The YouTube Secrets Behind Ali Abdaal’s $5 Million Channel | Saf Mohammed

0:00There's a system behind YouTube. If you can just lock in for 15 minutes, you're going to completely transform your business. That's Saf, the content genius behind Ali Abdaal, one of the fastest growing YouTube channels in the world. In this episode, he reveals the exact system Ali Abdaal used to scale to 6.5 million subscribers. What's the four elements of a perfect hook? You've brought people in, you've built the stakes, you've opened the curiosity loop, you've added the f***, and now we're going straight into the video. That's a banging hook. That's genius. Why the biggest entrepreneurs in the world are going all in on YouTube?

0:30One of the clients I work with, second video we made for him, it went viral. He had 30 ,000 leads coming per month to his business. 30 ,000 leads. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. That's crazy. CTR, ABD. What's the highest leverage of those? I think the highest leverage out of all of those is your... How often should I upload videos on YouTube? If you post a YouTube video, you will be able to change your life. Why everyone quits working for Ali Abdaal. Why did you leave Ali Abdaal? And why does everyone leave Ali Abdaal? So I think probably the honest answer is... I hope you enjoy it.

1:01Subscribe if you do. And let's dive in.

1:09Let's start at that first day working for Ali Abdaal. What happens when you walk in the door of the office or his home, is it, that you work from? Yeah, we were working from his home near Regent's Park. and I was expecting an office, but it's just this humongous flat. And I remember walking in through the front door and they were like, can you take your shoes off? I was like, oh, sure. And I take my shoes off and someone's actually coming out of the kitchen with their coffee and they're going in towards like the home office. And sure enough, you walk in over there, Ali's got his like massive softbox set up.

1:39He's got his standing desk and everything and turns around and goes, hi. And he goes back to like recording his videos. And that was like our first interaction. Yeah, it was super wholesome. Cool. And what was the, your kind of remit? when you're coming in to work for Ali, what was your first role? So I was hired as a video editor and I was going to be the second video editor for the main channel. But on my first day, I was sat down by Angus, who's a general manager for Ali. And he says, I've got some good news and I've got some bad news. And this is within like an hour of like walking into the office.

2:11And he says, the bad news is our head video editor has stepped down and he's resigned. The good news is you are now the head video editor. and the next video is coming out in like six days and i was like right okay but the twist is i've i've never been a video editor professionally before this point and i'd at that point only video edited for myself and for my own youtube videos so this is the first time where my videos were gonna get millions of views and so i was like stressed to make sure i did a really good job for him at that point like how many subscribers is is he on so ali at that point is on three million subscribers yeah and today he's on six and a half six six and a half and you've basically worked with him through that period of growth i'd love to kind of like unpack for someone listening to this who sees ali's channel um as this kind of amazing thing six six six plus million subscribers super engaged audience um publishing books a really powerful business behind him and it's all powered really from that youtube channel um i'd love to take people behind the scenes in this podcast and give them an insight into what it actually takes to create a YouTube channel that's that successful.

3:24What does the process look like on that first day, first week? And how does it work each week to output these videos? Yeah, so Ali's done a really good job of bringing together people and arranging them in a system to be able to churn out YouTube videos while still being like the key person of influence in front of camera. And he's definitely leaned into his advantages, which is teaching topics around productivity and investing and now financial freedom. Quite unusually, Ali's YouTube team is quite big and people are always surprised with how many people work on the team and are behind the content.

3:54He's got a number of video editors that he works with. A lot of them are overseas on full-time retainers, but we have really good relationships with them and they're almost like they're in the office. It's so good. But then we also have content execs, social media experts, the general manager, Angus, who's like across a number of different things. And then there's a commercial team, which also informs the content team. And it's like this flywheel where the organic content powers the courses and the courses fund the content. And that's what creates this. It's a very natural ecosystem for him to create that content.

