182. If You're a Creator, You Must Start a Business in 2026 ft. Ali Abdaal

20:38Ali Abdaal:Easy. And now you're building the product with your audience, with market validation built into it, rather than going into a cave for six months, coming out with a whole course and then realizing no one wants to buy the thing, which is such a freaking nightmare. No, it's a super fun game. I've done it before. It's fantastic. Fantastic. Going back to something you said earlier, you've spent a lot of money on mentorship. You recently just paid$100 ,000 for something. You've paid$30 ,000 plus for something. What have been some of the biggest unlocks from being around other very successful entrepreneurs that are selling stuff online, that are building products?

21:06What have those conversations looked like? I would love to know.

21:11Ali Abdaal:It's interesting because it's never something that I could have predicted ahead of time. But I've done it enough times to know that there's all sorts of unknown unknowns. that like just speaking to the right person unlocks something. So for example, I was at a mastermind in Palm Springs a couple of weeks ago with this guy called Taki Moore and it was a group of 50 people-ish. All of them were doing like a million plus a year from selling online coaching to some degree. One of them was selling coaching for farmers. One of them was selling coaching for accountants. One of them was selling coaching for like real estate people.

21:37Ali Abdaal:We were selling coaching for like beginners starting businesses, all of this sort of stuff. And through just a handful of conversations, I realized, huh, maybe we don't need a sales team because we were previously looking to hire a sales team to like, you know, book people into calls and do a sales team closing. And we saw these people making way more money than we were through a Google Doc. And so they just had a Google Doc talking about their offer. And they showed me the Google Doc. I was like, oh, we could do that. And so we decided to test it out. And for the next cohort of the program, we sold it purely through a Google Doc and a loom of me talking through the Google Doc, not a single sales call.

22:09Ali Abdaal:And we sold all 30 spots within like 12 hours. And last month I was on sales calls for like 50 hours that month to sell those first 30 spots, which was useful initially. It was useful for me to talk to the customers and to understand and to get a feel of where people are at in the process. But we realized, wait a minute, maybe we don't need to hire a whole sales team, which means we don't need to become a call center, which means we don't need to give away 10 % commission to salespeople, which means we don't need to worry about reviewing every call to make sure that they're on brand and they're not too salesy and all that kind of stuff.

22:35Ali Abdaal:And that came through just speaking to people. In these sorts of intimate environments, people are very open about how much money they're making. They're like, holy shit, you're making 12 million from that? Nice. And you're selling it through a Google Doc? with 80 % margins. Holy fuck, how's you doing that? And he's like, yeah, I'll show you. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. That's the sort of stuff that you don't get. You know, people are like, oh, everything's available online. It's like, that stuff is not available online. That's the stuff that you get from being in the room with people who are doing the thing.

23:01God, it's so interesting. You also referenced to me that you were able to chat with someone that was really big on LinkedIn. And I think a lot of our audience is looking at LinkedIn. Dude, I recently had a video go off on LinkedIn. Really happy about that. I don't know what happened. We just posted it, vertical video. all of a sudden I'm like, whoa, 400 ,000 impressions on this thing. This is kind of crazy. What are the learnings that you took away from LinkedIn? Because I know that's something that you want to dive a little bit more into. Yeah, so there's this guy called Matthew Lakajev,

23:25Ali Abdaal:or Lakajev, L-A-K-A-J-E-V. He is also one of the people in this mastermind. He wasn't at the Palm Springs event because he had like a family commitment, but various people at the Palm Springs event, we were talking about LinkedIn, and he was like, oh, you've got to check out Matt's stuff. I'm like, okay, let me check out Matt's stuff. And then we had a few like WhatsApp conversations, which works because now we're in the same mastermind groups. like if I reach out to him or he reaches out to me saying hey we're both part of boardroom immediately that's a connection because it's like okay I know you're legit you're doing a million plus a year you're part of this program like this is good this is gonna be worth the conversation right um and so I I had a call with Matt yesterday and just gave me a lot of advice about LinkedIn um how to approach it he's I mean he's got a bunch of videos on his YouTube channel that he's also got like a four hour long free course on how to do LinkedIn which is really really good I was listening to it at the gym the other day I was like this is some good stuff um but the key principles around LinkedIn are number one, you just got to do a lot of volume over time to get good at the thing.

24:16Ali Abdaal:Number two, do not outsource it to AI because like people can, people are able to now tell and it loses the authenticity, loses the soul, loses the connection you have with the viewers because you don't just want to get numbers on LinkedIn. You also want people to build trust with you and then convert to the thing that you're selling. A big principle that he told me was like, if you're just getting started, actually LinkedIn sales navigator is like incredible for being able to like cold message people and you know sending 200 plus like 200 connection requests a week sending 25 messages a day like actually using linkedin sales navigator as a way of kind of essentially cold dming people to try and sell your b2b offering and he told me about a bunch of their clients who have done that um successfully um we talked about how a lot of people struggle with posting on linkedin because uh if they have a job then the manager at the job might be like wait a minute you're soliciting for your side hustle on linkedin what the hell's going on.

25:06Ali Abdaal:And so you can almost build a secret side hustle by just cold DMing people on LinkedIn through Sales Navigator, which means you don't need to be like, hey, let me tell you about my course on LinkedIn. You can just do that in the DMs. And apparently there's people making like 10K a month on the side in secret without their employer knowing doing that kind of strategy. There was stuff like that, that I just had never come across before. Wow. So I got through a conversation with this dude. That is so been in silence, baby. Literally, yeah. Okay. So as someone who's invested a lot of money in yourself, okay, you brought up big number 60k 62k 100k someone might hear that say dude why not put that in the smp or invest in yourself and you say dude you gotta invest in yourself instead like you say that no one's actually saved their way or invested their way to financial freedom it makes more sense to invest in yourself and we've also talked about this it's like we feel that instead of putting the money that we make into investments or something like that it's like makes more sense to invest it back in ourselves we make more money and the return is going to be 10 20 100 x what you would see over 10 years if you were to put that into like the smp or stocks can you talk about just making more money bro yeah and why that's the best strategy it's all about making more more money bro right that's the that's the that's the thing um so here's the thing right so here's here's how i kind of like how i think about financial freedom is this on like if i draw stuff on an ipad can we like screen record of course we can and like show it in the yeah oh if you're listening to this on audio you're missing the diagrams but i'll talk through the diagrams let me let me get you something you can draw on what i care about and what like a lot of people in my audience care about is this idea of freedom you know freedom to live life on your own terms now this is all well and good we all want freedom to be able to spend our time however we want and the way i think of it is that you can almost quantify the amount of freedom you have because if you imagine there's 168 hours in the week, you spend 56 of them sleeping.

26:58Ali Abdaal:And let's say you spend another 12, like on the toilet and shit, you actually end up with a number 100. So there's basically 100 discretionary hours other than sleep and like bodily functions and stuff that you have to play with. And so the way I think about this is what, like how much freedom do I have in my life on a scale of zero to 100 is basically how many hours of these 100 hours a week am I doing stuff that I want to do versus stuff that other people want me to do or things that I really don't want to do. and the goal isn't necessarily to get this to full on 100 but like you know back when i had a day job i was losing 40 to 60 of these immediately because you know it was quite fun being a doctor i i did enjoy it but if i'm being honest i would choose if i had a fast forward button i would fast forward most of my work days with the exception of when i was teaching medical students that was really fun and that kind of made me realize that oh i really like teaching there's something cool about teaching but i would i would have chosen to fast forward forward most of my days um so i think this number is basically like how many, how much of your time is actually your own versus someone else's.

