Skip to content

The Dark Side Of Getting Rich On YouTube

2026-06-29 · Podcast or interview · Ali, Matt D'Avella · recording, 1 h 58 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Relationships and personal life) · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Family, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Meeting in person for the first time, Ali and Matt D'Avella compare two creator paths: Ali scaled a team and an online business school and riffs videos to teach, while Matt downsized to make cinematic videos for joy; both weigh growth against enough, and parenting against work.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Intro: Ali and Matt D'Avella, both on YouTube since 2017, meet in real life

00:01:45 — How it started: Matt's arc from his minimalist apartment tour to scaling and downsizing; the double-edged niche

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: After a year and a half of videos with about a thousand views at most, Matt D'Avella's minimalist apartment tour got 20,000 views in a week and eventually a million. — 00:02:32 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella scaled up to about five employees and ten freelancers, then after soul-searching around 2022 and 2023 took a step back and downsized his team. — 00:02:58 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella got to a point where he thought he would quit YouTube for good; he is now coming back to it and finding the joy again. — 00:03:23 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella says that as a parent he focuses on three things, his work, his family and his health, and can only pick two to do really well. — 00:05:06 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's 30-day experiments, starting with cold showers for 30 days, surprisingly became his most successful series. — 00:06:41 · Matt D'Avella

  • ★★★ Matt D'Avella says a creator with a million subscribers needs to create as if they had zero, free to express themselves, since an audience rarely enjoys what the creator does not. — 00:08:14 · Matt D'Avella

    “it's like if you have a million subscribers, you need to create like you have zero”

00:08:50 — Sponsor read for Wispr Flow

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella started on YouTube with $100,000 in student debt, a huge weight on his shoulders. — 00:10:15 · Matt D'Avella

00:10:20 — The dark side of the dream: money, payroll, falling course launches, Matt's anxiety and Ali's costs

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: Around 2020 and 2021 Matt D'Avella started making videos for the money to pay the payroll of five to seven people and his freelancers, and began losing the joy of creating. — 00:11:00 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ After a big growth period in 2020, Ali's business went on a hiring spree in 2021 and swung between months of loads of money and months at a loss. — 00:11:44 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella says he was diagnosed with generalised anxiety in 2019, which he partly puts down to YouTube. (hedged) — 00:12:26 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali says his business now has about two million in costs a year, so the first two million it makes goes on paying other people. — 00:13:56
  • ★ Matt D'Avella has just hired Ali's business coach, now his biggest business expense. — 00:14:41 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali does not get physical symptoms of anxiety, but almost every thought he has about the business traces back to the fear of running out of money. — 00:15:09
  • ★★ Ali's business has just hired four new people for its online business school, the Lifestyle Business Academy, because it is growing. — 00:15:34 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ A mentor told Ali that cohort businesses typically stop making enough money around cohort four; in Ali's YouTuber Academy, cohort five made 50% of cohort four's revenue. — 00:15:34 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:16:39 — Plug for Ali's free Mid-Year Reset workshop

00:17:17 — Parenting changes everything: identity, enough money, the lifestyle, frugality and overheads

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: Being a dad alone is not enough for Matt D'Avella to be happy, but nothing matters to him as much as being a parent. — 00:19:45 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali worries that if he stops grinding, his business will stop making as much money and the life he wants to create for his family will be under threat. — 00:19:45
  • ★★ Going by the four percent withdrawal rate, Ali says his family would have to take a significant hit on their lifestyle for him to stop working. — 00:20:23
  • ★★ Ali wonders whether working for his family is a convenient excuse for a habit of working that really serves his own ego. (hedged) — 00:20:50
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella felt the opposite of Ali: having kids gave him a reason not to hustle any more. — 00:20:50 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali used to translate his flip-flopping between growth and enough into what the business did; now it happens internally and with his coaches, so the team does not feel it. — 00:22:31 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★★ Ali says the central question of his life for the last five years has been expansion versus satisfaction: growth versus enough, more money versus more time for other things, and he keeps flip-flopping between them. — 00:22:31
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's family could live off his wife Natalie's salary alone, which he says helps relieve the financial pressure. — 00:24:36 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali, who got into the FIRE movement around 2016, says anyone with low overheads in business or personal life feels more free, because they need to make less money. — 00:25:04
  • ★★ Ali's business has to make two and a half million a year to break even, so each January feels like starting again from zero. — 00:25:33

00:26:09 — Old YouTube versus the tactics era: copycat packaging, money on YouTube, titles and thumbnails

