How To Start A $5 Million/Yr Business on YouTube (Ft. Ali Abdaal)

I know a chap who had 15,000 subscribers and built a million dollar business. Really the way people get rich off of YouTube is by.

This is Ali Abdaal, one of the biggest YouTubers and now literally the most followed productivity expert in the world. In this video, I went to Ali's house in London to hear why he left his job as a doctor to start a YouTube channel that now has over 4 million subscribers and is making millions of dollars a year. This video is an absolute masterclass. When you have attention like Ollie does, you can make millions. Millions. You can add events, you can add communities, you can add products, sponsorships, ads, job boards, consulting, paywalls, the list goes on. So many ways to make money. The one key is you got to build up your audience or just copy Ali's homework.

The people that I know who have succeeded on YouTube, people who have been through our YouTuber Academy and friends of mine, they have all had some kind of unfair advantage that they have leveraged on their YouTube channel. It's really hard to succeed on YouTube and in the content business general in general if you don't have any unfair advantages because all you can do then is just outwork the competition. MrBeast had zero unfair advantages. And you see his videos, like 400 videos to get to 10,000 subscribers. He's literally reading the dictionary for 36 hours. Domineering Dominican Dominion, Dominion Dom. Domino effect, Domino Don. He's literally saying Logan Paul's name 100,000 times for a 24 hour long video. That is the level of hard work that he's putting in to make up for the fact that he has zero unfair advantages in the space. And now obviously he's got his huge team and his huge setup. But unfair advantages, at least in the education space, you know, having expertise in a specific area and making videos about that, being particularly charismatic, being particularly good looking, like all of these are different unfair advantages that you could have. You have to figure out what your unfair advantages are and find a way to exploit those. Turks go. Hierarchical growth.

Ali talks about his unfair advantage. I think about it like your unfair advantage diagram. You're basically finding where do unique skill sets overlap in a way that is uniquely you? So you had medicine, you had test taking, you had productivity and you had teaching. Are those your unfair advantages?

Those. And I had Cambridge University branding behind me and I also had a business which meant I had money that I could invest into camera gear, which means my production value from day one was just better than every other student on the platform because I could afford Camera gear. I. I had the web design background that meant I had a certain aesthetic sense for, like, graphic design. And I'd been designing posters and brochures for like a decade at that point. Even when I started so my thumbnails look good. And I kind of had a feel for, like, what titles and transitions and animations would look classy and not egregiously over the top or not like Microsoft Word art or.

Yeah.

And so all of those things combined.

Where are there a few things about me that aren't a triangle that's perfectly centered like everybody else, but slightly askew? Maybe you're that one weird person who pulls out a guitar at every single part party. Maybe you love recording videos all the time and also happen to be really into spreadsheets like Ms. Excel. Maybe you are obsessed with graphic design, but also philosophy, like Jack Butcher. You want to find the few things that, when you put them all together, make you completely priceless and unique in the world. Much easier than stacking tens and thousands of hours at being the best at one thing. We can't all be Michael Jordan, but we could certainly be slightly skew from the rest. Now, how would I start thinking about my first video? I want to get my first one up, and I want to make the first hundred bucks that I'm going to make on YouTube through AdSense.

Level one, get going. Level two, get good. Level three, get smart. So our person is like, level one, get going. Usually that's like the first three to 10 videos where the objective is to not overthink it, to literally just put the content out there and just kind of see what happens. Usually there are a ton of emotional hurdles to getting videos out there. Even for the Gen z's that are TikTok native and stuff, it's still really freaking weird filming yourself and sticking it on YouTube and all of the stuff associated with, like, what my friends and family are going to think and all of those emotional hurdles. That is a massive barrier. And that is the biggest barrier that holds people back, which is why level one is just get going. Once you've gotten past the get going stage. At that point, you have to decide, do I want a casual relationship with YouTube or do I want a serious relationship with YouTube? Casual is, oh, we'll see each other whenever I feel like it. You know, I'll call on you when I feel like expressing my creative outlet.

I apologize to you if I don't.

Seem real eager to jump into a.

Forced, awkward, intimate situation.

