In the previous chapter, we completed the mindset upgrade from "service provider" to "product manager." We learned how to design a "lean and focused" product that leads users through a specific "transformation."
Yet standing on the road to "transformation" is one of humanity's most powerful innate traits: laziness.
People crave results but despise the process. People want to learn to paint but don't want to begin with tedious sketching drills. People want to make beautiful slides but don't want to study layout and design theory. People want to write viral articles but don't want to endure the torment of a blank document.
Traditional "course" products essentially teach users "how to build a boat." They demand that users invest substantial time and energy in learning theory and practicing skills before they can finally cross the river. This is the "hard but right" path.
But the market also offers a lighter, far more seductive path: sell the user a "boat ticket" outright — or even a "ready-made boat."
This is the "sell shovels" strategy.
The metaphor traces back to the nineteenth-century American gold rush. In that frenzy, the people who actually got rich were not the anxious prospectors toiling in the dirt, but the merchants selling them shovels, jeans, tents, and water.
The same logic holds in today's knowledge economy.
- When everyone wants to become a "video blogger" (a prospector), you can sell them video-editing templates, BGM music packs, and subtitle presets (the shovels).
- When everyone wants to become a "self-media writer" (a prospector), you can sell them Notion writing templates, viral-headline banks, and article-structure SOPs (the shovels).
The core value proposition of a "shovel" product is simple: "Don't learn, just use. Save your time, skip the process, go straight to the result."
In this chapter, we will dig into the lucrative philosophy of "selling shovels." We will learn:
- The psychology of shovels (6.1): Why do these seemingly low-tech tools and templates sometimes outsell a full, systematic course?
- The craft of making shovels (6.2): How do you use "information asymmetry" — organizing and curating public information — to turn it into a valuable paid product?
- The sales method for shovels (6.3): How can "crowd-funded development" reduce upfront investment and test engagement?
Get ready — we're going to open the most profitable "general store" in the gold rush.
6.1 Use It As Is: Why Do SOPs, Notion Templates, and Design Presets Sell Better Than Courses?
Imagine you're a content creator. Tonight you must hand in a piece, but you have no ideas, and you're staring at a blank Word document, scratching your head.
Two products sit in front of you:
- Product A: A 499-yuan online course called "Become a Writing Master in 30 Days" — 20 lessons that promise to systematically improve your writing.
- Product B: A 49-yuan paid document called "100 Viral Article Opening Templates" — promising to help you find inspiration and write your first paragraph within five minutes.
Which one would you buy?
I'd bet that in this "must turn it in tonight" emergency, 99% of people would pick Product B without hesitation.
This simple thought experiment lays bare the underlying psychological secret of why "shovel" products fly off the shelves.
6.1.1 The Three Core Advantages of "Shovel" Products
Advantage One: It Delivers "Instant Gratification"
- Psychological principle: The brain's "reward center" is innately drawn to things that yield returns immediately. A course offers "delayed gratification" — you must study and practice for a long time before seeing any effect. A template offers "instant gratification" — I pay, download, copy, paste, and my problem is half-solved on the spot.
- What it reveals: "Shovel" products don't sell knowledge; they sell "certainty" and "efficiency." They wrench the user out of the confusion of "What do I do now?" and into the clarity of "So that's how it's done!" This felt shift from disorder to order is itself extremely valuable.
Advantage Two: It Lowers the User's "Action Cost" and "Decision Cost"
- Action cost: A course demands that users pour in substantial "cognitive energy" to understand, digest, and convert knowledge. A template reduces this cost to nearly nothing — all the user has to do is "fill in the blanks" and "make small tweaks."
- Decision cost: When you provide an SOP, you are effectively making decisions for the user. "First do this, then do that." Clear instructions free users from "choice paralysis," letting them operate like "assembly-line workers" — switch off their minds and simply execute. For users under stress and anxiety, this is a profound relief.
Advantage Three: Lower Pricing, Higher Conversion
- Product positioning: "Shovel" products typically serve as the entry rung on a "value ladder." Their price is low enough to trigger an "impulse purchase" and secure the user's first paid experience.
- Trust leverage: Once a user truly solves an urgent problem with your 49-yuan template, their trust in you skyrockets. They think: "If a 49-yuan template is this powerful, imagine the treasures inside his 499-yuan course!" That little "shovel" becomes the perfect "calling card" for selling your far more expensive core product.
6.1.2 Which Knowledge Is Best Suited to Being "Shovelized"?
Nearly every field of knowledge offers a chance for "shovelization." The key is to find the bits that are "high-frequency, universal, and formulaic."
