I’m excited to bring you my Zero To Launch course review. I honestly don’t remember exactly how I heard about Ramit Sethi or what initially led me to I Will Teach You to Be Rich. I think it was from Daily Worth, Amanda Steinberg’s site, but I may have that backwards. At any rate, I started reading Ramit’s stuff, got on his email list and read his book. I purchased several of his courses, though I never used any of them to make money. I never actually took action on those, at least not enough to follow through all the way. I was not an ideal student.
I did some of the easier courses and watched the videos in Ramit’s Brain Trust. I liked Ramit’s emails. He made me laugh and he told funny stories. He talked about things other people didn’t talk about. I knew my husband wasn’t overly impressed with Ramit. I think it was mostly because of the name of his site. He thought it sounded scammy so he didn’t trust him. He never read any of his stuff so he didn’t really get what it was all about. So all of the courses I bought, I bought without telling my husband. But the price of ZTL was high enough that I didn’t think it would be fair to buy it without talking to him about it.
The sales copy and the testimonials I had seen were enough to make me think that maybe, just maybe, I could do this. I remember asking my husband on the night the course closed, “Do you think I could do it?” I was excited and nervous about it and he was kind of like, “Yeah, sure. If you want to.” So he said I could buy it. This was in 2014. I remember because my first daughter was about a year old at the time.
When I started the course I didn’t talk to my husband (or anyone else) about it at all. I kept it to myself and did all of my work online and, as with previous IWT courses, skipped the hard stuff. Well, I skipped the parts I thought were hard for me. Eventually I fizzled out. I couldn’t move forward without doing the hard stuff. I was missing the foundation.
I had another child, continued to work my day job, and all my documents sat in my google drive, which I never looked at anymore. Then, when my second daughter was a year old I got an email about Accelerator. It’s a coaching program, with it’s own FB community, for ZTL and Call To Action. I remember thinking “This might be just what I need” and I signed up. That was in May of this year.
Since then, I’ve been consistently taking action on the Zero To Launch course. The noteworthy results I’ve gotten are:
- I launched my website in 3 days
- I got over 300 subscribers in 4 hours
I have struggled, mostly with myself. That’s been one of the hardest parts for me. I’m married, we own a home, we both have “good” jobs, we now have two children. I had always thought that would mean I had made it. But ZTL has made me realize that I had a lot of fears to face. A lot of work to do on myself. My default setting had somehow become “I’m not good enough.” That has made my progress in ZTL slow, because sometimes instead of doing actual work, I have to spend time facing those fears and facing myself. When I don’t, I spend time either taking no action or doing all the wrong things.
I saw that other moms had been successful with ZTL. I like to watch the success stories, but sometimes I felt jealous about the results they got. I remember reading Nagina’s Growth Lab article and thinking things like “Yeah, but who was watching your kids?” and other things that were just signs I was jealous. I thought she was better than me or different than me, and it showed in my snide thoughts. Now I consider her a role model. I can be successful like her, if I put in the work. (I met her at Forefront in New York this year, and she is just such a great person.)
That’s the thing about ZTL. The steps are there. They all seem easy. It’s all laid out for you. And some of the steps will be easy. But not all of them.
I’d love to say that if you don’t have any fears or limiting scripts, ZTL will be easy for you. But it’s not. Ramit says it’s not supposed to be easy. If it were easy everyone would do it. But that doesn’t mean anyone can’t do it. It just means that you have to put in the work. You will have limiting scripts. Hopefully not as many as me, but they will be there and you will have to acknowledge them. How ZTL works for you depends a lot on you.
Something else I think is interesting is even the ZTL success stories have stories of failure. Nagina wrote about how one of her product launches didn’t go well. She went back to her audience, asked questions, and realized it was the name that wasn’t working. She changed the name and re-launched, and then did well. Ramit talks about “testing” all the time. Nagina saw that as a test, realized something wasn’t working and fixed it. ZTL and the community will help you move through that. How fast or how slow you move will depend on you and your attitude. The tools and the support will be there.
Also, the course is called Zero To Launch, but I don’t really think anyone starts from zero. You will be leveraging things you already know or are interested in. The success stories I read in the community, even when they say they start at zero, always talk about past experiences (pre-ZTL) that led them to their business idea or their audience.
Before ZTL, I thought an online business was just a pipe dream, something other people did. I don’t know where ZTL will lead me, but I will tell you that shortly after I joined Accelerator, I emailed Ramit to tell him that no matter what the outcome, it had already been worth it for me. You see, I hated Facebook. I joined FB only to be part of the ZTL community. But I was overwhelmed. People posted so much that I mostly ignored the community.
My experience with Accelerator has been the complete opposite. I’m an active member of the FB community. I love connecting with other students. I try to give back as much as possible because of how much I’ve gotten from the community.
