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If I Started YouTube from Scratch in 2026, I’d do THIS

2026-03-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Chris Williamson, Tiago Forte · recording, 33:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, AI, Sponsor segment present

Starting YouTube from scratch in 2026, Ali would work on three S's (strategy, skills, systems): set the goal among fun, fulfilment and finances, seek alignment between you, your content and your business (business first if you want money), build the click, watch, like and trust skills by leaning into expertise, and systemise production.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Growing a channel from zero as a doctor in 2017 to 2020; what this video covers

  • ★★ Ali grew his YouTube channel from zero to over a million subscribers while working full-time as a doctor, from 2017 through 2020, and says things are very different now. — 00:00:00 · Ali Abdaal

00:00:58 — The three S's: skills, strategy, systems

  • ★★★ Ali names three factors behind a successful YouTube channel: skills, strategy and systems; without systems to sustain content output, he says, you burn out very quickly. — 00:01:22

00:01:51 — Goal before strategy: the three Fs of fun, fulfillment and finances and where you sit on the spectrum

  • ★★ A strategy is a plan that gets you to a goal, Ali says, so before choosing a strategy for a YouTube channel you need to know its goal. — 00:01:51
  • ★★ Most people want some combination of three things from a YouTube channel, Ali says: the three Fs of fun, fulfilment and finances. — 00:02:20 · freedom profile
  • ★★ When he started his business, Ali's dream was to make an extra £3,000 (about $4,000) of passive income a month, which would have let him go part-time as a doctor. — 00:02:20 · passive income
  • ★ Ali sets aside fame as a fourth goal for a YouTube channel: people tend to care less about fame as they grow older. — 00:02:57
  • ★★ Although everyone wants fun, fulfilment and money from a YouTube channel, Ali finds it very useful to decide which of them you care about more. — 00:03:27
  • ★★ If you do YouTube purely for fun and do not care about money, Ali says, you need little strategy: you can make videos about whatever you want, with no need for consistency or an upload schedule. — 00:03:55
  • ★★ Once there is a financial motive behind a YouTube channel, Ali says, a sensible strategy really helps: treating YouTube more like a business than a hobby. — 00:04:24

00:04:50 — Alignment between you, your content and your business, with Aman, Kepi and Ben, and Jeff Su

  • ★★★ Ali's key word for a YouTube strategy is alignment between you, your content and your business; alignment between you and your content gives fun and fulfilment. — 00:04:54
  • ★★★ Alignment between your content and your business, the product or service you sell, is where the money comes from, Ali says. — 00:05:23
  • ★★ Ali does not generally recommend the influencer business model, where a creator makes money only through AdSense and brand deals. — 00:05:23 · YouTube AdSense
  • ★★ Ali's example of alignment: Aman, a student of his YouTuber Academy, makes content about helping students land a software engineering job and runs a business that does the same. — 00:06:00 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Kepi and Ben, YouTuber Academy students who sell a paid songwriting membership community, make decent money because their content also teaches songwriting, Ali says. — 00:06:29 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ You need not know your business from day one, Ali says: you can start making content about random things, let your niche emerge over time and work out the business model later. — 00:07:28
  • ★★ Ali's example of content first: Jeff Su, a YouTuber Academy student, began making content about productivity tools while working at Google, without caring much about making money. — 00:07:28 · Google, Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:07:57 — Skillshare sponsor read

00:09:25 — Content first versus business first: Chris Williamson, SixMed, Jeremy, and why creator-first gets harder

