Just paywall it

Today on Product Hunt, I saw a new app called Postal. It basically puts a paywall before your email inbox, such that anyone who wants to email you has to pay first. You kill spam and save your sanity. The paywall filters out and self-selects the serious folks with serious questions. And your email address remains confidential because all correspondence goes through the app without divulging the email address.

I just looove this idea. It’s amazing how easy it is to create a product these days, just by adding a paywall or a payment button. Today, Postal lets you get paid to receive emails. Similarly, I noticed other product categories emerging on stuff which we probably considered too small or insignificant to paywall, like selling your Notion templates for managing your newsletters, selling tiny e-books and docs on Gumroad, selling access to view an Airtable full of resources.

In other words, if you can paywall, you can sell it. Anything. Everything. Having a sellable product no longer needs to conform to the image of a traditional product—be it digital or physical—with a high barrier to entry in terms of material substance, packaging, marketing, capital. If you found it useful, someone else probably does too. Then it’s just a distribution issue, of getting the word out to these folks.

Just paywall it.