TC 020: Ajit Nawalkha – How MindValley Went From 1 Product to Over 8 Figures in Annual Revenue

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Interview with Ajit of Mindvalley

Sweeney: Hey guys! Sweeney here and welcome to another episode of the TriggerCast. This week we have a real treat for you. We have on Ajit from MindValley and let me read you his description here. It’s quite the description I must say. He’s a business strategist and marketer who’s also a senior partner at MindValley. MindValley describes himself as one who is pushing humanity for culture hacking and revolutionizing the global education system. Ajit himself is known as the Doubler which is an awesome tagline I got to because he has a knock for doubling the revenue of every venture he talks, of every venture he touches. It’s going to be a great talk today. We’re really excited to learn a little bit more about his testing process, some lessons he has learned and also how he runs and manages so many different large companies. So, Ajit we’re very happy to have you have on here.

Ajit: Thank you so much for inviting me, Sweeney! It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sweeney: He’s coming from out of the state. You want to tell us where you at right now?

Ajit: I’m at Kuala Lumpur right now. It’s early in the morning for me. I just woke up and jump on this interview. From Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia all the way from South East Asia.

Sweeney: Nice! I described the tagline a little bit but can you give us 2 minutes or less, a little bit better description of what MindValley does? What maybe their core products are and how you came about?

Ajit: Sure! MindValley is essentially an educational technology company. What we do is we put together education products with technology. When we say education products, we don’t mean high school education. We’re talking about education products which are in the space of personal development, personal productivity, enhancements, business training and that kind of stuff. Mostly working in the area of meditation or in area of business development. Those are some of the primary areas and my products revolve around those things. Some of our products that we started which is probably the most popular ones that we have which is 50 year old system from Laredo, Texas. We started a business built on one single website with one single product of this particular system. Now, with over 10 years into the business we have our sales to be able to say that we are probably one of the largest in the area of personal transformation. That’s what MindValley is. That’s what we’ve been doing. We also have a course because as I’ve said it’s an education technology. What our course do is allow and go beyond online courses. We go into things like coaching. We got into seminars and events and things like that. We have a large group of things that all related to educating individuals to be better human beings in some way, in either personal life or business side or both, whatever it maybe.

Sweeney: Very awesome! I got to say it’s very impressive to go from 1 product to just looking on site I have no idea how many products you guys have but seems pretty deep.

Ajit: Yes! Hundreds of them. We have over 100+ offers that we worked with.

Sweeney: Wow! That’s one of the things I’m curious. With your customers and with your leads in- let’s dig into that later. When you have so many products, is it cross selling? Is it focusing on getting leads on to a newer product and then figuring out what other products might apply to them. When you have that much depth, I can imagine it’s difficult.

Ajit: It could be if you would like to see that way. What we like to see is a little bit different. We feel that there are only 2 ways to really work on a business. First is either you work on the solution side of business which is essentially solving problems, right? When you’re a company sometimes people confused it products. Products sometimes become a little bit more internal focused. We approached it a little bit different. We go what does the client want? What’s the problem that I’m solving? So, they create solutions. Second, we have growing businesses just to increase area of influence which is basically sometimes called traffic. Why we don’t call it traffic is because influence is a factor of new leads, working on different platforms like email, Facebook, Instagram. At the same point, you’ll be able to drive leads from Google Adwords or Facebook and stuff like that. We’d like to mix and match. What we’re trying to do is for example we pick what’s the most outgrow solution side of business. What we did is we went ahead and create a process of how to on board. I’ve really worked with an author on how to create a product review really, really fast, run a solution really fast. How to really get out in the market really fast, all those kind of things. What we work was only on the solution side of the business and not necessarily on the influence side of the business. When you work on big or small companies or big areas or small areas, I think what really defines if it comes together in your head. If you simply put it the way I just put it, it’s not complicated anymore because you know everyday you wake up and you just think how do I make my solutions side of business. Every activity that we do and every networking that we do, every person that we meet mostly conversations are involving around solution side of business. Enhance your business growth because now you’re 100% focused on it. That one vertical with grow by about 100%, 200%, 300%. Once that vertical either of side grows by 100%, you’ll business will grow by 100%. It’s really that simple if you break it down. I’m reading this book. It’s called Hot Things about Hot Things by this gentleman called Ben Harvitt. He says one thing about CEO. He says, the hottest thing about being the CEO or the most difficult area is the CEO himself which is how you would manage yourself and how would you manage your state, how you would manage your emotions, how do you manage your anxiety or whatever that is or whatever that is or bringing you excitement is what will define if you will be a good CEO or not a good CEO. That’s how you can grow a complicated business, thinking everything complicated or even a simple business about making it more complicated.

