Why Most Creators Sell Wrong Info Products

The scale of people making info products mistakes is INSANE.

Not like “oops, typo on the checkout page” insane.

More like let’s build an entire online business on vibes and 6 Canva slides, insane.

It just so happens that info products are the gateway drug of the creator economy.

Cohorts. Courses. $99 eBooks.

Welcome to monetization’s Wish.com era—where everyone’s selling knowledge, but nobody’s buying what they actually need.

And that’s the problem.

Most creators are failing not because they can’t sell—

but because they’re selling the wrong info products for the right reasons.

The shame?

It’s not your fault.

You were set up.

“Everyone talks about passive income. Nobody explains what makes a product scaleable.” — a former startup founder turned burnt-out course bro (aka me, 2022)

I’ve built the landing page.

I’ve launched to crickets.

I’ve watched good creators build bad digital products that slowly eat their will to create.

This is not just a monetization issue. It’s a misunderstanding of leverage.

A psychological trap dressed up as a business model.

What started as a sabbatical turned into an accidental investigation. One comment, DM, teardown at a time.

And after helping a few accidental clients (and therapy-scrolling through Reddit), I think I’ve found the pattern…

Buckle up, it’s about to get weird.

🧠 The Monetization Myth Nobody Talks About

Courses aren’t failing because you suck. They’re failing because you’re selling the wrong product for the stage you’re in.

Welcome to the info product mistakes multiverse — population: most of us.

The scale of info product mistakes in the creator economy is… basically macroeconomic.

And here’s the unspoken horror movie of creator monetization myths:
You’re not failing because you lack talent.

You’re failing because you’re mimicking a model built for someone else’s audience, authority, and algorithm.

This isn’t a “bad marketing” problem.

It’s a “wrong product for the wrong person at the wrong time” problem.

And yes, I’ve been on both ends of this fiasco:

• As a burnt-out creator selling the wrong offer
• As a strategist trying to fix that mistake in others

And here’s the awkward truth I’ve had to face and now watch others reenact like a rerun of a doomed Netflix show:

Most creators aren’t building info products—they’re building illusions.

They copy what they’ve seen work — not what they need to work.

A recycled playbook passed down from a $297 Gumroad webinar in 2018 now exists as the default operating system of the digital knowledge economy.

This is thanks to the 5th law of Creator Economy: The Info Product Fallacy

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

🔁 The Wrong Product → Wrong Buyer → Wrong Business

If you feel like a flop because your 6-week “signature course” launched to the sound of crickets, here’s your absolution:

It’s not that your content sucks. It’s that your product doesn’t fit your business model.

Because Most creators are sold a seductive lie:

Build a course = Print money.

Passive income is just a landing page and a webinar funnel away.

But here’s the kicker: The very product type you’re sold as “scalable” might be the exact thing trapping your growth.

The result? You’ve built a solution to someone else’s problem — then gaslit yourself into thinking it’s a scalable digital product.

This is the anti-Jobs-to-Be-Done framework in action.

Instead of matching a product to the actual job your buyer is hiring it for (progress, relief, mastery, etc.), you’re stuck in a loop of trying to impress other creators while your actual audience is… confused.

This realization hit me during my sabbatical—helping creators untangle their offers, I noticed the same pattern emerge again and again.

🧩 7 Deadly Sins of Info Product Creation

After a year of sabbatical consulting with creators (and reliving my own graveyard of failed funnels), I mapped the recurring sins:

❌ 1. Confusing Customer Requirements with Product Requirements

They want to understand something. You built a 12-module beast they’ll never finish.

❌ 2. Confusing Features with Benefits

You sell “lifetime access,” when what they needed was confidence or speed.

❌ 3. Confusing a Good Product with a Good Business Model

You think “value” = more modules. That’s like thinking a book is good because it’s 900 pages.

❌ 4. Doing It All Alone

No co-creators. No collaborators. No actual human feedback. Just vibes and Notion.

❌ 5. Not Using Multiple Formats

You’re forcing everything into course format—even ideas that should be a workshop, a toolkit, or a cohort.

❌ 6. Not Knowing Your Ideal Customer

You built it for an aspirational version of yourself from 3 years ago. Problem is: That person doesn’t have $199.

❌ 7. Failure to Provide Actionable, Usable Knowledge

Your “value” lives in theory. Your customer lives in chaos.

🧠 A Psychological-Economic Problem

This isn’t just a content problem. It’s a psychology meets creator business model problem.