27:56Ali Abdaal:Now, the problem is obviously we all have expenses. And so we need to pay rent and bills and all that kind of shit. And therefore we need income. And income minus expenses equals like profit slash savings, whatever. So in theory, if you could get your expenses to basically zero, then you would be free because you wouldn't need to work in theory, right? If you have no expenses at all, you don't need any income, life's good or in theory if your income if i don't know we got like universal basic income or something like that and suddenly you had i don't know 10k a month 20k month like whatever it is coming in to that then covered your expenses and then some you also wouldn't need to work because now you can basically do whatever you want you'd still probably work anyway because most people humans need a sense of purpose need some kind of work but you certainly wouldn't you probably wouldn't be working the exact same job that you currently do if you had universal basic basic basic income or if you like won the lottery or something.

28:51Ali Abdaal:And so unfortunately, in order to make income, we have this thing called a job, which ends up sapping quite a lot of our freedom. Great. That's a one good. The way people get to financial freedom, to use Scott Galloway's definition is like financial freedom is when your passive income, i.e. the money that you make without actually doing anything, exceeds your lifestyle expenses. And so the biggest question, how do you generate passive income and passive income is generated through assets and an asset is a thing that puts money in your pocket so that could be stocks it could be like i don't know houses like real estate etc it could be um having like royalties uh like if you write a book then you actually get royalties from book sales for the rest of your life that is an asset that puts money in your pocket um and so the game of financial freedom is a game of essentially uh owning assets the people who own the assets are the people who are very wealthy the people who are very rich because assets create passive income passive income funds your lifestyle great you now have freedom to spend your 100 hours however you want which then begs the question of like okay how do we get these assets and there's basically only three ways to get assets either you buy the asset so you spend money to buy a house or you spend money to buy stocks um or you get uh sort of gifted the asset if your parents are rich and they gift you a house or whatever or you build the asset so in theory you could build your own house but that's kind of hard but a build would be something like you choose to write a book like right now anyone listening to this could choose to write a book you can self-publish it on amazon and now for the rest of your life you have an asset where if the thing is good and you have a way of driving leads to it you have a way of generating generating passive income um unfortunately with this buy you know mostly people get assets through buying which means you need money uh which means you need a job and so we're back just freaking back to fricking square.

30:37Ali Abdaal:We need, we need a job. God damn it. And so then we're like, all right, cool. Um, now the way we accelerate our journey to financial freedom is we could reduce our expenses to zero or as close to zero as possible, but there's only so much you can do. Like the most you can save is a hundred percent of your paycheck, right? Like there's a cap to how much money you can save. And you also probably don't want to live like a monk, but there theoretically is no cap, lol, no cap, uh, to how much you, I don't even know what that means i just hear the kids say it there's theoretically no cap to how much income you could earn but there is if you have a job because if you have a job and you try and like i don't know 5x your income um they probably won't go for that no you could make the case that hey i'm adding 5x value to the business but they're probably going to say something about bands and like salary bands and it's unfair and people in the rest of the team and it's just not how it works and you know the rule book says you're only allowed to negotiate a raise once every three years and bro you tried last year so fuck you you know that kind of that kind of situation um so then we think well a job is where you're doing work for some for someone else a business is when you are doing work for yourself and so can we take the skills that the employer is paying us which and our employer is basically a single client and could we potentially use those skills to start a business where we have multiple clients multiple clients or something like that the other thing there is that you know there's different types of businesses right like you could have a, you know, if you want to make a shit ton of money, you could have a very stressful job.

32:01Ali Abdaal:You could be a corporate lawyer, you could be an investment banker, et cetera, et cetera. And now you actually, you can probably get to financial freedom within like a decade or two. But the problem is that most of those people are kind of miserable in their 20s and 30s because they're like burning the midnight oil and not having a good time. Similarly, you could also build like a really high risk, high growth startup or like a traditional business where you're like, man, if this works out, I'll sell it for a hundred million and then I'll be rich and then I'll be financially free. But again, a lot of those people having spoken to them, A, they get depressed after they sell the company and B, like it sort of torpedoes their health and their relationships and all that kind of stuff.

32:33Ali Abdaal:So this is where coming back full circle, this idea of a lifestyle business comes in, where if you could build a business that kind of gave you kind of freedom and like flexibility and like fun and fulfillment. now actually you can actually have the freedom that you want on route to becoming financially free because like it takes a lot of money to get to a point where you like never need to work again a day again in your life um but if you build a lifestyle business where on route to doing that you're also you've also got the freedom and the flexibility you want you generally find that that is what people want anyway the reason people want all this money to be financially free is so that they can spend their time doing what they want but if your business allows you to spend your time doing what you want anyway if the stuff that you're doing for your business is stuff that you're not just doing for the money i imagine you guys enjoy running the podcast right super fun you know i would probably do this anyway if you won the lottery i'm having i'm having a this is a lifestyle business yeah it's a lot of business this is fun we get to do it we get to travel we get to hang out with you yeah and so that kind of thing and so and so that wouldn't and so you guys doing this podcast wouldn't eat into your 100 hours points because you would choose to do this anyway even if you were retired even if you had 100 million in the bank you just love the idea of doing a podcast it's really fun to do i would still make youtube videos for the most part, even if I had a hundred million in the bank.

33:49Ali Abdaal:I probably wouldn't sell online courses if I had a hundred million in the bank. So I know that for me, online courses are like a thing that I'm doing for the money, but that's okay. You know, every business you're doing some of the stuff for fun, some of the stuff for money. And hopefully most, mostly there's an overlap between those two things. It's my favorite time of the year. Is it the artless trends? Oh yeah. We're going through it. A lot of this was around AI. Okay. They surveyed 140 different countries, 6 ,500 creators at massive companies. You got like people at meta, people at Netflix, people that are really using creativity at the highest level.

34:17And I think we have some amazing insights for you guys today. So let's go through them. What's number one? Originality becomes your edge. I think that's a boom. Yes, of course. Originality is coming our edge. With AI, everybody can create amazing things. And so you need to be original to stand out. If you're not original, you're just going to blend in with everybody else. Absolutely. So maybe using it to put your own spin on it. Absolutely. Not relying on it entirely. Absolutely. Okay. Number two is getting up to speed with it. So I think a great place to be playing with these tools is an art list.

34:45They have everything integrated right there for you. So you can test it out. You can try these different things. It does take a little bit of time. So I even recommend messing around if you use Chat2BT to help you prompt and then bring it in to these different platforms to help you guys out. What's number three? Number three is that vision and taste are your superpowers with everybody able to use AI to make whatever they want. You have to become your own creative director. You have to creative direct the prompts. You have to use your taste and your vision to make original content and allow you to stand out.

35:16Number four, you can't fake real experiences. You can't. You guys need to be bringing people together, getting off the screen. Absolutely. Bringing people into different settings that are outside of the little bubble that we all live in on our phones. So whether that be coffee meetups or that be like a run club of sorts, a photo walk, whatever the heck the thing may be, try to bring people together in some way, shape or form. We're going to be doing in-person things, which we're super excited about. So I'd implore you to do the same. And number five is trust and authenticity is everything. Everybody is a little bit sketched out with AI of like, is this real?

