The best digital product to sell is the tool you built for yourself
Idea
The most durable digital product is the workflow you built for your own daily work; Ryan Dozer dogfooded Claude skills inside his agency, then packaged the same stack and sold it passively.
Notes & Verified Quotes
QUOTE: “I’m not just selling these as a digital product, Chris. I’m actually using these in my day-to-day work.” — src: scratch/sources/claude-skills-side-hustle.txt | source: https://youtu.be/quYKZushRPo t=467 QUOTE: “You took what you were already spending your time on and you monetized it.” — src: scratch/sources/claude-skills-side-hustle.txt | source: https://youtu.be/quYKZushRPo t=1385 QUOTE: “It’s made over $3,000 just passively as a digital product.” — src: scratch/sources/claude-skills-side-hustle.txt | source: https://youtu.be/quYKZushRPo t=35 QUOTE: “I would consider myself non-technical. I don’t come from a technical background.” — src: scratch/sources/claude-skills-side-hustle.txt | source: https://youtu.be/quYKZushRPo t=1062
- Source: Ryan Dozer on The Kerner Office (TKO Pod). He built ~20-25 Claude skills (one per marketing task: SEO blog writer, email writer, thumbnail designer, anti-slop) for his own agency work, then packaged them into a “$99 skill stack.”
- He even used his own skills to build the product’s landing page (web-designer skill) and wire up Stripe — “dog fooding”: using his product to sell his product, a flywheel.
- The stack was a by-product of real usage, not a thing he set out to build to sell. Sequence: build for an audience of one → notice it solves a problem others have → package.
- Angle (mine): the order matters. People try to invent a product, then find users. Dogfooding inverts it: the tool earns its keep on your own work first (so it’s already proven and you’d keep using it even if it never sold), and only then becomes a product. The internal utility is the moat.
- Caveat to be honest about: “$3,000 passively” is a modest, early number from a marketer with an existing audience and distribution — not a get-rich claim. The transferable lesson is the sequence, not the figure.
Outline
Draft — LinkedIn (master)
Draft — X (variant)
Final
Related
- Your years of expertise are one file away from being a product — sibling idea from the same talk: what you package (your expertise as a file); this note is the how (build it for yourself first)
- Claude Code - The Side Project That Got 2 Likes — the canonical dogfooding story: Boris built Claude Code for his own daily use, adoption followed
- From Side Hustle to One Million ARR — internal use and a side project compounding into a real, monetized product
- Free Stuff Better Than Their Paid Stuff — the same flywheel: use your own work to create the content that sells the work