Education is a complex business. When I started my coaching business, conversion was one of the biggest challenges. But as I was continuously nurturing my audience via my emails and this funnel that I designed proved to be a game changer.

Since then, I have released 20+ products and made more than 15 crores revenue using this funnel. I have spoken about Deep Marketing funnels on a lot of platforms and attracted a lot of coaches/agency owners/businesses who wanted to implement this.

I am doing a 2 Day offline workshop on Deep Marketing for all who want to have a sustainable marketing funnel for their products.

This framework is particularly useful for selling complex products or services that require customer education, unlike simple, straightforward products like chocolates or commodities. Commodities usually have a price war, but education and services have a lot of perceived value and can be sold at high profit margins.

To execute Deep Marketing effectively, you need a strong personal brand in a specific topic.

The Deep Marketing system consists of the marketing part and delivery part. You define Deep Marketing with a formula:

n^CATT + OST = R

The Marketing part is n^CATT and the delivery part is OST.

Deep Marketing is not just about selling; it's about creating an educated customer base that understands and values the intricacies of sophisticated products and services.

This framework not only enhances customer engagement but also drives meaningful and sustained transactions through informed consent and appreciation.

For more insights into the Deep Marketing framework and to understand how it can transform your business approach, join our workshop!

Agenda: Day 1

• 10 am to 10:40 am: Deepak’s Journey as a Founder10:40 am to 11:00 am: Morning Tea Break and Networking
• 11:00 am to 12:00 pm: Introduction to Deep Marketing
• 12:00 am to 1:30 pm: Content Creation for Deep Marketing Funnels (Content)
• 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm: Lunch
• 2:30 to 5:00 pm: Lead Generation using paid media/Personal brand/Outreach (Attention)
• 5:00 to 5:30 pm: Evening Tea Break
• 5:30 to 6:00 pm: Q&A and Networking

Day 2

• 10 am to 11 am: Review of Day 1 and exercises
• 11 am to 11:30 am: Morning Tea Break
• 11:30 am to 1:30 pm: Email Marketing, Community and Lead Nurturing (Trust)
• 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm: Lunch
• 2:30 to 4:30 pm: 1:1 Sales (Transaction)
• 4:30 to 5:00 pm: Evening Tea Break
• 5:00 to 6:00 pm: Review and Wrap Up

The WhatsApp Marketing Mastery Cohort is starting on June 26th.

If you missed the launch webinar, you can watch this short video that explains:

• The 8-week course curriculum
• Q&A Sessions
• Who should join WhatsApp Marketing Mastery

Once you join, you will get confirmation within 24 hours about the enrollment. If you have any questions, you can mail me at deepak@pixeltrack.com

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

On May 18-19 (Saturday & Sunday) I am going to conduct an offline workshop on the topic of Deep Marketing Funnels.

This is an opportunity for you to meet me in person and get mentored and trained from me personally over a period of 2 days.

• Venue: PIXELTRACK Bangalore Office (Koramangala 1st Block) - Exact location will be shared with participants
• Date & Time: May 18th (10:00 am to 6pm), May 19th (10 am to 5pm)

The workshop does a deep dive into the Deep Marketing Funnel, also called the CATT funnel.

Agenda:

May 18th (Saturday)

• 10 am to 11 am: Introduction to Deep Marketing
• 11 am to 11:30 am: Morning Tea Break
• 11:30 am to 1:30 pm: Content Creation for Deep Marketing Funnels (Content)
• 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm: Lunch
• 2:30 to 4:30 pm: Traffic Generation using Google and Facebook Ads (Attention)
• 4:30 to 5:00 pm: Evening Tea Break
• 5:00 to 6:00 pm: Q&A and Networking

May 19th (Sunday)

• 10 am to 11 am: Review of Day 1 and exercises
• 11 am to 11:30 am: Morning Tea Break
• 11:30 am to 1:30 pm: Email Marketing, Community and Lead Nurturing (Trust)
• 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm: Lunch
• 2:30 to 4:30 pm: Copywriting and Sales (Transaction)
• 4:30 to 5:00 pm: Evening Tea Break
• 5:00 to 6:00 pm: Review and Wrap Up

Things to Note

• If you are travelling to Bangalore, there are plenty of startup hostels, PGs and budget hotels nearby. Search for locations near "Wipro Park", Koramangala 1st Block.
• Tea/Coffee is included in the cost, but not lunch. There are plenty of restaurants nearby where you can have meals, north Indian, Chinese etc.
• There are only 15 seats for the workshop - first come first serve.

A lot of people ask me how I manage my time. How do I manage to get things done? Do I have a calendar that is always full? Do I sleep only 5 hours a day? Do I wake up at 5 am every day? Do I have all A-team with all 5-star employees?

The answer is no. It's all chaos.

I follow a chaotic productivity schedule and nothing is planned. Though I have borderline OCD for many things in my personal and professional life, I manage not to have OCD for how my week looks like.

Some people, supposedly, make a plan and stick to the plan. I don't know if it works for them or not, but it definitely doesn't work for me. I have tried making plans for the week and have failed many times, only to feel bad about myself for not sticking to the plan.

I do make plans, but the plans are for the near long term and distant long term.

Imagine you have a car. Do you plan to drive 200kms every week and stick to it? Do you have a plan for refueling 20 liters every Monday and stick to the "plan"? No. You keep driving and keep refueling whenever you need.