4:25I mean, Ali's channel has gone through different phases and he's definitely really, in my opinion, pioneered that talking head format. He started out with the medicine content and then he went into sort of studying and then into productivity and now into financial freedom. and I think part of the reason that he's so big today is that he continues to innovate at each point in time and he continues to reinvent himself and most importantly the audience he acquired in the early days in like 2017 2018 they have now grown up and they've graduated from uni they're young professionals and he's having to change his content and tailor it towards those people so he's growing with his audience rather than staying stuck with what used to work how does he decide that he's going to make a video is that something that is very much him and he's like walking around and he's got an idea and then he adds it to a list um or does it come from the team you know we really think you should make a video around this topic like yeah but how does that work i think a lot of people will be surprised at how chaotic it is behind the scenes yeah i remember thinking on my first day joining that it was going to be this well-oiled machine everything happens in time there is a process for everything but that's not always the case yeah um a lot of the ideas Ali will have after having a conversation with another YouTuber, or he has a specific angle he wants to go after.

5:40He will log those ideas inside of Notion. But at the same time, the team will be coming up with ideas and they'll be giving them to him. And most importantly, we'll be coming up with a title thumbnail on hook. And that will be the pre-qualifier for if that YouTube video is going to fly. So my friend Tintin, who was the channel manager at that time, and that was primarily his job, which was managing what are the video ideas that Ali wants to make? And what are the video ideas that the audience wants or what insights a team has on videos that could do well and how can we bring them together into a strategy that works with sponsor deadlines and at least energy and heavy lift versus low lift videos if i'm wanting to crush it on youtube and have this youtube channel share my ideas with the world and then create a thriving business on the back end it sounds like the first step is basically logging my ideas so whenever i have have them like having an easy place that I can log ideas in Notion.

6:32And then equally, if I've got a team, they can also suggest ideas. What happens next? Are they kind of reviewed on a weekly basis and then approved and then moved to like script writing? What does that look like? And you mentioned title and hook and thumbnail. Is there like a process that comes from the idea? There's a system behind YouTube and I would say the system is like a non-negotiable today. Maybe a few years ago, you'd get away with like creating videos and hoping it would stick. But without a system, there's no way you can stay consistent with doing the videos and staying on the right path.

7:03But if we take it from the idea, which is what we start off with, if you have an idea, you'd want to qualify if that idea is big enough to make a YouTube video about. And are you the best person to make that YouTube video? Interesting. So I would be looking across other outlier videos across other channels to see how they've performed. I would look at competitors in a niche and what they're making videos about. I would also look at the comments. You can use Google Trends research as well. It also helps to be a consumer of YouTube. And when you're consuming YouTube content every single day, you have an idea of the things which people are interested in.

7:36To give you an example, it was pretty novel when James Clear talked about systems. So you fall to the level of your systems rather than rise to the level of your goals. And that was like a mind-blowing moment for everyone in the productivity sphere. But this is kind of common knowledge now for the last couple of years. And so something that I've been seeing coming up through like the ideas ranks is the idea of setting constraints rather than creating systems. and constraints actually help you to execute in the first place. And it's really helpful to have constraints. You can find freedom through constraints.

