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How I Built a Million Dollar Business in Medical School - 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs

2019-10-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 16:30 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Aimed at students, Sponsor segment present

Junior doctor Ali tells how he and his friends grew SixMed from a BMAT course into a business with about £800,000 in revenue, and gives ten tips for entrepreneurs: don't wait for permission, learn from others, learn to code and design, work with friends, start small, do things that don't scale, expect failure, ask why, and just start.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: ten tips from six years of running SixMed

  • ★★★ Ali, now a junior doctor in Cambridge, has run SixMed for six years since he was a Cambridge medical student; it has made about £800,000 in top-line revenue, about a million dollars. — 00:00:00 · 6med, University of Cambridge

00:00:29 — How SixMed started with a BMAT course and grew

  • ★★★ In their second year of medical school Ali and friends decided to run a BMAT course: the big companies' courses seemed poor and expensive, so they would do better, charge less and give free places to low-income students. — 00:00:29 · 6med, BMAT
  • ★★ SixMed was meant to be a course at their local mosque, but Ali, who had made websites since about 12, built a website to market it nationally; that year they ran five sold-out courses for about 120 students. — 00:00:58 · 6med
  • ★★ In its second year SixMed expanded into a UKCAT (UCAT) course and then a course for medical school interviews, and both did really well. — 00:00:58 · 6med, UKCAT
  • ★★ SixMed then made question banks for the BMAT and UCAT and kept growing every year, with more students and locations, teaching courses in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. — 00:01:27 · 6med, Singapore

00:01:45 — Tip one: don't wait for permission

  • ★★★ Ali's first tip for entrepreneurs: don't wait for permission or a qualification; few fields need one before you create a product, and paying, happy customers who leave good reviews are qualification enough. — 00:01:45

00:02:30 — Tip two: stand on the shoulders of giants

  • ★★★ Ali's second tip: stand on the shoulders of giants; entrepreneurship is a well-trodden path with many books and podcasts, and starting without its basic literature is like being a doctor without anatomy and physiology. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ Ali calls Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek an absolutely incredible resource for thinking about entrepreneurship. — 00:02:30 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali recommends Indie Hackers, a website interviewing founders of successful internet businesses, with about 100 podcast episodes he calls amazing and incredibly inspiring. — 00:03:00
  • ★★ Ali also points to Paul Graham's essays on getting startup ideas and starting a startup, Seth Godin's podcast Startup School, and Y Combinator's podcast and Startup School videos. — 00:03:00

00:03:46 — Tip three: learn to code

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip: anyone thinking of starting a business should at least know the basics of coding, for two main reasons. — 00:03:46
  • ★★ Ali cites common startup advice that business ideas come from problems in your own daily life, not brainstorming with friends; knowing how to code shows you what can be done. — 00:03:46
  • ★★ Ali's second reason to learn coding: with an idea, like Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook or his own courses, you can turn it into a business yourself without bringing in someone who codes. — 00:04:17 · Facebook
  • ★★ Without Ali's ability to make a website, SixMed's course would have had 12 people at the local mosque in Southend-on-Sea; the website made it a national and then international business. — 00:04:46 · 6med

00:05:00 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

00:05:42 — Tip four: learn design basics

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip: develop a taste for design and for making things look pretty, which he calls an absolute superpower in today's world. — 00:05:42
  • ★★ Ali says a big part of SixMed's early success against the big names was its pretty, legit-looking website, at a time (2012–2013) when Squarespace or Wix did not yet make that easy. — 00:05:42 · 6med, Squarespace
  • ★★ Ali credits his design background for prizes for his conference presentations and for first prize at three medical hackathons, partly because their PowerPoint looked prettier than everyone else's. — 00:06:12 · Microsoft PowerPoint
  • ★★ Ali joined the board of an international plastic surgery charity running reconstructive surgery missions abroad after offering to improve its website, which gave him access to a network of plastic surgeons. — 00:06:41
  • ★ Ali thinks his YouTube thumbnails share a pretty design and his videos' production value is quite reasonable. — 00:06:41
  • ★★ To learn design basics Ali recommends the Muzli browser extension, which fills each new tab with web, typography and graphic design examples; bookmarking them builds a taste for good design. — 00:07:10

00:07:51 — Tip five: do it with friends

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip: work with friends; quoting "if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together", he says building a business with friends is far more fun, like camping. — 00:07:51
  • ★★ Ali says giving friends a little equity early on is fine: since the point of a business is to make us happier, why not involve friends from day one. — 00:08:22
  • ★★ About half the medics in Ali's college taught SixMed courses; its team of 20 to 25 were all friends of the founders, which made a really fun environment. — 00:08:22 · 6med

