I Create Digital Products For Creators And Make $600K/Month
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗
My name is Jan and I run the business kreatd, where we help creators (and soon also non-creators) sell digital products. However, it is not a coaching or consulting business.
We partner with creators to create a marketing strategy, the website/funnels, the infrastructure etc. for them and also manage after the launch all their bookkeeping. Like that, creators can keep their focus on uploading new content, while we take care of handling their new business.
We do not charge anything for our services, as we take a small percentage of the sales we get for the creators. This business model (with a few add ons, as you will see later) led us to around $600K/month of revenue.
How did you come up with your business idea?🔗
A few years ago, I started selling physical and digital products online and had great success with it. I was making a living with that.
Then, one day, a friend of mine from Argentina came to visit me. He had at that point almost 2M followers and I told him “hey, if I could sell some kind of digital product with your reach for you, you would be a millionaire by the end of this year”. And then it clicked.
I immediately had the headline in my mind “I make creators become millionaires”. I thought every creator would stop whatever they would do to keep reading, if they saw such a headline.
My business idea was basically to sell digital products for big creators by developing a marketing strategy for them and then also take care of the rest, like building a website, the backend etc. The only thing they had to do was create the digital product, like an online course, ebook, download or whatever (also with my assistance) and I would do the rest.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.🔗
The first thing I did was quickly build a website for my friend to see how much of his reach would transfer to website visits and how many people would convert. It was a very shitty website, as I built it in 2 days, but in the first 2 days he got over 4000 website visitors which converted to $500 in profit - only through affiliate links on his website. So I knew that I was onto something.
After my friend left, I built myself a website offering my services for creators. It cost me around $200 and these were my starting costs. I only built it in case some of the creators I was about to contact wanted to check out my website.
But mainly my strategy to get clients was just reaching out to creators by emails. At that point, I thought that everyone would want to start working with me, as the following was my offer:
- I create a marketing strategy for you
- I build the website for you (and pay the hosting)
- I create the backend (and pay the software)
- I handle your accounting
- I do everything for free for you, but I’ll take a small percentage of the future revenue
For me, that was an irresistible offer. In short, I would do everything for the creators for free and once they start making money because of me, I would take a small %.
However, I didn’t get a single response for my emails. I figured that probably most of the creators didn’t even read my email, as they get so many, and if they did, they probably didn’t care about making more money, as they would already earn quite a lot (I only contacted creators with 100K+ followers).
So after I wasn’t seeing any results, I contacted my friend again to ask if he could recommend me to any of his creator friends. And that’s when all started.
How did you land your first customers?🔗
He told two of his friends, who also had millions of followers, what my services were (still the ones above) and that he knows me and it could be worth it for them to at least have a chat with me. One of them did and I could convince her that she should start selling online recipes (she is a creator in the food niche).
First, she was skeptical, as her content is basically nothing else than showcasing recipes and obviously she didn’t want to sell her free content suddenly for money. But this wasn’t the strategy I had in mind for her.
Most of her most popular videos were about deserts. So my idea was to sell recipes for everything else, but not deserts (of course it was much more thought out, but in short, that was the idea).
So the deserts videos would act as free lead magnets to sell naturally her recipes for a main dish for example (which should be a main dish she has never covered in her videos).
She agreed and I finally got my first client after a few weeks. Now it was time to deliver results! And yeah, I got her pretty good results. We still work together to this day and in total I made her 7 figures in revenue until now. But my first client led me immediately to my next problem:
How have you grown your business?🔗
Even though I got her great results, she didn’t want to be featured as a testimonial on my website, as she thought that if her followers discover that someone else is behind her company, it would harm her reputation (still a very big problem for us up to this date).
And that screwed up my plans quite a bit, as my plan was to reach out to other creators saying “hey, check out XYZ’s website, I made all that, it’s making her $X each month and if you want, I can do that for you too”.
So basically I was again at point 0 with myself as the only testimonial on my website and going back to cold outreach emails.
I tried out different versions of my emails, but I got ignored for weeks and weeks. At that point, I was thinking about running ads, but I just didn’t want to become another “hey I make you rich guy”, so I never started running any ads (up to this date we don’t).
But then one day I got an answer to one of my emails and to make it short, I got my second client. Again, I got great results and this time the creator allowed me to use him as a testimonial and even recommended me to other creators he knew.
And like that I got my third client, then my fourth etc. and I could fill up my website with testimonials - where I actually use myself as a testimonial until this date, as a little easter egg.
After a few months I hired my first freelancer and now we are a team of 6 full time employees (including me) and many different freelancers.
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.🔗
In 2020 when I was still working alone I made around $8M in revenue for my clients, but my profit was below 6 figures, as I had huge monthly software costs and only took a small percentage of the creators revenue (I just had to take the % they offered me to finally get my first clients).
In 2021 I hit 6 figures in profit, as I could get new clients and the old ones were still making me money. I did around $17M in revenue for my clients.
In 2022 it was time for a change. We still had back then huge monthly costs to run our clients' businesses, as we were using around 15 different softwares to effectively market their digital products and also to host them. And since my business is located in Switzerland and salaries here get to $100K+ per year fast, that also didn’t help to improve our profit margins.
So by the end of 2022 we partnered up with a software company, licensed their base product for reselling and let other features we needed develop by them. Like that we could lower our monthly software cost from around $1500-2000 per client to a fraction of it and since we license the software for reselling, we created another income stream, as we can resell it.
That was the birth of onlineshop.ai. I purchased this premium domain for a completely different project, which wasn’t that successful, but I am very glad I did so, as getting great domains is either impossible or very expensive.
We ended 2022 with around $40M in revenue for our clients. As at that point I wasn’t working anymore alone or just with freelancers, I do not want to make any profit ranges public.
Then in 2023 we finally started making more profit, as we reduced our costs, but the big game changer for us was reselling our software (but we capped sign ups to improve it first, before releasing it to the public now in 2024).
We generated around $55M in revenue for our clients and made a slightly higher revenue for ourselves than in 2022, but way more profit.
2024: Currently we make around $600K/month in revenue for our company and around $4-5M/month for our clients, expecting a boost of revenue and profit by the end of the year, as we just released our software to the public and will start soon updating everything on kreatd.com to funnel also non-creators to our software.
What does the future look like?🔗
We definitely want to focus more on selling our software rather than working with more creators, as it’s just a more reliable income stream, which doesn’t rely on other people's content.
With kreatd.com we are going to transition to offering our services (marketing strategies, website development etc.) to the public and not just to creators and still for 100% free. Like that we hope to funnel more people to our software onlineshop.ai.
In the beginning, it will require a lot of manpower until we figure out an efficient system to create hundreds of great websites and custom marketing strategies for free, but if we get hundreds of new clients for our software each month, we add each month at least $10K of recurring revenue, which should add up until end of next year.
Additionally, we are releasing a free Ebook about selling digital products. This serves as a free lead magnet to again funnel people to our software.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗
Mostly I learned from my mistakes and these two were the biggest learnings:
- Trying to sell stuff without proper market research.
- Market research has been the most important thing for me to start a business and also to improve a business.
- Using myself as a “client”.
- I often thought about how I would like to have a product or service XYZ, but in the end my preferences were never important, as I was not my ideal client. Talking to existing or potential clients was the solution for that.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗
Start as long as you feel enthusiastic about an idea, otherwise it will get very hard to even start.
Where can we go to learn more?🔗
As we are releasing a free ebook about selling digital products anyways, you can reach out to [email protected] to get a copy once it’s ready.
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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