All My Learnings About Creator Platforms

Hi everyone,

After our launch week, I want to share my learnings about Audience First Handbook.

In today’s post, you will get details about Gumroad and Convertkit.

Gumroad

As you know, I uploaded the handbook to Gumroad, which is so popular among creators. Therefore, I considered Gumroad as it’s an easy-to-use and go-to platform related to digital products.

In 10 days, my handbook was downloaded more than 700 times, and I earned 131$ through Gumroad.

And the question is,

How I earned 131$ from a free product?

To be honest, this might be higher for two reasons.

First, I didn’t know how to add product variables and I learned this later on.

What I mean by variables, you can get more details from the image below. I completed my second product but couldn’t upload it to Gumroad on time. And wanted to sell it through Stripe but it was a bit difficult for users, so I couldn’t sell enough checklists.

Second, everyone can download my product on Gumroad for free but there is a small trick. For the name a fair price field, you can change this and write 3$, 5$ etc. At first, mine was 0$ and I didn’t earn anything then. Later on, I changed that part to make 5$ and started to earn. If product visitors, write 0$ to the field, they will still download the handbook, but I guess it is something psychological. And I also declared that they could download the handbook free in the variables.

Cons of Gumroad

Gumroad almost takes 20% of your revenue which is unacceptable on my side. And they only accept PayPal for payout.

LemonSqueezy is a strong alternative for creators because of more payout options and less commission fees.

Convertkit

Convertkit is a marketing platform for creators and it’s primarily used for form/landing page creation and sending emails.

I wanted to try a free e-mail course for a while and started to test it through Convertkit for my handbook. It can be hard to read the whole handbook in a day and splitting it into parts via email course might increase its readability and usefulness.

I uploaded all of the emails I got from Gumroad to Convertkit and started sending a daily series of emails that will continue for 10 days.

Today is the 4th day of it and open rates are higher than the average.

I am using the free plan of Convertkit and will subscribe to the paid version, which is 29$ per month because of its email sequences feature.

Daily email sequences are a great way to warm your audience before selling something.

What’s Next?

My mind is a bit complicated nowadays, but I plan to launch more handbooks related to audience building and monetization.

Feel free to ping me if you have any suggestions.