Lessons - Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write More | Yaagneshwaran Ganesh - Award-Winning Marketer & Author

In this episode, you'll discover why entrepreneurs should embrace writing as a tool for growth and brand building. Key insights include how writing can clarify your ideas, help you deliver consistent value, and create lasting connections with your audience. You'll also hear practical advice on staying grounded and how persistence can open doors in unexpected ways. So when you started writing books, when I look at Yag right now, you have a strong personal brand, you have your own website, and you've done all these things that seem like personal branding items, and I don't mean to turn this into like a personal brand chat, but you didn't actually go into writing books on purpose to augment to sell yourself as this marketing guru. This was not the goal. Absolutely not. In fact, I have my own gripe about personal marketing. I'm in personal branding. A lot of people, the things that they do in the name of personal branding is a bit annoying. It's not even personal branding to say. So yeah, going back to the part, I wrote my first book and to my surprise, they read about 800 to 900 people who actually paid and bought that book, and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then in the meantime, I also wanted to start speaking in the public. So I went to my business school. I asked my professor that I would like to do a guest session, and they were gracious enough. And they said, hey, give it a try. And it happened. And from there on, I quickly realized that talking to this audience was not my core because, you know, people are still studying. And I was more talking about things at work and how you could do certain things, you know, the mistakes that I learned from and all of that. So I thought, I need to pivot to a business audience. And the moment I started getting invited to speaking at different conferences and all of that, my publisher gave me a call. He was like, hey, if you're going to write a fiction book again, I'm going to charge you double. But on the contrary, if you write a marketing book, I'll publish you for free. And I was like, this is amazing. But then I was like, can I even do this? Because I don't consider myself an expert. Can I write books? And he was like, just go give it a try. Your first book is going to be bad. But by the time you figure your figure, your things out, you will be amazing. I gave it a shot. My first marketing book was is your marketing in sync or syncing, you know, because that was a good title. It's not a bad title. And there was also the dilemma that I was in. And from there, I consistently started writing marketing books. You know, my career started becoming more focused towards marketing stuff. I was working only specifically for martyck products and then slowly and steadily things fell in place. And at some point, I started a LinkedIn show called Coffee Conversations. It was a five-minute LinkedIn show that I posted every morning. And it took off. And then a lot of people came back to me and they said, hey, you should, you know, do a little more detailed version of this maybe start a podcast. And in 2019, December, I started the podcast. I had no clue what is a dynamic mic. What is a condenser mic? You know, what is what? I just had a topic in my mind. I went to a nearby studio and I thought, let's record this first episode. And then to look back now, having, we don't come into think that I've done about 115 episodes now. And I've had people like, say good and guy, Kawasaki, David Cancel, Ranfesh, can you name it? All the stalwarts of marketing have been on the show. It's so humbling and so rewarding. But the fun part is not even one day I try to reach out to these people thinking that, hey, if I have these guys, I'll get more downloads or more listens. That was never the thought process because after every episode, you know, people used to come back and give me a very detailed DM on my LinkedIn. And it would be like, yeah, I completely disagree with what this person said because of this, this, this, or I completely agree with this. And they used to write such detailed posts. And I realize people are so invested in this, you know, they are coming back and which is a good thing, positive or negative, they're invested, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're giving us so much of time. And which means whatever I do, I make sure that any guest that I bring in, it needs to make sure that I'm giving value to these people who trust me, you know, I need to focus on a single topic and go as deep as possible because they come in for the promise of the topic. And if I don't deliver on that, it's on me. So I started to look out and reach out to people based on specific topics. And in that virtue, all these things happened. And today, you know, the show is part of the HubSpot podcast network. So very happy about that as well. All right. That makes sense. I want to pull a few things out of this because I think there's a few different drugs that we can take it. So there is like book writing lessons. There is podcast lessons. And then there's also like just conversational intelligence, which is like a very smart, tactical, forward thinking marketing discussion. But first, I am curious about a few things. This is how I'm going to structure it. So I'm going to do, I'm going to do book lessons featuring one of your podcast guests. I'm pretty sure you had an interesting conversation with him. Then we can go into like podcast lessons. And why what I'm talking about is you wrote how many books total, eight books total, and then you spoke to Seth who's like, he's written an incredible amount of marketing books. So first of all, what have you learned personally from writing books? And then what was the most important thing that you took from a conversation with Seth Gordon that you're going to start using for maybe your framework or your process for writing? Right. So first question, what did I learn from writing books is that, you know, most people think writing a book is a difficult thing. Actually, it is not. You know, you can, and if you look at my style of working, I am not a very structural person if you think about it. My first book, I just randomly started writing. I did not even think that I'm going to publish it. Yes, there was a coordinator of me that told me that he I want to publish this book. And that's why I kept writing on a daily basis. But I was still, you know, rambling on my laptop. And at some point, I realized that he there are about 150 pages now. Let me go back and read how it feels. And I shared the copy with my wife and I said, hey, take a read and tell me what he feels. And she was like, yeah, you should go ahead and publish it. And so I went about it. And my biggest takeaway, I would say, is that after eight books, now I would say it's important to think about what is that singular value that you want to communicate through your book. It could be a story or it could be a framework or it could be, you know, something that people can take away. And one thing that I've done with my books is I've kept most of my books very short because as I told you, even from my podcast and everything, you know, a lot of things that I do also come from my frustration of experiencing those things and I want to do the opposite of that. So, for example, when I read books, you know, if I read 20 pages and if I feel that the next 200 pages is going to be saying the same thing with different examples, I'm not going to read any further. So I wanted to make sure that I keep things crisp and I don't repeat too much. But at the same time, it's not like I just say it once, you make it so actionable, you make it so clear that people can take that framework and use it for their work. And then from there, you can expand that into, say, some podcast talks or you can extend it to your speaking or you can expand it. I know, expand that into your training programs or all of that. Then that works. And from there, going back to said Gordon, you know, I mean, there is, I'm so happy to talk about this because at the outset, it looks like yeah, you had said Gordon or the show, but the secret or the reality of all of this is that the very first time I reached out to say it, Gordon, for something was way back in 2009. And I kept reaching out to him for one thing or the other. And finally, I got him on the show in 2021. So, you know, it was been, it has been a persistence of 11 years. 11. 11 years, but he's a popular, he's a popular marketer. He's a marketer. And you know, if I have to take one thing from said, you know, as you asked, more than anything about his writing, as a person, he's a wonderful, wonderful human being. And, you know, the reason why I have so much of respect is I've reached out to so many people and pretty much everyone that I've reached out to have virtual assistants, assistants, you know, you never talk to them directly and they are the ones who are okay. But in said case, you know, being who he is, he will reply to every single email that he gets. He might say no, that's fine. It might be a one or two liner, but he'd politely say that and he would be the person who is responding. And that to me, you know, I was like, this is how I need to be, you know, wherever you go in your life, you need to be grounded. And all of his examples, all of his stories come from real life, you know, every single thing that he says is from first principles. When you hear him talk about something, there is no one jargon that you would hear in that sentence. If it's a third grader who's listening to what he say, we'll still get it. If it's a granny, still she's going to get it. So that simplicity is something that I would like to take away from that conversation and implement it in everything that I do. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.