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How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months

2024-11-22 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 1 h 25 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Personal story · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, He changed his mind, Sponsor segment present

In a two-day behind-the-scenes Business Class episode, Ali tells how his team built Productivity Lab, a $97-a-month productivity community and course that made $869,000 in its first seven months: the concept, the name, pricing, the course and the refund requests, with the lessons he takes from it (sell the destination, build with intensity, charge more to fewer people, offer a ludicrous money-back guarantee).

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 product with $869,000 in sales; what the video covers; Ali's business so far

  • ★★★ Productivity Lab, the product Ali's team launched in 2024, has made $869,000 in sales over its first seven months. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says Productivity Lab is on track to make over a million dollars in sales by its twelve-month mark. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ When Ali earned 50K a year as a doctor in the UK, he never imagined he could build a business with numbers like Productivity Lab's, let alone with a single product. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ This video is a behind-the-scenes episode of Business Class, Ali's ongoing series on starting and growing an online business. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali built and sold his first six-figure business as a medical student at Cambridge, grew the next to six figures while a full-time doctor, then quit to run the business, which now makes seven figures a year in profit. — 00:01:27 · Cambridge · also in: 5 Simple Steps to Earn $10,000 Writing Online

00:01:56 — How Productivity Lab started: the word productivity, the YouTuber Academy years, Gareth's community idea

  • ★★ Productivity Lab began in October 2023, when Gareth on Ali's team was doing market research on what to do with a productivity course. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ In a one-word game from Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole (Ryan Holiday means stoicism), Ali says most people would associate the word productivity with his name. — 00:03:01 · Ryan Holiday, James Clear
  • ★★ Ali calls productivity a very good word to be associated with, because people are always interested in being more productive: it is evergreen. — 00:03:01
  • ★★★ A creator brand stuck in the student market or in getting people into medical school goes nowhere long term, Ali says, because you age out of those quickly, and lifestyle brands lack longevity because trends come and go. — 00:04:17
  • ★★ Ali landed on productivity after a video about 50 videos in, "my productivity desk setup", went well and people kept asking how he was so productive; he became "the productivity guy". — 00:04:41
  • ★★ The first cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, the course Ali started in 2020 after quitting medicine, made about $300,000 in sales, more money than he had ever seen. (hedged) — 00:05:40 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ In 2021 the pandemic boom in live cohorts let the YouTuber Academy take Ali's business from about $1 million to about $4 million a year in revenue. — 00:05:40 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Although Ali is known as the productivity guy, the YouTuber Academy was his business's main product, so for years his team felt it needed to build a productivity product. — 00:06:09 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's team is working on a course about productivity. — 00:06:38
  • ★★ In late 2023, Ali says, community was all the craze, with platforms like Skool, Circle and Mighty Networks, and many people were moving from courses into community. — 00:06:38
  • ★★ Gareth proposed building a $300 productivity course and attaching a productivity community to it. — 00:07:10
  • ★★ The product that became Productivity Lab was first called Productivity Club. — 00:07:10

00:07:37 — Sponsor read for Make

00:09:04 — Choosing Circle, competitor research, written memos and FigJam boards, the dream outcome

  • ★★ After talking to Sam Ovens and to the CEO of Mighty Networks, Ali's team chose Circle, which it has used since day one, and Ali recommends Circle for building a community product. — 00:09:04
  • ★★ Like Amazon, Ali's team writes a memo whenever a new idea or venture is proposed, because writing it out forces clearer thinking than slides or talking. — 00:11:04 · Amazon
  • ★ Ali does not like to think of people as competitors: Ness Labs was on his team's competitor list, but Laura (as heard) is a good friend of his, not a competitor. — 00:11:40
  • ★★ Competitor analysis is still worth doing, Ali says, to see what others in the market offer and at what prices, even when you are friends with half of them. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ Ali's team uses FigJam boards and Figma for everything it brainstorms, sketches or designs in the business. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ To design a product, Ali starts from the dream outcome by asking what language would go on the product's sales page. — 00:13:15 · landing page

00:14:15 — Concept: what the product is, the destination and the vehicle, execution, the four pillars, intensity over consistency

