Selling digital products: How Chris Nguyen doubled his revenue in 6 months (Bonus)

Chris Nguyen: I would rather do a pre-sale than a wait list. People are more invested and you can give a huge discount versus like, oh, you can get something later versus get it now and we'll just send it to you later. So we did that with Job Sprint and yeah, we converted five people within the space of a couple of weeks versus the wait list never converted. 

Lex Roman: Welcome back to the Low Energy Leads Show. I know I said that we were done with our Selling Digital Products series, but today I have a bonus episode to you that I think you're really going to want to hear.

Last Friday I interviewed Chris Nguyen. Chris is the founder of UX Playbook. UX Playbook is a suite of products for UX designers that are leveling up in their career and what Chris had to share about his different revenue streams, the percentages of how he's making that money, and specifically what's worked and what hasn't when it comes to selling digital products. I found our conversation really motivating.

Chris has created this business and built this audience in just two years, and in the last six months he's doubled his revenue.

Unlike me, Chris primarily makes his money selling digital products. So the questions we've been wrestling with in this series of how big does your audience size need to be? At what point does it make sense for you to sell digital products? Chris answers these questions, let's get into it. I'm Lex Roman, I help creatives make marketing bets they can win, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show. 

Lex: As we get into this episode, I just want to share with you what you can expect. We're going to start by talking about what UX Playbook is, what is this company that Chris has created? We'll get into his audience and how he's built that out because that's been a central question throughout this series. What size audience do you need to sell digital products? Then Chris will break down his revenue streams for us.

He'll share where he's making money and how that's shifted over the last six to nine months. And then lastly, we'll get into what worked and what hasn't, and Chris has some really detailed insights here that I know you're going to want to hear. Let's start first with what UX Playbook is. What does this company and why did Chris start it? 

Chris: UX Playbook was an experiment when I quit my job in 2020 and organically it kind of grew on its own and in 2022 I was like, okay, well I'm going to work on this and put more time into that. So that's when the social media stuff happened. But really UX Playbook is my attempt to fix the broken UX education because it's confusing to get started. There's no real world preparation and it's all focused on skills versus career and growth. And we do this through playbooks, courses, coaching, and really to help designers navigate this fuzziness and turn it into focus. So that's really what I'm trying to do with UX Playbook and again, playbooks, courses and coaching, those are the three things that we offer and we try to basically encapsulate the whole career from building a portfolio, finding a job to design leadership. So this is my take on that space. 

Lex: Chris is a serial founder and if you go to his LinkedIn you'll see titles like Mentor Entrepreneur in residence. So he's been at this a long time and you'll notice throughout his insights that his entrepreneurial spirit shines through. He has tested so many different things and that's what makes him an exciting person to listen to in the space of digital products. Now, Chris has a pretty sizable audience now, but he didn't start that way two years ago. This has been a question on our minds throughout this series, what's the minimum audience size you need to sell digital products? So I asked Chris where he started two years ago with his different marketing channels. Here's what he said. 

Chris: So I had 3000 on LinkedIn and before this recording we're speaking about it. Before, I wasn't really active on LinkedIn, it was just me adding people in my local area that are UX designers. Basically it's just me spamming folks, not really strategically doing it. So from 3000 just on LinkedIn, so I think we have 53,000 across the channels, if you will. So LinkedIn being our top, I think we are nearly 38. Twitter, we're about 5,000 on a newsletter, about 6,000 and then some other platforms, we tried that, we've got a thousand, but it's not anything to write home about YouTube and TikTok and ig. We just like we posted for three months every single day and it just grew to a thousand. We're just like, this sucks. And it wasn't proving a positive ROI, right? Had an editor had all of this stuff and it was just like, eh, it was a fun experiment. 

Lex: LinkedIn has been a real standout channel for Chris. You'll notice that he's got over 30,000 followers on there and especially given the growth that he's seen in the last two years coming from three K to 30 k, I asked him why did he think LinkedIn worked the best? 

