Modern Creator
Maria Wendt · YouTube

6 Things I Did Differently That Took Me to $11M With Digital Products

A digital-product creator says $11 million came from doing almost everything the pricing gurus tell you not to do.

Posted
1 years ago
Duration
Format
Listicle
educational
Views
13.3K
619 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Sticking to one cheap product for a year, mastering it obsessively, and packaging it as premium mattered more to this $11M outcome than going viral or charging what pricing advice usually recommends.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • A creator or coach with an audience who wants to sell a $5-$50 digital product instead of chasing high-ticket sales calls.
  • Someone about to launch a third or fourth product because the first ones underperformed, before mastering how to sell just one.
  • A beginner tempted to price low out of guilt, or price high because 'charge your worth' advice says so.
SKIP IF…
  • You already run a mature, diversified product suite and are optimizing distribution rather than positioning.
  • You sell services or high-ticket coaching, where the one-product, low-price model doesn't map directly.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

The creator made $11M selling digital products by doing the opposite of common advice. She sold one product, solving one hyper-specific problem, to one audience, on one platform, for a full year before diversifying (the 'rule of the five ones'), and priced it far below competitors, reasoning that 100 customers at $5 beats 10 at $50 because repeat buyers compound through upsells and order bumps. She became obsessive about the mechanics of buying behavior, packaged cheap products to look and function like premium ones, tracked and compounded small conversion wins instead of chasing viral growth, and only built products people were already searching for instead of ones that sounded fun to make.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:0000:24

01 · Cold open

$11M claim stated up front; she stayed in her own lane and did things differently.

00:2501:17

02 · The promise + proof of income

Introduces the six unusual things and addresses skepticism about the $11M claim (tax returns, dashboard shown elsewhere).

01:1803:05

03 · Thing 1: Sold one product

The Rule of the Five Ones — one product, one hyper-specific problem, one audience, one platform, one year — credited with reaching 7 figures within 6 months of adopting it.

03:1305:46

04 · Thing 2: Charged way less

Priced below competitors on purpose; 100 buyers at $5 beats 10 at $50 once repeat purchases and order bumps compound; cites $4M/50% margin year.

05:4607:39

05 · Thing 3: Became obsessed

Obsessive research into buyer psychology — clicks, cart adds, impulse buys; credits mastery, not tutorials, for the outcome.

07:3910:21

06 · Thing 4: Products looked and were premium

Professional mockups on cheap PDFs/screen recordings; builds $5,000-caliber products and sells them for $5 on purpose.

10:2111:47

07 · Thing 5: Small wins compounding

Made $63 in year one; stacked first sale, first 10, first 100, analyzing each incremental improvement; AOV ~$100.

11:4713:46

08 · Thing 6: Only sold in-demand products

Built what the audience explicitly asked for, not what sounded fun; most products flop because they solve problems no one is searching for.

13:4613:49

09 · Close

Soft plug for a related video; no in-video sales pitch.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Selling one product for a full year before launching anything else built more revenue than constantly relaunching after each disappointing result.
  • 100 customers paying $5 each can outperform 10 customers paying $50 each once repeat purchases, upsells, and order bumps are counted.
  • The lowest-price tier of a market is often the least competitive, because most sellers chase the mid-to-high range instead.
  • $4M in one year's revenue came at a 50% profit margin from serving the lower-price end of the digital product market that most competitors ignore.
  • Obsessively tracking what makes someone click, add to cart, or impulse-buy compounds into pricing and funnel decisions competitors never bother testing.
  • A $5 product can be built with the same production value as a $5,000 offer — professional mockups and presentation signal quality independent of price.
  • Testimonials calling a product underpriced can be the result of a deliberate strategy: keep quality high while pricing far below what it could command.
  • The first year of the business generated only $63 in revenue before compounding small wins reached $11 million.
  • An average order value around $100 shows an eight-figure business can come from a high volume of modest transactions rather than a few large ones.
  • Most digital products fail not because of weak marketing but because they solve problems nobody is actively searching to have solved.
  • Analyzing why a small win happened — a slightly better conversion rate, a slightly higher price test — and repeating it is how incremental gains compound into millions.
  • 'Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies' describes trading a bigger long-term customer relationship for a smaller immediate sale.
Takeaway

Six unconventional choices, not virality, built an $11M business.