35:48Is this AI? I don't know if I can trust it. If you can lean into being authentic and building trust with your audience, you're going to win. You can check out the full trends report linked down in the description. Let's keep it rolling. But the thing that you're doing for the money brings you joy because you're making an impact on the people that you're helping.

36:04Ali Abdaal:Sure. That's what I could tell myself. But if I didn't care about the money, I would just put it for free on YouTube, right? And so I'd still have the impact for way more people. You could argue that if you don't pay, you don't pay attention. And so people, if something's free, they don't value it, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I don't know. But I certainly wouldn't be trying too hard to sell an online course if I had 100 million in the bank. Which is good to know. It's good to know what's in my list of things that I do for the vibes and what's the things I do for the revenue. And often those things are not the same, unfortunately.

36:33Ali Abdaal:Like this podcast is not the most efficient way for you guys to make money. you could probably make way more money just doing more commercial brand deals but the podcast is fun yeah and there's almost always a trade-off between like the stuff i do for the vibes and the fun and the stuff that i do for the money and when we're building a lifestyle business we're just trying to have a nice overlap a nice mix where we're like you know what this is actually pretty good you brought up something in here with like having a job and being very burnt out were were you very burnt out as a doctor and was that a reason why you're like i am i need to figure out how to make this YouTube thing work or no?

37:03I actually won't.

37:03Ali Abdaal:So like, no, I figured out the productivity thing where like for the first couple of months of being a doctor, I was very burnt out. And then I realized that actually a lot of, a lot of the burnout came from the fact that I wasn't as engaged with the work as I could have been. This was kind of like the whole reason why I wrote my book, Feel Good Productivity. It's like, there's lots of things you can do to get energy out of whatever work you're doing, even if that work is hard or it's boring or it's tedious or whatever. and so I wasn't actually that burnt out but I had a lot of friends who were very burnt out and I looked ahead 10 years to see other doctors who were ahead of me and they were all burnt out and so I was like I don't want to run the risk I'm going to be the one special snowflake that like loves working in medicine 60 hours a week I'm probably not like everyone says as you get older you have less energy etc etc and so I want to optimize for freedom so that I have the option of working part time because the happiest doctors I knew were the ones working like 30 days a week or the ones who left medicine to build their own businesses You know what one of my favorite things about the podcast is?

38:00The whiteboard sessions. Yeah, the whiteboard. God. And the first time we did it was with Daniel Priestley. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you brought up talking more. You brought up other people that you've been working with. And Daniel is a good friend of yours. And you guys have worked together and he's taught you quite a bit. I'm curious to know what have you learned from Daniel Priestley? And how has he helped you transform the way you go about your business? Shout out to Dan.

38:23Ali Abdaal:Yeah, big shout out to Dan Priestley. So I discovered his book oversubscribed back in like 2021 or something. And that is still to this day, my most highlighted book of all time on Kindle. I think number two is The Way of the Superior Man. But oversubscribed by Dan Priestley, amazing book. And so when I started my podcast, I just assumed he was in Australia because I knew he did talk to his book about being in Sydney or something. And it turns out he lives in London. And so we had him on my podcast and it was like, it was super fun. We really got on. he taught me so much in that podcast episode that episode got like two million views then he came on the podcast again and it got another two million views and so he's been our like highest performing podcast guest of all time and then sort of through those conversations we just got to know each other as friends and now me and me and my wife go on like double dates with him and his wife and his vibes and stuff one of the key things that he taught me is i mean it seems obvious now but it really wasn't wasn't obvious to me back then which is that everything is downstream of lead generation like if you can't generate leads for a business then you don't have a business and so to this point around like validating an idea before you build the thing you know his whole shtick would be you know build a wait list or build a score app a quiz or build a free introductory workshop to personal branding if you can't get people to sign up to a free introductory workshop to personal branding there's no fucking way in hell you're ever going to get them to hey two thousand dollars for a program on personal branding.

39:46Ali Abdaal:And so that kind of idea sort of has really shaped our business over the last like five years of really recognizing build the waitlist first. Even now we've got a Black Friday offer coming up for our YouTuber Academy. We are building a waitlist for the Black Friday offer because it's just so easy to build a waitlist. It's very easy for someone to enter their email and be like, yeah, I want to learn more. And then we can sort of like send daily emails to them that like give them a lot of value and make them think, whoa, Ali really knows what he's talking about about this YouTube stuff. And then when we present the offer and the deadline and the 24 hours to go, one hour to go, four hours to go, all of that kind of stuff.

40:16Ali Abdaal:That's when we get a massive spike in sales. So that was a key thing. And then Dan also has really helped me around this sort of lifestyle business stuff. His shtick is that you kind of got to decide fairly early on, do you want to be a lifestyle business where you're like less than 12 people, fun, freedom, flexibility, all that kind of stuff? Or do you want to be a performance business where you're like 30 plus people and you've got a big team, you've got managers, you've got like a C suite and all that shit. And that zone in the middle between 12 employees and 30 is he calls it the desert. And every time we've been in the desert with like 15, 16, 17, 18 team members, everything has gone to shit.

40:50Ali Abdaal:And we've always sort of like then condensed back down to a core team of 12. And there is something really magical about this number 12. Like when you start going beyond it, things start to break. And so through conversations with Dan has helped me realize that, you know what, I don't really care right now to have a performance business. At this stage of my life, you know, I've got a kid. We've just moved to Hong Kong like a year ago. I want to have a balanced life. I want to actually start taking care of my health. For me, having a lifestyle business is what I want right now. Maybe I'll change my mind in a few years and be like, you know what?

41:17Ali Abdaal:Let's go big. Let's go for like the 50 million revenue type business. But for now, a lifestyle business is the place to be. When you got to over 12, had Dan already told you like, yo, you got to watch out for the desert? And you're like, I got it. Yeah. And then we went over. We had a similar conversation. Yeah. We love that, dude. I texted Dan like year after. I was like, you're fucking right. He goes, I know, dude. It's like, I'm wise, dude. I've been down this route before. We were like just about to get into our first program. Bang my head against a wall. And we were kind of workshopping it with Dan.

41:45We were pretty set in our ways. And he's like, I'm telling you, this is wrong. It's not going to work. Dan, no, you don't get it. You don't know, Dan. He's like, I've been here.

41:52Ali Abdaal:I've done this, brother. Dan was telling me not to build this Lifestyle Business Academy. He was like, look, you've already got a thing that works. You've got your YouTube thing, your YouTube Academy, which is doing like somewhere between one and two million a year in revenue. Why not just pour fuel on that fire? Because it's so much easier to take something that already works and make it better. And then you can potentially sell it, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, man, every time we've ignored Dan's advice in the past, we've always come back to do it then two years later. So maybe, and then we were like, nah, Dan.

42:20Ali Abdaal:This time. We're going to call him, dude. We're going to give him a call after this. On the, you brought up lead gen. Yeah. What ways do you have in your like sales process of qualifying leads? Because I feel like attention is really sexy and to get a lot of views and you get a lot of people coming to you is great. But if they're not qualified, it doesn't fucking matter because if you're trying to sell a high ticket thing and it's not a qualified lead, you're not going to turn them into someone who's going to pay for your product. So what ways do you have to be able to qualify leads if they come through you guys' funnel?

