Ep 33: Ramit Sethi on Persuasion, Negotiation, and Turning a Blog Into a Multi-Million-Dollar Business

Ramit Sethi built his personal finance blog (ramitsethi.com) up to 500,000+ readers per month, and has since turned it into a revenue generating monster. I don't use that phrasing lightly. In this episode, we dig into the nitty-gritty tools, software, and experiments he's used to turn a college side project into a multi-million-dollar business with 30+ employees. This episode is brought to you by The Tim Ferriss Book Club. See the 4-6 books (and free samples of all) at www.audible.com/timsbooks Also, would you like to join me and Richard Branson for a week of mentorship on his private island? Take a look at this: www.shopify.com/tim

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I have a very exciting episode and guest, but I'm gonna start with a bit of trivia, and this is a slang expression, an idiomatic expression, from Argentina, from Argentina. And I used to live in Buenos Aires, in Capital Federal, where I danced Tango, danced my little heart out, six to eight hours a day, for a very long time. It was supposed to be a four-week trip, ended up being nine months, and I learned a lot. There's an odd mixture of Italian, basically, plus Spanish, called l'infardo, there's all sorts of stuff, but this is a simple expression, and it basically means, "No fucking way." Not even if I were drunk, technically. So if someone were to say, "I'll sell this to you for a

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  thousand dollars," and you were to respond with, "No effin' way," it's ni en pedo, ni en pedo, "Not even if I were drunk," or borracho. So ni en pedo is the expression. So whenever somebody suggests something that you would never accept in a million years, even if you were drunk, ni en pedo is the response that you can use. Moving on to our guest. Our guest is a good friend of mine, Ramit Sethi. We've known each other for years, and he's a fascinating guy to study, and a fascinating friend to have. He has attended Stanford for both undergrad and master's degrees. He focused on technology and psychology, and a lot of his study of behavioral change and persuasion is built into what he does now.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  He formerly co-founded PB Wiki, which was a venture-backed startup, then jumped full-time into bootstrapping his own gig. He built up his own personal finance site to, probably at this point, more than 500,000 readers per month, and has turned it into a revenue-generating machine. And I don't say that lightly. I know a lot of very, very adept business people, and this is one of the most understated, just monsters, that is churning out revenue, that very few people are talking about. In any case, he does believe that money is only a small part of being rich, so we'll talk about certainly the tactics, we'll talk about the fact that he went from venture-backed startup to bootstrapping.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  And what some people might derisively call a lifestyle business. And most people do it in the reverse. So they will bootstrap, they'll generate a nice cash flow and they'll say, I want to go to the big leagues and raise a ton of money and go venture back. He did exactly the opposite and has paid off incredibly well. We will dig into how he thinks about life, how he thinks about money, the challenges he's had, as I have had with the branding that he chose in the beginning, the titles of his books, he's a New York Times bestselling author as well. And we dig into a lot, so I will, I will let you enjoy this. It is going to be a two-part interview. This episode is brought to you by the Tim Ferriss Book Club. And I, I really hope that you check it out. I do read a lot, probably three to four books a week.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  And the Tim Ferriss Book Club is a very short list of the few books that have had a huge impact on my life. To see those books, and there are only four to six of them, and get free samples of all of them, visit audible.com forward slash Tim's Books, audible.com forward slash Tim's Books, and I will be continually adding to that once every month or two. Last but not least, before we get started, I'd like to offer an opportunity to everyone listening. People ask me all the time about mentorship and my answer is always the same. I never do mentorships. Why would I want to take on an unpaid, part-time or full-time job on top of everything else that I'm trying to do and create and have fun with? So the answer is always no. Things have changed a little bit.

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  There's an opportunity to join me, Richard Branson, Seth Godin, and a bunch of others for nearly a week on Necker Island, which is Richard Branson's private island. And we will mentor you in your business and ostensibly in life, if you have questions related to that, although I can't promise you answers. It's an incredible opportunity. To check it out, just go to Shopify.com forward slash Tim. That's Shopify, S-H-O-P-I-F-Y.com forward slash Tim. This is not something that you can just pay for and join. It is a competition. It's super cool. I recommend you check it out. And now, without further ado, I'd like you to meet Ramit Sethi. Thank you for listening.

• 4:21Ramit Sethi?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  No, we'll just see an appropriate time.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:41Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And I am thrilled to have a good friend of mine on for grilling. And I feel almost like it's the beginning of a Sampras versus Agassi tennis match. Perhaps the fourth or fifth or 27th time. And I know there's going to be a lot of action, not to put the pressure on. Ramit Sethi is on. Ramit, how are you?

• 5:06Ramit Sethi?

  I'm doing great.

• 5:07Tim Ferriss?

  I am always excited to hang. Ramit is one of those folks that I call not too many for continual questions and pestering about a whole slew of different subjects. Before we get started, though, Ramit, this is something I've always wanted to ask, and I'm not sure I ever have, and that is, you have Ramit Sethi. Why is the T pronounced like a TH and the TH pronounced like a T?

• 5:32Ramit Sethi?

  I have, okay, I'll tell you two things about my name. First of all, in Punjabi, the way it's written, it's TH, so Ramit. And but the actual name I was born with was Amit, which is a much more common Indian name. And about two days after I was born, my dad woke up, rolled over, and told my mom, we can't name him Amit because his initials will be ASS.

• 5:59Ramit Sethi?

  And the best part, the best part is like true immigrants, my parents are from India, they went to the hospital and they didn't want to pay the $50 change fee. So they told them that they had forgotten to add an R, and they got it for free. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's genius. I love it. Okay, well, that, no, that's, that covers it. Thank you. For those people who may not be familiar with you, what would you say to them in terms of your background bio? And this, this doesn't have to be the cocktail. Actually, I'm interested. If you're at a cocktail party and somebody, I don't even know if you go to such things, but if you go to a party and somebody asks you, what do you do? Very sort of New York thing to ask. What is your answer?

• 6:37Ramit Sethi?

  Usually I would say I'm an author and entrepreneur. I used to say I'm a writer. And then the immediate response would be, "Oh, my cousin's son is a writer. He's been working..." I was like, "Your cousin's son is not a writer. He's unemployed." So I switched it to "author," and that is true. I've written a book called "I Will Teach You to Be Rich." I run a site about helping people lead a rich life using the power of psychology. And that is many areas, including personal finance, entrepreneurship, careers, and a whole bunch of other areas.

