Getting paid for what you know

Most people who could sell what they know never get round to it.

Not because the knowledge is not worth paying for. Because packaging it is a project. A course is weeks of filming. An ebook is weeks of writing. A membership site is a build. So the nine years of newsletters, the client playbook, the research folder, the thing you actually know that other people do not, stays where it is.

An AI that answers from your material skips the packaging entirely. You already have the raw material. The product is the ability to ask it questions.

SupaVector has payments built in, so you can charge for that directly. This is how it works and what people are doing with it.

How the money works

Plainly, because this is the part that decides whether you bother.

The money is yours, and it goes to your Stripe account. Not ours, held on your behalf, paid out later. We create the charge directly on your own Stripe account, so the funds land there and Stripe pays you out on your normal schedule. We never hold your money and we never see card details.

You set a one-time price. Somebody pays once and gets access to that AI for a year. It is not a subscription, and access does not quietly lapse a month later while they are still using it.

You can price in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD or NGN.

We take a 10% platform fee on each sale, taken automatically at the point of payment. Stripe's own processing fee applies on top, as it would anywhere. There is no monthly cost to have payments switched on: charging for access is on the free plan.

You can see what you have made. Net earnings, what has been paid out, what is still on its way, how many buyers, and your recent sales.

The ways people use it

The mechanic is simple, so most of the invention is in what you point it at.

Sell access to an archive you already have

The clearest case. Nine years of newsletters, two hundred podcast transcripts, every post you have written. Individually those are already public and already free. What nobody can do is ask them a question and get an answer in ten seconds.

You are not reselling the writing. You are selling the ability to search a mind.

Put the deep material behind the shallow material

Run two. A free one on your public work, which anyone can ask, and which does the job a landing page used to do. A paid one on the material you do not publish: the templates, the numbers, the case files, the things you would otherwise only tell a client.

The free one is the argument for the paid one, and both are the same five minutes of setup.

Sell what you already sell, in a form people prefer

If you sell a PDF, a template pack, a swipe file or a report, you already have the knowledge in a shape that will not answer questions. A buyer who wants one specific number has to read forty pages to find it.

Sell the same material as something they can interrogate. It is worth more and it costs you nothing extra, because you are not writing anything new.

The paid conversation before the paid conversation

For consultants, coaches, accountants, lawyers. Your first call is usually the same call: the qualifying questions, the how-does-this-work questions, the questions that are free to you but expensive in hours.

A paid AI on your process is a small purchase that filters seriously. The people who pay to ask are the people who were going to hire you.

Course and cohort companions

If you already run a course, the AI that knows every lesson, every handout and every past Q&A is the thing students ask for. Charge for it separately, or set it to your students' email addresses and fold it into what they already paid for.

Your own notes, for the people who share them

Not everything is a business. A researcher can open their reading library. A hobbyist with fifteen years of forum posts can open the archive. If it turns out ten people will pay a small amount for it, that is ten more than a folder on your laptop was ever going to earn.

Pricing it

Two things that are true of almost everyone who tries this.

Price it like a book, not like software. This is a one-time purchase. The comparison in a buyer's head is a paperback, a template pack or a cheap course, not a monthly tool. Most people start too low.

The first price is not the last price. You can change it whenever you like. Anyone who already bought keeps the access they paid for.

Setting it up

1. Build the AI and give it the material you intend to sell access to.
2. Connect Stripe. From Payments in the dashboard. Stripe asks the questions it has to ask by law, which takes a few minutes. Nobody can pay until Stripe says your account is ready to take charges.
3. Switch on "Charge for access", set your price and currency.
4. Buy it yourself first. Use a real card, refund yourself in Stripe afterwards. That is how you find out what the buyer actually sees before a stranger does.
5. Share the link. Anyone who opens it can see what it is and is asked to pay before they can ask anything.

Before you switch it on

• Test what happens when it does not know. A buyer who pays and then hits a wall is a refund and a bad word. Ask it the hardest questions you get, and if the answers are thin, that is a missing document rather than a reason not to charge.
• Be honest about what they are buying. Say what material is behind it. "Every newsletter since 2017 and the two unpublished templates" converts better than "my knowledge base", and it does not disappoint.
• Payouts run on Stripe's schedule, not ours. If it is your first Stripe account, the first payout takes longer than the ones after it.
• You are the merchant of record. The money is yours, which also means the customer relationship is yours: refunds and questions come to you, and you handle them in your own Stripe dashboard.

The point

The gap between knowing something and selling it has always been the packaging. Weeks of work between having the material and having a product, which is where most of it dies.

That gap is now about five minutes and a Stripe account.

If you have not built one yet, start here. If you want the argument for why any of this matters, it is in Introducing SupaVector.