How I fell into my Digital Products creation career after a wild ride in 2002 after working all my life for others then having to sort it all pout myself.
So here I am, I have been retrenched and nobody needs me because the dot com crash has happened and there are PHD people applying for my IT and Accounts jobs. It was just after Christmas and I had a few website jobs and sales of the eBook are trickling in but I give way more away than I sell. I was thinking digital products but not sure where to start. I can help you through this as I have been there.
My First Digital Products Discovering Sound
I did notice about 18 months before I left work and the internet was running ok on dialup in the office. We received an mp3 file from the orphanage in Thailand. In those days computers did not come with sound cards so I did a quick course on how to install by a guy faxing me a couple of pages with photos on how to do it.
I went back that night with the sound card and installed it and in the morning the boss came in and turned on his computer and we all heard Tah Dah. Sound had entered the office over the internet.
So sitting there with no real job and 4 boys and a wife to support it came to me that if I could find some software to stream audio over the internet I could make a lot more websites. I went in a search and found Real Audio and a couple of others but they were big blotted files you had to download to play the audio let alone make them.
Digital Products 1 – Streaming Audio Software
Then I found some software in the back blocks of music industry that was streaming audio with flash which was a tiny download compared to the others.
I contacted the owner in the UK and was advised he had built it for his music friends. I asked if I could be an agent and after a few days he came back and said he was a programmer and not a marketer so he would sell me the whole program, code and graphics for a set sum.
I bought it with my family and we all agreed it was a great code behind. My son was just finishing his uni degree so knew what to look for.
With the help of some friends (my son was doing computers at uni), some coke cola and pizza we redesigned it, renamed it and I launched it in October 2003.
I quickly learned how to market online and set up ecommerce etc and it started selling almost straight away. Within 6 months I was making almost as much as I was at the charity and from then on doubled every 6 months for about a year and a half.
Digital Products 2 – HI Fi Audio Stream
As the internet grew and we moved from dial up to broadband it was obvious we needed to upgrade the sound quality.
I contacted the programmer again and asked if he could upgrade to high quality sound as broadband was becoming more popular. He said ok as it was relatively simple and so I had my second product.
Tip: When I started selling these products I noticed certain groups exploding so I created separate sites for them.
Same product different descriptions and examples. Lastly I found a programmer to build some other software on a similar bent and contracted him to do the same. Software, code, graphics.
This also led to speaking engagements and lots of additional work designing web sites etc.
Digital Products 3 – MSI JukeBox
By now I had set up my business called MSIncome and started to deliver other products.
The next one was a jukebox to stream over the Internet because there were heaps of musicians that bought the other software.
This allowed you to add a whole bunch of music and create a streaming jukebox on your website.
Of course these days we do not have flash anymore but it was great while it lasted.
Digital Products 14 – MSI Prompt
This next product was born because we started doing videos and Audio books and Podcasts were becoming popular.
You would add your text and it would scroll through and you could read and record while you were doing it. Lots of people just used it as a teleprompter as they could run it on their computer and put it behind the camera.
As time went on we found that people were using it in all sorts of untought of places like schools etc.
Again we branched out from our original concept into different fields.
Digital Products 5 – MSI Streaming Video Software
This was a natural progression and the software takes all the hard work out of linking your video to a player.
If you have looked on the web for a player you will see they go from $25 upward and are very chunky.
Then you have to work out how to link them with your video.
Our player is a small 3 kb file which makes it one of the smallest on the web. Also you can adjust the size to any dimension you want.
As you can see in the diagram there are also a lot of added features for this powerful little player.
Crash and Burn
In 2007, YouTube offered videos in HTML5 format to support the iPhone and iPad, which did not support Flash Player. This was basically the end of this first generation of my Digital Products business.
Lots of other players now enetered the industry with new software etc.
It was not all bad however as it had grown my business and so I started investigating new areas of digital products which we will discuss later.
This was the first 5 years of my digital products career and if it has grown into a multi billion dollar industry which you can become a part of.