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How I Built 9 Streams of Income By 23

2021-06-06 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 14:35 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Personal story · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Family, Lesson from a book, Aimed at students

Ali goes through the nine streams of income he built between 13 and 23 in three categories: trading time for money (freelance web development, Kumon tutoring, paid close-up magic), productised services (app design packages, the BMAT Crash Course, SixMed) and digital products (an ebook and the BMAT Ninja and UKCAT Ninja question banks), together making him about £40,000 to £50,000 a year as a medical student.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Why multiple streams of income, and going back to his school and university years

  • ★★★ Ali is a huge fan of multiple streams of income: relying on one job is unsafe if you lose it, for example in a pandemic, while with several streams you still have other money coming in. — 00:00:00 · passive income
  • ★★ Even in a safe job such as being a doctor, Ali says, multiple streams of income give you the freedom and flexibility to do things like go part-time. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali had nine streams of income by the age of 23, in three categories: trading time for money, productised services and digital products. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali says there is nothing wrong with trading time for money: it is how a lot of jobs work. — 00:00:29

00:00:53 — Chapter 1, trading time for money: freelance web development and Kumon tutoring

  • ★★ Ali's first stream of income, from about the age of 13, was freelance web development; he learned to code from free online tutorials such as W3Schools. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Between 13 and 17, through getacoder.com, Ali did a handful of coding projects, some taking ages at a very low hourly rate, and made about $1,000 in total, a lot of money to him then. (hedged) — 00:01:27
  • ★ Today Fiverr, Upwork and People Per Hour are the freelance marketplaces where you can advertise a skill you are good at and get hired, Ali says. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali's second stream: at 14, good at maths, he asked Alison, the instructor at the Kumon maths and English study centre, for a job and became a part-time tutor at £4 an hour. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Ali's Kumon pay rose to £5 an hour after two years and £6 at about 18; working two to four hours a week, he earned £20 to £30 a week, which felt rich. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Kumon was Ali's first real job with proper hours: he really enjoyed teaching maths to those who came for help but not marking work and the grunt work. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ali took from Kumon the problem with a job: some parts are fun and others boring; often it was the banter with the other tutors that made his job much more fun. — 00:03:01
  • ★★ Ali says his web development and tutoring were nothing fancy: he had a skill, coding or maths, and sought out jobs where people paid him for that service, which is how jobs work. — 00:03:01
  • ★★★ Asked often how to build passive income, Ali says completely passive streams are hard to build; with no income streams yet, start with active income, trading time for money, which builds skills and shows what working for pay outside a standard job is like. — 00:03:30 · passive income

00:03:53 — Close-up magic, monetising hobbies and adding value

  • ★★ Ali's third stream: having decided at 17 to become a magician, in his first three or four years at university he was paid for close-up magic at balls, parties and dinners, sometimes £50 to £150 an hour. — 00:04:04
  • ★★ Ali learned close-up magic from free YouTube tutorials and PDFs; he says a professional magician needs only about nine tricks, three sets of three, to walk around and get paid. — 00:04:33
  • ★★ Many people Ali knew at university were into magic and knew the same tricks, but did not take the extra step of putting themselves out there to make money from it. — 00:04:33
  • ★★★ Ali often tries to make money from what he enjoys: a monetised hobby is fun and earns money, but it has to be done in a way that adds market value, useful to other people. — 00:05:02
  • ★★★ Paid close-up magic taught Ali that to make money you have to add value to other people: nobody cared about his magic, only the experience he gave them; he applied this to all his other streams of income. — 00:05:32 · first law of making money

  • ★★ Ali is reading The Millionaire Fastlane, which says that to make millions you have to impact millions, calling it the "law of affection" (as heard); for Ali, to make money you have to impact people. — 00:05:32

    “to make millions, you have to impact millions.”

  • ★★★ Trading time for money is not very scalable, Ali says; productising a service, packaging it and selling the package instead of charging per hour, makes it much easier to earn more for the same work. — 00:06:01

00:06:04 — Chapter 2, productised services: app design, the BMAT Crash Course and SixMed