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I've always felt a close kinship with you, or at least since the very early days, because we've both been blessed and cursed with very memorable brand names that make us both seem like we should be on after the rotisserie chicken at 3:00 in the morning in paid programming. The network does not necessarily endorse the views of Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi with "I Will Teach You to Be Rich" and "The 4-Hour Work Week." And it's been, you know, a hell of a process, I know, for both of us in a way to reinvent or diversify ourselves outside of what ended up, very fortunately, becoming successful

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  products or brands, or, you know, I tend to think of it just as a book in my case. How did you end up expanding the focus of what you do? And when did you decide to do that? How did that decision come about? And I think just for perspective, if you're willing to talk about it, you don't have to get into exact yield or anything like that, but you've built a very successful business. How many employees, full or part-time, do you have at the moment?

• 8:21Ramit Sethi?

  We have dozens and dozens of employees, mostly here in the US and around the world as well. Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started this site. It really was a personal blog. I started it in college. And originally, I had taken my college scholarship money, at least the first check, and invested it in the stock market. This is 1999-2000, and I immediately lost half of that money. And I was like, "Uh-oh." That's not a good thing for an entering college student to be facing. So at that time, I decided to learn how money worked. And I sort of went on this very long journey for many, many years to learn all about investing and stuff like that. And at the same time, I was studying human behavior, social influence and persuasion

• 9:06Ramit Sethi?

  at Stanford. And there was a moment right around sophomore or junior year, like that book we used to read when we were kids, The Emperor Has No Clothes. And I realized that all these experts were telling people, keep a budget, stop spending money on lattes, and nobody was listening. Everyone was nodding their head, saying, yeah, that's great advice. And nobody was actually doing it. And with the background I was learning in persuasion and human behavior, I realized there are actually ways to get people to change their behavior, but it's not the kind of thing you see in mass media. It's not cutting back on $2 lattes or anything like that. And so my interest was in helping people lead a rich life.

• 9:48Ramit Sethi?

  The fact of the matter is, personal finance, it's interesting, but it's not my life passion. It's not what I love to do. I do love psychology. So I wanted to figure out a little Trojan horse. And that was what originally started I Will Teach You To Be Rich. It actually was me teaching one-hour classes for free on campus to my friends. And when that didn't work, after about a year and a half, I decided to start a blog.

• 10:14Tim Ferriss?

  And when you started the blog, at what point, and I'm actually astonished, I've never really dug into this, although it's part of the fun of interviewing friends like Larry King, is I get to ask all the questions I probably should have asked four years ago. At what point did you, because you've done a great number of different things, including working for startups or with startups, and what were some of the early wins or moments that convinced you or led you to believe you might be able to make a full-time go out of either the blog, or writing a book, or anything as a solo entrepreneur, and obviously later building a company? But what were the early indications that gave you confidence?

• 10:50Ramit Sethi?

  There were two or three pivotal moments for me. Keep in mind that this was a personal blog. It was so low budget that I did not make a cent for three years. I didn't charge, I didn't put ads. I didn't want people to think that I started a site called I Will Teach You To Be Rich just to make money. And I also had a lot of invisible scripts or psychological barriers around selling. I think most of us do when we start. So what happened was I started writing and I just wanted to write the best material for my friends and for people like me. And after about six months, nobody read my site for six months. In fact, you can go look at those posts right now. There's zero comments on them. I kept emailing the Wall Street Journal and I was like a cocky college kid.

• 11:35Ramit Sethi?

  So I literally said, you know, "You guys are great, but you need someone who can help you relate to a young audience. And I could write for you. In fact, I'll do it for free." And they were like, "How'd you get my email address?"

• 11:49Ramit Sethi?

  Back then, people didn't put their email addresses out there. So, you know, maybe I'm blessed or cursed with this persistence. And, well, I call it persistence. I think they call it badgering. But I would just email them every couple of months and I would say, "Hey, here's an update. Here's a post I wrote," or "Oh, I gave a talk," wherever. And finally, I remember it was, I believe it was December of 2004. A reporter called me and said, "We're doing an article on personal finance bloggers. I'd love to feature you." And that was pivotal moment number one. I still remember that day. I got 9,000 visitors to my site, which was a huge deal. So that really taught me the fact that most people would have just given up.

• 12:30Ramit Sethi?

  And just sometimes just staying in the game a little longer than others really helps take you to the next level. The next pivotal moment, this one actually taught me that this could be a business. So I had started writing and at a certain point, I was getting a lot of readers. And I just decided one day, "I want to try to sell something and see what happens." And again, this is all public. It's all on the site right now. You can still dig it up. I created an ebook in December 2006 called "Ramit's 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass." I mean, I have a real weird thing about names, product names. It always gets me in trouble. So I had such low self-esteem about anyone actually buying this

• 13:14Ramit Sethi?

  that I priced it at $4.95, which I thought was crazy.

• 13:19Ramit Sethi?

  I apologized in the blog post. I said, "Sorry, guys. I know you could probably find a lot of this stuff for free online, but..." And then I didn't have any fulfillment set up. Like, if people bought it, I was just gonna wait for the PayPal order to come in and then manually email it to them.

• 13:35Tim Ferriss?

  How long was the ebook?

• 13:38Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, it was like thirty pages.

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 13:40Ramit Sethi?

  And what happened was, there were a lot of people that day that called me a sellout. And now, this actually was the beginning of a whole new chapter for me. If you've ever done anything creative, you know how much it hurts when somebody says, you know, "You're a sellout," or, "Oh, you're just..." "Oh, I will teach Ramit to be rich." And it was actually infuriating because I'd been writing this site for free for three years, almost every day. And all of a sudden, for the first time, I sell something for five bucks and I'm getting this kind of flack. But what I discovered was, there were a few vocal complainers, and yet, like, hundreds and hundreds of people were buying this thing. And in fact, the people that bought it were way more likely to open it,

• 14:23Ramit Sethi?

  to read my material, to open emails, things like that. That was when I discovered that what is said on the surface is often very different from reality. And after a while, I started testing all kinds of different monetization methods. And you could consider my site a laboratory. I run tests at all given times. And the ultimate sign for me that this was a real business was when I was making more from "I will teach you to be rich" than I was from my full-time job, which was at a Silicon Valley venture-backed startup.

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  And what was... Just to put that on the timeline, when was that roughly?

• 15:00Ramit Sethi?

  After college, I was gonna go work at Google. Google was very nice to me. They let me take a whole summer off. And then I went back to them and I was like, "During the summer, I did a startup and it took off, so can I have a little bit more time?" They go, "How long do you need, like a month?" I go, "How about two years?" They were like, "See you later." So, my negotiation kind of failed there. But, uh, that was called PB Wiki. Uh, it's still around in the form. It's called PB Works. It's an enterprise collaboration company now. Um, so I did that for about five years, but I continued to write "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" on the side. And during that time, towards the end, I actually wrote the book. Um, by that point, the site had been around for several years.

• 15:43Ramit Sethi?