PRODUCT STRATEGY LESSONS

Staying narrow, pricing low, obsessing over mechanics, and packaging cheap products as premium compounds into outsized revenue more reliably than chasing virality or premium pricing.

03Thing 1: Sold one product
  • Selling the same one product for a full year, solving one hyper-specific problem for one audience on one platform, builds more expertise than launching a new offer every time one flops.
  • Constantly relaunching after a disappointing result trades away the time needed to actually improve marketing, sales copy, and traffic — the things that make money.
  • A single, narrow offer run long enough became the base of a seven-figure business within about six months of adopting the approach.
04Thing 2: Charged way less
  • Charging less than competitors while still delivering better quality can outproduce premium pricing, because far more buyers convert at a low price point.
  • 100 customers paying $5 each can outperform 10 customers paying $50 each once repeat purchases, upsells, and order bumps are added back in.
  • The advice to 'charge your worth' ignores supply and demand — a lower price expands the buyer pool enough to make total revenue higher.
  • The low end of a market is often the least competitive, because most sellers chase the mid-to-high range instead.
05Thing 3: Became obsessed
  • Treating buyer psychology as a subject to master — tracking what makes someone click, add to cart, or impulse-buy — compounds into pricing and funnel decisions competitors never test.
  • Mastery, not a handful of tutorial videos, is what actually produces outsized revenue.
  • The obsession has to be sustainable enough to enjoy, or the research and experimentation required won't get maintained long enough to pay off.
06Thing 4: Products looked and were premium
  • A $5 product can be built with the same production value as a $5,000 offer — professional mockups and presentation signal quality independent of price.
  • Buyers only ever see a digital product through its packaging, so investment in presentation is what creates perceived value.
  • Deliberately pricing far below what a product could command, while keeping quality high, generates testimonials and word-of-mouth a fairly-priced version would not.
07Thing 5: Small wins compounding
  • Getting the first sale, then the first 10, then the first 100, and analyzing why each small improvement worked builds a business dollar at a time rather than through one big launch.
  • An average order value around $100 shows an eight-figure business can come from a high volume of modest transactions rather than a few large ones.
  • The first year of the business produced $63 in total revenue — a reminder that the compounding, not the starting point, is what mattered.
08Thing 6: Only sold in-demand products
  • Products should be built around problems people are already urgently trying to solve, not ideas that sound fun or interesting to the creator.
  • Most digital products fail because they solve problems nobody is actively searching to have solved, not because of weak marketing.
  • Listening to what an audience explicitly asks for, even a topic the creator isn't personally excited to teach, can outsell a passion project.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Average order value (AOV)
The average amount of money a customer spends in a single transaction, calculated by dividing total revenue by number of orders.
Order bump
A one-click additional offer presented at checkout that a customer can add to their cart before completing the primary purchase.
Rule of the Five Ones
A positioning constraint: commit to one product, solving one hyper-specific problem, for one target audience, on one platform, for one full year before changing direction.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:47linkher website (tax return proof of income)
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

04:01
I would rather get a 100 people to pay me $5 than 10 people to pay me 50.
tight, contrarian pricing thesis with no setup neededTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
07:10
But the mastery is what created the $11,000,000.
one-line thesis statement, punches hard on its ownIG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
08:27
I make products that I could charge $5,000 for easily, but I sell it for $5.
specific numbers, surprising claimTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
09:41
You create a product that is so good you could be charging 10 to 100 to 1,000 times more for it, and then you don't.
counterintuitive punchline with escalating numbersnewsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
13:17
Most digital products flop because they solve problems no one is actually searching for.
diagnostic one-liner, broadly quotableIG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