Processes and Checklists
- Essence: Break a complex task into a sequence of foolproof, step-by-step instructions.
- Product forms: SOP documents, PDF checklists, project-management templates.
- Examples:
- "The 21-Item Checklist Before Publishing a Short Video on Douyin"
- "The SOP Flowchart for Launching a Podcast from Zero to One"
- "Standard Procedures and Precautions for Freelancers Signing Client Contracts"
Templates and Frameworks
- Essence: Provide a "fill-in-the-blank" structure into which users simply drop their own content.
- Product forms: Notion/Feishu/Roam Research templates, PPT/Keynote design templates, Word résumé templates, email-marketing copy templates.
- Examples:
- Notion templates: This is currently the hottest "shovel" category. You can design templates for different scenarios, such as a "Personal Annual Review System," a "Content Creator's Topic Bank and Draft Management System," or a "Freelancer Client Relationship Management System."
- Design presets: Photographers can sell Lightroom/Capture One color presets; video editors can sell Final Cut Pro/Premiere transition effects, LUTs, and subtitle-bar presets.
- Copy templates: "50 Email Subject Lines That Double Your Open Rates," "Xiaohongshu's Viral 'Two-Section' Note Structure Template."
Asset and Resource Packs
- Essence: Bundle the "raw materials" users need for their own creation.
- Product forms: Design asset packs (icons, fonts, textures), commercially usable image/video libraries, BGM background-music packs, industry-research data packs.
- Examples:
- "A 100-Image Royalty-Free Vintage HD Image Pack"
- "A 30-Track White Noise Audio Pack Designed for Meditation Videos"
- "The 2023 China New Consumer Market Trends Report with Data Charts (PPT)"
Action Workshop: Prospect Your Own "Shovel" Gold Mine
- Return to your consulting practice: In solving problems for clients, have you developed a personal workflow? Have you built your own spreadsheets, checklists, or templates? Unearth them! These are your most natural "shovel" prototypes.
- Examine your daily work: In your own field, which tasks do you repeat every day until they've become muscle memory? Can you translate that "muscle memory" into an SOP that an outsider could follow?
- Observe beginners' struggles: Browse the communities and forums in your field. What are the most common, most "give-me-it-for-free" questions newcomers ask?
- "Can anyone give me a résumé template?"
- "Any tool recommendations for building a portfolio website?"
- "Can someone share a format for writing a weekly report?"
- Behind every one of these begging requests lies a "shovel" need that can be productized.
Remember: a "shovel's" value lies not in "creating" knowledge but in "organizing" and "simplifying" it. You are not playing the inventor; you are playing an efficient, considerate "librarian" or "toolbox organizer." And that, precisely, is the core competency we'll explore in the next section.
6.2 Monetizing the Information Gap: Organization Is Itself Value — How to Profit from "Curated Resource Packs"
When many people imagine a "shovel" product, they fall into a trap: "All of this is free online. Why would anyone pay me?"
This is an extremely common — and extremely mistaken — "producer" mindset.
Hold on to a paradigm-shifting insight: in an age of information overload, information itself is worthless. It is the "structure" and the "curation" of information that are worth a fortune.
Users pay for your "curated resource pack" not because they can't find the information, but because they lack the time, the energy, and the professional judgment to sift that 1% of truly useful, high-quality, interconnected content out of a vast sea of junk.
You are not selling information. You are selling:
- Your time: You spent dozens or hundreds of hours gathering, organizing, and verifying on the user's behalf.
- Your taste: You used your professional eye to pick out the best for the user.
- Your perspective: You arranged these scattered fragments into a logical framework, granting them new meaning and new usefulness.
Organizing, curating, structuring, interpreting — this is the "alchemy" of the information age.
6.2.1 Three Product Models of "Information Alchemy"
Model One: The "Information Navigator" — Create the "Ultimate Resource Guide for [Field]"
- Core value: Help users quickly build a complete cognitive map of an unfamiliar field, and hand them the highest-quality resources for getting started.
- Product forms: Paid documents, Notion pages, Knowledge Planet/Xiaobao Tong columns.
- How to do it:
- Choose a niche field: for instance, "Getting Started with Independent Podcasting," "Getting Started with AIGC Art," or "Getting Started with Web 3.0."
- Establish a cognitive framework: divide the field's knowledge into core modules. "Getting Started with Independent Podcasting," for example, might split into Positioning and Planning, Equipment and Recording, Editing and Post-Production, Publishing and Distribution, and Growth and Monetization.
