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12 Tools I Use to Run My $4m Business

2023-08-02 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 33:16 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali walks through the 12 apps his team uses to run his business (Slack, Webflow, Kajabi, Canva, Google Sheets, Loom, Notion, Figma, ConvertKit, Help Scout, QuickBooks and Stripe), showing its scorecard, course revenue and email numbers, and recommends Kajabi for selling online courses.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introduction: 12 apps behind the business

  • ★★★ Ali runs his multi-million-dollar business, built over six years, on 12 apps: Slack, Webflow, Kajabi, Canva, Google Sheets, Loom, Notion, Figma, ConvertKit, Help Scout, QuickBooks and Stripe. — 00:00:00 · Slack, Google Sheets, Notion
  • ★ Ali has used Slack to run his business since 2019. — 00:00:00 · Slack

00:00:18 — Slack: channels, feedback and core values, team pulse, the Accelerator community

  • ★★ Ali's team splits its Slack into two branches of the business: the content squad, which makes the content, and the money squad, which runs the courses and customer success. — 00:00:58 · Slack
  • ★★ Ali struggles to give his team regular feedback, so for their 360 feedback he asks each team member for specific questions and answers them by voice message or Loom. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ The final cover of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity is a variation on the design its publisher Penguin first made, discussed with an outside designer in a Slack Connect channel. — 00:02:44 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Slack
  • ★★ Ali's team has five core values (be a team player, enjoy the journey, level up, over-communicate, take responsibility) and gives each other kudos for them with the Slack app Matter. — 00:03:13 · Slack
  • ★★ Ali thought core values and shout-outs for them were corporate nonsense until he started running a team; now he sees the value of core values and of shouting them out to keep them top of mind. — 00:03:42
  • ★★ With 14 people on the team, Ali and Angus get a weekly report on how engaged and happy the team is from Teamspective, a Slack bot that asks the team questions every week. — 00:05:08 · Angus, Slack
  • ★★ Ali's team also runs a Slack community for students of the Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator, its coaching programme for people growing YouTube channels, where the team offers office hours. — 00:05:37 · Slack
  • ★ In the Accelerator's Slack, Alison of Ali's team pinned the "holy grail" books that have really helped her: DotCom Secrets, $100M Offers and Copywriting Secrets. — 00:05:37 · Slack

00:07:01 — Webflow and the book's website

  • ★★ Ali's team has used Webflow for its course pages, such as Camera Confidence and Creatorpreneur, and web designer Henry built the website of Ali's book, feelgoodproductivity.com, in it. — 00:07:05 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali calls Webflow a really powerful tool for making a great-looking website and points to the many free tutorials on YouTube. — 00:08:32

00:08:47 — Kajabi: hosting and selling the courses, launch revenue

  • ★★ Ali's team hosts all its video courses, including the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, on Kajabi, an online platform for hosting and selling courses, coaching and communities. — 00:09:02 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy has 3,741 customers on Kajabi. — 00:10:09 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's business switched its courses over to Kajabi in January 2023. (hedged) — 00:12:09
  • ★★ The final live cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy brought in $387,000 on its first day. — 00:12:39 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's team launched the evergreen, self-serve version of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy on 12 July 2023, and it brought in $245,000 of revenue on day one. — 00:12:39 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Kajabi is now the platform Ali recommends to anyone who wants to start and market an online course or any digital product; you still need a good product and an audience to buy it. — 00:13:08

00:13:23 — Canva for thumbnails and channel banners

  • ★★ Ali tells his YouTuber Academy students not to design channel banners and thumbnails from scratch but to find a Canva template they like. — 00:14:35 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:15:23 — Google Sheets: the company scorecard and dashboard

  • ★★ Ali's YouTube channel has 4.5 million subscribers, about 140,000 behind the pace for its end-of-year target of 5.5 million. — 00:16:03
  • ★★ Tracking targets is useful, Ali says, because aiming for 5 million subscribers is very different from aiming for 50 million and shapes what the team does. — 00:16:03
  • ★★ In the company scorecard in Google Sheets, the people in charge of each platform fill in its numbers every Monday, and they roll up into a main dashboard Ali looks at every week. — 00:16:32 · Google Sheets
  • ★★ Ali's team put a lead magnet in some videos and ran a giveaway, which he says drives a lot of email subscribers. — 00:17:31
  • ★★ The weekly scorecard means the team actually look at their numbers, and lets the business zoom out to compare how it is doing with earlier in the year. — 00:18:00
  • ★★★ Ali used to be anti-numbers, but working with his CEO coach Eric Partaker he has realised the value of putting numbers to things: with a team of 14, targets give the team clarity, since people want to know they are doing a good job. — 00:18:29
  • ★★ Ali's team is building a new dashboard of the big things he cares about: happiness (still to be worked out), long-form views, net new followers, new email subscribers, operating profit and customer happiness. — 00:19:28

00:19:41 — Loom: video walkthroughs and level-up Looms

  • ★★ Recording a Loom walkthrough, which others can comment on and watch at double speed, is a far more efficient way to share information than booking a meeting or asking people to read a load of text, Ali says. — 00:19:57
  • ★★ Since May 2023 everyone on Ali's team records a monthly "level up Loom" presenting what they learned that month, so the whole team benefits. — 00:19:57