  • ★★ Ali started YouTube as a fun way to make videos and teach, and to drive leads to his physical courses business helping students get into medical school. — 00:27:12
  • ★★ Ali says YouTube tactics are now so established that a title that does well in a niche is repackaged by everyone; the meta demands a lot of strategy just to keep up. — 00:28:07
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella is fatigued by the same YouTube formulas, intros and styles copied over and over. — 00:29:23 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Many YouTubers have told Ali they watched his 2020 video on how much money he made on YouTube, in which he copied the income transparency of Graham Stephan and Pat Flynn. — 00:30:04
  • ★★ Ali does not enjoy thinking about the packaging of a video and would love titles and thumbnails not to exist on YouTube. — 00:32:33
  • ★ Ali likes the idea of vlogs, but his vlogs get far fewer views than his main-channel videos. — 00:33:09

00:33:49 — The hamster wheel: when is enough enough, growth as a harder video game, fun, fulfilment and freedom

  • ★★★ Ali also finds joy in growing the business: hitting 10 million in revenue, which it has never done, would be like playing a video game on a harder difficulty setting. — 00:35:20
  • ★★ During a week in Sydney with Izzy's family, Ali was on calls with his team until 11 p.m. every night over HR issues and the online business school. — 00:35:56 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ With two years to live, Ali would not spend them growing his business; with ten years, he probably would, since building an online business school is a fun project. (hedged) — 00:37:06
  • ★★ When Ali and his brother Taimur started their podcast, they bought Matt D'Avella's entire gear set, which Ali knew from Matt's Patreon. — 00:39:05 · Taimur Abdaal, Not Overthinking, Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali's three Fs are fun, fulfilment and freedom: more money brings more freedom only up to a point, after which leaving money on the table brings more freedom. — 00:39:34 · freedom profile, leave money on the table
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella says he was so bad at running a creator business at scale that he made less money with a big team. — 00:40:01 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali says a big reason he puts out so much content is that he cares less about each individual video than Matt D'Avella does. — 00:41:00 · Matt D'Avella

00:41:04 — Quantity versus craft and each one's unfair advantage

  • ★ Inspired by Matt D'Avella's 30-day experiments, Ali learned freestyle rapping for 30 days during the pandemic. — 00:41:27 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali preps a video in under an hour and films it in about an hour; his editing has been outsourced since 2019, which lets him put out quantity. — 00:42:07 · Final Cut Pro
  • ★ The downside of Ali's quantity is that every video gets highly upvoted comments calling it recycled content. — 00:42:34
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella spends 20 to 50 hours on each video, sometimes all of it on editing. (hedged) — 00:43:27 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's unique skills are filming, editing and finding the story in the edit, rather than talking off the cuff. — 00:45:13 · unfair advantage, Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali's business model from day one: teach something on YouTube and sell a course on the back end; about a year ago his business added software. — 00:46:57

00:48:47 — Would you still do it without the business: the lottery test, vlogs, podcasts, backlog, the business school

  • ★★★ If Ali won the lottery and had 100 million in the bank, he would still make YouTube videos, broadly the same way as now. — 00:49:17
  • ★★ Ali is not wedded to the craft of making videos; he just really likes teaching, and long-form YouTube is his medium for it. — 00:49:44
  • ★★ Like MrBeast, who says everyone has multiple reasons, Ali makes YouTube videos partly for fun, fulfilment, finances and flexibility. — 00:50:11 · freedom profile
  • ★★ Ali thinks of some videos as made for vibes, some for views and some for revenue; this conversation with Matt D'Avella is for the vibes. — 00:50:45 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's experiment of a daily Short cut from his 30-day experiments stopped at about 20: it drove no business and he did not enjoy recycling old content. — 00:51:45 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Of his 30-day daily vlog experiment, Ali says he was sick of it after about three days, as he was writing his book and had nothing interesting to film. — 00:52:25
  • ★★★ Ali shut down his interview podcast, realising after three years that he should. — 00:53:06 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ On his interview podcast with authors promoting books, Ali felt like an actor teeing up softball questions instead of having an interesting conversation. — 00:53:45 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: Feeling there is too much content, Matt D'Avella has pulled back to one or maybe two videos a month, each made intentionally. — 00:54:31 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali does not enjoy every video he puts out, but his business, like Steven Bartlett's and Chris Williamson's, is based on churning out content. — 00:55:01
  • ★★★ Ali's goal is a business whose revenue and profit are completely decorrelated from how many YouTube videos he makes, so he can make videos when he feels like it. — 00:55:28
  • ★★ For the first time ever, Ali's channel has a backlog of about ten long-form videos. — 00:56:21
  • ★★ Planning for Ali's March in Australia, his team dropped from two videos a week to one to build up a buffer. — 00:56:21
  • ★★ Ali doubts that only doing things when you feel like it is the north star: he often has to push himself to hit record, and is glad afterwards. (hedged) — 00:57:36
  • ★★ In 2025 Ali had an existential crisis of about six months over the content hamster wheel, while his YouTube course needed reshooting because of AI. — 00:58:01 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Talking to his mentor Olly Richards, Ali said he really wanted to build his own business school; Olly said that sounded like the thing, and the Lifestyle Business Academy came about. — 00:58:48 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Making content feels motivating again for Ali because it has a point: each video drives traffic to his business school and his team's software. — 00:58:48 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali thinks the content hamster wheel is not enjoyable unless it is building something. — 00:59:27

