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How to Grow on YouTube - Live Stream with Ali Abdaal

2022-02-25 · Livestream or live hangout · Ali · recording, 1 h 24 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book

In a live stream for the Part-Time YouTuber Academy waiting list, Ali lays out his three-level method for growing on YouTube (get going, get good, get smart, with a choice between casual and serious and between hobby and business), then answers questions on target audiences, niches, thumbnails, browse versus search, scripting, sponsorship rates, Shorts and networking.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Welcome to the live stream and the YouTuber Academy waiting list

00:00:57 — The three-part method: get going, get good, get smart; level one, get going

  • ★★★ Ali's three-part method for growing on YouTube, and for being a creator generally, has three steps: get going, get good and get smart, with a choice to make between each level. — 00:00:57

    “the three steps of that are get going get good and get smart”

  • ★★ Ali's channel has grown to about 2.7 million subscribers in about five years, and his business has about $5 million in annual turnover at about 60% margins. (hedged) — 00:01:53

  • ★★ Ali asks viewers to take his YouTube advice with a pinch of salt: he can speak only from his own experience, which carries a large element of survivorship bias. — 00:02:38
  • ★★ Ali's three-level model for growing on YouTube was built from running four cohorts of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy over about 14 months, with about 1,500 students. (hedged) — 00:02:38 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Level one, get going, is about getting out of your own way and filming those first videos and starting the channel, even on a phone, Ali says; most of the fear of being on camera goes away when you publish your first video. — 00:05:07

00:05:50 — Choice one: break up, casual or serious relationship with YouTube

  • ★★ Once you have got going on YouTube, Ali says, you have three choices: break up with YouTube, have a casual relationship with it, or have a serious relationship with it. — 00:05:50

00:07:21 — What it takes to succeed: videos people click and watch, the many skills, videos per subscriber milestone, his growth, compounding and fun

  • ★★★ What it really takes to succeed on YouTube, Ali says, is to make videos people want to click on and want to watch, preferably for a long time; it is simple but not easy. (overstated) — 00:07:21
  • ★★ Being a good YouTuber takes many skills (writing, filming, editing, storytelling, branding, public speaking), each of which could be a three-year university programme, and YouTubers must do them all themselves, usually part-time. — 00:07:50
  • ★★ For his first four years on YouTube Ali made videos part-time, alongside a full-time job or, for one year, while a full-time medical student. — 00:08:30
  • ★★ Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), now one of the biggest tech YouTubers, had made 100 videos before he reached 74 subscribers, as he says in his video number 100. — 00:09:38 · Marques Brownlee
  • ★★ According to data from before YouTube Shorts, a few years old, the average YouTube channel with 1 million subscribers has 3,873 videos. — 00:10:58
  • ★★ By data Ali thinks is from TubeBuddy, the median YouTube channel with 100,000 to 1 million subscribers has 1,171 videos, with 10,000 to 100,000 has 418, and with 1,000 to 10,000 has 152. (hedged) — 00:11:28
  • ★★★ Ali says these numbers show that success on YouTube takes a lot of time and a lot of videos: you cannot make a full-time living from two hours a week of YouTube. — 00:12:20
  • ★★ The more fun something is and the more autonomy it gives, the more competitive it is, Ali says, and everyone wants to be a YouTuber. — 00:12:20
  • ★★★ Ali's channel took six months and 52 videos to reach 1,000 subscribers, about a year and 91 videos to reach 10,000, videos 92 to 143 to go from 10,000 to 100,000 and videos 144 to 287 to reach 1 million. — 00:13:07
  • ★★ Ali started his channel in June 2017; by June 2018 he had 23,000 subscribers and made about $1,500 a month, and a year later, with 178 videos and 250,000 subscribers, about $9,000 a month. — 00:14:21
  • ★★ Ali's Warren Buffett puzzle shows compounding: 99.9% of Buffett's net worth exists because he started investing early and kept going, and growth on YouTube compounds the same way. — 00:16:09
  • ★★★ Growth of a YouTube channel can take six months, two years or three years to take off, Ali says, so do not quit before it has had a chance to go wild. — 00:16:38
  • ★★★ Ali thinks the key to staying consistent on YouTube is to make it fun: if YouTube is fun for you, you would not think of it as work. — 00:17:31
  • ★★ For Ali a serious relationship with YouTube meant consistency: working as a doctor he sometimes had to force himself to film, but 95% of the time he filmed because it was fun. — 00:18:16

00:18:45 — Level two, get good: extrinsic and intrinsic definitions of good, the cringe test, quantity leads to quality

  • ★★ A good YouTube video, Ali lists, has a good title, thumbnail, concept, hook, structure, writing and personality, plus production value, entertainment value, branding and storytelling. — 00:19:14
  • ★★ The extrinsic definition of a good video is traction (views, subscribers, likes, comments), which Ali calls creator-audience fit, after the startup idea of product-market fit. — 00:21:19