8:04So this is a video idea from a much smaller channel. It's been a massive outlier. I remember seeing it for the first time and saying, Ali, I think we should make this video. I think you should credit the guy. I'm sure you've got a lot to say about it. So that's gone into the idea bank. So that's just an example of how we would put together these ideas. But to really qualify it, you want to make sure that the TAM for that video is quite high. and before you even get to the point where you're filming it the things the filters you want to take it through are title thumbnail your packaging yeah and then a hook and if you have a really compelling hook it's often going to inform the direction of that video and the talking points you're going to hit because in the hook you set up the promise you set up the value and so it's going to be a really big bold promise you're going to have retention pieces in there you're going to build on the speaker's credibility and then you're going to make sure that the talking points afterwards hit on that is there like a idea that ali's had recently um or you've had recently that you could just talk me through how i verify like you said outliers and you said tam how would we actually practically do that and is there like a practical example yeah do you want me to pull up my laptop yeah let's do it let's do it let's do it the original title for this video was how i use ai to solve my biggest life problems when we were looking at this title we were we're being very critical like what are the reasons why this might not work um how what are ways that we could increase the value proposition of this video how can we demonstrate more proof of work and we ended up trying like if you look at this page there's like loads of different titles and we're like changing very tiny words to see if we can simplify the concept how can we make the value proposition bigger and the one that we landed on was um i used ai as my life coach for 365 days here's what i learned interesting and the way we landed on that was by looking at other videos that had done well and there was a video from matt diavela where he did it for journaling there's like a top-down shot and it was like i tried journaling or bullet journaling for 365 days um you know this is what happened and so we wanted to create we wanted to build an idea or a format that had done already very well but bring it into the ai space and from observations a lot of the ai videos out there weren't doing that well already because a lot of people were just creating quick tips, new tools, comparisons, lots of doom and gloom, and it can be very saturating.

10:20But this was an angle that we decided Ali could definitely lean into. He's got the credibility of having used it for that time or longer. And then being able to go through the talking points and here's what he actually learned. And so in that video, he had like prompts that people could try out. He actually went through and did like a therapy session in real time and he's very happy to be vulnerable and open up. and this video performed much better than we had expected for it. Interesting. So the original idea, to say that again. The original idea was how I use AI to solve my biggest life problems.

10:49Okay. So what you've done with the title there is really interesting because you've basically studied like a format that's done well for a different topic and basically communicates that someone's done a lot of work and you're going to get the condensed answer of 365 days of work in like 10 minutes. um so that's like partly just optimizing the packaging first and coming up with like a really optimized title but then the thing you said around the tam stuff how would you have validated that there's enough interest in that topic at the moment you would have just gone oh ai is kind of trending and ai coaching is trending or that kind of thing for this particular video i believe we had a sponsor okay interesting we had an ai sponsor and so it was like how can we make the best video possible for the audience while keeping in mind the sponsor for that video and so that was the constraint that we were working with and it's like what's the biggest ham biggest idea that we can make around that so keyword research definitely plays a part looking at outlier videos and using a tool like one of ten helps you to qualify certain formats that are doing really well and so using a combination of those two things but also like even doing research on reddit and places like that you can start to see what gets traction or even on twitter and so bringing all of these different things together it helps it inform a direction for where you want to take that content and then quite often once you've done all of that you can review it with a fresh set of eyes, you can work with a second strategist, you can come together and you're just trying to tear apart the title and the thumbnail to get to a point where it's like, okay, I would, I would actually really click on that.

12:16It's surprising how often people put out YouTube videos and they wouldn't even click on it themselves. And that's actually a really good filter for whether you should make that thing in the first place or just spend more time on it. You're going to spend like a week editing it. You have to show up in front of camera. There's so much work that goes into it. So you want to make sure you do it right. Um, without being crippled by perfectionism, of course. We've got the idea. We validated that we're happy to do it. We've come up with a title, the thumbnail. Just quickly, one out of 10, that's a tool that does what?

12:43Yeah, one out of 10 is a tool that helps you to understand for a given YouTube video, what is its outlier score? And it's going to look at the average views that video gets on the channel. Then it's going to compare it to that specific video. And so relative to its baseline performance, how much did it overperform by? So it could be a 2x outlier, which is like double what you'd typically expect, or a 10X outlier or a 100X. And so you might find a 100X outlier on a really tiny channel. And it was the fourth video. It's absolutely blown up. And it was on topic, which no one's made a video about.

