Digital products for engineers and technical professionals: Five formats that sell and three that do not

digital products the four paths

Engineers and technical professionals are told, repeatedly, that they should "create a course". It is the default advice for anyone with expertise, and it is mostly wrong for them. The formats that actually sell to a technical audience are narrower, more practical and less glamorous than a course, and the people best placed to make them are the ones who have spent years inside a specific problem rather than the ones with the best camera.

This post is for the engineer, the analyst, the scientist, the project manager or the specialist who has a body of working knowledge and wants to turn part of it into a digital product alongside the job. It sets out five formats that sell to technical buyers, three that reliably do not, how to price them, how to test one in a weekend, and where the first buyers come from. It is written from what I have seen work in the digital products path on this site and from a decade and a half of being the technical buyer myself.

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Why the technical buyer is different

A technical buyer is not looking for inspiration. They have a task, usually with a deadline, and they will pay to finish it faster, with fewer mistakes, or with less arguing about the method. They distrust polish and trust specificity. They will pay £40 for a spreadsheet that does one calculation correctly and refuse a £400 course that promises to make them a better engineer. And they buy from people who have obviously done the thing, which is the one advantage a working professional has over every content creator in the market.

That changes what a product needs to be. It does not need production values. It needs to be correct, specific, and built around a job the buyer already has to do. The five formats below share that shape.

Five formats that sell

The calculator or model

A spreadsheet or small tool that performs one calculation your field does repeatedly and gets wrong repeatedly: a tolerance stack-up, a cable sizing check, a cost-of-quality model, a project risk register with the scoring built in. The buyer is paying for your assumptions and your validation, not the arithmetic. Typical price: £20 to £80, sold many times.

The template pack

The documents your discipline produces on every project, pre-structured and annotated: a design review checklist, a validation plan, a supplier audit template, a technical report skeleton with the sections a reviewer expects. Sold as a bundle. The value is the years of reviews that shaped the structure. Typical price: £30 to £150.

The narrow tool course

Not "learn data analysis" but "the twelve things you need from this specific software to do this specific job in this industry". Two hours of screen recordings, no face, organised around tasks. Technical buyers pay for narrowness because narrowness is what saves them time. Typical price: £60 to £250.

The exam or certification prep

Every technical field has qualifications people sit under pressure: chartership applications, professional certifications, regulatory exams, software vendor accreditations. Worked examples, past-question walkthroughs and marking-scheme notes from someone who has passed sell steadily, year after year, because a new cohort arrives every year. Typical price: £25 to £120.

The paid briefing

A monthly or quarterly digest for a narrow industry: what changed in the standard, the regulation, the supplier landscape, the tooling, with your reading of what it means. Small audiences pay well for this because the alternative is reading everything themselves. It is the slowest of the five to build and the most durable once built. Typical price: £5 to £30 a month.

The prices are ranges seen across the digital products path rather than rules, and they are deliberately modest. The pattern across all five is the same: a specific job, a buyer who already has it, and a product that is obviously made by someone who has done it. The post on which product to build gives the general framework; these are the formats it points to for technical people.

Three formats that do not

The generic introduction course, "Fundamentals of X for beginners", fails because the beginner market is enormous, crowded with free material, and not who a working professional should sell to. Your advantage is depth, and a fundamentals course throws it away. The opinion ebook, a hundred pages of what you think about your industry, fails because technical buyers do not pay for opinions; they pay for things they can use on Monday. And the "everything I know" mega-course fails because it takes a year to build, cannot be tested before it exists, and asks the buyer to commit before they trust you. Every one of these is a product you would build if you had a year and no job. You have evenings and a job, which is a reason to build the narrow thing first.

"A technical buyer does not want to be taught. They want to be finished. Sell the finishing."

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Testing one in a weekend

None of the five formats should be built before someone has agreed to pay for it. The test is the same reversible bet used everywhere on this site, scaled to a digital product, and it costs a weekend rather than money.