00:59:58 — What scale costs: Angus runs the business side, the fear of re-hiring, business coaches

  • ★★ Angus runs the whole business side of Ali's company; Ali's input is the content and the product and curriculum design for the courses. — 01:01:04 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★ Ali focuses on the student experience, playing with Claude Code to build AI tools for his students. — 01:01:45 · Claude, Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali's YouTube producer Becky brings him a menu of video ideas like a restaurant menu, and he picks the one that sounds good or suggests his own, such as a book he is reading. — 01:02:12
  • ★★★ Angus is now an official partner in Ali's business with a slice of the profits, which Ali hopes keeps him on board. — 01:03:44 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★ Ali worries more that Angus will burn out than leave; each month Ali and Angus meet their coach Eric to rate their working relationship out of 10. — 01:04:05 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★★ Having over-hired in anticipation of revenue, Ali now understands the advice to hire slow, fire fast, and only hire when it starts to hurt. — 01:06:20
  • ★★ Ali has had business coaches since 2019; having an adult in the room who has been through the process is insanely valuable, he says. — 01:07:35

01:07:52 — Permission-seeking, goals and targets, organisational whiplash

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: Tired of asking others for permission, Matt D'Avella has decided to forget other people's opinions and make mistakes again. — 01:08:50 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella says you sometimes need to experiment in small ways, as with his limited ten-episode podcast series, which he was glad to quit fast. — 01:10:05 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Team feedback taught Ali that his people want him to set the vision and direction and give them constraints within which they have autonomy. — 01:11:04
  • ★★ For years Ali was against targets and goals, especially content goals, since views are outside our control; his coach Eric changed his mind, and he now finds goals and KPIs really helpful. — 01:11:32
  • ★★ Eric Partaker (quoted): Eric Partaker told Ali that without a target he was playing darts blindfolded: take the blindfold off and set a target. — 01:11:32

  • ★★★ Matt D'Avella advises creators to focus on the reps, not the rewards: their first 100 videos rather than their first 100,000 subscribers. — 01:12:06 · Matt D'Avella

    “focus on the reps, not the rewards”

  • ★★★ Ali splits goals into inputs, outputs and outcomes: beginners focus on putting in the time, then on making the content, and only later on outcomes. — 01:13:49

  • ★★★ Ali's business aims for 50 to 60% margins on costs of over two million, so its goal is at least 5 million in revenue, about a million from sponsors, needing 50 to 80 videos a year. — 01:14:46
  • ★★ Ali used to roll his eyes at business books' north stars, missions and visions; now he says it is so true that you need a clear sense of where you are going. — 01:15:44
  • ★★★ Ali's flip-flopping caused organisational whiplash: inspired by Matt D'Avella's Slow Growth, his team built Creatorpreneur for a year, then scrapped it because he no longer wanted it. — 01:16:08 · Matt D'Avella

01:17:10 — Find what only you can do: riffing versus scripting, how many videos to make, joy as the filter

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella learned from Ali to focus on what only he can do: documentary-style, explorative videos documenting a journey. — 01:17:40 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Hearing in a 2021 YouTuber Academy workshop that Matt D'Avella scripts word for word and cannot riff, Ali realised riffing on camera may be his own strength and leaned into it. (hedged) — 01:19:42 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: Counting his favourite creators' output, Matt D'Avella found a wide range: Mark Rober and MrBeast about 12 to 15 videos a year, Ali, Peter McKinnon and Marques Brownlee around 80, many 20 to 30. — 01:23:44 · Peter McKinnon, Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Matt D'Avella's rule for his videos: each must either teach him something new or push him in some way. — 01:24:45 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella used to avoid other creators' videos on his topic for fear of stealing ideas; now he watches them, such as Levi Hildebrand's, and credits what he learns. — 01:26:03 · Matt D'Avella

01:28:19 — What would you make for joy: the tenured professor, teaching in a classroom, packaging as craft

