Everything entrepreneurs need to know about Zero to Launch and Accelerator- How Ramit Sethi helped me build an online business
I originally wrote this article way back in 2014, and have updated it to reflect recent changes in the Accelerator program. More recently, I attended Ramit's 2017 Forefront conference- if you're interested in networking, public relations, running an online business, or just being a great learned, read my notes from Forefront 2017.
I’ve wanted to run an online business ever since I was in college. Having an online business means I can make a lot of money, be location independent, have a tremendous amount of freedom to determine when I work and what I work on, and best of all, the ability to make a huge difference in many people’s lives. Before this year, I had made several abortive attempts to start blogs and online businesses, with varying degrees of success, but had never really fulfilled my dream of having a stable and lasting business that delivers massive value to a loyal following.
In early 2014, when Ramit Sethi, CEO of I Will Teach You to Be Rich and GrowthLab, announced that he was going to offer a course on starting an online business, I knew that if I didn’t jump at the opportunity, I would regret it for a very long time. You see, by that point I had been reading his blog for years, and it had already changed my life. I hadn’t bought anything from him other than the Kindle version of his book, but I had already used his advice to save thousands of dollars a year, land highly competitive jobs that much older, more experienced people were competing for, and even receive a few freelance consulting gigs. I knew that Ramit’s blog is one of the most successful online businesses around, and that he’s done exactly what I want to do, so when he first launched his Zero to Launch Course in April 2014, I jumped at my chance to live the dream of running an online business.
Since then, I’ve built a blog, I’ve gotten traffic and subscribers, had readers ask me to coach them, and even been interviewed by an editor at Business Insider. Most importantly, I’ve learned a lot about starting an online business. I’ve also made some big mistakes which impeded my progress for the first few months, so I wasn’t an instant success like some of Ramit’s students, but I can see the path to success ahead of me. Now, “online business” is a very broad subject, so I’m going to explain exactly what aspects Zero to Launch covers, what it doesn’t cover, what parts it does best and worst at, my personal experience, and my final verdict on this product, including who should and should not buy it.
What Zero to Launch Teaches You
If you’re looking for the ultimate guide to all things online business...this isn’t it. I’m certain that no such guide exists, because online business is just too broad of a topic. Instead, ZTL balances breadth with depth, focusing on the earlier stages of starting a business according to one particular business model. Specifically, this course will teach you how to start a blog that you monetize by selling information products and coaching/consulting services primarily through your mailing list. It also focuses on the things you’ll need to do in your first couple years as you build an audience and launch your first 2-3 products. Within this limited scope, Zero to Launch teaches you almost everything you need to know.
The core elements of the course consist of four modules- Your Game Plan, Your Audience, Your Products, and Your Sales. The Game Plan module, and part of the Audience module, actually come before starting your blog. Do this part right, and you’ll start your blog knowing that you have a clear target audience, places you can reach that audience, solutions to their problems that you can package into products and services, and even other blogs to guest post on. Do it wrong and you’ll struggle, as I did (more on that later).
Once you’ve verified that you have a good niche, you can start your blog. The course gives you solid instructions on building a blog, and even provides tools to make the whole process quick and easy. It gives some guidance about the appearance and layout of your blog, but mostly tells you to get writing articles and promoting them, and not worry too much at first about cosmetic issues. Ramit’s blog looked like shit for years, and it still built a following.
After that we have the products and sales modules. The Products module shows you how to build a solid informational product- not a cheap $17 ebook, but video and multimedia courses ranging from $50 to over $10,000. It also gets a little bit into services like coaching and master classes, but it’s less about product design than about researching your audience to be sure you’re giving them exactly what they need. The Sales module has a ton of great information about writing sales pages and emails, and setting up email autoresponders to automate your sales cycle, digital downloads and membership sites. I didn’t get that far into this phase, as I haven’t reached the point where I’m ready to monetize yet.
There’s a Facebook group for ZTL students, where you can share your experiences, get advice both from each other and from Ramit, and see what’s worked for other people. Finally, in addition to the course itself, you’ll also get occasional emails from Ramit with bonuses such as case studies, copywriting tips, and the results of experiments that Ramit has done that have made him millions of extra dollars by increasing his sales, mailing list signups and audience engagement.
In short, this course gives you just about everything you need to start a blog, connect with a niche audience, build a mailing list, build products, and start making money- even passive income, if you set everything up correctly. But there are also plenty of things that the course doesn’t really get into.
What ZTL Doesn’t Cover
There’s a lot that ZTL doesn’t get into, or at least hasn’t so far. It doesn’t really get into other business models besides selling courses and coaching through your mailing list- anything involving selling physical products, affiliate websites or ecommerce stores is completely outside the scope of the course. Ramit brings up the subject of monetizing blogs with ads, affiliate links and selling ebooks, but mainly to say that doing so would require far more readers, and selling higher-valued courses through your mailing list allows for more revenue with a smaller but more engaged list. No argument here.