Chris: Trying to figure out the LinkedIn game, learning the rules, and I think one of the biggest things for us is just be really active on it with all the, I think it kind of rewards you. Not only you get to meet really cool people like you, Lex, I get to say hey, but I think the platform just rewards activity and so I can't remember who said this, but if you post once a day, your followers might see your post, right? That's it. Maximum of one time a day. But if you comment on as many things, they might see you 60 times a day. So it's just the law of numbers. That's why I spend at least two hours a day on LinkedIn. I don't really want to because that's two hours of me not doing something else, which is, but it's like, yeah, I think I want to get it to a point where I can just be like, okay, I don't need to go on LinkedIn. I can go five minutes a day. That would probably be the point or do more lives like this, but it's fun. Now I just try to make a game of it and troll some people. 

Lex: Now that you have some background on Chris on UX Playbook and on how he's built up this audience, let's move into talking about his revenue streams. If you're not on the Low Energy Leads newsletter, you're going to want to get on there because Chris put together this really beautiful Canva board with his revenue breakdown over the last three quarters and what he's tried, what's worked and what hasn't. So you can see that all visually. I'm going to do my best to walk you through it and Chris also speaks to it throughout the episode. So Chris has five revenue streams, digital products, services, sponsorships, affiliate income and live cohort. 

Chris: Digital product is by far, I think the most in terms of split of revenue. Then we have services, things like portfolio critiques, coaching. Then a new one that we introduced relatively recently actually in Q4 last year is sponsorship. As you create content, folks want to use you as a marketing channel. So sponsorship is a new one. Then we have affiliates. This is not affiliates of mine or UX Playbook, it's actually affiliates of other products. So me trying to sell other products, this has not worked. This is such a low percentage, it's not even worth doing. It's under a percent of our revenue. So might as well just kick that off. And then there's a live cohort, which was another experiment. It's like, can we do it? Is it fun? But that was a revenue stream in Q3, but it's no longer and I'm sunsetting that, but turning it into a digital product because that's where most of our revenue is coming from. 

Lex: Chris walks us through this piece by piece. Here's what he has to say about the revenue picture over the last nine months. 

Chris: Yeah, Q3 is when I decided to launch the cohort that I did, it was a relatively small cohort, it was like six people. So you can see it took up 22% of the revenue because it was in the thousands of dollars. So that kind of made sense. Sponsorship, we basically got one of our first times we got sponsorships. So that's a tiny, tiny percentage of the pie services was also not significant I would say. But digital products accounted more than like 67% of what we did. So Q3 was 11,000 ish dollars and then Q4 we grew 78% to nearly $20,000, 76%. That was digital products. This is also awesome because it's at that time of the year when people are really trigger happy with Black Friday and we can talk that later, but a lot of that revenue, actually 50% of that revenue came from November 20 grand in Q4, 10 grand came from November, which is crazy. 

And that also coincided with sponsorship I think in November. That's when all the sponsorships were majority majority coming from. So we grew that because people knew that trigger happy shoppers. So that's why sponsors were also interesting and then our service didn't really grow, actually it decreased in terms of revenue.

Then move on to Q1. What we have seen that's grown and we're on about 20 5K now, which is a 23% growth. Obviously we haven't finished, we still have two weeks left, so fingers crossed we hit 30. But yeah, sponsorship has grown so much and this is evident of me actually putting more effort into sponsorship and reaching out to folks. But also as you get more sponsors, of course you have case studies of previous sponsors you work with, so you're just more credible in that sense. So this is why I think it has grown services is also ramped up to about 15%. 

Oh, sorry, it's 17% and digital products only accounted for 50% of this. So I guess diversifying the revenue stream just a little bit more. So we are not just stuck on my digital products because my digital products are a one-time purchase. It's not recurring revenue, so I always have to bring people into the door.

But if we, and just look at the revenue over the last three quarters split into a pie. So in top place is digital products with about 63% of the revenue split sponsorship with 22% ish, and then third place is services around 10%, and then the others you can kind of disregard not that significant in my opinion. So 

Lex: There's this sentiment in online business that diversification of revenue streams is inherently good. This idea that we have multiple sources of income makes us more resilient business owners, and I think that on one level that can be true because the more games you know how to play, the more resilient you are to changing economic forces, to changing industry conditions.

At the same time, it can be a lot of plates to spin and if one of those revenue streams is very, very small, it might not even be worth the effort to keep that revenue stream going. So I think diversification of revenue streams generally good, but when it actually comes into practice, it can be okay to say, I'm making a little bit of money from this, but it's not enough to warrant the effort that I'm putting in. That's sort of the question we've been asking when it comes to selling digital products. So I asked Chris, what does he actually want this revenue picture to look like? 