Sweeney: It makes a lot of sense. There’s one point that you are talking about and might get passed over so I do want to bring more attention to it that is we don’t think about it as products. We think about it as solutions. I think that’s a huge point that this day in age often gets overlooked. A lot of times, we’re so focused on ourselves on what we can create. We forget to think about the customer. If we get to think about client especially with the start up or software, they live or die when someone uses it. Someone’s going to use it if you’re providing a solutions to a problem they have. If you’re answering a solution to a problem that no one has well then it’s not going to succeed very well. I think digital courses and products probably forget that to at least most people do.

Ajit: Yup, that’s true! Surprisingly, yesterday I was watching a presentation by a gentleman called Guy Kawasaki. He was one of the Macintosh team members. He’s making a presentation about what’s the most messed thing that start ups do when they’re pitching them. They said that they come up with these 60 slides explaining their business. He says the rule should 10, 20, 30 between 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 in size. The reason why he said that is in 10 slides, you only have to really cover is the title of your presentation, the problem that you’re addressing and what’s the solution to it. It’s what you have to do and that’s good enough for 10 slides. That was his key point. These are 3 slides that you need to have. Sometimes they do it complicated.

Sweeney: I’m curious with your sales copy and sales pages. Sure, it’s very hard to find balance between directory response which can be a little bit heat them over to head compared to having the softer side of selling. Obviously, certain sales material can be extremely aggressive. Do you have built in a little bit to the format like here’s the problem here’s our solution?

Ajit: It’s very, very built in. We followed a template to right sales but at the same time we never do the hit-you-in-the-face sales because we like to give and set a level of respect to our client. We don’t want to disrespect. We don’t see client as the client of this product. We see a client as a long term partnership with them. Every time they disregard or challenge or not appreciate their intelligence, I am mostly killing a relationship. That’s really old school copywriters and we may write their own terms but they say think your client as a stupid idiot or something like that or something direct response to people. That’s just not true. Clients are not stupid. They will never be. If you addressed the need in nice way, they’re going to buy if they believe that your solution is good for them at the price that you are promising and the product is going to do what you say they’re going to do. You can do that in a nice thing. You can do it not in a really bad way. There’s a book that shows on how we operated as a company. We don’t try to be the smartest or we don’t think that we are the smartest people. We just think that we study a lot more and we just work better than anybody else. There’s another book called Spin Selling. I don’t know the name of the gentleman but the book basically covers 4 steps to making a sale which is S is situation. P is problem. I is implication and N is need pay off. That really simply means is if you have a conversation with your potential client where you only ask qualifying questions, you actually make a much powerful sale. This gentleman is like somebody who invested to many companies and all that kind of stuff so you really know his stuff. What will happen is you will ask person a question that will help them identify the situation. Your situation basically is I can’t get off my bed yet, for example. I’m just giving hypothetical example. What happens is you get them to say what is the situation that you are facing right now? They are the ones that are really identifying that it maybe the problem. Then you get them and say, “What will happen if you stay with this problem for the next 6 months or 6 years?” Now, they’re really going into the problem. You are not really saying anything. They are saying everything. You are only asking the right questions for them to be able to identify. Then you position your product by saying, if you don’t a person who knows what is the implication of these things, now you go in with your pay off and say what if we did this and this is the result you could get. Would it make sense? Now, of course the acceptability of the person how it is works because they are conditioned in some way because they have knowledge. I am in the situation. I have this problem. I need to get out of it. You are somebody who can help me. Let’s work. I give you a 30 day money back guarantee forever and ever. That way the person has no reason to say no at that point. But at the same time, the way you make the sale is not quite talking to somebody but working with somebody. It’s much easier but at the same point the result is the same. Sometimes it’s better actually.

Sweeney: Gotcha! That makes a lot of sense. With that being said, when you take that kind of format and then you put it on to a page for just one way conversation, it can be a little bit hard to translate.

Ajit: Not really! Think about this way. If you would start a promotion, you will start by saying here’s who I am, know about me, this is my system. Let me do a survey with you. That is you identifying the situation. When you do your first video, you don’t need to talk about you but you talk about this is the situation that most people encounter. You can already gauge that by the kind of questions you will ask and what’s the situation that they’re ready to present. Who’s going to qualify as a person, right? Now when you’re going into the problem, you go in knowing that the person is from the situation because that’s how they qualify themselves. You go like, maybe the problem is this. Comment below so I can know that this is the problem. Why do you think this is the problem you need to address? What do you think the person will say and identify the situation? Most likely as this is your second qualifying page. You qualify them now as a person who identifies the problem themselves. Now, the implication you can probably do your side with saying it but in a way that they can relate to it. You can say, I was like this. This is where your story comes in. This was my problem exactly like your problem. This is how cut my life as going to be but have changed. You communicate the implication. This is also the time that you go, this is how it changed. Here’s the technique that you can use to help. That is also giving in your result in advanced. I’m walking you through a whole process of motion but you can do the same thing while on the direct response sales letter. When you hit them with the final webinar, final sales page now you are capturing all these 3 things and really presenting the offer. That’s pretty much it. I’m not saying your sales letter will flow this way. Sales letter will flow exactly how 21 or 28 steps sales will end up. You would come to know what your clients already said. Your conversation rate would actually be more than to make less but you don’t have to push anymore because they already qualified themselves.

