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9 Business Lessons - How I Made $1.6m in 30 Days

2023-04-05 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His medical past

In an episode of his Backstage series, Ali says his business made $1.6 million in 30 days and gives the lessons behind it: paying off ignorance debt in sales and marketing, action before reading, crafting the offer from $100M Offers, experimentation and reversible decisions, the alchemy of packaging, specific knowledge, and patience, progress and playfulness.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — The business has made $1.6 million in the last 30 days; seven lessons in an episode of Backstage

00:00:26 — Lesson one: ignorance debt, three sales and marketing books, getting knowledge out of people's heads, levelling up skills

  • ★★ Alex Hormozi (quoted): Alex Hormozi's concept of ignorance debt: at the start of a business or any journey you spend a long time paying off the debt of lacking the relevant knowledge and skills. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ When launching the latest cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy a few months earlier, Ali did not take sales and marketing seriously, a massive hole in his knowledge. — 00:00:58 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ In a session in the third quarter of 2022, Ali's CEO coach Eric Partaker asked him his weakest area in running a business; Ali said sales and marketing, which he knew nothing about. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Pressed by Eric Partaker, Ali read DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson, $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi and Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards; all three were mind-blowing and levelled up his sales and marketing. — 00:00:58
  • ★ Ali says the three sales and marketing books added a lot to his business's top and bottom line, and he wishes he had paid off his ignorance debt sooner. — 00:01:34
  • ★★ Eric Partaker (quoted): Ali's CEO coach Eric Partaker says that when you try something new, everything you need to know is already in someone's head, and your job is to get it out. — 00:01:34
  • ★★ Ali says you get knowledge out of experts' heads by reading their book, taking their course, listening to them on podcasts or speaking to them face to face. — 00:02:03
  • ★★ Ali's friend Cliff Weitzman, founder of Speechify and a guest on Ali's Deep Dive podcast, learned a skill by listing its top 100 people, cold-emailing them and holding half-hour Zoom calls with them. — 00:02:03 · Deep Dive
  • ★★★ Ali's lesson is the importance of levelling up: your ability to make money is directly proportional to the skills you acquire over time, through time, money, sweat or experience. — 00:02:32

  • ★★ Ali says the money-making power that levelled-up skills bring results in a feeling of financial confidence rather than financial security. — 00:03:01

    “a feeling of financial confidence rather than necessarily financial security”

  • ★★★ To balance reading and doing, Ali sees action as the foundation with reading on top: someone learning web design should start by doing it, not by paying off ignorance debt through books and videos. — 00:03:01

00:03:02 — Balancing reading and doing: action as the foundation, $100M Offers for the sales page

  • ★★★ $100M Offers was the main book Ali's team followed step by step to craft the offer on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy's sales page, which brought in the 30 days' revenue. — 00:03:42 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ One mistake is reading too little and acting too quickly, but Ali suspects more people are too slow to act and too quick to jump to books and reading. (hedged) — 00:03:42

00:04:24 — Sunday Snippets, his weekly email

00:04:57 — Offer creation, copywriting and funnels: the offer first, the delivery second

  • ★★ Ali says three marketing lessons got his business to $1.6 million in 30 days: offer creation, copywriting and funnels. — 00:04:57
  • ★★ Ali defines an offer as the thing you are selling; he did not know the term before reading $100M Offers and wishes he had known it ten years earlier. — 00:04:57
  • ★★ Alex Hormozi (quoted): In $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi says you want to create an offer so good that people feel really dumb saying no to it. — 00:05:26
  • ★★★ Ali says an offer's value should be way higher than its price, ideally ten times or more, like a working iPhone 13 offered for $10. — 00:05:26 · iPhone
  • ★★★ Ali's team learned to think about the offer first and the delivery second, because people buy the offer: for their course they asked what the best possible offer was, then how to fulfil it. — 00:05:53 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:06:22 — Excess cash in index funds; Trading 212 sponsor read

  • ★ Ali invests the excess cash his business generates in index funds, mostly in the S&P 500. — 00:06:22 · S&P 500
  • ★★ Ali's fourth lesson is experimentation: whenever he struggles to do something, he tells himself it is fine, it is just an experiment, and tries it to see what happens. — 00:07:50 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Worried the Part-Time YouTuber Academy offer and sales page would be too salesy or scammy, Ali's team treated them as an experiment, followed the book, and found it really helpful. — 00:07:50 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, experimental mindset