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See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

analogy
00:00As I was on my journey making $11,000,000 selling digital products, I very much stayed in my own lane, which naturally led to me doing things very differently than how most people do in attempt to sell digital products.
00:14And it's only now looking up and, like, $11,000,000 later, I realized that it's because I did things differently that I've made such a disproportionate amount of money selling digital products. What I wanna do in this video is walk you through the six unusual things.
00:29So I have notes here. There's six unusual things that I did when selling digital products that most people don't do, and that's what made all the difference.
00:37And I just did it almost, like, accidentally. I didn't mean to do it, but it just, like, by doing that, it's the thing that actually made such a big difference selling digital products.
00:47Um, I share proof of income claims everywhere, so you can go to my website, read my tax returns from last year. I also, in many of my videos here on this channel, will just, like, share my dashboard. Um, so I also am putting links in the description.
00:59So, um, $11,000,000 selling digital products, big income claim. I totally get that. I get the skepticism.
01:04So I try to work with you guys to show you proof because it is going to reset your belief in what's possible, and that's a good thing. That's the goal. So okay.
01:13What did I do differently here? First thing that I did, number one let me make my font a little smaller here. First thing that I did is I sold one product over and over again.
01:25Now you're gonna see me look down a lot. I'm reading my notes. I've got two big pages of notes for you here.
01:31Here's what I want you to know about selling one product. It's called the rule of the five ones.
01:37I have other videos on my channel that really dive into it, but I wanna give it to you right now because this is what allowed me to run a 7 figure business selling digital products. You're selling one product, solving one hyper specific problem.
01:51We'll talk more about that later. Problems. One product, solving one problem.
01:58Oh my gosh. Can I spell? I can make $11,000,000, but I can't spell.
02:03One problem, um, to one target audience on one platform like Instagram, YouTube, or whatever for one year.
02:14When I first heard about this rule of the five ones, it was November 2019, and by May 2020, so less than a year later, I was running a 7 figure business.
02:22The rule of the five ones works. I have a video that dives even deeper into it. It works.
02:28Most people and this is what I want to read pretty much verbatim because I like the way I wrote it down in my notes. Most people constantly try launching new products all the time, especially when the first one doesn't work. Right?
02:37So, oh, my product flopped. My product launch flopped. Better launch a new product.
02:42I didn't do that. I kept getting better and better at marketing, better and better at sales, better and better at generating traffic, getting people to my checkout page.
02:51So I sold the same exact product over and over again. And because I wasn't constantly changing my offer, I had tons of time to improve the things that actually make money. This first unusual thing I did is I sold one product.
03:04Just gonna erase this over here. You guys, I highly recommend you go look at that other video of mine that talks about that, because I think it's gonna really help you.
03:13Second thing that I did is I charged way less. Charged way less than my competitors. I've kind of always been in the, like, lower end of the market, so my digital products are way better and way cheaper.
03:30That is so different than what most people tell you. They tell you to charge your worth, which is completely unhelpful advice and takes absolutely no account of supply and demand and basic business and economic principles.
03:45My digital products are way better, so they get way better results, and I charge significantly less than most people in my industry do.
03:54I would rather you charge $5 and get a 100 people to pay you for a total of $500.
04:02Right? Like, $5 each and a 100 customers doing that instead of sweating and working really hard for one $50 sale. Plus, and this has been my experience as someone that sells literally thousands of products every single month.
04:15This is my experience. Those 100 customers buy from you over and over and over again. So I would rather have an a 100 customers paying me $5 because I'm going to remarket to them over and over and over and over again with cross sales and upsells and order bumps and all that other jazz and make a lot more profit ultimately long term from those 100 customers than getting, um, working hard for 10 people to pay me like, 10 people to each or, yeah, 10 people to each pay me $50 for a total of, like, $50 sales.
04:47Gosh. I could not have said that more confusing. Basically, I would rather get a 100 people to pay me $5 than 10 people to pay me 50.
04:53Because I will make more money fundamentally having 100 customers, and that is what people miss. That is what people do not understand.
05:00The other thing that's different that people do not understand is that when no one's taking care of that demographic, the lower end demographic, right, because people always are trying to go to the mid to high range, no one serves the very that very bottom, but it's super easy to do super well in that space because no one's going after that market.
05:18So if you can figure out how to do it profitably, which I can. Last year alone, I made 4,000,000 selling digital products. I took home 50% of it.
05:25So I made $4,000,000 and took home and paid myself $2,000,000. So it's a very profitable demographic to take care of if you know how to do it.
05:35Sorry. Hit the microphone. If you know how to do it, which is what I this is which is where I come in, because I do know how to do it.
05:41So that's the second thing, I charged way less. That worked out really, really well for me. Third thing is I became obsessed.
05:50You guys have no idea. You think I'm normal? You think I am, like, oh, I I look like an ice girl.
05:57No. I am a freaking nerd. I'm obsessed.
06:00I ran experiments. I asked a million questions. I read hundreds of books.
06:04I tracked so much data. I wanted to understand what makes people buy. I wanted to know what makes them click yes, what makes them add something to the cart, what makes them, you know, click, what makes them impulse buy, what makes them buy six products all at once instead of just one product.
06:23So I understand completely everything that I need to know about my industry.
06:30I am a master at selling digital products. I know there's so many different things I know, whether it's optimal price points, whether it's running ads to them profitably, whether it's collecting emails to then remarket to them, whether it's taking a $24 order and turning it into a $400 order, I became obsessed to insane levels.
06:49And I'm sharing that because most people it's different. Most people are not as obsessed about this as I am. Fortunately, I genuinely enjoy it because I don't think if you enjoyed this, you could get as obsessed as I am because I'm obsessed.
