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The Simplest Way to Make $10k/month - Case Study

2026-05-07 · Podcast or interview · Ali, William Brown · recording, 55:48 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali interviews William Brown, who grew an online education business from a $50 Word document to $16.4 million, about his five-step roadmap to $10k a month (offer, traffic, sales process, conversion, value): pricing at 10–15% of the buyer's 12-month value, teaching from a 3 out of 10, cheap ads run as pure maths, scripted sales calls and a human touch in delivery.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Ali introduces William Brown and asks for the high-level roadmap from beginner to 10K a month

  • ★★ William Brown started his online business by charging a stranger on the internet $50 for a three-page Word document; it grew to $16.4 million over the next few years and he sold it to a US private equity firm. — 00:00:00 · United States

00:01:10 — The five-step roadmap: offer, traffic, sales process, conversion, value; the accountant Kevin

  • ★★★ William Brown's roadmap from beginner to 10K a month with an online education business has five steps: offer, traffic, sales process, conversion and value. — 00:01:10
  • ★★ William Brown: For traffic to an offer William Brown names organic content, paid with your time, and paid ads, paid with money, and says the best thing is to do both in combination. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ William Brown: For William Brown the best sales process is an explainer video that tells viewers about you and how you can help them, with a button to book a call. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ William Brown says his client Kevin, an accountant, was doing multi-five figures a month within a few months of working through the five steps. — 00:02:53

00:03:20 — What an offer is, the I help statement, and whether to niche down

  • ★★ William Brown thinks of a business as 50% offer and 50% marketing: a great offer nobody hears about fails, and great marketing of a bad offer ends in refunds. — 00:03:20

  • ★★ William Brown starts an offer with a promise in an "I help statement": I help these people to do this by this method. — 00:03:48

    “That's what I call an I help statement.”

  • ★★★ William Brown is not a fan of niching down: it makes your market smaller, so he has always gone after the entire market. — 00:04:17

  • ★ William Brown's last market was all losing traders on the planet; his current one is anyone with a skill, talent or knowledge who wants to build an e-learning company. — 00:04:17
  • ★★ Ali objects that specialists can charge more: he would pay a wedding photographer far more than a general photographer, and a neurosurgeon earns more than a GP while standing out in a crowded market. — 00:04:41
  • ★★ William Brown: Conceding that a market like fat loss benefits from niching in slightly, William Brown still suggests keeping the market broad for most industries. — 00:05:42

00:05:53 — How to price an offer, finding your skill, and who you can help most

  • ★★★ William Brown prices an offer at roughly 10 to 15% of its 12-month value to the buyer: if Kevin adds $50,000 to a business in a year, $5,000 is fair, provided the customer can afford it. — 00:06:50
  • ★★ William Brown: For outcomes that seem hard to value, such as stopping drinking for executives, William Brown says you can still put a financial number on what sorting out their life is worth to them. — 00:08:37
  • ★ William Brown believes his client who helps executives stop drinking alcohol charges about $8,500 for a year of working with him. (hedged) — 00:08:37
  • ★★ William Brown: To find an offer William Brown asks people for their skill, talent or specialist knowledge; nine in ten name something, and if not he asks what they love doing or are good at. — 00:09:03
  • ★ William Brown: A client of William Brown who was good at talking to women and arranging dates turned it into a cold-approach offer and is making a lot of money with it. — 00:09:31
  • ★★ Ali says a big question for an offer is who you can actually help the most: he would challenge a doctor who wants to help people into medical school to name the country and kind of school they know best, such as public medical schools in the UK. — 00:11:00
  • ★★★ Ali's approach to choosing whom to sell to is to start niche and broaden out from there to land on the absolute dream client who would shout your name from the rooftops. — 00:11:49
  • ★★ William Brown thinks of the offer first, the market second and the avatar third; when the three align, you have a good offer. — 00:11:49

