Greenlight Your Idea – Ramit Sethi

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How do top entrepreneurs get unstuck?

Which of these questions have you agonized over in the last 30 days?

• “What’s the right business idea?”
• “Why won’t my customers buy?”
• “What do I do next?”

Most people spin in circles with endless ideas, procrastinate, get frustrated, and eventually “take a break” (code for: give up).

Top entrepreneurs do one thing differently. They talk to the people who matter: their customers.

Get all of the exact scripts, surveys, checklists, tools, and questionnaires we use to get unstuck, discover what our customers really want, and “greenlight” our next business idea.

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).

Stumbling in the dark for 14+ months

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:

• 4 months reading everything we could lay our hands on: forums, online comments, surveys, blog posts, and more
• Then another 4 months to create our initial content — while still doing research on the side. (By now, the days were starting to get very long)
• Then 4 more months to beta test the material. (To our horror, we discovered that half of the material we’d created was confusing, or worse, useless. There’s nothing as demoralizing as deleting something you spent months on … and knowing you have to redo it)
• And, sprinkled throughout, 2 extra months just being plain burned out

It was an exhausting, confusing, 14-month sprint that I never wanted to do again.

For most of that time, we had no idea if we were on the right track. Or if anybody would care about what we were spending our time creating.

Along the way, we ran into a lot of obstacles. Some of them were tactical (“what questions should we ask our customers?”). Some were psychological (“isn’t it weird asking a stranger for an interview?”). We had to figure all of these hurdles out.

Let me show you some of the biggest obstacles — and the biggest customer research insights — we discovered along the way…

Obstacle #1

“I’m stuck. How do I decide what to do next?”

It’s normal to get stuck in your business journey. Maybe you’re stuck on your business idea or what your next product should be. That’s OK — even successful entrepreneurs get stuck.

What’s bad is to stay stuck. Or to use “guessing and praying” as your way out.

If you’re stuck, the solution isn’t to think it away or agonize endlessly over all the different things you should do. The solution is to ask your customer what they truly want.

Your customers will give you the answers … if you just know which questions to ask.

Obstacle #2

“Customer research takes a ton of work. Too much work.”

Customer research can be a ton of work — if you’re doing it the wrong way. I know because I used to do it that way.

But there is a better way, and there are simple, powerful customer research tools you can use to make customer research fast, easy, and crystal clear. (Keep reading to learn more about these tools…)

The big danger with this invisible script is that it’s not that big of a leap from “Customer research is too much work…” to “…so I’m just going to follow my passion.”

What happens when you make that leap? You follow your passion and wonder why no one is paying any attention to your oddball business idea. There’s a better way.

Obstacle #3

“If I fail to validate my idea, then I have to start over.”

This common belief is doubly false.

First, you don’t “fail” at customer research. If you discover your business or product idea isn’t going to be profitable — that’s great news! Much better to find that out now, upfront, than after you’ve spent months (or years) and thousands of dollars on it.

Plus, even if your idea falls apart during your research, that’s not a dead end. Our customer research process opens up many other, related doors you can step through.

A good customer research process keeps you always moving closer to your winning idea.

Obstacle #4

“It’s weird to ask people for an interview.”

Only if you ask in a pushy or weird way.

We’ve created a word-for-word script to ask for an interview that’s not pushy or weird. Trust me, people will want to help you.

Obstacle #5

“I already interviewed a few friends. And I lurked on FB groups, subreddits, and Amazon reviews.

None of that helped.”

You can learn a lot from forums and Amazon reviews, but it’s not the whole picture. How do you put the pieces together? How do you know when an idea is actually good enough?

Your friends love you but they’ll lie to you. They don’t want to tell you the truth, so they’ll say things like, “Yeah, that would probably be really helpful to people” (code for: “…but not for me”).

That’s why we created “Greenlight Benchmarks,” which give you a clear YES or NO on if your idea is ready to act on.

Bottom line: Customer research can get you unstuck.