  • ★★★ Ali's favourite definition of a good video is intrinsic: it passes the cringe test, meaning you would not cringe if someone told you they had seen it. — 00:21:48

    “a video that passes the cringe test”

  • ★★ It took Ali about 80 videos for his own videos to pass his cringe test; he had no background in filming or editing, though his web design background helped. — 00:22:59

  • ★★ While a channel is small, without tens of thousands of subscribers, Ali says analytics such as click-through rate and watch time are kind of useless for lack of data, so he would not worry about them. — 00:22:59
  • ★★★ To make good videos, Ali says, do not learn everything first: keep making videos, starting with quantity and making each about 1% better, which leads to quality. — 00:24:09
  • ★★ Ali tells the parable of the pottery class, where the best pots all came from the group making 30 pots rather than one, to show that quantity leads to quality over time. — 00:25:01
  • ★★ A casual relationship with YouTube, making videos whenever you feel like it, is fine, Ali says, but you cannot expect traction or any money from it. — 00:26:26

00:27:16 — Choice two: treat YouTube like a hobby or like a business

  • ★★ Once your videos are good, Ali's second choice is whether to treat YouTube like a hobby or like a business, a spectrum on which neither end is wrong. — 00:27:16
  • ★★ Ali does not monetise his hobbies of guitar, drawing, piano and singing, but treats YouTube like a business he wants to make money from. — 00:28:59

00:29:23 — Level three, get smart: The E-Myth, workflow, cash flow and the 99-1-1 rule, outflow

  • ★★★ Treating YouTube like a business means shifting your focus from yourself to the audience, Ali says, as someone who makes coffee for himself must think of customers to run a coffee shop. — 00:30:12
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited, which he read in 2019 and says completely changed his life: being good at baking pies differs from running a pie business. — 00:30:58 · The E-Myth
  • ★★ Building a business on YouTube is a different skill from making videos as a hobby, Ali says: knowing how to make good videos is required but not sufficient. — 00:31:22
  • ★★★ Ali's model for treating YouTube as a business has three parts: workflow, cash flow and outflow. — 00:31:43
  • ★★ Ali has read dozens of business books and spent probably tens of thousands of dollars on business, management and leadership coaching, things he once thought corporate nonsense. (hedged) — 00:32:13
  • ★★★ Many creators struggle to think like business owners, Ali says, but thinking a little like a business gives a far more sustainable and lucrative career as a YouTuber than thinking only about the craft. — 00:33:18
  • ★★ In Ali's model, workflow means strategy (niche, target audience, competitor analysis, unfair advantages) and systems for the content production pipeline (org charts, processes). — 00:33:46 · unfair advantage
  • ★★ Cash flow, in Ali's model, turns a stranger into a fan through content, a friend and then a prospect through email, and a customer, by giving value first. — 00:34:27

  • ★★★ Ali's 99-1-1 rule, like Gary Vaynerchuk's jab, jab, jab, right hook: 99% of his content is free, 1% is paid, and ideally 1% of his audience buys the paid part. — 00:35:02 · Gary Vaynerchuk

    “So 99, one, one.”

  • ★★ About 20,000 people are on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy mailing list, Ali thinks: of his 2.7 million subscribers, those are the ones potentially interested in it. (hedged) — 00:35:48 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

  • ★★ Ali rarely mentions his course on his YouTube channel: it is fine for paid content to appeal to only 1% of the audience. — 00:36:17
  • ★★ Ali's team now has 18 people, about half working on the free content and half on the paid products, including a full-time team behind the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. — 00:36:52 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Outflow, the third part of Ali's business model for YouTube, is hiring freelancers, possibly building your own team, and managing it. — 00:37:19
  • ★★ Ali has a 20-hour course on treating YouTube as a business coming up, to be filmed the following week, and will tell the Part-Time YouTuber Academy waiting list about it. — 00:37:45 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali recommends the YouTube channels Think Media and Video Creators, which focus on getting good at videos, for beginners. — 00:39:02