  • ★★ Ali learned while writing Feel-Good Productivity that at every stage of making something you must keep asking what it is actually about. — 00:14:15 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Some of the mistakes Ali's team made in creating Productivity Lab came from losing focus on what the product even was. — 00:14:37
  • ★★★ Sell the destination, not the vehicle, Ali says: as package holidays sell the beach, not the flight; pitching Productivity Lab as "double your productivity" sold a vehicle, a mistake the team warned him of, and it settled on "achieve your goals". — 00:17:49
  • ★★ Ali's team's mental model: achieving goals is only about 20% knowledge and 80% execution, and audience surveys showed people struggle with actually doing the thing. — 00:18:40
  • ★★ Over 20,000 students have taken the YouTuber Foundations and YouTuber Academy courses. — 00:18:40 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali reckons over half of the YouTuber Academy's buyers have not taken any action after buying the course. — 00:19:08 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ In the $2,000 six-week live cohorts of the YouTuber Academy, only 50% of students submitted the first assignment and 15% the week-six one. — 00:19:08 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Productivity Lab was built on the idea that the true secret to productivity is accountability and execution, actually doing the thing rather than consuming content about it. — 00:20:18
  • ★★ In medical school Ali got far more work done studying with a group of friends in the Emmanuel College library than working on his own. — 00:22:56 · Emmanuel College
  • ★★ During the pandemic Ali joined London Writers' Salon's Zoom co-working sessions, then hosted his own free ones at 9 am UK time for a month or two while writing his book; hundreds joined. — 00:22:56
  • ★★ One of the big productivity habits that helps people, Ali says, is a weekly review: review your week, then plan the next. — 00:23:50 · weekly review
  • ★★ From January to April 2024 Ali hosted free weekly reflection workshops on Zoom every Sunday, joined by a couple of dozen to a few hundred people. — 00:24:11 · weekly review
  • ★★ Productivity Lab's framework: set the goal, take action, reflect and celebrate, then repeat, with a fourth pillar of building and refining your productivity system. — 00:24:38
  • ★★ Ali generally prefers teaching live, with someone on the other end of a Zoom call, to pre-recording a self-paced course. — 00:25:03

  • ★★★ When building a new product, Ali says, consistency (a little progress each week) sucks and intensity is the way to go; working on Productivity Lab bit by bit from October 2023 over the following months was a mistake. — 00:26:17

    “Consistency sucks when you're trying to build a new product from scratch. Intensity is the way to go.”

  • ★★ Michael Masterson (quoted): Michael Masterson's thesis in Ready, Fire, Aim: going from $1 million to $10 million a year comes from building good new products very fast, while getting to $1 million comes from nailing one product. — 00:27:00

  • ★ Michael Masterson (quoted): Ready, Fire, Aim gives a formula Ali calls a bit dodgy: growth from $1 million to $10 million is proportional to innovation times velocity squared. — 00:27:22
  • ★★ Ali's business makes about $5 million a year in revenue, and its next goal is $10 million, "because why not". (hedged) — 00:27:22
  • ★★★ To grow his business from about $5 million to $10 million a year, Ali says, what his team needs is new products. — 00:27:22
  • ★★★ Following Ready, Fire, Aim, Ali says a sales page, or at least its basics, should be written within 24 hours of a product idea, because it condenses the idea into its sellable form. — 00:28:57 · landing page
  • ★★ To move faster on a new product, Ali advises daily check-ins rather than weekly ones, as Alex Hormozi also says; his team has adopted them. — 00:28:57 · Alex Hormozi
  • ★★ Ali wishes his team had spent two whole days, with three to six people, ideally in person, purely on fleshing out the product. — 00:29:46
  • ★★ Ali's team got Productivity Lab ready in January and February 2024 and launched it around April 2024; since then, to November 2024, it has been iterating on it. — 00:31:01

00:32:02 — Name: the brainstorm with Greg Isenberg, Productivity Pirates, Productivity Lab and the flask logo

  • ★★ The name of a product is really important, Ali says. — 00:32:02
  • ★★ Ali recorded a naming conversation with his friend Greg Isenberg in January or February 2024, which he thinks was never uploaded. (hedged) — 00:32:02
  • ★ Ali says his team will put his hour-long naming brainstorm with Greg Isenberg on the Deep Dive channel or as an unlisted video and link it below. — 00:32:31 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Greg Isenberg (quoted): Greg Isenberg's view: a community's name is about 90% of its value. — 00:33:02
  • ★★ Ali campaigned to name the community Productivity Pirates, with pirate-themed branding; the team was against it, talked him out of it, and the name is now a running joke on his team. — 00:34:10
  • ★★ Someone who replied to a tweet suggested the name Productivity Lab; Ali's team donated $1,000 to a charity of their choice and bought the domain for, he thinks, about $10,000. (hedged) — 00:35:32

00:37:29 — Day two of filming: the critic voice and what he would do if money did not matter

  • ★★ Giving himself permission to film a long video over two days makes Ali less likely to burn out and makes the work feel more sustainable. — 00:37:29
  • ★★ The editor-critic voice ("is this useful to anyone?") is not helpful while filming, Ali says: get the material out and cut later, as with writing his book. — 00:37:55
  • ★★ Views on Ali's channel in 2024 are about 10% down on 2023. — 00:39:06
  • ★★★ For decisions about his channel and business, Ali asks what he would do if he did not care about the money and did it purely for enjoyment and service; with $100 million he would still make behind-the-scenes videos. — 00:39:35

