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How to Make Money Online

2022-02-04 · Podcast or interview · Ali, David Perell · recording, 37:44 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book

Ali and David Perell lay out the path each took from no audience to a multimillion-dollar business, Ali on YouTube and David through writing: start (archaeologist before architect, quantity before quality), get better (compliments, CRIBS feedback, PoP writing, document don't create), grow (waves, trends, remixing ideas), move people over the public-to-private bridge to an email list, and sell only once people ask.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Ali and David Perell set out the stages from no audience to a profitable business

  • ★★ Ali and David Perell have both built multimillion-dollar businesses from audiences they started from scratch, David through writing and Ali through YouTube. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali suspects starting out as a writer is probably easier than as a YouTuber: writing costs nothing, while for YouTube he had to buy cameras, mics and lights. (hedged) — 00:01:31

00:01:39 — Starting out: writing versus YouTube, what to write and make videos about, quantity before quality

  • ★★★ David Perell tells beginning writers to write every single day with a 60-minute timer and to show up daily, like going to the gym. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ David Perell advises beginning writers to commit to publishing regularly: start with once a month; once a week is ideal. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ David Perell tells beginners interested in ideas to focus on building their audience on Twitter. — 00:02:35 · Twitter
  • ★★ David Perell tests ideas with screenshot essays: he writes 200 to 400 words, shares a screenshot on Twitter, watches the response and follows up ideas that do well. — 00:03:04 · Twitter
  • ★★ David Perell tells Write of Passage students to just start writing, see what resonates, and double down where their own curiosity meets what resonates with others. — 00:04:02
  • ★★★ Ali tells complete beginners who ask how to build an audience to start by writing, since starting out on YouTube is a lot harder. — 00:04:02
  • ★★ Ali started writing his blog a year and a half to two years before YouTube; without the blog, which got him okay with putting himself out online, he would not have started his channel. — 00:04:32 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★★ With his architect-versus-archaeologist framework, Ali says most YouTube beginners should be archaeologists who dig by making videos; only once good at videos should they plan like architects, with market and niche research. — 00:05:29
  • ★★ David Perell: When starting a craft, David Perell says, the most important thing is to do the craft: anything that takes you away from actually doing it is suboptimal. — 00:05:58
  • ★★★ Ali always preaches that quantity matters more than quality at the start, "get going and then get good", switching to quality once you are good. — 00:06:27
  • ★★ Ali tells the parable of the pottery class: of a group making one pot in 30 days and a group making a pot every day, every top pot came from the quantity group. — 00:06:56
  • ★★★ Against perfectionism, Ali's formula for new YouTubers: level one, make one video; level two, one video a week, with less friction and batch filming; level three, one good video a week. — 00:07:26
  • ★★ YouTube takes many skills, from public speaking and writing to thumbnails, titles and editing, Ali says; nobody has them by default, and they take tons of reps of bad videos. — 00:07:55

00:08:24 — Getting better at the craft: compliments, CRIBS feedback, document don't create, PoP writing

  • ★★★ David Perell: To get better at writing, David Perell advises paying attention to the compliments people give your work and cultivating what they praise; style, he says, is your personality on the page. — 00:08:24

    “style is your personality on the page”

  • ★★ Ali used his YouTube comments, both compliments and viewers' requests such as how he takes notes on his iPad, to know what to make and that his videos helped people. — 00:09:38 · iPad, iPad Pro

  • ★★★ David Perell asks readers who edit his work for five things, the CRIBS acronym: confusing, repeated, insightful, boring and surprising, to see what to do more and less of. — 00:10:07
  • ★★ David Perell: With CRIBS feedback, David Perell rewrites what is confusing, deletes what is repeated or boring, doubles down on what is insightful and builds suspense towards what is surprising. — 00:10:33
  • ★★ Since specific feedback on a YouTube video is hard to get and use, Ali advises not worrying too much about this video: think about the next one, using analytics and comments. — 00:11:03
  • ★★ Early on Ali tried to make every video better than the last, which he now calls completely unsustainable and a way to get caught in paralysis. — 00:11:03
  • ★★ Ali never had goals for his channel beyond making one or two videos every week for a few years, seeing what happens and slowly improving. — 00:11:49
  • ★★ Ali likes Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create": even now, he says, 90% of the videos on his channel document the process of something. — 00:12:18 · Gary Vaynerchuk, show your work
  • ★★ David Perell: When reading a writer whose work he admires, David Perell stops to ask what he can take from the way the writing is constructed, beyond its ideas. — 00:12:48
  • ★★★ David Perell's PoP writing framework, taught in Write of Passage, has three pillars: writing that is personal, observational and playful. — 00:13:17
  • ★ David Perell says he is good at observational writing but less so at personal and playful, so he reads other writers to see what makes them work. — 00:13:46
  • ★★ Applying PoP to YouTube, Ali says he is good at the personal and the playful and pretty bad at observational. — 00:14:15
  • ★★ Ali's video on how he types really fast, at 156 words per minute, went viral; it condensed a skill he has honed for 14 years. — 00:14:15

