How to Kill Your Info Product (& save it)

They say “build it and they will come.” Nobody tells you “build it wrong and they will ghost.” All of this is a problem that comes from crappy info product planning.

The info product graveyard is massive.

Full of courses, eBooks, and programs with 3 modules, zero sales, and one lonely landing page haunting the web like a digital poltergeist. 👻

And this most happens after this series of events:

• You’ve made a couple grand from coaching or 1:1s.
• Your audience keeps asking “Do you have a course?”
• You see other creators on Twitter launching every 6 weeks.
• Suddenly, you’re thinking: “I need to productize now before I get left behind.”

This is what I call the Panic build… it’s an imaginary race everyone seems to be running to “productize first.”

Truth be told, I didn’t plan on writing this.

But after ghostwriting dozens of ideas for other creators—and watching even smart experts sabotage themselves—

I’ve started compiling the real checklist.

Not the step-by-step kind.

The emotional landmine kind.

Because what kills your product

isn’t bad tech.

It’s bad timing, misaligned intent, and you building too fast, too early, for the wrong buyer.

This wound is fresh cause I just made that mistake by writing a LinkedIn post that was all “ME, ME, ME” and it tanked.

So buckle up, its about to get nasty and weird. 

⚠️ Creator Myth: “If I Just Build the Product, Everything Else Will Follow”

Let’s start with the lie.
The myth.
The pretty little Instagram carousel you saved and forgot:

“Just package your expertise.”
“Productize what you know.”
“Create once, sell forever.”

🙃 What they don’t tell you:
People post revenue screenshots, not refund requests.
They share “$20K launch wins,” not “$6K in Facebook ad losses and a panic attack at 1:13 AM.”

The problem isn’t your product.
The problem is you’re making one too soon.

Its like the quintessential part of INFO PRODUCT FALLACY from the Hidden Curriculum of Creator Economy

“When solo creator-educators mistake audience attention for intent, they default to selling courses and eBooks—assuming knowledge transfer is the only desired outcome”

Its just one of the TEN, You can read it in this free guide I’ve written: The Hidden Curriculum of Creator Economy

Its also why you should probably stop building courses off the hip.

👁️ The Real Sequence of Events (That No One Screenshots):

Yet we keep teaching the “build once, win forever” script like it’s gospel.

Here’s what I learned while crashing headfirst into that wall:
You’re not launching a product. You’re installing a behavior.
And behavior change is expensive—for the buyer and for you.

🧠 Economic Theory Drop:

In behavioral economics, it’s called “The Planning Fallacy” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979):

“We tend to underestimate how long something will take, how hard it will be, and how much effort will be required.”

Creators don’t just do this with time.
They do it with trust.
They assume their audience will be ready to buy—when the audience isn’t even ready to listen.

Remember the panic build I mentioned.
This is its evil twin.

It doesn’t just rush the “how.”
It completely skips the “why, what, and who.”

Your job isn’t to finish your course.
It’s to create demand before a single lesson is outlined.

“Your course isn’t a product. It’s a behavioral upgrade.”

If you don’t position it like that, no one clicks buy.

What No One Tells You About Building Too Early

This is where we throw cold water on your course-building fever dream.

I get the allure of building info products, but…

Right after I built the B.U.I.L.D. Filter, I started seeing something strange—like a pattern no one talks about.

It wasn’t about content. Or niche. Or platform.
It was creators sprinting into product mode before reality caught up.

You think you’re building a course.
No.
You’re building a contract of belief.

And belief isn’t built in Canva slides. It’s forged in your buyer’s gut.
Yet here’s the tragicomic loop most creators run:

There’s a word for this: Premature Productization.
It’s the creator world’s version of “marrying someone you had one good date with.”
And just like in dating, vibes aren’t validation.

The Cost of Premature Productization

(a.k.a. When You Build a Course That Dies Alone in a Teachable Graveyard)

There’s something quietly devastating about watching a course die.

Not in a loud, flaming “I got roasted on Reddit” way.
But in that soft, ghost-town kind of death.
No comments.
No sales.
Just… tumbleweeds in your Gumroad dashboard.

You don’t realize how lonely digital graveyards are until your 47-slide “Ultimate Freelancer Accelerator” gets 3 views.

Here’s what no one warns you about:

🧨 You might confuse interest with intent.
🧨 You might create something valuable… that still fails.
🧨 You might burn 60 hours “refining modules,” thinking you’re iterating when you’re actually procrastinating on clarity.