I function in a similar way. When I have the time and energy, I work. Whenever I am tired, I sleep. When I feel burnt out, I take a vacation. Or just have a day in my week where I do nothing. It could be a Wednesday or a Thursday, and if I don't feel like working, I take the day off. Sometimes I take two days off mid-week until I feel recharged enough to be productive again.

We are not mentally and physically fit all the time, and our fitness levels go up and down. Humans are not machines. The need to stick to a routine or a plan is over-rated. Yes, good habits are necessary, but that doesn't mean that you have to make a schedule for yourself, try to stick to it, and feel bad if you miss.

It is a luxury to be in this position and it takes years to find what you love to do and get paid for it.

When I was in a job, I did not have this luxury. But with the money I saved while I was in a job, I invested my excess capital in things that would have a long-term return. I missed out on investing in crypto in 2013, but I started my blog in 2013 and started building an audience.

What I did almost a decade back has helped me spawn new companies with the personal brand that I've built. I had to grind, but I knew that the way I wanted to grind was a different way. I wanted to be a content creator, a mentor, and a digital marketer, on my own terms.

If you are a digital mentor like me, you are mostly creating content. Creating content doesn't need to stick to a plan. You can create content when you want, where you want, and how you want.

The content you create becomes an intellectual property that keeps paying dividends for a long time. Such a business model makes the fertile ground for chaotic productivity.

If you are in a job, you have to attend meetings on time and work from Monday to Friday. Go to the office if required. Take off only on the weekends. And vacations have to be planned in advance.

Many people are used to having a strict weekly routine, do it for decades, and don't complain. That's something that wouldn't work for me and I found that I was unemployable a long time back. I have switched 5 different jobs in 5 years and in many companies, I did not even complete 6 months.

If you are a freelancer, you have some level of freedom but you still have to schedule calls with your clients and make sure that you are on time. Synchronous communication is a pain.

If you are not in a mood to work, and if you are pushing yourself to work, you might hate doing work and that's a dangerous path to go down on.

When you are an entrepreneur, you can have the luxury of not having to stick to a schedule, work anytime you want, and still get a lot of things done and be super productive.

That's why entrepreneurship is not just about making the dough (which is definitely an incentive) but also bringing in the luxury of chaotic productivity. It is freedom for work timings.

Only when you are well-rested, well slept, had good food, work out, and feel positive about the world around you, you can do great work.

The culture of working hard is overrated because as soon as you "work hard" in a way you push yourself to do things even when you don't feel like doing it, and the quality of your output (especially if you are in a creative field) will suffer.

Shipping good quality work, done with the right mindset, while you are feeling mentally and physically fit will always make up for doing 3x work but with 1/3rd quality.

When you are well-rested, as and when needed, you will make better decisions. Good decision-making will beat hyper-productivity any day.

One right decision could bring you 10x more wealth than blindly having to slog each day. And you can re-use that wealth to make your calendar free, further. Slogging through the week will make you pessimistic and decision-making will go for a toss.

Years of hard work will be undone with one wrong decision. And trying to push yourself to be "productive" and over-working yourself to exhaustion will lead you to make wrong decisions. You will be pressing the accelerator and the brakes at the same time. You will end up coming back to square one.

As an entrepreneur, find something that will help you do the work when you want, where you want, and then find a way to make money off it.

• If you are building an education company, learn how to keep making good quality content that will keep paying dividends without you having to run the system all the time yourself.
• If you are building a services agency, find out a way to build processes and systems in such a way that the system gets extraordinary results from ordinary people (instead of you trying to be extraordinary all the time).
• If you are building a D2C product brand, spend enough time researching the market and find a niche that is profitable, where you have a competitive advantage, and build loyal customers who trust and keep coming back to you.

The most important work that you will do in your business are things that are not urgent, but important. To do important but non-urgent tasks, you have to have the time, space, and biological fitness to do it. And you will never get that time and space if you are trying to fill up your entire week with meetings and things to do.

You don't want to "feel productive" but miss out on the long-term, important and non-urgent tasks. You will end up back to where you have started.

For example, most of my friends who read this blog (probably you too) wish they could write a blog like this regularly. They understand that writing is therapeutic, helps you organize your thoughts, refines your goals, and most importantly helps you build your personal brand. But they complain of not having enough time to do it. That's because their calendar is full all the time.

This blog post that you are writing right now has been made possible because of a blank Thursday morning in my calendar with no plans. It's blank. Only during times like that, do I feel like, ok let's write an article.

When I have free time, this is what I might do (it is never planned, and always chosen based on what I "feel like" doing):

• Write a blog post
• Edit an old blog post and re-publish it
• Write a book chapter
• Make a mind-map
• Make a video
• Do some market research
• Spend time with the members of my community (AlphaClub & MasteryClub)

All the above tasks move the needle in my business. A little bit here, a little bit there, and it keeps compounding.

Yes, there are times when I have to have a meeting with my CA, do a live webinar that is scheduled, meet with a client for my agency or have a meeting with one of my team members. But scheduled meetings are always at the max two per day, rarely three.

The rest of the time, I do non-urgent, important things for my personal growth.

Personal growth tasks include:

• Reading a book
• Watching a training video
• Listening to audiobooks/podcasts
• Working out
• Eating well
• Meditating
• Spending quality time with friends and family
• Travelling and Vacations
• Staring at the ceiling and dreaming about the future

Unless you are retired, it might be impossible to do away with schedules completely. But if you are an entrepreneur, you can move the needle as far as possible to keep your week free without schedules.

Remember, schedules are for slaves.

Entrepreneurship is about freedom for yourself first. Use that freedom to create value for the world. Don't enslave yourself to your calendar in the name of making the world a better place.