00:39:56 — Questions: monetising a passion; why a video gets pushed on browse

  • ★★★ Adding money to anything risks crowding out the reasons you did it in the first place, Ali says: extrinsic rewards such as pay make people stop enjoying a thing for its own sake. — 00:41:05
  • ★★ Ali is researching intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for the book he is writing. — 00:41:05
  • ★★★ It is nice to monetise a passion, Ali says, but not to rely on it as your only source of income: making a little pocket money from it keeps it fun. — 00:41:33
  • ★★ Derek Sivers (quoted): In a blog post Derek Sivers says that if you enjoy art you should not try to make a living from it, because then 90% of your time goes on the business and 10% on drawing. — 00:41:33 · Derek Sivers
  • ★★ Ali enjoys both the business and the creative side of YouTube; through delegation and hiring, his team takes care of the business side so he can focus on the creative side. — 00:42:16
  • ★★★ Nobody at YouTube decides to put a video on the home page, Ali says: it is shown on browse because it had a high click-through rate and enough watch time. — 00:45:15
  • ★★★ YouTube channels grow by targeting browse, Ali says; targeting search is how you grow while very small. — 00:45:15
  • ★★ About 95% of the views on Ali's channel come from browse or suggested, he thinks. (hedged) — 00:45:43
  • ★★ Other factors for the YouTube algorithm, Ali says, are session watch time (how long a video keeps people on YouTube) and a new survey of viewer satisfaction; experts say likes and comments no longer really matter. — 00:45:43
  • ★★ There is no secret sauce to getting on YouTube's home page, Ali says: make more good videos, with high click-through rate and watch time. — 00:46:29

00:46:52 — Questions: a channel whose Notion videos do best; target audience, SEO and thumbnails for a business channel

  • ★★★ To a creator whose Notion videos do best while her channel is about systems and business, Ali says the problem is probably an undefined target audience: define that person and all their problems. — 00:48:28 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali used to have a target persona for his channel: Mohammed, a 22-year-old medical student at Imperial College London interested in tech, reading, exams, fitness and a social life. — 00:50:12
  • ★★★ The more specific the problem your videos solve at first, the more growth you get, Ali says, citing the phrase "niche down to blow up", and then you slowly expand your circle. — 00:50:59
  • ★★ When you have landed on a trend such as Notion, Ali says, ride it as long as possible while slowly moving into the other areas you like, using it to illustrate wider lessons. — 00:52:16 · Notion
  • ★★ The more focused a channel's message is on one person, Ali says, the more it resonates with more than that one person. — 00:52:16
  • ★★ Ali asks questions before advising because of what he calls the law of equal and opposite advice: advice that fits one person may have an equal and opposite version that fits another. — 00:55:53
  • ★★★ Instead of starting from SEO research, Ali says, start from the target audience: list their problems, make videos that solve them, such as a series on getting more leads, and do not worry about SEO for now. — 00:58:46
  • ★ Forty-minute interviews with big names are probably not what an audience of service-business owners wants to watch on YouTube, Ali suspects. (hedged) — 01:00:02
  • ★★ To make better thumbnails, Ali says, learn Canva, or outsource them to a thumbnail designer if your business can afford it. — 01:00:29

  • ★★★ The first step with thumbnails, Ali says, is to choose the vibe that appeals to your target audience ("your vibe attracts your tribe"): make a mood board, get audience feedback, then optimise each thumbnail. — 01:00:29

    “your vibe attracts your tribe”

  • ★★★ Standard YouTube thumbnail advice (a face, a meme face, flames, high contrast) is skewed towards children of 9 to 14, Ali says, and does not apply to an audience of 35-year-old business owners. — 01:01:43

01:02:33 — Chat questions: profitable niches, scripts, finding a niche, sponsorship rates, ads, Shorts, networking, video length, ideas, search volume