42:52Ali Abdaal:Yeah, so in our case, for our high ticket thing, we have an application, so you have to apply. And then we review every application and we have an AI that also reviews every application. And what we are looking at is based on the way they filled out the application, do we think we can actually help them? i.e. do they have enough pre-existing expertise that they could potentially come up with a high ticket offer so we get a lot of like 19 year old kids who have no life coach yeah i want to be a life coach want to be a life coach because they've watched like hums us content or something they've never done they've never started a business uh you ask them what you do what they do in the spare time and they'll like watch netflix and scroll tiktok and stuff like that super into video games but not good enough to be competitive and so they just actually have no skills now it's very hard for us to take someone like that and help them build a hundred thousand dollar a year business in under 12 months.

43:36Ali Abdaal:So we just don't even accept them into the program. If you are that 19 year old with no skills, that's OK. You can just spend a year or two learning the skills because it's not that hard to learn skills that are like high income skills. These days, the whole AI thing, as a 19 year old kid, if you were to just figure out like what kind of businesses do you like the idea of that's not too saturated and can you figure out a way to learn how to use AI to help them make more money, you're onto a winner. Like I was speaking to one of the guys at the Mastermind who started off a few years with basically no experience, but had previously worked at a marketing agency and was like, all right, I'm gonna do marketing for businesses and landed on hair salon owners.

44:13Ali Abdaal:He's not a hair salon. He's never been to a hair salon in his life. But he found that the niche of hair salon owners wanting to grow their business was underserved. And so now he's the guy who helps hair salon owners make more money. And he's doing like 10 million plus a year from helping hair salon owners. And then he expanded like beauty salons and the nails and like, you know, adjacent markets as like the only dude in the space who's like never actually run a hair salon or been to a hair salon. But he was like, yeah, it just works because you can just apply the same skill set to a specific niche.

44:39Ali Abdaal:So just because you don't have skills doesn't mean you can't learn the skills. I think, oh, I don't have any skills. And like, what's the easiest, laziest business to start as a beginner without having any skills? All of that kind of stuff gets a lot of views on YouTube. And so then you end up in the realm of like freaking paid surveys and stuff. But I think the underrated thing is learn a high income skill, become really good at something, and then parlay that skill into building a business that helps someone else ideally make more money what are other ways that you're using ai in the business that have really helped you guys because you said you have a smaller team now but you can operate at a much higher level because you you're using different things to save you more time what are some of those things i mean i still think we're quite like um bloated in terms of team size um but like every everyone is good it's a problem like we we have no one in the team who's like clearly bad um and so you should do like a hunger game so yeah i should yeah um and so yeah on the ai front we use it a lot for like um brainstorming so for example uh one thing that's really helpful is being able to take transcripts of like sales calls or um taking all the application forms that we get for a lifestyle business academy or taking all of the workshops that i do for our students and all of our like coaching calls and stuff that our coaches do chuck them all into like Florida chat gpt and get it to figure out like what are the things that people are struggling with, which then helps inform the content that I do in the next week's workshop and stuff.

45:57Ali Abdaal:So that's like super, super helpful. Previously, that would have taken a human like a bunch of time to do. We also do a bunch of like idea brainstorming for content. So we will feed it the CSV of our YouTube analytics and be like, all right, tease out the patterns here and help us figure out like, oh, actually, when we do videos about books, those don't get as many views as videos about money, but they actually drive more subscribers. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, that's good to know. Or like when we do videos about money, but framed around how to make money versus how to start a business. Actually, no one wants to start a business, but everyone wants to make money.

46:26Ali Abdaal:It's almost that meme where you have the two lines, because you're sort of lining up outside this like kiosk and one kiosk is make money. The other kiosk is start a business. And like, there's no one there. And everyone's like, I want to make money, which is interesting. So we found that when we're doing videos about business, titling it in the way around how to make money rather than how to start a business. And then using the business as the vehicle that's explained within the video actually performs better. And so stuff like that is insights that the AI has come up with that we we didn't see just looking at the data ourselves were the bottlenecks different going from zero to one million and then one to five uh revenue or subscribers like revenue oh um or subscribers or subscribers yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah or subscribers yeah uh yeah what were the bottlenecks um yes and no so there's basically two categories of bottleneck right there's like we don't have enough customers and then there's we don't have enough uh sorry there's a sort of the lead generation problem of like we need more people to buy our stuff and then there's the um sort of delivery problem of like we actually can't uh we can't facilitate more people to buy our stuff because we're actually limited in operations or in customer success or that or that kind of thing up until about two months ago 100 of our bottlenecks has been in the realm of like we just need more people to buy our stuff because if we could get more people to buy our stuff.

47:49Ali Abdaal:If it's like leveraged self-paced online courses, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand customers or a million customers because the fulfillment for those is the same because it's an online course. But now with our Lifestyle Business Academy, we are literally limited to like taking 30 people a month because it's so high touch. And so now we're like for the first time actually bottlenecked on capacity to take customers. And so now we're like literally turning customers away. We're like, sorry, you want to pay us 10 grand? Yes, we actually don't have space because like we want to make sure people in the program actually have a really good experience.

48:16And so now we're in the game of how do we increase capacity?

48:20Ali Abdaal:How do we hire more coaches who are actually good? Make sure that they're like the fit with the vibes of the team, that they know what they're talking about. How do we build systems that allow students to get results at scale beyond like the first 30 people? And so for the first time in our business history, that is now the bottleneck. Do you find that you have to still be very much in this or can the team make decisions without you there? The team can totally make decisions without me there but i find that when my energy is in a project a project just does better and people have a better like the team have a better time of it and the customers have a better time of it because i've just got so much context on like the business stuff and haven't been doing it since the age of 13 and so it is unreasonable to expect our team members that are mostly junior and haven't done the thing before to be able to have all of that like 18 years of context that i've got in my head to be able to like do something um having said that they are still very good so for example geo is our head of student success and so she has had experience in like running communities and we sort of has taken a lot of online courses and like spoken to a bunch of mentors around how to build a good like customer success system within within within the business so i fully trust her views on that front but when it comes to the curriculum what are the the sequence of steps that we get students to do to help them define their niche or figure out their offer or figure out their lead generation system and stuff when i try outsourcing that to the team to do, I end up just scrapping their work and doing it myself anyway.

49:42Ali Abdaal:And so we've realized that I just have to design the curriculum myself. And my wife Izzy helps as well because she has a lot of context on this stuff. What does the week-to-week look like now? We have a part-time YouTuber Academy. We have this lifestyle business. We're making YouTube videos still. What does the daily look like for you? You have a kid. You have a kid. Oh yeah. I'm a baby. Yeah, daily looks like basically we have two filming days a week. So Wednesdays and Thursdays. Tuesday and Thursday, Tuesday and Friday afternoons are devoted to software because we're building apps as well. And so that's when I have my call, like the calls with the developer and sort of our CEO on the software side.

