Chilton Tools

And just one month after I came up with my idea!

It took a bit of willpower to take the plunge and finally deciding to publish it. I’ve read your first product has to suck.

My MVP consists of a worksheet to overcome your fear of failure and replace it for a love of challenge, by changing your mindset. I mixed techniques from various sources: Carol Dweck’s Mindset book, Dr. David Burns Three Column Technique and the Inquiry Based Stress Reduction technique. I’m trying to incorporate trusted sourced with enough evidence to back them up.

The initial plan was to publish it on Etsy, because that’s where my audience hangs out. I couldn’t do it because the platform is not available in my country yet. I tried to set up a direct PayPal button but I had problems with that too, since I’m not in my home country. I had success publishing it in Gumroad.

The product is free for now, with a suggested price of US$5. The purpose is to gather feedback from the initial users.
4 people already downloaded the worksheet. Which is pretty neat, because I just posted a lousy tweet on my account (Thanks @SankethYS for the RT!).

Now I’m setting up a website and a newsletter to make a proper launch and start building my email list. I'm excited to see how this goes!

Wouldn't it be great if non-fiction books came with a worksheet?

Reading is not enough to learn.

I came to this realization while I was locked up in my ASQ room in Thailand. So I decided right there and then that I'll build tools to apply what you read in self-development books an simple and effective way.

I'm starting with the growth mindset topic. Here's why. Last year I read Carol Dweck's Mindset. When I finished, I was... disappointed. The "growth mindset" concept was brilliant! But the book didn't mentioned much about HOW to actually achieve it. I felt this was a powerful concept that could really help myself and, most importantly, my friends and family: How could I explain the concept in an easy way to my mom? How can I help her teach the concept to my little brother?

This time I really believe I have the knowledge and the skills to build something useful:

• I know a lot about the subject and keep learning about it.
• I've created a lot of self-development tools for myself (forms, journals, trackers, GTD systems).

I believe there's a business opportunity in this too: the learning, self-development and e-commerce market is still growing.

I'm using the sales in workbooks, journal / planners and notion / spreadsheet templates as a proxy on what I could sell. I'll be making worksheets and journals to test my idea.

I have a lot of plans for more complex products involving Notion templates, email sequences, flash cards and videos for the future. But I'll try to make tests with simple products first.

I'll focus on the most promising channels first to gain traction early on (there are a lot of segments in this audience, so this one will be tricky). I'll follow the 50% rule of traction: spend 50% of my time on making something people want and 50% on distribution.