That was a big mistake I made the first time around. I thought this was something I had to do by myself. I was so wrong.
ZTL seems really straightforward, but if you’re not paying attention or if you are purposely ignoring something, you can lose your way. If you’re spending time on FB because you’re trying to connect with your audience, you can easily get distracted. You can think you know what something means but be totally off-track. You may start looking into ZTL success stories and then find a bunch of courses you want to do. But if you’re like me and you already have a full-time job and a family, you probably won’t have time to do other courses. I say you shouldn’t. I think you should focus on ZTL, no matter what your circumstances. In all of these cases, it’s important to have people you’re talking to, that you trust, that can help you keep going in the right direction. You can find that in the ZTL community.
So, pros and cons.
Pros
- The course literally takes you from no idea to a product. It’s the only course you need.
- The course is focused and you don’t have to worry about advanced strategies. Ramit will tell you what you do not have to worry about and what you should focus on.
- Community. Like I said above, I think the community aspect is extremely important.
- The material is tried and tested.
Cons
- The course is 8 weeks. I think the beta testers may have actually gone from zero to launch in 8 weeks, but most people won’t.
It’s hard for me to talk about ZTL at this point without talking about Accelerator because I love Accelerator, the community and the coaches. The ZTL community is great too, but I haven’t made the connections there that I’ve made in Accelerator. I know the ZTL community is great though because the “famous” ZTL students still post there and give back to the community – I’m talking about people like Naveen Dittakavi, Nagina Sethi Abdullah, Selena Soo, Felicia Rose, and on and on.
What led me to the idea for my website was that I realized one day, shortly after I joined Accelerator and really started working on ZTL, that I didn’t want to be that exhausted mom who felt like everything was a chore or a sacrifice. I was sitting at the table eating dinner with my family thinking “I don’t have the energy to give the girls a bath tonight. That means I have to dry their hair and put them to bed. I won’t be done until at least 7:30. Ughh, I just don’t have the energy.” For some reason, that time, I actually questioned that thought and realized how ridiculous it was. That was not the person I wanted to be.
Sometimes I still feel that way, but I know enough now to question it. I do all the things I used to do, plus I talk to new people almost every week, I work on my ZTL business, I engage in the FB community. I meet up with people. I do things I never thought I would do.
I know I could find a job I like better, where I work less hours and can spend more time with my kids. I could change the way I live my life, if that’s what I wanted. I know that we can change anything about our lives if we want to. I have more confidence in myself.
Sometimes I fall back on the old “I don’t know anything” “I’m not good enough” thoughts. I get discouraged that I have to keep facing that shit again. But even facing those thoughts has led me to relationships that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
I still have a lot to learn and I haven’t launched a product yet, but I’ve learned so much and I’ve had some successes. I feel like I have more purpose in my life right now. I believe I can help other people and that’s what I want to do.
I’m not in ZTL because I want to quit my job and work from the beach. That’s not where I’m at. But if I decide that’s what is right for me and my family, I feel confident we could do it.
Is Zero To Launch right for you?
Well, that depends on you. ZTL can work for anyone. It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you live, what language you speak. It really doesn’t. There’s a ZTL student that teaches people how to do handstands, in German. And he has sold his product.
To know if ZTL is right for you, I’m going to borrow a phrase from Ramit – you’ll have to be brutally honest with yourself. Are you ready to do the work? Are you ready to confront your invisible scripts? Are you fed up with all the bullshit courses you see that focus on one possibly insignificant aspect of online business? If the answer to those questions is yes, then ZTL is right for you.
Even if the answer isn’t a definite yes, ZTL might still be right for you. Maybe you’re like me and you buy it now but don’t actually make progress for a while. That’s OK. You have lifetime access. You can do it when the time is right for you.
Zero To Launch is not right for you if…
you don’t want to take action. If you think watching videos is doing work. If you’re going to go through and do everything but the work. Even in this case you can still buy it. But it’s not going to do the work for you. You won’t be successful until you take action consistently.
Final thoughts
The Zero To Launch course is a course for starting an online business, but like all of Ramit’s courses it’s also a self-development course. Whether I launch a product or not, I’ve learned enough and made connections that are worth so much to me that I’ve made back my investment. I invested in myself.
Everyone will have different goals. A lot of the other moms in ZTL are doing ZTL because they want to quit their day jobs and be with their kids. Right now, that’s not my goal. (I struggled with that for quite awhile. I felt guilty because that wasn’t my goal. I felt like it made me a bad parent or a bad person. It was another of those invisible scripts I had to work through.) Maybe it’s selfish, but I’m doing this for me. I’m doing this because I want to show myself and the world the person I’ve always dreamt about being. I want to be that confident, successful person that I know is in there. ZTL has showed me that I can be that person.