Hey
Eight years ago I was folding burritos for minimum wage.
Five guys in a one bedroom apartment, because that was all any of us could afford. Student debt sitting on my chest every single night. I would come home smelling like a kitchen and stare at the ceiling doing math that never worked out.
Today I run a digital product business that has done over $3 million in sales. Simple PDFs. Sold online, over and over again.
I want to be careful here, because that sentence sounds like every fake guru you have ever scrolled past. So let me tell you the part they never tell you. The part with the failures in it.
I grew up in an immigrant family. My parents worked themselves to the bone so I could go to a good school, and I did. I got in. And that was supposed to be the finish line. Good school, good grades, good job, save a little, retire at 65. The whole script handed to every kid like me.
Then one Sunday at church, a doctor I knew told me with relief in his voice that he had finally paid off his medical school debt that year. He was almost 50. I walked out to the parking lot and watched him climb into a 1998 Toyota that looked one pothole away from falling apart.
I stood there and did the math again.
If one of the most respected, most difficult careers on the planet still meant drowning at 50, what exactly was waiting for me at the end of the safe path?
That was the moment I decided to find another way.
So I tried everything. Drop shipping. An ATM business, where I literally got robbed. A jewelry business run out of my dorm room. Every single one flopped. Some of them lost me money I had borrowed from my own family, which is a special kind of pain you do not forget.
For years I built one thing after another and got nowhere.
And then almost by accident I stumbled into the one model that actually worked. Digital products. In my first year selling a single product, I went from zero to over $500,000 in sales. No inventory. No shipping. No customer service nightmare. I built it once and sold it again and again.
That same model has now crossed $30 million. And the wild part is it has only gotten easier since AI showed up. Things that used to take me weeks now take me an afternoon.
If you have ever quietly wondered whether this could actually work for you, this is the email I wish someone had handed me when I was 21 and exhausted.
Here is the exact stack, and what each one is actually for.
##### **First, two ways to start. Only one of them works.**
The first way is what almost everyone does. You sit down, you think about what you would love to build, your hobby, your passion, and you build it. Then you go hunting for people who might want it.
This is the creation first path. It is also the slowest, most expensive, most likely to fail way to start anything.
The second way is the opposite. You look at the market first. You find a topic where people are already paying, already searching, already buying from somebody. Then you build your version for that audience.
The market tells you what to sell. AI helps you build it faster than anyone else can.
Proven demand beats original ideas every single time. Hold onto that line. It is the whole game.
Step 1: Pick a niche the market already pays for
Do not start with what you love. I will say it again. Do not start with what you love. Start with what people are already buying.
Open Instagram. Open YouTube. Open Etsy or Gumroad. Type a few keywords into the search bar and look at what is actually selling. Productivity. Fitness. Relationships. Money. Mental health. Side hustles. AI tools. Faith. Self development.
These are evergreen niches. The demand never stops.
You do not need to be the world's leading expert. You need to be one step ahead of the person you are selling to. A college freshman can write a study guide for high schoolers. Someone who lost 20 pounds can teach someone who wants to lose the same 20.
Step 2: Find the specific pain inside that niche
This is where most people get stuck. They pick fitness, then try to sell a generic ebook called "How To Get Fit." Nobody buys that. There is no problem in that title.
Nobody wakes up at 11pm on a Tuesday and types "how to get fit" into Google because their life is on fire. They type "how to lose 15 pounds before my wedding in 8 weeks."
That is a specific pain. That is a product that makes money.
So go where the audience already is and read what they say. The comment sections of the biggest videos in your niche. The Reddit threads where they vent. The three star Amazon reviews of the books they already buy, because that is where people tell you exactly what is missing.
The same complaint will surface again and again. That complaint is your product.
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Step 3: Build it with AI in a single afternoon
This part used to take months. It now takes hours.
Open Claude or ChatGPT. Paste in the pain point you found. Tell the AI exactly who the customer is, what the painful problem is, and the specific outcome they want. Then ask it to write a 5 to 10 page guide that solves that problem step by step.
The first draft will not be perfect. That is fine, because you are not publishing the first draft. You are editing it. You are adding your own voice. You are dropping in the one or two original ideas only you have. You are stripping out anything that sounds generic.