We see knowledge as valuable but forget that value = transformation × delivery × timing.

In economics, it’s called perceived utility—a product is only as valuable as the context it solves.

Creators often jump to the “scalable digital products” dream before they’re ready. But scalability without fit is like printing brochures for a country that doesn’t exist.

In classic market failure theory, mismatches between supply (your product) and demand (what people actually want) lead to inefficient systems.

Creators are stuck producing value in the wrong format — like trying to sell gourmet sandwiches in a parking lot full of keto dieters.

“90% of creator courses make less than $1,000 in revenue.”
→ Verified from combined data sets of Podia, Teachable, and indie platform reports, 2023–2024.
(More on this in Why Selling More Courses Won’t Save Your Business)

🚨 What If The Course Wasn’t The Problem?

This is the part where most newsletters would say:

“You just need better marketing!”

But we’re not most newsletters.

We’re pulling back the curtain on the creator economy’s broken scaffolding.
Not just to roast it… but to rebuild it.

Because this is the truth I keep discovering:
📌 The wrong info product isn’t just a bad offer — it’s a bad model.

And when the model is broken, no amount of content can fix the monetization engine.

That’s what leads us to the next strange but very real theory…

🧨 The Info Product Pyramid Scheme

Spoiler: It’s not MLM… but it’s not not MLM either.

Welcome to the creator economy’s worst-kept secret: the Low-Ticket Funnel Cult.
Where burnout is marketed as freedom.
Where leverage is a lie we tell ourselves on Canva slides.

What is it?

🕳️ Welcome to the Low-Ticket Funnel Cult

If you’ve ever bought a $47 course on “How to Sell a $47 Course,” congrats—you’ve unknowingly joined the Low-Ticket Funnel Cult.

It starts innocently. You want to monetize your knowledge. You launch a mini-course. Then another. Then a bundle. Soon you’re trapped in an infinite loop of “sell the course that sells the course”—like a Russian nesting doll made of false leverage and checkout timers.

It feels productive. It feels scalable.
But here’s the inconvenient truth:

You’re not building a business. You’re playing multi-level monetization.

🏰 You Built a Beautiful Business… On a Sandcastle

From the outside, it looks like success.

Funnel. Email welcome sequence. Cohort waitlist.

The vibe is “Startup Founder”—the bank account says “freelancer with a fancy Typeform.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most creators are trapped at the bottom of a pyramid made of cheap courses, recycled frameworks, and audiences who are also trying to sell cheap courses and recycled frameworks.

It’s creator cannibalism.

Like economic bubbles, this loop looks productive… until demand dries up or the audience moves on to the next dopamine hit.

And when you zoom out, you realize something scary:

Most low-ticket courses aren’t products.
They’re artifacts of mimicry.

Not built for demand.
Built for familiarity.

👉 You followed a template.
👉 You got a sale or two.
👉 Then it flopped.

And now? You’re stuck in a funnel with no floor.

🎭 Why It Feels Real But Isn’t

Like a Ponzi scheme, the illusion of progress depends on volume, not value.

You hustle harder.
Build more.
Sell faster.

But you’re not stacking assets.
You’re stacking exhaustion.

Economists call this a “low-efficiency flywheel.”
Energy input ≠ durable output.

In this system, content is the bait.
Courses are the hook.
But the real product… is you.

And here’s the kicker:
Once you’re out of dopamine or novelty, your entire system collapses.
(Not unlike subprime mortgages. Except the only foreclosure here is on your calendar and creativity.)

📉 Fragile Monetization ≠ Scalable Business

Low-ticket doesn’t mean bad.
But low-leverage is a silent killer.

If every launch feels like you’re reinventing the wheel, that’s not growth.
That’s economic friction.

What we’re seeing is the velocity of information without the structure of assets.

The solution isn’t just to charge more.
It’s to build smarter, modular, scalable info product models that don’t collapse under your own effort.

(More on that in The Knowledge Liquidity Model →)

🛠 What I’m Building to Escape This Trap

This isn’t me roasting the ecosystem from the sidelines.
I’ve burned the candle, launched the course, and danced for the algorithm.

Then I took a sabbatical.

Researhced & Worked with creators.

And realized we all kept tripping on the same broken stair:

Selling the wrong product for the wrong stage.

So now? I’m testing a new framework.
One built on info product tiers, economic utility, and IP-as-asset structures.

