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If I Started a Business With No Audience, I'd Do This

2026-09-14 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali, Carol, Nathan, Katherine, Andrea, Owen · recording, 22:17 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present, His medical past, His own numbers

At his team's offsite in Thailand, Ali asks five Lifestyle Business Academy coaches how they got their first clients and tells how he got his own; nearly all came from people they knew, communities they belonged to and referrals, which the academy turns into its magic question, "Do you know anyone who happens to need X?"

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Teaser: how did you get your first client?

00:00:28 — The team offsite in Thailand; landing the first client is the hardest part

  • ★★ Landing the first client is by far the hardest part of starting a business and what almost all Lifestyle Business Academy students struggle with, Ali says; coming up with the idea is relatively straightforward these days. — 00:00:28 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali's team is in Thailand for its offsite with many coaches and facilitators of the Lifestyle Business Academy, its online business school that helps working professionals start their first businesses. — 00:00:28 · Lifestyle Business Academy

00:01:13 — Carol's first client and clients two to five

  • ★ Carol: Before charging, Carol ran many free trial sessions of team dynamics, team coaching and Gallup StrengthsFinder. — 00:01:42
  • ★★ Carol: When Carol told a peer who loved her session that she was starting her LLC and would charge, the peer introduced her to her husband, whose boss Caleb became Carol's first client, a B2B client. — 00:02:11
  • ★★ Carol's next clients came from warm referrals: both of Caleb's peers in a UX design team at a large US bank hired her, and leaders she had worked with hired her again when they moved to new companies. — 00:02:40
  • ★★ Carol concluded that her client was the new leader who could not figure out their team. — 00:02:40

00:03:40 — Nathan's first client

  • ★★ Nathan got his first client for his marketing services business by going to a local chamber of commerce event of business owners. — 00:03:40
  • ★★ Nathan: New to the town, Nathan went to the chamber of commerce event just to meet business owners and get to know them, and saw an overlap between his skills and their challenges. — 00:04:10
  • ★★ Nathan: Over coffee with a business owner from the event, Nathan worked to understand his problem, then offered to do an audit to work out exactly what he needed and talk about price afterwards. — 00:04:39
  • ★★ Nathan's first client referred him to many fellow members of his church who were business owners; in the small town a lot of people knew each other. — 00:05:08

00:05:22 — Sponsor read for ManyChat

00:07:13 — Recap of Nathan's first clients

00:07:50 — Katherine's first client

  • ★★ Katherine: In the Slack community of a women's professional network, Katherine shared that she was training as a coach; a member she did not know offered to put her in touch with their son in his mid-twenties, who paid $75 for a test run of her workshop and became her first long-term client. — 00:08:20 · Slack
  • ★★ Katherine: At a small conference of the same women's network, Katherine connected with a woman who thought the five people on her team could use a coach and suggested they work something out. — 00:09:14
  • ★★ Katherine: For her coaching business Katherine ran no ads and made a lot of content, which brought very little return. — 00:09:43

00:11:05 — Andrea's first client

  • ★★ Andrea: When Andrea told her best friend, who worked in sales, that she was starting a boutique marketing agency, he passed her a business needing paid advertising; it booked her at once because it trusted her friend. — 00:11:34
  • ★★ Andrea's second and third clients came from Upwork during the pandemic's boom in demand for marketing agencies, applying to about 10 jobs every couple of days. — 00:11:34
  • ★★ Andrea's other early clients came from a previous agency she had worked with, which agreed to send her smaller clients it could not handle. — 00:12:04
  • ★★ Andrea kept in touch with her former colleagues through LinkedIn, birthdays and liking their posts, so asking them for work did not come out of the blue. — 00:12:33 · LinkedIn

