Stan Store Guide: How to Sell a Digital Product Without Building a Website
You don't have to quit your job or build a website to start selling online. Here's how Stan works, what it costs, and how to decide whether it's worth it for you.
There's a lot to like about selling a digital product. When you sell a service, you're renting out your time, and there's only ever so much of it to go around. With a knowledge product, you make the thing once and it keeps earning whether you're at your desk or asleep six time zones from it.
This is the logical next step for a lot of people who sell what they know. Freelancers, coaches, and consultants spend their days answering the same handful of questions and walking people through the same steps. So do plenty of licensed professionals, from lawyers to therapists to accountants: a good part of what you charge for is knowledge you find yourself repeating.
That knowledge doesn't have to stay tied to the hour. The explainer you give every new client, the checklist you run before a launch, the worksheet you've rebuilt a dozen times, the talk you've given so many times you know it cold… any of those can be packaged once into a book, a guide, a template, or a set of exercises that keeps earning while you're doing something else.
For anyone already making a living from their hours and wondering where a second or third income stream might come from, it's a low-cost, low-stress place to start. You aren't inventing something new. You're taking what you already do well and letting it sell on its own.
But once the product is made, where do you actually sell it from without building and babysitting a whole online shop of your own? That’s the question this post answers, and my favourite answer, for about a year now, is a tool called Stan.
You know how Substack folded a stack of separate subscription tools into one place? Stan does something similar for digital product sales, standing in for a good chunk of the setup it used to take to sell one thing to your audience.
Related:
This post is about the where you sell, not the what: where to sell your ebook, course, or other digital product once you've made it, and how to do it for about the price of a coffee a week. We talk about the “what” in other posts.
Below, I’ll walk through how I actually use it: what you can sell through Stan, what it costs and which of its two plans you really need, how it stacks up against Gumroad and against running your own website, and the questions people often have about it.
If you’ve been Stan-curious but weren’t sure it was worth $29 a month, here's everything you'd need to make the call.
