At the start of the year, my online audience was the sixth-form friends who followed me on Instagram.
My online business endeavours were non-existent and I had little motivation or direction.
Just under two months ago, I launched a digital product that earned $1k in revenue over the launch weekend. It’s called PARAZETTEL.
But this post is not to promote and explain what the product is. If you want to learn about that, read this piece…
This post shares the technical side of building and launching the product — the platforms and services that went into the launch. I’m going to write another piece that details the sales and marketing strategies that went into the launch, so keep an eye out for that shortly.
I’ll explain the process behind building PARAZETTEL, why I made the decisions that I did and how they impacted the launch.
I hope you learn something new; enjoy!
Quickly though — PARAZETTEL is relaunching very soon. If you want updates, you need to sign up for the mailing list. It can be found on the page just below this and once on the list, you’ll receive a discount when we go live…
The first job in building this product was to decide what I was going to sell.
Was it to be a course? A written guide? In the end, I went for a demo vault because it would offer the most immersive experience for the people who wanted to learn the system.
Once I had decided what the product was, I had to choose a service to manage the hosting of the product and delivery to customers when they checked out.
This is where the first service in the stack comes in…
Lemon Squeezy (Free, with a sale fee of 5% + $0.50)
I considered Gumroad and Shopify for this role too but in the end, I went with Lemon Squeezy.
Used by giants in the digital product space, such as Thomas Frank and others, this platform seemed a lot cleaner, tidier and more feature-filled than something similar, like Gumroad.
Using Lemon Squeezy allowed me to set up launch discounts as well as affiliates for the launch. The checkout page was simple and helped convert when it mattered.
Because they take quite a significant cut of sales, I might look to transition from Lemon Squeezy to something more powerful, such as Shopify in the future, but for now, I’m happy where I am.
I link to the checkout page on Lemon Squeezy from the website that I built using the next tool in this stack…
Webflow (£17.80/m)
When looking at platforms for building websites I considered Carrd, as well as Framer. I thought that I wanted a simple tool that would help me make a website from a template that would be very simple to build.
After consulting my friend, who’s the CEO of a website design agency, he recommended Webflow. I opened the website and decided to give it a go and loved it immediately.
The granular controls and pre-built libraries of components were exactly what I needed to build a site from the ground up that was ideal for my product.
The result can be viewed at parazettel.com. I opted for a simple design that would clearly show the benefits of my product. Rather than focusing on fancy animations and coloured elements, I optimised for click-through actions that would sell copies of the product.
I’m quite OCD from a design perspective too, so I didn’t want too many moving parts. This aspect of my character also meant that I wanted a custom domain name, which brings me on to the next service in the stack.
Squarespace Domains/Google Domains (£10/domain/y)
The two domains that I used whilst making this product (fundamentalised.com and parazettel.com) were purchased through two different services. Because Google Domains sold all their domains to Squarespace whilst I was building, fundamentalised.com’s registrar is the former, and parazettel.com the latter.
Both were similar experiences to use. I simply hooked up the store.fundamentalised.com subdomain with my Lemon Squeezy store and parazettel.com with my Webflow site by adding a couple of custom DNS records.
Priced at about £10 per domain per year, this was a cost-effective way to make sure that the product site and brand behind it were displayed professionally. One thing that also helped build a reputation for the product was social proof…
Senja (Free)
I’d heard of testimonial.to before Senja, but I went for the latter when it came to collecting testimonials for the product to display on the Webflow site.
Their studio was fantastic, allowing me to customise the appearance of the testimonial widgets to my liking and then embed them using the generated code snippet placed into an embed block in Webflow’s Designer.
I could also generate images of certain testimonials, to share on social channels, which increased the reach and awareness of the product as well as building more social proof of its efficacy.
But how did I collect testimonials? Through the use of the last tool on this list…
ConvertKit (Free)
ConvertKit is a platform used for email marketing for creators. For use in PARAZETTEL’s launch, I built a landing page which I linked at the bottom of every piece of content that I released whilst I was building the product itself.
When it was almost ready to launch, I sent out an email asking whether anyone wanted to test the almost-finished product. After leaving PARAZETTEL with them for a few days, I asked for testimonials on Senja. I provided an incentive of 50% off of the product if they complied (that’s how important social proof was to me).
ConvertKit was also valuable for stirring up hype around the product launch. I sent emails that delivered discounts, reminded the audience of the time limit on the launch weekend and showed them testimonials and social proof when it was time to sell.
The email list was the greatest catalyst to the success of this product, allowing me to reach an audience and convince them to click through to the website. Once on the website, the page design took charge of the rest of the steps from click-through action to checkout conversion.
This is my breakdown of the tools that I used to launch a 4-figure product in a weekend. I hope you learned something new, and if you want to check out the product that I built because you think you might benefit from a knowledge management system that combines project management and creativity principles, you can check out PARAZETTEL here.