Sweeney: Out of curiosity, you have any examples of that survey or launch strategy similar to that?

Ajit: All of ours are the same. Everything that we doing is scalable, reputable and it’s important and that isn’t easy. Because of that, you can find any of the MindValley flows and they’re the same. They all follow the same system in one way or another. Sometimes, they would not start with qualifying that survey but they would start qualifying the learning page so they would very much addressed of particular situation on landing pages and we will work with that situation through that process of entire promotion or entire webinar sequence.

Sweeney: It sounds like the MindValley Product Launch Formula. It sounds like you switched the hard pitching that most people do, the hammering of the head instead you aim to qualify or survey or the landing pages and things so it’s a softer sale, so to speak.

Ajit: Yes, in a way! I don’t want to call it softer or hard to sell. It’s just we feel that it’s the right way to sell. It’s not that our conversion numbers are less than anybody else. Not only we put out more offers, we can put out the best converting offers pretty much in my industry. If $1 you can see is the average of the industry or the best average of the industry or the higher average of the industry, that’s what you’re going to get from us. If not, we will not get that offer out. It’s not that we want to not convert. That’s not the point. The point is to have a long term relationship with the client. So, that’s the reason why we don’t hit them on the head and try to make it not just promises but be instead going in an approach which people can relate. It’s not selling. That’s not the point.

Sweeney: Gotcha! I don’t know the correct for it. Maybe I need to think of something you can call that form. You guys still get it done but you do it in a different way.

Ajit: Yes, which also differentiate as strong to rest of my industry.

Sweeney: Moving forward, you have a testing process that I heard was brought and you have some examples. There’s one particular example where you give away bonus. MindValley will give away bonus. The way you did it is you added that into the check out page, for the carts and help increase in sales by 23% which is obviously not only it is huge but it’s only also funny because you’re not changing anything. You’re giving them this free bonus. You simply added it on the cart page instead of delivering it afterwards. I’m curious to hear a few more techniques or hacks that you have tried or maybe you’re trying now. You can also tell us how this testing process works and how other people use it for themselves.

Ajit: I was taught with the testing process. What happens is everyday when you study so much, you get a lot of testing ideas. When you listen to Podcast like this one, you get selling ideas but you just don’t know where to go. What we do is instead of just going ahead and testing everything that we can find, we go to a process which allows us to value what is a good test and what is not a good test. What we would do is we will log all these and say something like that and we list down each one of them. We will go ace this test, replicable, scalable and easy. By replicable it means it cannot be replicated across different websites . By scalable it means cannot be scaled out without too much hassle with it which means can this test further lead to growth overtime. Last is it’s easy to put out. It’s a simple test that you can set it up in an hour or 2 hours.

Sweeney: Does it have to hit each of these or you’re just seeing of it hits at least one?

Ajit: How you would rank is if it has 3 stars which means it’s replicable, scalable and easy. That’s the first test that you will do. If it is 2 stars then it will be less than 2 stars and 1 star would be the least. When you do that, most of the time you’re always testing things that are highly relevant and will give you immediate results. One more factors sometimes we use and it’s actually an important one that is proven. It’s not just somebody suggested out their mind saying I should do this. It must be proven somewhere or some psychological story that has to be behind that for it to work. If it’s not proven ever then we will not test it. 4 stars in the scenario will be the highest rated and will be done first then 3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star. Then being replicable, scalable, easy and proven. That’s how we know if a test worth doing or a test is not worth doing. That could also clean up a lot because the 3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star probably will never get tested.

Sweeney: I’m going to post that on the group hacker community and we’ll see how does one does. I know that’s a constant problem. It feels a little silly because your answer is so simple. There’s a lot of genius there and just in the rating system because you’re always testing as you say a kind of the cream of the crop and you’re not wasting your time with these 2 stars or 1 star. It’s a constant thing everyone’s learning about growth hacks. How does that look? Do you have your 4 stars, 3 stars, 2 stars and 1 star and they just get put in?

Ajit: 4 stars is you’re going to this every week. Let’s say 3 or 4 stars, those are the ones that are going to implement and tested. Some of them are testing but needs a lot of time. Let’s say checkout that stage a little bit more time than a learning phase test. Just the amount of traffic so they try to get a span within a course of a week, if not in 2 or 3 weeks. We will just wait 4 stars every week. This is a 4 star test, let’s do this first and then this one and then this one. We just follow the 4 stars first and that’s how it is.

Sweeney: The 4 star system does success. Is it your idea or it is a team measure?

