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How I Started My YouTube Channel in My Spare Time

2023-05-07 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:44 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Productivity and time) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own numbers, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Family, Sponsor segment present

Ali explains how he grew his YouTube channel to 1.2 million subscribers in his spare time: success needs strategy, execution and consistency, and with limited time and energy he relied on leverage, building systems and outsourcing editing, plus five personal productivity tips.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Growing to 1.2 million subscribers with a full-time job, in three to ten hours a week

  • ★★★ In his first three years on YouTube, while working a full-time job, Ali grew from zero to 1.2 million subscribers; now going all in on his internet business, he still spends only three to ten hours a week on the channel. — 00:00:00 · YouTube

00:00:29 — Part one, the YouTube and business success framework: strategy, execution, consistency; skill, time, energy and money

  • ★★★ Success on YouTube and in business, Ali says, comes down to three things: doing the right things (strategy), doing them right (execution) and doing them for a long time (consistency). — 00:00:29 · YouTube

  • ★★ Luck plays a part in business and YouTube success, Ali says, but the right strategy and reasonable execution and consistency increase your odds of getting lucky; he calls the three the levers of success. — 00:01:14 · YouTube

    “the three levers of success”

  • ★★ The ingredients of the three levers of success are skill, time, energy and sometimes money, Ali says; unlike a restaurant, a YouTube channel needs little money to get started. — 00:01:44 · YouTube

  • ★★★ Unlike becoming a neurosurgeon, the skills of making YouTube videos can be learned on the internet for free with no gatekeepers, Ali says, so what really holds people back is time and energy. — 00:02:42 · YouTube
  • ★★ With unlimited time and energy, growing a YouTube channel would not be that hard, Ali says, as MrBeast shows; with a day job your time is limited and you often lack energy after work. — 00:03:11 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Starting his channel in his final year of medical school with very limited time and energy, Ali found two main ways to make the most of them: leverage and personal productivity. — 00:03:11

00:03:49 — Part two, how to make the most of your time and energy by applying leverage: systems and people

  • ★★ Leverage, Ali explains, means the same input of work gets more output, like a tractor that lets one person do the work of 100 in a day. — 00:03:49
  • ★★★ The first of two main ways to increase leverage in YouTube and business is building systems, which Ali learned from The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. — 00:04:19 · The E-Myth, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali raves about The E-Myth Revisited: it looks like a boring business book but is incredibly exciting, because it is about the power of systems and of leverage. — 00:04:48 · The E-Myth
  • ★★ Retelling The E-Myth's McDonald's example, Ali says McDonald's, like Starbucks and other franchises, gives the same experience anywhere in the world because it has created systems for everything, written in a handbook for its employees. — 00:05:15 · The E-Myth, McDonald's
  • ★★ Businesses grow by building systems and operations, Ali says; it sounded boring to him once, but applying it to his YouTube channel changed his life. — 00:05:44 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali advises asking how you can build systems to increase your leverage on your YouTube channel; over time he has built systems for idea generation, scripting, and titles and thumbnails. — 00:05:44 · YouTube
  • ★★ Many of Ali's thumbnails look similar because they come from a template; reinventing the wheel for each would waste time, and broadly no one cares if thumbnails are the same. — 00:06:13
  • ★★ Over his channel's first couple of years Ali developed a system for editing, with templates and the same colour grade every time, and found he spent less time and energy because the system took care of much of the process. — 00:06:43
  • ★★★ The second main way to apply leverage is people, and of everything that helped Ali grow his YouTube channel in his spare time, leveraging people has been the single biggest needle mover. — 00:07:12 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali has not edited a video on his channel since around 2019: he edited all his own videos for the first two years, then, after reading The E-Myth Revisited and with a mentor's push, outsourced editing, which freed time for writing, research, family, friends and his health. — 00:07:41 · The E-Myth
  • ★★★ If you have some money, Ali advises outsourcing the parts of your business or YouTube channel you don't want to do to an expert, so long as the value of your freed-up time exceeds what that person costs. — 00:08:39 · YouTube
  • ★★ An extra hour or two spent researching and writing a video gives Ali's YouTube channel a far higher return than the same two hours spent editing. — 00:08:39 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali discovered outsourcing by reading The 4-Hour Workweek at around 17; in his first business, SixMed, he and his brother built medical school question banks and hired outsourced workers for data entry, so Ali could focus on the coding. — 00:08:39 · The 4-Hour Workweek, 6med, Taimur Abdaal