00:08:55 — Tip six: start small

  • ★★★ Ali's sixth tip: start really small instead of growing a feature list that never ships; build a minimum viable product, get it in front of people and improve it with user feedback. — 00:08:55
  • ★★ Ali says starting small applies to any creative work: an artist who wants their first piece to be the Mona Lisa won't get anywhere. — 00:09:25
  • ★★ Had he held his first videos to the standard of Peter McKinnon or Matt D'Avella, Ali says he would never have released any; early on he told himself his first 50 or 100 videos would be terrible anyway. — 00:09:54 · Peter McKinnon, Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali's seventh tip, from Paul Graham: do things that don't scale, putting in extra effort at the start to make customers happy and recruit new ones. — 00:09:54

00:10:08 — Tip seven: do things that don't scale

  • ★★ Ali tells how Airbnb's founders, early on, went door to door to Airbnb listings in New York offering to take professional photos for free. — 00:10:39 · Airbnb
  • ★ Ali says the company Wufoo sent each of its customers a handwritten thank-you card for its first few years. — 00:10:39
  • ★★ For SixMed's first couple of years Ali personally emailed every new customer, introducing the team and offering to answer any question about medicine applications, A-levels or studying; customers found them very personable. — 00:11:08 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali's eighth tip is to expect failure: he cites stats that 80% of startups fail and that 80% of those that succeed are gone within five or ten years. — 00:11:37
  • ★★★ At secondary school Ali and his friend James tried a new money-making plan every year, and all five businesses failed; the sixth, the BMAT crash course, became SixMed. — 00:11:37 · 6med, BMAT

00:11:49 — Tip eight: expect, and learn from, failure

  • ★★ Ali says that without those five failures he would not have learned to code in PHP, make websites or take payments online; the failures led to his success. — 00:12:19
  • ★★ Ali says an internet business costs almost nothing to start: a domain, hosting and card payments for a few dollars, set up in a weekend for maybe 10 or 20, with a massive potential upside. — 00:12:49
  • ★★★ Ali advises treating a failed business as a learning opportunity: don't be too put out if it fails, because what you learned sets you up for later success. — 00:13:18

00:13:26 — Tip nine: ask yourself why

  • ★★★ Ali's ninth tip, which he often tells himself: always ask yourself why you are really running the business, because it is easy to get caught up in the hype. — 00:13:26
  • ★★★ Around 2015–2016 SixMed's revenue stagnated and dipped and competitors arrived; Ali no longer enjoyed running it, until he found Derek Sivers's book Anything You Want. — 00:13:26 · 6med, Derek Sivers
  • ★ Ali says Anything You Want takes about 20 minutes to read and gives Derek Sivers's lessons from setting up CD Baby and eventually selling it for $22 million. — 00:13:56 · Derek Sivers

  • ★★★ Derek Sivers (quoted): In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers writes: never forget why you are really doing what you do; are you helping people, are they happy, are you happy, are you profitable, isn't that enough? — 00:13:56 · Derek Sivers · first in: 2019-02-11, 3 Books that Changed my Life

    “Never forget why you're really doing what you're doing.”

  • ★★ Ali says Anything You Want really changed his life; its "isn't that enough" line is probably his favourite quote, which he recalls when feeling down or too focused on the numbers. — 00:13:56

  • ★★★ Ali says we run businesses only because we think they will make us happy and help people; if we are happy, helping and profitable, revenue numbers and growth rate do not matter. — 00:14:26
  • ★★ On YouTube too, Ali calls chasing view counts a pointless game: the channel is still fun, he enjoys it and hopes he helps people, and that is all that is needed. — 00:14:57

00:15:03 — Tip ten: just start, and sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali's tenth tip is to just start: you need no more knowledge first; even without coding, get an idea, start working on it and learn what you need as you go. — 00:15:03
  • ★★ Ali compares starting a business to the gym: people get fit through consistent effort, turning up and eating healthily over a long time, not by reading about workouts. — 00:15:03
  • ★★ Ali says reading Tim Ferriss, Indie Hackers and Y Combinator is good but no substitute for starting your own thing: you really start to learn when you start, then apply the lessons. — 00:15:33 · Tim Ferriss

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali says his company SixMed does around £150,000 in annual revenue and was built by him and his friends while they were medical students at Cambridge University. — video description · 6med, University of Cambridge
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked which coding language Ali uses, the channel answers HTML and CSS for the website and PHP for the question banks. — creator comment · 6med
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked what inspires him to build a YouTube channel, the channel answers that it is fun, makes money and helps people. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 6med · do things that don't scale

Also: People: Derek Sivers · Mark Zuckerberg · Matt D'Avella · Paul Graham · Peter McKinnon · Seth Godin · Tim Ferriss

Works: Anything You Want · BMAT · Indie Hackers podcast · Mona Lisa · Seth Godin's Startup School · The 4-Hour Workweek · UKCAT

Organizations: Airbnb · CD Baby · Facebook · University of Cambridge · Wufoo · Y Combinator

Concepts: minimum viable product · Plastic surgery

Places: Hong Kong · Netherlands · Singapore · Southend-on-Sea

Products: Microsoft PowerPoint · Muzli · Squarespace · Wix

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