50:13Ali Abdaal:And then the other, what is it, like two days a week are spent on like the Lifestyle Business Academy stuff. So that's some pretty nice little portfolio of stuff that we're doing. It's quite a bit. You got your hands full, which means you need to be productive. Exactly. So on the topic of productivity, how important is being productive with being able to build a lifestyle business? Oh, massively. Like productivity is basically like how much output do you get for a particular like input of let's say time energy or focus and so if you are more productive you are getting more useful things done in the same amount of time compared to someone who is less productive uh and so there's there's sort of two axes on this there's vision and then there's action there's vision is is that's sort of like the directionality like knowing what direction you actually want to go and then there's action like actually doing the stuff day to day week to week that gets you there.

51:02Ali Abdaal:And I generally find that when people start to get into productivity, they care a lot about the action efficiency thing. Like how can I type faster? How can I use keyboard shortcuts? How can I just do shit a little bit faster? And then as your business grows, you end up actually realizing that the vision bit is just way, way, way more important than the action bit. Like even if I don't do any execution at all, the business will still hopefully grow if I make the right decisions. And so then the game for me becomes a game of how do I make sensible decisions, which is why I invest in all these mentorships and like mentors and stuff.

51:35Ali Abdaal:They're not actually helping me sit down and do the work. They're helping me figure out what are the right chess moves to make because making, you know, the chess move of removing the sales team and going with a Google doc is a massive chess move that I wouldn't have seen if I was just like trying to optimize the sales team. It's sort of like zooming out a little bit or the chess move of, Hey, do you realize with your offer, you could just like bump the price to 10 grand and like, it would be fine i was like oh hmm that person's got more experience than i do i feel weird about this but let me just borrow their belief right now and let me just test it sick that worked all right let's keep going and immediately we've just added 40 to our to our bottom line so it's it's things like that that you wouldn't come to from just sort of the day-to-day productivity but you kind of need the day-to-day productivity to even get to a point where your decisions start to be so leveraged that it becomes about the decision making yeah it's like instead of uh dude just make more money it's like dude bro just charge just charge more money yeah literally yeah it's simple math that's often often a magic bullet like every time you hire a business coach often the first thing they'll say is what's stopping you from charging more money usually the answer is like i'm scared and so it's like have we thought about testing it because the pricing page is the easiest pace on your easiest sort of page on your entire in your entire business to test and the one where the least amount of effort has the most amount of like impact because generally increasing prices drops directly to the bottom line because you've already got your costs so the extra revenue you make from a price increase literally just goes to your profit and that can be the difference between like 10 margins and like 40 margins which is the difference between like a really kind of shitty business and like a very good one i remember when we were first getting started in this whole game we thought to be able to charge more you had to like include more information oh yeah to like make it more valuable give away more time yep but it's not actually the case.

53:15Ali Abdaal:Can you talk about that? Yeah. We've also had this issue where it's just so natural to think that people pay for things and like the more things you give them, the more they will pay for the things. But especially when you're in the business of selling transformation rather than selling stuff, which is sort of the more high ticket you get, the more people care about what's the result rather than what's the method for getting there. You actually want less stuff. Like if you're helping a business owner make more money, the less they have to do to make that money, the more they will pay you. But if you're giving them like access to our course library with 156 hours of content, bro, 156 hours, who the fuck has got time for that?

53:54Ali Abdaal:Whereas when you're selling to, when you're selling to, actually, you know, there was a talk from Maria Wendt at this mastermind. I was at like two weeks ago and she sells low ticket products, like$10,$27,$37 products. Two people wanting to start businesses. Her take was that when you're in the low ticket game, you want to stack as much stuff as humanly possible because that type of person who wants to buy a$27 thing, almost like when you see those like telemarketing shows, there's like, you get this knife for$27 and you get these other 84 knives for another$1. And you're like, oh, wow, 85 knives for like 27.

54:28Ali Abdaal:Wow, I might as well just buy this. So similarly, what she does is she sells like, you know, 300 Instagram Canva templates plus 5 ,000 hooks that work on LinkedIn plus these other 27 courses I've made for$27. and for that type of audience who's a beginner getting started who thinks they need stuff the stuff is what gets them over the line but if you're selling high ticket it's about the transformation that gets them over the line and the less stuff there is people don't really care about the stuff they care about getting the result and the stuff is just there to a facilitate them getting the result and b for the result to be believable so if i said to you that i'll just make you an extra million overnight you probably wouldn't believe me but if i said i'll help i'll make an extra million overnight and the way i'm going to do that is because i'm going to give you my list of contacts that are all like businesses doing at least 50 million in revenue.

55:13Ali Abdaal:And I know that they could benefit from a personal branding masterclass. And they've literally said to me, they would pay a hundred grand to have a consultant consult with someone who has an experience in personal branding. So with 10 WhatsApp messages, you could get an extra million dollars. Now you believe me because you're like, oh shit, the stuff is going to get me the outcome. But if I said, you know, oh, and I'll throw in my 156 hour long YouTube course. Oh, and by the way, I'll throw in like a, you know, a free copy of my book and like, you know, the audio book as well. and by the way, we've got all these like thumbnail templates that you can use.

55:40Ali Abdaal:And then you'll be like, bro, like, what do you do? Yeah, you've been able to also amass quite a following on YouTube. It exploded during COVID. You've kept fuel in the fire. It's continued to grow. What are some of those bottlenecks that people face in the very, very early days of YouTube? Because so many people want to be full time YouTubers. I mean, we're conversations with you conversations with Daniel You know, Daylon, I mean, we're going back rejuvenated with YouTube. I'll tell you what. We came here being like, maybe, maybe we'll vlog at some point. We're leaving Hong Kong being like, oh, YouTube needs to be like number one priority for us.

56:16As far as a second channel that isn't the podcast, that's like a vlog built in public type situation. Nice. What are your thoughts then? I'm building a YouTube. Sick.

56:27Ali Abdaal:Okay. I have some hot takes on this. A lot takes for you guys. For us, dude, tell us some hot takes. throwing this in the trailer okay give me some hard take okay so the thing is like to the point we made earlier around like uh it's it's very hard to follow the model of build an audience first monetize it second correct it's a lot easier to do when you have something to sell so daniel dalen makes all his money from his like e-com warehousing thingy he doesn't make his money from the fact that he's got like a youtube channel with like i don't know 100 000 something subscribers right so he has a legit business that's very legit and is just pouring fuel on the fire by virtue of the fact that he has a youtube channel now if someone didn't have that product and they were just like pov how i'm trying to build my ten dollar agency from dubai or whatever like they would realize there's like 500 000 people also trying to do that and none of them are getting any views and so the game of youtube is it's becoming harder and harder and harder to get views which means what you want is a product to sell to the people and then the content you make is like aligned with that particular product so the way i think about this if i if i use my hands rather than the diagram so you've got your your niche is basically a person and a problem right do you want to draw again sure yeah oh i love the drawing oh let's go i love the drawing double draw session so this is this is sort of like your person and this is sort of like where they are right now and this is situation where they want to be right you got this this kind of thing going on here and your offer or your product is positioned as the bridge that helps them get from A to B.

57:54Ali Abdaal:You know, for example, I don't have a YouTube channel and I want to be a successful YouTuber. Great, take Oliabal's YouTube course. The offer is positioned as the bridge between where they are and where they want to be. I don't have a personal brand. I want a personal brand. Your personal branding masterclass or whatever is positioned as the offer. The thing to keep in mind is your content is also, should be positioned, in my opinion, as the bridge that gets them from A to B. So if my, if I cared about making money from helping people start YouTube channels. My YouTube channel would probably be more like Think Media, where I'm making content about how to start a YouTube channel.