13:11That's a really strong signal. And so there's a Chrome extension that you can install at home. And as you're passively consuming YouTube on your browser, you will start to see ideas that do well, don't do well. YouTube surfaces, loads of titles and titles on the homepage. And some are going to catch your eye. Yeah. And like, why did that catch my eye? Oh, it happens to be an outlier as well. Let's double click into that. Maybe I can be inspired and we can use that for a video later. So you build up a bank and a back catalogue of ideas. So we've got those bits. What comes next, the hook or? Yes, the hook comes next.

13:41So the hook is, it's really important in your hook that you're delivering on the value proposition of that video. So if you've said, I've used AI as a life coach for 365 days, here's what I learned. It's really, really important that in your hook, you actually reinforce that you did use AI for 365 days. So you have to work sometimes what you've got or if you're willing to put in the work to demonstrate that proof of work. Lots of B-rolls of you using it in different places. Maybe there is like a stack of journals or something where you've taken your notes from AI into that. There are a time lapse.

14:13There are different ways that you can show that you've actually done the work. A lot of big creators, what they do is they'll sometimes use the thumbnail shot and they'll directly make that the opening shot of the hook in the first place. I think Nico does that with some of his thumbnails and hooks. and the reason he does that is to deliver on the promise like no i've actually done the thing and trust trust on youtube can be quite low because people just like click bait and bring you in so you want to make sure that you reinforce like you're actually going to get the thing that you asked for and this is what this video is about this is the value you're going to get at the end of it and this is why you should stick around and there's like different retention pieces you can put in to make sure people stick around so that's just delivering on the promise literally probably saying the title to confirm that you're in the right place and that's what are getting showing the outcome if you talked about the outcome um anything else i should do with the hook yeah so with the hook i like to script my hooks the hooks are so important it's really worth taking time to script the hook you're like after you've done the hook if you wanted to freestyle your talking points because it's organic it's natural it's authentic you want to storytell great but the hook is so important it's worth at least having a scripted hook to try and then you can do one from the heart on the day and so that's always been my recommendation for people I work with.

15:24When I'm writing the hooks, I try and do it one sentence at a time. The reason I do that is because there are different ways of ordering and structuring your hook. And some of them is like a one plus one equals three moment if you put it together in the right way. But most importantly, if you have a line by line hook and you remove one sentence, that sentence shouldn't be redundant. It should be a critical part of that hook. And so sometimes if I'm being ruthless, I'll be removing sections from the hooks. I know that's where retention is the highest. And if I don't need it let's see if we can remove it and so by the end of this exercise you might have five six sentences where it's like oh my god that's a banging hook you've brought people in you've built the stakes you've opened the curiosity loop you've added the credibility you've reinforced the retention pieces and now we're going straight into the video and you can't take anything out because if you do the whole hook falls apart what were those five things you just said very quickly it's like the credibility the value proposition um retention pieces why that person should stick around um opening the curiosity loop sometimes it'll be like look to answer this question we first need to figure out x and it's like oh wait okay fine let's figure out x first and we're going to get to the other thing at the end of the video and so that's where you start off and that's how you build your story and that's how you set the context and one of the videos i've made with one of my clients we tried something like look if you can just lock in for 15 minutes you're going to completely transform your business or like you're going to be able to become a millionaire if you can't just lock in 15 minutes and take some notes on this i'm sorry you're not going to make it yeah and it's like that that simon squibb yeah yeah simon squibb's done that one of my friends makaya did that in one of his videos um and it's working surprisingly well and the things that work tend to change over time but the the bar for what makes a good hook is only going up and up and like incorporating more of these pieces into your hook are great ways to to to ultimately make a better video i don't think it's hacky or scammy it is if you don't deliver on that but by having these filters as you go through your hook and you polish that hook, it then sets the direction for the rest of that video.

17:20It's quite hard to go wrong. You've got a title, you've got a thumbnail, you've got the hook. Now, how do you deliver on that? By the end of the video, you have to reverse engineer how you deliver it. Oh, okay, great. We can do it in three steps. I can share my screen. We can talk about this. Ah, there's a case study. I did this with somebody else. Let's put that into the video. And suddenly you've got this really, really, really good video. Quick one. If you're enjoying this episode with Saf, make sure you're subscribed to the channel. It helps us more than you would know to secure bigger and better entrepreneurs, marketers, and content creators, and share lots of value with you.

