The 6 Product Creation Steps I Like to Use Before I Think About Marketing

I’m going to tell you something that might sound backwards in today’s online business world about digital products, product creation and marketing.

I don’t think about marketing until I have a finished product in my hands. Yes, I said it.

Not a sales page. Not a launch strategy. Not even an email list to send to.

I build the actual thing first. The workbook. The course. The guide. The toolkit. Whatever digital product I’m creating, I finish it before I write a single word of marketing copy.

This approach confuses people sometimes. We’ve been taught that we need to build an audience first, validate our idea with pre-sales, and have our entire funnel mapped out before we create anything. But here’s what I’ve learned after years of watching creative women get stuck in the planning phase: you can’t market something that doesn’t exist yet. And more importantly, you can’t truly understand what you’ve created until you’ve actually created it.

Why I Start With Product Creation, Not Marketing

I noticed a pattern with women who came to me excited about creating a digital product. They had the knowledge. They had the expertise. They knew they could help people.

But then they’d get caught up in questions about branding, positioning, target market demographics, and which social media platform to use. They’d spend months building a website and an email list before they had anything to offer. Some of them never actually created the product because they were so busy preparing to market it.

I take a different approach. I believe in creating first and marketing second because the act of product creation teaches you things about your digital product that no amount of market research can reveal. AND it’s already difficult to even finish creating your product most of the time.

When you’re actually building your workbook or recording your course lessons, you discover what you really want to say. You find the natural flow of your teaching. You uncover gaps you didn’t know existed and connections you hadn’t anticipated.

Your product tells you what it wants to be. But only if you give it space to emerge before you try to sell it.

The Product Creation Stages (Before Marketing)

My product creation framework (called the SAC Method) has seven distinct stages, and marketing doesn’t show up until the very last one. Each stage builds on the previous one, moving you from idea to finished product.

Stage One: Ideation is where you figure out what you actually want to create. You take inventory of what you know, what people ask you about, and what problems you’ve solved. In  my community for women 50 and older, we use a quiz to help identify which of 14 different digital product types might suit your expertise. The goal is clarity: moving from “I know a lot about this topic” to “I’m creating THIS specific product for THESE specific people.”

Stage Two: Content Creation is where you organize the knowledge scattered across your brain, old work documents, emails, and voice memos. You choose your teaching style and outline your product. Then you write what I call your “dirty draft.” This is not polished content. This is getting the raw material out of your head and onto paper. We use highlighters and comments and lots of notes to ourselves. We keep it messy so we keep moving forward.

Stage Three: Prototyping is where your idea becomes something you can touch and test. You turn your dirty draft into a working version that someone could actually use, even if it’s rough. Sometimes we start with paper, spreading things on the floor or using index cards on the wall. The real magic happens when you share it with actual people and get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t.

Stage Four: Production is where you turn that tested prototype into your final version. You clean up the content, fix the typos, make it look professional. You add helpful extras like welcome notes or quick start guides. This is not about perfection. This is about finished.

Stage Five: Pricing is where you look at what it costs to create your product, what similar products cost, and what feels fair to you for the value you’re providing. You set a starting price that you can say out loud without apologizing.

Stage Six: Systematizing is the tech phase where you set up the systems that let you actually sell and deliver your product. You choose a selling platform, connect your payment method, and test that everything works. You also document your basic processes for handling refunds, customer questions, and access issues.

Only Then Do You Market Your Product

After all six of those product creation stages are complete, you move into Launching your digital product. This is finally where marketing enters the picture.

But notice what you’re marketing now. You’re not marketing an idea or a concept or a promise. You’re marketing a real digital product that exists, that you’ve tested, that you know works. You can describe it accurately because you’ve built it. You can answer questions confidently because you understand every component.

Your sales page practically writes itself because you’re not inventing claims about what your product might do. You’re describing what it actually does. Your launch timeline makes sense because you know exactly what you’re sharing. You’re not scrambling to finish modules while people are buying.

What This Product Creation Approach Changes

Creating before marketing prevents so many problems I see creative women encounter.

It prevents you from over-promising because you know exactly what your product delivers. It prevents you from under-pricing because you understand its value after investing the work to create it. It prevents tech panic during launch because your systems are already tested. Most importantly, it prevents you from getting stuck forever in the planning phase. When creation comes first, you have to actually make the thing.

Now, I need to be honest. Even though I’ve described these stages in order, the actual process is messier than that. Sometimes you’re prototyping and realize you need to go back to content creation, or even all the way back to Ideation to work things out. The stages aren’t a rigid checklist. They’re a flexible framework that meets you where you are and gets you into action.  

Why This Matters for Women in Their Second Act

There’s something particularly important about this approach for women in their fifties, sixties, and beyond. We’ve spent decades building expertise. We’ve navigated career transitions, family changes, personal transformations. We have knowledge that matters.

But many of us also carry voices from earlier in our lives that told us to wait our turn, not to be too bold, to make sure we were perfect before we put ourselves out there. Those voices can keep us stuck in the preparation phase indefinitely.

Creating first breaks that pattern. It says your knowledge right now is enough. It says the messy process of making something real matters more than having everything figured out in advance. It says you don’t need permission or perfect credentials. You just need to start building.