  And I felt that, you know, I could package up what I knew into one definitive piece. And that was when I wrote the book, which came out in 2009.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  I remember that well. I remember that journey well. The most, one of the more masochistic exercises any human can embark upon.

• 15:57Ramit Sethi?

  It's the worst possible thing you can do. And, uh, it's a wonder that people keep going back and doing it again and again. But it's one of those industries where people tell you, "For the love of God, don't do it." You know, industries like, uh, like lawyers will tell you the same thing. Doctors will tell you the same thing. And authors.

• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

  You know, maybe it's, uh, of course, as someone who's gone back to like the whipping post repeatedly. I don't know, maybe it's my own version of, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey. I just don't have some hot woman with like a cat of nine tails. So I have to go back to publishing for just the like the most unrewarding, unsexy approach to masochism. The early critical mass that you developed, your writing, you're putting out a lot of free stuff. And just to echo one of your sentiments, uh, so at this point, I started blogging in 2007. I've written more than 500 free posts. Many of them, uh, they're all free posts that are, in some cases, 10, 15, 20 pages long. And, uh, I, I put out, I gave away some codes yesterday on Facebook.

• 17:00Tim Ferriss?

  These are codes that get you free audiobooks. And I gave away a free code on Facebook. And half of the comments were complaining that I was only giving away one code. And calling me a sellout and sleazy and I'm like,

• 17:16Ramit Sethi?

  Tim, you're such a sellout.

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  I'm like, for giving away something for free. So to those listening, if you face criticism, and you will, if you have any strong opinion on the internet ever, 10% of the folks out there will find a way to take it personally. And then a handful of those will embark upon a campaign of pain in the assery, very vocally, because they have, it's safe to assume, infinite time on their hands. And before you respond, you should ask yourself, do I want to pour gasoline on a fire and start a fight with someone who has nothing better to do than bitch and moan on Facebook? And the answer should be no, generally speaking.

• 17:55Ramit Sethi?

  Can we talk about this for one second?

• 17:56Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 17:57Ramit Sethi?

  I love this topic. It took me three years from that first sale until I truly became comfortable selling. And I really had to go through some really gut wrenching, horrible processes. And I think that many people who may be amazing at what they do, when you first put yourself out there to sell, and it could be selling your image, selling your brand, selling your vision, or even your book or product, it is so easy to get discouraged by the people around you, especially through the anonymity of the internet. So over those three years, I had to learn how to master it because it wasn't the tactics that would have stopped me. Like, I learned how to grow my email list to several hundred thousand people. I learned all these things. But you wake up every day and you open up

• 18:41Ramit Sethi?

  your comments and you just hear people saying like, I hate you, go back to India, what a scammer. I'm like, first of all, I was born in India and I have one more spelling bees than you can even fathom. So who are we talking to here? But what I really learned was, I had to master the psychology of learning how to handle critics. Because ironically, the better you get, the more exposure you get, the more critics you're gonna get. And that's something I didn't expect. I thought they would go away, but they actually got to be more. So I started cataloging these, I call them freeloader comments. So there's about 10 classic freeloader comments that people will say. Let me give you a link. I've cataloged

• 19:26Ramit Sethi?

  all of them, my favorites over the last few years. It's at delicious.com/ramitsati/freeloaders.

• 19:36Ramit Sethi?

  And you'll just, and you're not gonna believe how much detail I've gone into, but I just, this is a pet hobby of mine. I know I'm a weirdo. So for example, people will be like, "Oh my god, that is ridiculous." Uh, $39 a month? That's crazy. Maybe if it was $6 a month, then I would consider joining. This is a classic freeloader comment. And the first 10, 20 times they said it, I was like, "Oh my god, oh my god, did I price it too high? I'm, I don't know what I'm doing." And then one day, I was like, "Okay, how about, I'll give it to you for $6 a month." And I just decided to take a more judo approach. And of course, they either didn't respond, or they said, "Well, that's, that's crazy. I'm really busy right now, but maybe in three months."

• 20:19Ramit Sethi?

  And so, I think it's really important to test your assumptions. There are always gonna be people who are critical. Frankly, in my experience, like, if you commit yourself to something, you're gonna become good at the tactics. You're gonna become good at the mechanics. But, learning how to master that, that psychology, especially against critics, was one of the most challenging things I had to do in the last five or so years.

• 20:38Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And just on that point, because we both interact with large communities of people. And when, for instance, on my blog, I have about one and a half million unique visitors a month. And I mean, that's, that's a large, reasonably large city. And you just have to assume, or at least the way that I philosophically approached dealing with some of the craziness that comes over the transom. And you and I, I think, have developed a fairly amusing way of commiserating where, you know, when we get a really insane comment. I mean, just super insane, like, and we both get them very regularly, but clearly insane. I mean, not, and I'm not using that euphemistically. I mean, when someone's like, "You are the white horsemen to my children for supporting this nonprofit.

• 21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Like, I will deliver you on Judgment Day and, you know, whatever, skull fuck your grandchildren that haven't been born until your head explodes." I'm just like, "What?" Like- Unbelievable. With a real email address, by the way, that I can respond to. I'm just like, wow, okay, so I'll take that and then I'll email it to you and I'll put it in the subject line. You know, like, hmm, tempting. And then you just have to assume when you're dealing with that level of insanity, that the general population mirrors the internet population. So if you go to, say, San Francisco, you see crazy people walking around, maybe one out of every thousand people. It's just totally batshit crazy. They might have a semblance of normalcy, but then you kind of dig under the surface and four sentences later, you realize, wow, this person is, is very insane. They can manage their life well enough to

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  go to a coffee shop and log onto my website, but they are totally insane. And I think that gives people a certain degree, gives me at least, a certain degree of comfort in knowing that it's not necessarily because you did something wrong. There, there's also constructive criticism when you fuck up, don't get me wrong. But if you have a large enough audience, just assume one out of every thousand is going to be certifiably insane and you're going to have to learn how to contend with that.

• 22:30Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly right. I think that it's actually a good sign that you're doing the right thing. Not if you're getting overly critical comments, because you have to learn, sometimes they're right. Sometimes you really cross the line. And I remember one time I crossed the line so much that I actually had to send an apology email to my list. That was once out of thousands of emails I've sent. But for the most part, you want to listen to the critics, you know, and then decide. And at a certain point, you'll have seen virtually every criticism they can lob at you and you can move on because they're going to be there five years from now, still complaining and you can be on doing, you know, sharing your knowledge with the world.

