info product.
Wow. Well done. Could you speak to some of the foundational steps you took when you launched your course/book?
SeekWell
How much is your Twitter following worth to you? In other words, if you were starting at 0, how much would you pay to get it back in an instant?
Userbase
@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?
95Travel Kit
Amazing story! What's your biggest advice on selling educational info products? I've seen advice ranging from building out an email list to focus on building out a Twitter audience.
What is yours? Thanks!
Userbase
@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).
Schedulr
Hey Daniel, great to see you here! I'm a happy purchaser of your Twitter course, great stuff!
Userbase
@rickfiyah Thank you Ricky!
Sober October Challenge
Hi Daniel!
1) What habits have you developed that changed your trajectory and why?
2) What habits are you currently working on building/maintaining, if any?
Thanks!
Userbase
@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.
I've been following your journey on Twitter. I've a few questions:
1. When did you start believing this(selling digital products) could be a thing?
2. If you're doing it again with another product, what would you do differently?
3. Is it necessary to use traditional sales techniques(cold emails, calls, etc) apart from using platforms like Twitter?
Userbase
@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.
Social Rebel
Wow that's great news! Have you worked with any partners to make this happen or are you a solo entrepreneur. I'm working within my marketing business solo so I always like to hear how others are successful.
Userbase
@trey_cannon Mostly solo. I created my first info product with a co-author, but the rest have been just me.
Hey Daniel,
How do you measure the impact of your info products? Is that a factor when you do a retro on your product?
Userbase
@pavithra_kodmad I don't have a way to measure precisely, but I can get a good sense by seeing people buying, reviewing, and recommending my products to others.
Notion Monkey
I've been following you for a while on Twitter and IH. Love watching this journey. A few questions:
1. Do you do traditional investing as part of your income strategy?
2. Most of your income seems to have been from info products. How is your SaaS, Userbase doing?
Userbase
@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 :)
Notion Monkey
@dvassallo Thanks, Daniel! One more question if you have time:
Can you elaborate on why you're "bad for the economy"?
Userbase
@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...
Notion Monkey
@dvassallo lol. awesome, thanks!
Great job Daniel! What other projects are on your roadmap aside from the cutting boards that you've mentioned on Twitter/ig?
Userbase
@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 :)
Hello. Congratulations on those big numbers!
Where do those sells come from? Did you already have an audience before making those info products? I think that making those products is the "easy" part, but getting people to know them and buy them is the real challenge. Don't get me wrong when I say easy, but I think there are lots of great info products with very little sells, how did you do that?
Thanks!
Userbase
@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.
Slidepage 1.0
Hey Daniel, congrats with your success.
Do you know any other examples of makers like you?
Userbase
@begovatovd1 Thank you! My friend @searchbound just tweeted a list of people who are doing business 'my way', by building a small portfolio of projects aligned to their personal interests: https://twitter.com/searchbound/...
Awesome, Congratulations bro. Can you give me more details about this journey?
Huge congrats! And thanks for hosting an AMA! What percentage of your sales still come from your Twitter followers?
Userbase
What ways do you suggest for people who do not have a large following to sell info products? Do we have to start with building an audience first?
Userbase
@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.
Branalyzer Brand's Instant Analyzer
Excellent story. Many congratulations. π₯π
I have a question, did you do it all by yourself or did you delegate work to others?
Userbase
@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 :)
Branalyzer Brand's Instant Analyzer
@dvassallo thank for your answer, it will be very helpful. Best wishes!
How do you manage your personal finances?
What do you think about the FIRE movement and did it play a role in you quitting the rat race?
Greetings from Argentina Daniel!
Userbase
@timoteo_ladmann I'm not a fan of FIRE, mainly because of its distinct bimodal approach towards life: the deferring phase, and then the living phase.
First of all, I believe that the discovery of our true preferences is a life-long exercise, and the most reliable way to reveal our preferences is to live them. Almost everyone I know who retired after a grueling career went into retirement unprepared, and their life went downhill fast. The 'Always Be Compounding' attitude during the deferring phase gets in the way of exercising the muscle that leads to discovering what we truly like and dislike.
The other issue is about the hidden risk behind the magic $xM number. I don't think it's easy to convince our subconscious that any number is sufficient (beyond cases of extreme wealth), and our subconscious is likely right to smell a hidden risk β especially when expecting a long retirement. The 'safe 4% withdrawal rule' hasn't been proven safe, and it can never be proven. I'd imagine myself waking up every morning worrying about the stock market and an endless number of things beyond my control to verify that my assumptions are still valid. When it comes to matters of survival, the lizard part of our brain has a tendency to keep us up at night.
For me, active income is the ultimate robustifier and peace of mind enabler. Every day I make $100 from something I did recently confirms to me that I'm still relevant to society. And if my active income declines one day, it forces me to adapt while I'm still exercising my income-generating skills. It's much easier to adapt in this state, rather than 10 years into retirement when I realize I'll need to top up my savings.
There are certainly a few inspiring things from the FIRE movement, such as the questioning of our expectations, awareness of the hedonic treadmill, and thinking hard about what really matters. I think there's lots to gain from reading Mr Money Mustache, et al. However, I'm quite convinced that the better life strategy is one of incremental lifestyle enhancement, where we're simultaneously adding enough optionality for the future, and also arranging our life in the present to best match our preferences.
More specifically, my approach is to save the minimum possible so that I can weather any storm, then spend the excess in the present. I buy insurance for catastrophic risk, and save some money for what I can't insure against. Beyond that, I spend all the excess now. And sometimes, 'spending' simply means working less (leaving money on the table).
Daft Punk Cafe
Hi Daniel, thanks for doing the AMA!
One piece of advice you gave here is to work on multiple products in parallel and I'm wondering, should there be a separate newsletter for each or one personal newsletter where I write about all of them in one place? I thought that the first option is better, since people subscribe to read specific stuff they're interested in, but at the same time there's no "single audience" to market my new projects to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this, thank you!
Userbase
@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.