00:21:01 — Notion: project management, quests and the YouTube hub

  • ★★ Ali's team uses Slack for real-time and asynchronous communication and announcements, and Notion for project management. — 00:21:08 · Slack, Notion
  • ★★ Ali's team works in six-week sprints, and everyone has one or at most two objectives, called quests, tracked as OKRs in Notion. — 00:21:08 · Notion
  • ★★ Angus works about 70 hours a week, and the team's "Operation Free Angus" uses time tracking to bring that down to 40 to 50 hours. — 00:21:37 · Angus
  • ★★ On Ali's team he can film whenever he wants but not whatever he wants: the team tells him what to film, because titles and thumbnails are important. — 00:22:23
  • ★★ Ali's channel still puts out only one or two videos a week; the team's dream is three valuable videos a week across its topic areas. — 00:22:52

00:23:11 — Figma and FigJam: website mock-ups, book diagrams, the business map

  • ★★ Ali designed his website, aliabdaal.com, in Figma, and Dan, the team's website manager, coded it up in WordPress. — 00:23:22 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ After the book launch, Ali wants the homepage of aliabdaal.com to put his book first, inspired by jamesclear.com, where the first thing you see is the book. — 00:23:51 · aliabdaal.com, James Clear, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali mocks up website designs in Figma, a pure design platform, because doing mock-ups in WordPress or Webflow takes ages within the confines of the code. — 00:24:49
  • ★★ The diagrams in Feel-Good Productivity, such as the motivation spectrum, were made in Illustrator and Figma; the team hired designer Stefan to redo the Flaticon icons as custom icons in one style. — 00:24:49 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Figma and FigJam have a really good free plan, Ali says; he has used them for years. (hedged) — 00:25:48
  • ★★ In FigJam Ali mapped his business as a loop: views bring followers, followers email subscribers, the YouTuber Academy revenue, and profit is reinvested to get more views. — 00:25:48 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:26:16 — ConvertKit: the newsletter and email sequences

  • ★★ Ali's latest weekly newsletter went to 368,000 people; 42% opened it and 1,322 unsubscribed, and every email he sends gets over a thousand unsubscribes. — 00:26:17 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali's team started using ConvertKit properly in April 2021, importing subscribers from Revue, which Twitter bought and then shut down. (hedged) — 00:26:46 · Revue, Twitter
  • ★★ Ali's email list gained 128,000 net new subscribers in May 2023; its average open rate is 52.5%, and it has sent four million emails in about two years. — 00:26:46
  • ★★ Ali's email lists have 482,915 subscribers in total. — 00:27:21
  • ★★ Ali's team sends a seven-day email sequence, the Part-Time YouTuber crash course, through ConvertKit automatically rather than by hand. — 00:27:21 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:28:07 — Help Scout for customer support

  • ★★ Since starting Help Scout about a year earlier, Ali's team has had 4,473 customers and 25,000 support conversations with 8,100 people, about 27 a day. — 00:28:49
  • ★★ Handling customer-support email in Help Scout, which lets the team assign each email, is far more efficient than doing it in Gmail, Ali says. — 00:29:18
  • ★★ In April 2023, with the biggest Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort ever, the support team got 3,800 emails in the month. — 00:29:18 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali spends little time in QuickBooks, where his business does all its accounting, because Angus, now his CEO, and the accountants work in it. — 00:29:47 · Angus

00:30:00 — QuickBooks: accounting and finances

  • ★★ Ali's business has spent £64,648 on software and subscriptions so far in 2023. — 00:30:16
  • ★★ It is good to have people on your team with the skills and interests for work you don't want to do or aren't good at, Ali says: he does not enjoy the finances, but Angus loves a spreadsheet. — 00:31:15 · Angus
  • ★★ Ali's business processes payments with Stripe, which lets it accept payments from most places in the world. — 00:31:15

00:31:28 — Stripe for payments

  • ★ Ali asks viewers who reach the end of this long video to leave a clover emoji in the comments. — 00:31:44

00:32:05 — Clover emoji, feedback request, book pre-order and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You comes out in a few months; viewers who pre-order it and save the receipt will get special bonuses, including behind-the-scenes material on running a business. — 00:32:42 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Kajabi · Slack · Webflow

Also: People: Alison · Amber · Angus · Bhav · Dan (staff, mentioned from 2021) · Eric Partaker · Henry · Inez · Jakub · James Clear · Marques Brownlee · Stefan · Tintin

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Camera Confidence · Creatorpreneur · Deep Dive · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator · Sunday Snippets

Works: $100M Offers · Copywriting Secrets · DotCom Secrets · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Penguin UK · Stripe · Twitter

Concepts: brain health · core values

Products: Adobe Illustrator · Canva · ConvertKit · FigJam · Figma · Flaticon · Gmail · Google Sheets · Help Scout · Loom · Matter · Notion · QuickBooks · Revue · Teamspective · WordPress

Also centred on Kajabi: How to Build a Website with No Code (2026)

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