  • ★★ Ali calls Chris Williamson's path with the Modern Wisdom podcast the creator-first approach: he worked out the business side downstream of playing the content game first. — 00:10:23
  • ★★ If you do YouTube mainly for fun and fulfilment and do not mind making no money for the next few years, Ali says the creator-first path is perfect for you. — 00:10:58
  • ★★★ If you care about making money, Ali still recommends starting YouTube business first, as he did: focus on building a business rather than worrying about the content. — 00:11:27
  • ★★ Ali says only about 3% of the people who watch his videos have an established business. — 00:11:27
  • ★★ When Ali started his YouTube channel in 2017, his business was SixMed, since sold, which helped students get into medical school in the UK. — 00:12:25 · 6med
  • ★★ SixMed capped out at around £150,000 a year in revenue, after which Ali decided to do content marketing on YouTube. — 00:12:25 · 6med
  • ★★ Without knowing the term content marketing, Ali made YouTube videos teaching SixMed's material, hoping viewers would think him legit and buy his course, and that sustained the business for many years. — 00:12:50 · 6med
  • ★★ After selling SixMed, Ali focused on content for a while, became known as a productivity expert, and that led him to write his book Feel-Good Productivity. — 00:12:50 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), 6med
  • ★★ When many people asked how he built his channel, Ali brought business back in by selling a course teaching people how to do YouTube. — 00:12:50 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's example of business first: Jeremy, a YouTuber Academy student, sells software that helps gardeners and started a YouTube channel as a marketing driver for it. — 00:13:20 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Making content first and building a business later gets harder every year, Ali says: AI makes creating content easy for anyone, everything skews to short form, and subscribers no longer really matter. — 00:14:18
  • ★★ Ali says the YouTube algorithm pushes videos based on their content rather than on whether viewers are subscribed to the creator. — 00:14:18
  • ★★★ Starting from scratch, Ali would first work out which of his skills could solve other people's problems, ideally painful ones needing his expertise, then make content aligned with him and that business. — 00:14:48

00:15:15 — Get going, get good, get smart; getting bored of your content faster than your business

  • ★★★ If you have made fewer than seven videos, Ali says, ignore all strategy advice and just make the seven videos: the process teaches you far more than watching videos about strategy. — 00:15:17
  • ★★ In the get good stage Ali recommends another 20 to 30 videos focused on the craft; you may find you hate YouTube and prefer writing on LinkedIn or Substack. — 00:15:46 · LinkedIn
  • ★★★ You will get bored of your content far faster than your business stops benefiting from it, Ali says, because your interests and values change over time. — 00:16:44
  • ★★ Ali, who started in 2017 with videos helping people get into medical school, says he no longer particularly cares about that. — 00:17:13
  • ★★ You make far more money sticking to one thing for a very long time, Ali says, but your interests will probably change faster than your business can evolve. — 00:17:42
  • ★★ Ali says he has partly started new businesses over the years to keep his content aligned with what he cares about, accepting the cost to maximise his fun and fulfilment. — 00:18:12

00:18:41 — Practical questions to find your channel and business

  • ★★ To find your channel and business, Ali suggests journaling on questions such as what topics you would talk about on a channel that could never make money, and what you would sell at a minimum of $2,000. — 00:18:41

  • ★★★ Ali's hot take: the more alignment you have between you, your content and your business, the better your life will be. — 00:19:39

    “the more you have alignment between you, your content and your business, the better your life will be”

00:20:05 — The four skills: click, watch, like, trust

  • ★★ Ali says YouTube is a click-and-watch platform: once someone clicks on your video, YouTube really cares about watch time. — 00:20:38
  • ★★★ YouTube skills aim at four things, Ali says: getting people to click and watch, and, less talked about, to like and trust you; with a critical mass of viewers you can build a business around the channel. — 00:21:07
  • ★★ Viewers come to trust a creator's integrity and also their expertise, which Ali calls especially important for an educational rather than an entertainment channel. — 00:21:36

00:22:07 — Leaning into expertise makes monetising far easier: Tiago Forte versus entertainment creators

  • ★★ Tiago Forte's YouTube expertise pays off, Ali says, because he sells products based on it: courses on personal knowledge management and on productivity. — 00:23:22 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Use your expertise to solve a problem that makes or saves people money or a lot of time, Ali says, and you can charge a lot for it. — 00:23:51
  • ★★ Entertainment YouTubers find it very hard to monetise, Ali says; huge ones like MrBeast, KSI and Logan Paul monetise attention through food and drink brands, not expertise. — 00:23:51
  • ★★ Ali, like many creators much smaller than MrBeast, has tried to build a brand selling cheap things and found it very hard to get large numbers of people to buy. — 00:24:21
  • ★★★ If you have pre-existing expertise, Ali says, lean into it fully for your channel; if you do not, you can build those skills. — 00:25:19
  • ★★ Ali knows creators with only a few thousand YouTube subscribers, niched into expertise valuable to individuals and businesses, who make millions of dollars a year. — 00:25:19
  • ★★ Ali says every current AI influencer knew nothing about AI three years ago and built expertise by learning and documenting it on YouTube. (overstated) — 00:25:19