Sirius is. I'm committing to doing one Video a week at least. Now if they decide Sirius, then we go to level two. Level two is get good. Now, getting good involves making videos that are actually good. I'm kind of a big deal, and that's just like a lifelong journey. But I think there's two barometers of good. There is the internal barometer, which is, I no longer cringe when I watch my own videos because I actually think, yeah, you know, this is reasonable. And that when you have that feeling that this is at least reasonable, then you know your videos are good. And then there's the external stuff. There's like, okay, I'm seeing some amount of traction in the market. Like some people, the view kind of slightly going up. Maybe I'm getting 24 views rather than three. Maybe I'm getting three comments being like, oh, wow, this was actually helpful. Maybe I'm getting a few likes. You're starting to see some indicators of interest from the market. When you have those indicators of interest and you no longer feel cringe watching your own content, you then ask yourself the big question, is this a hobby or is this a business? And on the scale of 0 being hobby and 10 being business, where do you land on that scale? And you're not allowed to pick five. Now, if you want to do, if you want to do it as a hobby, then great, continue at level two, do whatever you want, make the content you like. It's a hobby, et cetera, et cetera. But if you want to do it as a business, at that point we get to level three, which is get smart. And that is where business strategy starts to come into it. That's where we start to say to this person, okay, you have made 15 videos already. Your videos are pretty solid. You think they're reasonable? They started to get a small amount of traction. You maybe had two comments in one of your videos saying this was helpful. At this point, let's zoom out and let's think strategy. Let's figure out, what is your niche, who is your target audience? What is the value proposition? Let's do a competitor analysis. Who's big in the space. Let's spend like a whole two weeks literally, just like consuming every piece of content within your niche or adjacent niches to figure out, like, if you were starting an Italian restaurant, you wouldn't just randomly start an Italian restaurant. You would see, hey, what other restaurants are there on the street? What other Italian restaurants are there on the street? How can I differentiate myself? What actually are your unfair advantages? How can we leverage those? What's the kind of brand that we're trying to create here, what's the vibe you're trying to go for? That will then feed into the content. And so at level three, once people's videos are already good, most of the growth is to be found in really thinking about it as if you were a business. The business strategy, the competitive analysis, how do you stand out in a crowded market? And then you apply consistency and patience over time and you get the results.

Riches and itches. Hate to break it to you, but you're probably not going to ever be the next MrBeast. Me either, by the way. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of followers across multiple platforms doing these crazy challenges. Not really my style. And you know, I don't appeal to like 17 year old boys on YouTube, which is like the predominance of the audience. And so that's not going to work for me. I had to think when I was creating my audience, how could I come up with an audience that I could actually serve that wants the things that I know about and how can I make, let's say, enough money to build a business around this particular audience that is going to be 1/100th of the size of Mr. Beast? That's when I realized that the higher the niche, the higher the rich. And what do I mean by that? I mean that when you have a very specific skill set that you focus on, the people who want that thing are typically willing to pay more.

Shut up and take my money.

Then let's say people are willing to pay when you have hundreds of millions of followers like Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast can sell a chocolate bar because he can get 1/100th of his audience to buy it and have a business that does tens of millions of dollars a year. You and I have to be more specific.

I actually started out on YouTube trying to make singing videos. I thought I was going to be the next Boyce Avenue, the next Hugo Schneider. I was going to play all the instruments. My friends would sing and I would sing occasionally. But I'm not that good. I found a love for me darling Just dive right in and follow my lead. Play the guitar as well along, you know. And My first like five or six videos on YouTube are music covers of Payphone by Maroon 5 and when I Was yous man by Bruno Mars and all this kind of stuff. Had I tried to succeed in YouTube on there, I have no unfair advantages there. It's just a dumb area. It's not. It's not an interesting niche. Find something that the market actually wants Because a lot of people will treat YouTube as like, oh, I should be able to creatively express myself and then good things should just happen, right? But no, if you're treating it like a business, which is my whole thing, you know, treat a YouTube channel like a business. If it's a creative hobby, then let's call it a creative hobby. But if it's a business, a business needs to solve. A need that the market has. The market had no need for my shitty singing skills, shitty guitar playing skills, inability to kind of string two, two notes together. But the market had a need for me teaching people how to get into med school. What are the things you enjoy? What are the things people would say you're good at? If you were on a desert island and you had to give a talk about something, what are the five topics you might give a talk about? What are the things you wish you had known two years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago? What are the things that people are asking you for advice on? What is the thing that you would do even if you weren't making money for it? All of those are trying to figure out the who am I component. And then we're trying to figure out the what value can I add to my audience component. So what groups are you familiar with, like medical students, chess players, doctors, high school students, what's the kind of content you consume? What Were you like two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago? Can we try and get you into the mind of who this person is that you're speaking to and then can we bridge that with some kind of value proposition? Really the way people get rich off of YouTube is by selling their own products. It's just a business plan. I know a chap who had 15,000 subscribers and built a million dollar business off of that because it was a very niche audience. He was doing very, very, very detailed videos about how to build operation systems in Notion and then his course was about how to build operation systems in Notion and did like 400k in his first first six months of running that, of running that business with a relatively small audience of only 15,000 subscribers. The people who I know who've made money off of YouTube with even less than that have maybe sort of a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers. But they target a very niche audience who have money to pay for one on one consulting or coaching services, because that is where the money is at. If you can land a 2k a month, 5k a month client, you just need two of those people. And so if you have a couple hundred subscribers who really love your stuff and it's the right niche and they crucially have money and are willing to spend money to solve this problem, you can make a six, sometimes even seven figure business, although it's harder to seven figure at least a six figure business. Off the back of selling one on one coaching or consulting, I had to.