Use Canva for the cover. Export a clean PDF for the file. Price it between $27 and $47. Not $9, because too cheap signals low quality.
Not $297 either, because you have no testimonials yet. That middle range is the sweet spot where buyers do not think twice and you still keep a real margin.
Step 4: Drive traffic with content that matches the pain
You do not need to be a content creator. You do not need 100,000 followers. You do not need to learn video editing.
You need short, simple content. 7 second videos on Reels, TikTok, Shorts, that speak directly to the exact pain your product solves.
If your product is about waking up at 5am without feeling destroyed, your content is about waking up at 5am without feeling destroyed. Not "morning routines" in general. The specific pain.
Two things happen when you do this. The algorithm shows your content to the exact people who have that pain. And those people self qualify, so by the time they click the link in your bio, they already know they have the problem and suspect you have the answer.
And you never have to show your face. AI avatars, screen recordings, voiceovers. A friend of mine runs a faceless brand built around an AI monk avatar and makes over $80,000 a month selling simple $50 ebooks. The human behind it has never once shown his face.
The platform does not care who the face is. The customer does not care. The only person who cares about your face is your own ego, and that is a problem for another day.
Step 5: Validate before you build anything
Before you write a single page, validate. There are two ways and you should do both.
The first is the AI listening pass. Pull 50 to 100 comments from the top videos in your niche. Screenshot them, drop them into Claude, and ask it to find the most painful repeated problems.
AI reads hundreds of comments in seconds and hands you back the exact words your audience uses. Those words go straight into your title, your sales page, and your content.
The second is the demand signal rule. Find accounts in your niche with a few thousand followers. Look for posts that pulled at least double the views of the follower count. An account with 5,000 followers and a post with 10,000 views is a demand signal.
The algorithm is rewarding that exact content because the audience clearly wants more. Pull 5 to 10 of those, find what they share, and there is your product.
Do all of this before you write one page. The validation is free. The creation is what costs you. Thirty minutes of reading comments saves you three months building something nobody wants.
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"Wait, is this just copying?"
You are probably thinking it, so let me answer it.
No. When you study the market and build your own version, you are doing what every successful business in history has done. Apple did not invent the smartphone. Netflix did not invent streaming. Tesla did not invent the electric car. They each looked at something the world already wanted and built a better, more specific version.
You are not copying the product. You are modeling the demand and then changing three things.
Your angle, which is who you speak to and the exact problem you solve. There may be a thousand productivity books, but there are not a thousand productivity books for nurses working night shifts. Your packaging, which is the format. A 10 page PDF, a 7 day email course, a workbook with templates. Same information, different container, different buyer.
And your positioning, which is the name, the price, the promise, and the proof. "Productivity tips" and "The 5am Reset For Exhausted Night Shift Nurses" are the same niche and a completely different product at a completely different price.
My final words on this
Everything I just walked you through is simple. Here is the whole thing in one breath.
1. Pick a niche the market already pays for. Not what you love. What people already buy.
2. Find the specific pain inside it. The complaint that shows up again and again.
3. Build the product with AI in an afternoon, then add your own voice on top.
4. Drive traffic with 7 second videos that match the exact pain, faceless if you want.
5. Validate before you build, because the validation is free and the building is not.
Simple does not mean easy. Information without implementation is meaningless. You actually have to read the comments. You have to open Claude and write the prompts. You have to make the videos, even faceless. You have to ship before you feel ready.
The reason most people who read this will do nothing is not that the system fails. It is that they were hoping for a button that drops money into the bank with zero effort. That button does not exist and never will.
Digital products gave me a life I did not believe was possible while I was folding burritos at 21. I paid off a $350,000 mortgage my parents spent 30 years chasing. I take month long trips with my family. I built something that does not require me to trade my hours for a paycheque I resent.
You do not need a degree. You do not need certifications. You do not need a giant audience or your face on camera or anyone's permission.
You need a niche the market already pays for, a product built with AI, content that matches the pain, and the willingness to ship before it feels ready.
That is the whole game.
So the only question that matters is whether you are going to be someone who reads this, or someone who actually executes on it.
Stay curious, talk to you tomorrow.