Stop Giving It Away
Your knowledge has value. The platforms trained you to forget.
The Indie Creator Revolution is here.
In this issue:
✍🏻 The Last People Making Things on Purpose
📃 20 Ideas to Build Your Catalog
We’re in the middle of something and most people haven’t noticed yet.
A person with a laptop and a weekend can build a product, list it for sale, and wake up Monday with money from strangers. No agent, no publisher, no distribution deal, no venture capital, no permission from anyone.
That sentence would have been science fiction twenty years ago. Now it’s a day to day reality.
Enough people are doing this that it stopped being a novelty and started being a movement.
Not the kind with a manifesto and a hashtag. The kind where people quietly make things in their apartments and sell them directly to other people and don’t bother telling anyone about it because they’re too busy making the next one.
The gatekeepers haven’t disappeared. They’ve just become optional. And every month, more people figure that out.
Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!
✍🏻 The Last People Making Things on Purpose
A friend of mine quit his job at a marketing agency last year. Good salary and everything else you’d expect from that type of corporate job.
He walked away because he’d spent four years convincing people to buy things they didn’t need using words he didn’t believe.
His first week on his own, he made a seven-page PDF about organizing a home workshop. Priced it at three dollars. Sold eleven copies while he slept.
Eleven copies at three dollars. Thirty-three bucks. That wouldn’t cover his lunch tab at the agency.
But he told me something that stuck. Those eleven people found him on their own, read his description, decided it was worth their money, and paid him directly for something he made with his own hands and his own brain. No algorithm chose them. No ad budget targeted them. No content strategist optimized the funnel. Eleven strangers and a PDF and a transaction with nothing between the two parties except the work.
Four or five companies now own the pipes, the platforms, the ad networks, and increasingly the content itself.
Every year the membrane between creator and audience grows thicker with intermediaries skimming percentages, shaping what gets seen, burying what doesn’t serve their quarterly numbers. You produce the value, you pay the rent, and the landlord rewrites the lease whenever the shareholders get nervous.
I watched this happen from the inside. I spent all my time after the military until about 2023 being a corporate goon.
Sat in rooms at large corporations where a piece of content had to pass through legal, compliance, marketing, brand safety, and a committee that sanded every edge until the thing could offend nobody and interest nobody in equal measure.
Good people doing their jobs, and the net result was always the same. Anything with a pulse got flattened into something safe enough to attach a logo to.
I choose the subject because it matters to me.
I price it because I think the price is fair. I distribute it through channels I control or at least understand.
That PDF on a Gumroad shelf, that zine in a manila envelope, that newsletter sent from a list I actually own. Small acts of economic stubbornness in a system that runs on your dependency.
Thousands are doing the same thing from their own apartments and kitchen tables, and we didn’t ask anyone if we could because nobody’s permission was required.
The dependency is the business model.
You need the platform more than the platform needs you, and the moment that equation shifts, they change the terms. Substack could pivot tomorrow. Gumroad could raise fees. Amazon could tweak its algorithm and bury your book where nobody scrolls.
You’re a tenant. You just haven’t read the eviction clause yet.
The people who spread the risk survive.
Multiple platforms, multiple formats, none of them big enough to be catastrophic if one vanishes overnight. A newsletter here, a catalog there, maybe some audio, maybe some print.
Small on purpose, because small means maneuverable, and maneuverable is how you stay standing when the platforms rearrange the furniture.
That’s the money argument. Here’s the one that keeps me up.
Every independent zine, small-press book, and weird newsletter written by someone at midnight carries information that institutional channels won’t touch. Too niche to be profitable. Too honest to be safe. Connects dots that the institutions need to keep separate.
I spent enough years inside corporate ops to know what gets killed before it reaches the public, and it’s almost never the dangerous stuff.
It’s the specific stuff. The stuff with edges. The stuff that sounds like one person talking instead of a department performing.
I sell PDFs from my apartment.
Two-dollar guides, five-dollar field manuals, the occasional piece of fiction. The whole catalog would fit on a card table. But every one of those products represents a decision I made without asking permission, on a subject I chose because I thought it mattered, at a price I set because I thought it was fair.
Nobody approved it. Nobody told me the topic was too narrow or the audience too small or the format too lo-fi.
I make the thing, put it on a shelf, let whoever needs it find it. No gatekeeper between us. It feeds the people at both ends and the middlemen can go to hell.
Platforms will keep consolidating.
Ad networks will keep getting greedier. The algorithms will keep doing whatever algorithms do. None of that matters if enough people stay stubborn enough to keep making things on purpose and selling them directly and telling the bigger cage to go fuck itself every time it’s offered.