The weekend test

Saturday morning: write the one-page description

What the product is, the job it finishes, who it is for, what is inside, the price. If you cannot write it in a page, the product is not narrow enough yet.

Saturday afternoon: build the smallest real piece

One tab of the calculator, one template of the pack, one lesson of the course. Enough that a buyer can see it is real and judge the quality.

Sunday: offer it to ten people who have the job

Former colleagues, people in your professional network, members of the forum or group where your discipline talks. A pre-order at the full price, delivery in three weeks. Not a survey, not "would you buy this", a payment.

Sunday evening: apply the criteria you wrote first

Three or more pre-orders: build it. One or two: change the price or the scope and ask ten more. None: the description was wrong or the job was not painful enough. Refund anyone who paid and keep the notes.

The ten people matter more than the product. A technical product finds its first buyers through the people who already know the maker does the work, not through a marketplace search. The post on the first consulting client describes the same network from the services side, and the two paths share the first step: a short, specific email to someone who has the problem.

A worked example: the calculator that pays for itself in ten sales

Illustrative numbers for a £45 engineering calculator

A mechanical engineer builds a tolerance stack-up spreadsheet with worked examples and a one-page method note. Three evenings to build, one weekend to test. Ten pre-orders at £45 return £450 before it exists, which is the signal to finish it. Platform and payment fees of around 10% leave roughly £40 a sale.

At four sales a week, a modest rate for a narrow tool in a large discipline, that is about 200 sales and £8,000 net in a year, from a product built in roughly 15 hours.

Illustrative only; fees, prices and sales rates vary widely. On a £52,000 salary the £8,000 profit is taxed at 40%, so about £3,200 goes to HMRC and £4,800 stays. Set the 40% aside from the first sale.

The example is deliberately unglamorous, and that is the point. Nobody will write about the tolerance calculator, but two hundred engineers will buy it because it saves them an afternoon and a review comment, and it will still be selling in three years with an update or two. The mega-course would have taken the same engineer a year and might never have found its first buyer.

Where technical buyers gather

The first ten buyers come from your network. The next two hundred come from wherever your discipline already talks: professional body forums and member groups, the LinkedIn groups and hashtags for your specialism, the subreddit or Discord for your software, the comment threads under the standards bodies' updates, and the conference you attend anyway. In each of those places, answering questions with genuine expertise for a few months, and mentioning the tool only when it is the honest answer, builds the trust that technical buyers require before they pay. It is slow, it costs nothing, and it is the marketing channel every content creator is locked out of because they have not done the work.

Pricing, delivery and the admin

Price on the value of finishing the job, then check it against what similar products in your field charge, and lean slightly high. Technical buyers read a low price as a low-quality signal. Deliver through any of the established digital product platforms, which handle payment, download and VAT on digital sales for you; compare their fees for your expected volume rather than picking the most famous. Sell the first version as a fixed one-off purchase, and only consider subscription once the paid briefing format has proved there is a recurring audience.

On tax, a digital product is trading income. Once gross receipts pass £1,000 in a tax year you register for self-assessment by 5 October after the tax year ends, and the profit is taxed at your marginal rate on top of your salary. Keep a separate account from the first sale. And read your employment contract's outside-work clause before you publish anything that could be read as using your employer's material; the product should be built from your discipline, never from your employer's documents.

Why this is the technical professional's path

I chose e-commerce, and I have written elsewhere about why. But when I ran the four-question comparison, digital products came second, and for a technical professional with a specialism they can teach I think it often comes first. It needs no stock and no capital. It sells while you are in a meeting. It compounds, because a calculator sold two hundred times is the same calculator. And it is built from the one thing an engineer has that no content creator can copy: years inside a specific problem, with the scars to prove it.

Pick the narrowest job your field does badly. Build the smallest real piece of the fix. Offer it to ten people who have the job. That is the whole method, and it fits in a weekend.