Ajit: I don’t know where this comes from but I’m almost sure that it comes from some books. Like I said, we just study.

Sweeney: Is there anything else on the process or is that about it?

Ajit: That’s pretty much the process because you ask me to share. I have one example right now that I recall of a test that we recently did. It was about deleting the phone number from my check out. This wasn’t done with an English business. It was done in a Spanish business. But we are testing it now and the English business as well. They use to have a phone number as a requirement on the check out. They took it out and I think the conversion is like 30% or something like that. I don’t have the exact number on me but that’s a good test we’re running in case somebody has phone number on the check out. Unless you absolutely need it because you call them. You probably need that field.

Sweeney: We do have phone number because with our abandoned carts we will actually call them. It’s interesting because you say that increase by 30%. I think by having the phone number we increase their sales by 30% by calling the abandoned carts. If you’re not calling them then why do have?

Ajit: Exactly! That’s why I said if you’re not calling them then you don’t need it. Same as far that sometimes we tend to pull out the credit card systems and feel that we must get that dressed. Taking that dress also increases conversion if you’re never going to mail them. If you’re not selling a physical product or you’re never going to do a direct response mail to them, you can just take out that dress and that can be conversions too. These are just test in the queue. I haven’t proven them but we know it rated in the proven start. We know this is a test that is worth doing.

Sweeney: Do you have any special test or tricks that you do for abandoned carts?

Ajit: We have a follow up sequence that goes out and that seems to work well. We haven’t done the phone calling thing.

Sweeney: It’s like saying there’s so much money that we just can’t hire enough people. You blurred out there for a second.

Ajit: I was just saying that every company leaves a lot of money on the table. That is always going to be the case. If you are saying that you’ll make all the money that you can make, you probably are a thousand billion company. That just can’t happen. There’s a certain flow to growing a business. You can grow at a certain phase. Sometimes it’s the technology you choose. Sometimes it’s just the market you choose. We try to get through them as fast as we can but we are not always through them and that’s for sure.

Sweeney: Very good point! That’s part of the reason why I like that 4 star process so much because there are always hundred things you can test. At least having some sort of ranking system and knowing this one is a lot more important than this one, is very important. Do you wonder having phone calls end up being a 4 star or not. I guess the scalable will make. The scalable and easy will make it hard.

Ajit: It’s scalable but easy is a challenge in that particular thing. We know even if it’s not easy to something that has a business process, we should serve clients gently. We do have a call center where people can call to order but just the whole idea of being able to call for abandoned cart and all that stuff, it needs lot more resources. It’s not that we are leaving everything on the table but we know that we are leaving a ton on the table because we don’t call the guys. It’s not easy to hire so many people to be able to deliver and make calls to happen.

Sweeney: The only reason why I speak into this is because I know we personally have been doing it more and how we got started was it was actually one of customer support guy and that’s how we approach it. We really approach it from a customer support. It’s more just like, we saw you’re going to buy this. You didn’t have a chance. Is there any way we can help you? Can we answer any questions? Most of our customers are like, “Ryan called today and I’m happy.”

Ajit: That’s great! That’s always serving the client and that helps every time we do something good for the client. Like I said, people are not stupid. People are actually brilliant. They just sometimes need help or they just need help in the decision. Sometimes, that’s all it really is required. It’s not that they’re idiot or anything like that. They are smarter than you are most of time.

Sweeney: If you’re buying some digital course and you’re not even getting something tangible, it’s reasonable to speak to someone before you put down the cart.

Ajit: That’s true! It’s about helping the clients. You pick up the phone and say, “Can I help you?” Usually, they would call and say, “Yes”.

Sweeney: Now for the CEO process. It seems like you’re in charge of a decent amount right now. I think you maybe have a course or some sort of longer detail on this CEO process you have?