My friend made thirty-three dollars his first week.
Six months later he’s clearing a thousand a month.
He still can’t believe that people pay him for things he knows. I keep telling him that’s the whole point. The platforms trained all of us to give it away for free so they could sell ads against the attention.
What are you sitting on?
What do you know, right now, that someone else needs to hear, and what’s stopping you from writing it down and putting a price on it?
Not the big comprehensive thing you’ve been planning for six months. The small thing. The one you could finish this weekend if you stopped waiting for permission.
Stop giving it away. Make the thing. Sell the thing. Keep the receipts.
📃 20 Ideas to Build Your Catalog
You’ve read the argument.
Here’s the ammunition. If you’ve got one product on the shelf, you’ve got a start.
1. Turn your process into a checklist. Whatever you already do well, somebody wants the steps in order on a single page. One page, one dollar. Done.
2. Answer the question you keep getting asked. If three people have asked you the same thing, a hundred more are wondering. Write the answer. Charge for it.
3. Take your longest blog post and give it structure. Add a table of contents, clean up the formatting, tack on a resource list at the end. Congratulations, you made a product before lunch.
4. Build the starter kit you wish existed when you were new. I wasted months figuring out things that a single short guide could have told me in an afternoon. Whatever would have saved you that confusion, write it. Price it cheap. It’ll sell for years.
5. Bundle three related products into one. You already did the work. Discount the bundle fifteen to twenty percent below the individual total. New product, no new creation required.
6. Write the FAQ nobody publishes. Every industry has questions the professionals answer in private but never put in writing. Put them in writing. Watch what happens.
7. Make a template from your own system. If you have a spreadsheet, a planning doc, a workflow, or a tracker that keeps your operation running, clean it up and list it. People pay for structure they don’t have to build themselves.
8. Cover the same topic at a different depth. A one-page checklist, a seven-page guide, and a thirty-page field manual can all cover the same subject for different buyers at different price points. Three products from one body of knowledge.
9. Write the honest review nobody’s writing. Pick the tools you actually use. Write what works, what doesn’t, and what the company’s marketing page conveniently forgets to mention. Trust is scarce. Honest reviews sell because of it.
10. Solve one software problem. I’ve bought three-dollar PDFs that saved me an entire evening of Googling. “How to do X in Y” guides for specific tools sell constantly because somebody is always stuck at three in the morning. Find the pain point. Write the fix.
11. Create a resource list with context. Not just links. Why each resource matters, what order to approach them in, what to skip. I’ve bought resource lists from strangers because the curation saved me hours I didn’t have. Other people will too.
12. Translate jargon into plain language. Every profession has a wall of terminology keeping beginners out. Write the decoder ring. The people on the other side of that wall will pay you to open the gate.
13. Document a project from start to finish. Walk through something you built, repaired, cooked, grew, or made. Photos, steps, mistakes, results. Real documentation of real work sells because most content out there is theory with no dirt under its fingernails.
14. Write the thing your industry is afraid to say. Every field has sacred cows. Slaughter one in print. The people who agree with you will buy it on principle. The people who disagree will buy it to argue. Either way, you sold a copy.
15. Take a broad topic and narrow it ruthlessly. “Gardening” won’t sell. “Growing tomatoes on an apartment patio in the South” might. Specificity is your edge over everyone trying to cover everything.
16. Make the comparison guide. People spend hours researching which option is best. Do the research for them. Compare three to five options honestly. Put a price on the homework.
17. Repurpose your newsletter archive. Your best issues, edited and collected, become a product. You already wrote it. Package it.
18. Create the thing you keep recommending to friends. If you keep telling people the same thing over and over, that thing is a product waiting to be written down. I built two of my best sellers this way.
19. Solve a seasonal problem. Tax prep checklists in January, garden planning guides in March, holiday shipping timelines in October. Seasonal products spike when the calendar says they should, and they come back every year.
20. Write the short version of the long thing. If something in your field takes six months to learn, write the weekend version that covers the twenty percent people need to get started. The deep version can come later. Or never. The short version might be all anyone actually needs.
Which one are you starting with?
Hit reply and tell me. And if you’ve got a twenty-first idea I didn’t think of, I want to hear it.
🛰️ GOOD READS:
If you made it here, that means you should…
That’s it for this week. As bad as things may get, at least no one punched you in the junk while you read this. Until next time…
~ J.D.
P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…
Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.
I need to do at least one of these on the list. What's funny is that I write tutorials and procedures all the time for work. So why not for what I do outside of that?
Also, thanks for the plug!
I have one idea I got from your last thread I'm writing out now.