00:41:02 — The name poll, the waitlist, annual versus monthly pricing, premium pricing and what the membership offers

  • ★★ In Ali's Instagram poll on the community's name, 18% chose Productivity Pirates, 60% Productivity Lab and 22% neither. — 00:41:53 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali's team opened a waitlist for Productivity Lab on 18 March 2024. — 00:42:22
  • ★★ Because memberships always face churn, Ali's team first sold Productivity Lab only annually, collecting a year's fee up front for a year's commitment. — 00:42:48
  • ★★★ In hindsight Ali would quite possibly have used monthly pricing rather than annual for Productivity Lab. (hedged) — 00:43:16
  • ★★ With annual pricing, people who stop using a product rarely ask for a refund, Ali says; monthly pricing would have kept his team more honest about whether members get value, with better tracking of cancellations. — 00:44:31
  • ★★ The goal for Productivity Lab in 2024 was not revenue, though it made about $800,000, but to iterate the product until users got a lot of value from it. — 00:45:00
  • ★★ Almost everyone Ali knows who runs a paid membership says customers stay only about three or four months. — 00:45:53
  • ★★★ Recurring revenue requires recurring work, Ali says: a membership takes a lot of effort to fulfil, so you may as well make a course and sell it for $300. — 00:46:16
  • ★★ Ali's team will turn the Productivity Lab material into a self-paced course sold for $300, some time in January 2025. — 00:46:16
  • ★★★ Ali would rather have fewer people paying more money than more people paying less. — 00:46:56
  • ★★ At about $1,000 a year, Productivity Lab needs only a thousand members joining each year to be a million-dollar product; at $10 a month it would need 10,000. — 00:47:20
  • ★★ The complexity of a community or membership grows with its number of members: more customer service, more events, less intimacy. — 00:47:20
  • ★★★ Not every product needs to be for everyone, Ali says: Productivity Lab at $97 a month is not for students but for working professionals and entrepreneurs, as Apple sells budget iPhones and a $30,000 Mac Pro. — 00:47:56 · Apple
  • ★★ Customers who pay more are higher-quality customers, Ali says; those spending a large share of their income on a product demand more support, which high-ticket pricing avoids. — 00:48:55
  • ★ Ali's team wants to offer Productivity Lab scholarships at some point, as it has for years for the YouTuber Academy. — 00:50:10 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Productivity Lab was priced at $97 a month. — 00:50:33
  • ★★ Productivity Lab, hosted on Circle, offers daily Zoom co-working sessions run by hired productivity coaches, weekly reflection workshops on Fridays and Sundays across time zones, and monthly and quarterly planning sessions. — 00:50:33
  • ★★ A Productivity Lab member who had procrastinated for five years on a software side project built its minimum viable product after a couple of weeks of Focus Lab co-working sessions. — 00:51:31

00:52:01 — Design: the Circle community today and the coming redesign of the website and workspaces

  • ★★ Productivity Lab now offers one-on-one onboarding calls with its productivity coaches. — 00:52:01
  • ★★ A redesign of Ali's website, aliabdaal.com, made with a web design agency, will launch, he thinks, next month (December 2024). (hedged) — 00:53:15 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★ Ali's Circle workspaces will be redesigned in the website's style: a free Ali Abdaal Academy section in blue, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy in red and Productivity Lab in purple. — 00:53:47 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★ Productivity Lab's Focus Lab sessions run several times a day, some led by its coaches and some by members called alchemists. — 00:55:20

00:56:19 — Process: building the course with Charlotte and Katie, the life productivity system and its simplification

  • ★★ In February 2024 Ali spent a Saturday co-working in Paddington, London, with university friends Sahil, who builds Firecut, and Sam, who runs The Stoic Teacher. — 00:56:19 · London
  • ★★ Working alongside other people on similar-ish things, even different ones, makes you more productive and makes work more fun, Ali says: a philosophy behind Productivity Lab. — 00:57:17
  • ★★ In April 2024 Ali worked with Charlotte, an entrepreneur, learning designer and coach, and Katie, a learning designer, on the course curriculum: full days twice a week for about three weeks, with post-its and a Miro board. — 00:57:17
  • ★★ A key insight from working with Charlotte: students need visual mental models of the material, not walls of text and slides. — 01:00:18
  • ★★ Productivity Lab's course is now on about version four, simplified after each round of student feedback, whose main point is still that it is too complicated. — 01:03:07
  • ★★ After many versions, the course's life productivity system settled on four S's, your system, skills, yourself and space, with life compass, annual goals, quarterly quests, balanced weeks, joyful days and focused hours. — 01:05:44
  • ★★ Ali says he will make another behind-the-scenes video on the course probably some time in 2025, once there is more data on its new version. (hedged) — 01:06:12
  • ★★★ The first Productivity Lab cohort had about 500 people, many of them entrepreneurs, nine-to-five professionals and parents without much time; a few hours a week on the course was too much. — 01:06:42
  • ★★ Having worked on the course full-time for a month, Ali lost sight of his members' time: his version of simple is not most people's. — 01:07:07
  • ★★ Ali first delivered the four-week Productivity Lab course as a live cohort in about May 2024. — 01:07:07