First, make a better world for yourself and then use that to make the world a better place. Because creativity cannot happen without the time and space freedom that you create for yourself. Don't wait for freedom to fall in your lap one fine day. That's never gonna happen.

One more question that might pop up with my thoughts around this is: what about my team members. They are employed and will they have the same level of freedom? Probably not. But I do encourage people to have some free time for themselves and do a side hustle while they work with me.

The percentage of scheduled tasks that has to be done on time might be more for them, but they can work on reducing it over a period of time by building systems and processes within the business. And hiring younger people to follow the systems.

With time, the money they earn will also help them earn their freedom in the future and they can make the time and space to find something that they can do without sticking to a schedule, and still make money out of it. And hopefully, the money they make will be re-invested into creating more time and space for themselves.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

The best way to totally dominate a market is to create the market that you want to dominate. You don't want to compete in it, you want to dominate it. Else what's the point of building a business in this capitalistic world? There is no middle ground, and mediocrity is unacceptable.

As the blog name goes, you need to be the winner, who can take it all.

But the very idea of wanting to dominate the market conjures up ideas of beating your competitors and stealing the market share from them. That's scarcity thinking. People think that there is a limited opportunity out there, and all of them are taken by the competition.

While stealing customers from competitors cannot be ignored, it comes as a side effect of being the market maker. Without being the market maker, you cannot just put focus on sales to steal the customers, because, in such a world, another competitor can steal it back from you.

What does it mean to be a market maker?

In every market, there are hungry customers, who are limited in quantity. These customers are valuable, cannot be ignored, and is important for the business. But most businesses, only compete for the share of the market that is hungry to buy.

That's why Google ads are much pricier per click than Facebook ads. People search for what they want proactively on Google. But the hungry customers only make for 20% of your potential customers. (And your competition thinks that the 20% is the 100%.)

80% of the potential customers are yet to be convinced that they need your product or service, and no one is putting effort into educating them and convincing them. This 80/20 is sometimes 90/10 or 99/1.

Your real competition is buyer inaction.

We sell digital marketing courses at LearnToday and we always say, our competition is not the other ed-techs who sell similar products. Our real competition is people deciding not to enroll in a digital marketing course.

When I worked at Razorpay payment gateway startup, we used to say, our competition is not other payment gateways, our competition is people choosing to use cash instead of digital payments.

In India, PayTM, Google Pay, and Razorpay have had an impact on people's behavior and they created the online payments market.

If Razorpay didn't exist, Razorpay's market share wouldn't have been captured by one of the competitors. Instead, the market size would be smaller. That's what it means to be a market maker.

We have estimated that in our business, around 65% of our customers wouldn't have enrolled in any digital marketing course if they didn't choose to enroll in our course.

That's because we are not trying to convince people who want to learn digital marketing, to learn it from us, instead, we are trying to convince people to learn digital marketing. There is a huge difference between the two.

Our products and our marketing is aligned towards convincing people to want to learn digital marketing. We are scratching the itch, not selling the calamine lotion.

We temporarily lose money at the top of the funnel because convincing people that they should be learning something alone cannot put money in the bank. But it is a good investment to make because once these customers decide to enroll in a digital marketing course, we would be the obvious and sometimes the only trustworthy option for them to buy from. This needs patience because you need to give a buffer of time for nurturing the leads.

We have a digital marketing training program, but we do not advertise the main product that is for sale. All our competition advertises their products, and they pay through the nose to Google and Facebook to acquire the leads who are ready to buy digital marketing training courses. But instead, we create lead magnets and advertise them.

The lead magnets have useful but incomplete value in them, which makes them wanting for more.

Here are some of the lead magnets we advertise for lead generation:

• Free Digital Marketing Course with 25 Videos
• eBook: How to Get Your Dream Digital Marketing Job
• Free Webinar: Digital Marketing Career Opportunities
• Digital Marketing Freelancing Opportunities
• How to Build a Digital Marketing Agency

And more along these lines.

The content in these lead magnets convinces people to take digital marketing seriously. It also subtly upsells our premium course. People with lukewarm interest in digital marketing can never be sold to. We cannot get their money. But we can get their attention to our free content. And the content can convince them to pay money.

We will also put effort into convincing them to consume the free content (through repetition and gamification). They need to consume the content for the content to do its work. The medicine doesn't work if it is not consumed.

If you can convince them to pay attention, you can convince them to pay money. So put efforts into attracting attention and the leverage that attention to influence their actions in a specific direction.

My customers, at some point, might also buy from our competition, who might have products that we don't have. Some of the customers that the competitors get might not even exist in the first place; if not for us.

The competitors might be feeling bad about us having a higher market share but they might not realize that the market wouldn't even exist if not for the competition (us) they dread!

The competition is, always, a blessing in disguise.

In most cases, multiple top players in the market end up creating and expanding the market size.

For example, the number of online transactions enjoyed by mentors, e-commerce stores, ed-techs, streaming video services, and D2C brands might not exist if not for Flipkart bringing the wonders of online commerce to India and convincing a huge number of hesitant people to slowly move from COD to online payments.

If you want to dominate the market, forget trying to deviate people from your competition to you and start focusing on convincing people why they might need what you are selling.

Once you start looking at the idea of business growth and market dominance from this angle, your marketing strategy will change.

Create content and market that content. That's the true meaning of content marketing. A lot of people think of content marketing as a free traffic source through organic channels, it is not.

