Should you create a physical or digital product?

In the ever continuation of the review of The Four Hour Work Week, this one question has been bothering me. Should I create a digital or physical product? There are distinct advantages to just creating something digital that people can download and use instantly. However, in any case you still may have to support these products and as such that would take away from your time, which is kind of the point in creating a “muse.”

There are plenty of websites that help you create physical products you can sell easily online. For instance TeeSpring comes to mind and many people have been making a killing selling customized T-Shirts through Facebook. This is a very viable option, at least for now, but there are some concerns.

For instance, if you should tie yourself with another company that is basically your supply chain you are still at the mercy of that company. If TeeSpring should go under you would lose any revenue you had for the month, and if you were away during this time you could waste thousands of dollars in advertising costs.

So, while this option is good it may not be a “forever” option. However, should you really plan on having a “forever” option but rather just keep adapting to the market? If you are always evolving with what your customers want you should be at least keeping up with the trends.
A digital product such as an online blog is another viable avenue for generating revenue. However, advertisers are becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. As well, with so many websites popping up each and every day it can be difficult to compete for readers/visitors.

So then the line of reasoning continues to, why not create a combination of both digital and physical products. But here is where there is a problem. If you have so many things you are selling online, it can be daunting to keep track of it all. In order for this to scale properly, you would need to hire well trained virtual assistants that you would trust would not steal from you.

Ideally you would want to create a revenue stream big enough so that you can focus on what you want to do each and every day and also save up enough money should disaster strike. Just imagine how hard it would be to stop everything you are doing right now and just mull over your other options should you stop receiving any outside revenue.

Making your business flexible enough so that you can start and stop it at will would be ideal. If you can do this with a combination of both digital and physical products you should be ready to take off whenever you want.

I think the point right now is to not just analyze this forever, but to get something started, and then figure out how you could rapidly scale this business so that you can generate any amount of revenue at will. However, you would be a complete idiot if you didn’t think of an exit strategy if the worst case scenario should happen.

Again, this is just a continuation of my thoughts on creating a “muse” for the ideal Four Hour Work Week. Without implementation, though these posts are pretty meaningless, so in that regards I should really get to work creating something so I am not just coming across as a blowhard.