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How I Made My First $1M at 26 - Every Step Explained

2025-06-25 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 34:24 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Personal story · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

Ali tells how he became a millionaire at 26 without aiming for it: years of tutoring and web work to a first $1,000, four years "in the trenches" with his medical school admissions courses, then outsourcing editing and the YouTuber Academy year of about $1.2 million; he argues anyone can make a first $1,000 and that fear, not admin, holds people back.

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: a millionaire at 26, by accident

  • ★★★ Ali says he became a millionaire at 26 somewhat accidentally: becoming a millionaire was never his goal. — 00:00:00

00:00:38 — Why accidental: the goal was an extra 3K a month

  • ★★ Ali spent six years at medical school at Cambridge University from 18 to 24, and in his first job as a doctor at 24 earned about £3,000 a month. — 00:00:38 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★★ Ali's goal was an extra £2,000 to £3,000 a month, doubling his salary, so he could work three or four days a week in medicine, as the happiest doctors he knew worked part-time. — 00:00:38
  • ★★ Growing up in the UK with a single mother who was a doctor, among people who were nearly all doctors, Ali thought £100,000 a year was about the most anyone could earn. — 00:01:25 · United Kingdom
  • ★★ Had his target been one of the big figures people on YouTube throw out, such as 100 or 200 grand, or 100K or 10K a month, Ali says he would have been paralysed and not known where to begin. — 00:01:48

00:02:11 — The first $1,000: a $10 digital product, a service, Million Dollar Weekend

  • ★★ Ali made his first dollar online at 13; through bits of web design, web development and private tutoring it took him about five years to make his first $1,000 online. — 00:02:15
  • ★★ Ali says that today most people serious about making money can get to their first $1,000 online within about six weeks, maybe 90 days, judging by his experience and that of his friends. — 00:02:44
  • ★★★ For a first $1,000, Ali suggests creating a digital product such as a PDF, spreadsheet, template or 5,000-word ebook from expertise others value, and selling it for about $10, even to friends and family. — 00:02:44
  • ★★ Ali also suggests asking what you are good at and what friends ask your advice on, then selling it as a service, such as training someone over a Zoom call. — 00:03:41
  • ★★★ Ali says making a first $1,000 is really easy and anyone can do it, while reaching $100,000 is really hard: that takes adding value and finding something the market wants. — 00:04:03
  • ★★ A couple of days before this video, at an in-person event in Hong Kong with 100 people, Ali found himself recommending the same books to about 15 people asking how to start a first business. — 00:04:45 · Hong Kong
  • ★★★ For anyone who has not yet made $1,000 online or started a business, Ali calls Noah Kagan's Million Dollar Weekend required reading: a step-by-step guide to a first business idea and making money from it. — 00:05:15 · Noah Kagan
  • ★★ Ali says everyone he has met who read Million Dollar Weekend and did what Noah Kagan recommends made $1,000 online, unlike those who never acted on it or never read it. — 00:05:42 · Noah Kagan
  • ★★ After Million Dollar Weekend, Ali suggests The Millionaire Fastlane audiobook, DotCom Secrets and $100M Offers, though none of them is needed for a first $1,000 online. — 00:05:42 · The Millionaire Fastlane, Alex Hormozi
  • ★★ Ali says his team may run a six-week challenge, hosted by him, to help people make their first $1,000 online, with a waitlist, though it has not decided yet. (hedged) — 00:06:25

00:06:47 — Grammarly sponsor read

00:08:12 — Fear of business administration

  • ★★ Ali says starting a business is easy in most developed countries with Stripe and PayPal, while in Pakistan, where he is from, accepting payments online is hard. — 00:08:21 · Pakistan
  • ★★ Ali says anyone in the UK can register a business at Companies House for about £10. — 00:08:53 · United Kingdom
  • ★ Ali believes UK law lets you earn up to about £1,000 a year tax-free without declaring it. (hedged) — 00:09:34 · United Kingdom
  • ★★★ Ali says a beginner needs no registered company, accountant or business bank account: step one is to start making real money, step two to deal with the admin of starting a business. — 00:10:03
  • ★★★ Ali says the real reason people do not start businesses is fear of putting themselves out there; not knowing an accountant or the right company structure is where they hide. — 00:10:03
  • ★★ Ali says the word "business" is unnecessarily scary: it just means offering a thing and charging for it, like selling hot dogs at a fair or tutoring a friend's child. — 00:11:28
  • ★★ When Ali began selling his medical school courses at 18 he did not think of it as a business, just as having something to teach; had he, he says, it would probably have held him back. — 00:11:28 · 6med