00:26:10 — Questions to identify your expertise; Hannah the ballet dancer

  • ★★ To find your expertise, Ali asks what problems people come to you to help solve, at work and in private, and what you find weirdly easy that others find weirdly hard. — 00:26:17
  • ★★ Ali puts the £15,000 that Hannah, a professional ballet dancer, made after his YouTube course (within a few months, by her own account) down to her leaning into pre-existing expertise. — 00:27:45 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ You do not need to be very entertaining to make a big difference by teaching people, Ali says, and then sell expertise-based offers such as a course, a membership community, a service or consulting. — 00:28:30
  • ★★ Content that leans into your expertise or niche is easier to make and to monetise, Ali says, because it is much easier to be known for one thing than for many. — 00:29:00

00:29:07 — Systems for ideas, packaging, scripting, filming, editing, publishing, analytics and repurposing

  • ★★★ To sustain YouTube for years, Ali advises breaking video production into a pipeline and systemising every step as much as you can without losing a creator's soul and authenticity. — 00:29:29
  • ★★ Having made over a thousand videos in eight years, Ali says, you run out of ideas and need a system for idea generation. — 00:29:29
  • ★★ For a video's packaging, Ali suggests recording a voice note on the concept and having AI generate title ideas and thumbnail concepts to pick from, then editing the photo in a tool such as Canva. — 00:29:58
  • ★ Ali has his own template system for all the thumbnails on his channel, which is why they look similar. — 00:30:27
  • ★★★ The mistake many YouTubers make is scripting every video word for word, which takes ages, Ali says; his team recommends bullet points instead. — 00:30:27
  • ★★ Ali advises against copying someone else's video templates wholesale: use them as inspiration and build your own systems, since you understand a system you built far better. — 00:30:57
  • ★★ Ali plans most of his videos by talking to VoicePal, which asks him follow-up questions, then puts that into Notion and uses Notion AI to turn it into an outline from his script template. — 00:31:26 · VoicePal, Notion
  • ★★ In his first years on YouTube, Ali realised that leaving his camera set up in the living room at all times made producing videos much quicker, even though it looked a bit annoying. — 00:31:55
  • ★★ Ideally, Ali says, once you have edited a few of your own videos, outsource your editing and find a video editor. — 00:32:24
  • ★★ Ali's team makes content for YouTube as its primary platform and repurposes some of it onto Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. — 00:32:53 · Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok
  • ★★ Ali thinks having the right systems is one of the most important parts of building a sustainable YouTube channel over the long term. — 00:32:53

00:33:11 — Pointer to his studio video and sign-off

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Mentioned

Central: alignment of you, your content and your business · business-first approach · click, watch, like, trust · creator-first approach · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · three S's of YouTube

Also: People: Aman · Chris Williamson · Hannah · Jeff Su · Jeremy · KSI · Logan Paul · MrBeast · Tiago Forte

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Modern Wisdom

Organizations: 6med · Google · How To Write Songs · Instagram · LinkedIn · Skillshare · TikTok

Concepts: content marketing · freedom profile · get going, get good, get smart · hook · motivation matrix · parasocial relationship · passive income · personal knowledge management · triplet method · watch time

Places: Amsterdam · Singapore

Products: Canva · Google Workspace · Notion · Notion AI · Substack · VoicePal · YouTube AdSense

Also centred on business-first approach: My Honest Advice to Anyone Starting YouTube in 2026 · If You Want to Make Money From YouTube, Do This.

Also centred on creator-first approach: My Honest Advice to Anyone Starting YouTube in 2026 · If You Want to Make Money From YouTube, Do This.

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