Let’s call it what it is:
A product is not a project.
A product is a bet on buyer psychology.

Most failed info products aren’t trash. They’re mis-timed assets.

🪤 They die from:

• Offering clarity before trust is earned.
• Solving a problem the audience hasn’t named yet.
• Teaching before diagnosing buyer readiness.

And it wrecks you. Not just the sales.
But the self-belief you poured into the work.

“Was my idea stupid?” you wonder.
No, it was premature. Like planting seeds in concrete.

🎯 That’s why you test the intent, not the interest.
🎯 That’s why you use the B.U.I.L.D. Filter before you even open Google Slides.

How to save your info product: Enter the B.U.I.L.D. Filter 

A Brutally Honest Self-Check Before You Make Anything

You’ve made it this far.
You’ve dodged the “launch fast” trap, the “too much value” myth, and the “one-size-fits-all course” delusion.

Now you’re craving a map. Not a lecture. A litmus test that screams “don’t build that thing until you’ve faced the truth.”

This is that.

The B.U.I.L.D. Filter isn’t advice. It’s a diagnostic you wish you ran before that burnout launch. 

It’s built from my own graveyard of failed digital products and the psychological autopsies I’ve run on dozens of creators during my sabbatical. 

It’s built on the backs of behavioral economics, signaling theory, and regret minimization frameworks—and yes, actual blood, sweat, and broken Stripe dashboards.

Let’s crack it open.

🔍 B → BIASES You’re Blind To

“You’re not building a product. You’re projecting a therapy session.”

Imagine this: A creator launches a course on productivity. But it’s not really for their audience. It’s for the version of themselves who used to procrastinate in 2020.

That’s not insight. That’s unresolved ego.

🧠 Cognitive bias: The False Consensus Effect. We assume our needs, preferences, and beliefs are normal—that the audience surely feels the same. Spoiler: they don’t.

According to research by Lee Ross, this bias warps our product ideas by making personal breakthroughs feel universal.
This is how creators accidentally end up designing therapy tools instead of market solutions.

👉 Ask this instead:

• “Would my audience pay to solve this the same way I did?”
• “Have I tested this assumption in public?”
• “Or am I building this to feel smart?

💡 Breakthrough: Just because something saved you doesn’t mean others want to buy it.

🧨 U → URGENCY That’s Fake

“If you build fast from fear, you’ll sell slow from regret.”

Panic is not strategy.
But here’s the twist: panic often feels like momentum. Creators misinterpret anxiety spikes as divine deadlines.

So you should definitely look into making at least a basic Info Product Strategy.

Because we’re stuck in the FOMO-Scarcity-Launch spiral. A loop where urgency is reverse-engineered from comparison, not customer data. And that can land you in a world of hurt.

Shoutout to the “Startup Curve” by Paul Graham—most creators confuse the “Trough of Sorrow” with a launch date.

🧠 Behavioral echo: This is “Loss Aversion” meets “Availability Heuristic.” You see creators launching quickly and winning (visibility bias), and you fear losing time (FOMO bias). So you launch half-baked.

Instead of urgency, ask:

• “Is this real market timing or performative pressure?”
• “Am I launching to avoid my own doubts?”

Scarcity is sexy. But stupidity is expensive.

🧠 I → IDENTITY Traps

“Are you productizing the person you used to be?”

This one’s personal. I’ve built offers that locked me into versions of myself I was trying to outgrow.
Then I had to sell that identity, over and over again. You don’t want that.

🧠 Here’s what’s really happening: You’re navigating the “Narrative Identity Gap.” You’ve evolved, but your content ecosystem hasn’t. So your product becomes a tombstone for an outdated self.

In sociology, this is linked to Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory—you’re performing a public persona that no longer aligns privately. Your “course creator” mask is out of sync with your actual growth.

📌 Ask yourself:

• “Does this product represent what I want to be known for next year?”
  
• “Or am I building it because people expect me to?”
  

🔮 Wake-up call: Building a product locks in a version of you. Are you ready to market that version… forever?

💥 L → LEVERAGE Mismatch

“Your product isn’t what you know. It’s what people can repeat without you.”

This is where most creator-educators break the business model.
They confuse “sharing knowledge” with “scaling assets.”

📉 A personality-based product feels valuable… until you try to automate it, license it, or teach it without being in the room.

That’s not leverage. That’s a performance loop.

