Splinter Scaling: A Counterintuitive Approach to Growing an Online Business

The proper way to grow an online business is actually very counter intuitive. When I got started selling digital products over a decade ago, I thought, well, I’m not the expert, I don’t know that much, I’m just a newbie. So I’m gonna create these little cheap digital products, these products that are like under a hundred bucks. And a lot of people think this way. They think, oh, I’m just starting out, so I’m gonna sell something cheap. But I think there’s a better approach. This is something I call the splinter scaling method. And this applies even if you’re a total beginner. What you wanna do if you’re first starting out especially is you want to have a business that can sustain itself on less than 100 customers per year. You do not wanna have this business where you’re reliant on this high volume of sales. You wanna be able to just serve 100 people per year and make a full time income doing that. So you do that by creating your core offer. So you gotta do the math and actually determine like, what’s your freedom number? How much money do you need to live comfortably, to pay all your bills? And what you wanna do is you wanna divide that number by 1 hundred to determine how much you need to charge for your product. So let’s say your freedom number is $100,000 a year. Divide that by a hundred and you get a thousand dollars. So that means you need to charge a minimum of $1,000 for your product. And what you do is you just focus on making this core offer better and better and better over time. And you just dial that in and get that selling and get that to a full time income. Then and only then do you start to splinter off little pieces of that main product to create these smaller products, these lower cost digital products and things. But the people who buy your core offer, they’re gonna get everything. They’re gonna get all your knowledge, all your resources, all your tools, everything in one place. And then later on, you can take little pieces of that product out to create what I call satellite products. So for example, let’s say in your core program, you’re taking people on this journey. And like every week you’re delivering something to your clients. Some sort of resource or a coaching call or something. And you’re building out your signature program over time. Well, each one of these little weekly resources that you create can then be pulled out later, or it can be combined to create different products. So for example, you could take like a bundle of five or 10 of these resources and you could turn that into a stand alone product like an online course or a template bundle or something like that. But all these products are coming from your core offer. Your main solution, that’s Your high ticket offer. And that’s what you start with. You get that to a full time income, and then you create the other little things. But sort of counterintuitive, like if you’re first starting out, you actually want to sell higher priced things. Only when you’re more experienced do you want to start to sell the lower ticket items.