Ramit's copy

Tomie, If you’re a celebrity and you want to know the best high-end shoes to wear to the Oscars, you don’t ask a salesperson at Payless. If you’re on a strict budget and you want to know how to save money, you don’t ask Gwyneth Paltrow how to shop (or this happens). And if you want to know about marketing, you NEVER ASK THE NERDS ON HACKER NEWS. Here’s what happened. Someone wrote an awesome article on how Silicon Valley devalues marketing. This is true -- and one of the reasons I moved to NYC years ago. Then Hacker News, a site for Silicon Valley engineers (probably the single-worst audience of people to ever ask for marketing advice), found the article and posted it. And that’s when the comments started:

• Marketing is a total scam (“Marketers and salesmen are basically middlemen who skim from everyone's success”)
• If you had a good product, you wouldn’t need marketing (“Aren't we tech people taught that sales and marketing is the cost you pay for being unoriginal?”)
• Popups don’t work (notice the responses to my tweet on popups)

Here’s my point: Be very careful who you listen to when it comes to your business. If I had stayed in Silicon Valley and bought into their worldview that “marketing = evil and scammy,” I never would have spent years learning about copywriting, positioning, and market research. Lessons to learn:

1. Asking the wrong people can cost you dearly.
2. If you ask the wrong people, you’ll get the wrong answers.
3. Don’t accept what the world tells you. Find the truth -- nobody is going to give it to you.

-Ramit P.S. My goal is to show you the truth about starting your business, with real numbers. Here are 3 of my favorite articles from GrowthLab:

• 15 hard lessons I learned from my $36,381 product launch
• The anatomy of a six-figure email course
• Dandelions and orchids: Why some people thrive as entrepreneurs and others flame out