17:49So if you're enjoying this episode, please subscribe. And now let's get back into it. So on that video that we just talked about with Ali, what roughly we'd be doing there for the hook, for hook credibility, promise retention. I might need to remind myself what the hook was. Thing is working with Ali is like sometimes he will give him the hook. He's like, ah, I shouldn't do the hook I want to do because it's vibes. Ali's unfair advantage is that he's so charismatic yeah he almost doesn't need to put in as much work with a hook because people want to pay attention anyway and so it's a bit of a red herring so as much as he tried to tell him like you could get way better results oh yeah would you mind playing it all right so for the last 18

18:23Saf Mohammed:months i've been using various ai tools to act as a personal life coach i was skeptical so he basically very quickly says for the last 18 months i've been using ai as a life coach initially and i had a lot of reservations about it but the results have really surprised me in a good way and that's why i continue to use it like that today and so in this video i'm going to show you exactly how I've been using AI as a personal life coach. We're going to start with a conceptual overview. So then he like confirms I'm going to show you how I've been using it as a life coach. Overview of how to think about using AI as your personal life coach and then in the second part of the video I'm going to share the workflows and the tools and the prompts and of course there will be timestamps to everything down below so you can skip around the video if you feel like it but let's now jump into it.

19:02Saf Mohammed:Okay so we're going to start. And then he's straight in but there was also some visual cues of like lots of things going on that he's going to talk about. Yeah let me talk about some of the elements that was going on over here um one of the things that we were considering is most people's baseline understanding of ai is chat gpt and so we really wanted to put emphasis on some of the ai tools some of the ai coaching elements that he has tried that's not chat gpt another thing was we did some analysis and we found that there was some skepticism from people like could could ai really replace a therapist can it really replace a human and so we really wanted to have ali endorse that it's surprisingly good he doesn't actually tell you why it's surprisingly good the other thing is um you'll notice for this video we what we're trying to do is shrink our intros from one minute 30 seconds down to 30 seconds like how can we really respect the viewer's time and then get straight into the video so the example for this hook wasn't actually following a script uh we gave a script to ali and he ultimately saw that and he decided to take some of his elements and do it in his own style sometimes it's quite hard to get the speaker's tone of voice and they'll want to do it in their own way but that's okay it's like a happy medium and the way you land.

20:06And then what we can do afterwards is once we have the edit inside frame IO, then we can go through ahead of time and be like, okay, let's remove this. Let's remove that. Maybe if we had a voiceover line, we could actually just bridge these two things together and be a much cleaner hook. And so only then you can start trying and experimenting and then seeing what would be a better hook overall. I think I get that now. So I've basically got idea, title, thumbnail, hook, then the detail of the hook, establishing credibility, making a promise, maybe putting in some retention techniques. What else makes an Ali Abdao video so successful?

