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How I Created a $3 Million Business Part Time

2021-07-28 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 16:11 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Productivity and time) · mode: Personal story · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Lesson from a book, He changed his mind

Ali tells how his YouTube channel grew into a business with ten full-time staff and about $3 million a year in three stages: working alone (thinking in systems, cutting friction, productive downtime), building a team (outsourcing editing, The E-Myth, hiring Christian) and running it full time (giving people ownership, goals and KPIs, time-blocking for deep work).

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Four years of the channel: a team of 10 and about $3 million a year

  • ★★ Ali started his YouTube channel in 2017 as a medical student and for three years built it part-time in evenings and weekends, the last two while working full time as an NHS doctor. — 00:00:00 · NHS
  • ★★★ Ali's business has grown to a team of 10 full-time staff and around $3 million in annual revenue, and his channel to nearly 2 million subscribers. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Stage 1, doing it alone: thinking in systems, friction, productive downtime

  • ★★ Finding two videos a week one at a time unsustainable, Ali mapped the stages of making a video, from idea generation, writing and scripting to filming, titles, thumbnails and editing, and made the workflow as efficient as he could. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali batched his video work: a writing day for the bullet-point talking points of his next 10 to 20 videos, then filming many of them in one day once the equipment was set up. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Preparing for finals at medical school, Ali studied from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., edited videos from 6 to 8 p.m., then played the board games Avalon and Articulate with friends until about 1 a.m. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson for solo creators and entrepreneurs is to think in systems: treating the work as a system rather than a heavy lift every single time makes creating it much easier. — 00:02:26

  • ★★★ Ali's second lesson: friction is the most powerful force in the universe, and anything that minimises the friction in getting things done pays dividends in the long run. — 00:02:26 · friction

    “friction is the most powerful force in the universe”

  • ★★ Ali stopped propping his camera on his medical textbooks and spent $20 on a tripod, which cut about five minutes of friction from filming each video and made a massive difference. — 00:02:55 · friction

  • ★ Because setting up the camera, angles and lighting took about 20 minutes each time, Ali found a camera angle in his room where the camera could stay up at all times. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali practises the guitar around ten times more when it is right next to him on the sofa than when it is in another room. — 00:03:28 · friction
  • ★★ Studying for exams, Ali found that keeping his books and laptop right at his desk, instead of on a bookshelf three metres away, made him much more likely to work than to procrastinate. — 00:03:28 · friction
  • ★★★ Ali's third principle is productive downtime: if a project takes up a lot of your time, you can use your downtime productively. — 00:04:37
  • ★★ As a junior doctor, on some days Ali used gaps of 10 to 30 minutes at work, when his colleagues scrolled social media and he often did too, to plan a video or draft the structure of an online course. — 00:04:37
  • ★★ Ali is all about enjoying the journey, and finds scrolling Twitter or browsing Instagram, for example on the toilet, not particularly fulfilling or enjoyable; planning videos in that time gave him more joy. — 00:05:06 · Twitter, Instagram

00:05:29 — Stage 2, building a team: the freelance editor, The E-Myth Revisited, Christian, Angus and Elizabeth

