In the last year or so, I’ve built some “mini apps” in Google Sheets. For example, a daily weight tracker for weight management/loss/gain, a per-customer and per-project time tracker for freelancing, and a few more - just for my own use.
But it occurs to me that those tools might be good for me to hop on the digital product sales bandwagon. They’re certainly better than some Etsy planner or whatever digital products the Instagram “wealth” influencers are pushing these days.
My questions are these:
1.1. Since these tools are built in Google Sheet, do you know of a way that I can protect customers from sharing the tools with people who haven’t paid for them? It’s very easy to share access to a Google Sheet and make a copy for yourself.
1.2. Or should I not concern myself with piracy at all? I remember I read in a Tim Ferriss book that you don’t need to bother with stopping piracy, because those who pirate your product was never going to pay for it anyway, and pirated products are, in and of themselves, a kind of advertising.
- What do you think of this idea in general? Digital products conceptually, but also in the form of Google Sheet apps
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- Just disable the ability to share the sheets doc. I’m not sure if u can block copying too though.
- Tbh people will find a way to pirate it if they want to hard enough that just comes with selling online digital products.
Go for it!
I recently released my first Google Sheet product (A calculator for freelancers to figure out how much money they need to make and the rate they should charge in order to get there).
I got a lot of sales when I first launched it. I have a way to track the links and see how many times the link is clicked. I have not noticed any abnormalities so far.
I also am not worried. If someone wants to steal it, well have fun! I hope it brings them value. You could waste a lot of energy and time trying to keep people from pirating your tool, or you could use that time to better support the paying users. That is the approach I am taking.
As far as “is it a good idea”, yes! I was surprised at how many people would pay for a tool like this. It beat my expectations on sales in the first couple of hours. I say go for it! You already have the tool built.
On that note, do you think a digital book of the twenty years I lived would sell? I would write about the things in life that accumulated pain and what I learned from them. New to this.