20:42What else am I missing from this? Ali's unfair advantage is that he is a good storyteller and a good teacher. And people feel very drawn to him. The style and the way in which he teaches, he's very authentic. He's willing to wear his heart on his sleeve. I think that's been a pattern, a theme since his early days. And so as his channel has grown and as he's approached bigger and bigger video topics, he's never really shied away from those principles i still remember one of his viral videos around how much money i made as a youtuber in a year where he'd sit down in front of camera for 45 minutes and he would go into the nitty-gritty details of his revenue where it's coming from his costs all these other things and a lot of his audience find that very refreshing they can connect with it they find it aspirational and nobody at that time was doing that type of education yeah i think to this day um when ali sits down to do the scripting and to figure out the videos he will go to a cafe he'll get a coffee he'll get his notepad and pen and he'll write down like so if i was teaching someone else how like we were here and we're having coffee how might i approach it well first we're going to start with this i'm going to go over there and maybe there's a personal anecdote here and um and recently in the channel you will notice there's been a lot more honest advice type videos because it really leans into ali's unfair advantage of being able to teach in that kind of way and especially in a youtube landscape where everything is super highly polished people leaning into retention editing it's no longer an unfair advantage to have the rotoscope with the text coming behind your head having something where you can ying rather than yang is being able to lean into your unfair advantage of being a storyteller and doing it authentically and honestly interesting yeah because he's very charismatic and there's kind of feels very soft and safe and friendly and kind of feels like he's letting you in even in the way that he's kind of leaning in the set on the desk it's kind of all kind of feels like he's letting you in yeah another example of a creator has done this really well is nisha yes nisha has this golden touch where any video she makes right now seems to blow up and she has great personality she has a great relationship with her audience she's willing to be authentic honest vulnerable and she has a very beginner friendly audience with like massive tam massive value proposition um for anyone thinking how could they recreate that success i do think being in front of camera is a skill it's definitely a skill you can learn my advice to most of the entrepreneurs that i work with who are trying to build profitable youtube channels through world-class content is telling them that you can't create the world-class content if it's like not authentic to who you are and it's really hard to do that through scripted content and so instead i get them to do talking points for all of their videos there is something that you're an expert in there's something that you know enough about that you could riff off a few stories you could tell me from the heart how you'd approach a certain thing um what is the skeleton structure of that and if we work back from the title thumbnail on the hook of that particular video and we have those talking points so we know you're going in the right direction and you finished the right finish line i don't really care how you deliver it just deliver it how callum would deliver it and then you're going to sit there in the chair and you think oh yeah so how would i deliver about it oh yeah so i first started out in this okay so to understand this i want to start with this and then you can go into the video that way over time you also get better at not blabbering and saying too much you can be a lot more concise but leaning into your authentic energy being able to show up as your true self and being able to teach um everyone has a different style but that's always a really good starting point yeah i definitely see that in niches content and these content and then even someone like hormosy like it is him it's more direct uh and straight but it's definitely him and i've definitely seen that where people try to actually then just script the whole thing because they think that's what they're meant to do and then it feels very robotic and it's not really them chip every week that's really important right is that the other kind of part of Ali's process here which is it's it's all about constraints and consistency is that right yeah I was teaching on the part-time youtuber academy for the two years when I worked on the team and one of the principles behind that academy is posting a youtube video every single week and if you post a youtube video every single week for a year, Ali's promise is that you would be able to change your life or the YouTube channel would lead to some really interesting and cool things, some opportunities, maybe the channel blows up, but you have to like post a video every single week.

24:57And when I was speaking to a lot of students, the ones who were posting every single week had the most interesting results. Either they drove revenue to their channels or they blew up their audiences and they're able to do music for full time and to replace their jobs. It just led to so many interesting opportunities. I think the reason why is because people sometimes think YouTube video is just a YouTube video is all the technical things. It's a strategy things. It's a writing things, but actually it's also the emotional things. And your first 10 videos is really hard to look and stare into the camera, knowing that this thing is going to be on the internet and everyone's going to see it.

25:31You're going to be judged for it, all of that kind of stuff. And so having the consistency, being able to flex the muscle, being able to practice your storytelling, being able to practice your title thumbnail hooks, how you're making it better each time, how you're adjusting the studio, the more shots you have on goal, the better you're going to get in a shorter amount of time. Some people have come to me and said like, Saf, what about two videos a week? If you can do two videos a week, great. But it's really hard to do one video a week. And if you can do two videos a week, sometimes I'll encourage you to create a back catalogue of videos so you have some space to be able to really dive into like, okay, what's the next video is going to be about?