00:12:14 — Trading 212 sponsor read

00:13:35 — Building the offer, pitfalls, choosing the avatar, and affordability

  • ★ William Brown says the detail of what an offer is, who it is for and not for and how it works belongs in the sales process, not in the offer itself. — 00:13:42
  • ★★ William Brown: The major pitfall William Brown sees at the offer stage is struggling to identify an avatar in a massive market, which often comes down to self-belief. — 00:14:11
  • ★★★ William Brown: An offer does not need to be 10 out of 10, William Brown says: it just needs to be good enough to help the zeros and the ones. — 00:14:44
  • ★★ William Brown: To find the avatar in a big market William Brown looks at sex, age, country and affordability, and above all at how serious the problem is to that person. — 00:14:44
  • ★ William Brown: A client of William Brown sells male fitness only to people over 50 in America, a more serious avatar than 20-year-olds. — 00:15:49 · United States
  • ★★ William Brown sells a $12 book containing everything he learned in the first six years of his career, a gateway to his main program. — 00:16:17
  • ★★ William Brown wants to help as many people as possible: with only a very expensive program he would rule out 90% of the market, so he also sells a cheap book alongside his course, coaching program and mastermind. — 00:16:46

00:17:26 — What if I don't have a skill to teach: the scale of one to ten, qualifications, saturated markets

  • ★ William Brown: As a golf beginner William Brown would not want to learn from Tiger Woods but from someone about a four to a six. — 00:17:53
  • ★★★ William Brown: On a scale of one to ten in a skill, William Brown says anyone above about two and a half or three can start an online education business by teaching zeros; a four or five can teach zeros to twos. — 00:18:21
  • ★★ William Brown: A teaching qualification is nice to have but not essential, William Brown says; qualifications can box you in, and teaching from natural skill is more genuine. — 00:19:40
  • ★★ William Brown says the online education business model is not suitable for people who truly have no skill, talent or specialist knowledge and no self-belief at all, though most people have something. — 00:20:50
  • ★ William Brown: A former client of William Brown who teaches knitting went from about 11,000 to about 19,000 a month while working with him. — 00:20:50
  • ★★ In applications to the Lifestyle Business Academy, Ali's team looks for evidence of a pre-existing professional or personal skill set that could lead to a high-ticket offer of at least $2,000. — 00:21:58 · Lifestyle Business Academy, the $2,000 offer rule
  • ★★ William Brown: A former client of William Brown who helps men get visible six-packs makes over $300,000 a month, with offers at $5,000 and $15,000. — 00:22:26
  • ★★★ William Brown: Against fears of a saturated market, William Brown says to find other people doing the same thing: if nobody is, the idea is probably bad; if many are, it is clearly good. (hedged) — 00:23:20

  • ★★ William Brown: In a crowded market, William Brown says, people buy people along with the outcome: customers buy a programme because of who teaches it. — 00:23:20

    “The truth is people buy people along with the outcome.”

00:23:53 — Step 2: traffic, starting small and running ads

  • ★★★ William Brown: The simplest start for someone with knowledge to sell, William Brown says, is a YouTube channel with one or two talking-head videos a week to the ideal customer and a very small offer, such as a few consulting calls for $500 to $1,000. — 00:23:53 · YouTube
  • ★★ William Brown says you do not have to start with ads, a big sales process and a high price: start small and get it working; just getting started is the best advice. — 00:24:42
  • ★★ William Brown says a good starting ad budget is about $1,000 a month, because on average it costs about $70 to book a sales call, depending on the offer. — 00:25:11
  • ★★ William Brown: The average show rate for booked sales calls is about 65%, William Brown says: ten calls for about $700 give six taken calls and, hopefully, one sale. — 00:25:36
  • ★★ William Brown's first ads were a screenshot of a chart with a voiceover and subtitles, and they made him multiple millions of dollars. — 00:26:27
  • ★★★ William Brown: Ads do not have to be fancy or well produced, William Brown says, but they do have to be well written. — 00:26:27
  • ★★ William Brown: To claims that ads and organic content keep getting harder, William Brown says that if you do it right and are good at it, it always works; his own cold ads, restarted ten weeks ago, have phenomenal numbers. — 00:27:53
  • ★★ Ali says his team has relied on organic content for basically his whole career rather than ads. — 00:28:50
  • ★★★ William Brown: To start ads William Brown would write five hooks and two ad bodies for a first batch of ten ads, run them on Facebook and Instagram at about $50 to $100 a day into an explainer video to book a call, and turn off ads that book no calls. — 00:28:50 · Facebook, Instagram
  • ★★ William Brown: As ad spend scales and costs rise, William Brown says, profitability falls and you rewrite a new batch of ads to bring the cost back down. — 00:30:27
  • ★★ William Brown's ads currently return about 6.7 times their cost: $1,000 spent brings $6,700 back in a month; he calls anything 2x or above great. — 00:30:51
  • ★★ William Brown keeps scaling ad spend until the return falls to about two or two and a half, then stops scaling and makes new ads. — 00:30:51
  • ★★ William Brown: Running ads is pure mathematics, William Brown says, agreeing with Ali that it is a math problem. — 00:31:14
  • ★★ William Brown: The first of three major pitfalls William Brown sees in running ads is trying on your own without a clue; the others are neglecting the copywriting and not tracking the funnel metrics. — 00:31:14
  • ★★ William Brown tracks ads daily but judges them in two-week and one-month blocks, because daily fluctuations lead people to panic and change ads that were fine. — 00:32:53