  • ★★ Ali says the idea of a "business with a capital B" holds many people back because it sounds far scarier than it is. — 00:11:56

    “This idea of business with a capital B”

  • ★★ Only when his courses made about £10,000 did Ali register them as a business; he had made small amounts online for years, including his first $1,000, without registering. — 00:12:18 · 6med

00:12:41 — The 3 stages of making money

  • ★★★ Ali advises starting as a "one figure entrepreneur": make your first dollar online, then $10, $100 and $1,000, and only then research registering a business and taxes. — 00:12:44

    “you want to start out by being a one figure entrepreneur”

  • ★★★ Ali's map of making money: the first $1,000 makes you a four-figure entrepreneur; $1,000 to $100,000 is "the trenches", which is really hard. — 00:13:48

    “I'm going to call that the trenches.”

  • ★★ Once a business has made $100,000 in revenue, Ali says, growing it is not that hard: it has added that much value to customers, so reaching $150,000 up to a million becomes doable. — 00:14:15

00:14:59 — $1,000 to $100,000: the medical school courses business in the trenches

  • ★★ At 18 or 19 Ali set the goal of an extra £3,000 a month; tutoring at £15 an hour that meant about 200 hours a month alongside medical school, which seemed unsustainable. — 00:15:16
  • ★★★ Ali started selling day-long courses for medical school applicants at about £60 a student, at first with two or three people in a rented conference room at the local mosque; a class of about eight made about £400 in a day. — 00:15:45 · 6med
  • ★★ Later Ali's courses filled classrooms of 30 students at £60, £1,800 a day; a course on a Saturday and a Sunday in the summer holidays met his goal of £3,000 a month. — 00:16:14 · 6med
  • ★★ At 18 Ali lost his $1,000 of life savings trying to buy a dodgy MacBook from a seller on Craigslist, which pushed him to find a way to make money. — 00:17:12 · MacBook
  • ★★★ The medical school courses business made about £8,000 (about $10,000) in its first year and about £70,000 in revenue the next, with £20,000 to £30,000 profit for Ali. (hedged) — 00:17:12 · 6med
  • ★★★ The business then plateaued at about £150,000 revenue, with Ali making about £40,000 profit a year; the climb took about four years during medical school. — 00:17:39 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali spent weekends, evenings and summers writing and printing course booklets and booking hotel conference rooms around the country, and ran courses in Singapore and Amsterdam with friends. — 00:17:39 · 6med
  • ★★ When the booklets for a 30-student course in Manchester were never delivered, Ali cancelled his day and took the train three hours from Cambridge to hand-deliver spare ones; it happened a handful of times. — 00:19:20 · Cambridge

00:20:19 — Making mistakes in my first business: friends as tutors, sacrifices, delegation, finals

  • ★★★ When friends taught a course without him, paid a few hundred pounds a day, Ali saw he could make money by building the system: the first time he decoupled his time from money. — 00:20:58 · 6med
  • ★★ To make time for the business, Ali mostly sacrificed only TV: he set a rule never to watch TV on his own, saving hours every week. — 00:20:58
  • ★ Ali occasionally missed things such as a friend's birthday party to teach a course, but seldom enough that it was no big deal to him. — 00:21:36
  • ★★ In his fifth year, with his friend Sahil visiting from America with friends in his room, Ali spent three hours answering customer support emails, and the visitors left. — 00:22:00
  • ★★ Ali calls it a big mistake, not repeated since, that four or five years into the business he did not realise he could outsource customer support; with no systems he was the bottleneck. — 00:22:42
  • ★★ A couple of years later Ali discovered Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited, which made him realise he could outsource, hire and delegate; before, his delegation was asking friends to teach courses. — 00:23:29
  • ★★ From the mistakes of his medical school admissions business, Ali learned to start delegating sooner rather than later once he started his YouTube channel and online courses. — 00:24:11
  • ★★★ Ali started his YouTube channel at 23 as a content-marketing driver for his courses: videos helping applicants get into medical school would bring sign-ups. — 00:24:11 · 6med
  • ★★★ During his finals in 2017 Ali chose to spend an extra 20 hours a week on his YouTube channel, then a few hundred subscribers, rather than grind for a distinction. — 00:25:12
  • ★★ Ali told himself that, done strategically, anything above a pass in finals was wasted effort, since exam grades correlate very little with performance as a doctor. — 00:25:12
  • ★★ Ali scored in the 80s in his clinical exams but aimed only to pass the written exams of memorised details, and scraped a pass by about 2%. — 00:26:01
  • ★★ Ali says a medical student who really wants to be a doctor should care about exams, but anything pursued outside work costs some grades, and the trade-off is a personal decision. — 00:26:28
  • ★★★ In 2019, with his channel at about 200,000 subscribers and no longer enjoying medical school admissions work, Ali got an offer, not for much money, to buy his courses business. (hedged) — 00:27:19 · 6med