Content marketing's primary goal is to warm up potential leads. We could call it content+marketing rather than content marketing to distinguish the approach.

Let the content convert the cold leads into warm leads. When it is time to buy, you will be the only option for them. They wouldn't bother to look for options because you have already built the trust with content.

You will help yourself and also end up helping your competition. Let the competition also grow the market size which would somehow come back to you.

🍻 to the market makers of India.

We are where we are today because of the visionaries who have made the market.

- Deepak

A lot of people think that it's a great idea to build a software company. They see big software companies and get inspired by their growth and valuations. HubSpot, Freshworks, Zoho, Microsoft, and so on. There are mobile app companies that are worth a billion dollars such as Calm, the meditation app.

There is more than what meets the eye here. There are too many variables that define the success of a software startup. First things first, you have to notice that most of these software companies are in losses except a few big ones. They have sky-high valuations in the stock market and the reason why the price keeps going up is because of a narrative and not because they make business sense.

People invest in these companies not because these are good companies to invest in, but because they need to deploy their capital somewhere to beat inflation and some of that capital goes into tech companies with strong narratives. Many of these investments are fuelled by inflation rather than capital being attracted by strong companies. (But let's not digress and go in that direction, then I cannot stop talking about Bitcoin).

Many young people who have great talent in developing apps and writing code think that their capabilities are enough to build a software company. They come up with an idea, build it, and then struggle for years to convince the market that other people need their app. It takes a few more years of low traction for them to finally understand that their software is not as cool as they thought it would be.

Then they release discounted lifetime deals on sites like AppSumo and squeeze out some sales. Some revenue to console them for the efforts they have put into developing the app. Then they need to serve these painful customers who didn't buy the software because it was great but because it was a great discount. They never needed the software in the first place.

The biggest reason why most software companies fail is because there is no product market fit. They built something that the market doesn't want. Y Combinator's tagline is: "build something that people want." It's easier said than done. The developers didn't intend to build something that people didn't want. They just had the wrong understanding of what the market wants.

They didn't have that understanding because they didn't have a community. They didn't talk to their target customers. It's not enough that you talk to a few people and ask them what they want in terms of software products. It takes years of closely observing the market dynamics and people's challenges and frustrations. One needs to talk to 100s of people if not thousands. And it's difficult to do without a personal, community, and some coaching products to fuel this funnel.

That's why I believe everyone should start with coaching and services first before diving into building software. It is difficult to build a strong and serious community with just content marketing. When you have coaching products like courses and mastermind programs, you attract a serious crowd. Interacting with them will give you insights into their challenges and needs. This information will help you build the right products for them.

For example, if I attract coaches into my community, I will have an idea about the challenges of coaches. Coaches have a problem building landing pages. They don't want the best-designed landing page in the world. They just want a simple landing page that can give information, host a video, and collect leads. For this they have to first get the copy done by a copywriter, then a design made by a landing page designer, the landing page coded and hosted by a front-end engineer. This is a long cycle that slows down their business.

If I want to build a landing page tool for coaches, I wouldn't complicate it with a custom builder like Elementor. Most of the coaches cannot build an Elementor landing page because it has too many features and options. I would make a simple form that they can fill out that outputs a ready landing page for them. The only customization options would be a few well-designed templates and color themes. This gets the job done which is their requirement. I would also be a customer of this product because I struggle to develop landing pages quickly and fast myself.

People who build platforms and apps after being in the coaching and service industry usually get the product-market fit of the product right the first time. One good example of it is Skool.com by Sam Ovens. Sam started with freelancing and agency. Then he got into the coaching business. He worked with so many coaches personally and his approach was to build communities. The community ideally should have a learning management system to host courses, a calendar for live events, notifications a mailing system, and a discussion forum for clearing doubts.

Sam was using Facebook Groups, Kajabi (an LMS system), ActiveCampaign, and Google Calendars to run his coaching programs. He had the need himself and he observed that other coaches who are following a similar path had the same challenges. With this clear understanding of needs, he built Skool. He built it so well that it started picking up immediately. Even we use Skool for now. Alex Hormozi has recently invested in Skool.

The personal brand and community not only helped him understand the market needs clearly but also gave him the needed distribution to get the initial customers. Starting with coaching and services also gave him the needed seed capital to invest in building Skool. Many startup founders depend on seed investments from angel investors and VCs to get the initial capital. Many times the VCs end up changing the direction of the company and founders do not have enough freedom during the initial phases of the startup.

ClickFunnels, Hyros, FlexiFunnels, and many such successful software products were built by people who were into coaching and services at the early stages of their careers. They instinctively understand that software is about solving problems for the customers and not just having a tool with a lot of features in it.

I intend to build software in the future, but not anytime soon. I am going to get the market understanding, the distribution, and the needed seed capital for product development from my coaching business before I start building software. You will get to see my journey as I do it.

In another post, I will dive deep into the differences between software and platforms.

A lot of people ask me this question. If you are starting a new business, should you offer coaching or services?

To be honest, it doesn't matter whether you position yourself as a coach, mentor, or guide with services. The lines are blurred in this.

There are 3 parts to the offer that help your customers reach their goals.

• Done for you (DFY)
• Done with you (DWY) and
• Do it yourself (DIY)

Done for you (DFY)

At the top of the pyramid, it's done for you services. You help your customers reach their goals by doing it for them. DFY can be building landing pages, content, email marketing or sales for your clients (in the digital marketing field). You charge high for DFY services because you are doing it for them and you cannot do it for everyone. The pricing for this will be high-ticket.