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to rewind the clock and look at your blog and say the first thousand diehard fans, because there's an article that I refer to a lot. And I think it's, it's a very useful read for people who may get overwhelmed by the million different options presented to them in the worlds of marketing, sales, a lot of self-proported social media experts spewing off. There's just, there's a paradox of choice and people get paralyzed because they don't know where to begin. And I think that the article, 1,000 True Fans... By Kevin Kelly, it's very short, it's available at KK.org, you just search 1,000 true fans is a great place to start, which makes the point, in effect, for people who

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  haven't read it, that if you have 1,000 diehard fans, for all intents and purposes, you can probably live comfortably as an artist, whatever that means to you, on full-time income, if you take care of and cultivate those 1,000 people. So I think getting to that point is a real milestone for a lot of folks. And maybe it's 1,000, maybe it's 2,000, but it doesn't have to be a million. And I remember for me, one of the first milestones that I hit, it took me a long time to find my voice on the blog, and all that means is writing the way that I speak, actually being myself, as opposed to trying to sound smart, trying to imitate other blog posts that I thought would do well, going to, say, 43 folders and going, oh, he formats his posts this way, I'm going to imitate that. Oh, I go

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  here, they create lists of this type, I'm going to do that. And it was a very schizophrenic, un unified, weird attempt when I first started. And the blog was atrocious. I mean, it was just the most hideous fluorescent yellow and blue blog imaginable. People can find screenshots if they search, you know, early blog, as well as your site, no offense, but it wasn't exactly a prom queen. It was awful. Yeah, it was terrible. And, but it was, it was good enough, right? And one of the tipping points for me at the time was I had an article, which is very controversial still to this day, called Geek to Freak, How I Gained 34 Pounds of Muscle in 28 Days.

• 25:14Tim Ferriss?

  And it made the front page of Digg. And at the time, Digg.com, D-I-G-G.com, was a very big deal, and drove just, I think it was thousands of clicks a minute, something along those lines. And of course, immediately crashed my site. And I freaked out. I was in New York City at a lunch, and I found out that it had crashed. And I viewed this as my one golden opportunity. And I'd fucked it up. And oh my God, I was never going to recover. But that really created a lot of buzz that set the tone. The other thing that really helped was a guest post that I did on GigaOm.

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Run by Omalik and I spent as much time on that guest post as I would have spent on an article for the New York Times and because that is still generally rare on the internet, it sounds crazy to say, but it's true, that drove incredible amount of dividends and it wasn't because a million people went from GigaHome to my site, it's because perhaps a few hundred highly influential qualified folks in Silicon Valley went from that article to my blog and that was enough. So I'd be curious to hear for you, in the early days, what were some of those tipping points? And I also have to ask, because I can't leave it unasked, what was the one email that crossed the line and why did you have to apologize?

• 26:35Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, man, I don't remember what that email was. I wish I did, but knowing myself, I probably just said something a little too offensive. You know, I probably laughed at it. I'm like, this is great. But when you're starting to send it out to like 25,000 people or 50,000 people, you know, I make jokes now, I have to stop myself and I do what it's called a joke review. Sometimes I have jokes that are, I think might be so offensive, I have to ask women from my team, I'm like, uh, did I cross the line on this? I have to ask like people in other countries. I don't want to compromise my jokes or the way I write, but I also don't want to let like a joke overcome the message, right? So that's, that's what I learned from that. And since then, I've never had to do that

• 27:19Ramit Sethi?

  again. For me, I agree 100% with 1,000 true fans. I think that was one of the seminal articles that inspired me to really build amazing material rather than just recycling what else was out there. And I knew that if I had 1,000 true fans, then not only would I be able to live doing the things I wanted, but I would be able to turn that into 2,000, 5,000, 10,000. And that's exactly what happened. I have students of mine now who have told me literally, like in person, they've said, I've pre-committed to buying anything you create at any price, which is a very unusual thing to hear.

• 27:56Tim Ferriss?

  That's a hell of a statement.

• 27:57Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm like, wow, really? So in my head, I'm like, man, I need to create something, you know, much, much more higher price. Other students just tell me, they scroll down to the bottom of my sales page, often which are 70 plus pages long. And they don't even look at the price, they just go straight to the buying. So that's a good place to be. And how did I get there? I mean, the first things I did were, was, number one, I looked around and I had a very interesting experience interning with Seth Godin. And I watched Seth, and I watched the way he worked. And I realized he got hundreds of emails a day with the best stories, the best examples. And that's why his books have so many amazing examples that nobody else has. Same with Malcolm Gladwell.

• 28:38Ramit Sethi?

  And so I'm watching him and I realized it is very hard to be the best, but once you get there, it's pretty easy to stay there, or relatively easy. It's like getting into an elite college. Very difficult to get in, but once you get in, you basically can't flunk out. That really inspired me to say, what can I do to become the best? And go through that really tough process, because once you're there, you're there. So, in terms of my first thousand true fans, first of all, you can look at my posts, they tend to be very long. Very long, in some cases fifteen, twenty, twenty-five pages long. Second, I cannot recommend guest posting enough. In fact, if you search for the phrase "guest post", I have an article that shows up number one.

• 29:21Ramit Sethi?

  And it tells you exactly how I write like guest posts that grew my business dramatically and grew my readership, including one on your site. So I did one for you. That probably took me twenty to twenty-five hours to write. It was very detailed, it included video, all kinds of stuff. And to this day, a lot of the people I meet ask, "How'd you hear about me?" And they say, "Oh, through Tim Ferriss."

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  Just to reiterate, and I want to come back to knowing some of the, the subject matter of some of the posts in the early days that really, if you did an eighty-twenty analysis, drove the vast majority of those first thousand true fans. But just to underscore something you said, and I'm looking up your post right now on, on my blog, so I can point people to the actual guest post. So they have an idea of what's, what I feel is required to really,

• 30:11Tim Ferriss?

  to really put a dent in your traffic. Yeah, boy, you're mentioned quite a few times on my blog.

• 30:18Tim Ferriss?

  I think it was automating.

• 30:20Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, it's called the psychology of automation.

• 30:22Tim Ferriss?

  The psychology of automation. So if you guys go to fourhourblog.com, just all spelled out, and then search automation and Ramit, it'll pop right up. And another good example is hacking Kickstarter. I mean, how to raise a hundred thousand dollars in 10 days, which was written by an entrepreneur named Mike Del Ponte. And these posts take a long time to write. They take an extremely long time to write. And the reason that's worth it is that a single blog post can change your life forever. That sounds crazy, especially in the crowded sandbox that is the world wide web. But if you take the time to do the hard thinking, instead of just churning out 100 mediocre bullshit articles, you will

• 31:06Tim Ferriss?

  stand out. And if you think about it strategically, and are willing to put the time in to say, develop relationships, relationships that can be long term, and put together two to five guest posts that are truly world-class, it's almost guaranteed that at least one of those will take. And it can immediately change your business potential and your career trajectory, literally overnight. And I don't think that's overselling it. That's true for my blog, and the blog has become the heartbeat of everything that I do. But I'd love to hear from you what some of the early content was, what the subject matter was.

• 31:46Ramit Sethi?

  Yep, I agree 100%. I've had three or four posts that have changed everything for me. And one of those was the one on your site, the psychology of automation, building a bulletproof personal finance system. So for me, the ones that really, really stand out in the early days were all about personal finance. And again, for me, I believe personal finance is a small but important part of living a rich life, but it's just a small part of it. So I started off for the first few years writing about money. Everyone has money. Everyone has problems with money. They don't know what they're doing. So some of the most popular posts I wrote were, I wrote one on weddings, which was very controversial, because I told people. Here's what everyone says about weddings. Have a small, simple wedding.

• 32:31Ramit Sethi?

  I want to elope. I'm just going to keep it small and simple. And yet, nobody does. And so, I talked about the fact that we should stop deluding ourselves and just acknowledge that we're probably going to have a big wedding. So if that's the case, here's how much you need to save for it. And the numbers were quite stark. And then, I led them into the rest of the automation system. Now, I think this worked for a couple of reasons. Number one...

• 32:56Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember the headline? I just, I'm so curious. Do you remember the headline of the post?

• 33:00Ramit Sethi?

  I do. It was called "The $28,000 Question: Why Are We All Hypocrites About Weddings?"

• 33:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a good one.

• 33:10Ramit Sethi?

  I think it worked for a couple of reasons. One, it takes an unconventional and very brutally honest look at something that we all think or take for granted. So, there are these classic things that everyone says, and yet, nobody does. Like, "Oh yeah, I should go to the gym." Okay, but no one really goes to the gym. Why not? Let's talk about that. Or, "Keep a budget," which nobody does. Let's talk about that. Let's put it on the table. So that was one. It really shined a light on something that most of us weren't doing. And then, the second thing was, it was a tactical, specific sliver of an entire, larger discussion. So, for example, instead of you writing the post like, "How to Build a Healthy Lifestyle," you wrote, "34 Pounds of Muscle, From Freak to Geek," or "Geek to Freak."

• 33:55Ramit Sethi?

  34 Pounds of Muscle in 30 Days. That is a really specific sliver of a larger discussion. And so, if you can chunk out what you know into really specific slivers, that will attract lots and lots of people.

• 34:08Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And to underscore that, when I'm writing posts, I never start out with trying to write a post that will appeal to all of my readers. Because the only way that you attempt to achieve that is by having something so generic... Non-polarizing and lukewarm that no one will hate it. Well, actually, people will still hate it and no one will love it. And what I prefer to do instead is to try to hit the majority of my audience at least once every two months. And what that means is I will try to write a post that perhaps appeals to, that I think 10,000 to 50,000 of my readers will love, just absolutely love.

• 34:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't care if the other people who come to the blog ignore it altogether, which is why I'll write about some quirky aspect of inside baseball and startups. And then follow that up with a post on the seven different mechanics of powerlifting, squatting, right? And over time, I'm going to hit all of my readers and I don't feel rushed to hit them all with each post. And that, I think, is how you develop diehard fans. You only need someone to love one of your posts to have them as a fan for a very long time.

• 35:24Ramit Sethi?

  That's right. Don't try to get a lot of people to like you. Try to get a few people to love you and then do it over and over again.

• 35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly. And when did you make the leap? It seems like you did it pretty early. And this is, this is a very self-interested series of questions that I'm going to hit you with. But when did you make the leap to utilizing email? Was that right from the beginning or is that something that you came to later?

• 35:47Ramit Sethi?

  No, it's one of my biggest business mistakes is not setting up an email list for several years. And in retrospect, that decision cost me millions of dollars. But you know, it is what it is. That's the price you pay when you don't, when you're learning something for the first time. I set up an email list, probably three or so years into it, maybe four. And at that point, I didn't have any sophisticated knowledge of email. I didn't even have an email service provider. When you submitted your email, it was saved in some text file somewhere. And, and then I made the second worst mistake you can make. So the first is not having an email list. And the second is not emailing them regularly.

• 36:29Ramit Sethi?

  So people signed up and then I just forgot to email them for like nine months. And then the first time I emailed them, they're like, who is this spammer? Like spam? And I was like, I'm not spamming. You signed up for me. But we didn't have a relationship nine months later. So.

• 36:44Tim Ferriss?

  You mean, you mean people shouldn't wait like seven years to send their first emails? Not that I know anything about that.

• 36:51Ramit Sethi?

  Every single time I see you, you talk about you setting up an email list. And at this point, I just, I just shake my head. Until finally, I, I saw the great news that you were doing it. I was so happy.

• 37:01Tim Ferriss?

  It just took me seven years. So, sorry, continue.

• 37:05Ramit Sethi?

  So since then, we've now gotten considerably more sophisticated. We have, you know, around 300,000 people on our email list. We do behavioral based segmentation. We have multiple cohorts at any given moment going through different funnels. We send millions of emails a month with multi-million different types of combinations of email funnels. And we generate roughly 99% of our revenue through email.

• 37:30Tim Ferriss?

  So. Just to, I apologize to pause, just to define some of those terms for folks. So behavioral segmentation would mean if someone signs up through one form and then they click on something and the first email they go into a certain group, how, how is that split out?

• 37:44Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. Well, what most people do when you sign up for an email list is you sign up for an email list and they'll send an email and it goes to everyone on the list.

• 37:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:52Ramit Sethi?

  Makes sense. It's pretty simple. We did that for many years. Over time, we found that we were expanding our list of topics to, you know, different things like psychology and entrepreneurship and stuff. So if you sign up to learn about starting a side business in our Earn One K funnel, probably don't care about finding a dream job at that moment, which is another funnel we have. So based on where you sign up or what you click on or even what you open, we can determine certain things about you and then we can shunt you into the correct series of emails that are most likely for you to want and most likely for us to get benefit from it as well.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Shunt, like doing arterial surgery.

• 38:31Ramit Sethi?

  There you go.

• 38:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's exciting. So what, what are some of the other, either best practices or common mistakes that people make? So best practices that you've devised or common mistakes that people make when it comes to email management or emailing in general?

• 38:45Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, so we do things a little differently and we're pretty rigorous about testing. And one of the things I learned is that there's a lot of best practices out there about email, but almost no one tests it. So it's just like one, it's like the blind leading the blind. People are out there. Giving their best practices, but they don't really know what they're doing. So, we said, "Look, we're gonna start from a fresh slate and try all these things and see what works and what doesn't." So, if you sign up for my emails, you're gonna learn a few things that are different. Number one, they look like plain emails. Like, when I send you a personal email, it looks the same as if you're on my list. And that's because I'm not trying to, I'm not J. Crew. J. Crew is selling a brand, so their emails have to be beautiful.