  • ★★ Ali likes the phrase "your vibe attracts your tribe": his channel is lighthearted, with a light-mode setup, banter and colourful keyboards. — 00:14:44

    “your vibe attracts your tribe”

  • ★★★ Beyond just publishing, Ali says YouTube takes strategy: find the intersection of what you are interested in, what you are good at and what the audience wants, for true creator-audience fit. — 00:15:07 · unfair advantage

00:15:22 — Unfair advantages

  • ★★ For unfair advantages Ali points to the MILES framework of his friends' book The Unfair Advantage: money, intelligence and insight, location and luck, expertise, and a last letter he recalls only as "skills or status or something like that". (hedged) — 00:16:06 · unfair advantage
  • ★★ Ali's unfair advantages on YouTube were the brand name of a Cambridge University medical student and a business already making money, which let him invest in camera gear early. — 00:16:06 · University of Cambridge, unfair advantage
  • ★★ Using his brand name and high production value led Ali to give advice to medical school applicants, where being a Cambridge medical student helps; teaching guitar, it would be irrelevant. — 00:16:35
  • ★★ David Perell found his unfair advantage in what comes naturally to him but is hard for others, citing Naval Ravikant: do what looks like work to others but feels like play to you. — 00:17:04 · Naval Ravikant, unfair advantage

00:18:03 — Growing the audience: waves and trends, remixing ideas, distribution, the public-to-private bridge

  • ★★ David Perell: To grow an audience as a writer, David Perell advises riding a wave, such as a wave of ideas or a wave of people, which makes growth a lot easier. — 00:18:03
  • ★★ David Perell: The economist Tyler Cowen shared much of David Perell's work on his blog Marginal Revolution, which brought David a lot of reach and distribution. — 00:19:01 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Once you can make a good video, Ali says you can chase trends on YouTube, as the many channels that blew up reacting to Squid Game did. — 00:19:26
  • ★★★ Ali's other way to grow on YouTube: look at channels similar to yours and find which of their videos did disproportionately well, then consider a similar video. — 00:19:55
  • ★ When Ali takes a video idea from someone else, he makes a point of not watching their video and takes only the idea. — 00:20:25
  • ★★ After an engineering student's iPad Pro note-taking video got a million views on a 20,000-subscriber channel, Ali made "How I take notes on my iPad as a medical student", his first viral video, now about 5 million views. — 00:20:25 · iPad Pro, iPad
  • ★★ Citing Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, that everything is a remix, Ali says worrying too much about being original makes you less useful; focus on what you can add. — 00:20:54 · Austin Kleon
  • ★★ Ali likes the line "there are no unique messages, only unique messengers": he cannot copy another person's video, since he will always do it his own way. — 00:21:24
  • ★★ David Perell follows "imitate then innovate": he takes an existing idea, asks what is missing from it, and what is missing becomes the originality he brings. — 00:21:53
  • ★★ David Perell's most viral article is "Peter Thiel's Religion", about the famous investor Peter Thiel. — 00:21:53
  • ★★ David Perell began "Peter Thiel's Religion" by summarising René Girard's influence on Thiel; what he added was that Thiel's ideas were very influenced by Christianity. — 00:22:22

  • ★★★ David Perell always strives to end with originality but never insists on starting with it. — 00:22:22

    “I do always strive to end with originality, but I never insist on starting with originality.”

  • ★★ When Ali summarises a book on YouTube, it is never just a summary but a personal reflection, saying how he applied each idea in his own life. — 00:22:51

  • ★★ YouTube has distribution built in, Ali says: its algorithm promotes by default a video that resonates, meaning people click on it and watch it for a long time. — 00:23:59

  • ★★★ David Perell's "public to private bridge": find your audience on public platforms, then build it on private platforms. — 00:24:28

    “find your audience on public platforms but then build your audience on private platforms”

  • ★★ David Perell: Public platforms, David Perell says, do not let you own your audience and are mediated by an algorithm, so move people to private platforms such as email. — 00:24:51

