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If I Wanted to Grow An Audience in 2026, I'd Do This

2023-11-28 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 11:08 · watch on YouTube

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

Drawing on an interview with Noah Kagan, Ali gives his advice for growing an audience from scratch: define a niche as target and value, copy what already went viral in your own way, work from an unfair advantage, systemise content, set input goals and post weekly for two years, then delegate as if building a franchise.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Six years of growing an audience, and the best advice from Noah Kagan's interview

  • ★★ Ali says he has spent six years growing an online audience to over 6 million followers on YouTube and other platforms. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Content ideas: niche as target and value, content buckets and viral replication

  • ★★ Ali says content ideas stem from a niche, which for him combines two things: the target audience and the value you give it. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Once the niche is set, Ali advises listing content buckets of ideas and looking at what is popular on blogs for that audience and on other YouTube channels in the space, sorted by most views to find their viral videos. — 00:01:02

  • ★★★ Ali calls his technique viral replication: the easiest way to get content that works is to copy the title and thumbnail of content that has already worked and make it your own way, so you are not plagiarising. — 00:01:02

    “technique of viral replication”

00:01:29 — Unfair advantage: from med-school admissions to study tips to productivity

  • ★★ Ali first made very niche videos on getting into UK medical schools such as Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL, with an unfair advantage: he was a Cambridge medical student who had run admissions courses for about five years. — 00:01:29 · University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, unfair advantage
  • ★★ Ali says he made videos about what he knew, not trying to be a general productivity self-help guru, and asked only how to add value to people he was confident he could help. — 00:01:29
  • ★★★ Citing Amy Porterfield's idea of the 10% edge, Ali advises finding the audience you are 10% ahead of and can light the path for, being a guide rather than a guru, as he was for would-be medical students. — 00:02:00
  • ★★ When his viewers reached medical school and asked how to study, Ali followed Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create", documenting how he studied for his own exams without needing to be a guru. — 00:02:21 · Gary Vaynerchuk, show your work
  • ★★ Ali thinks it took him about 50 videos to get his first 1,000 subscribers and about 80 videos to reach 4,000. (hedged) — 00:02:21
  • ★★ Around 2019, two years into YouTube, viewers began asking Ali how he was so productive as a medical student and doctor, and he started thinking about making productivity videos. (hedged) — 00:02:21
  • ★★ Ali notes that Ryan Holiday started with marketing content and journalism, stumbled on stoicism with The Obstacle Is the Way, and now doubles down on stoicism, the one word he is known for. — 00:03:00 · Ryan Holiday, stoicism
  • ★★ Since productivity is now the one word people associate with him, Ali decided to double down on it, going adjacent into tech, books and anything that helps people be more productive. — 00:03:00

00:03:36 — Systemising content: packaging, hook and structure

  • ★★ To get the most out of little time on content, Ali says the 80/20 on YouTube is the packaging, the title and thumbnail: if no one clicks, no one sees the content, so spend a decent chunk of time on it. — 00:03:36
  • ★★ For the content itself, Ali says the main thing is the hook, the first 30 seconds, plus the structure, a rough three-part structure for the video. — 00:04:02

  • ★★★ Ali says content creation can be systemised: it is less a matter of creativity than of systems, processes and standard operating procedures. — 00:04:02

    “Content creation can be systemized.”

  • ★★ Ali has found that the more he systemises his content creation, the less he needs to worry about being a creative person and the more results he gets for his business. — 00:04:27

00:04:40 — Sponsor read for Epidemic Sound

00:06:23 — Staying consistent: patience, faith, input goals and two years of weekly videos

  • ★★ Ali says there is no magic bullet for consistency: it takes patience, because results take a long time, and faith that doing the right things and showing up consistently will eventually bring them. — 00:06:23
  • ★★★ Ali's main strategy for consistency is input goals within his control: not hitting 10,000 subscribers or a million views, but showing up every week to share something that adds value to his target audience. — 00:06:23

  • ★★★ Ali tells his students that to do YouTube they should commit to posting a video every week for two years, the time horizon that basically guarantees it will change their life. — 00:06:59

    “commit to posting a video every single week for two years.”

  • ★★ Ali calls expecting results from day one completely absurd: in the UK it takes eight years of medical training before someone is even remotely in front of a patient. — 00:06:59

  • ★★ Content creation starts as a heavy lift, Ali says, such as recording an hour for 10 minutes of content, but push through and build systems, processes and templates and hire people for what you don't want to do. — 00:07:28

00:07:52 — Delegating: The E-Myth, the franchise model, repurposing and the team

  • ★★★ Ali says time management only gets you so far: you cannot time-manage your way to two YouTube videos a week alongside a full-time job, family and life; you have to build systems and tools. — 00:07:52 · time management
  • ★★ In his first year or so on YouTube, Ali flew by the seat of his pants, coming up with, writing, filming and editing a video each week in medical school, and made the title and thumbnail in Adobe Spark while it uploaded. — 00:07:52
  • ★★ A few months into YouTube, Ali realised his week-by-week process was a recipe for burnout and not sustainable, and that he needed to systemise it. — 00:08:39
  • ★★★ Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited completely changed Ali's life by introducing him to systemisation and delegation: he saw his YouTube channel as the prototype for a franchise, like McDonald's, which gives an identical experience anywhere. — 00:08:39 · The E-Myth, McDonald's
  • ★★ Ali advises creating systems that make your business a theoretical franchise: for a YouTube channel, a process each for idea generation, writing, filming, editing and publishing. — 00:09:08
  • ★★ Ali first did every step of his videos himself, then slowly delegated: others now generate ideas and research some videos, while he still writes. — 00:09:08
  • ★★ Having tried it, Ali finds writing for your own videos really hard to outsource; he films his own videos while others edit, publish, repurpose and look at the analytics. — 00:09:48
  • ★★ Having put the effort into a video, Ali's team chops it up into Twitter and LinkedIn threads, Instagram and LinkedIn carousels and TikToks, to make it sweat across the platforms. — 00:09:48 · Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok
  • ★★ Six years in, Ali's content pipeline runs on a team of 14 people, 10 of them on content, supported by a courses business, with Angus as general manager handling day-to-day management. — 00:10:16 · Angus
  • ★★ Ali gives his editors feedback by recording a Loom and spends his time on what he cares about and is good at, drawing diagrams and talking to a camera, while everyone else does what he is bad at. — 00:10:45

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: process goals · The E-Myth · viral replication

Also: People: Amy Porterfield · Angus · Gary Vaynerchuk · Michael Gerber · Noah Kagan · Ryan Holiday

Works: The Obstacle Is the Way

Organizations: Imperial College London · Instagram · LinkedIn · McDonald's · TikTok · Twitter · University College London · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford

Concepts: 80/20 rule · guide, not guru · show your work · stoicism · time management · unfair advantage

Products: Adobe Spark Post · Loom

Also centred on process goals: How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers · My Toxic Relationship With Productivity · How to Beat Procrastination

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