Ramit Sethi re-engineered

Ramit Sethi has built a product ecosystem of more than 20 courses. He has a tribe of nearly half a million people who read his emails. And he’s worth more than $25m.

I’ve spent a lot of time re-engineering his success and working out what we can creatively swipe from what he does well. Plus a couple of things I’d improve if I was Ramit.

Video transcript

The top ideas to creatively swipe from Ramit Sethi

We can’t emulate everything Ramit has done straightaway, and not all of it would work for all of us. But here are my top takeaways from spending all these hours looking at how he builds his business.

• Put as much attention into your emails to people who have done you the honour of joining your list as you do attracting new people to your list. These folk are more likely to buy.
• Make a virtue of being outspoken about your opinions in your field. Stand for something.
• Make the most of product launches. It’s where you will make the most sales. Find a reason to do a launch and a series of relaunches, whether that’s a new version, a slightly different version, or building your product for cohorts like Productise Your Expertise.
• Keep the products themselves simple, especially online courses and memberships.
• Spend at least as much time on marketing as you do making the products.

You will find Ramit’s site at I Will Teach You to be Rich.com

I thoroughly recommend signing up to his emails to see how he does things for yourself.

Video transcript

What I’m gonna do is take the work of Ramit Sethi. And this is Ramit here. And I’m going to look at how he’s built his business empire, his product ecosystem, and see what we can learn from that. Ramit is worth something like 25 million US dollars, he’s built up this company, and he’s pretty well known, you may well have come across his work before. So he’s doing something right.

At this stage, if you’re just getting started, or you’re on your second or third product, we don’t have to be everything that he is, we’re just taking some bits and pieces that we can apply, and use in our own work.

I’m going to take you through what I like about it, and maybe some bits I would improve. But don’t feel that this is something that you have to be, it’s just some ideas for you. Let’s look at how it all works.

Ramit has a website called I Will Teach You To Be rich.com. And his central idea is that for people who don’t have a huge amount of money, you can still have what he calls a rich life. And he offers to help you find out what is your version of the rich life. In fact, he’s got a quiz right here. This isn’t necessarily about making big money, it’s about living a rich life.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Ramit says, but I do really admire him as a marketeer.

He’s got tons and tons of content, he started from a writing point of view and has created a lot of blogs, different sorts of content, often long form, and taking people through his process of how to achieve your rich life. He makes a point of giving away most of his information. And having looked at his products and got into his products and gone through some of his courses,  he does actually give you most of it on the side, and then charges you for the courses and the product. He’s got a blog, different ways, and different areas that are all to do with how to achieve your rich life. He’s got free resources, he’s got a podcast, he’s got videos, and he was quite late to social media and social media are still quite a small part of what he’s doing.

Let’s look at his process. All of this is very cleverly designed to get you onto his email list. The email list, not the website does the work. If you do the quiz, you’ll be invited to get your results from the from email, if you look at a blog entry, so on this one, the “17 jobs and careers that make a lot of money.” you can see how for a target market of people who are going, ” Why haven’t I got enough money?” This is very attractive. I might go oh, well, maybe there’s something that I’m missing here. I want to have a look at this.

Let’s have a look through. There’s a few things that you see repeatedly and how Ramit’s copy team, because he’s got a team of people doing all of this, how he talks. He repeatedly talks about how long he studied and how much time he’s put into learning. And that is one of his trademark ideas about studying, researching, learning. And he pushes the idea that success comes from studying and learning. And of course, he sells some courses where you can study and learn how to do these things. So there’s a little layer of ideas underneath. They’re very clever.

He also uses the words “a proven system.” I’ve actually used that myself on a sales page. I nicked it straight from him. There’s a download here “The Ultimate Guide to Personal Finance”.  Repeated offers here, “my ultimate guide to working from home.” Everything is around getting you somehow to do a quiz, download a lead magnet, to go on a waitlist, whatever it is. Go to email. And once you sign up to one of those things, you will get emails from Ramit pretty much every day. He is unashamed at sending something out very day of the week, so he is consistent. And he puts just as much work if not more into the emails that go out, as he does with his website. And that kind of makes sense with the website, people come to your website, go away. Are they truly interested? Would they buy? Have they got budget, all of that the people who are on your email list, maybe they’re the ones that we should put our attention on, and put the work into the email that does the work.

