How to Find Winning Products That Actually Sell (For Free)
Welcome back chump,
Rejoice! Christmas came early. And Jolly old S has a special gift for you.
Let me do you a favor and save you from burning money and your sanity on the #1 time-waster among new dropshippers: the never-ending chase to find the “winning products.”
Most newbies run around like headless chickens trying to find the “winning product,” buying every tool some YouTuber with a rented Lambo tells you is “essential” (they aren’t lying, those tools ARE essential… essential to lining their own pockets with fat commission money).
Here’s the dirty secret no guru wants to admit:
You do NOT need to shell out hundreds on ad spy tools or spend your evenings doom-scrolling TikTok until your brain leaks out your ears.
All you need is a process. One that’s free and actually works.
You want a step-by-step?
Then you’ve come to the right place boyo.
What’s a “Winning” Product, Anyway?
You can’t find gold if you don’t know what it looks like. Let’s go over the essential pillars of what makes a product a winner.
1. Solves a Real Problem
If your “winning” product doesn’t solve a problem or fulfill a need, it’s hard to get people to impulse buy or feel the emotional pull to order from you.
Now contrary to popular belief, this is much more about your marketing angle and how you advertise and position the product, rather than the product itself.
For example:
A lint roller isn’t about “removing lint.” It’s about stepping into a job interview without looking like you rolled around in a kennel and then faceplanted into your grandma’s knitting basket.
The real problem you are solving isn’t just “clean clothes,” it’s having others get a better impression of you when you walk in the room.
Okay… yeah I’m getting ahead of myself and covering content that will be in a future post.
But the main point here is that whatever product you pick, you should already have at least 3-4 solid real problems in mind that it solves or that you can position it for.
2. Healthy Margins
If you buy for $15 and sell for $20, you don’t own a business—you’re running a charity for Facebook Ads. I want at least 3X markup. Minimum.
Scaling ads always means lower ROAS (return on ad spend) over time. This means even if you’re profitable at first, as your budget increases audiences become more cold and less receptive. It’s hard to infinitely improve your ad creatives.
What’s much easier, is picking a product with juicy margins that have the padding to deal with increases in ad costs and hiccups along the way.
3. Lightweight
If you need a forklift to ship it, pass. If you can’t fit it in a shoebox, you’ll spend your profits paying UPS to manhandle your mistakes.
This is probably one of the most overlooked aspects when it comes to picking products.
Big, heavy crap bleeds you dry on shipping, racks up damage claims, and turns every refund into a financial mugging.
If you don’t want to feel like Bruce Wayne’s parents, maybe think about this before you decide to move forward with a product.
Keep it small and keep it light. There are exceptional products of course that are worth the extra baggage (both physically and mentally) but they are rare and in all likelihood you’re better off going with something else.
4. Evergreen
If your “winner” only sells when people are drunk on eggnog, congrats, you just started a business that’s more dead than your New Year’s resolutions by January 2nd.
Unless your dream is to spend eleven months a year crying yourself to sleep wondering what went wrong, pick a product that sells when it isn’t whiter outside than an Asian-American girl’s boyfriend.
Seasonal products can work but it becomes a hamster wheel. I’m not saying you shouldn’t bother with them but it’s not my cup of tea. Building a long-lasting year-round brand is by far the way to go, in my humble opinion.
5. Already Validated
I don’t care about your “revolutionary” new product. If it’s not already selling at scale ($300k+ per month), you’re not a genius. You’re a test subject.
One of my favorite ways to make real money dropshipping is picking a tried and tested fire product and just switching the marketing angle for it. Again, this is overlapping a bit into future posts so I’ll keep it brief with a nice example.
There’s a company called Zima that did this with jewelry cleaners. They took an existing winning, saturated product and switched the target customer and marketing angle. Instead of marketing it for jewelry, they marketed it as cleaners for retainers.
Genius.
6. Maximizing AOV & Upsell Potential
As mentioned before, as you scale, so does your average cost to sell a product.
The brand that makes the most money per sale (highest average order value), can afford to bid the highest on ads and out-scale competitors.
One way to do this is with a more expensive product, but what works even better without killing the perceived value to cost ratio of your product, is adding in some quality upsells related to the problem or customer you’re targeting.
If they buy a flashlight, sell them the batteries. If they buy skincare, pitch them the serum that “makes the moisturizer work twice as fast” (but please don’t sell snake oil, find real products that actually work and pair well).
Every upsell is a polite way of saying, “Since you’re already here and spending money, why don’t you spend a little more?”
A trick to incentivize upsells is having “Free Shipping” be unlocked at a price slightly over the price of your main product.
Again, a deep-dive into maximizing AOV is a topic for a future post but I’ll leave you with one other thing to think about when picking a product.
Can I somehow make a subscription out of this?
The 5-Step Free Method to Find Winning Products (Facebook Ad Library Edition)
Step 1: Pick a Niche
The key to making bank is selling an outcome. People want three things:
More freedom (more money, more time)
More pleasure (more fun, better relationships)
Less pain (physical, emotional, existential)
Skincare? Check. Pain relief? Check. Pet stuff? Absolutely. Kitchen gadgets? It’s doable but I wouldn’t recommend it.
If you want, you can keep it open for now and narrow your niche down later.
Step 2: Get in the Door
No need to make TikTok burner accounts and scroll through brainrot trying to find the diamond in the rough.
Facebook Ad Library is public and far more useful. Just go to facebook.com/ads/library, select United States, and in the “Ad Category” dropdown pick “All Ads.”
Step 3: Dig Like a Pro
Type in keywords related to your niche (if you chose one).
If you’re in skincare, search “serum,” “moisturizer,” “face mask,” etc.
If you’re in pain relief, try “back brace,” “neck massager,” “pain patch.”
If you are struggling to decide, just try a variety of keywords. Even niche-agnostic terms like “50% OFF” or “FREE SHIPPING” work pretty well.
Look for active ads that has been running for at least 2-3 weeks. If someone is still paying Facebook after 21 days, the product is likely making tons of money.
Step 4: Hunt for Winners
Click into each advertiser profile to see what variations, creative angles, and landing pages they have running.
Also click into the ads themselves and look for:
High engagement in the comments (real people tagging friends)
Multiple ad creatives for the same product (means they’re testing and scaling)
Offers or hooks that solve a clear problem and are easy to understand in 3 seconds
Different marketing angles they are using
Tip: Sort by “Impressions by Date” to see what’s currently getting spend, not just what’s been live forever.
Step 5: Validate Like a Pro (For Free)
Don’t just assume because an ad is running it’s a winner.
Verify with the following:
Keyword Volume: Use Keywords Everywhere or similar tools. Look for 30,000+ searches/month.
Google Trends: Enter product keywords, zoom out 5 years. Steady or rising? Good. Downtrend? Maybe think twice.
SimilarWeb: Check if the brand’s site is pulling 150k+ monthly visitors with SimilarWeb’s free chrome extension. Anything less and they probably aren’t making very much money.
If it doesn’t tick every single box, toss it back in the ocean. This is the best way to find real, scalable winners without donating your wallet to Mark Zuckerberg for “testing.”
The Truth about Winning Products
Everyone thinks the reason they’re not successful is because they just didn’t find the right product.
In most cases, it’s not the product that’s the issue.
If you know how to build solid positioning and marketing angles, landing pages that actually convert, strong copy that evokes emotion and pricing structured for scalability you can easily make $30-50k/month with products that break more than half the rules in this post.
Products are just one piece of the puzzle.
If you keep failing, consider improving outside of product selection.
Because the product might not be the problem here.
Your Next Step
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See you on the inside,
-S