00:07:56 — Lesson four: experimentation, and Jeff Bezos's reversible and irreversible decisions

  • ★★ Experimentation reduces the feeling of failure, Ali says: like a scientist testing a hypothesis, you learn something whether the experiment succeeds or fails. — 00:08:34 · experimental mindset
  • ★ Ali's business has lately treated things as experiments, such as adding an extra sales feature to its landing page for more revenue from the cohort. — 00:08:34 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Jeff Bezos (quoted): Jeff Bezos, as Ali has heard, sees decisions as two doors, one you can come back through and one you cannot, and argues that for a reversible decision speed is what matters. (hedged) — 00:09:07
  • ★★★ When he catches himself overthinking a decision, Ali asks whether it is reversible: if so, he takes a playful, experimental approach without letting fear of failure hold him back; irreversible ones deserve more thought. — 00:09:50 · experimental mindset

00:10:09 — Lesson five: Alchemy, perceived value and packaging of an offer

  • ★★ Rory Sutherland (quoted): Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy is about how you can create value from nothing. — 00:10:19
  • ★★ Ali's example: a 30-minute seminar on delegating video editing, plus a checklist, the job description he uses to hire freelance editors and a bonus feedback training, has far higher perceived value than a two-hour seminar. — 00:10:19
  • ★★★ Recognising that an offer's perceived value is not the same as its actual value, and that packaging matters a great deal, was a huge level-up in Ali's business acumen. — 00:10:58
  • ★★ Naval Ravikant (quoted): Naval Ravikant's specific knowledge cannot be trained: if it could, others could be mass-trained and you would be replaceable; it is found by pursuing your curiosity. — 00:10:58 · Naval Ravikant

00:11:19 — Lesson six: Naval Ravikant's specific knowledge and six years as a part-time YouTuber

  • ★★★ Ali puts the $1.6 million in 30 days down to six years of building specific knowledge as a part-time YouTuber: growing a channel alongside other work without it taking over your life. — 00:11:38
  • ★★ When Ali started his channel six years earlier he did not set out to make money: he planned a video every week for two years, hoping some viewers might sign up to his medical admissions courses. — 00:12:00
  • ★★ Editing videos in the evenings at medical school and as a doctor felt to Ali like play, not work, though others wondered how he had the energy. — 00:12:00
  • ★★ Ali advises asking what specific knowledge you can build in your field to become more valuable and raise your earning power, so you can monetise it later if you want. — 00:12:27
  • ★★ Ali's final lesson is the three Ps: patience, progress and playfulness. — 00:12:27
  • ★★★ Ali's success was not overnight: he has tried to make money on the internet since the age of 13, and at 28 has had his first million-dollar month. — 00:12:27

00:12:47 — Lesson seven: patience, progress and playfulness; his money milestones from 13 to 28

  • ★★ Ali's first £1,000 month came at about 18, his first 100K month at about 25, and a million-pound month at 28. — 00:13:16
  • ★★ Ali tells people who want to make money quickly that they won't: making money is about the long road, with patience, progress and playfulness. — 00:13:39
  • ★★★ Progress, Ali says, is about consistency rather than intensity, as James Clear would say: consistent effort over a long time compounds massively compared with intense bursts when you feel motivated. — 00:13:39 · James Clear
  • ★★★ Ali says approaching studies, work or a side hustle with playfulness reduces stress, makes it more fun and far more sustainable; it is why his 15 years of trying to make money online have lasted. — 00:14:08

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Mentioned

Central: $100M Offers · experimental mindset · ignorance debt · offer · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · specific knowledge

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Cliff Weitzman · Eric Partaker · James Clear · Jeff Bezos · Jim Edwards · Naval Ravikant · Rory Sutherland · Russell Brunson

Projects: Deep Dive

Works: Alchemy · Copywriting Secrets · DotCom Secrets

Concepts: copywriting · funnel · index fund · landing page · reversible and irreversible decisions

Products: iPhone · S&P 500 · Speechify

Also centred on $100M Offers: 15 Incredible Books to Read in 2026

Also centred on ignorance debt: What Does My Mum Think of Me? 4M Subscriber Q&A · 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You

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