The course also hasn’t covered SEO, social media or viral growth, and Ramit says that those are a waste of time for your first year. Again, I agree with this completely, although these would be good topics to know about down the road.
Ramit brings up the topic of expanding beyond your initial niche, such as how he moved from talking about personal finance, budgeting and investing, to earning more money, and later on into subjects like psychology, social skills and fitness. He doesn’t really talk about how to do this smoothly, except for telling you not to box yourself in with an ultra-specific website name that leaves no room for growth.
There are also two very big topics that seem hugely important, but which the course hardly goes into at all. The first is blog design- although Ramit is probably right when he says not to worry about design from a cosmetic standpoints at first, he also doesn’t go into much detail about designing your overall layout for ease of use and maximizing list signups. He does give a few examples of websites that he considers to be well-designed, and they seem to come in a variety of layouts.
Second, the course doesn;t say much about list segmentation. He’s said in the Facebook group that this sin’t something to worry about early on, but it can become very important as your mailing list grows into the tends of thousands, and a lot of students will want to know more about it later on.
In short, the course glosses over a few subjects that Ramit doesn’t think are important until a year or two after you’ve started your blog. I should not that he’s mentioned a few web design and segmentation tips in his emails, but overall it’s still something a lot of students will want to know more about.
Accelerator: Ramit's Secret Weapon
Edit: I had to rewrite this whole section recently, to reflect Accelerator's pivot to being purely a coaching program. In addition to the core ZTL product, you can also join Accelerator, Ramit's online business coaching program. Accelerator has undergone a major transformation since Zero to Launch was...umm...launched. Originally, it included two components. The first was the aforementioned coaching program, and the second was a Wordpress plugin which helped you quickly set up your site, gave you some decent (but not top shelf or particularly unique) Wordpress themes to use, and also allowed you to quickly and easily set up opt-in forms, landing pages (aka squeeze pages), and lightbox popup ads. It was a nifty tool that really made the early stages of setting up a website easier. However, it was buggy, particularly the included themes, which caused my site to crash a few times, requiring me to restore it from a backup. To Ramit's credit, his tech support was top-notch. But the bugs, combined with people's tendency to outgrow the plugin, caused him to discontinue it and instead double down on the coaching program. So, the coaching program. Accelerator currently has three full-time coaches. Accelerator students have access to a private Facebook group in which coaches will answer any online business questions you have. They also run weekly and monthly challenges for students. But the real meat of it is the live coaching calls. The coaches hold live coaching calls about 12-15 times a week. Each one is about an hour long, and focused on on subject- strategy, copywriting, community building, customer research, productivity, etc. These calls allow you the opportunity to get detailed, one on one help with various aspects of your business or issues you're dealing with- and the coaches are among the best in the world at what they do. You can also just attend the calls to watch other people get coached and learn what kinds of things your fellow students are doing to succeed. The coaching program also includes students from Call To Action, IWT's copywriting course- which is also a great course by the way. The main downside is that the calls so far have all been on weekdays, which can be a big limiting factor for students who are still working at a full-time job and building their online business on the side. Accelerator is a subscription program- they used to offer both monthly and annual subscriptions, but are currently only offering annual memberships at $999/year.
How I messed up, and how I’m recovering
After a few weeks of research, I picked job hunting, and more generally career advice as my niche. I’ve always been good at the process of job hunting, and several times I’ve beaten far more experienced candidates for highly competitive jobs. Overall, it’s a skill that I’m better at than 90% of people, and I know I can add a lot of value. I was able to make some solid connections with other bloggers, and over the next few months published more than half a dozen guest posts, interviewed a forum manager, and even got interviewed myself by an editor at Business Insider. I also had a couple of readers reach out to me for paid coaching, which felt amazing, not to mention making me some money. However, my mailing list didn’t grow anywhere near as fast as I wanted it to, and a few problems became apparent over time.
First off, I was working a full-time job when I started my blog, but a few months later I quit that job to be a full-time freelancer. Now I never intend to work a regular job again, and that creates two issues. First off, I’ll no longer gain experience in that area- I was already worried about running out of stuff to write about, and now I probably won’t ever be job hunting myself again. Second, my enthusiasm for my niche has waned a bit- since I prefer self-employment, I’d rather help people with that than with job hunting, but I don’t feel experienced enough at freelancing to teach others to do it just yet.
Second, it was difficult to find communities that I could reach out to directly. I found a few forums devoted to specific professions, such as financial analysts and airline crew, but the only general job hunting/career advice community I found where I could easily address people was the r/jobs subreddit on reddit, and most people there were not open to my networking-based advice, and instead just wanted to learn a magic resume formula that would get them their dream job. This left me with guest posting as my only good option.