• 39:29Ramit Sethi?

  My emails look like I'm writing to you, because I want to be your friend, right? At scale. And so that's why my emails appear to be really simple. Behind the scenes, there's a lot of stuff going on, but they appear to be like, "I just jotted you a note", which is exactly what I'm writing to you. So that's number one.

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So no header, no graphics?

• 39:46Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, none of that. Straight, simple, use your name, you know, "Hello", and then I end like, "Hey, talk to you soon, Ramit", like that.

• 39:54Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 39:54Ramit Sethi?

  Alright, the next thing that we learned to do is to train people to take action. And this is, this is very counterintuitive. So, most people think of their email as a newsletter. "Let me give you the five best posts", "Let me give you a digest of what's going on". We don't wanna do that. We want, when you see my email, or when you see anyone's email, most of the time, we look at an email in our inbox and we go, "Ugh", like, "Alright, one more email to process". But, what I want is for people to see my email and go, "Awesome, what crazy story does he have today", "Or what am I gonna learn, or am I gonna laugh"? And so, we want them to read it, first of all, that's why we talked about the design and the stories in it. But we also want them to take action.

• 40:38Ramit Sethi?

  You don't want to build a list of consumers. You also want them to do something. So, we will have people reply, and I tell them that I read every email, which I do. Still, I read every response. We'll have them fill out surveys, we'll have them click a link, we'll have them watch a video. The point is, if you just get them to read your email, they kinda wipe their hands together and say, "Alright, cool", you want them engaged, and that turns out to make all the difference.

• 41:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I have to ask, so now you've got dozens of employees, potentially. Presumably, you have a couple of managers in between yourself and... The everyone on the front lines, but how do you with 300,000 people read all responses? Or maybe am I anticipating the number is bigger than it is? How do you schedule your time so that that is possible?

• 41:25Ramit Sethi?

  You know, first of all, if you email 300,000 people, you're not going to get 300,000 responses.

• 41:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 41:30Ramit Sethi?

  But on a really, an email that connects with people, you're going to get many, many thousands of responses. And what happens typically is that they almost all come in in the first two or three hours. And then after that, they trickle in. So after a while, you can look at an email and almost sight read it in seconds, like typically two to three seconds. Because at a certain point, you've seen so many responses, you're just pattern matching. So to go through, let's say, three, six, 10,000 emails, it sounds like a lot, but you're working very quickly. And why do I do this? Because not only do I enjoy staying close to my readers, you also get certain insights in email that you will never get in any other medium. So let me tell you what I mean.

• 42:15Ramit Sethi?

  When we send out, when we do a lot of research with our readers, if I ask someone to fill out a survey, they're going to answer differently than if I asked them to fill out an email. Any idea why?

• 42:27Tim Ferriss?

  I know, you know, I could, I could give a lot of guesses, but I'll let you tell me.

• 42:31Ramit Sethi?

  An email is personal.

• 42:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:33Ramit Sethi?

  And if it's a relationship with someone, especially someone who tells them they read every email, and then you know that they do, then they actually will open up their heart. They'll tell you stuff they've never told anyone else. Alright, so I had a very interesting woman. I asked my readers, what's one thing you claim you want to do, but you don't actually do it? And she wrote me back and said, you know, I keep telling everyone I want to run three times a week, but I never do. And I wrote back to her and I said, why don't you just run once a week? And she goes, why would I run once a week? What's the point of that? It doesn't do anything. And I thought that was so interesting, that we would rather dream about running three times a week than actually run once a week. And so I use that in a future email as an example.

• 43:16Ramit Sethi?

  And so people get the message that you actually read the emails. And I then use that concept in a future course of mine. So you can actually, like one insight, it's like reading a great book. One insight can change your life. And so that, that is the best possible place to get your insights, is from the fans who have signed up to hear more from you.

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  So this is, uh, this brings up an complimentary or alternative approach to very similar ends that, um, people out there might be interested in. This is something that I do, which is based on the blog. So I will very often publish blog posts very late at night. So I will, I will publish blog posts extremely late on west coast time. So presumably most people on the east coast are asleep and I'll put up a post. I'm a night owl, so it doesn't bother me to stay up until two, three in the morning. And I will sit and wait and go back 60 minutes later into the comments to allow people who are overseas generally to give me feedback so that I can then address

• 44:17Tim Ferriss?

  concerns. Let's say one of my jokes is over the line, or if the post gives an indication that it's going to be very, very controversial, I might add in a caveat or some type of preface. And I'll get feedback from people in other countries that I then work into the post before I promote the refined version the following day. And I will then typically read at least the first 50 to 100 comments of almost every blog post in a similar way. And it's very easy for me to respond to. I use WordPress. I've used it since day one because I think it's very good for SEO out of the box and I'm very comfortable with it, which allows me to then do the same in the admin panel as opposed to doing it on the site itself, which takes

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  a lot longer because you're refreshing the entire page each time. But I found that extremely useful and very critical to stem potential blowback with articles that are controversial. Like I put up a post at one point, Jesus, that really, really rankled a lot of folks out there, which was about a reader, a male reader who had gone to, I think it was Brazil, and created a swimsuit calendar and ended up marrying one of the women that who modeled in the, it did a shoot with him and blah, blah, blah. And it was a very, I thought, inspirational piece. It wasn't, I didn't think it was sort of sleazy, but there were a few things that were not addressed in the piece that let people's imaginations run

• 45:41Tim Ferriss?

  wild and make assumptions that were not true. So it was it was important to catch that early. And when I haven't done that, you can wake up, especially with a large enough audience, to a major PR crisis on your hands. When you have journalists or media or large bloggers who are also reading your posts. In the case of email, what I'd love to ask you is, at this point in time, what software helps you run your life? What software and services help you run your life and business?

• 46:13Ramit Sethi?

  Yep, so we use a lot of off the shelf software. Because we have a team that works remotely, we use some things, some of which are standard, some of which might be a little surprising. So we spend most of our day in email, chat, Skype, Basecamp for project management and Google Docs for sharing documents with people. We've built some systems to be able to, like, we use a lot of checklists. And there's a great book called The Checklist Manifesto.

• 46:43Tim Ferriss?

  Atul Gawande, that's amazing.

• 46:45Ramit Sethi?

  And it's all about how you should save, like, for us, we know we have, we're cognitive misers like anyone else. We have limited cognition, limited willpower. Why do we want to spend that looking for, did we do this? Did we do that? You know, airline pilots use checklists because there's big risks there. We do the same for our business because we want to spend our limited creativity on the stuff that really matters. So that's good. In terms of other business tools that work well for us, we started off our first ESP or email service provider being Aweber, A W E B E R. And I think they're really good. They're great to start off with. We were there until we had about 150,000 people on our email list.