  • ★★★ A niche is profitable, Ali says, if its people have money and your product makes them money or saves them time. — 01:02:54
  • ★★ Ali does not recommend targeting students, who famously have no money, unless parents make the buying decision, as in college admissions. — 01:03:50
  • ★★ All of Ali's material for students is free or on Skillshare rather than a paid course, because students could not afford a paid course. — 01:04:35 · Skillshare
  • ★★★ For filming, Ali suggests a teleprompter for fully scripted, research-heavy videos and bullet points for videos from personal experience, since reading a word-for-word script is easy to hear. — 01:05:35
  • ★★ For a YouTube channel in English when it is not your first language, Ali says it depends on your level: you can get going and get good without English, and at get smart, ask whether your target audience will accept it. — 01:06:16
  • ★★ A channel people follow for its creator's personality rather than a topic is really hard, Ali says, since the personality must be super interesting; vlog channels are hard to grow without large unfair advantages. — 01:07:14 · unfair advantage
  • ★★ One way to find a niche, Ali says, is the overlap of what you like and what your audience needs, then trying about 10 videos in it. — 01:08:16
  • ★★★ Another way to choose a niche, Ali says, is by target audience rather than topic (beginner YouTubers, experienced home cooks, new dads), which makes it much easier to make lots of content. — 01:09:11
  • ★★ Ali does not want a niche but keeps a target audience in mind: people of about 24 or 25, male, living in the UK and caring about tech, basically himself a few years ago. — 01:10:14
  • ★★ Ali started his channel with videos for applicants to medical school at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial or UCL, a tiny niche where he had an unfair advantage as a Cambridge medical student. — 01:10:41 · University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, unfair advantage
  • ★★★ At the get smart level, without unfair advantages in a niche you might reconsider it, Ali says: outworking people is not sustainable, and like Y Combinator's founder-market fit, he prefers niches where he has an edge. — 01:11:09 · unfair advantage
  • ★★★ Ali does not recommend the architect approach to a niche, planning everything from day one, unless you start at level three; at levels one and two be an archaeologist, digging with videos in several niches. — 01:12:39
  • ★★★ For pricing YouTube sponsorships, Ali says the benchmark is $15 CPM, generally considered the standard for most sponsorships. — 01:14:09
  • ★★★ Do not grow a channel with YouTube ads, Ali says: every YouTube expert he has asked says no. — 01:14:33
  • ★★★ Ali's team is launching a Skillshare class on how to grow on YouTube the following week. — 01:14:33 · Skillshare
  • ★★ Ali's new free Skillshare class, a step-by-step guide to starting a YouTube channel, was filmed a few weeks earlier and is being edited; Part-Time YouTuber Academy sign-ups get it free. — 01:15:10 · Skillshare, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ There is no shortcut to turning viewers into subscribers, Ali says: they have to like you and your content, so consistently make good videos that deliver value. — 01:15:58
  • ★★★ The problem with YouTube Shorts, Ali says, is that people who watch Shorts do not necessarily become viewers of long-form content. — 01:17:07
  • ★★ A Part-Time YouTuber Academy student from Cohort 4, Daniel Wall (as heard), went from zero to 400,000 subscribers in a few weeks using Shorts. — 01:17:07 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's team has started a new channel for Shorts as an experiment. — 01:17:07
  • ★ Ali recommends Peter McKinnon's recent video on his philosophy on Shorts. — 01:17:07 · Peter McKinnon
  • ★★★ Ali's answer for networking with people in your niche is Twitter and maybe Instagram: he has made all his YouTuber friends through Twitter. — 01:17:34 · Twitter, Instagram
  • ★★ YouTube's algorithm team said recently that the algorithm has no preference for shorter or longer videos, Ali says: a video should be as long as it needs to be. — 01:18:23
  • ★★ At the previous enrolment the Part-Time YouTuber Academy sold about 200 places in the first 10 minutes, Ali thinks. (hedged) — 01:18:46 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ About two years earlier Angus cold-emailed Ali asking whether he wanted to hire a writer; Angus is now a core member of the team. — 01:18:46 · Angus
  • ★★ Ali's idea generation machine has six or seven ways to find video ideas, such as looking at other YouTube channels, competitive research, Reddit and BuzzFeed. — 01:19:17
  • ★★ Search volume is not that important, Ali says, since channels blow up through browse; high search volume also means high competition, so a small channel might better target smaller searches. (hedged) — 01:20:03
  • ★★ Twitter is better than LinkedIn for networking, Ali says: he has made dozens of friends on Twitter and none on LinkedIn. — 01:20:03 · Twitter, LinkedIn
  • ★★★ To connect without chasing clout, Ali says, connect with creators in your lane, at your level or a bit bigger or smaller, rather than much bigger names such as Tim Ferriss or Gary Vaynerchuk. — 01:20:48 · Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★★ Ali's philosophy for meeting creators is to be so good they can't ignore you and to put your head down and do the work; he rarely reaches out and lets friendships come organically. — 01:21:11

01:21:49 — Wrap-up and Part-Time YouTuber Academy enrolment

  • ★★★ Enrolment for the next Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort opens at 4 p.m. UK time on Monday 28 February 2022. — 01:21:49 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's team is launching a brand-new YouTube channel on how to be a part-time YouTuber, with free videos on how to grow on YouTube. — 01:23:24

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: cringe test · get going, get good, get smart · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Also: People: Angus · Arun Maini · Charlie Houpert · Derek Sivers · Elizabeth · Gary Vaynerchuk · Marques Brownlee · Matt D'Avella · Michael Gerber · Pat Flynn · Peter McKinnon · Tim Ferriss · Warren Buffett

Works: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook · So Good They Can't Ignore You · The E-Myth · The Great CEO Within

Organizations: Imperial College London · Instagram · LinkedIn · Reddit · Skillshare · Think Media · Twitter · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Video Creators · Y Combinator

Concepts: 99-1-1 rule · architect versus archaeologist · compounding · CPM · creator-audience fit · extrinsic motivation · idea generation machine · law of equal and opposite advice · parable of the pottery class · unfair advantage · watch time

Products: Canva · Notion · TubeBuddy · YouTube Shorts

Also centred on cringe test: How To Start a YouTube Channel - Beginner’s Guide to YouTube

Also centred on get going, get good, get smart: How To Start a YouTube Channel - Beginner’s Guide to YouTube · How I Make $4 Million Per Year - The CBM Framework · If I Started a YouTube Channel in 2026, I'd Do This

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