I have built a lot of courses and digital products over the years. The ones that have worked — the ones that found a real audience and kept selling — share a quality that I couldn't name precisely until recently. They weren't the products I found most interesting. They weren't the ones I'd spent the most time on. They were the products that answered a question someone had already asked me. Not a question I'd invented. A real one, from a real person, about a real problem they were trying to solve.

The ones that didn't work shared a different quality. They were built from the inside out — starting with what I knew, what I wanted to teach, what felt intellectually satisfying to put together. Good material. Carefully made. Nobody asked for it.

I had been thinking about this pattern for a while when I read a 1916 business parable called Obvious Adams, by Robert R. Updegraff. The book has a story about a cake company whose sales have been declining for three years despite a strong advertising campaign. Adams looks at the problem and delivers his answer almost immediately: the advertising is good, but nobody has tasted the cake. Give away free slices at every grocery store that stocks it. The previous team had been trying to solve an advertising problem. Adams noticed there was no advertising problem — there was a sampling problem. The product was good. People just hadn't tried it.

The thing that struck me about this was not the sampling insight, which is well-established in marketing. It was the diagnosis. Adams didn't approach the problem by asking how to improve the advertising. He asked what was actually stopping people from buying. Those are different questions. The first question produces better advertising. The second question might produce something else entirely — in this case, free cake.