Third, and this is a big one, bloggers in the career niche tend to have low engagement from their followers. I guest posted for blogs with tens of thousands of people on their mailing list, got people with over a hundred thousand Twitter followers to tweet an article of mine, only to get a bare handful of subscribers out of it. What I eventually realized is that people tend to read career advice when looking for jobs, sign up for career blogger’s mailing lists, follow career coaches on Twitter, but then tune out once they get a job. So I got surprisingly low traffic from my guest posts, and realized that it’s very hard to get loyal, consistent long-term readers in the career niche.
To solve these issues, I re-did my Game Plan, and I’m taking my blog in a new direction by changing my niche altogether. Instead of career advice, my blog is now going to focus on self-experiments in physical and mental performance. I’m hugely into fitness and nootropics, and have gotten really into the quantified self movement over the last couple of years. I’ve also recently been given opportunities to be an early tester for two different devices- one is a biofeedback device that measures brain waves and has been shown to have benefits like reducing anxiety and improving focus, and the other is a handy device that lets you measure your testosterone, vitamin D, inflammation, and a few other cool things at home.
This is an area where I have a ton of knowledge and passion, will never run out of things to write because I’ll always be doing more things to write about, and there’s are several highly engaged and motivated subcultures that would be very interested in my blog, not to mention a lot of great bloggers in this niche who I can guest cross-promote with. I love this subject and I’m in no hurry to monetize, so I’m going to focus on building my audience and developing a core group of loyal fans before I worry bout making money off my blog.
Three lessons to be learned from my experience: first and foremost, be extremely thorough in developing your game plan. Take as long as you need, because your success is heavily dependent on having a great niche and positioning before starting your blog. Second, if you get Accelerator, pay attention to the monthly teardowns, as some of them are very helpful in clarifying market and positioning issues. Finally, be active on the ZTL Facebook group; a couple of the discussions on there really helped me to understand where I went wrong.
Final review of ZTL
So in conclusion, would I recommend Zero to Launch for someone who wants to start an online business? Absolutely I would! If you want to start a blog that will eventually become a very scalable, profitable business, allowing you to set your own hours and work from anywhere in the world, this course is a great choice. Like Ramit’s other flagship courses, Earn1k and Dream Job, Zero to Launch has the potential to be life-changing.
The greatest strength of ZTL, as with most of Ramit’s courses, is how it teaches you to front-load the work. By over-preparing at first, you can rep disproportionate rewrads later on. On top of that, the Facebook group is a humungous value-add, and you can even get some personal attention from Ramit.
The Accelerator coaching program is well worth joining. First, because it allows you to get answers to nearly any question you might have. And second, because it allows you to quickly get past sticking points and move forward when you're stuck in a rut. It's hard to overstate how important this is- problems that would hold you back for months or even years can often be fixed in one week if you get good and timely advice.
Zero to Launch gives you everything you need to get your first ten thousand subscribers and make a solid living off your business, and I found myself only reading a handful of articles from other bloggers. As mentioned, it is a bit thin regarding more advanced topics for established bloggers, but Ramit is coming out with a Zero to Launch version 2.0 in January, and I expect (and hope) that it will go a bit more into those advanced topics, as well as diving deeper into some of the common “failure points” where people go wrong with starting a blog.
In short, if you want to start an online business, join Ramit’s mailing list and buy Zero to Launch the next time he opens it up for sale, and sign up for Accelerator. Thise course will help you build a money-making blog, and so so quickly. If you have an online business but you’re in the early stages and having trouble growing, I think ZTL is still worth buying, though Accelerator might not be worth the cost if you’ve already set up some of the features it provides. If you have a successful online business that’s already making good money, Zero to Launch 1.0 might be too basic for you, but you should still check out the 2.0 version when it launches in January, as it may well have enough advanced material to be worth your while.
Historically, when Ramit updates his courses, it’s always in a big way, often increasing the total amount of content by 50% or more and tackling entirely new subjects that weren’t covered in the original version. His courses tend to grow with their users. The price also tends to grow, and I expect him to hike the price of Zero to Launch sometime soon. So if you have any interest in this course, I wouldn’t put it off.
If you want to become a successful blogger and a known authority on your subject of choice, build a business that brings in a steady stream of customers eager to buy your products, and live a rich life while helping others to do the same, Zero to Launch is by far your best option. You can read more about it here, including case studies. My favorite case studies can be found here, here and here.
Ramit is probably the best person to learn from if you want to build a seven-figure online business. He's also taught me to be a great student at everything I do- from online business, to fitness, to learning social skills. If you want to start an online business, I can't recommend this course highly enough.
Questions or comments about this article? Join the discussion on Facebook.
If you're interested in Zero to Launch, you may also want to read the following articles about productivity:
How to spend the first hour of every day The three mindsets that highly successful people have Four sleep habits of highly productive people Eight health and productivity habits you should change this week