Done with you (DWY)

There are some categories where you cannot do DFY. For example, weight loss or relationship coaching. You cannot lose weight for them or find a date for them. In this case, DWY works well. You guide them step by step and offer personal consultation (like 1 call per week for 3 months).

In business also you can offer DWY services. For example, in AlphaClub mastermind, I do not do anything for my customers myself but guide them how to do it on mastermind calls. I review their work and suggest improvements. This is more scalable than DFY but you still have to trade your time and it's limited in scale.

Do it yourself (DIY)

Do it yourself is the most scalable. From the understanding you acquire from DFY and DWY, you can create a training or coaching product that is customized for a target audience (niche) and you release it. Books are DIY but you cannot charge much for books. Video training courses are great DIY products because they offer a richer learning experience.

Video training courses are hard to make and communicate the information better than books. People will pay more for it. You can add a little bit of DWY here by offering a community where people can ask questions. You can answer the questions yourself or have team members do it for you.

The Path

Whenever you are entering a new niche, I recommend starting out with Done for you and done with you services. Because you do not understand the niche well enough to create efficient DIY products that can scale.

If you are building something for your clients, take less clients, charge high and then give it to them. If you are helping your clients reach a goal, work very closely with them.

The initial traction from DFY will help you get testimonials from customers and then you can transition into DWY (more scalable) and then into DIY (highly scalable).

The digital marketing services that we offer are part of DFY (includes content, performance marketing, design, email marketing and copywriting). The consulting services that we offer are part of DWY (includes our mastermind program and business consulting)

The courses that we offer are part of DIY (includes various mastery courses and internship programs) with a little bit DWY mixed with it such as mentorship from my team. The books, lead magnets and tools are completely DIY.

When you have a lot of people taking your DIY offers, you will have some people who are ready to pay a premium for your DWY and DFY offers. Your DIY becomes your top of the funnel at later stages to bring people into DFY.

If you are starting a new business, this is the path I would recommend for you.

Do you think this framework makes sense?

In the past 3 months, I've lost 5 kgs. Weight loss is not rocket science. People complicate their weight loss journey by bringing too many variables into the equation. It's not like I was a fat person. I am relatively "not fat" but I was gaining weight and feeling lethargic during my weekdays.

Getting fit is easy. All you need to do is push yourself to burn calories. You don't need a gym subscription or the latest Apple Watch. Run for 15 minutes every day and do some stretching and weight training in the morning. A pair of dumbells at home does wonders.

People complain - I do not have time for exercise. But they are underestimating how much more focus they will gain when they workout every day. The work that you do in 2 hours can be done in 90 minutes if you have worked out in the morning.

Physical exercise is also great for mental health. Your brain goes through bio-chemical changes when you work out regularly. I don't want to get into the technical details here, but you know it. Even if you do not workout regularly, you can feel the difference on the days when you walk a lot (like during a vacation).

It's hard for us to push ourselves, that's why everyone needs a personal trainer. Simran, one of our AlphaClub members has been helping people lose weight and get back on track with their fitness. Everyone needs an accountability partner who will push and remind them on their lazy days. Simran has been pushing me. She doesn't let me laze around a single day without running.

The difficulty is only until I wear my shoes. Once I wear my shoes, I am up and ready for running. And it doesn't take a lot of time to run. Just 10-15 minutes of running. Take the heart rate to 130+ bpm and run for 1 to 1.5 km. After running I feel great and feel gratitude to my trainer for pushing me.

A trainer is not just for following up with you, guiding you, and teaching you what exercises to do. A trainer is also for helping you with your diet. What you eat is what you are. 50% of your fitness depends on what you eat. Simran has been guiding me with a protein based diet and I have reduced carbs by more than 50% in my daily meals. Also thanks to my wife Sandhya for helping me with the diet part. Without her, I would be ordering unhealthy foods from Swiggy half the time.

I am not sure if I will get 6-pack abs but come on, dreaming is free. Maybe one day I will be ripped. Simran has earned herself a lifelong student.

You can check out Simran's personal training services on her website SimfitIndia.com

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to become a startup founder. I wanted to be in business. The uncertainty of running a business not only keeps you active mentally but also can be profitable if you do the right things.

The reason why most businesses fail is not because business is risky but because people do not know how to do the right things. My first attempt at building a startup failed because I didn't know what to do. I started a motorcycle blog called BikeAdvice and grew it to a million page views a month. But I sold that blog. So I can't say it failed but it failed to become the business that will help me retire. I learned the hard way that you can't make much with just display ads revenue.

I came to Bangalore and worked at Practo, Instamojo, and Razorpay to learn how startups are built and scaled. I learned a lot and I was impatient to become a startup founder again. In the process, I did employment and freelancing to pay the bills and have a roof over my head.

This is how everyone's journey is going to be. Unless the job is so rewarding and gives you startup-like flexibility in your work, you might be better off starting something of your own.

Once you have earned enough wealth with your startup, you can become a full-time investor and just retire to follow your hobbies.

Some people do skip the startup founder stage. They make so much with their employment and stock options from the job that they can jump to the investor stage directly.

Unless you are working in an early-stage startup that has a very high upside potential, your best shot at creating wealth is going to be startups.

If you have inherited a lot of money and you just need to manage the growth of the capital, you can directly jump to the investor stage but that's not for most people here, including myself.

I don't think I need to convince you further that startups are going to be vehicles for your financial future.

The next question is, what kind of startup?

You need to unlearn what you have learned in the first place. If you have been watching Shark Tank USA or Shark Tank India, you might have a very vague idea about what it means to build a startup.