26:04It's really impressive if I speak to someone and say, I've done a video a week for a year. That's a really interesting person to talk to. They're actually in the arena. of the successful ones was it just consistency that won out or was there anything else so i think probably the the honest answer is like with a lot of these programs a lot of people take them thinking that they want to become a youtuber and they might have had like a life change where they've decided youtube is a thing i want to try and i want to do and maybe for like 60 percent of them they realize after doing youtube that actually it's not for them and that realization can take a long time and so of the remaining people the ones that actually stayed consistent the ones that actually realize they enjoyed the process of YouTube and they're willing to show up every week and they're talking about topics that they love or even if there's not topics that they love they found a way to enjoy the process those are the ones that tend to succeed so it's it's like validating like is it is it just like a nice idea they've got or this dream idea of of a life they've got versus like actually do you actually enjoy it or can you get to a process where it's it's sustainable it's really really hard to make it and that's why having we come back to the system I was saying earlier, the system is designed to help you to ship one video per week, but also do it without the stress.

27:14You have visibility, everything's vetted, it's gone through a process. So it doesn't feel like this whimsical thing. And if I am shipping every week, what should I be tracking? Before someone launches a YouTube channel, one of the first questions that they tend to ask me is, what is going to be the strategy for the YouTube channel? And I always find that question is a bit of a red herring, because if you haven't launched the videos yet, you can spend ages coming up with a strategy but the strategy goes out the window when you throw stuff at the wall and the stuff that's sticking isn't what you expect it's yeah yeah and so quite often my advice would be to create videos the first 10 to 20 videos sure do some research but don't painstakingly decide on the strategy because it's just going to change but after 20 videos that's when you can start to look at the data and see what's sticking out to you so you can look at the most basic thing which is views.

28:05You can look at things like your click-through rate. You can look at things such as your average view duration. You can also look at the comments and they can be interesting. And again, you can look at other channels in your niche or even in other niches, but you're looking at outliers and you bring all of those different things together. Ideally, your strategy is a set of content pillars that you know you can deliver on where you're already starting to see content audience fit. And what's the highest leverage of those? I think the highest leverage out of all of those is your AVD. Okay. I think it's your AVD.

28:37Why is that? So I think that's the case because YouTube wants to keep people on their platform for longer and they want to encourage binge sessions. Yeah. And the best way that they know how to do that is by looking at videos that people feel satisfied by watching. Right. So average view duration is one of the many metrics that they'll be looking at to promote videos. It's not quite as simple as that because there is the other half of the equation, which is getting people to click in the first place. And it's really important to get that right. But I often find if you can build a video with a good ABD, it's got a really good value proposition.

29:08People want to stick around. Hopefully the packaging downstream of that is something that would have to make sense with that ABD in the first place. Another way to put it is you could spend ages polishing a turd where you have an idea and you've gone to an agency, you've gone to design your thumbnail, you've AB tested it. And it's like, this is like an absolutely gorgeous thumbnail, but the AVD is really low because the time is really low because the idea isn't that appealing. One of my friends approached me and he said, Saf, I would love for you to help me do some packaging and like a hook review for a video we're making.

29:41And I was like, sure, I'd be happy to do it. And the video was about how war zones create modern day technology. It was like how the war's going on in the world right now with like drones is actually the same drones they're using at Amazon. And so after doing a lot of the keyword research, after looking on YouTube, after looking around, There were very few examples of that type of video doing very well. And so the angle became really hard to spin. And we tried so many different things. Then we're like, okay, let's not give away Warzone in the title. Let's save that. It's like the secret thing.