Ajit: I handle 4 companies that this point. 3 of them that I co founded and 1 that I’m the CEO. It’s quite a few company but it’s like how I said and there’s nothing there. It is only the power I think of growth is about how doing less. It’s not about doing more. You don’t grow by adding things to your pocket. You grow by deleting things to your pocket. Most of the time what happens is we end up doing the whole parade of consulting which means 80% of your time than can only leave 20% of the result. That itself right there is a where the challenge growth comes in because you start to focus on things that maybe don’t matter as much. What I do as my process is I’m very, very consious of what my time goes into. If it’s not worth my time, I just don’t look at it. I’m just like that and I think all CEOs and founder should be that way. Your business is not about $10. It’s about a million, $10M or $100M that you want to make. If you want to make $100, you can’t worry about $10. You have to worry about how it tends out and make picture. That’s what I try to do. I try to focus on what’s the big concept, what’s the big people that I need to be able to execute that concept that will add to bottomline dramatically. Sometimes, you’re working on the concept for months because you want to know one thing. Time wealth is as important as money wealth. There’s a friend of mine where I first started on some companies. He said the 2 ways of you could do a start up, you pay in timely or you can pay in money. Most of the people tend to do that’s not paying in time. That’s the worst way of investing and do a start up. What happen is you will know if it’s going to work or not in the first 1 month or first 2 months or 3 months, whatever is the time cycle. That gives you a lot more wealth on the long, long term. By long term, I don’t even mean 3 years. I mean within a scope of a year. If you’re a start up or you’re in a new business you can get time wealth which means you invest the money, you test it and actually see if it works or not. You will move a lot more faster. You will be successful really, really fast. There’s a gentleman called Neil Patel. He runs a company called KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout. Neil Patel himself has a brand and he owns an agency and stuff. He’s very a successful man. One day I was talking to him, I’m like why do you think you are more successful than the usual 29 year old? He said, I just failed more. I have done so much hookups in my life that I know exactly what will work and what will not work. Now I don’t fail anymore or my failure rate is much, much less. Why? Because he always failed in money. He makes sure he learns really, really, really fast. By the time he was 25 or 26, he already learned so much that 29 he’s an entrepreneur, call or speak everywhere, works for government and creates great company like KISSmetrics. You have to be mindful of that. Your time is extremely important. Your mental state is extremely important. Until the time you work on the 20% that brings 80% results or 80% of their time is gone and brings 80% of the revenue and your company follows the same principle, the company is going to go crazy. It’s going to grow really, really fast. That’s all I do. I really don’t do anything else. I just tell my people not to do things.

Sweeney: Interesting! Your answer’s simplicity or perfectioner, excellent and something like that when you can’t remove anything else.

Ajit: You can always remove something. It’s like the question of revenue, right? Are you leaving money on the table? Yes, always! Can you make the business simpler? Yes, always! There’s always something that is more complicated than it needs to be. It’s just that somebody hasn’t gone and ask that question. It’s just complicated. It can be made simpler. It can execute the same process. So, think about like this. Just to give example on how simplicity works. We started last year the same process that I talked about marketing, we think about 3 months built. One really good promotion that will make over million dollars about 3 months. Earlier this year, we trim the process to 15 days. It would take us about 15 days or about 3 weeks or about 21 days actually. We’ll take about 3 weeks to put together a promotion. Right now, it takes us under 2 weeks. It takes about 8 working days to put together the same process which we took 3 months last year. I’m almost sure that by the new technology that we just finished building and proved it once the marketing has built, it takes 7 hours. Technology rights, you have time gained almost from 3 months to 7 hours. That means I could put out a new offer every single day. Do you see how business just grew just by working on deleting stuff and working on the more important stuff and building technologies to support that growth? That’s what simplicity is. You have to try to make it simpler and simpler. I’m sure it can even be less than 7 hours at some point. 7 hours is already something that I’m like I haven’t care. I just wanted to build that marketing class and really becomes a day or 2 day long process. That’s mindset that you offer, it allows you to have more freedom which is essentially more of the entrepreneur side of business because they want to create great things in the world and they want the freedom to be what they want to be and do what they want to do. It creates more freedom because you have all the time in the world and it grows your business by high scales. People are happier because they don’t have to do complicated stuff that they’re doing. It’s super easy and everybody can do it.

Sweeney: It makes a lot of sense. I think you’re like stepping over a dollar to pick up pennies. That’s seems to speak to what you’re saying. There’s always revenue and sometimes people are grabbing at smaller proof that’s why they never reach the higher amounts. I think that connects with some of the things you’re saying. Also, what I find interesting in this mix is how does paid acquisition fit into this? Paid acquisition strikes me as money spent instead of time spent. You can lose a lot of money quickly but you also get a lot of data and a lot of information that quickly. Obviously, paid advertising tends to scale pretty nicely.

Ajit: Being this over half a million every month in paid advertising, that’s the way to grow the business. What we do is also on that front as well, there’s a set process and set formula that we know works every single time. All we do is we replicate it as many times as we can. One thing that happens with paid advertising is people tend to go into un-targeted market and try to go how can I scale this and all that kind of stuff. If it can’t be targeted marketing, just don’t do it. Work on the ROI. Don’t worry about the scale of that particular campaign. Work with 100% ROI in the first 30 days so you can run that effective cycle. It builds up because you start with one offer and then they will the next one then the next one. By the end of the year, now you have 12 offers and you’re making maybe $100,000-$300,000 every month with little investment without putting a lot of money in there. To grow until the first $10,000 a month is actually very easy. It’s not that hard. It’s beyond that, that is really hard because you get into really tricky optimization process and all that. We try to go beyond $10,000 of course. All you need to go for is can I create 6 offers this year where I can invest $10,000 which will net $60,000 every month. Paid advertising is way, way faster than SEO or any other format of organic reach. Of course paid advertising gives you a lot of leverage. If you’re working smartly, you would have worked with the solution side of the business which means most of your products are relatable which means you can retarget all the audience and we just leverage. That’s how we work a lot with leveraging on what we already have. I don’t know if I’m making sense.

