How YouTube Helped Build His Multimillion Dollar Business | Ali Abdaal

Really think about your YouTube channel like a business. What is the value that your YouTube channel provides? Who is the target customer? What I'm trying to do is to build a business that is not reliant on views. That normally comes from having your own product to sell. You don't need to be getting hundreds of thousands of views; you just need to be getting a few views from the right audience. A year ago, two years ago, we tried doing a daily vlog. That was hard because for the first three days I had stuff to say, and then day four I'm like, well, I'm just. I'm sitting in the office writing my book and I have nothing to say.

That doesn't feel good.

It felt— yeah, it doesn't feel good. It felt like trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel every time.

Yeah. We're basically employees of these social platforms, right? And so, once you stop playing the YouTube game, your organic reach starts to drop. So, how do you plan on combating that?

Partly what I'm trying to do is to build a business that, A, is not reliant on views, because it's quite a stressful place to be. Like, you know, you and I know people, know other YouTubers who monetize exclusively through AdSense and brand deals. That's really stressful because now your business revenue is directly tied to how many views you get. So how do we get to a place as a business where our business revenue is decorrelated somewhat from how many views we're getting each month? And that normally comes from having your own product to sell. If you have a product in a niche market that's fairly high ticket, you don't need to be getting hundreds of thousands of views. You just need to be getting a few views from the right audience who'll then buy your stuff. And I think a great example of this is August Bradley, who had a YouTube channel about Notion. It still does. And his channel only had like 15,000 subscribers when he released his online course. And I think in his first launch of his course, he made about $600,000 from an audience of only 15,000. And there are so many YouTubers I know with millions of subscribers who do not make $600,000 a year because they just don't have a product to sell.

Right.

For us, it's like, A, how do we decorrelate our business revenue from the number of views that we get? And B, more broadly, How do we decorrelate the value that we're giving to our audience from me personally sitting in front of a camera and filming? So, one thing that we're trying to do is we've just launched a daily productivity email newsletter modeled after Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic, where I've started off by giving the broad brushstrokes of what I want this newsletter to look like, but we've hired a writer to write it, and it's got like 10,000 subscribers on it now, and that thing is growing. And that means every day the writer can write productivity advice, That I can contribute to, but it's not directly tied to me. And so what we're trying to do is how do we build assets and how do we build kind of delivery vehicles for our courses and products that do not require me to sit in front of a camera?

Got it.

And that's a real challenge.

So how are you guys solving that challenge right now?

So number one, we're thinking what are the organic sources of content that we can create that don't rely on me, like daily productivity, the email newsletter. We're thinking of maybe doing something around YouTube as well, because our course is a YouTuber academy. And so If we had an organic email list, kind of like Colin and Samir's, where we just gave really good, useful YouTube tips, could that be a funnel to the courses? And then on the product delivery end, we have a customer service head, Alison, our head of customer success, and she's got a team of freelancers and contractors working underneath her. And so what we're trying to do is figure out when we're creating the offers for our courses, how do we deliver value to our audience or to our customers in a way that does not require me? So, instead of me hopping on a call with them every time, can we get members of the team to have regular office hours? Can we hire people to give them feedback on their videos? We're toying with the idea of doing some sort of productivity coaching thing. Obviously, that needs to not be me who's delivering the product. So, can I create the curriculum? Can we train coaches on the curriculum? And then can the coaches deliver the product? That's the sort of thing that we're trying to do now.

It's kind of like what Think Media does with their YouTube channel. You know how like it used to be tied to the founder, Sean Cannell, right? And now it's like a bunch of people on the squad.

Yeah, so we actually, we got a lot of inspiration from Think Media back in the day and we tried to copy them basically. So, we tried to launch a YouTube channel called the Part-Time Creator Academy and we had like this whole vision for it and we did a massive amount of competitor analysis. We looked at Think Media, Video Creators, Channel Makers, Film Booth, all of these other channels that were teaching people how to be creators. And we thought, great, let's just do Think Media. Let's just get a cast of characters Every week, one person can film a video. If we have 5 people, that's 5 videos a week. This is great. We'll sell our courses. And then we realized, oh my God, it's really, really, really hard growing another YouTube channel. And we made a few videos. It just didn't feel right. And we shut down the whole project. So, I'm filled with admiration for what Think Media have managed to do because Sean has really done the thing well where he has been able to distance himself from the content. And over time, his gang are featuring more and more in the videos. and he's having to show up a lot less.

What would you say if people were like, hey, I don't know what my style is, I don't know how to find like, you know, what I stand for. What would you say to these?

I would say it depends on what stage of the process you're at. So the way I think about it and the way that we teach it in our course is there's 3 levels. Level 1, level 2, level 3. Level 1 is get going. Level 2 is get good. And level 3 is get smart. Now level 1, get going, that is your first like 10 videos. If someone has not made 10 videos and they're worrying about their niche, They are overthinking it. Worrying about your niche and worrying about how you stand out is a level 3 problem to have. A level 1 problem to have is I just need to start my first few videos. And I know so many people who get paralyzed by just that initial upload. Oh my God, what are my friends and family gonna think? They don't realize that no one gives a flying fuck. They're just so caught up in their own heads, they're overthinking it. And I was like this back in the day. It took me reading a book called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon to get over the fear of starting my blog. So level 1, get going. That's the first part. handful of videos. Then level 2 is get good. And in level 2, the objective is to actually get good at the craft of making videos. Now, some people are good at this immediately if they've got a film background or if they're particularly creative. But for a lot of people, the average age of our students in our YouTuber Academy is 36. For a lot of 36-year-olds who haven't been living on the internet their entire life, it's actually quite hard making good videos. And so again, you don't need to worry about your niche over there. You don't need to worry about how you're going to stand out. You just decide, I'm going to make a video about this sparkling passion fruit naturally essenced water, and you try and talk about it in a way that makes sense. Then you think, you know what, I'm going to make a book review of this book that I've just read, and you try and make a video about it. And after you've done this a few times, you get good at the craft of making videos. Now you are finally ready for level 3. But before you get to level 3, you have to decide, am I treating YouTube as a hobby or am I treating YouTube as a business? If you're treating it as a hobby, you can do whatever you want. You don't need to worry about your niche. You don't need to worry about your target audience, your competitive analysis, nothing like that. Who cares? It's a hobby. Great. You have fun. You do it for yourself. But if you're doing it as a business, the key difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby is for you, a business is providing value to other people. So if you're going to treat it like a business, you then go on to level 3, which is where you get smart about it. Like if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant down the road, you wouldn't just open an Italian restaurant because you like Italian food. You would see what's happening in the area. What's the footfall of traffic in the area? What other restaurants are there? What other Italian restaurants are there? What's the way that my Italian restaurant is going to stand out? Should I even be doing an Italian restaurant just because I like Italian food? You know, opening a restaurant is a very different skill set to enjoying cooking food. And so taking that same approach to business as you would if you're starting a business to a YouTube channel. And that's why, you know, the advice I would give for someone who's at level 3 is really think about your YouTube channel like a business. What is the value that your YouTube channel provides? Who is the target customer? What are they like? What are their needs? What are their hopes, dreams, aspirations? All of the standard marketing stuff around, you know, target audience analysis. And then do a competitor analysis. See who else is in the space. See how saturated the market is. Analyze all your competitors and see what are they doing well and what are they doing badly so that when you make videos in that niche, you can find a way to make yours stand out. They don't have to be better than other people's, but they do have to be different. Excellent.