- Gather and curate resources: for each module, find the three to five highest-quality resources on the web — these could be:
- Must-read articles/books
- Must-watch video tutorials
- Must-follow experts/bloggers
- Must-have tools/software
- Add your interpretation: This is the most critical step! Don't just list links. Write a "recommendation note" for every resource, telling the user:
- What is this?
- What problem does it solve?
- Why am I recommending it? (What makes it unique?)
- How do I suggest you use it?
- Pricing logic: Your price should roughly equal the value of the time you save the user. Say you spent 50 hours organizing, and your hourly rate is 100 yuan — the guide's intrinsic value is 5,000 yuan. You could price it at 99 or 199 yuan, letting users feel, "For the price of one meal, I bought fifty hours of an expert's work" — an exceptional bargain.
Model Two: The "Digital Scavenger" — Build a "Themed Asset/Inspiration Library"
- Core value: Hand creators ready-to-use "raw materials" or the "ammunition" that sparks inspiration.
- Product forms: Paid resource packs (delivered via cloud drive), Notion galleries, Eagle asset libraries.
- How to do it:
- Pick a creative medium: say, Xiaohongshu notes, short videos, or PPT design.
- Identify a high-frequency need: for example, Xiaohongshu "cover images," short-video "transition effects," or PPT "data charts."
- Collect and organize at scale:
- Example: Suppose you're building a "Xiaohongshu Viral Cover Image Inspiration Library." You could spend a month scrolling Xiaohongshu daily, screenshotting every high-performing, beautifully designed cover you encounter.
- Categorize and tag: This is where your value really shows. You need to build a multidimensional classification system across those hundreds or thousands of images — for instance:
- By industry: beauty, fashion, food, parenting...
- By style: minimalist, vintage, magazine...
- By layout: collage, single-image-with-large-text, dialogue-bubble...
- Package and deliver: Upload the organized images to a shared Notion gallery or Eagle asset library, with a clear category index.
- Your moat: Your edge lies not in the images themselves (they're public), but in your one-of-a-kind classification logic and organization system. That system is your "intellectual property."
Model Three: The "News Interpreter" — Produce "Trend Analyses of the Frontier"
- Core value: Help users in fast-shifting fields (like AI, Web 3, or investing) keep pace, filter out the noise, and grasp the essential developments.
- Product forms: Paid newsletters, paid communities, weekly/monthly reports.
- How to do it:
- Subscribe to primary sources: follow the field's top dozens of Twitter accounts, foreign-language blogs, and research reports.
- Read and filter daily/weekly: spend two to three hours a day reading everything, then pick out the three to five most important items.
- "Translate" and "interpret": Your job is not simply to render English into Chinese. It is to:
- Speak plainly: explain complex technical jargon with metaphors and language a newcomer can understand.
- Supply context: tell the user "Why does this matter? How does it connect to what came before?"
- Offer a viewpoint: give your own analysis and judgment — "What do I think this could mean? What here deserves our attention?"
- Business model: This product is perfectly suited to a subscription model. What users pay for is your continuing ability to save them time and cognitive effort. It is an outstanding model for building long-term trust and steady cash flow.
In sum: stop agonizing over the fact that "information is free." Your brain is the most powerful "information processor" there is. Through the three alchemies of navigation, scavenging, and interpretation, you can turn the free information that surrounds us into gold — into unique, valuable, paid products of your own.
6.3 Crowd-Funded Development: Pre-Sell First, Build Later, Develop Products with Your Customers' Money
All right — by now you've conceived a brilliant "shovel" product: maybe a Notion template, maybe a resource pack.
You're rubbing your hands, ready to sink dozens of hours into polishing it.
Stop!
Remember the MVP and the pre-sale from Section 5.2? That principle applies here too — in fact, it matters even more for "shovel" products.
"Crowd-funded development" is an advanced product-development and marketing strategy that fuses the "pre-sale" model with "community co-creation."
Its purpose is not simply to "test demand" or "collect payment early." Its deeper value lies in transforming your first batch of users from passive "consumers" into enthusiastic "co-creators" and "advocates."
6.3.1 Why Is "Crowd-Funded Development" a Nuclear Weapon for the Solopreneur?
Launch with Lower Upfront Investment
- A presale can postpone some development spending until demand receives preliminary validation, but it does not eliminate risk. Copywriting, acquisition, support, payment, refunds, and reputation are all upfront costs. A successful presale proves only that someone will pay for the promise, not that the product can be delivered at the promised cost, quality, and date.
Precise Demand Calibration
- You are no longer "guessing what users need"; users are "telling you to their face what they need." After a successful pre-sale but before formal delivery, you can set up a dedicated beta-testing group and interact deeply with your first batch of "angel investors" (the pre-order users).