• 47:28Ramit Sethi?

  And we had done some really wacky things with their software to customize it. So that when one person joined, they counted as like eight leads. It was like crazy, the stuff we were doing there. And finally, we realized we needed to move off them and get on to somebody a little bit more sophisticated. We then moved to Infusionsoft.

• 47:47Ramit Sethi?

  And we're probably gonna have to make a move because in about a year, we've already almost outgrown them. So that's what we use for our email software. Other things that we use, Survey Monkey, which is terrific for collecting responses. It's simple, it works. Most of it is free, or you can pay a little bit for the premium service. And then along with that, we have a host of sort of back office tools that we use as well.

• 48:09Tim Ferriss?

  What would some of those back office tools be?

• 48:11Ramit Sethi?

  Those would be things like GitHub for managing our design process. We've got a tool that we use for sharing screenshots and things like that.

• 48:20Tim Ferriss?

  What do you use for the screenshots?

• 48:22Ramit Sethi?

  That one, I'm gonna have to check the name on.

• 48:24Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, no worries.

• 48:25Ramit Sethi?

  But honestly, we could run 85% of our business using the tools I just mentioned.

• 48:29Tim Ferriss?

  What do you use for sharing checklists and ensuring that people are using checklists?

• 48:36Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so that, we use Google Docs. And in Basecamp, we have a detailed checklist that says, "Did we do this? Did we do this?" That is less about tools and more about the mindset of if someone got hit by a bus, would we be able to do what they're doing today? And, you know, I learned that a long, long time ago. And so, you know, I have to say, I'm pretty inspired by places like McDonald's. I don't think that we have a business like McDonald's. I mean, in many ways, we're not as big, of course, but they wanna be able to bring in anyone. And within 30, 40 minutes, an hour, they're on the line, cooking. We don't wanna do that, but I am inspired by them, by the sense that if someone got hit by a bus or quit, that their system could go on.

• 49:20Ramit Sethi?

  It's reproducible. And so, we have taken a lot of steps to make sure that we put those systems into place. And I think that's something I would challenge every entrepreneur to do. I went through a lot of challenges, saying like, "No one can do this as well as me," or "No one can do that." Like, at this point, I don't even know how to send an email out to my own email list. You know, someone else does it. I have no idea how it works.

• 49:39Tim Ferriss?

  You're gonna arrive at the office, or at your house, and be locked out? Fired from his own company. Couple of other tools people might find helpful. I also use Basecamp and a lot of people use Basecamp. I think it's a great tool. I also use Asana and I've been experimenting a lot with Asana, which is an interesting alternative to Basecamp that was co-created by Dustin Moskowitz, co-founder of Facebook. I do not use Google Docs much, partially because I spend a lot of my time offline working and I've been frustrated in the past when I've been unable to access Google Docs. So I'd love to come back to that and get your two cents on it. The checklist manifesto, definitely checklists are hugely important.

• 50:21Tim Ferriss?

  One of the approaches that I take, and I did this after I had to fire an assistant, which for something very egregious. And I realized that, not all certainly, but a lot of the processes and preferences and checklists were in her head. Now what, right? And it was a real pain in the ass to then have to get someone else up and running and try to recall what was missing. And I've found ScreenFlow and Dropbox very helpful for that. So I will do a ScreenFlow using that software of the same name and speak as I'm capturing a ScreenFlow of me, for instance, moderating comments to show how I moderate, what types

• 51:03Tim Ferriss?

  of comments go where, how I deal with gray cases that are questionable for any number of reasons and so on and so on. And I then put these into Dropbox into a, basically a process folder. And that is accessible to anyone who may work with me who needs to see how something is done, which I found very, very helpful. SurveyMonkey, definitely. They bought a company called Woofoo. I've used Woofoo and SurveyMonkey both for a very long time. In the case of Google Docs, do you have, what do you use for chat? Is there any particular tool you use for chat?

• 51:38Ramit Sethi?

  We just use Google Chat. And we might do one of these more corporate tools like Yammer or something like that. I've been hearing good things. What about you? Do you use anything like that?

• 51:48Tim Ferriss?

  I don't use chat currently much. There are a few exceptions. If I'm dealing with developers typically or designers, particularly overseas, I'll use Skype. And I do like Skype due to the encryption for a host of reasons and the ease of file transfers. I get a little edgy if I have too much of my data on any one company's services. And Google would certainly fit that bill, but I'm.

• 52:16Ramit Sethi?

  Let me give you a couple of other tools that we use as well.

• 52:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:18Ramit Sethi?

  This is for the more technically minded crowd. If you have a website, we use Visual Website Optimizer to run a lot of different tests.

• 52:26Tim Ferriss?

  That's great, as do I, actually, recently.

• 52:27Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, it's a great one. So at any given moment, we're probably running five plus tests on our site. And of course, we're testing many more versions of things in our emails. We recently started using an interesting tool called Umble. This, this is.

• 52:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 52:42Ramit Sethi?

  It's U M B E L. It's more of an enterprise level software. If you have a lot of fans or email subscribers or something like that, it allows you to look in and see their social profiles and learn about your audience. Who are they? What are their demographics? How much do they make? What are they interested in? Things like that. That's a cool way. Personally, my favorite way is just to ask them. So a lot of times we'll just send an email saying, hey, would you mind, you know, sharing a little bit of information? And here's a cool way to do it. Let's say you have a few thousand people on your email list or your blog readers or whatever. You can just send them a link which automatically redirects them to one of three different Survey Monkeys. Or you can just post Survey Monkey one, two, or three. In this way, you can get a lot more responses pretty quickly.

• 53:27Ramit Sethi?

  We tend to limit our surveys to about five questions. So if we send an email out, we can fill up four or five Survey Monkeys in, you know, a matter of minutes. And we want to ask things like, you know, who are you? What are your biggest challenges? What have you tried to do to solve X? And when I do surveys, I love qualitative responses. So Survey Monkey is great for that.

• 53:46Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you say Survey Monkey one, two, three, and four, why are you? Why do you have four different surveys?

• 53:53Ramit Sethi?

  Because I don't want to have to create a survey with 20 questions. No one's going to fill that out. And so I just, I'd rather create four different surveys with five questions and send it to a bunch of different people.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So those, so those, you have four sets hypothetically of five questions and you're just splitting your list up into four different segments.

• 54:12Ramit Sethi?