Sweeney: No, it does makes sense. The 6 offers, $10,000 a month is a little bit less clear. I think what you’re saying is that by building up something that scales and repeatable you might not be able to reach that $100,000 a month. But if you have 6 different offers and you are spending $10,000 on each one then you’re still growing. That’s how you can grow elsewhere. Everything is related, it does all connect. It might not be completely overlapped but it is all connected. You are focused on the solution side of the business. It should be good offers and hopefully connects somehow.

Ajit: Yes! I believe that’s how you build your offers. Think about like this. What we said on the first part of the interview was you always really get a solution which means you’re always asking questions. Your audience is pretty much always the same that’s answering different things. They have a connection between the answers they will give because they relate to you in a particular way and expect you to create certain kind of results. The kind of answers they will give you is mostly likely be related to what proven to already deliver in some way or another. Maybe the product or free training or free content that you give away. What’s going to happen then is when let’s say you’re a business coach. Let’s just take a random example. The question #1 might have got you to create solutions on how to build a business. The 2nd answer that you might get from the audience is how do I grow a business? 3rd question might be how to take your business from $100,000 a year to $1M a year. The 4th question might be how can I create a social media strategy? Something that may look completely different. Another question maybe how do I start my first Google Advertising campaign? All of a sudden you now have 6 different ways of creating a solution that can help your audience. Now you have different solutions or if you technically think 6 different audiences on Facebook, if you’re starting your advertising on Facebook. What you do is you simply plot these offers into Facebook, investing $10,000 and retargeting the 6 offers because now they have visibility of you as an author. Now you’re 6 different channels where you’re getting 3,000- 6,000 leads every month. You would be probably be generating about this point already a business that creates maybe a million a year if you could do just 6. It becomes that easy because it’s only 6 offers. So that means you have to create one product every 2 months and that’s not hard. Instead of that, if you just go in on how to create a million dollar business, it looks really hard out there. I’m giving example only because MindValley is compliant with authors. It might look difficult to people. I’m just one guy and that’s all this business is all about. That’s why giving brandness example. He’s really small in the sense of team size but the revenue of the business is up to $10M as far as I remember. Last acquisition that I have with him is up to $10M. But if you really look at brandness, products sweep then maybe 8 products is in entrie sweep. It would be probably less than the 8 products. Think about the focus he can do because he created those 8 products probably in a scope of last 4 years. He was doing the products every 6 months and he could generate over $10M with just that. Doing that math and say how much do I need to create the wealth that I want to create? How much should cost? How many customers do I need? Now it looks, all I have to do is make a sale every other day or every 3 days. It looks achievable. It look smart. It looks like something that I can actually do. So, you create your business really, really fast. You grow your business really, really fast. This can be done at any level. A hundred thousand level, a million level. We do it at our level which is multi 8 figures. You just have to do that math and becomes really simple after that. Makes sense?

Sweeney: Yes, it does! It makes a lot of sense. I know some people prioritizing this and be like I just need to spend 6 figure in a month on paid advertising, no problem. Obviously you work your way. You get there and that one is even breaking on ROI and paid advertising and taking it from that level. I actually have below here acquisition in how you achieve your growth. It sounds you like a lot of the page. I would like to hear more about that. I was listening actually to a Podcast so might as well I bring this up. They speaking against paid acquisition sayinng that once you stop paid acquisition, you find out customers actually want your solution instead what you are providing your solution- something to that effect. I spoke in the paid acquisition. This was more so frame on start ups. I’m curious, what do you think about that?

Ajit: Well, the different ways of growing a business, I’m not saying paid acquisition is the only way of getting it but I don’t think it’s evil. I don’t think trying to organically growing a business is also evil. My only thing is with organic growth unless you’re sitting on Silicon Valley which these guys are, it is damn, fucking slow. It takes you years to get any attraction. It takes you years and hours to get any data or any valuable information. The reason why it works for somebody like him and companies that are sitting in San Francisco is because it’s a network. It’s like having JVs. A lot of them. If you have JVs then you don’t have to worry about paid acquisition because your friends have a mail for your and give you the initial and you built from there. That’s really fine if you got it. If you can do that, good for you. Do that because that will give you more profits. But if you’re starting a business right now and this is your first business and this is your first time you’re trying to do anything, organic is the slowest  path to figure out if you’re going to win or lose. It’s like paying in time like I said. For me, I’m not saying I’m against organic growth. If you got the partners, if you got friends, that’s the better way. You make more profit 100% guarantee. But if you don’t have all of that, start with paid advertising. Start with Facebook for that matter even though in paid advertising it’s easy to jump start at this point.