First things first, do not start an eCommerce store or a D2C brand. Some people have built a successful D2C brand but it's not my cup of tea for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, D2C brands thrive on trends. One week it's bamboo towels and another week it's the latest health supplement. Unless you know how to look for trends and capitalize on them, you will not be able to make it a D2C brand. You also have to invest in production, acquisition of raw materials, warehousing, logistics, and unsold inventory. You will have to return to original orders which do not go through and it just adds chaos to your life. You don't want that if you are looking for freedom and peace with your startup.

Another major reason why I do not prefer starting an e-commerce company is that big brands like Amazon and Flipkart spend more than they earn for years to capture customers and increase their brand value. They have funding in the billions of dollars and they can out-spend other companies who are competing for the same keywords. You can only compete with them if you are also able to raise venture capital funding and can afford to run into losses for a while until you get a critical base of customers.

I prefer bootstrapping a startup until a point of maturity before raising any funding rounds. Many startups raise money just based on an idea, but many of them also fail within a few years. Bootstrapping helps you get disciplined in the first few years. This involves being humble, learning from the environment, listening to the customers, and most importantly, being frugal.

Constraints encourage us to be creative and most creative ideas come to us when we have constraints. The financial constraint of having to run a business without external funding creates a very solid foundation on top of which a big company can be built in the future. The bootstrapping years cement the culture of your startup.

So if you have to bootstrap a startup, how do you go about it?

There are 4 major offers you can create in your startup. They are Education, Services, Platforms, and Software.

Starting with education services doesn't cost any money. I started mentoring people in digital marketing. That's how I generated enough cash flow to setup my digital marketing agency that provided services. Which I rolled into making a software called OptinChat. And now I run a platform to hire digital marketers where there is a match of demand and supply.

Companies that want to hire digital marketers contact us and we supply them trained talent who have graduated from our courses. Our platform, though, is in a very early stage without software powering it. Eventually, we will be able to build a much more robust platform.

If you want to build a startup of your own, build your brand, and a community around your brand, and start mentoring people. That's the best way to get started. Once you have built your fan base, you can leverage that community for hiring and building your team. Your team can help you build a services agency that generates more cash flow.

Services don't mean that you should only offer services to B2B such as digital marketing services. Even in B2C, a personalized coaching program with multiple mentors or account managers is a service. A service is something that cannot be scaled as a product and needs a team to execute and deliver. It might not scale very fast but can be profitable enough for you to take that money and invest it into something more scalable.

This is my recommended approach because this is what has worked for me and many people in the industry. In future emails, I will cover some case studies that illustrate how people have followed a similar path to build a successful, bootstrapped, and profitable startup for themselves.

Only after your startup has reached this stage I would recommend raising funds for the startup. Do not go to investors with an idea because what you want to execute will be influenced by the investors.

Unpopular opinion but the truth, most investors do not know anything about business. They are just managers of capital and that capital is drying up. You need to choose your investors carefully but that comes after a certain point in your startup's maturity.

If you are following me around, you might have heard that I went to a 10-day meditation course called Vipassana. I wrote about it a bit, but today I wanted to go deeper into the experience and let you know about what I experienced.

A lot of people think that Vipassana is very difficult. They think that it is difficult because, for 10 days, you cannot talk to anyone, make eye contact with anyone, no phones, no reading and no writing. This is not the hard part.

People think that the hard part is sitting and meditating for 10 hours a day (starting from 4 am) at the meditation hall. That's also not the hard part.

The hard part (esp. the first 3 days) is your mind. You will observe that when you do not have any new inputs for your mind, your mind will surface past hurt, guilt, anger, frustration, and regrets. In normal life, we carry this baggage all the time and we don't realize that our mind is not clean.

Most people do not like a weekend without plans. They resist staying alone because being alone, though not as powerful as meditation, still gives space for the mind to think about the past. We become miserable when that happens. We have not sorted through those elements of the past yet. Some people keep distracting themselves with work, entertainment, drugs, and recreational activities. They grow old like that.

The Vipassana meditation technique makes you enter the madhouse of your mind and clean every room of all the cobwebs that we have built through our life experiences. All the old stuff surfaces. A friend might have said something and you got hurt. Mom or Dad said something or their behaviour affected your life. Your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend or ex-wife or husband wronged you and you feel angry about that.

The technique is just to observe what surfaces and not react to them. If you get a good memory surface, just observe it. Don't crave the same experience again. If a bad memory surfaces, just observe it. Don't create further entanglements.

You will observe that in the process of 10-day meditation (for almost 10 hours a day), every past impurity from your mind will be cleaned off and you will feel like you are born again.

Jesus said “You must be born again, to be able to enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3)

That doesn't mean that you have to let go of this life and be born again. It means that you have completely not just made peace with your past but put it behind your back so much that you don't even feel like you are related to the past.

Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or anyone from any religion can do Vipassana because it's a scientific technique and has nothing to do with religion. Human suffering and bliss are universal. There is no such thing as a Hindu suffering or a Muslim suffering. We all suffer because of our minds in the same way. Vipassana is a purification of the mind so that you don't have any baggage. You will start to live life in the present moment.

Since my Vipassana experience, the relationship I have with my wife (Sandhya) has become much better. We do not fight as we used to because I do not react in anger much, which is the seed of all marital disputes in the first place. You get angry, they get angrier and the cycle continues until one person (usually the wife) starts crying, and the cycle breaks.

I am planning to do Vipassana again this year and probably once or twice every year because I have seen that I have turned over a new leaf since that 10-day experience. I am not anxious about the future anymore and I don't have regrets about the past anymore. I have not just forgiven everyone who has wronged me but also forgotten about them (almost). I have no emotions attached to my past and my past is as good as a different person.

The only way to achieve world peace is to achieve inner peace. Look inside. Turn into yourself and look into the mind which is the source of all suffering. The body experiences pain, the ego experiences hurt, but our mind is the one that creates the suffering. It thinks "Why me". Vipassana will teach you to accept things as they are and you will come to the peaceful conclusion that "it is what it is" and what's done is done.

Remember that this experience is not intellectual. Yes, you will get to listen to some discourses, but the gyan part is just 10%. You can read all the books in the world and your behavior won't change because you are learning from your conscious mind and it never touches the subconscious mind. The only way to scratch the surface of the subconscious mind is to start a meditation practice and train your mind to be more present all the time so that you can flow like a river in life.

A river flows, it is always changing. Life is also like that. From moment to moment, life passes by. Things happen. Some things are in your favor and some things are not. But just like a river that flows down its path just changes its direction when it meets an obstacle, you also just navigate through life moment by moment.

Stop looking at the rear-view mirror of life. And stop looking at your maps to see where the destination is and how far it is. The only way you are going to go to the right destination is to see the road in front of you, in the moment and be alert and safe in the journey. These words might give you a momentary insight into the right way to live life, but the only way to change your behavior is to train the mind through meditation.

May all beings be happy.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

P.S. If you want to apply for this course, there are 240 centres in the world and 102 in India. Head to Dhamma.org for finding the course dates and application dates.

For the past 2 days, I was at an event in Chennai.

It's called the Quantum Club retreat organized by Siddharth Rajsekar.

This event was only for his inner circle of students. This was one of the best events I've attended in the past 1 year.

The production quality was top-notch. Sidz spent more than a crore to organize and run this event. I was happy to be a part of it.

I met a lot of people from the industry, and many of them were also my followers and email subscribers.

Apart from sessions taken by Sidz, there were a lot of speakers from the audience itself. I learned about AI, data, analytics, ad spending and so much more.

No matter how much you know or think you know, it is always good to humble yourself and focus on learning. There are always things that we don't know.

One of the best talks was from Suren, the founder of Success Gyan.

Here are some key takeaways from his talk:

• Business success is nothing without personal success. You cannot change the world unless you change yourself.
• You are the CEO of two businesses, one is the business that you are running right now and one is the business that's becoming. You have to hit the puck where it's going to be, not where it is. Everything is evolving all the time.
• 4H formula, be happy, hungry, helpful, and humble all the time. If you become egoistic, success will not come to you. You need not chase success, success should chase you.

The event also had some late-night DJ music and party. We stayed at Radisson Blu Temple Bay resort at Mahabalipuram and the event also happened at the same place.

Next week I will be attending UAbility's event. I love learning in person from these events and that's why I'm a part of so many masterminds.

Whenever I've invested in masterminds, it felt like it is too much to spend, but after a while I see the impact that it has had on my business and the investment is always justified.

Are you part of any mastermind groups?

Reply to this email and let me know.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

Money makes the world go around. We are all focused on making money. It helps us live a comfortable life. Most people, most of the time think about making money. They also think that money is the path to happiness.

Now I am not here to tell you that you should become a monk and meditate all the time. There is nothing wrong with being rich. One should live a comfortable life because through work and labor, they have earned money and they have every right to live a life of comfort and luxury.

If you want to make more money, then instead of thinking about money all the time, think about creating value. Because money is just a representation of how much value you have created for other people in the world. There is a certain level of happiness and satisfaction that you will derive from helping other people live a better quality of life.

Think deeply about it. If you have a billion dollars, but there is no one else to provide any products and services, you will be poor. No one will cook for you, help with house cleaning, build a house for you, or build a car for you. If you are the only person on planet Earth, all the money in the world will not be enough for you to live a luxurious life.

The luxury and comfort are provided by the effort and hard work of other people around us. So having a large population is not a bad thing as most people think. Having a large population means that you have more people around you who are making products and services for you to make your life better. Everything that you see around you is made by others.

So even if you have money, it is your moral responsibility to create something of value for others. Whatever you want to do, you can do, but it should help others live a better life. It's only fair because they are helping you live a better life. Money is just a medium of exchange and a unit of account. Money itself doesn't help you live a better life.

I have saved enough money that I can continue my life at the current standard of living for the rest of my life. But I still work (like writing this article). Why? Because it gives me happiness and satisfaction to help other people (like you).

That's why I am not a fan of people who make money through inheritance, illegal means, or through bribes and corruption. I am also not a fan of people who call themselves "full-time traders" on the stock market. They might be buying and selling all the time and if they are smart enough, they will make money, but what they have created or produced to improve the lives of other people. If all the people in the world just buy and sell assets, and speculate on the price movements, who will run the companies, build the buildings, clean the floors, and run it?

I feel very fortunate to be born at a time when I can create value for other people by sharing my thoughts with them. There was no way to create such value 1000 years back. Even if language was being used, there was no way to send emails or publish blogs. But people still did it, such as writing on scrolls or tree bark.

Buddha's teachings have been transferred through his disciples across 25 centuries. But we still do not know if that's what Buddha said. That's the claim. Buddha did not have a way to publish blog posts and add signatures on the blockchain to prove that he was the one who wrote what he said.