- You can ask them: "Beyond the features I've already planned, what's the single feature you'd most like this template to add?"
- Real demand from actual paying customers is worth infinitely more than any of your wildest imaginings.
Igniting Word-of-Mouth
- The IKEA effect: experiments by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely found that assembly can raise participants' valuations of completed objects, with successful completion as an important boundary; the effect disappears when the task fails or the work is dismantled. The experiments concern valuation of self-made objects and do not directly prove that co-creation guarantees recommendation or repurchase. See the original study.
- Participation may increase psychological ownership, but it can also create burden, conflict, or disappointment when suggestions are not adopted. Whether ownership develops must be tested through later interviews, retention, and recommendation behavior.
- Early preorder customers can become feedback nodes. They become word-of-mouth nodes only if the product fulfills its promises and they choose to share it.
6.3.2 The Four-Step SOP for "Crowd-Funded Development"
Step 1: Create a "Minimum Sales Commitment"
- Core: Use a single page of copy to clearly define what your "shovel" is and what problem it solves for whom.
- Key elements:
- A hook headline: "Goodbye, Chaos: A Notion Client Management System Designed for Freelancers — Coming Soon!"
- A clear promise: "This template will let you manage your prospects, project progress, contracts, and payments in one place, freeing you from tedious administration so you can focus on creating."
- A core feature list: list three to five of the most essential modules. Crucially, add — "More features will be co-created based on feedback from our first users!" That single sentence is the key that opens the door to "co-creation."
- An irresistible "early bird" offer:
- Price discount: "Official price 199 yuan; for the first 50 co-creators, only 69 yuan."
- Exclusive perks: "As a co-creator, you'll receive: 1. Access to the exclusive beta-testing group and the right to make feature requests directly to me; 2. Lifetime free updates to all future versions of the product; 3. Your name listed on the product's 'Acknowledgments' page."
- A clear call to action: "Reserve your co-creator seat now — let's build the strongest tool together!"
Step 2: Set a "Success Metric" and Promote
- Before launch, set yourself a clear, realistic pre-sale target. For example: "Once twenty people have paid, I'll officially begin development."
- This target gives you a clear decision-making benchmark and a "gamified" source of motivation.
Step 3: Form the "Co-Creation Beta Group" and Switch on "Demand-Mining" Mode
- The moment the pre-sale target is reached, create a WeChat group or Discord channel and pull in every pre-order user.
- First order of business: express your gratitude and reaffirm their identity as "co-creators."
- Second order of business: launch a series of "votes" and "discussions" to make the development process "transparent."
- "On feature A, do you prefer option 1 or option 2?"
- "What are the three most maddening details when you manage clients?"
- "I've just built version 0.1 and want to invite three friends to try it and give me feedback."
- This process does more than make your product progressively better — it continuously "solidifies" your fan base.
Step 4: Deliver Formally — and Thank Your "Co-Creation Team"
- Deliver the final product within the agreed timeframe.
- On the product's introduction or "About" page, list all "co-creator" names prominently.
- Encourage them to share their experience on social media after receiving the product. Because they were so deeply involved, they'll be more than happy to "vouch" for you.
Chapter Summary: Become a Clever "Arms Dealer"
In this chapter, we learned a product strategy that is at once unconventional and immensely powerful — "selling shovels."
- We understood why "use-it-as-is" products like SOPs, templates, and presets can exploit human "laziness" to convert at higher rates than courses. What they sell is "efficiency" and "certainty."
- We mastered "information alchemy," learning how to turn free, public information into valuable "curated resource packs" through organization, curation, and structuring — monetizing the "information gap."
- We learned to use presales and community co-creation to reduce upfront investment and expose demand and delivery risks earlier. Whether the first users keep using and recommending the product remains a question for their actual behavior after the promise is fulfilled.
The "sell shovels" strategy perfectly embodies the essence of "productization thinking": begin with the end in mind, stay user-oriented, iterate quickly, and operate at low risk.
It may not carry the grandeur of "crafting a timeless course," but it is lighter, nimbler, and far better suited to the guerrilla-warfare survival rules of the solopreneur in the market.
Once you have accumulated a first batch of paying users who trust you through these "shovel" products — and secured a steady cash flow — you will have more ammunition and deeper insight to build that grander, more systematic core course.
By then, everything will fall into place.
For now, your arsenal is stocked with every kind of "shovel." In the next chapter, we'll learn how to build a fully automated, 24/7 "sales assembly line" for that arsenal.