Before · After
Teach the craft, sell the tool
Give away the method in public. The product is the faster way to do what you just taught. Students become customers because you already changed how they work.
Education builds trust at scale. It also ranks. A tutorial that ranks is a salesperson that never sleeps.
How to run it
- 01Publish the how-to you wish existed when you started.
- 02Put the product at the end of the tutorial as the obvious next step, not an ambush.
- 03Keep a consistent voice across free and paid.
- 04Update the canon. Dead tutorials leak trust.
In the wild
Patio11's essays sold software and later a career. Tailwind's docs and videos sold a framework. Indie courses that actually teach outperform launch-week discounts.
Used by · 4
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
SEO + copy · charge more
SEO, copy, and charging more — the Kalzumeus school of software marketing
Arvid Kahl
@arvidkahl
Embedded · audience-first
Audience-first SaaS inside a community you already belong to
Justin Welsh
@thejustinwelsh
Content system · LinkedIn
Turning a personal content system into a one-person media company
Rob Walling
@robwalling
Bootstrap compounder · email
Start Small, Stay Small — bootstrap compounding as a go-to-market