You've Never Bought Your Own Product

Hope Is the Product. How Is Free. — Went up today. The whole playbook the pay-a-guru crowd charges for, the four moves that actually get a writer off zero, handed over with no gate. Same instinct as today’s drill: stop assuming, go look at the actual thing.

Why Most People Suck at Selling in Print by Mike Searles — A short one on the actual mechanics of selling, not the mindset stuff. Fits today’s drill: most of what’s wrong with a sales page nobody notices until somebody’s actually trying to buy the thing. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)

The Checkout Walkthrough

You’ve sold this thing a hundred times. You’ve never once bought it.

Morning, fam. Quick gut check before you do anything else today: when was the last time you actually bought your own product? Not the admin preview, not logged in with every field already filled in for you. The real door. The one a stranger walks through with a credit card and zero patience. Most of us built the thing, shipped it, and never once sat in the customer’s chair. I hadn’t either, honestly, until a reader told me my own receipt looked like spam. Today you go find out what yours looks like.

1 // Buy it like you’ve never seen it

Open a private browser window, no cookies, no saved logins. Pull up your actual product page from a link you’d hand a stranger, not a bookmark. Buy your cheapest thing with a real card. Don’t skip this part because it’s only two bucks, that’s the whole point of the drill.

2 // Count every click

From landing on the page to holding the receipt, count clicks and page loads. Anything past five clicks is friction you’re paying for in abandoned carts you’ll never see logged anywhere, because nobody sends you a report on the people who quit.

3 // Open what actually lands

Check your own inbox, not the dashboard. Does the confirmation email land at all, does the download link work on the first click, does the file open clean on a phone? This is the step nobody checks, because checking it means buying your own stuff, and none of us buy our own stuff. Every refund I’ve eaten on a digital product started right here.

4 // Fix the worst one, today

Pick the single worst step. The extra signup field, the redirect that dead-ends, the receipt that reads like it came out of 2004. Fix that one thing. Not the whole funnel, not a redesign, not a weekend of tinkering you’ll abandon by Sunday. One fix, shipped before you close the laptop tonight. Then go look at it in a private window and watch the damn thing work!

Standard: if you can’t finish your own checkout in under 90 seconds, neither can they.

Test the door yourself before you go blaming the traffic.

THE TIP. Most checkout friction got there by default. An extra field the template shipped with. A redirect somebody copy-pasted eighteen months ago and never opened again. Nobody decided any of it, which is exactly why nobody goes back and undecides it. We wrote the checklist down so you don’t have to guess at what to look for. How to Sell Digital Products on Gumroad (free guide)

DEAD AIR · ORDER LOG / TEST PURCHASE

A test purchase ran through the storefront at 6:14 this morning. Private window, no cookies, cheapest item on the shelf, paid on a real card. The confirmation landed in nine seconds. So did a second one, same order number, same timestamp, itemized for a product this store has never carried and has no file for. It has been downloaded four times.

Reply with your own click count off your own checkout, curious how many of us have actually run this test before. ~ J.D.