Sweeney: Gotcha! With that being said, acquisition or your channels mostly Facebook, some Adwords? Would you say 80% of it is paid? Do you also have some sort organic strategies? I’m curious.

Ajit: Yes! We have a nice mix. I don’t know the percentage at this point right now but our biggest investment is Google. Our 2nd biggest investment is Facebook. Our 3rd biggest investment is email drops. We’re actually retargeting on Facebook and Google. Without investment, what we’ve done is a based, solid content strategies. What we do is we really engage people through emails and through Facebook by giving free content away. In a way where we really brand MindValley as a company, what happens is there’s a strong recall on everything that we do if you are in our area of influence. You would really have a recall for the brand name because you branded it really, really strongly. What we do is everything that comes to paid is essentially rechannelled to go into our social and go into our email funnels. We know that simply by retargeting on Facebook and doing content strategy we have revenue by 20%-30% just by adding that on our webinars.

Sweeney: You bump your webinars 20%-30%?

Ajit: Yes. We called it sub list when somebody signed up for a webinar 30% of our sub list or 40% of our sub list actually come from Facebook through retargeting or through content.

Sweeney: I actually didn’t know that you guys did webinars but it sounds that you do.

Ajit: we only do webinars these days. That’s all we do. We don’t do launches. It’s so much work.
Sweeney: With that being said, talk to me about webinars?

Ajit: What we’ve done last year like I said, it would take about 3 weeks to prepare. I think what we did at that point is this takes 3 months to prepare. This doesn’t look right. This doesn’t look scalable. This looks like pain in the ass. He said, what are the different format we can try? So, there was a point and this was a challenge that I took and I said, I’m going to put together something in 2 weeks and let me see what that would be. I’m put together a promotion that will perform equally or better than what we do in 3 months and let me see what we can do. Like I said, 2 weeks what can you put together? We put together a webinar which took me only 2 weeks or one and a half to put together. I’ve got same results. On that particular slide there are little bit better results. So we said, it looks like we may be over taking the process because everybody talks about this damn launches. Maybe we don’t need to do it. Then we did it again. By December, we have realized we didn’t need to do a lot. We could just do a webinar and it was equally wording. It had better engagement because people are actually going to an event and they were showing up for something. We are like, why don’t we just do this. We have to do launches. Since then, we have no launch. We just don’t do launches anymore. We just do webinars. It’s exactly the same but if you look outside it looks different. The process is exactly the same. The flow is exactly the same. The way the webinar is delivered is exactly the same. The landing page is exactly the same. You’re pre launch sequence is going to be exactly the same. Everything is the same, it just looks different from the outside but it’s  a different solution we are representing.

Sweeney: With the webinars, what happens after? Is there sales pages once the webinar launches over?

Ajit: The webinar is playing and we pitch the offer in the webinar, the sales page will pop right below the webinar. Once that is done, we will send them a link to replay of that webinar which we have a link to the sales page. Then will have 5-6 days closing sequence which will basically answer their questions, present testimonials, social proof and all the triggers. We use 6 influence triggers and maybe a few more like results and advanced, etc.

Sweeney: That makes a lot of sense. What are your numbers look like? Actually, I guess it doesn’t matter what the numbers look like. It works, I’m just curious because a lot of people don’t attend webinars.

Ajit: That’s OK! We have replays.
Sweeney: People are watching webinar on a replay?

Ajit: It doesn’t matter. What people do is let’s say when you sign up, remember the process that we do before? I don’t actually have to do the webinar. I do the webinar because that’s the commitment that you have done with them. What’s happening is before the webinar, they get about 2 or 3 pieces which cover the elements. 20%-30% of them will actually go to the webinar. The remaining 70%, they already know why they need to buy this product. Our sales page converts like 10%-12% for the sub list. It’s a pretty good conversion rate for something like that.

Sweeney: Because you handle the marketing right. By the time the sales page is there, it’s already ready.

Ajit: Yes, we are just handling objections at that point. We’re making sure if there are last questions that they have beyond to that so they can choose not to come to the webinar, it doesn’t matter.

Sweeney: Gotcha! Well, maybe that spreadsheet that they share in the forun helps speeds up the process a little bit on headlines.

Ajit: Yes!

Sweeney: We’re basically timewise running out. Do you have a few tiny more questions? I know you have a private mastermind Zentrepreneur. Is that correct?

Ajit: Yes! We do have a product on mastermind and it’s called Zentrepreneur. You can go zentrepreneur.com. There are 2 level mastermind that we have. One is a simple mastermind that anybody can join. It’s like $99 a month or something like that. Then there is Elite Mastermind. It’s $7,000. You get private access to me. You have a private access to events that we do. That is more where you can even jump on a call and help your business. That’s a little bit more exclusive. You will also get a thousand dollar product for free especially you come from DigitalTriggers so just let us know and we will sure that you will get that. That’s the product where I explain my entire process on how to double business in a year.

