Ramit Sethi – Greenlight Your Idea course with special price just for you: $297 $56
Hi, I’m Ramit Sethi, the New York Times best-selling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and the founder of IWT and GrowthLab.
Let me tell you a story about one of the hardest periods of growing my business…
It’s hard for people to understand how uncertain an entrepreneur feels.
It’s one thing to work at a place where there are standard policies and procedures to follow. You walk into work and you have an employee badge. Your work computer is there. You have a boss and you know what to work on today.
But when you’re starting your own business, the path isn’t so clear. Early on, I remember struggling with even knowing what to do next.
I had just published my book and I was on book tour.
Every day, I’d wake up at 4am, talk about my book all day, then fly to a different city that night. When I met my readers — my favorite part of book tour — I’d always ask them one question:
What should I write more about?
Invariably, the answers would come back to something about “earning more.” Honestly, it was baffling. What do you mean, earn more? How would you want to earn more? They had no idea.
For me, it was confusing and nerve-wracking. I’d spent the last few years talking about personal finance. What did earning more have to do with that?
I wondered if I could just ignore the people who were asking about earning more. Maybe they were outliers. Then, in the next city, I’d hear the same thing.
OK, so earning more. What does that really mean? Should I talk about negotiating your salary? Selling stuff on eBay? Side hustles? It was like opening a can of worms — only there were 50 cans, and I didn’t know which one was the right one.
And now it wasn’t just a personal blog that I wrote in my free time. My business was at stake. If I got this wrong, my readers would leave.
Worst of all, I didn’t know what my next step was. Should I blog about a few different topics? Or ask random people? What then?
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had stumbled onto the need for “customer research.” Get it right and you can grow a profitable business. Get it wrong and you launch a product nobody wants and hear crickets (and potentially lose your business).
Well, we decided to do it. So my (small) team and I jumped in to create something on “earning more.” Little did we know at the time that we’d spend the next 14 months figuring it out. This included: