Ajit Nawalkha Interview (Co-Founder At Ever Coach) Part 2

Ajit recommends picking up anything written by Dan Kennedy, as well as a book called copy logic, written by Michael Masterson, which allows you to think logically about copy.

Ajit also gets a lot out of anything written by John Caples. He writes about advertising, but all the concepts apply.

Spin selling is a fantastic book, it’s written for people who pick up the phone. He’s found the concepts behind the spin selling model are applicable to anything. Ajit uses the same model for launches, for consulting calls, for webinars, and anything he has to promote or market.

He also recommends to pick up a book called scientific advertising, it’s a really old book, but it’s a good one. It covers the basics of marketing, and you’ll feel like you already know it all when reading it, but if you really think about it after you’ve finished reading it, it will always give you something new to do, and follow through on.

Ajit’s companies are very much pro about understanding the user experience, and have the most epic experience for every user. If you have a look at his funnel structures, they run a lot of funnels, which are a pile of webinars.

His company does about a webinar a week, in each of his businesses. Sometimes there are as many as two or three webinars, in each of the niches, which is a lot of webinars. First he, and his team were running these webinars live, which was a lot of work, because designers and developers would have to sit down, and create each webinar on a platform.

Then he and his team started looking at platforms that were available out there, and they realised that when they scale their webinars on these platforms, they wouldn’t be able to handle it.

As well as that, Ajit found that all these platforms looked ugly as well. They were a disaster because they were old, clunky and it was very hard to set them up. He and his team didn’t like any of these things.

Through this experience, he realised that there must be a lot of people out there who need this software. To address this, they looked at the best technologies in the market, and looked at how they could use it to solve the platforms, to create the most epic webinar system.

The problem with setting up the webinar system, was that the design was horrible, and it needed to integrate with something else. So they decided to make themes, which people could pick from, and that were already pre-created by Ajit’s team (so they are already stunning). All the user would have to do, would be to type in the copy. Another issue came up: when typing in the copy, it could be in html, which is complicated for many people.

With this information Ajit’s team decided to make it a feature, that you don’t have to touch code at all. They’d just type, and it would show up (it looks really slick). You’d upload the image, and it would just show up, and everything looks beautiful and pretty.

The third issue, was knowing whether the person watched the webinar, or didn’t watch the webinar. They built a responder inside the webinar, where you could see if someone had watched the webinar or not (you could track it). If someone watched it halfway, you could track it, and you could send emails based on what the person did.

They send every email through send grid, which is the best technology out there for email, in Ajit’s view (they decided to send it through that).

Another issue was that when a user sent a lot of traffic, the pages would take a long time to load. Ajit decided to use technology to fix this as well: the entire page delivery, is done through a software called Google App Engine.

Essentially if Google is up, then your website should technically be up, because it’s the same engine that drives Google. They bought that technology, and he runs their entire webinar system on the Google App Engine.

Also the webinar delivery is important, so they used Amazon, as It’s the best of all the worlds. It’s a very easy interface to create webinars that perform well, look beautiful, and that you can trust that they won’t fail on you.

To top it all off, anyone who joins blink webinars, Ajit’s team will make sure their webinar never goes down, and even if Ajit had to expand the brand, because you’ve gone over packet, you won’t have to call the company. Ajit isn’t going to be uncool with his clients, he wants them to make some money.

The way Blink Webinars works, is if some big affiliate decides to promote you, or your Facebook campaigns are going really well, and you’re starting to throw ten thousand people into a webinar, Blink Webinar isn’t going to go down on you, because you’re not on a large enough package.

What Blink webinars will do, is scale for you, and you’ll get an email from Ajit’s company saying: “hey your Webinars are doing fantastic, but your package needs to go up, because the cost of running it is too expensive.”

Ajit wants to create a differentiation in the market place, where what he creates is ten times better, than whatever is available on the market. Ajit had already validated the idea: they ran a squeeze page. If you get blink webinar right now, you’ll see a page that has timed out, and says: ‘sign up for early notification’. This was Ajit’s testing, and he saw more and more people sign up. Off this he knew, that the page people were signing up for, people would actually go buy the products.

It’s very ugly, but that’s how you test something, and it is just a test page. He validated the idea, before they started to build the software.

Mind Valley is famous for many many things, but what Ajit does is he hires really good people to work for him. He manages to attract people away from Google, and get people to come to Malaysia to work for him, and that’s through having a great company culture.

He’s found most entrepreneurs don’t focus on building a great company, they focus on how to generate more revenue. It’s OK to do this, it’s your decision, but if you want great talent in today’s times, who is a millennial (anywhere from twenty five to thirty five years old), If you want to hire them, you can’t lure them with money, after a point. At a certain point they’re looking for satisfaction in what they do, and how they do it. They are more concerned about the contribution they make in the world, rather than how they make an extra five thousand dollars.

They value money, but they are also really aligned with something where they do meaningful work, something that is purposeful and has passion, rather than something boring, or which doesn’t resonate with them.

As Ajit’s done, if you create a company like Mind Valley, you can say: “hey, it’s not just about making more money, yes we will do that in the process of it, but it’s actually about creating a great world.”

Ajit’s punchline is ‘be extraordinary’ and that’s what he expects of everybody: every employee, every client, he expects them to be extraordinary, and he will give them the resources to do so.  In his experiences, that’s how you drive really good talent towards you.

People from Google, or Facebook, they apply to join, and Ajit rejects them a lot of the time, because even though these companies are cool, and they have all these benefits and perks. A lot of the time the work that these companies are doing, is empty and meaningless.

The work that they are doing is grunt work, and they are looking for something more purposeful, and meaningful. These are the smart guys, because they know eventually they’ll make the money, or they are already making the money. They know the value of money, and what they can get with it is temporary happiness. They are looking for something where they feel excited, and they jump out of bed looking forward to going to work.

Instead of the kinds of people who have the attitude of this another day, I’m going to do the grunt work, and make my extra thousand dollars bonus check. There are people who show up every day at work, with the attitude of creating something meaningful, and purposeful. They show up every day, where they can actually contribute, which in Ajit’s opinion, everyone should be able to do.

When Ajit is hiring, people make a video, and his selection rate is something like two percent. It’s not something that Ajit is actually proud of, because he’d like to hire more people, but it’s getting harder and harder to get into mind valley. There are at least three rounds of interviews, there is a whole process for it. They don’t decide on selecting someone to fast. He is as slow as you can imagine: the mind valley process, can be as long as a month before you know if you’ve been selected or not (from your application submission).

For the person applying, it will be a process of two months, because they have to create the video, submit it, then Ajit and his team will review it. Then if they pass that, they can be doing as many as five interviews, and then if they make it through all that, then they will get their offer letter.

It’s a really long process, and it’s all about personal growth stuff as well. Ajit doesn’t care what qualifications the person applying has. He cares a little bit about what experience they have, but that’s not the most important thing – it’s their attitude, what they’re like, what they stand for, what they want to create, and why they want to join mind valley.

Through Mind Valley, Ajit has found that skills are easy to learn: the company can transfer new skills onto someone within three months. What can’t be transferred is someone’s attitude. That’s his primary selection criteria when hiring someone.

Ajit’s average age of an employee is about twenty eight, and that ranges all the way from up from someone in their early twenties. They do have a few people over thirty (Ajit is thirty). His company is a very millennial heavy company, but in today’s world you’re not going to hire a forty five year old, who doesn’t know how to operate the internet, or even if they do understand it a little bit, they don’t have the depth of knowledge, because they’re not from the same generation.

The younger Ajit hires, the more he has found they are connected to the new technology, and it’s easier for them to learn all this stuff. Ajit would much rather hire those guys, instead of someone who has an MBA, because they don’t understand marketing, or how content marketing works. They will have learnt about very different things, and if internet is your medium, you need people who will understand it.

Ajit is working on a lot of things, but every three months, he likes to focus on a new business, take it to level that he wants to, and then focus on the next one (this helps him keep focused). Right now he is focused on Ever Coach, which is to make people better coaches.

You can reach out to Ajit on his email: ajit@mindvalley.com, his Facebook page, and his YouTube channel: Ajit Nawalkha.

Ajit posts once in a while, it’s not very heavy duty. If you want to find out more about Mind Valley, the web address is mindvalley.com. If you have any questions, comment below.