58:28Ali Abdaal:Best video, how to like your videos, best film camera gear for beginners, like review of the DJI Osmo and all that crap. And then it's like, hey, join thinkmasterclass.com, which is their webinar funnel that goes into the offer, which is, I don't know what the offer is, but it's like there's alignment between the content and the offer. And this is an easy business to run. I'm not saying Think Media's business is easy, but like in general when you have alignment between the stuff life is good if it's like the content is about like you know in in in my case for example the content is sort of about productivity but so also sort of sort of sort of about study tips and there's like some vlogs in there about life as a doctor and oh by the way the thing we sell is about how to do youtube it's like that is misaligned and so we can get a shit ton of views and subscribers but actually be making relatively little money in the grand scheme of things compared to other people who have more alignment between like the content and the product and so in your guys's case i would ask the question of like what is the offer like what's the core thing that you want to make money out of and then we can figure out like what's the youtube channel strategy which might be vlogs but also might not be because to me vlog is a format rather than a a thing yeah oh interesting okay so what's your offer the offer is going to be a personal branding workshop okay and it's going to help people make six figures online selling products uh what kind of products digital products make 100k plus online i don't make this a bit thicker there we go uh selling digital products low ticket high ticket all of the above all the above i don't think i don't have like a specific one there okay cool nice um where does the concept of personal brand to come into this it's like how to build a personal brand and then how to craft an offer around your personal brand okay cool so it's like make 100k online that'd be the promise yeah let's make 100k online sort of through building a personal brand through personal brand which helps you sell digital products of some description correct okay and you mentioned like paid to be you or something yeah paid to be you yeah i think that's a really cool name paid to be you so you help people become rich uh paid to be themselves exactly so you have your target audience you've got kind of their dream outcome which is so now they're making like 100k plus a year uh being themselves basically correct sick and where is their current situation like describe your target audience target audience they're currently in a job uh how old are they roughly i would say 24 to 35 maybe 24, 35, not range.

1:01:06They're working a job right now, not loving it. Yeah, not loving the job. They see this idea of making money online feels fake. Like there's no way. Great. I would say they get a lot of help out of online content. They see YouTube not as something where it's like, oh, this is totally fake. This is very helpful. They're searching for this content to be able to leave their job. Or I also think it could be a creator of sorts that's making content, but hasn't been able to fully monetize.

1:01:38Ali Abdaal:Okay. Now, in that world, you have a divergence of who this person could be. is saying either it is a working professional who's like wants to build a business or it is a creator who and those are drastically different audiences and so what i would encourage you to do is like if you had to pick one okay who is the one you actually want to talk to oh is it the existing creator who's not making enough money or is it the total newbie who is not an existing creator who also wants to make money i would say it's i want to go after the person that's probably the working professional because they have more money and you can sell them a higher ticket.

1:02:13Ali Abdaal:Correct or no? Well, not necessarily because, I mean, if someone is an existing creator and they're like, they're probably doing it alongside a day job, so they probably have income coming in. Okay, so then let's go, let's go the existing creator. Yeah, let's go the existing creator. Okay, but the problem with the existing creator is that if you think of how many people there are who are not creators versus how many there are, you've automatically alienated a lot. Like 1 % of the total addressable market. of see which is what I feel like we did the first time we were selling a product online we were selling to creators and I felt like creators weren't making and I think the 1 % of creators is very small like they're making 6k USD plus per month very small oh god that's like a 1 % only 1 % of people are creators in the first place and only 1 % are actually making money from it so unless you're going mega mega mega high ticket and your content is purely targeted at that person then And I would, I don't know.

1:03:08Ali Abdaal:This is where it's like, it's not an exact science, but from what I know of your audience, I imagine mostly the people listening to this podcast have jobs and want to make it rather than are already doing a great thing and want to improve, I suspect. But I could be wrong here. No, I think you're right. I think most of the people have jobs. I think that's given us some clarity. Yeah. And so, okay, great. And now we're talking, we know we're talking to the person with the job. Yeah. Great. so your offer is you're going to take someone who's a boring ass working professional with a job and you're going to help build a personal brand online through content and shit that sells stuff that eventually makes them to correct okay show them how to do a newsletter show them how to optimize for that show them how to make content consistent on youtube or yeah fantastic all that kind of stuff so great so that's your offer now all of your content is also going to be that kind of stuff so you would do youtube videos or whatever you would pick a platform stick to it probably youtube um unless you want to go linkedin i mean obviously yeah the choice of platform up to you um but given your guys a skill set probably youtube although i don't know instagram high high-end instagram could be interesting as well because a lot of that audience is on instagram i mean this is a massive audience so they're on every platform yeah uh or maybe it's even linkedin maybe you're you're a differentiator is the fact that you're the only people doing insanely high quality videos on linkedin and talk about this shit where everyone else is just doing chat gpt written text content talking about the stuff because a load of people on youtube doing it but tons but there's very few how many on linkedin doing it so i'd be interested in like i wonder what linkedin is like anyway so your content would be also selling this transformation and helping them along the way and the way i think of content um i'm literally doing a workshop for our students about this like this week so it's it's top of mind is that a good piece of content should do two things number one it should move them move your target audience one step closer to their dream outcome to d o dream outcome uh like let's say you did a video on how to start your first newsletter step-by-step guide that moves them one step closer or like how to stay more consistent when doing content moves them one step closer and secondly if you imagine like a trust meter from zero to a hundred that your audience has with you you want a plus one on the trust meter every time you make a piece of content so if there's a width that this is generated boom you're going to lose trust with a sophisticated audience yeah um even even though the content might be useful uh so you want to be thinking in those terms around like what is useful in terms of moving them closer and how do we showcase personality vibes which you guys already have in spades as you know so i wouldn't worry about that too much but like how do we come across as like nice people that the audience audience will want to trust enough to take the next step i.e join our free workshop sign up to our seven-day email crash course fill out the scorecard apply to our program blah blah blah all of that jazz and so so interesting and so when you when you say when i hear people say we're going to start a vlog documenting the process i'm always like yeah vlogs yeah i would have maybe worked in 27 to 2015 ac nice that era like and i'm all for vlog as a format but fundamentally no one gives a fuck about you guys totally uh they care about what you can do for them and so if it was a video that was titled um how to produce a high quality podcast step by step and it was a vlog of your trip to home so you're talking now this makes sense yes vlog as a format yes uh we're doing a video like tomorrow or something about like you you know, read these four books to become a millionaire or something.

1:06:23Ali Abdaal:Actually, it's a good title. Ooh, I like that. And it's about... Write that down. $100 million offers, obviously, Dotcom Secrets, Million Dollar Weekend, and The Millionaire Fastlane. Ooh. And I could do that video at my desk, but I'm going to use vlog as a format to sort of like walk around Hong Kong a little bit. Make it more interesting. Make it more interesting. Go from one coffee shop to another, talk about the stuff. And like, it's a bit more vibey there. See, because I think when we were kind of discussing of like, what would a vlog format look like for us? it's not just like yeah it's not like oh dude come with day in the life come with me to get my food it would be it would be around building a podcast yeah plus like incorporating some sort of there has to be a board session has to be a value giving value and then also kind of like showcasing life and otherwise it's just like look how cool i am not it's not helpful for me as a viewer yes you know what i mean but i think it's more engaging than me sitting in my office and like just telling you about it for 10 minutes it's like we can use our skill set with video and with editing to make it much more engaging and still deliver you something where you're like, oh, I got something.