  • ★★★ Ali wishes someone had told him to edit his first 10 videos himself and then outsource editing; it took him two years to learn, and he wants Part-Time YouTuber Academy students to outsource before the two-year mark if they can afford it. — 00:09:23 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

    “edit the first 10 videos yourself. That's fine. But then from that point on, you need to outsource your editing”

  • ★ At around 14, Ali's brother made his first money online as a freelancer on Fiverr, doing psychic readings for about $5. (hedged) — 00:09:52 · Taimur Abdaal

00:10:22 — Sponsored experiment: five tips sent to five Fiverr editors at different price points

  • ★★ Outsourcing in your channel, business or personal life, for example to a virtual assistant, which Ali has tried and calls great, lets you hire specialists for what you don't want to do or are not good at, a massive boost to your leverage. — 00:11:55

00:12:24 — Part three, how to make the most of your limited time and energy by boosting your personal productivity: five tips and the editors' versions

  • ★★★ Ali's first productivity tip is to use small pockets of time: as a doctor, in five-to-ten-minute gaps between patients, instead of scrolling his phone he wrote bullet points for a video, generated ideas or made thumbnails in Canva or Adobe Spark. — 00:12:24
  • ★★ A lot can be done in five or ten minutes here and there, Ali says; a common productivity mistake is thinking you need a whole block of uninterrupted time to do something. — 00:13:32
  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is to multitask learning through audio: he learns YouTube skills from podcasts, audiobooks and YouTube videos played in the background with YouTube Premium, such as the Video Creators Podcast while driving or tutorials while doing chores. — 00:14:29 · AirPods, YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is productive procrastination: instead of video games, he would procrastinate by watching videos from creators he admired or browsing web design inspiration, which gave him ideas for content and his edits. — 00:15:28
  • ★ Ali says not every minute needs to be work and rest is fine, but procrastinating in ways that recharge him and also help his channel feeds two birds with one scone. — 00:16:26
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip is to use momentum: do a little on your channel or business every day, because after a break of weeks getting back into it feels like a much heavier lift. — 00:17:20
  • ★★ Ali aims to film something every day, a video, a Short or a reel, because after two weeks off filming on holiday the next video takes an enormous effort. — 00:17:20
  • ★★ In his channel's first three years, Ali showed up every day to do at least something, even one bullet point of a script, which sustained his momentum; momentum often drives motivation, a virtuous cycle. — 00:17:50
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip, one he has given for years, is to enjoy the journey, which he calls the ultimate hack to personal productivity. — 00:19:00
  • ★★★ Work that is enjoyable and engaging becomes energising, Ali says, and that solves the energy problem of coming home drained from a day job; early on he made editing fun by tracking progress and turning it into a game. — 00:19:00
  • ★★ Hiring and outsourcing while building a business part-time gives you the skills to work with more people if you go full-time on it, as Ali has. — 00:20:39

00:21:38 — Fiverr discount code, the free email crash course and the end card

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: leverage · YouTube

Also: People: Derral Eves · Michael Gerber · MrBeast · Peter McKinnon · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: The 4-Hour Workweek · The E-Myth · Video Creators Podcast

Organizations: 6med · Fiverr · McDonald's · Starbucks

Concepts: productive procrastination · virtual assistant

Products: Adobe Spark Post · AirPods · Canva · YouTube Premium

Also centred on leverage: How to Become a Digital Nomad

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