More on that soon. But first…

💣 The Real Reason Most Info Products Don’t Scale

Or: Why Your $47 Masterclass Is Just a Well-Decorated PDF Grave

Let’s start with an economic truth bomb:

Most info products are not products.

They’re presentations.

And worse? They’re dead-end containers of content—not compounding knowledge.

🧪 You Built a Funnel. Not an Asset.

This isn’t a dunk. It’s a diagnosis.

Creators are told: “Package your knowledge! Make it passive!”

So they record 47 hours of slide decks and call it a course.

What they actually built is a lesson plan with a landing page.

A digital binder. A knowledge burrito.

Something that sells once, then sits quietly in the corner while Stripe forgets your name.

But the market isn’t paying for your bullet points.

It pays for transformation, leverage, or status.

No leverage = no scale.

No transformation = no retention.

No outcome = no sales.

In other words:

Offer ≠ Outcome.

🎭 The Myth of “Value” = More Videos

Here’s the kicker:
You could have 10 modules, a Miro board, 3 Notion templates, and a partridge in a pear tree…

It still won’t scale if it doesn’t function like an asset.

Unlike scalable digital products like software or systems that unlock compound utility, your course ends where it starts: one buyer, one use case, one-time revenue. No compounding. No ecosystem.

This is where most creator monetization myths go to die.

⚡ Which led me to a painful realization during my sabbatical…

Maybe we’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along.

Not how much you can teach—
…but how valuable your transformation becomes over time.

Which brings us to the real question:

🧬 What They Should’ve Built Instead

“If your info product can be copied by ChatGPT, it was never a business to begin with.” — scribbled on a sticky note next to my burnt-out Notion dashboard during sabbatical.

After years of helping creators fix their broken creator monetization models and falling face-first into my own, I’ve finally realized:

The problem was never the content. It was the structure.

The Great FrankenCourse Delusion

Most creators are duct-taping together courses like Frankenstein’s monster—patchworked tutorials, generic templates, stolen workshop replays.

What should they’ve been building instead?

Flagship Info Products. Something that compounds, scales, and—this is key—can’t be ripped by a $20/month AI.

In economic terms, their product isn’t an asset.

It’s an expense disguised as a funnel.

Courses are often depreciating commodities (source: internal case study from 37 failed launches; also, vibes).

They don’t hold value. They don’t scale.

They’re sold like tech but behave like tomatoes.

What Actually Compounds

High-leverage products—like DWY offers, implementation systems, or IP licensing models—act more like assets than content containers.

They solve specific problems, deliver tangible transformation, and create asymmetry of value (source: Clay Christensen’s theory on Jobs to be Done).

They also let you escape the low-ticket hustle treadmill and actually build wealth.
Not just revenue. Wealth. (A distinction most gurus forget.)

“One-off downloads are a sprint. Scalable digital products are infrastructure.”

This shift didn’t come from theory.

It came from watching creators burn out, pivot, and try to escape by selling harder.

I’ve been inside those inboxes.

It’s not pretty.

Now, I’m quietly testing new info product models with a few founders during my sabbatical—less course bro, more intellectual architect.

🧠 TL;DR: The Course Isn’t the Business

Most creators aren’t failing because their content sucks.
They’re failing because they’re selling the wrong info products.

Courses are the easy button the industry keeps pressing—and it’s jamming.

The real wealth? Comes from building scalable digital products that act like assets, not exhaust fumes.

→ Start with IA you can package and provide, not lessons you need to beg people to finish.
→ Ditch the creator-funnel-industrial-complex.
→ Build offer ecosystems that compound, not collapse.

“If you’re tired of sprinting, maybe it’s time to design a system that walks for you.”

🧨 Conclusion: The Real Product Isn’t a Product—It’s a Paradigm Shift

What if your “course problem” isn’t a marketing issue, but a misdiagnosis of value?

What if you’re not in the wrong niche—but operating in the wrong economic model?

This is what I’m now exploring—after burning out twice, helping creators privately during my sabbatical, and realizing the creator business model problems aren’t solved by another fancy funnel or high-ticket coach.

They’re solved by rethinking what an info product actually is.

Not a container.

Not a video file.

But a scalable digital asset that compounds over time.

“Monetization isn’t about how loud you shout—it’s about how long your ideas echo.”

If you’ve ever felt stuck, this isn’t your fault.

But now, it’s your move.

(Writing this piece has taken me upwards of 32+ 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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