1:07:24I also enjoyed watching said show today. Yeah, I also, I don't necessarily have desire to do sit down talking head YouTube style videos. I think like being able to teach in a vlog format

1:07:37Ali Abdaal:sounds a lot more exciting. Yeah, you definitely want to follow your energy on that front. That's why I'm doing vlog as a format. I know it probably won't make a difference to the video, but at a certain point, actually fairly early on in the journey your own creative mojo is like the most important asset in the business and so if you find something fun even if it doesn't have a very clear roi like what's the roi of you guys shipping all this equipment you probably could have done it in slightly less good production value and saved the thousand dollars that like china air you can charge god damn china air dude probably could have done that but you guys like the aesthetics of good production value yeah i could have not spent bloody like a shit ton of money on like my personal website design.

1:08:16Ali Abdaal:I just really like design. And this call I had this guy this morning with a dude, he was like, man, I look at your website and I can tell you really care. And I was like, thank you. Finally. It's a negative 50K investment, but thank you because that's what I'm going for. You're calm and it makes me care. So doing stuff that you find fun, keeping in mind, you also want to add value because there's sort of like overlap between art and business. You want to keep it enjoyable for yourself and you also want to make it useful for the audience. So, yeah. Was this vision at the very beginning of what you thought your brand, your channel, and all of this could turn into, has that stayed true or has it changed a lot along the way?

1:08:48Like if you look at this trajectory of a line, if you're writing and you're like, this is where I want the Ali Abdaal brand to be like eight years from now, five years from now. Did it end up hitting that or did it change so much along the way?

1:08:58Ali Abdaal:Yeah, I didn't really have a vision for it. I didn't have much of a plan. The extent of the plan was, I'm going to start making videos about life as a medical student because firstly, I can shill my courses because I was teaching courses and helping people get into med school. And secondly, because in the UK, not many people are talking about life as a doctor. So like, I just think it would be interesting. I think if I just did that and was able to vlog my life as a doctor, I'm sure some good things will happen further down the line. So that was the extent of the plan. I had no idea that it would become about productivity.

1:09:25Ali Abdaal:I didn't even think of the word productivity applied to myself until people in the comments started saying, how are you so productive? Oh, interesting. And then the content went into productivity. I didn't think I would make videos about like iPads and shit until I was like, hmm, let me do a video about like iPad note-taking and boom, 2 million views. Holy fuck, okay. You know, I've been watching desk setups for years. Let me do my own productivity desk setup. boom 50 ,000 people's like oh nice this is fun and so it's just like over time the thing has evolved by me kind of kind of following my own energy kind of figuring out what would be useful but also keeping an eye on like a little bit of a long-term trajectory because i knew that initially my content was about how to get into med school i knew that it couldn't stay like that forever uh because that's a niche that you age out of then my content became about how to study for exam uh exams again it's a niche you age out of no one wants to listen to a 58 year old talking about how to study for your 18 year old exams kind of thing oh you're saying you age out of it yeah as opposed to yeah as viewer yeah i mean yeah i guess there's a viewer showing as well but like i would age out of it and i don't want to be making videos about exams forever but then when productivity came came about i was like oh there's something here where like you know david allen author of getting things done is like in 80s and he's still doing content about productivity this works similarly if you look at tech youtubers every year they got something yeah every year there's something new and like marquez has been doing the same shit for like 15 years i just dean's been doing the same shit for 19 years like in tech you don't age out of it as the creator you actually in a way age into it you become more and more credible the longer you keep doing it so i'm like all right what are those niches and i landed on productivity as being a nice one and now i think building a business is one of those niches where the more experience you have the more credibility you have yeah homozy gets more and more credible every year rather than less and less credible every year which is the issue with like lifestyle influences in that like it's so hard to stay relevant as an entertainment slash lifestyle personality but it's fairly straightforward to stay relevant as an educational personality yeah and i mean he also is getting more stories every year from every month there's a new business that pops into to the workshop in las vegas and he's like well we have a new youtube video to make beautiful we can help someone with this this is a crazy bottleneck wow i didn't even know this one existed we have a new video so with my stuff as well one thing um i also landed on a few years ago was books because like we have we've got the series on the channel called book club where i just make videos talking about books and those episodes do really well uh and they're really fun to make and i read books all the time and books are sort of like my tech in the sense of there's always new books coming out and there's always authors of those books wanting to promote the books and so now it's easy enough for me to get them on the channel to do an interview or whatever or to get early access to the book and so i've never been only once i got early access to like an imac for apple but i can get early access to any book i want now because people are like whoa if he makes a video about this it'll like boost our sales and they only need like a few thousand sales to hit the new your time's bestseller list.

1:12:03Ali Abdaal:So they're like, that's it. They just need a couple, how many they need? Like 8 ,000 hardback US pre-orders kind of thing. That's a good number to shoot for, like 10 ,000. And so like a YouTube video from me can actually move the needle and could be the difference between them hitting the list versus not hitting the list. And they kind of know this. And so I'm like, we want to lean more into book club as being an unfair advantage of the channel because that's also a thing that has longevity. The more books I review, the more legit I become as a book reviewer. Gosh, this is so interesting. You're really, I mean, you're really reverse engineering what it is that you want business yeah kind of on the topic of lists on colin and samir you talk about youtube is just a format of a list are you still in that camp of like when you create the format or you're scripting out your videos like you're doing it in the format of a list for the most part um it's it's it is becoming harder and harder to get views on youtube and so list as a format is not that interesting anymore like list as a format when buzzfeed pioneered it like 10 ways to whatever, was novel.

1:13:05Ali Abdaal:And then a few years ago when I did that Colin Samir interview like 2023 or whatever it was, it was still kind of novel in that there weren't that many people who were leaning into the idea of a list. Now almost every educational YouTube video you see is leaning into the idea of a list. Homozi's videos are a lot about lists, but now they're doing different format. They're doing the Shark Tank format, which is not a list. I mean, you could kind of say it's a list, but it's a different format. And it's got a moat around it in that it is hard for someone to replicate that format just like overnight.

1:13:33Ali Abdaal:Whereas anyone can replicate the format of a list overnight. Wait, which one? The one where he brings someone on. He brings someone on, talks about it. That's hard to do. I wouldn't just be able to do that. It would take some back and forth and operational shenanigans and stuff. But they've built that system now so they can just do that very easily. Yeah, you also see Colin and Samir doing it with their creator support. Yes, exactly. And they have the unfair advantage of actually knowing these people on WhatsApp and being able to iMessage a big YouTuber and getting them to actually spill the beans on what they're struggling with with their channel whereas a newcomer in that space just wouldn't be able to do that and so i think when you're as you're growing it's useful to find formats that give you an that lean into your unfair advantages and so list i mean we still do lists but also we get less views than we did back in the day when we were still when we're just doing lists so i don't know yeah why do you think it's gotten so much harder to get more views on youtube is it people have gotten better over time it's gotten more competitive yeah i think it's basically like supply and demand type situation where, you know, if we imagine like five years ago, pandemic times, like in, when was it like 2019, when I made a video talking about how much money I make as a doctor and YouTuber, that like blew up.