Chris: Probably majority digital products, I think that would be better and sell less services. My time sponsorship would be cool, but yet again, it's like having a client. You're providing a service to a client. So ideally I would say digital products 

Lex: At this point, Chris has many different things that he's offering. We talked about all those different revenue streams, but where did he start? What was the launch product? Here's how UX Playbook got started. Here's the first thing that Chris put into the market. 

Chris: I started with one single guide, so it was I believe product persona. So it was one single guide for something like three or four bucks, I can't remember. And then that turned into UX Playbook where there's 14 different guides and then new playbooks, management portfolio, all that stuff. But really it just started with one guide and when I was doing usability testing and just some contextual inquiries with some mates in the first week, someone bought it randomly because I had to basically put it on buy me a coffee just to test would they click the buy button and obviously not having them pay for it, and then someone organically bought it, and that kind of started off this experiment to what it is now. 

Lex: So you have a sense of what Chris is selling on his website, you'll see bundles, products, services, and freebies. So he's got digital downloads, he's got services like his portfolio critique and the coaching workshop, and he has things like the live cohort, which he talked about in his revenue pie. If you caught the title of this episode that it's about growing revenue with selling digital products. So you probably want to know what exactly did Chris try that worked to increase his sales with digital products over the last six months.

Again, we're going to go over to the Canva board, which I recommend you check out on the newsletter, and we're going to start with what has worked for Chris. The number one thing that he put on this board naming the product name. Here's what Chris said about the name of the product and how it's changed over time. 

Chris: First it was like UX Playbook, a collection of guides, and then my second product was UX Management Playbook. How do you train and a builder kick ass team culture? So then I was like, okay, that's interesting. They're still the same name. So naming and bundling is actually, they have a direct correlation. So first when I tried to bundle the products, I said, okay, what about you can buy UX Playbook, you can buy UX and you can buy UX and Management Playbook together. It's a bundle.

But then I just called it that. I just said, you get UX Playbook and Management Playbook and that's the name. But yeah, so it was just like what? That's the product name. But then when I changed it to when I had more products, the junior designer bundle, the senior designer, it improved revenue so much more. It was a significant bump. I can't tell you the exact metrics, but we did see resonate with more folks who are like, oh yeah, I want to be a junior or folks that I want to be a senior or I'm already a senior. So I think naming your products based on the persona is super interesting, and for us it worked really well. 

Lex: Chris also talks about bundling products, which is really popular on some of the platforms. I've noticed that Gumroad now has that feature. This is a really key insight to pay attention to because he talks here about the naming of the bundles and how that actually impacted sales as well. So not just the product name, but also thoughtful naming of the bundles. 

Chris: Bundling is crazy. So I started with a one guide thing. I had one guide, so then I sold 12 different products and it was like, okay, if you want stakeholder interviews, just get that thing. If you want wire frames, get that thing. And I was like, wait, why am I selling it like this? Okay, why don't I just bundle it into UX Playbook? Just get the whole playbook and you have a bunch of different things. So that was my first attempt at bundling, and turns out we sold more of that because people just kind of wanted to save money instead of ordering 12 different things. And so they just bought the bundle. Then I went further and was like, okay, well can we bundle UX playbook and management Playbook to target seniors and Growth Playbook to target seniors? These are potentially what seniors care about. 

And then for the junior bundle, it's about finding a job portfolio, how to interview, and then of course UX Playbook being one of our core products that's also in the bundle. And then you have these two personas that have different products, and then what about everything bundle? And just so happens that we sell more of that than anything else. People just want it all for a cheap price. So I've tried bundling in a bunch of different ways and I kind of worked up two bundling and be like, what can we bundle? What can we add? So I've done another one which is also related to naming, which is the design transition bundle that didn't really work out or the job hunting bundle that didn't really work out. So these ones that stuck are the ones that actually sold. And I'm like, okay, well that's what I'm just going to call it. And that's the configuration of the bundle basically.

Lex: Also in the what worked column discounts and sales here, Chris talks about last November versus this November, so 2022 to 2023, what changed to boost their revenue? And it all has to do with a very specific sale. 