07:03Obsessed. And I I love it. I genuinely love it, and so that helps.
07:08But the mastery is what created the $11,000,000. You can't just watch a few I got started by watching a few YouTube videos.
07:16I certainly continue to watch YouTube videos to learn, but you have to be willing to dive deep and invest time and resources into mastery levels.
07:25If you want the again, if you want, like, a couple $100 a month, couple thousand bucks a month, that's fine. But if you want life changing amounts of money, there has to be some level of obsession. There has to be some level of mastery, um, because it's just not gonna happen if you don't do that.
07:39Fourth thing is okay. My products, this is a this is a big one.
07:45My products, um, looked and essentially, like like, were premium.
07:53They definitely looked premium, and then they really were. Like, even if they're just PDFs, even if they're just screen recordings, I always took the time to create quality mock ups.
08:04I want the offer to feel very valuable, and the thing that people don't realize about digital products is that the only way that you're gonna see the products is with things like mock ups.
08:16And so I put a lot of work into my products. I wrote down, never say I'm only charging $5 so you can just launch a shit product.
08:28I make products that I could charge $5,000 for easily, but I sell it for $5.
08:36And $11,000,000 later, I promise that you will not regret it. I used to sell just so you know, like, my background is in the high ticket coaching world.
08:44I used to sell $72,000 coaching packages over DMs. So I wouldn't even take a sales call.
08:49I would just sell them over the DMs. So I'm really good at selling just in general, um, high or low ticket. Right?
08:55High ticket is, like, anything over $1,000. Low ticket is anything under $1,000. My secret, the thing that I have done differently, is make products that I know I personally could sell for $5,000 or more and sell it for $5 because that's fucking nuts.
09:10Right? And so if that's nuts, then people get my and then, again, you see my testimonials all over the Internet. People say, Marie, you could be charging way more for these.
09:19I can't believe you only charge $24 for this course. I can't believe you let us have this. I can't I paid $10,000 for a coaching program and learned way less than I learned in your $200 course.
09:27That's on purpose. That's a really good business strategy for me. That's not an accident.
09:31I genuinely love helping people. I genuinely love that it gives access to my courses and my information, everything I've learned to more people, but that's a business strategy fundamentally. You create a product that is so good you could be charging 10 to 100 to 1,000 times more for it, and then you don't.
09:47And that is why I've made $11,000,000, and most people are stuck trying to hit, you know, even 7 figures, even their first million dollars. It's because they're so obsessed with getting what they're worth and getting what the product's worth.
09:59They are you know, what is the word? Like, you're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, something like that where you're, like, you're trading your short term sale for the long term massive scalability of a business.
10:11So my products the way my product looked and felt and just were is really important in this, um, like, what I did differently, basically. Okay.
10:21Digital product one zero one, I kept perfecting small wins until it added up to 11,000,000. So I'm just gonna write small wins here.
10:29So I didn't try to go viral overnight. I certainly didn't.
10:33I made $63 in my first year of business, so we had a lot to learn. I didn't try to scale to 6 figures in a month.
10:41Although I will say, my first month that I launched, I was genuinely shocked that I didn't make $20,000 in my first month.
10:49Genuinely shocked. I couldn't believe it. I thought something was wrong because I just had really bad expectations from bad marketers.
10:56I just focused on getting my first digital product sale. And then I tried to get my first 10, and then I tried to get my first 100. And every this is key, guys.
11:03Every time something went slightly better or I had a slightly better conversion rate or I got slightly more money, which is something worked a little better, the nerd in me, the data girl in me analyzed the shit out of it. Why did that do better?
11:16What happened? What why is this working so much better? And then I would rinse and repeat that, and so I just kept stacking my small wins.
11:22I got to $11,000,000.01 dollar at a time. So if you look at my, like, the breakdown of my actual sales, my average order value is right around a $100.
11:33Right? Meaning, like, the average amount of money someone gives me when they, like, they spend is around a $100. I've just built that small win enough to turn that little $100 orders into a $10,000,000, essentially, $10,000,000 business.
11:47Okay. Number six. This is a good one.
11:49This is important one. A lot of you guys need to hear this one. Okay.
11:53How do I turn this into, like, two words? I'm gonna turn it into three words. I only sold in demand products, and I'm gonna say it another way, the way I wrote it down, because this is really important.
12:05I only built products people were already desperate to buy. So I didn't create random products that sounded fun to make. I built offers based on real demand, urgent pain points, urgent pain points, hyper specific problems.
12:21Most of you guys are and again, I'm saying this with love, but most of you guys are launching products that sound interesting to you, that feel fun to make, that look cute, but then you wonder why you don't get sales. A lot of the products that I have made is not necessarily what I even would talk about, but they're products that you guys told me you needed.
12:42So I'll give you an example. I recently launched a copywriting course on how to write, like, copy on your checkout page, how to write copy for your emails, how to write content in your captions, and it's all through the lens of making money. So the name of the course is called, like, words into money, and I'm very good at writing copy.
12:58That is a strength of mine, but I'm not particularly interested in, like, teaching it. It's very hard to teach good copywriting well.
13:06It's a it's a hard one to do. And so I wasn't super interested in making a course on that, but that's what you guys wanted. And so what I wrote down here is that most digital products flop because they solve problems no one is actually searching for.
13:21So really think about the digital products you've been trying to sell, and really answer the question, are people urgently trying to solve this urgently? If the answer is no, that's a really big clue as to why you might not be getting the results you want. Now, if you want some digital product ideas that actually sell, watch this video next.
13:40It's gonna show you exactly how to create digital products and give you a whole bunch of ideas on digital products that actually sell. I'll see you there.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

