How to give away a free sample of a digital product

Someone's asked whether they can see inside before they pay ₱850 for a file they can't hold. It's a fair question and the answer is yes. What you give them, though, is the whole decision, and most people get it exactly backwards by handing over the first ten pages.

The rule that works: give away one complete thing that solves one problem end to end. Hold back the system, the volume, and the parts that only make sense together. Six pages out of eighty-four is plenty if those six pages actually work on their own.

A sample isn't a preview. A preview shows what the product looks like. A sample proves it does something, and proof is the only thing that turns a stranger into a buyer.

Chapter one is the worst possible sample

The default move is to export the first section and call it a sampler. It's the easiest thing to do and it does close to nothing.

The opening of almost any digital product is setup. Introduction, why this matters, who you are, what you'll need. It's the least useful part, it's the part most similar to free content everybody has already read, and it ends right at the moment something interesting was about to happen. The buyer's takeaway is "seems fine" and nobody has ever paid ₱850 for "seems fine".

Worse, a truncated sample teaches the buyer that the product is a thing you consume in order, which most digital products are not. Nobody reads a 90-recipe ebook front to back. They flick to the one thing they want to cook tonight.

So don't cut the product. Extract from it.

Give one complete unit

Take the smallest self-contained piece of your product, the piece someone could use tonight without any of the rest, and give that away whole.

• A recipe ebook: three full recipes, including the ingredient list, the method and the photo. Not the introduction and half of recipe one.
• A template pack: one complete template, fully working, with its own read-me.
• A spreadsheet: the whole thing, one tab, with the formulas intact and the other eleven tabs removed.
• A course: one lesson, start to finish, including the worksheet that goes with it.
• A workout plan: week one, all of it, properly laid out.

The test is simple. Could someone use only the sample, get a real result, and tell a friend about it? If yes, it's a sample. If it leaves them mid-sentence, it's a trailer, and trailers work for films because films are two hours long and your PDF is not.

A sample that gets used is worth ten samples that get downloaded.

What to hold back

Three things, and being clear about them makes the sample easier to design.

Volume. The reason to buy is that there are 84 pages, not 6. Ninety recipes, not three. Fifty presets, not one. Nobody buys a thing twice, so if the sample contains one of each of your categories, you've given away the map and kept only the territory.

The system. If your product has an ordering, a method, a framework that ties the pieces together, that's what people are paying for. Give away one piece of it working. Don't give away the diagram that explains how all the pieces relate, because that diagram is the product.

The bits people will need again. A one-off recipe is a gift. A conversion chart someone will print and stick on the fridge is a reason to buy the whole thing. Keep at least one of those inside.

What you should never hold back: quality. The sample has to be the same standard as the paid file, formatted the same, proofread the same. A sloppy free version tells people exactly what the paid one is like, and they will believe it.

How much to give away

There's no magic percentage, but there is arithmetic worth doing.

If your product is 84 pages, six to ten pages is right. If it's 50 presets, one or two. If it's a 12-lesson course, one lesson. Roughly 5 to 12 percent of the whole, chosen for usefulness rather than position.

Below that and it doesn't prove anything. Above about 20 percent and you start solving the buyer's actual problem for free, which is a good deed and a bad business. The signal you're over the line: people thank you warmly for the sample and never come back. That's not a conversion problem, it's a portion problem.

One exception. If your product is cheap, say under ₱300, skip the sample and put four good screenshots on the page instead. At that price the friction of downloading a sample costs you more sales than the reassurance gains you. How to price a digital product for the first time covers why the price band changes what the page needs to do.

Free is the one thing that delivers instantly

This is the practical advantage of a zero-price sample on Sailo and it's genuinely useful.

A paid digital product is held until payment is confirmed. On a manual rail, that confirmation is you, checking your bank app and marking the order paid. It might be twenty minutes, it might be nine hours if the order landed at midnight.

A product priced at zero has nothing to confirm, so it releases the moment the order is placed. The buyer fills in their name, taps through, and the download link is there. No waiting, no message from you, nothing on your to-do list.

That matters more than it sounds. The sample is usually someone's first contact with your shop, and the experience they get is instant delivery that just works. Then, when they buy the paid version, the wait feels like a normal payment thing rather than a broken thing, because they've already seen the machinery work.

One catch worth knowing. If someone puts the free sample in the same order as a paid product, the whole order is treated as one delivery and the strictest rule wins, so the sample waits for the payment along with everything else. In practice that's fine, but it's why the sample works best as its own listing that people grab on its own.

The email trade, and whether to make it

The standard advice is to demand an email address for the sample. It's not wrong. It's just not free.

