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business on easy mode

concept · in 19 sources (2019–2023)

Services, education and boring industries are easier first businesses than apps, physical products or glamorous markets.

Sources by year: 2019: 1 · 2020: 3 · 2021: 6 · 2022: 4 · 2023: 5

Also known as: hard mode, unsexy businesses, boring businesses

Questions

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2023

  • 2023-01-26 · 7 Side Hustles Ideas to Make $1000/Month — Ali's formula for making money: learn a skill that people will pay for, then find people who are willing to pay you for it. — 00:03:24
    • If he were in his early twenties and trying to make money, Ali says he would probably take the web designer route. (hedged) — 00:27:36
  • 2023-05-19 · 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You — recommendation: Ali: A business need not be everything to everyone like Amazon or Walmart, Ali says: be very good at one specific, even super-niche, service or product, because exploiting an unfair advantage beats shoring up your weak areas. — 00:14:40
  • 2023-08-11 · If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This — recommendation: Ali: On how to start a business, Ali says just give it a go and start with a service business, by far the easiest way to start making money. — 00:09:56
  • 2023-09-15 · 6 Side Hustles Students Can Start in 2026 — Ali: Content businesses are generally J-curve businesses, Ali says: at the start, for an unspecified time, you are in the negative from the time and effort put in, then hope to hit an inflection point. — 00:13:21
    • For quicker money, Ali says, look for a non-J-curve business that makes money basically immediately; such businesses tend to be service businesses. — 00:14:40
    • Ali dislikes selling services on freelance platforms like Upwork or Fiverr because too much competition makes it hard to stand out; he is pretty sure Chris Misterek could earn far more by leaving Upwork and finding clients directly. — 00:23:24
  • 2023-09-27 · Starting A Business is Easy, Actually — Ali's second step is to choose a business model and find leads; there are three ways to make money from a skill: a service, a product, or content given away free and monetised through advertising such as YouTube AdSense or Medium, or by selling to the audience it builds. — 00:08:53

2022

  • 2022-02-16 · 7 Side Hustles You Can Start This Year — recommendation: Ali: The trick for a website designer, Ali says, is to appeal to a very niche group of people rather than to everyone. — 00:07:47
  • 2022-08-31 · How to Earn Money Doing What You Love — Ali personally likes digital goods: they have no cost of reproduction, so you are very unlikely to lose money on them. — 00:07:03
    • Services such as teaching guitar in your neighbourhood are an easy place to start, Ali says, while making goods is a lot harder but much more scalable and not directly tied to your time. — 00:07:32
  • 2022-11-17 · How to Become a Digital Nomad — recommendation: Ali: For the digital nomad lifestyle Ali recommends the freelancer path, which needs two things: a skill you can do remotely and people who pay you for it. — 00:06:06
    • Ali also recommends targeting boring businesses as clients, such as orthodontists, dentists, plumbers, electricians and builders. — 00:10:34
  • 2022-11-30 · How to Make Difficult Decisions (without overthinking) — Ali's team once considered a service helping big companies with their YouTube channels, which people said could make millions, but Ali found the idea draining and prefers learning cool things and making videos for his audience. — 00:12:06

2021

  • 2021-02-14 · The Book That MOST Changed My Life — recommendation: Ali: The key to a muse, Ali says, is to find a niche market, offer it a service and build systems and people so that you do not spend your own time delivering it. — 00:14:26
  • 2021-04-15 · 9 Passive Income Ideas - How I Make $27k per Week — Ali: Digital products such as an ebook, a download or an app are made once and sold many times, Ali says, usually with no cost for each sale. — 00:16:56
    • A paid membership or community, Ali says, is generally a bad idea unless you already have an audience. — 00:23:18
  • 2021-06-06 · How I Built 9 Streams of Income By 23 — Ali: Digital products are the next step up, Ali says: you make one once and sell it a zillion times, with no more effort to sell a million copies than one, so scale is built in. — 00:10:16
    • A principle of building businesses, Ali says, is to make the cost of entry for others high: any first-year medical student can run a course, but a coded question bank from scratch is very hard to copy. — 00:13:04
  • 2021-07-16 · How to Make Money Online - 6 Tips in 60 Seconds #shorts — recommendation: Ali advises focusing on the internet: a lemonade stand in your neighbourhood can make money, but the internet's reach and scale make far more with much less effort. — 00:00:29
  • 2021-08-25 · How to Start a Business from Nothing — recommendation: Ali's first step is to learn a monetisable skill that helps the people you care about; for him those would be YouTubers. — 00:04:16
  • 2021-10-08 · The Best Book I've Ever Read about Making Money — Ali: The third money tree is a software system, Ali explains: make the software or digital product once and sell it many times, since the cost of distribution and replication is effectively zero. — 00:08:18
    • The content system, the fourth money tree, is Ali's favourite kind: a book, YouTube video, blog post or online course takes time once and can be sold to many people later. — 00:08:51

2020

2019