She made $11 million selling digital products by doing almost everything the standard pricing advice tells you not to do, and this video is the whiteboard walkthrough of exactly which six choices did it.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

00:25list

The 6 Things

  1. Sold one product
  2. Charged way less
  3. Became obsessed
  4. Made products look and be premium
  5. Compounded small wins
  6. Only sold in-demand products

The overarching numbered structure of the video — six specific, unconventional choices credited with the $11M outcome.

Steal forstructuring any 'how I built X' breakdown video
01:34list

The Rule of the Five Ones

  1. One product
  2. One hyper-specific problem
  3. One target audience
  4. One platform
  5. One year

A constraint framework for staying in one narrow lane long enough to master it before diversifying.

Steal forany single-offer launch or niche positioning decision
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
13:46next-video
Now, if you want some digital product ideas that actually sell, watch this video next.

Soft internal cross-promotion only — no live pitch or sales push inside the video itself; the affiliate/product links sit only in the description above the fold.

Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

open
hookopen00:00
promise + proof
promisepromise + proof01:17
thing 1: sold one product
valuething 1: sold one product01:28
thing 2: charged way less
valuething 2: charged way less03:22
thing 3: became obsessed
valuething 3: became obsessed05:47
thing 4: made it premium
valuething 4: made it premium07:51
thing 5: small wins
valuething 5: small wins10:37
thing 6: in-demand products
valuething 6: in-demand products11:49
full framework revealed
valuefull framework revealed12:31
CTA: watch next
ctaCTA: watch next13:46
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

Watch next

More from this channel + related breakdowns.

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June 27th 2024
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