Many successful people I know are not writers like me. They create value through other means, such as designing a landing page, making YouTube videos, or creating and managing performance ad campaigns for other people. These examples are just from the digital marketing space. There are plenty of other examples. You just need to look around you. Someone made the chair that you are sitting on. Someone made the screen you are reading this on. Someone made the internet through which this web page or email opens. Someone invented the electricity which powers the internet and your computer. The list goes on and on.

So don't just focus on making money. Focus on creating value for other people. The money will come to you if you add value to other people. Calculate how much wealth and value you are adding to the world, not to yourself. Some people donot have much personal wealth, but their work has added so much wealth to the world. They just didn't choose to monetize it. Monetizing your work is optional. However, creating value for others is not optional.

People who make money through illegal means, live on inheritance, or just laze away their days with some savings they have do not last long. The money in the family usually doesn't last more than 3 generations. The first generation makes money through some corrupt means, the second generation saves it but doesn't add to it and the third generation ends up spending it all because from the beginning they had the idea that they were born into a rich family. It's a predictable cycle.

That's why if you have kids, do not give them money. Instead, give them this mindset of adding value to the world. The money will come but the idea of money and value should be differentiated. Your bloodline will last for 100s of generations. That's true wealth.

I have been in the startup space for quite some time.

I have worked in startups like Exotel, Practo, Instamojo, and Razorpay.

I have observed them closely. Working in marketing helped me understand the cost of customer acquisitions and the ROI that each customer brought in.

I was shocked to see that most of these businesses were not profitable.

They do not intend to make a profit anytime soon. They are driven by a narrative. The narrative is that if you are an early mover, and become the most dominant player in the market (almost a monopoly), then you can charge whatever you want and the company will be worth a lot.

But in most of the cases, this story doesn't play out as expected. The narrative dies down.

I understood that startups do not raise money because the opportunity is so lucrative. They raise money because there is a lot of capital waiting to find some place to deploy itself and a percentage of those come into venture capital investments. The venture capital companies are looking to invest in narratives such as Fintech, Ed-Tech, AI, and so on.

Because they believe in the narratives, but it is not needed that the narrative has to play out as expected in the end. As long as they are sure that the narrative is going to hold for a while, they will always find an exit from a bigger whale who will buy their shares.

Unfortunately, the last person is the retail investor. The public markers give exit liquidity to the last investors in the private market and we have seen what happened with a bunch of celebrated startups that went public in India around 2021 and 2022. The stock price fell rapidly and initial public investors lost money.

If that's going to be the end game of narrative-driven, loss-making startups, I do not want to play that game.

So that's not the game to play, then what is?

How about a profitable micro-startup?

I call it a Micro Startup because anyone who is building a startup, at least at the initial phases, is not looking to raise multi-million dollar venture capital. They are looking just to get started with a business so that they can get out of the rat race of having to grind in a 9-to-5 job. That's how I got into startups.

When you are not looking to raise funds immediately, your startup must be profitable otherwise you will not have any money to take home. And there is no point in working to build a startup if you are not taking any money home.

In such cases, building a SaaS, Platform, AI, or deep-tech startup doesn't usually make sense. Cash flow is best generated with education and services. That means coaching and agency.

For most people, a combination of education and services is needed. Because through coaching you can find and create talent. With services, you can deliver results for your clients and hire from your coaching program to scale your services.

Coaching and service startups are usually not very investable for two major reasons. One, with the coaching, the entire business depends on a single person. We call them the key person of influence. You cannot buy equity in a personal brand. Unless the coaching business scales to remove the dependency on the founder, the ed-tech business cannot be invested and scaled.

Service-based startups usually have a cap on growth. As a service-based business, you can only handle so many clients and the big clients will need to involvement of a key person of influence. Also, as service businesses scale, it has a heavy dependency on talent and it's hard to hire, manage, and retain clients. Most important of all, a service-based business doesn't need investments in the first place because you generate the required cash flow needed for expenses through client invoices.

Software businesses need funding because you need to invest copious amounts of capital in building solid software. App developers and designers do not come cheap. Apps for different platforms, brand identity, UI / UX, support and update systems need to be built before the app can onboard customers and start making recurring revenues.

Platform businesses combine the demand side and supply side (Such as Ola, Zomato, PayTM) and so on. And until they build a critical mass of people on both sides, the business will not make money. That also needs funding.

If you want to build software or platform businesses, you need to first build an education or service business. Teaching people not only helps you build a distribution, but it also helps you understand the challenges and pain points of your customers. And the initial investment that you need to build software will come from your education and services.

There are many examples of people who used to do education and services and then pivoted to software. For example, Sam Ovens used to train people under the brand Consulting .com and then understood that people need a good platform to build a community and host their courses. He used the profits from his coaching business as a seed investment in Skool. After almost 6 years of building Skool, he is raising money from big names in the industry like Alex Hormozi.

We have an Indian example for this as well. Saurabh Bhatnagar was a digital marketing and funnel coach. He used the profits from his coaching to invest in building FlexiFunnels, a landing page software for digital marketers. He used the distribution from his coaching business to get the initial sales of his software. Then he reached out to partners like me who will promote FlexiFunnels to their audience for a commission.

So unless you have a background in tech and development, or have a ready investor who will do an angel or seed investment, do not start your startup with software or platforms. Start with education and services. Build the distribution. Build the community. Build an understanding of the market. Earn some money. Invest for your future. Once you do all this, you will have the perfect launchpad to get into software and services.

And keep the startup profitable. Worst case, break even. But do not run a loss-making startup in the education/services category.