Skip to content

Starting A Business is Easy, Actually

2023-09-27 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:29 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present

Opening his Business Class series, Ali sets out the feel-good business model: a business built for its owner's fun, freedom and flexibility, with high margins, little capital, a small flat team and slow growth, set against traditional businesses and high-growth startups; he gives a five-step framework and three mistakes, from ignoring market validation to forgetting work-life balance.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — A new series, Business Class, and the plan of the video

  • ★★ Ali starts a new series, Business Class, to share what he has learned over six years of starting, growing and scaling a profitable, relatively stress-free business that gives him a lifestyle he enjoys. — 00:00:00

  • ★★★ Ali calls his philosophy of a profitable, relatively stress-free business that funds a lifestyle he enjoys the feel-good business model. — 00:00:00

    “which I call the feel-good business model”

00:00:51 — The feel-good business charter, version 0.1

  • ★★ Version 0.1 of the feel-good business charter of Ali and his team sets its purpose: a business that prioritises personal fulfilment, meaningful work and a positive impact on customers, team and audience, making good money with freedom, fun and flexibility while helping others. — 00:01:06
  • ★★ The first principle of Ali's feel-good business charter is to enjoy the journey: look forward to Mondays, embrace work that energises you, and keep doing what you love even with financial success. — 00:01:06
  • ★★ Principles two to four of Ali's feel-good business charter: work with team members and clients you enjoy, let team members focus on tasks they enjoy and excel at, and avoid relying on big clients so you can choose whom you work with. — 00:01:35
  • ★★ Principles six and seven of Ali's feel-good business charter: keep the team as small as is reasonable to reduce pressure, and aim for high profit margins, taking profits annually to build a financial safety net. — 00:02:04
  • ★ Principles eight and nine of Ali's feel-good business charter: allow flexible schedules so team members keep a healthy work-life balance, and limit synchronous work. — 00:02:04

00:02:46 — Three business models: traditional business, high-growth startup, feel-good business

  • ★★ A traditional business, Ali says, from a local laundromat or accounting firm to McDonald's, Coca-Cola or Ford, has steady, moderate growth, margins of usually under 20%, moderate capital needs, no priority on work-life balance and a formal, hierarchical structure. — 00:02:46 · McDonald's
  • ★★ High-growth startups, Ali says, aim for rapid, exponential growth and burn venture capital in the hope that profits come later, as Uber and Amazon did; they need a lot of capital and are famously bad for work-life balance. — 00:03:32 · Amazon
  • ★★★ In a feel-good business growth is not that important, Ali says: it optimises for the owner's fun, freedom, flexibility and lifestyle, so if working half as much kept profits the same, he would rather do that than work twice as hard to grow twice as much. — 00:04:01
  • ★★ Feel-good businesses usually have very high margins, Ali says, beyond 40 to 50%, and the higher the margin, the more you can run the business on your own terms. — 00:04:30
  • ★★ A feel-good business, Ali says, can often be bootstrapped with your own money, puts work-life balance first, and keeps the team very small and flat; some are solopreneurs with a few virtual assistants or contractors. — 00:04:59

00:05:28 — Sponsor read

00:06:42 — The five-step framework for building a feel-good business

  • ★★★ Ali's first step for building a feel-good business: find a skill you are passionate about and market-validate the idea, since a feel-good business is centred on a skill its owner particularly enjoys. — 00:06:56
  • ★★ A t-shirt printing business started only to make money, with no passion for t-shirts, would not be a feel-good business, Ali says; creative skills such as graphic design, illustration, writing, coding or video editing are fairly easy to build a business around. — 00:07:25
  • ★★★ To find the skill for a feel-good business, Ali often asks himself how he would spend his time if he won the lottery and had $100 million; once cocktails on a beach get boring, most people want to do something of value to others, and for him that is reading, writing, learning and teaching. — 00:07:55
  • ★★ If you do not yet know what you are passionate about, Ali says, that is fine: finding work you love is a lifelong journey, and trying lots of different things shows what you have an aptitude for, enjoy, and find energising rather than draining. — 00:08:24 · energisers and drainers

  • ★★ There has to be a market for the skill, Ali says, because a feel-good business is not a hobby: the aim is to use what you enjoy to add value to other people, who then pay you for it. — 00:08:24

    “it's not a feel good hobby. It's a feel good business.”