00:32:58 — Step 3: the sales process, and why scrappy production works

  • ★★ William Brown: An offer is first presented in content or ads, such as YouTube videos, Instagram reels or paid ads, William Brown says; from there people go into the funnel with copy, images and proof. — 00:33:23 · Instagram
  • ★ William Brown's knitting client gets customers from YouTube: her videos point to a link in the description, which leads to an explainer video with copy and a button to buy. — 00:33:51 · landing page
  • ★★ Besides courses shot in a studio at MasterClass-level production, Ali's team has made courses where he records Loom videos at his standing desk with a webcam, drawing things out in Figma. — 00:34:18
  • ★★★ Ali says the feedback on his team's simple webcam-recorded Loom courses is worlds apart from that on super-polished, MasterClass-level ones: people say they finally understand. — 00:34:52
  • ★★ William Brown's first product, a three-page Word document for $50, became a few scrappy videos in a Dropbox folder that people loved and got great results from. — 00:35:21
  • ★★ Ali says something filmed on a webcam feels more authentic, like the real stuff, than something overproduced on a professional camera. — 00:35:46
  • ★★ William Brown says you should not go above and beyond on production in a course, and doing so can even be worse for the customer. — 00:35:46
  • ★★ William Brown says his YouTube channel grew after a rushed video, shot on his iMac built-in camera with no script and a cheap Amazon mic bought for about 30, got half a million views, while his earlier videos with three cameras, a slider and a script got 200 to 1,000 views. — 00:36:31 · Amazon
  • ★★ William Brown: People do not want perfection, William Brown says: it sometimes scares them off because they can tell it is overproduced and not genuine. — 00:37:00
  • ★★★ William Brown: A sales call should start, William Brown says, by asking why the person is there and what the problem is; if they have no problem, the call should end quickly. — 00:37:00

00:37:07 — Step 4: conversion on sales calls, and believing it is possible

  • ★★ William Brown: After learning where the prospect is and wants to be, William Brown says to ask permission to explain how you can help, pitch the program and then, with permission, share the price. — 00:38:00
  • ★★ William Brown says founders who are the face of the business usually close about 35% of sales calls, and sales reps 20 to 25%. (hedged) — 00:38:28
  • ★★ William Brown: The number one mistake William Brown sees on sales calls is not following the script, which helps both sides see whether the offer is a fit. — 00:38:52
  • ★★ William Brown: On a sales call, William Brown says, talking too much is a massive mistake: the prospect is there to talk and you are there to listen. — 00:39:41
  • ★★ William Brown: Objections on sales calls are often just fear, William Brown says, so hold prospects accountable: letting someone go when your offer is perfect for them lacks integrity. — 00:40:33
  • ★★ Unlike friends who see online courses as a scam, Ali has bought a great many online courses and watches them at double speed, which he calls the best way to learn. — 00:41:01
  • ★★ Ali says people starting an online business often need mindset work to realise it is possible to make money from people who are not like them. — 00:41:30
  • ★★ William Brown: When people making large sums online seem unbelievable, William Brown says to trust but verify: look into the process, and as you understand it your mindset will open. — 00:42:59
  • ★★ New members of Ali's team, used to corporate jobs, get a mindset update from seeing Slack notifications such as eight people signing up to his YouTube Academy in a day and paying $1,000. — 00:43:52 · Slack, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali says he paid quite a lot for William Brown's program and a great deal to join another program, and team members are stunned by a $60,000 payment to a coach, like two years of a junior doctor's salary. — 00:44:20
  • ★★ William Brown: When a stranger first paid William Brown $50 he could not believe it; when two or three others he messaged on Twitter also bought, he felt he had unlocked a magic parallel universe. — 00:44:50 · Twitter

