Field guide

Sell your first digital product from a website you own.

Seven steps from "I should sell something" to taking payments. No audience required to start; every step works with tools you can set up in a day.

1. Make something small and finishable

The best first product is the one you can finish in a week: a template, a checklist pack, a Notion/CSV toolkit, a short guide, a set of presets. Scope it so the v1 is embarrassingly small — you can always update it after launch, and buyers of digital products expect exactly that. Done and shipped beats perfect and imaginary.

2. Own the storefront

Marketplaces and no-code platforms are fine places to start, but read the trade: they take a cut of every sale (typically 5–30%), control your customer relationship, and can change the rules under you. Your own website flips it — payment fees only (~3%), the customer email is yours, and nothing can delist you. A one-page site with a clear offer beats a beautiful profile page on someone else's platform.

3. Wire up payments that go straight to you

A Stripe account is free and takes minutes. Create one product with one price, put a checkout button behind it, and your customer pays you directly — no waiting for a marketplace payout cycle. If you sell to EU customers, enable Stripe Tax so the checkout calculates VAT for you (see step 7).

4. Deliver automatically

The moment a purchase needs you to manually email a file, you've built a job, not a store. Deliver instantly and verify the delivery against the payment — buyers get the file the second they pay, and nobody gets it for free. This single decision is what makes a product business compatible with a day job.

5. Launch to thirty people, not "the internet"

You don't need an audience — you need thirty the-right people. Communities where your future buyers already hang out (subreddits, Discord servers, newsletters, LinkedIn groups) all welcome genuine "I made this" posts. Show the problem you solved, link the site, answer every reply. Thirty real visitors who need the thing beat ten thousand drive-by clicks.

6. Offer a guarantee, honor it instantly

A 14-day money-back guarantee removes the last reason not to buy, and almost nobody abuses it. The trust it builds is worth far more than the rare refund. Put it next to the buy button, not buried in a policy page.

7. Mind the boring stuff early

Digital products are tax events. Enable automatic tax calculation at checkout from day one and keep your records clean — it's five minutes now versus an accountant invoice later. If you keep selling, talk to an accountant about registrations.

The shortcut

Everything in steps 2–4 — the storefront, the Stripe checkout, the verified instant delivery, the guarantee page, the legal pages — is exactly what Pagemage ships as a product. You deploy it in about ten minutes, swap in your product's name and price, and you're at step 5 with a storefront that looks like this one.

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