SPECIMEN #0021: Venditor recursivus (The Recursive Seller)
Or How to Earn Money Selling Guides About Earning Money Selling Guides
- Classification: Advice Merchant / Digital Product Fabricator / Pinterest Evangelist
- Habitat: Medium.com, Gumroad storefronts, Pinterest boards about Pinterest strategy, the specific corner of the internet where the product and the instructions for making the product are the same product
- Diet: Aspiring creators, the dream of passive income, and the enduring willingness of people to pay for a PDF explaining how to make a PDF to sell to people who want to make PDFs
- Threat Level: To your wallet ($37 minimum, no refunds), your understanding of what constitutes expertise, and your faith in the spelling abilities of people charging you for professional branding kits
There is an article on Medium.com
It is similar to approximately 423,098 other articles on Medium.com
It explains how to use Pinterest to sell digital products on Gumroad.
It contains three links to digital products on Gumroad.
The products teach you how to sell digital products on Gumroad.
The article is the funnel.
The products are what the funnel sells.
The products teach you to build the funnel that sells the products.
We have arrived at the recursion.
The Author
A.S. is a passive income coach and full-time writer who uses these exact strategies to earn from content and digital sales.
This is stated in the product description.
The strategies she uses to earn from content and digital sales include writing articles about earning from content and digital sales and embedding links to products about earning from content and digital sales within those articles.
This is not a criticism.
It is a description.
The medium through which she earns is itself the message she is selling.
The Article
The article explains how Gumroad businesses can use Pinterest to build a powerful long-term revenue machine.
It is 1,800 words long.
It contains a 90-day growth plan, a section on Pinterest SEO, advice on creating pins that get clicks, guidance on building content funnels, and a section on offer ladders for increasing revenue per customer.
The advice is not wrong.
Pinterest does function as a visual search engine. Evergreen traffic is real. Keyword strategy matters. Consistent posting outperforms sporadic bursts.
This information is also available in approximately 400,000 other Medium articles, several YouTube channels, Pinterest's own help centre, and a basic Google search conducted by anyone with five minutes and internet access.
The article adds a link to a Gumroad product in paragraph two, before making a single argument.
The second link appears four paragraphs later.
The third link appears six paragraphs after that.
Three products embedded in 1,800 words of advice about selling products.
This is the content funnel the article describes.
The article is its own case study.
The Products
There are three.
Product One: The AI Hustler Toolkit. $37 minimum. No refunds.
A 10-page PDF containing 25 ChatGPT prompts for building and selling digital products.
$37 for 10 pages is $3.70 per page.
25 prompts for $37 is $1.48 per prompt.
The prompts teach you to use AI to create products to sell to people who want to use AI to create products.
The toolkit was created by a real solo creator who uses these exact prompt strategies to earn from content and digital sales.
The content and digital sales include this toolkit.
83 people have purchased it.
Product Two: The Ultimate Ebook Branding Kit. $29 minimum. No refunds.
50 Canva templates in two colour themes, described as vibrant and minmalistic.
Minmalistic.
On a professional branding kit.
Sold without the option of return.
The kit is designed for creators who want to create premium-looking ebooks without hiring an expensive designer.
The kit was designed using Canva, which is available free of charge to anyone with an internet connection.
The kit teaches you to use Canva to make things that look like they were made with Canva.
Product Three: The Ebook Business Toolkit. $21 minimum. No refunds.
A 41-page PDF explaining how to write, publish, and sell an ebook.
It is itself an ebook.
About writing ebooks.
Sold on Gumroad.
Promoted via an article about selling things on Gumroad.
Which also promotes a toolkit for creating things to sell on Gumroad.
And a branding kit for making those things look professional.
The three products together cover the complete cycle: create a product, brand it, sell it.
The complete cycle costs $87 minimum, with no refunds on any stage.
The Name a Fair Price Mechanism
Each product displays the phrase "Name a fair price" above the purchase button.
This implies flexibility. Generosity, even. The suggestion that you might pay what you feel the product is worth.
The minimum prices are $37, $29, and $21 respectively.