  • ★★★ Most of the revenue of Ali's business comes from its courses, and most course sales come from his mailing list, where people opted in, rather than from YouTube. — 00:25:52
  • ★★ Ali rarely talks about his roughly $3,000 course on YouTube, knowing it is completely inaccessible for most of his audience; for mailing-list subscribers it makes perfect sense. — 00:26:22
  • ★★ David Perell: Making a mailing list hard to hear about or join, or not explaining why to join, adds a toll to the bridge, David Perell says: the higher the toll, the fewer people cross. — 00:26:22
  • ★★ David Perell: Rather than just asking people to join his mailing list, David Perell offers a free 50-day writing series for an email address, a far more compelling pitch. — 00:26:50
  • ★★ Ali's team offers a free seven-day Part-Time YouTuber crash course by email, so that when the course launches people are primed to trust them with the topic. — 00:27:19 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ From beginner to multimillion-dollar business, Ali says the rule of the game is to deliver as much value as possible, as in Gary Vaynerchuk's jab, jab, jab, right hook. — 00:27:48 · Gary Vaynerchuk

00:28:47 — Monetisation: AdSense and sponsors, letting customers ask, courses sold to an audience

  • ★★ YouTube has monetisation built in, Ali says: AdSense pays by default, and at about 10,000 to 20,000 subscribers brands such as Skillshare and Brilliant start asking to sponsor videos. — 00:28:47 · Skillshare, Brilliant
  • ★★★ David Perell: As at a conference where an impressive person gets asked "can I hire you", David Perell says content online should bring customers to you, saying they want to buy and what they want. — 00:29:45
  • ★★ David Perell advises listening to what your audience wants, its stated and its implicit motivations, and delivering a product for that. — 00:30:24
  • ★★ David Perell tweeted an offer to teach a thousand people to write in 2019; with a couple thousand Twitter followers, he got a flood of direct messages from every continent. — 00:30:54 · Twitter
  • ★★ David Perell: After a consulting attempt he was not good at, David Perell saw a good time for an online course business and turned Write of Passage into a product. — 00:31:23
  • ★★ David Perell's course business reached multi-million dollars in revenue without a single cent spent on paid advertising, because he had the audience. — 00:31:23
  • ★★ When Ali first launched the Part-Time YouTuber Academy he only tweeted about it, not mentioning it on YouTube for the first two cohorts, and had an avalanche of people wanting to sign up. — 00:31:56 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Twitter
  • ★★ David Perell says you know it is time to monetise when you provide enough value that enough people start asking you. — 00:32:54
  • ★★★ Following Sahil Lavingia's The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Ali advises building an audience first and then a product that suits it, rather than building first and finding buyers. — 00:32:54
  • ★★ David Perell's roadmap: share ideas and learn as you write, position yourself as an expert, ask readers to join your email list, write about what they ask to learn, and they will offer to pay. — 00:33:53
  • ★★ David Perell: As you work, David Perell says, you may see a big hole in the market, as the Collison brothers did with payments when founding Stripe and Sahil Lavingia did when starting Gumroad. — 00:34:28
  • ★★ David Perell: With an audience, David Perell says, you need not raise funding and take far less risk, since people who trust you give your first product the benefit of the doubt. — 00:34:57

00:35:28 — Discipline, consistency and fun as what sustains the work; sign-off

  • ★★ Ali says 99.99% of what he and David Perell do is completely free, and focusing on value with some strategy is what led to their successful businesses. (overstated) — 00:35:28
  • ★★ David Perell used to write for 90 minutes every day, published something almost daily for about five years, and has not missed a newsletter in a couple of years. — 00:35:28
  • ★★ David Perell: Building an audience business is possible, David Perell says, but it requires a certain amount of discipline and consistency. — 00:35:28
  • ★★ David Perell: For David Perell, businesses they can run from anywhere and the freedom to explore ideas for a living make the hard work worth doing. — 00:36:19
  • ★★★ Ali kept making videos without an audience or money because it was fun: enjoyed work doesn't feel like work, and the more you enjoy it for its own sake, the easier it is to sustain. — 00:36:48
  • ★ Ali made editing fun by trying new tricks and borrowing elements from Peter McKinnon and Matt D'Avella. — 00:36:48 · Peter McKinnon, Matt D'Avella

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: architect versus archaeologist · CRIBS · David Perell · PoP writing · public-to-private bridge · unfair advantage

Also: People: Austin Kleon · Gary Vaynerchuk · John Collison · Matt D'Avella · MrBeast · Naval Ravikant · Patrick Collison · Peter McKinnon · Peter Thiel · René Girard · Sahil Lavingia · Tyler Cowen

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook · Marginal Revolution · Peter Thiel's Religion · Squid Game · Steal Like an Artist · The Minimalist Entrepreneur · The Unfair Advantage · Write of Passage

Organizations: Brilliant · Skillshare · Stripe · Twitter · University of Cambridge

Concepts: batching · educational email course · embrace the suck · imitate then innovate · MILES framework · parable of the pottery class · show your work

Products: Gumroad · iPad · iPad Pro · YouTube AdSense

Also centred on architect versus archaeologist: 9 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started YouTube

Also centred on David Perell: How Writing Online Made me a Millionaire

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