01:07:57 — Response: launch figures, the ludicrous money-back guarantee, refund requests and what they taught the team

  • ★★ Productivity Lab launched through a free two-hour quarterly alignment workshop with over 10,000 registrations; Ali still runs one about every quarter and invites attendees to join at the end. (hedged) — 01:07:57
  • ★★★ Productivity Lab's first launch brought 615 sales and $458,000, reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and drew 27 refund requests. — 01:08:26
  • ★★ After later rounds of about 300 and 200 students, Productivity Lab has about a thousand members. — 01:08:54
  • ★★★ Productivity Lab has a "ludicrous money-back guarantee": members pay $1,000 for the year, and even 11 months in, anyone who says they do not like it gets the whole year refunded. — 01:10:05

  • ★★ Ali calls it the "help Ali sleep at night" money-back guarantee, an idea he took from an Instagram ad by One Peak Creative (as heard): he would lose sleep over an unhappy customer. — 01:10:31 · Instagram

    “the help Ali sleep at night money back guarantee”

  • ★★★ A generous money-back guarantee cuts a new customer's risk to about zero, and lets Ali's team release a product without sinking into perfectionism and analysis paralysis; refund requests then show what to improve. — 01:11:38

  • ★★ After one refund request complained about the onboarding, Ali's team completely revamped Productivity Lab's onboarding. — 01:13:42
  • ★★ More than half of Productivity Lab's refund requests say the session timings do not work for the member. — 01:14:07
  • ★★ A friend who runs several membership programmes told Ali that overwhelm is the biggest reason people cancel memberships, so his team is making Productivity Lab feel less overwhelming. — 01:15:32
  • ★★ Productivity Lab is deliberately not an "access to Ali" product: members get value from what the team built, with only a monthly Q&A with him. — 01:15:59
  • ★★ In 2025 Ali's team will release a mastermind, an access-to-Ali product probably costing about $30,000 a year. (hedged) — 01:15:59
  • ★★ A difficulty of a personal brand: people want more of Ali, but his time is stretched and he must do the highest-leverage things, which is not engaging in the community. — 01:16:53
  • ★★ When customers want something the product will not give, such as more of Ali, set expectations clearly on the sales page, for example in an FAQ. — 01:17:22 · landing page

  • ★★★ Ali's advice to new entrepreneurs and creators worried about selling: refunds are your best friend; offer an unlimited money-back guarantee, because you only want money from people who get value. — 01:20:28

    “Refunds are your best friend.”

  • ★★ Productivity Lab has had about 100 refund requests so far. (hedged) — 01:20:52

  • ★★★ Each refund request still feels like a punch to the gut to Ali; part of the spiritual challenge of building a business is to feel that emotion and be okay with it. — 01:20:52
  • ★★ Do not overcorrect a product for one person's feedback, Ali says, but act when a handful say the same thing, such as that it is too overwhelming. — 01:21:21
  • ★★ A product balances the offer, what customers expect, against what is delivered: customers should know what they are getting and get it, ideally more. — 01:21:55

01:23:21 — What is left for the Business Class newsletter; asking viewers for feedback

  • ★★ Ali says his Business Class newsletter will at some point give a behind-the-scenes look at how his team structures staffing, onboarding, operations, finances and HR. — 01:23:21
  • ★ Ali says his channel will do more behind-the-scenes business videos like this one. — 01:24:04

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Circle · money-back guarantee · Productivity Lab · Ready, Fire, Aim

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Angus (general manager) · Anne-Laure Le Cunff · Charlotte (learning designer, mentioned from 2024) · Dan Koe · Dickie Bush · Gareth · Greg Isenberg · James Clear · Mark Manson · Michael Masterson · Nicolas Cole · Ryan Holiday · Sahil · Sam · Sam Ovens · Tiago Forte · Tim Urban

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Business Class · Deep Dive · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Amazon · Apple · Emmanuel College · Instagram · London Writers' Salon · Mighty Networks · Ness Labs · Skool

Concepts: analysis paralysis · GPS: goal, plan, system · landing page · minimum viable product · personal brand · quarterly quest · weekly review

Places: Cambridge · London · Tenerife

Products: FigJam · Figma · Firecut · Miro

Also centred on Productivity Lab: 7 Mistakes to Avoid While Building Your First Business · Stop Wasting Time - 11 Tools to Double Your Focus · A Week in My Life · Vlog

Also centred on Ready, Fire, Aim: 19 Books to Transform Your 2026

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