Sweeney: You’re saying the thousand dollar product or you’re saying the mastermind?

Ajit: A thousand dollar product but we will give it you for free because you’re coming from DigitalTriggers.

Sweeney: I appreciate that. 5 by 5 principle on productivity and product managing multiple products and multiple projects. Do you want to divulge into that before we go?

Ajit: That was the old presentation I did. I don’t remember the details of that anymore at this point. My principles on productivity involve from that point as well. The principle is what I share today which is I like to delete more and more stuff. I only have to work on things that matter. I don’t do any priorities more than I can count on my hand which is 5. You never have more than 5 priorities in business. That keeps your business very simple and it scales faster. It grows much, much faster. If you join Zentrepreneur you will get it but I can send you a presentatation which we call the Achievers Productivity Sheet. If you want to give it to your audience, we can. It’s a short 10 minute that explains how to be extremely productive in your business. It’s a sheet that you can actually follow. If you fill it in you got everything done and that’s what you need to do. I can send it to you if you want.

Sweeney: Yes, definitely! I appreciate that. With that being said, I’m a little bit curious. Do you have any personal hacks outside of like meditation? How do you handle overwhelm? Do you have someone that manages your inbox? Do you have an Evernote system? Do you have any processes or software in place that actually happens?

Ajit: For inbox, I have the Principle of Inbox Zero. If you don’t know about it just Google it. When you touch the email, you can either reply, delete or archive. Unless it’s something that you need more time, you would monitor that but it’s extremely rare. I follow the process of Inbox Zero for managing my email generally. I get a lot of email. I have the principle of 1 win a day which means that if I can get one really big win a day, I’m happy. I don’t have to worry about anything else. The reverse gap principle by Dan Solomon is usually what would happen as an entrepreneur. If you look at the future and you will go I wanted to be in that business and I’m not there yet. It’s extremely frustrating as an entrepreneur and day to day to manage your state. What happens is at that point, if you look at where you came from, if it’s extremely satisfying because your reverse gap is probably even bigger. This helps your business far. This far helps you manage the state of your mind which is my principle. I would look at their worst gap and it’s ok. I’m getting there. It’s a process. I might have missed my timelines and stuff like that. Being human beings too, is we tend to overestimate what we can achieve within a year and underestimate what we can do in 3. In one you think, you can do 10x but usually you can’t. You build 2x, 3x or 4x depending on the size of your business. To get 10x, you need 3 years. That’s exactly what also helps as mindset because it allows you to go I don’t to bother my long goals. There’s a lot of little hacks like these which helps you manage your state. I would not start my day without studying. I need to study something before I start my day. It could be a course. It could be a book YouTube video before I open my inbox. That’s the first thing that I do. The reason for that is you jumpstart your day because you’ve got inspirational idea or business ideas. That helps your productivity idea. That jump starts your day. I have almost an hour long ritual before I look at my email. I called it my power hour that would involve either meditation. It’s not that I do it everyday but I do it sometimes. That’s for sure is one hour, sets me up for the day because I emotionally position myself. I have inspirationally position myself and I’m physically positioned myself.

Sweeney: I’m excited to hear about the book coming up called the Power Hour.

Ajit: Not any time.

Sweeney: Not of a writer?

Ajit: No, terrible writer.

Sweeney: You know Jordan Belfort was a horrible writer too. He wrote in New York Times as a best seller. Then it became quick famous movie.

Ajit: I didn’t know he’s a horrible writer. Nowadays, what I’ve done and that’s my hack for writing is hiring a writer. I just audios and send it to them. They write to a proper readable article. Sometimes my comprehension is funny so I save things that don’t make any sense. They clean it up for me. That’s not my priority. That’s not my thing for the year so it’s OK.

Sweeney: This is the subject that I would like to hear more about. We don’t have the time for it that’s why I’m kind of pushing you to do it elsewhere but with that 3 year principle, is there a system that you follow or way that you break that down to achieve that or no?

Ajit: No, I put it down but I’m not attached to it. 3 years is a lot of time. What may happen is a year from now, you’re goals may change. If I attach myself in 3 years, I would save myself the other way. Your goals should change. What happens is eventually, if you really come into or stick to it or the same thing will happen just in a different way. So, I don’t get attached to how I will there. I’m only attached to results. I would maybe go even higher from that or lower from that depending on what I feel. For me, it’s extremely important that I’m happy now. Right now, I’m having a great time even in the future you will not be like I will be a billionaire. I don’t really care. I just want to be happy as everyday. You just aligned with yourself everyday and you’re doing great so results come. You are always working for growth and that’s it.

Sweeney: Gotcha! That’s a beautiful note to end off on. Thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Ajit: Thank you for inviting me.

Sweeney: I’ll stick around afterward for a second and watch out a little bit.

Ajit: Sure. Thank you so much and thank you guys for this thing.

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