  • ★★ Ali says his business's goal is 10 million in revenue. — 01:29:44
  • ★★ Right now the bottleneck and priority in Ali's business is the Lifestyle Business Academy rather than the YouTube channel. — 01:29:44 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali does not intrinsically enjoy making videos, but he does enjoy teaching and sharing things. — 01:30:38

  • ★★★ Ali approaches his content like a well-paid tenured professor teaching two classes a week on how to build a life you love, to students who want to be there. — 01:30:38

    “I'm a tenured professor at a university and I'm teaching a course called how to build a life you love”

  • ★★ Ali loves teaching at a whiteboard in a classroom, so his videos mirror it: he now films standing up, with no sit-down set. — 01:33:28

  • ★★ Ali would love his own physical event space in Hong Kong to host and film workshops for entrepreneurs or creators once or twice a month. — 01:33:58 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella is not sure he agrees with Ali's wish for a YouTube without titles and thumbnails, a game he has learned to play well. (hedged) — 01:35:25 · Matt D'Avella

01:36:21 — Slow Growth and building a brand without a face; software as the exception

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella's media company Slow Growth reached 100,000 Instagram followers and a newsletter of about 65,000 to 70,000, but he never found a way to monetise it. — 01:37:44 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali found it really hard to generate leads for anything not tied to a personal brand. — 01:39:38 · personal brand
  • ★★ Of the five to ten creators Ali knows who tried to build a brand outside themselves, none succeeded, and all brought their face back in. — 01:39:38
  • ★★★ The only one of Ali's businesses growing without a face behind it is software: VoicePal is growing on its own, since software has virality built in. — 01:40:07 · VoicePal
  • ★★ Ali expects to be a teacher in some capacity for the rest of his life, with no attachment to whether it is on YouTube or another medium. — 01:41:02

01:41:55 — The family landing: making videos at 60, work rules, night nannies, enjoying parenting, hustle

  • ★★ Matt D'Avella cites a saying that the biggest risk to a creator business is the creator no longer enjoying it, so enjoyment is the most important thing to optimise for. — 01:42:22 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★★ Ali finds very firm rules really helpful against overwork, such as not being allowed to work on weekends. — 01:43:04
  • ★★ Izzy asked Ali to stop work by 6:30 to spend evenings with their baby; with a global team, they settled on Mondays and Fridays. — 01:43:04 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella: After ten months of broken sleep with their first son, Matt D'Avella and his wife regretted not hiring help, and hired a night nanny for about three months after their second. — 01:44:50 · Matt D'Avella, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella says the amount of parenting he does should follow how much his kids need him, not how much he enjoys it. — 01:45:32 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali enjoys a certain amount of baby care, while a probably higher amount is good for the baby's bonding; he has not yet figured out where the line is. (hedged) — 01:46:47
  • ★★ When their daughter had a urine infection, Ali spent two hours, from one to three in the morning, getting her to wee into a cup, asking Gemini for strategies. — 01:48:36
  • ★★ Ali, who tries to do everything in life by asking how to enjoy it, does not know whether enjoyment is the right frame for the hard parts of parenting. (unsure) — 01:49:37 · feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ Joe Hudson (quoted): Executive coach Joe Hudson says he feels no obligation towards his kids and does things for them because he wants to; Ali is trying to reach that perspective. — 01:52:50
  • ★★★ Ali's real failure mode would be to look back and wish he had spent more time with his kids, as many entrepreneurs realised too late. — 01:54:40
  • ★★ Matt D'Avella is glad he hustled in his twenties and thirties, but no longer can or wants to, so he can spend time with his kids. — 01:55:25 · Matt D'Avella

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Angus (general manager) · Lifestyle Business Academy · Matt D'Avella

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Ali Abdaal's daughter · Becky · Chris Williamson · Eric Partaker · Graham Stephan · Izzy Sealey · James Clear · James Jani · Jason Fried · Joe Hudson · Joe Rogan · Johnny Harris · Levi Hildebrand · Mark Rober · Marques Brownlee · MrBeast · Olly Richards · Pat Flynn · Peter McKinnon · Seth Godin · Steven Bartlett · Taimur Abdaal · Tim Ferriss · Tony Robbins

Projects: Creatorpreneur · Not Overthinking · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Bonus D'Avella · Colin and Samir · Harry Potter (book series) · Life Of Riza · Moneyball · Mr. Money Mustache · She Comes First · The Dip · The Ground Up Show

Organizations: Slow Growth

Concepts: attention economy · FIRE movement · four percent rule · freedom profile · hustle culture · leave money on the table · personal brand · process goals · unfair advantage

Places: Hong Kong

Products: Claude · Feastables · Final Cut Pro · Frame.io · Gemini · Patreon · VoicePal

← Previous: The truth about transitional phases · Next → My worst business failures