Asking for an email costs you a meaningful share of the people who would have downloaded it. In exchange you get a list you own, which is worth more than a follower count and survives any platform going strange on you. Building that list is covered properly in how to build an email list without a website.

The version that works for most small sellers: ask for name and email, don't ask for anything else, and be specific about what they're joining. "You'll get the sampler now and about two emails a month" beats "subscribe to our newsletter", because the second one sounds like a trap.

Then actually send the emails. A list you never write to is worth nothing and will bounce or complain when you finally do, eighteen months later, with a launch.

If you can't commit to writing to it, take the email anyway for the receipt and don't call it a list. There's no shame in a sample that just converts.

Worked example: Grace in Quezon City

Grace sells an 84-page Filipino home-cooking ebook at ₱850. Ninety recipes, shot on her phone, laid out cleanly. Most of her traffic comes from short cooking videos.

Her first sampler was the first eight pages: cover, introduction, a page about her lola, a kitchen equipment list, and the start of the first recipe. She gave away 340 of them in two months and could not trace a single sale to it.

She rebuilt it as six pages: three complete recipes, chosen because they were the three her videos got the most comments about, plus one page at the end that listed the other 87 recipe names by category and the price.

That last page is the part people skip and it's the part that sells. Someone who's just cooked her adobo sees 87 more names, half of which they recognise from their childhood, and the ₱850 stops being a price and starts being obvious.

Numbers after she changed it: fewer downloads, 190 in two months, because she also started asking for an email. Twenty-nine of those 190 bought the full ebook within six weeks. The old version had converted almost nobody.

The thing she'd tell you: the free sampler needed a cover that looked like a real product, not a leaflet. She'd originally exported it as a plain PDF with no cover page and no title on the first page, and people saved it to their phone and forgot what it was within a day. A cover with the ebook's name on it meant the file was still recognisable in someone's downloads folder three weeks later, and several of her sales came from exactly that.

Samples for things that aren't documents

Presets and filters. Give one preset, the most distinctive one. Show the before and after on the page. Ship it as a zip with a read-me, same as the paid pack, because the install experience is part of what they're evaluating.

Spreadsheets and trackers. Give the working tool with the extras stripped out. Keep the dashboards, the extra tabs and the automation for the paid version. People who try a spreadsheet and start entering their real data have effectively bought it already.

Courses. One lesson, all the way through, plus the worksheet. Pick lesson four rather than lesson one. Lesson four is where the useful stuff usually starts.

Services. Don't give away a free consultation call as your sample. Give away something that costs you nothing to reproduce: a checklist, a two-page audit template, a written answer to the question you get most. Your hour is the thing with a hard ceiling on it and it should be the thing people pay for.

Music and audio. A full track at lower quality, not a 30-second clip of the full-quality one. Clips get skipped.

The cost you didn't budget for

Two honest limitations, and the second one surprises people.

The first is the product slot. A sample is a separate product in your catalogue, so every paid file with a sampler attached uses two of your listings. Sailo's free plan caps you at 10 products. Five paid files with five samplers is ten, which is fine, but a template shop with twelve packs and twelve samplers is over the line and looking at the Pro plan at $19 a month. Worth knowing before you build a sampler for everything.

The second is that a free product still generates support. People who paid nothing message you about install problems, ask questions the read-me answers, and occasionally complain. That's the deal. Budget for it and put the same read-me inside the sample that you put inside the paid pack, because it halves the volume. The mechanics of getting a file onto a stranger's phone cleanly are in how to sell a PDF without a website, and they apply to free files exactly the same.

When not to give a sample at all

Three cases where the answer is no.

When the product is the answer to one question. If someone buys your file to find out one specific thing, the sample either contains that thing, in which case you've given away the product, or it doesn't, in which case it proves nothing. Sell it on the page copy instead.

When you're selling to people who already know you. If your audience has watched you work for a year, they don't need a sample, they need a link. The sample is for strangers.

When you haven't sold any yet. Make the paid thing first. Sell it to ten people. Find out from those ten what they actually valued, and build the sample out of that. Building a sampler for a product nobody has bought is a way of avoiding the harder job. How to turn free content into a paid offer covers the sequencing, and it runs in the direction most people don't expect.

Build the sampler this week

Open your product. Find the smallest piece that works on its own and would be genuinely useful tonight. Export it with a proper cover, the product's real name on it, and one page at the end listing everything the buyer doesn't have yet, with the price.

List it at zero, and check that the download appears immediately when you order it yourself.

Then put it at the top of the paid product's page, one line, plain: "Not sure? Get three recipes free." The people who were going to buy anyway will skip it. The people who were going to leave might not.

If you're deciding what else should be free and what should be behind a price, how to sell digital products and services online covers the shape of the whole thing.