  • ★★★ Ali's second step is to choose a business model and find leads; there are three ways to make money from a skill: a service, a product, or content given away free and monetised through advertising such as YouTube AdSense or Medium, or by selling to the audience it builds. — 00:08:53

  • ★ Ali's example of the three models for a woodworker: a service designing custom furniture in clients' homes, a product business selling what they make to enough people, or content teaching woodworking, touring the workshop and filming time-lapses. — 00:09:33
  • ★★ A general skill is easier to build a feel-good business around, Ali says: with coding he can serve almost any client he likes, for YouTubers through a creator-economy startup, custom competitor-analysis databases or a channel teaching coding. — 00:10:03
  • ★★★ Ali's third step is to build a minimum viable product to get the idea out and get feedback, rather than spending three years building in a cave; a feel-good business should be nimble and adapt to the market. — 00:11:01
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth step is to scale sustainably and optimise for balance: early on it is easy to burn the midnight oil, but a feel-good business should begin with the end in mind and be sustainable from day one. — 00:11:30
  • ★★ Ali says future videos of the Business Class series will go into the specific methods he and his team have used over the last few years to scale sustainably. — 00:12:00
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth step is to periodically re-evaluate and pivot, asking whether what you are doing is what you want to be doing, since after a success it is too easy to keep doubling down on it. — 00:12:00
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy was making millions a year, but asking himself whether he would keep teaching people to be YouTubers if he won the lottery, Ali answered not really, so his business turned it from live cohorts into a pre-recorded evergreen course. — 00:12:29 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali expects his business to make at least a million dollars a year less than if the Part-Time YouTuber Academy had kept running live cohorts, a choice made for lifestyle, freedom, fun and flexibility rather than growth and profit. (hedged) — 00:12:58 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Many startup founders tell Ali in confidence that they no longer enjoy their startups, worth $100 million or $300 million, and like the idea of a YouTube channel for its freedom, fun and flexibility. — 00:12:58

00:13:26 — Common mistakes to avoid

  • ★★★ The first mistake with feel-good businesses, Ali says, is ignoring market validation, such as building a business on a YouTube channel of only videos you enjoy making: a hobby is for yourself, while a business adds value to others and makes money. — 00:13:57
  • ★★ Ali's business aims for profit margins of 50% and above. — 00:14:26
  • ★★★ Ali says his business made the mistake of scaling too fast too soon about a year earlier; when it grew too quickly, his week went on managing the team, operations, firefighting and admin instead of making content. — 00:14:26
  • ★★★ Slow, sustainable growth is much more relaxing than rapid exponential growth, Ali says: keep re-evaluating so you do not scale too fast or set ridiculously ambitious growth targets, because all of that adds stress. — 00:14:55
  • ★★ Chronic stress over the long term, Ali says, is bad for physical, mental and emotional health. — 00:15:53 · Mental health
  • ★★★ The third mistake is forgetting work-life balance, which Ali says he makes all the time: the whole point of a feel-good business is to enjoy life, not just work. — 00:15:53
  • ★★ Ali normally works on weekends, telling himself work is fun; during a weekend away with university friends in Yorkshire he asked himself how much joy he has in his life and found honestly not very much, though he enjoys video games and fiction. — 00:16:23
  • ★★★ Ali's rule for himself: when he finds himself working two or three weekends in a row, that is not the goal; a feel-good business should let him enjoy life, making time for health, relationships, friends, family, hobbies and joy. — 00:17:20

00:17:30 — Why he shares the charter in real time; the apps video; sign-off

  • ★ Ali shares version 0.1 of his business charter in real time rather than after three years of refining it, because every business is an evolving entity. — 00:17:49

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: feel-good business model

Also: Projects: Business Class · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Organizations: Amazon · Coca-Cola · Ford · McDonald's · Uber

Concepts: energisers and drainers · Mental health · minimum viable product

Places: Thailand

Products: Medium · YouTube AdSense

Replies to

← Previous: 8 Simple Hacks to Improve Your Health · Next → Change Your Life by Journalling in 2026