Episode 033 Ramit Sethi Part 1

Summary

• Tim Ferriss introduces a slang expression from Argentina
• Ramit Sethi is a guest on the show
• He has attended Stanford for both undergrad and master’s degrees
• He formally cofounded PBwiki, a venture backed start up
• He then jumped full time into boot strapping his own gig
• He built up his own personal finance site to more than 500,000 readers per month
• He believes money is only a small part of being rich
• He went from venture backed start up to boot strapping
• He is a New York Times Best Selling Author
• He has dozens of employees, mostly in the US and around the world
• He started a personal blog in college
• He studied human behavior, social influence, and persuasion at Stanford
• He realized experts were telling people to keep a budget, but nobody was listening
• He believes there are ways to get people to change their behavior
• Ramit Sethi created I Will Teach You to Be Rich as a way to help people lead a rich life, but it was not his life passion.
• After six months of writing, he was featured in a Wall Street Journal article which brought 9,000 visitors to his site.
• He then created an eBook called Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass and sold it for $4.95.
• Despite some criticism, hundreds of people bought the eBook and he realized he could make a business out of it.
• He continued to write and test monetization methods and eventually made more money from I Will Teach You to Be Rich than his full time job.
• He wrote a book in 2009 which was a masochistic exercise.
• Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss discuss the psychology of dealing with criticism when selling products or services.
• Sethi had to learn how to handle critics over the course of three years.
• Sethi cataloged the "freeloader comments" he received and created a list of the ten classic freeloader comments.
• Sethi suggests taking a judo approach to criticism and testing assumptions.
• Ferriss suggests assuming that one out of every 1,000 people is certifiably insane and learning how to contend with that.
• Ferriss recommends reading Kevin Kelly's article "1,000 True Fans" to understand how to cultivate a fan base.
• Tim Ferriss started his blog with a “schizophrenic, un unified, weird attempt” and a “hideous, fluorescent yellow and blue blog”.
• His blog gained traction when an article he wrote called “Geek to Freak” made the front page of Digg.com and crashed his site.
• He also wrote a guest post for GigaOM which drove an “incredible amount of dividends”.
• Ramit Sethi was inspired by the article “1,000 True Fans” and created content that was “very long, very long” and included video.
• He also recommends guest posting and building relationships to stand out in the crowded web.
• His early content focused on personal finance and he has had three or four posts that have “changed everything” for him.
• Ramit Sethi wrote a post called The $28,000.00 Question, Why Are We All Hypocrites About Weddings? which took an unconventional and brutally honest look at something that everyone takes for granted.
• He suggests chunking out knowledge into specific slivers to attract lots of people.
• Tim Ferriss suggests writing posts that appeal to the majority of readers, rather than trying to please everyone.
• Ramit Sethi made the mistake of not setting up an email list for several years, which cost him millions of dollars.
• He now sends millions of emails a month with multimillion different types of combinations of email funnels and generates 99 percent of his revenue through email.
• He suggests behavioral based segmentation, where people are split out based on where they sign up, what they click on, or what they open.
• He also suggests sending emails that look like plain emails, as if you are writing to a friend.
• Ramit Sethi's emails appear to be simple, but there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes.
• He trains people to take action, not just read the emails.
• He reads every response he gets from his readers, and uses the insights he gains to inform his future courses.
• He uses offtheshelf software such as email, chat, Skype, Basecamp for project management, and Google Docs for sharing documents.
• He also uses checklists to help him stay organized.
• Airline pilots use checklists to reduce risk
• Aweber and Infusionsoft are good email service providers
• Survey Monkey is a good tool for collecting responses
• GitHub is used for managing design process
• Google Docs is used for sharing checklists
• Basecamp is used for ensuring people are using checklists
• Asana is an alternative to Basecamp
• ScreenFlow and Dropbox are used for capturing processes
• Visual Website Optimizer is used for running tests
• Umbel is used to look into social profiles of fans and email subscribers
• Surveys are limited to five questions and qualitative responses
• Ramit Sethi suggests that people should not worry about writing short emails and bullet points, but instead focus on writing the best material they can.
• He believes that people should not try to be 40 before they are 40 and should not try to copy what the best people in the world are doing.
• He encourages people to include stories and narrative in their emails to connect with their readers.
• He believes that tactics become commoditized and that psychology is what ultimately connects with people.
• He suggests that people should not be worried about unsubscribes and should even encourage them if they are not the right fit.
• Ramit Sethi advises against obsessing over data, such as unsubscribe rates, as it can be unproductive and drive one crazy.
• He suggests focusing on growing one's list, writing amazing content, and measuring revenue per email instead.
• He also advises against checking investments every day, as it can be a disservice.
• He recommends checking investments every 612 months instead.