Chapter 19 Further Reading: Digital Products: Courses, Templates, and Info Products

1. "Course Correct" by Ama Karikari-Yawson (2023, self-published)

A clear-eyed examination of the online course industry from someone who built, sold, and then dramatically revised her course business. Karikari-Yawson writes specifically about the equity issues in the "anyone can build a course" narrative — who has the resources to produce quality courses, whose expertise the market tends to reward, and how the refund-request dynamics in course businesses often reveal misaligned expectations rather than product failure. Honest about failure in ways that most course creator guides are not. Available directly through her website.

2. "The $100 Startup" by Chris Guillebeau (2012, Crown Business)

Despite its age, this book contains the clearest thinking available on the "expertise into product" model — how to identify what you know that others would pay to learn, and how to build the simplest possible version of that product. Guillebeau's case studies of sub-$100 product launches are particularly valuable as a counterweight to the "you need a six-figure launch" narrative. The digital product landscape has changed significantly since 2012, but the core insight — that domain expertise plus a small audience is sufficient to build a profitable product — is more relevant than ever.

3. Ali Abdaal's "How I Earn $X From My Online Courses" Video Series (YouTube)

Abdaal has published multiple detailed breakdowns of his course business economics on YouTube. Search his channel for "how I make money," "passive income report," and "Part-Time YouTuber Academy" for the most detailed public data available on a large-scale creator course business. His willingness to share real numbers — including mistakes and underperforming products — makes this more educational than most industry reports. Treat these as case study material, not instruction manuals.

4. "Gumroad Discover" — discover.gumroad.com

Gumroad's discovery marketplace is one of the best research tools available for understanding the digital product landscape. You can browse by category, filter by price, and see (in some cases) download numbers and reviews. Spend an hour browsing the categories adjacent to your niche and you will come away with a clear picture of what price points are working, what product types are saturated, and where there are gaps in the market. Invaluable for competitive product research before building anything.

5. "Building a StoryBrand" by Donald Miller (2017, HarperCollins Leadership)

Miller's framework for business communication — positioning the customer as the hero of the story, not the company — is directly applicable to digital product sales pages and launch sequences. The framework helps creators articulate: who the buyer is, what their problem is, how your product helps, and what success looks like. The resulting clarity dramatically improves sales page conversion rates. Not a course creation book specifically, but one of the most effective tools for improving how you talk about your products.

6. "Teach Online" Research Reports — Class Central (classcentral.com)

Class Central is the leading aggregator for online course reviews and data. Their annual research reports on the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) industry include data on completion rates, pricing, student demographics, and platform performance. The completion rate data is particularly sobering — average completion rates for self-paced online courses run 5–15%, which has significant implications for how you design and market your course. Their analysis of cohort-based courses vs. self-paced is worth reading before making that architectural decision.

7. "The Embedded Entrepreneur" by Arvid Kahl (2021, self-published)

Kahl's framework for finding business ideas by embedding yourself in communities and identifying problems worth solving is directly applicable to the digital product discovery process. His approach — observe a community, find recurring problems, validate that people are actively paying to solve those problems, then build the solution — is the systematic version of what Marcus did informally when he interviewed his YouTube audience. Kahl writes from a software perspective but explicitly extends his thinking to info products and education.

8. ConvertKit's Creator Economy Report (Annual)

ConvertKit, the email marketing platform built for creators, publishes an annual report on creator earnings, product types, audience sizes, and income diversity. The report includes specific data on the correlation between audience size and digital product revenue (which is weaker than most people assume — a small, engaged audience often outperforms a large, passive one for product sales), the distribution of creator income across revenue streams, and benchmarks for email conversion rates to product sales. Free to download on ConvertKit's website.

9. "Launch" by Jeff Walker (2014/2021, Hay House)

Walker's Product Launch Formula is the origin of the modern digital product launch sequence — the pre-launch seeding, waitlist, early-bird, launch window, and close structure that is now standard practice. The book is partly self-promotional but the framework is genuinely useful and well-documented with case studies. The 2021 updated edition adds material on email marketing and video content that makes the original PLF framework more applicable to social media-native creators. Read it for the framework; apply it with appropriate skepticism about the very large launch numbers Walker highlights.

10. "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford (2019, Ambient Press)

Dunford's book on product positioning is one of the clearest thinkers on how to situate a product in the market so buyers immediately understand who it is for and why it is better than alternatives. Her "positioning canvas" — which maps competitive alternatives, differentiated value, target market segment, best-fit customers, and market category — is directly applicable to digital product sales pages. A creator who can answer all five canvas questions clearly for their product will have dramatically stronger marketing than one who does not.

11. "The Minimalist Course Creator" — Delia Monk's Substack

Monk writes specifically about building course businesses without the overhead, the massive team, or the $50,000 launch budget that characterizes large-scale course operators like Abdaal. Her audience is solo creators who want to build a $30,000–$100,000/year course business with low overhead and high margins. She covers the free-tools stack, minimum viable course structures, and the math of small launches that still generate meaningful income. Particularly relevant for the equity discussion in this chapter — her framework explicitly designs for creators without startup capital.

12. Kajabi's "Creator Playbook" — available at kajabi.com/resources

Kajabi publishes extensive creator education resources on their platform, including data on what types of courses, memberships, and digital products perform best on their platform. The "Creator Playbook" series includes specific guidance on course design, pricing, launch sequences, and evergreen funnels, with data drawn from their creator base. The data is skewed toward Kajabi's typically more established, higher-revenue creator segment, but the benchmarks for conversion rates, pricing, and launch performance are useful reference points even if you do not use Kajabi as your platform.