  Exactly.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, got it. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. How do you think, of course, I just started emailing, so I'm actually a bit of a funny case because I have absolutely no experience really emailing, yet I have big enough numbers to make catastrophic mistakes and, and just suffer like the wrath of God tsunami of, of like regret if I do anything wrong, which is very anxiety-producing place to be, needless to say. It's like, oh, great. You've had a week of gymnastics. You're, you're, you're going to be in the finals at the Olympics tomorrow. Good luck. And I'd be curious to hear, I don't know if you've seen any of the stuff that I've sent out, but what would you change? What would you improve or test with how I'm approaching things currently?

• 54:57Ramit Sethi?

  Well, you know, one of my general life philosophies is don't try to be 40 before you're 40. So.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  I just turned 37. I'm in no rush to get there, but I don't, I don't think that's what you mean.

• 55:12Ramit Sethi?

  It's funny how many of us, you know, we want to jump ahead and do all these like really sophisticated things and I'm no exception. Like every time I start something new, I want to jump to what all the best people in the world are doing and try to copy them. But of course you have to go through the pain and the fire to be able to get there. And I think email is a great example. Like right now you have a huge list, a huge amount of people. Like I've seen your emails. I'm on your email list. I think they're great. I think they're a great way to start. Ultimately, like having known you and having read all of your stuff, I think people want to hear your voice in the emails. And one of the classic things when people start off, they just list, here's a list of all the things I've been writing about or stuff like that.

• 55:57Ramit Sethi?

  And I think that's a fine way to get your feet wet, but ultimately I'd like to hear the stories of what you've been doing. I'd like to hear more narrative. I'd like to get inside your life a little bit, you know? What is the life of Tim Ferriss, this mysterious charming man?

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  I'll give you mysterious. Charming is definitely TBD. Cool. Anything else come to mind?

• 56:20Ramit Sethi?

  Let me tell you one best practice that people share as if it is the law of God, but it's actually not true at all. So there's this movement, particularly in Silicon Valley, but everywhere, where people say, everyone has too many emails. People are just, they want to get to inbox zero. So if there's one thing to know, it is quick, to the point, quick, quick, quick. Write your email, five sentences or less. And that's just not true at all. We know it. We've tested it experimentally. We know it for a fact. Many of my emails are 10, 15 pages long. In fact, there's a very sophisticated marketer who wrote even longer emails. And people said to him, you know, who reads this stuff? Would anyone even read to the end? Who does it?

• 57:04Ramit Sethi?

  And he laughed and then he said, only the buyers.

• 57:09Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and so the point is-

• 57:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's very Alec Baldwin response.

• 57:12Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. If your material is good, if it is engaging, there's almost no maximum you can write. For example, like some of my sales pages, 72 pages long. Who reads that? Plenty of people read it. And they scroll to the bottom, they find the one link that says buy and they click it. So my point is not write longer. It's don't worry about space. If you have a compelling piece of copy and if you have a relationship, people will read it. So don't worry about short bullet points. None of that is relevant. Just worry about writing the best stuff you can.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, and I want to reiterate just, just hopefully for clarity with people and feel free to correct me, but what Ramit is saying is not make your stuff as long as possible. The way that I'm hearing it at least is the way that I approach my books, although I might have to modify it because they're growing at an alarming rate in length. But the blog post, the email, whatever it is, should be as long as it needs to be. That's it.

• 58:10Ramit Sethi?

  That's right.

• 58:11Tim Ferriss?

  And so one of my concerns, I suppose, with the-

• 58:16Tim Ferriss?

  Personal stories or narrative is that if I don't have really concrete how to take away and tactical stuff in that email, that it will come off as too self-indulgent and that I will have massive unsubscribes, particularly with the new people who've subscribed and do not have a deeper familiarity with my story or the books and so on. How would you respond to that?

• 58:41Ramit Sethi?

  I mean, there's some element of truth to it. Look, first of all, you probably are self-indulgent. I mean, you're sitting here talking about yourself and me for two hours. I mean, who could be more self-indulgent than us right now? And I love it. But beyond that, I think that, you know, I had the same thing. So if you go back and look at my early posts, they're very tactical. And I think that's awesome. But someone said to me years ago, they said, you know, Ramit, tactics are great, but tactics become commoditized. What ultimately connects with people is getting into their emotions and their psychology. You know, and I was very resistant to this. I'm like, you don't understand, my tactics are world-class, blah, blah, blah. But over time, I came to realize that she was exactly right.

• 59:25Ramit Sethi?

  Tactics matter, of course. Tools matter, but to ultimately connect, psychology matters. So for you, I actually think people would love to hear the stories of lessons you learned, failures you had, what happened this weekend, and an interesting insight that came up. I mean, if you look at any, you know, columnists, they're not always sharing how-tos. A lot of times, they're just sharing interesting ideas. One other thing, don't be worried about unsubscribes. We monitor it, but we don't measure it in the sense that if someone unsubscribes, you know what? It's my gift to you and it's your gift to me. I wouldn't want to waste someone's time and I don't want them to waste my time either. In fact, I regularly encourage people to unsubscribe. I put the link right there.

• 1:00:07Ramit Sethi?

  I say, look, if this is too much, if this is too involved for you, here, maybe we're not right for each other, unsubscribe. And it actually causes a huge spike because people are like, what the fuck? Who has the, who says that? But the people who stay. Are actually highly committed.

• 1:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, what's so paradoxical maybe about my concern about unsubscribes is that I regularly call my readership on the blog all the time. So I will, if I'm getting particularly fired up or have my, you know, knickers in a twist about something and I've just had a long day and maybe too many glasses of wine, I'll be like, you know what, I'm gonna write a blog post and I'm gonna put a couple of fucks in there, just a couple of extra fucks. Because I'm so tired of people chastising me for my language and like, I used to have a rat tail, I'm from Long Island, give me a break. And so I'll write a post with an extra few fucks in there, just so that if someone is easily offended by that stuff, they effectively opt out of visiting the blog. Because I don't want to deal with their,

• 1:01:05Tim Ferriss?

  you know, mom-like scolding. And part of the reason I'm comfortable with that is because it doesn't give me a concrete number in a user interface or a dashboard on Aweber or elsewhere that's like, you had X number of people leave and unsubscribe. And it's been kind of psychologically fascinating to see how it's tempting for me to be more conservative, much more conservative with email than I am in my blog posts because of that precise number that it gives me as feedback.

• 1:01:38Ramit Sethi?

  It's a good reminder that not all data is good data. And that often the most productive thing you can do is stop looking at data. For example, you know, for my investments, I don't check my investment numbers except once every six to 12 months. You should not be looking at your investments every day, that's crazy. And it's actually doing you a disservice to do that. Same thing with unsubscribe rates. I mean, it's crazy. You need to be focusing on growing your list, writing amazing stuff, and probably revenue per email. That's a great measure if you're growing a business. Unsubscribes, that's gonna drive you crazy. It serves no real purpose.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G dot com.

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  Where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com/TFerriss.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  Or on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.