Product: The Senior Engineer's Burnout Protocol — a diagnostic field guide for senior software engineers and tech leads.
Profitably score (quick): Pain — high (career-threatening and recurring). Audience — narrow but high-income (senior ICs, $150k+). Frequency — symptom hits monthly during review cycles. Price tolerance is strong; this audience pays for tools, not motivation.
Format chosen: structured PDF runbook (23 pages), with three fillable artifacts: a 20-question diagnostic audit, five conversation scripts, and a sprint negotiation worksheet.
Why PDF, not video / course / community:
The audience won't watch a video. Senior engineers consume technical writing, not talking-head content. A course on burnout would be ignored on principle by the exact buyer I'm targeting.
The artifacts are the product. A diagnostic checklist needs to be filled in. Scripts need to be copy-pasted. Worksheets need to be marked up. Video can't do any of that. Only a structured document can.
One-evening read, runbook-style re-use. Buyer reads it once, then re-opens specific sections situationally. PDF is the only format that supports both linear and reference-style consumption.
Lower production cost, higher iteration speed. I built a Python pipeline (Markdown → WeasyPrint → PDF) so I can revise chapters in under 2 minutes per build. Course-style content would have locked me out of that velocity.
Live now on Whop. $9.99. Built the entire thing (copy, banner, 23-page PDF, build pipeline) in the last 48 hours using the framework.
https://whop.com/joined/mert-retail-group-llc/products/the-senior-engineer-s-burnout-protocol/