Chris: So last November and I did a brief check. We literally did so bad, we did so bad last November, and it was like because Black Friday, it wasn't in my mind and I was probably busy doing something else, but then this Black Friday, I was like, okay, it's three or four weeks before Black Friday. I want to make sure everybody knows that something is going on. There's a sale, they can absolutely get a steal. And that was the strategy. So we knew banners across all the social medias. The description was only about Black Friday, like your headline. So it's like the featured post multiple email blasts. I think we did maybe even three or four leading up and then reminding people and then last chance.

So you really have to, the number one learning is just tell people that they can get a discount. It is as simple as that, and I just didn't do that last year, but it doesn't always work. I did it again for Chinese New Year, but nobody cares about Chinese New Year. Literally nobody cares. It is not known for to be the holiday that everybody's spending money in the west, in the east, yeah, everybody's broke by Chinese New Year. So you got to pick your times, right? And for us, it makes sense because most of our audience, I think 47% of our customers are from the US. 

Lex: The last thing we're going to touch on when it comes to what worked is abandoned cart. Abandoned cart is something you're probably familiar with. It's the idea that if someone gives you their email, you can email them and say, Hey, you left this in your cart. Did you mean to purchase this? And this is a feature that is automated in a lot of carts. Chris talks about this feature and why it made sense for them to pay for it. 

Chris: I didn't switch this on because I was too cheap. So what happened was I got the midpoint of Squarespace pricing. I was like, I don't need the full thing, I'll just do this, but it didn't have this abandoned cart feature. And I was like, and then I finally was like, oh, let me just upgrade and switch this on. It didn't work straight away, but it did start working for us. And what we did was we offered a discount.

We just said, Hey, if you put something in your cart and within 24 hours they don't buy, you send them an email considered, they've given you your email and you just give them a discount. And then if they purchase within that 24 hours of receiving that email, then it's registered as an abandoned cart. Sometimes they do it after. But in Q1 alone, it has been, we converted 9% of the people that we could email, which is a great conversion metric, right? Yeah, totally. So it's actually worth it. And if I just look back at all the abandoned cart sales that we've got, it's basically paid for software for two or three years. You can also customize it to that email address. You can put some of that email address and a number or something. So it looks like a personalized code. And for folks, it just creates a bit more urgency and they're like, oh, okay, cool. 

Lex: Moving on to what didn't work. There's four things on the board here that Chris spoke about didn't work for UX playbook affiliates, upselling services, cheaper pricing, and the wait list. I want to start with the wait list because that's a thing I see a lot of us doing. I've had trouble with it too. Here's what Chris said about his thinking and trials with things like wait lists, early access and pre-orders.

Chris: I think we tried it twice. The first one was the second product, so I was working on a second product like product development. Everything takes longer than you expect it to be. So I also think that if you want to do a wait list, you best be sure that it's relatively soon because people are going to forget the urgency they felt before they don't feel now. So I think my wait list was for four weeks and that was way too long, even with a huge discount. So we had 250 people on the wait list, which is pretty good for having a tiny, tiny audience back then. And I think we converted two, maybe three, I don't really remember. So I haven't really cracked this wait list, how to do it, how to cause excitement, and maybe I didn't do a good job of product updates during the wait list. 

So it is something for me, I'm still yet to crack it, but for us, it hasn't worked. So we've done two wait lists. Yeah, I would rather do a pre-sale than a wait list, to be honest. I think that's just way better. People are more invested and you can give a huge discount versus like, oh, you can get something later versus get it now and we'll just send it to you later. So we did that with Job Sprint and yeah, we converted five people within the space of a couple of weeks versus the wait list never converted. 

Lex: So Job Sprint is still in pre-order right now, is that right? No, 

Chris: It's actually early access.

Lex: What's the difference?

Chris: Yeah, so pre-order is like you can't get any of it, right? You are going to get the product soon, and then early acts is like, Hey, I'm working on it. And because this product took so long to make just hours of video editing that, I was like, no, I have to give people who's on the wait list a taste of the product, so I'm just going to do early access. So now they have access to five modules, which is plenty of their time it should take up. And then I'm working on the last module.

Lex: The interplay of products and services is really hard, and as we've explored through this series, most of us are leaning heavily towards products or services. In Chris's case, he's leaning towards products, but he does sell some services and he's found that it's really challenging to go from product to services. It's a lot easier to go from services to product. Here's why he said product downsells work better than upselling services. 