It will show you where to take your business next.

It doesn’t need to be a ton of work. It doesn’t need to be full of dead ends or awkward interviews. Best of all, it doesn’t need to be ambiguous.

The goal, after all, is a clear GREENLIGHT forward. When you do it right, customer research can be fun, fast, and even enjoyable.

Our “customer research toolbox” in action

Today, instead of taking over a year to “greenlight” a single idea, like we did the first time, we can research and validate 7+ ideas in a year.

That doesn’t include all of the ideas that naturally fall by the wayside during the research process.

How did we do it? By creating, testing, and perfecting our “customer research toolbox” to take all of the hassle and guesswork out of the process.

When we hear or come up with a business or product idea, we know exactly what to do. We know who to talk to, how to connect with them authentically, and exactly what to say.

We have clear “Greenlight Benchmarks” that take all the guesswork out of knowing if our idea is a winner or should be skipped.

Today, I want to give you access to our toolbox of customer research.

Introducing…

Get ALL of the EXACT scripts, surveys, checklists, tools, and questionnaires we use to greenlight every business idea and product

Greenlight Your Idea is our brand-new, online course that gives you our COMPLETE customer research toolbox — everything you need to get unstuck and move your business forward.

Including…

The 6 Why Prompts

How to get great answers from people even when their first response isn’t that good

The 5 Greenlight Benchmarks

The exact signs that tell you when to move forward with your idea

The Paid Test Menu

All your options for proving that your idea truly taps into a burning desire of your customers

Three Step Outreach

How to get all the interviews you could possibly need from any market in an authentic and genuine way

The Double Slot Method

The single easiest and fastest way to get any call scheduled

Meet your instructor

Your instructor: Lars Lofgren, Sr. Director of Growth for GrowthLab

Greenlight Your Idea is taught by our very own Senior Director of Growth, Lars Lofgren.

Lars is the mastermind behind our Growth and Product teams. He personally developed the rapid customer research system we use and that you’ll learn in this course.

All the good stuff — everything that’s included with Greenlight Your Idea

This program includes six videos, all of which you get immediately once you join. With 80 minutes of training, Greenlight Your Idea is designed to be fast and focused — the quickest way for you to start using our customer research toolbox in your own business.

Each video is direct and tactical. We walk you through each step and challenge in the customer research process, then give you our proven tools, scripts, and recommendations for how to handle it.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Grab our toolbox, use the tools you need, and start growing your business!

• How to separate customer lies from the truth
• The 6 Why Prompts that allow you to dig deep into your customers’ needs — naturally, efficiently, even enjoyably
• Script: How to open a customer interview
• PDFCustomer Interview Checklist: The 9 questions we ask in every interview (plus detailed notes on why we ask each one)
• Script: How to end a customer interview
• Recommendations: Which tools to use for easy and effective customer calls
• The best way to take notes during the call
• First time doing a customer interview? We have tips for making your first call a cinch
• The biggest customer lie — and what it really means
• What if someone tells you “it’s too expensive”?
• The dangerous Customer Mirage and how to spot it during your research
• What to do when you don’t find any clear trends in your customer research
• PDF5 Greenlight Benchmarks that tell you when you’ve got a great idea and are ready to move forward
• The #1 way to tell if your business idea is a winner
• The Paid Test Menu — 7 ways to structure a paid test of your idea
• Recommendations: Which tests should you use for service vs. product businesses?
• What to do if you find your target market doesn’t have the ability or willingness to pay (don’t let this be a dead end)
• Three Step Outreach: Our simple, proven system for connecting with potential customers
• How to attract qualified interview subjects in public groups
• PDF Script: How to ask for a customer research call
• How to do customer outreach if you already have an email list (and how to do it when you don’t)
• The #1 lever in fast, smooth scheduling. Do this daily
• The major disadvantage with scheduling tools
• Our Double-Slot Method for scheduling calls quickly and efficiently

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