🧠 According to the Knowledge Capital Framework by Paul Romer, true scale comes when your intellectual output becomes modular, replicable, and decoupled from labor.

Use this test 

🧪 Leverage Litmus

📌 Reminder: You’re not selling your knowledge.
You’re selling their ability to use it without you.

→ Dive Deeper: [The Truth about Leverage in the Creator Economy Revealed]

🔥 D → DEMAND That’s Imaginary

“You’re not validating your product. You’re validating your buyers.”

This one’s brutal. You have 100 comments, 500 likes, and 12 DMs.
But when the cart opens? Crickets.

Here’s the cognitive dissonance: Vanity Metrics ≠ Buyer Intent.
It’s the “Attention Fallacy.” You thought noise meant desire.

🧠 Harvard’s Theodore Levitt once said: “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
But you’re selling drill tutorials to people still deciding whether they want shelves.

💣 Reframe it like this:

• Likes = applause.
  
• DMs = curiosity.
  
• Sales = clarity of offer + timing of need.
  

🧭 Final Word Before You Build Anything

The B.U.I.L.D. Filter isn’t here to discourage you.
It’s here to decouple what feels good to create from what’s designed to succeed.

What you’re making is more than a product.
It’s a permanent snapshot of your credibility, a signal of your strategic thinking, and a mirror to your audience’s intent.

Don’t ship by default.
Ship with design.

🧠 The Creator’s Final Sanity Check (Before You Ship Junk in Fancy Clothes)

“Most info products aren’t broken. They were just built for imaginary people.”

After testing dozens of digital products (and blowing through several revenue walls and stress-induced Google Docs), I landed here: most failed launches are strategic hallucinations.

We assume:

• The audience wants what we know.
  
• Our knowledge is monetizable as-is.
  
• Packaging equals value.

And rushing it? That’s how you create what economists call a negative externality—when your “course” pollutes trust in your brand. 📉 (See: Moral Hazard.)

But what if… the product is fine, and it’s your mental model that’s faulty?

That’s where the B.U.I.L.D. Filter came in—my attempt to un-junk the junk drawer of creator assumptions.

Here’s the real kicker: Building an info product before filtering it through B.U.I.L.D. is like bottling wine before fermentation.

It’s loud. Fizzy. And it’ll explode in the buyer’s face.

So Before you bottle your brilliance, ask:

Is this wine or grape juice in a champagne bottle?

Because once it’s out there, it’s pricing signal + perception + buyer regret math.

🔒 The Real Power of Waiting to Build

(Or why your “delay” might be the best business move you’ve ever made)

Most creators I meet are in a rush to ship the thing.
But every seasoned one I’ve helped during my sabbatical eventually hit the same wall: speed killed clarity.

When I slowed down, tested, and looped through audience intent → insight → alignment… the product almost built itself.

Here’s what I’ve discovered:

This is not procrastination.
This is the creator equivalent of Warren Buffet’s “circle of competence.”

So yeah, slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Especially when you’re playing a long game in a short-attention economy.

🎭 Final Act: Don’t Just Ship—Shape

So here we are.

Not at the end of a checklist, but at the edge of a cliff.

Because building an info product isn’t a task. It’s a transformation. Not of your Notion doc, but of your entire lens on what knowledge is worth selling.

If you’re hesitating right now—good. That’s not fear. That’s signal.

“The most dangerous products aren’t bad. They’re misaligned.”
— Me, after watching smart creators burn out on beautiful flops

This essay wasn’t here to tell you what to build. It was to shake you out of building blindfolded.

Because nobody tells you that…

• Packaging ≠ clarity
  
• Teaching ≠ transformation
  
• Value ≠ volume

But now you know.
And knowing forces a choice:
→ Ship faster?
→ Or shape smarter?

Take the long way. It pays better.

(Writing this piece has taken me upwards of 22+ hours, from all the research to making sense of things and putting it up in a slightly easy-to-digest format.
So for some reason, if you decide to share this piece of content with others on social, it’ll be appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed, so thank you).

Sudhanshu Pai

Sudhanshu Pai is the writer of THE INFO CREATOR DEPT. He spends his days researching knowledge business, creators economy, why & how 7 fig info business scale (or flop) and generally figuring out blueprints, breakthroughts and strategies to help creator educators get higher return on their expertise.

The deep dives and other content take more than 100 hours to put together, so sharing this content with others on social media will be much appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed.)

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