One email a week: something from which I hope you'll get real value. We talk about things we can build, and how to defend them. That can apply to cybersecurity, physical buildings, digital products, and .... just about anything. The two concepts matter for progress, both as individuals and as a society.
Today's topic is: the thing you know that everybody else keeps asking you about.
Most of us have one.
It might be the best way to move a family from one country to another without losing your mind. It might be how to buy a particular kind of old guitar without accidentally acquiring a very expensive firewood rack. It might be the part of enterprise security that nobody explains in plain English. It might be the local bureaucracy, the specialist software, the strange hobby, the school admissions process, or the 1994–1998 New York Knicks. (I said useful knowledge. I did not promise it would all lead to financial freedom.)
The clue is not that you enjoy it. The clue is that people ask you the same questions, and your answer saves them time, money, embarrassment, or a weekend with twelve hundred browser tabs open. (That would still be less than me.)
That is not “content”. It is earned specificity.
And it can become an asset.
🔨 BUILD: The Thing Only You Can Explain
A useful thing does not need to be an app, a course, a SaaS company, a YouTube channel, or a business plan with seventeen arrows pointing at a circle called “scale”, while still leaving room for the conjoined triangles of success. In fact, it should not be any of those at first.
Start by making the smallest thing that gives one kind of person one reliable shortcut. I did this for migrating OpenClaw agents to Hermes (guide in links).
A relocation veteran might make a Dubai first-90-days checklist for remote-working families: the real order of operations, the forms people miss, what needs a local phone number, and the bits that turn out not to matter. A guitarist might make a buyer’s field guide for one under-documented model: what to check, what replacements cost, which listings are suspicious, and the questions to ask before getting in the car. A security architect might make a plain-English board briefing pack that helps a small company understand its actual exposure without pretending it needs a £300,000 transformation programme on Tuesday.
The product is not the accumulated facts. Google has facts.
The product is your judgement about which facts matter, in what order, for whom, and where the nasty little surprises live.
Here is a simple way to find the first product:
Write down five questions people repeatedly ask you.
Circle the one where your answer is unusually concrete: an ordered process, a decision framework, a list of traps, or a template you already keep sending.
Name a narrow buyer. Not “people who like music.” Try “first-time buyers of Japanese-made 1980s Strat copies in the UK.”
Make the answer useful in one sitting: a 10-page guide, a checklist, a template pack, a short workshop, or a paid hour with a follow-up document.
Put a price on it before perfecting it. The price can be modest. Its job is to prove that the problem is real.
I like the paid hour plus a small reusable pack as a first version. It is not passive income, and it does not pretend to be. But it teaches you the customer’s actual questions, which is vastly more useful than asking an AI to invent a “target persona” called Sarah, 34, who enjoys artisanal basketweaving, apocryphal stores about productivity, and converting MQLs to MQCs.
Do that a few times and the repeated answer starts becoming a document. The document becomes a product. The product may become a course, a community, an app, a service, or simply a tidy little income stream that pays for something you value.
That is the point: build something small enough to finish, specific enough to matter, and owned enough that it does not disappear when an algorithm changes its mind.
🛡️ DEFEND: Do Not Turn Expertise Into Expensive Noise
The danger here is not mainly that someone will steal your idea. Most ideas are sitting around un-stolen because the hard part is doing the work, talking to customers, and making the thing less annoying than the alternatives.
The real danger is building an enormous cathedral for a problem that only three people have, two of whom are your mates.
Defend against that by keeping the first version deliberately constrained:
Sell the outcome, not your biography. “I have spent 20 years in this industry” is nice. “Use this checklist to avoid the three costly mistakes first-time buyers make” is better.
Keep the promise narrow. A guide can help somebody prepare, compare, or decide. It should not promise legal, medical, tax, investment, or immigration advice unless you are actually qualified and insured to provide it.
Use your experience, not your employer’s property. Do not package confidential material, client data, internal slides, or somebody else’s paid research. The useful version is the method you have learned, written freshly and honestly.
Make the source of truth portable. Keep the guide, templates, customer notes, and mailing list in formats you can export. Your product should survive a platform sulk.
Protect your time. If every £9 sale creates an hour of support, you have accidentally invented a very badly paid job. State what is included, add a short FAQ, and notice the questions that deserve to become the next revision.
Ask for feedback before testimonials. “What did you use this for?” and “What was missing?” will improve the product faster than a vague compliment from your cousin. (I'm sure your cousin is lovely, but she is unlikely to be market research.)
There is also a confidence trap. People with real knowledge often see all the exceptions, so they assume they have nothing worth selling. Meanwhile, somebody with a ring light and seven months of experience is charging $1497 for “The Ultimate Mastermind".
Do not become that person. But do not let their existence convince you that careful, bounded, honest expertise has no value either.
💰 STACK: A Very Small Product Machine
You can make a first paid version with boring tools:
A working document: Google Docs, Word, Obsidian, or Markdown. Use the thing that lets you revise it without drama. You can even get AI to help you.
A clean PDF: enough structure to be readable, printable, and useful on a phone. A checklist people actually use beats a 70-page masterpiece they admire and never open again.
A payment and delivery page: Gumroad, Payhip, Stripe, or your own site if you already have one. Choose the option that makes refunds, tax handling, and delivery least painful for your situation.
A simple feedback route: one email address or a short form. Ask one good question after purchase: “What were you trying to do when you bought this?”
A list of revisions: keep a changelog. When you update a useful guide, that is an asset getting better, not a post disappearing into the social-media swamp.
Do not begin with branding, a logo, a twelve-part funnel, or a Discord server full of tumbleweed.
Begin with one person who has a frustrating problem, one thing you can make that genuinely helps, and one small transaction. The transaction is not just money. It is evidence.
And once you have evidence, you can decide whether to do more.
🔗 LINKS
A short, practical book on learning whether a problem is real without accidentally coaching people into giving you polite, useless encouragement.
A straightforward way to sell a small digital product without building a shop from scratch.
Another lightweight digital-product platform, particularly useful to compare before choosing where your first version lives.
Useful if you want to state clearly what buyers may share, adapt, or redistribute.
In case you want an example and/or want to migrate!
💬 ONE THING
This week, write the title of a tiny guide you could finish in a weekend:
“How to ___ for ___ without ___.”
Make it absurdly specific. “How to choose a family VPN” is a blog post. “How to move a non-technical family from password reuse to a shared password manager without locking anyone out” is something a real person might pay to avoid getting wrong.
You do not need a giant audience. You need a useful answer, a defined person who needs it, and the nerve to ask whether it is worth paying for.
Build the small thing.
Defend the truth of what it can do.
Thanks for reading this newsletter! Feel free to respond any time.
Thomas
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