00:13:02 — Ali's own first clients

  • ★★ For his first business at 13, a one-person web design agency, Ali emailed all his contacts; Stan, the stepdad of a school friend, replied that he needed a website and paid Ali 30 pounds for it. — 00:13:02
  • ★★ As a first-year medical student at Cambridge, Ali got the first clients of his BMAT coaching business by posting about it in his school's Facebook group, the WHSB Medical Society. — 00:13:35 · BMAT, Facebook, University of Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali's post for his BMAT course, about 50 pounds for the day, was seen by four people and liked by Manu Srivastava, who became one of his first students. — 00:14:04
  • ★★ Ali's BMAT course began as a tiny class of about four friends or friends of friends, some of them friends of his brother, in the family living room. — 00:14:04 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ In later years Ali got the BMAT course's first clients by emailing past students to pass its details to anyone applying to medical school. — 00:14:04
  • ★★ Ali only started online marketing for his medical admissions courses business about five years in, when he started his YouTube channel, whose first aim was that marketing. — 00:14:41
  • ★★ Before any online marketing, Ali's courses business reached six figures in revenue, mainly through asking people he knew, then people they knew, and referrals. — 00:14:41
  • ★★ Towards the end of medical school Ali got his UI and UX design work for medical technology companies by attending a hackathon hosted by a society for plastic surgeons. — 00:15:11
  • ★★ At the hackathon Ali made his team's pitch PowerPoint; impressed by the design, two plastic surgeons on his team who ran medtech businesses both asked him to do their design work. — 00:15:40
  • ★★ Ali credits landing his medtech design clients to attending an in-person networking event, showing up and adding value, and being good at design after years of practice. — 00:15:40
  • ★★ Ali made tens of thousands of pounds from the two medtech design clients he met at the hackathon while still a medical student, before he started his YouTube channel. — 00:16:09

00:16:28 — Owen's first client

  • ★★ Owen got the first client of his marketing agency from his existing network: an old employer he had worked for as a sports coach in university breaks. — 00:16:50
  • ★★ Owen messaged his old boss with results from his full-time marketing job, said he was taking on freelance clients and offered a quick audit of his marketing; the free audit led to a paid engagement. — 00:17:20
  • ★★ Owen's next clients came by referral: his first client's business-owner friends saw the ads Owen ran for him and asked who did his marketing. — 00:17:49
  • ★★★ Ali's outreach principle WIIFT, "what's in it for them": outreach becomes much easier if you offer the person something valuable, ideally for free, as Owen did with a free marketing audit. — 00:18:24

00:18:54 — Wrapping up at the zip line place; comments wanted

  • ★ Ali's team wants to make more casual vlogs bringing on team members with their own expertise, and asks viewers for feedback in the comments to decide. — 00:18:54

00:19:44 — The pattern across all six stories and the magic question

  • ★★★ Your first client is usually not a stranger, Ali says: it is someone you know, a friend of someone you know, or a member of a community, online or offline, that you belong to. — 00:19:47
  • ★★ A new bakery, Ali says, would get its first customer by telling friends and family in the local area, not through Instagram ads, TikTok advertising or a billboard. — 00:20:14

  • ★★★ The Lifestyle Business Academy's magic question for a first client: "Do you know anyone who happens to need X?", offering something in return such as a free audit, consultation or coaching. — 00:20:43 · Lifestyle Business Academy

    “what we call the magic question. Do you know anyone who happens to need X?”

  • ★★ For your first client, and probably your first $10,000 in revenue, Ali says you do not need to reach out to strangers. (hedged) — 00:20:43

  • ★★★ Selling to friends can be scarier than selling to strangers, Ali says: simple but not easy, because of emotional hurdles such as the worry of seeming scammy or spammy to friends. — 00:21:24
  • ★★ Almost everyone struggles to message friends about their business, Ali says, but after the first few messages they find the world did not end and people were generally nice and supportive. — 00:21:53

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Lifestyle Business Academy · magic question

Also: People: Andrea · Carol · Katherine (coach, mentioned from 2026) · Manu Srivastava · Nathan · Owen · Taimur Abdaal

Works: BMAT

Organizations: Facebook · LinkedIn · University of Cambridge · Upwork · Westcliff High School for Boys

Concepts: WIIFT

Places: Australia · Hong Kong · Thailand

Products: ManyChat · Microsoft PowerPoint · Slack

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