You cannot pay less than the minimum.
You cannot receive a refund regardless of what you paid.
"Name a fair price" permits you to pay more.
It does not permit you to pay less, reconsider, or recover your money if the product does not deliver what was implied.
The flexibility flows in one direction.
The Recursion
Let us map the complete operation.
The author writes an article about using Pinterest to sell Gumroad products.
The article embeds links to three Gumroad products.
The products teach you to write articles that embed links to Gumroad products.
Which you would then sell to people who want to write articles that embed links to Gumroad products.
Who would then write articles embedding links to their Gumroad products about writing articles embedding links to Gumroad products.
The pyramid does not require examination.
It requires participation.
The Spelling
The Ultimate Ebook Branding Kit promises to help creators produce content that looks credible, modern, and high-value.
The product description spells "minimalistic" as "minmalistic."
Twice.
On a product about professional branding.
With no refunds.
This is either an oversight or a philosophical statement about the nature of credibility.
The product listing has not clarified which.
The Language
A brief glossary:
"Passive income" — income generated while sleeping, requiring significant active work to establish, maintain, and promote through articles embedded with product links.
"Real solo creator who uses these exact strategies" — a creator whose primary documented use of these strategies is selling a guide to these strategies.
"Name a fair price" — pay the minimum or more. Not less. Not back.
"No refunds allowed" — the flexibility of the pricing model does not extend to the direction of money flow.
"Minmalistic" — minimalistic, on a professional branding kit, undetected through the editing process, sold without the option of return.
"Long-term revenue machine" — the article title's promise. The machine, on examination, is the article itself.
The Testimonials
"I purchased the AI Hustler Toolkit. It contained 25 prompts. I used them to create a PDF about using AI to create PDFs. I listed it on Gumroad. I wrote an article about it on Medium. The article contains a link to the PDF. I am monitoring sales." — Cordelia, 41, Building Her Funnel
"I bought the branding kit. The templates are clean and professional. I noticed the spelling error in the description after purchase. I attempted to raise this with the seller. There are no refunds. I have used a different spelling in my own products." — Fenella, 38, Maintaining Standards
"I followed the 90-day Pinterest growth plan. In month one I created five boards and published my first batch of pins. In month two I increased pin volume and began collecting email subscribers. I am now in month three. I have 4 Pinterest followers, 0 Gumroad sales, and a very well-organised content calendar." — Imogen, 44, On Schedule
"I purchased all three products for $87. I now have 25 prompts, 50 Canva templates, and a 41-page guide to selling ebooks. I have used these to create a PDF about using Pinterest to sell PDFs. I have listed it on Gumroad for $19 minimum. I have written an article about it on Medium. The article contains a link to the PDF. I have named a fair price. No refunds are available." — Gerald, 67, Fully Integrated
Field Notes
The innovation of Venditor recursivus is not the Pinterest strategy.
It is not the Canva templates.
It is not the ChatGPT prompts or the ebook guide.
It is the architecture.
A system in which the product teaches you to build the system that sells the product, promoted through the channel the product teaches you to use, to an audience seeking to replicate the income the product claims to generate.
Each buyer is a potential future seller of the same advice to a future buyer who may also become a seller.
The advice economy does not require the underlying activity to be profitable.
It requires only that the advice appear credible enough to purchase.
The article is 1,800 words of credibility.
The products are $87 of infrastructure.
The recursion is the business model.
Minmalistic, but effective.
Advisory
If you encounter Venditor recursivus in the wild, do not be alarmed.
The Pinterest strategy is real. The Gumroad platform works. Digital products can generate income for people with existing audiences, genuine expertise, and the patience to build both over time.
The 10-page PDF of ChatGPT prompts is $37 minimum with no refunds.
The branding kit contains a spelling error and no returns.
The ebook about selling ebooks costs $21 and is itself the thing it is teaching you to make.
The "name a fair price" button permits generosity in one direction only.
Before purchasing, consider whether the income being demonstrated is from the strategy being sold or from selling the strategy.
Then consider that the answer to that question is available free of charge.
Unlike the products.