Think, what is the niche that is going to make me rich? And that niche for me is finance. If people specifically want to learn how to buy small businesses, I'm your gal. Now, how many people are going to want to buy small businesses? I don't know one out of 100, but that one will be willing to pay a lot to learn how to do it. And the skill that I'm teaching them can take them from investing, let's say $1,000 to making 100,000 or a million. You can't really make money by buying a chocolate bar.

People are paying for your videos. They're not paying with their money, but they're paying with something arguably even more valuable, which is their time and their attention, which is the only limited resource that they have. And so would someone actually choose to pay you for your content? Does it provide enough value to their life to warrant the amount of life force and time that they're paying for it? If the answer is no, then let's get to a point where it is. And if the answer is yes, then you've got potentially a chance on YouTube.

So the better model your niche is, the more rich you and your business will become. If you're one of those business buyers, here's a free little something for you down in the corner. The first three things you need to know if you're going to go look to buy a boring business, and that right there. You guys, what I just did, where I said, hey, if you're my audience, if you're 1 in 100 that wants to buy a small business, and then I point you to something that only those of you who are going to do this cares about. That's how you don't oversell to people. Because for people that aren't interested, what do you do? You just keep watching the video, ignore it, doesn't matter. How do you do a business where you sell things online in a way that feels really good to you?

Yeah, this is something I really struggled with. So when I first created our YouTuber Academy, we were charging $400 for it. I had never charged $400 for anything before in my life. And so I had a lot of kind of in hindsight, emotions and feelings around the ickiness and the pain of like, oh, I don't want to come across as that used car salesman. Look at the size of that trunk. You could put three bodies in there. And it was speaking to some other. Some other friends of ours who kind of helped me change my mindset around selling and helped me see that selling is not an evil thing. Selling is almost education. You're educating people on your product, and if they want it, they will buy it. And if they don't want it, it's not like you're trying to shove it down their throats. And after trying this and, you know, putting it slowly out there into the world and seeing, oh, my God, people don't hate me for charging money and people are getting lots of value from the course, we're giving out loads of scholarships to people who can't afford it anyway. We have a basically zero questions ask refund policy. Like all of those things in particular, I think the refund policy made me feel very okay with selling because if someone doesn't like it, they'll literally just ask for their money back. And now I don't have to worry too much. And now that's the advice that I give to people. Like, because I speak to so many people who are struggling to sell, sell. And I say because they don't want their audience to hate them or whatever, just offer a refund policy and it's probably going to be fine.

Can you find your point of pain and solve it? Your point of pain, not somebody else's. Here's a perfect example. This is Danny Austin. Danny, online influencer, schlepping out a bunch of affiliates to dresses and jeans and shorts. Things that, you know, we don't really need but influencers like to talk about online. All of a sudden, Danny started losing her hair a little bit. She was getting stressed at a young age. She was staying up late with her business and like, a lot of women was losing hair and not talking about it because this is really faux pas for women to lose hair, right? This was her pain. She started sharing it on the Internet again and again and again. Like, look at this. Does anybody else have it? All of a sudden, she found a bunch of other humans who shared that pain. They had the same issue and nobody else was really talking about it. So as she continued to share her pain and some small little solutions, she also started behind the scenes creating products to fix it. Enter Divi, her brand. That solved this one unique issue of women losing their hair early all of a sudden. She's spent months priming her audience to want the thing that she has created to solve hers. And now their pain point. That means she has no what I call audience degradation in sales. If you go out and you try to shill something to your audience, something that they don't really want or need, it feels like you're pushing a giant boulder up the hill. If instead you allow them to do something that gets out of the way of the boulder that is already careening towards them, that's where you make millions and you don't have to sell your soul. So find your pain, because that's where the profit is. So if you're wondering what to do next, how do I also grow my audience? You should watch this video. It's got all the answers you want.