  • ★★★ In June 2019, after two years as a solo creator, Ali decided to outsource the editing of his videos to a freelancer. — 00:05:36
  • ★★ Using Naval Ravikant's idea of an effective hourly rate, Ali put his own at around $30 an hour and saw that four to eight hours of editing per video was not the most value he could add to the business. (hedged) — 00:05:36
  • ★★ Ali found a freelance video editor on People Per Hour; this was game-changing, as the roughly 20 hours a week he had spent editing his own videos were gone. — 00:06:05
  • ★★★ In his Part-Time YouTuber Academy Ali always advises outsourcing editing as soon as you can afford it; students who do it say it feels like a weight taken off their shoulders. — 00:06:27 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali says that whatever project, business or creative work you are on, you could probably outsource some parts of it rather than doing them yourself. — 00:06:27
  • ★★★ Ali calls The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber a book that changed his life and his business: to run a great business you must be not only a technician doing the work but also an entrepreneur who plans ahead and a manager who knows what is happening and delegates. — 00:07:11
  • ★★ A few months after reading The E-Myth Revisited, Ali's business made enough money to afford a full-time employee, and he was really scared about hiring his first one. — 00:07:11
  • ★★★ Around October 2019, two and a bit years into the channel, Ali hired Christian as head of content and video editor, his first full-time team member; at first he could barely afford Christian's salary. — 00:08:27 · Christian
  • ★★ Having two people focused on the business skyrocketed its growth and revenue and let it make more courses; Ali then joined Standard, his YouTube agency, which was amazing for sponsorships. — 00:08:56
  • ★★ Ali says you cannot hire at the very start, when you make no money and must do everything yourself, as he did for two years. — 00:08:56
  • ★★★ Many big YouTubers, Ali says, are afraid to hire full-time team members even when they can afford it; for him, hiring full time was one of the best decisions he has ever made. — 00:09:33
  • ★★ From October 2019 to August 2020 Ali's team grew by two; Angus joined as a writer researching scripts and moved into a more managerial role. — 00:09:33 · Angus
  • ★★ Elizabeth joined as Ali's personal assistant, but her role soon moved into management, leading projects and helping with the Part-Time YouTuber Academy; she also started her own YouTube channel. — 00:10:05 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ From October 2019 to August 2020 Ali still worked full time as an NHS doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology during the pandemic, with a team of three helping with the business. — 00:10:34 · NHS
  • ★★★ In August 2020 Ali took a break from full-time medicine meaning to travel the world; because of COVID he could not travel, so instead of working four hours a week on the business he has run it full time for the last year. — 00:10:34

00:10:55 — Stage 3, running the business full time: ownership, goals and KPIs, time for deep work

  • ★★ Over the last year Ali's team has grown from four people to 10 or 11; it hired one new person the week before this video. — 00:11:03
  • ★★★ Ali used to think meetings a waste of time and goals, metrics and KPIs pointless and too corporate; he now thinks that for four years he threw out the baby with the bathwater by rejecting corporate practice just because it was corporate. — 00:11:38
  • ★★ Ali has realised over the last year that the role of a manager is ridiculously important, and one he needs to improve in many ways. — 00:12:14
  • ★★ Ali is learning to manage, for example how to talk to someone about negotiating a pay rise, from books and coaches, and feels himself levelling up. — 00:12:14
  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson from running the business full time is to give people ownership of a project and let them run with it, as long as he sets reasonable criteria for what he wants and what success looks like, which he admits he is still bad at. — 00:13:00
  • ★★★ Ali, historically very anti-goal because goals are not within our control, has realised over the last year that goals are really powerful for setting a business's direction and as a motivating and strategising tool for team members. — 00:13:30
  • ★★ Ali, who used to call SMART goals BS, now sees their power: with SMART goals in the business, his team members reverse-engineer strategies from the numbers it wants to hit. — 00:14:16
  • ★★ Not working as a doctor, Ali has more on his calendar and his plate than when he worked full time and ran the business on the side; his calendar fills with calls and meetings. — 00:14:16
  • ★★ For the last few weeks Ali has not made time to write the book he is supposed to be writing and has made no real progress on it, which he finds embarrassing. — 00:14:58
  • ★★ Ali is working towards time-blocking parts of his own day purely for his own deep work and letting the team fit their schedules around it. — 00:14:58 · time-blocking, deep work (concept)
  • ★★★ Whatever stage you are at, Ali says, it is incredibly powerful to time-block a few hours a few times a week to make progress on your most important project. — 00:15:27 · time-blocking

00:15:48 — Thanks to viewers and a pointer to his time-management video

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked by a viewer whether Ali enjoys his work as a doctor more now that he is also living out his passions, the channel says yes. — creator comment · NHS

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: friction · productive downtime · The E-Myth

Also: People: Angus · Christian · Elizabeth · Michael Gerber · Naval Ravikant

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Organizations: Instagram · NHS · People Per Hour · Standard · Twitter

Concepts: batching · deep work (concept) · SMART goals · time-blocking

Products: Articulate · Avalon

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