00:45:39 — Step 5: delivering value, guarantees, time needed and imposter syndrome

  • ★★★ William Brown: For delivering value, William Brown says you cannot beat one-to-one consulting, which has by far the highest success rates. — 00:45:41
  • ★★ William Brown: If you sell a course, William Brown strongly suggests a human touch point: group coaching, one-to-one, or at least email or chat support. — 00:45:41
  • ★★ William Brown: In the first 24 hours after a purchase William Brown counters buyer's remorse by adding the customer to a WhatsApp chat with him, sending a welcome doc with a week-by-week timeline and a voice note. — 00:46:35 · WhatsApp
  • ★★ William Brown: A training program should be broken into weeks, or months for a longer program, and structured in the exact order things must be done to get the outcome, William Brown says. — 00:47:16
  • ★★ William Brown is conflicted about guarantees, which many use to trap customers; used the right way a guarantee is very beneficial, and sometimes you do not need one. — 00:48:09
  • ★ William Brown's current company offers no guarantee, while his old trading company refunded customers who followed the program and tracked trades for three months. — 00:48:09
  • ★★ Against expectations of six figures in months on four hours a week, Ali says six figures puts you in roughly the top 1% in the UK, and doctors train for 20 years to make 100,000. — 00:48:49
  • ★★★ William Brown: About an hour a day is the baseline for building an online education business alongside a job, William Brown says; more time gets you there much faster. — 00:49:53
  • ★★ William Brown: For William Brown, making life-changing money while helping people and adding value to the world is the best thing in the world. — 00:51:16
  • ★★★ Ali finds that his very successful professional students have even more imposter syndrome than 19-year-olds having a go, because good students set a very high bar for being good at anything. — 00:51:45 · imposter syndrome
  • ★★ William Brown: Against imposter syndrome William Brown reminds people that everybody started from zero, as he did in his parents' spare room with a $50 Word document. — 00:52:14 · imposter syndrome
  • ★★ William Brown finds that less clever people generally get better, faster results because they do not overthink and simply believe it will work for them. — 00:52:14
  • ★★ William Brown: Selling a course alone from a sales page means customers are less likely to succeed without support and the price is capped, William Brown says, while coaching earns more and gets better results but takes work. — 00:53:53 · landing page
  • ★★★ William Brown: The simplest way toward 10K a month, William Brown says, is to take the leap of faith and commit, understand what to do and why, then take action, track progress and ask for help. — 00:54:34

00:54:48 — The simplest path to 10K a month

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: offer · William Brown

Also: People: Tiger Woods

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Organizations: Amazon · Facebook · Instagram · MasterClass · Twitter

Concepts: copywriting · do things that don't scale · funnel · I help statement · imposter syndrome · landing page · math and drama problems · money-back guarantee · scale of one to ten · Specialty training · target avatar · the $2,000 offer rule · value proposition

Places: Canada · Syria · United States

Products: Dropbox · Figma · iMac · Loom · Microsoft Word · Slack · WhatsApp

Only in the description or credits: How to $10M

Also centred on offer: 9 Business Lessons - How I Made $1.6m in 30 Days · A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses · I've Read 417 books. These 4 will make you financially free · If I want to build a $100k a year business, I'd do this · If I Wanted to Make My First $100K in 12 months, I’d Do This

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