30:10And like you're sort of concealing it as a retention piece. And we're kind of moving the CTR, but really the AVD was super low and it wasn't ever going to be as high as it could be. Just a quick thing. If you're enjoying this episode with Saf, I'm going to put a breakdown of all of the frameworks we ran through in the episode in my next email newsletter. you can get a copy at the link in the description so how do i get a high avd well the the easy way is to have a longer video in the first place yeah but the trouble of just having a longer video is you might find that your retention drops very quickly and so it's important to look at your retention charts to see if if making a longer video is indeed going to be the right thing for talking head educational videos which is a thing that i spend all my time looking at yeah more often than not it's about going deeper and teaching how are you going to show rather than tell yeah so instead of having a listicle of 10 things you look at a retention chart and you can see the spikes where people like go to the different 10 things yeah how can you actually show people and how can you teach them and how can you the thing you want to get is like reassure the viewer if you skip ahead you're going to miss this key lesson which i need to show you first for that to make sense and so if there is a way that you can incorporate more of that into your educational videos the more likely you're going to have someone go oh great look this is my lunch i'm viewing let's full screen it let's eat i might 2x speed it or 1.5x speed it but i'm paying attention what about comprehension level in all this like if i want to go deeper does that mean i go more detailed um because i think one of the other things that ali does really nicely is break down topics so they're accessible to a lot of people is there a balance there that i shouldn't go too detailed or should i just embrace that you said something interesting about like tam there and like with nisha kind of almost being beginner level um and you obviously work with clients who are mostly like entrepreneurs or founders so would you encourage them to think about the level that their audience are going to find easy to understand and go broader versus like going niche on topics yeah that's a really important thing that we try and do it's translating what that founder's vision is into language that's more accessible to the general public yeah and so the sweet spot is finding a value proposition that appeals to this like ideal customer profile who they want to reach but if you want to do well on youtube you also have to reach a wider audience so how could you bring both of them in yeah and so we made a video about um how to run a business in like three hours per week or something like that and it was called the ceo dashboard yeah and this video was appealing to 10 million entrepreneurs who actually needed a ceo dashboard to run a business yeah and people who are just interested in how the hell do you run a 10 million dollar business using a dashboard maybe there are some lessons that i can learn from that interesting and so um my friend callum mcintyre has a term called insider baseball yeah so some topics if they are too niche and they're too technical the terms are too insider baseball it just goes over people's heads so how can you translate that and make it more accessible to more people and so even using the term system that could be too detailed and too niche it depends on the sort of audience that you're going after but you want to try and simplify things as as much as you possibly can.

33:17And so, yes, the devil's in the details and it can really help depending on the value proposition of the video, depending on what you're breaking down. But it's also really important that you can deliver on that value proposition doing a simple way and at least ladder up to the technical terms. At least, you know, like Hormozy very rarely goes into the technical formulas for some of the business stuff that he does. And I've seen him do it like my first million. And that for the right audience, for the right, that's inside of baseball. And they're going to love that video. But for his own audience, he's chosen not to lean into it he'd make it as simple as he possibly can so how long ago did you leave Ali I left about nine months ago now okay interesting and then a few months later he texts you right yeah he texts me about four or five months later and asked would I be open to helping him out on the channel um and this was like four or five months after I'd left and I've already started my own business and that's something has always been a personal ambition of mine So I agreed to hop on a call and he became a client of the business rather than me going back full time, which was a nice way to be able to help him like two days a week on strategy, thumbnails, hooks, those types of things.

34:20And why did he call you? I think ultimately we had a few departures from the team in a short amount of time. And these are people who'd been on the team for like two years or longer. And he wanted to have some expertise on how to set the channel direction, what's going on behind the numbers. And I offered to go in and do a full audit with him. and it was like this massive 30 page document. We looked at AVD, click-through rates, audience demographics, we looked at other niches and we had raw numbers that we were able to attribute to a lot of different things. We had hypotheses that we were testing.

34:50And by the end of this document, we had the top three content pillars, which did well for Ali and his audience. And it was like, don't waste time on these other things because we noticed you have and they can feel like they're adding value. But really, if you just focus on like money, book club and like this one other thing, you'd actually do very well. At the end of that call, at the end of that insight, that was like the opening piece I delivered to him. He was like, what's the next step? Like, how can we now build on this? And that's where me and my team came in. It was mostly me, to be honest.