Shipping a $19 Product

I shipped a product. It’s called The Actual Stack Kit, it’s a $19 download for Budget Homelab, and it sells through Kit, the email platform that used to be ConvertKit. Nineteen dollars isn’t a lot of money. It’s still a lot of steps.

Here’s what it took to get from “I have a zip file” to “you can buy the zip file.”

The zip file, minus my network

First I built the buyer zip. Then I made sure none of my stuff was in it.

A homelab kit gets built out of a homelab, and this one came out of mine. So before it went anywhere, I ran a leak audit on the zip. No real DNS zones, no internal IPs, no secrets. Anywhere something real used to be, there’s now a sample zone like example.lan. Your network is your business. Mine is mine. The kit is there to help you build yours.

Tag the buyer, then email the buyer

When someone buys, Kit adds a buyer tag. A Kit automation watches for that tag and kicks off a 3-email follow-up sequence. Day 1, day 6, day 14.

That’s simple on purpose. Buy the thing, get the thing, hear from me a few times about using the thing.

The sender address problem

I run several sites out of one shared Kit account. Most of the time that’s fine. The catch is that purchase receipts come from the account’s default sender, not from whichever site the product belongs to. So the real question was what else I’d be changing if I changed the default.

Before I touched it, I went through every form and every sequence and checked which sender each one actually used. Only then did I switch the default to a [email protected] address. It was the most boring part of the launch. It was also the part most likely to go wrong quietly if I’d skipped it.

Buying my own product for $0

Next was a $0 test purchase. Checkout, receipt, tag, sequence. I wanted to see what a buyer sees, in the order they see it, before a real person had to.

Buying something from yourself for nothing is a weird feeling. I’d still recommend it.

A landing page, and then linking to it

The landing page went live, and checkout lives at five30am.kit.com. Then I linked the landing page from the top pages on Budget Homelab. A product page nobody can find from the rest of the site is just a very well formatted secret.

Then I told people

The last step was a launch broadcast to subscribers. That’s the whole list: zip, audit, tag, sequence, senders, test purchase, landing page, links, broadcast.

I’m not going to tell you how it’s selling. That’s not what this post is about. It’s about how a $19 download has about as many moving parts as something that costs a lot more. The low price just makes you feel a little silly about how careful you were.

If you’ve got a homelab and want to see what’s actually running in mine, The Actual Stack Kit is right there. It’s $19. It’s the actual stack.