If I was Ramit, maybe he’s doing this for a reason, what do I know? Now, actually, I’m gonna stick to that if I was there, only I wouldn’t do this. In order to buy something you go through to a second site, growth lab.com. And this is where all the products live. So for some reason, he’s got that on a second site. This is his signature main premium product, I think this is $6,000. It’s the the big one, called Earnable. And that’s about growing your business. And the offer is to grow to 1000 a month, 10,000 a month, even to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. That’s his big thing. So it’s right at the top.

But he’s also got all of these other products. Remember, he’s been doing this for a long time. But he has an impressive product ecosystem. And I know from talking to people who have bought his products, when you’ve bought one, you’llprobably buy six.

They’re all at different price points. And he’s built them at different times. So you’ve got ones that will help you to build your business. But he’s also got ones on productivity. The only one that I’ve ever actually thought about paying money for “Delegate and Done” is how to work with an assistant to delegate everything that you shouldn’t be doing yourself. There’s “Mental Mastery”, which is about overcoming those patterns in our head, that sap our confidence, how to talk to anybody, teach yourself anything, a lot of self-help things. But it’s linked to his core idea of creating your rich life. Because if you have, if you bought “Success Triggers”, and you have the ready-to-use mental frameworks for increased happiness, confidence and success. You can see how that pans into having a rich life.

There’s all of these different areas and different products. It’s impressive that he’s built all of this up. 

What can you creatively swipe here, there are some key things that he does really, really well. Number one, he keeps the product simple. He doesn’t do 100 module courses, or make it really complicated, and takes you forever to do it. That doesn’t fit with his target market.

He puts way more effort into the marketing than the products themselves. And in fact, the products themselves are just kind of the video versions put in the right order that take you through what he’s already given you in the blogs. He keeps the product simple.

He has this amazing product ecosystem of all of these different products. We can’t possibly emulate that right now. And please don’t think that you’ve got to make once you’ve got 20 products don’t make 20 products courses, you just need to finish one of them really.

But you could have it in your mind that there will be a number of different products as you go forward and start jotting down those ideas for what they might be. That’s how you start developing your product ecosystem.

Ramit’s true genius is the way that he puts his effort into his email list. And everything that he does is around getting people to become part of his tribe. And he communicates with his tribe in his email list. In fact, his emails regularly say, talk to me, tell me what your experience of this situation is. It talks about very detailed, nuanced things, things that he’s noticed things that is learned, and he has a certain amount have humility in his writing, he does really, really well on email. In fact, I would recommend just signing up to his emails to see how to write really, really good emails, but the nurturing sort, and the sale sort. He’s a good example. 

He builds his tribe there. And he communicates, and he consistently gives you this vision of your rich life, he sticks to that. He talks about confidence, or health, and all of the other things that are part of having a rich life. But he’s got one core area. I think he’s also got a core audience that he’s talking to. So he’s not talking to top lawyers or people who have already got, you know, 10 million pounds to invest. He’s talking to ordinary people about their ordinary lives, and how to get an extra $1,000 a month, and then maybe building that up. So it’s very achievable, it feels achievable. And from that, he’s able to talk really convincingly to his target audience and get his message across.

The other thing that Ramit does that is really good, is that he does consistent launches. I bet you if I went to their offices, except they don’t have an office, they’re fully remote. And he talks about that a lot. But I bet you that somewhere, there is a calendar that says when they’re going to launch which of these products, so he doesn’t just launch it when he’s got a new product, he has a consistent launch. Once a year, twice a year. And every two or three weeks, there’s a new launch, there’s a new thing. He doesn’t say that is new, he doesn’t lie. But he says I’m opening it up. So it’s it’s evergreen content contents.

But you will sell more products on a launch than if you just put it on your website. Especially for anything that is more than a couple of hundred pounds. What he does is take a product that he’s made, maybe years ago, and he has a launch. And then he takes it off the market. And then he has another launch later on. This is very clever because it maximizes his sales because people think, oh, there’s a closing date. I better get it by Friday. I’ve got all of these emails time with it as closing. So they’re pushed into action to buy. Now, you might think that that’s disingenuous or false. I’ll leave you to work out the ethics of it and how much of that you want to creatively swipe. But whatever you think of it as clever.

Re-engineer Ramit Sethi for yourself

Now it’s your turn, go and look at Ramit’s site or somebody else who is much further on in their product journey and see what you can re-engineer and see what you can creatively swipe.