  • ★★ Ali recommends Take Your Shot by his friend Robin Waite, a book about going from earning per hour to earning large sums from productised services. — 00:06:30
  • ★★ Ali's fourth stream, at university from about 19 to 23, was app design: with a web design portfolio, he met founders of medical technology startups who saw his design skills at hackathons. — 00:06:30
  • ★★★ Instead of an hourly rate Ali offered startups a package: the first draft of their app with all the files and two revisions for £800; he was surprised they said yes, as it did not take him long. — 00:06:59
  • ★★ For a website Ali quoted a price for the whole design package instead of the half hour a WordPress theme took him, charging for the value he gave rather than per hour. — 00:07:26
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth stream was the BMAT Crash Course, set up at 19: before packaging it he tutored the BMAT, an exam some UK medical schools require, one-to-one for about £20 an hour. — 00:07:26 · 6med, BMAT
  • ★★ Ali packaged all he knew about teaching the BMAT into a one-day BMAT Crash Course; in its first year it cost £69 for the day, cheap as an hourly rate, but put 30 people in a classroom. (hedged) — 00:08:11 · 6med, BMAT
  • ★★ Productised services let you scale, Ali says: charging per hour you cannot have 30 people in a class, but charging for a course you can. — 00:08:11
  • ★★ The BMAT Crash Course made about £2,000 for a day of teaching and got very good reviews; Ali and his friends ran it every year, a huge injection of funds while he was at university. — 00:08:40 · 6med, BMAT
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth stream was SixMed, the company he founded at university, which is still going. — 00:08:40 · 6med
  • ★★ SixMed combined the BMAT, UKCAT and interview crash courses with help on personal statements; it never charged by the hour but sold courses many people could sign up for. — 00:09:09 · 6med, UKCAT
  • ★★★ Teaching courses on weekends at medical school, Ali made around £40,000 (about $50,000) a year, more than in his first two years as a doctor. — 00:09:09 · 6med
  • ★★ By 21, with five streams of income, Ali saw the problem that much of it was tied to his time and a lot of effort while studying medicine at Cambridge University. — 00:09:39 · University of Cambridge

00:09:50 — Chapter 3, digital products: the course manual sold as an ebook

  • ★★ Running physical courses meant logistical headaches: course manuals delivered to venues around the country, Jake and Katherine getting to Manchester and their hotel, conference room bookings. — 00:10:16 · Katherine
  • ★★★ 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
  • ★★ SixMed had more students than it could handle, and people in Australia and Singapore who had heard of the courses asked for access to the course materials. — 00:10:45 · Singapore, 6med
  • ★★ Ali's seventh stream: he turned the course manual he wrote into an ebook sold on the website for about £29, emailing buyers the PDF himself. (hedged) — 00:11:14
  • ★★ The courses never felt like free money because they were a lot of work to run, Ali says, but selling digital products to people around the world who had never met him really did. — 00:11:14
  • ★★★ Ali's eighth and ninth streams: at 21 he and his brother Taimur decided to make online question banks for medical applicants taking the BMAT and the UKCAT. — 00:11:14 · Taimur Abdaal, BMAT, UKCAT

00:11:42 — BMAT Ninja and UKCAT Ninja question banks and the cost of entry

  • ★★ They named the question banks BMAT Ninja and UKCAT Ninja after a .ninja domain Ali had; Ali coded the back end of the two websites and his brother Taimur the front end. — 00:11:54 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Students subscribed to BMAT Ninja or UKCAT Ninja for about £29 for all the questions and answers, and the site tracked their progress with an experience bar to fill. (hedged) — 00:11:54
  • ★★ Ali calls the question banks the dream digital product: software as a service (SaaS). — 00:12:23
  • ★★ Ali and his brother Taimur built BMAT Ninja over the summer of 2015, working all day every day for many months, coding side by side at the dining table, which he found fun. (hedged) — 00:12:23 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ 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

00:13:45 — Three books on streams of income and sign-off

  • ★★ Having taught themselves to code over years at school, Ali and his brother had the unfair advantage of coding skills while Ali, as a medical student, knew what medical students wanted. — 00:13:45 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ By 23 Ali's streams of income were making him around £40,000 to £50,000 a year, very solid for a medical student. (hedged) — 00:13:45
  • ★★ To learn the streams-of-income approach Ali recommends three books: The 4-Hour Workweek, The Millionaire Fastlane and Take Your Shot by Robin Waite. — 00:13:45 · The 4-Hour Workweek

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: 6med · BMAT Ninja (website) · productised services

Also: People: Jake · Katherine · Robin Waite · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: UKCAT Ninja

Works: BMAT · Take Your Shot · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Millionaire Fastlane · UKCAT

Organizations: Fiverr · getacoder.com · Kumon · People Per Hour · University of Cambridge · Upwork · W3Schools

Concepts: passive income · unfair advantage

Places: Australia · Manchester · Singapore

Products: WordPress

Also centred on productised services: How to Start a Business from Nothing

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