Chris: I have two services on the website. One is so, oh, this is also naming where I had this product, which is One Hour Coaching. People were like, who cares about one hour coaching. Then when I changed the name to coaching workshop, people were like, I'll buy this. And I was like, what the hell, man? It's the same thing. I just phrased it differently because a workshop sounds way better apparently, but that's basically what we do in coaching. We jump on a whiteboard and we start figuring stuff out. So I changed the name on there. But anyway, so from these services, because it's quite high touch, one is a one hour call. The other is I send a 20 minute video to you. I've built enough trust with the customers that when I recommend a product there, it converts quite well, right? And it's usually a down sale because the products are less, right? 

Because services are always more expensive. So if I roast your portfolio and it's really bad and I'm like, dude, just get the portfolio playbook. People usually get the portfolio playbook. That makes sense, right? It's like 69 bucks or whatever it is. But it's harder to say, Hey, you've just bought the portfolio playbook. Do you want to finish your portfolio and let me roast it? And majority of people are like, no, right? They haven't shown me that. They would be like, oh, I'll prefer this other thing.

And I've tried to integrate it into the product as much as possible in terms of upselling services. I know we're solving the same problem here, right? A portfolio playbook to tell you how to do a portfolio and then a review of your portfolio. It's like near enough the same thing. And it's more hyper-personalized here for us. It just hasn't worked and I dunno what to do and maybe it should be more of a targeted approach or maybe there's an integration of a video of some sorts, but for us, it just has worked. 

Lex: We didn't talk much about pricing in this episode, but one of the things Chris put on the what didn't worked column was cheaper pricing. And pricing is always the bane of everyone's existence. What should something cost? What is something actually worth? What's the perceived value? Should it be a five, a seven or a nine? Here's what Chris said about his lesson in cheaper pricing. 

Chris: Cheaper pricing is completely counterintuitive. You thought. So one month we made the best revenue month back in 2022. We were like, oh my God. And it's because we had this portfolio playbook for 19 bucks that just sold like crazy. We had our best revenue month, but then when I tried to experiment with the same concepts with our bundles and stuff, really cheap, didn't work. It was probably below average month. And it was just like, this is crazy. Why wouldn't people download a 93,000 word guide for 99 bucks? So be careful your pricing, and that's the takeaway for the audience, I think because pricing is such a sensitive subject 

Lex: In my mind, it's always good to start lower rather than higher because you can always go up. It's a lot harder to go down. And there's a lot of calculations you can do around pricing. I've been recently reading Austin Church's book Free Money, which is mainly about selling freelance services, but has some really interesting calculations that you could also use in the product realm. You can tell through this episode that Chris is a rapid experimenter, and I like to say that the people who succeed fast learn fast. Chris embodies this really well. So I asked him, what's he trying now? What's the current experiment look like? 

Chris: What's next for us is I am testing instead of a freebie or like a lead magnet, right? Something related to the product that you can upsell. I'm actually giving, let's just say 20% of the product for free. Oh, not free $1, which is the job sprint and seeing and letting people try it. And if they try it and they like it, they will buy the full thing. If they don't like it, they get the first module, which is 32 videos, 14 workshop activities, four in-depth guides for one buck. And that's fine. And that's the most common problem I hear from designers where it's like, I dunno how to stand out. Well check out this course for a dollar. We already had three customers, but yeah, that's what I'm trying next. And we'll see if this kind of $1 trial works because then if it does, I'm going to roll it out to other things. 

Lex: You can find Chris on LinkedIn and I highly recommend following him. He's a really excellent content creator on LinkedIn. You can also see what he's up to@uxplaybook.org and check out all of his different landing pages, how he's positioning all of these different offers we spoke about today.

You're also going to want to get on the Low Energy Leads newsletter if you're not already. I share tools there like Chris's Canva board, you can see his revenue breakdowns, you can see what worked and what didn't. And I also share templates that I create to make selling digital products and selling services even easier for you. Go to read.lowenergyleads.com to get on that list.

I'm going to be hitting pause on live streams. Just wanted to give you a heads up on that. Not that anyone comes to 'em anyway, which is one of the reasons why I'm hitting pause on them. I feel like live streams could be really cool in the low energy leads community, but it's really hard for me to figure out where they fit in. So I'm going to hit pause on that. We're streamlining, we're downsizing, we're simplifying this year.

And so on that note, next week's episode is going to be very simple, very tactical. Coming up next week, we're talking about how to do an email newsletter swap.

Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.