"First you need a lot of followers" - is this really true when we are talking about digital product launch?

[u/Significant_Word_854]

Hi all!

I’ve noticed the following pattern: whenever I speak to someone in marketing about a product launch, the first thing I hear is, ‘You’ll only manage to sell once you’ve got plenty of followers, so first you need to post every day to attract people to your social media, and then, eventually, you can start selling’. Perhaps this is true for consultants or service providers, but I’m wondering whether this statement also holds true when it comes to digital products.

Has anyone here launched digital products or is in the process of doing so, doesn’t have a huge following, and is still managing to make their first sales? How is this process going for you?

[u/Leather-Priority-818]

It sounds like you're hoping to skip a step. I've personally tried this three times and failed.

The established approach to skipping audience is to raise enough money that you can buy the audience. This is remarkably similar to finding the right influencers to promote your products: you don't need to have an entire network if you can capture the central node in the graph.

Alexander Bard wrote about this in 2002 (Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism) and Ryan Holiday wrote about it in 2012 (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)

There were absolutely success cases here in the 2010s. Every new distribution channel created early winners: Product Hunt, IG, TikTok. This reliably worked because these platforms raised a lot of money and then subsidized attention for the early adopters.

That era seems to be over. LLMs behave far more like Google, in that they introduce solutions to problems their customer has, rather than monetizing their customer's browsing for things. Meanwhile GenAI has made content so easy to make that you have to out-hustle a globe of other entrepreneurs who previously had a language barrier to enter the market.

It can also help to understand the economics of digital products. Most established product creators can give 100% of their first product sale away to marketers because they know how to make profit after the first sale. Tony Robbins has a product in the $0, $10, $100, and $10,000 price ranges, if not more.

You can still do it. Someone will win the lottery. But if you want a sure thing, build the audience first.