00:27:21 — From $100K to $1M: selling the business, the first editor, the YouTuber Academy

  • ★★★ Rohan, who bought the business and became Ali's friend and mentor, asked why he still edited himself; Ali's $5-an-hour editor in the Philippines had not been good. — 00:28:02
  • ★★★ Pushed by Rohan, Ali hired Christian, who had emailed asking to be his editor, as his first editor; he stayed about four years, at first paid all the channel's income. — 00:28:57 · Christian
  • ★★ Ali is glad he hired an editor: it freed his time for Skillshare classes, more videos and sponsorships, which took the business from 100K to 300K and then to 500K. — 00:28:57 · Skillshare classes
  • ★★★ Ali says the pattern of how he has made money is doing a thing, then teaching a course on it: exams, getting into medical school, then building a YouTube channel. — 00:29:26
  • ★★ To those who call teaching the people behind you a pyramid scheme, Ali replies that this is how teaching works. — 00:29:53
  • ★★★ In 2020, when Ali was 26, his team launched the YouTuber Academy, and that year the business made about $1.2 million in revenue: on paper he became a millionaire. — 00:30:23 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali says the only thing holding people back from a first $1,000 is their own emotions: fear of admin, of being laughed at, of having no value, and of selling. — 00:30:23

  • ★★ "Abdaal's first law": any adult with a pulse in the Western world can make $1,000 online fairly easily by getting past their own emotions. — 00:31:00

    “Abdal's first law”

  • ★★ Past $100,000, Ali hears, every tripling becomes hard: $100,000 to $300,000 is easy enough, $300,000 to a million harder, one to three million harder again. (hedged) — 00:31:25

  • ★★ Ali's business now makes a few million dollars a year in revenue and profit and has never passed $10 million. — 00:31:25
  • ★★ Citing his mentor Olly Richards, Ali says $1 to $3 million a year is a very good place for a YouTuber selling courses; $10 million needs ads, a bigger team, more costs and high-ticket offers. — 00:31:52
  • ★★★ Ali thinks aiming to become a millionaire would have held him back through overthinking; his modest goals, to make money online and then £3,000 a month, got him through the early stages. — 00:32:21

00:32:45 — Why he still makes videos once money is not the point; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali tries not to think of his videos as making money, as that sucks the motivation out when he already has enough; he finds it fulfilling when people get real value. — 00:33:33

In the description and comments

  • ★★★ Asked how "never the goal" fits his earlier "unhealthily obsessed" with money, Ali says £3,000 a month, not a million, was the goal, to have the option of part-time medicine. — creator comment
  • ★★ Ali gives prices in US dollars because his channel's audience is about 20% US, 10% UK, 15% India and 55% the rest of the world. — creator comment · United Kingdom
  • ★★ Ali says his is a personal channel, not a productivity channel, and he makes no more study videos: seven years after university, how-to-study content no longer interests him. — creator comment
  • ★★ Asked whether he took courses to get where he is, Ali says he read loads of books, took loads of courses and had lots of one-to-one coaches. — creator comment
  • ★ Replying to a viewer who paid £2,400 for a SixMed advanced course and found it disappointing, Ali says that since selling the business he has nothing to do with its quality assurance, and suggests asking for a refund under its generous refund policy. — creator comment · 6med
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): To a viewer in their sixties asking if it is too late to make money online, the channel says customers do not care about age, only whether you offer value. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked where to sell ebooks or PDFs, the channel suggests Stan or Gumroad. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 6med · Million Dollar Weekend

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Christian · Jake (friend, mentioned from 2017) · James · Katherine · Michael Gerber · MJ DeMarco · Noah Kagan · Olly Richards · Rohan · Russell Brunson

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Skillshare classes

Works: $100M Offers · BMAT · DotCom Secrets · The E-Myth · The Millionaire Fastlane · UKCAT

Organizations: Craigslist · Fiverr · PayPal · Stripe · University of Cambridge

Concepts: content marketing · leverage

Places: Amsterdam · Birmingham · Cambridge · Hong Kong · Manchester · Pakistan · Philippines · Singapore · United Kingdom

Products: MacBook

Only in the description or credits: Gumroad

Also centred on Million Dollar Weekend: How to Start Your First Business in 48 Hours · 19 Books to Transform Your 2026 · My honest advice to someone who wants passive income · I've Read 417 books. These 4 will make you financially free

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