1:14:36Ali Abdaal:And like so many people have referenced that video over the years. Like that was why I started a YouTube channel. And then I made a video like nine passive income ideas, which has got like 15 million views. And that was when the supply of content on YouTube about how to make passive income was actually not very good. They were all kind of shit. But now if you type in passive income, you see insane production values from Emon Gatze, you see Alex Omosi, you see Mark Tilbury, you see Dan Martel, you see like, then you see like the girl's side of the algorithm that's also doing that kind of content.

1:15:03Ali Abdaal:Like there's just so many and they're all really good. And I, you know, I sometimes see like an Iman Ghazi video popping up being like passive income ideas. And, you know, I know Iman, we have, we have a bit of like a WhatsApp relationship going on. So I know he's a legit guy and I know he knows his stuff, but I want to hate the content. I want to be like, oh man, he's just fucking clickbaiting people into buying a score. And then I watched the video and i'm like oh shit it's really good and similarly i saw dan martell do a video the other day being like how to add 100k to your bottom line in 2025 and i was i my initial response was to roll my eyes be like come on dan and then i watched the video i was like oh shit it's really good oh dan you really know your stuff oh and so it's like it's just the bar is the bar has gotten so high where i can no longer dunk on these people for having clickbait i have i have i have i have clickbaiting titles because their content is good i'm like fuck i need to make my content better and And so it's almost like you're sort of, to me and to a lot of YouTubers I speak to, it feels like we are running faster and faster just to maintain, just to stay in the same place.

1:16:00Ali Abdaal:Interesting. Of like plateauing view counts and stuff. How much does that affect your mental? Because you're running a business and a lot of how you generate leads and generate sales is directly correlated to like how many views and your engagement on social. So like, how do you internalize that if you're saying you're running faster, you're having to continuously like get better and better and maybe your views aren't what they were a few years ago. Yeah, that's the sort of primary kind of mental struggle that I face. It's very much a first world problem. But this is kind of what I talked to my, I had a session with one of my coaches like three days ago where we were literally talking about this.

1:16:41It's this question of, so yeah,

1:16:44Ali Abdaal:so what it feels like is like, yeah, was sort of struggling to almost stay afloat in the water and paddling harder and harder because the waves are getting like choppier and choppier with more and more people coming in with like banger content and like people like Dan Martell and Homozi and people like that investing a shit ton of money into their teams and into their content and actually just doing it really well and so the market is getting more saturated and more competitive and so like we're having to paddle harder and harder just to get the same number of views now the way that we are approaching this is to move away from views as being the primary like metric that we care about it's never really been the primary metric we could we care about um and it's been about trying to figure out like okay the the direction of travel is that we're probably not going to be getting way more views over time because to do that like let's look at johnny harris for example every video gets like three million views holy fuck the amount of effort that goes into those videos it's like and do i do i want to try and do that probably not like i actually like sitting in front of the camera just talking about a book that i've just read i don't want to have to do a whole like half an hour long script with a team of seven animators you look at kudskasakt and i you know i spoke to philip who runs the channel and the team of like 70 animators do i want to do that no okay so can i see so if i look at where where the puck is going i imagine a world where we actually get less and less views over time at least on youtube so what does that mean that means we need higher revenue products i.e high ticket things that require us to convert fewer customers to get make the same amount of money okay hence why we started the high ticket thing software so we're building like a sort of monthly recurring revenue play through like productivity software because that's one of those things where if you can build like a product-led growth loop into the app like a referral loop or something then you can grow the app without it being tied to my personal brand and so we've seen that with one of our apps voice pal where we've got like a few thousand users it's it does like a million in annual recurring revenue ish and only 15 of the viewer of the users have ever heard of me whereas at the start it was 100 because i provided the initial traction but over the last 12 months, actually, it's mostly grown through word of mouth, which means now we have an asset that is decorrelated to my fame on the internet.

1:18:45Ali Abdaal:And so this is kind of how I'm thinking about the business. How do I decorrelate the amount of money we're making from how popular I am in a given moment on the internet? Well, we're still continuing to do YouTube videos and diversifying into LinkedIn and Instagram and stuff. That's really interesting. The apps is so interesting. How many are you currently working on right now? So VoicePal is out. Momentum is out. and sort of like a habit tracker with accountability uh we're actively working on uh creator grid is out as well so that's a third we're actively working on like a fourth and a fifth but trying to sort of weave them into like one ecosystem of like productivity that all like talk to each other and stuff so that is what i'm doing for three hours this afternoon because it's a tuesday so it's my software block this afternoon thinking about how these apps different these different apps interact and what's like the system behind how they talk to each other so that if someone wants to massively become more productive they could just like yes they could use to do and like Notion for some stuff and like email for some stuff and this and that.

1:19:38Ali Abdaal:Or they could use all of the individual apps that we're building that all talk to each other that will then give them insights into how productive they're being and what they can tweak and stuff. So that's what we're crafting right now. And that feels quite exciting. Do you see a world and maybe you're not even thinking this far in advance, but like is there a possibility or a world where you're not actually making YouTube videos anymore? Yeah, I would love to get to a point where I no longer have to make YouTube videos. I would love to get to a point where kind of like where PewDiePie is at, where bro just releases a video when he feels like it.

1:20:06Ali Abdaal:That is, that's where I would really like to be. We're not quite there yet because YouTube is still a primary lead gen mechanism for the business. But I, but to be honest, I think in a world where I didn't feel like I had to make YouTube videos, I still probably would because I still read books. I still enjoy teaching. I like sharing the stuff. And I often think of the question of like, if I won the lottery and just had a hundred million in the bank, I'd still probably make YouTube videos. I just would care less about the views. Although I say this, I have a friend who sold a company for a hundred million and he started a YouTube channel and he really cares about the views.

1:20:34Ali Abdaal:And I was like, bro, why do you care about the views? You made all the money. He was like, well, yeah, but like when you're doing anything, you want to do it well, right? And views is like a metric of how well you're doing. And I was like, oh, shit. This guy's kind of like me. So maybe if I actually had 100 million in the bank, I would still care about views. Maybe this is actually like an internal spiritual growth game rather than if I had this external metric, then dot, dot, dot. We talked to Max Tuning about that, who sold sour strips. And it was like for a similar number. And he's like, yeah, these YouTube views are a little down.

1:20:59It really bothers me. And I put a lot of effort into these blogs, man. I set up the camera I do the drone he goes yeah views are down a little bit he's like I'm not phased I'm not phased I feel like as creative people though it's really difficult to not look at that little shiny number and then when you open YouTube Studio it tells you how bad or good you're doing it's a really fun game it's a really fun game

1:21:20Ali Abdaal:especially when the arrow's been grey for a while or even red I mean you know we're like well you know in fairness we didn't publish that much but like actually we kind of did it yeah you start making like excuses and like try to validate or like it's okay it's fine everything's fine yeah i'm i'm fine everything's good dude everything's i've uh i've kind of ended up becoming an unofficial therapist to a lot of other kind of big youtubers who will often message me and be like hey can we have a chat i'm thinking i'm feeling worried about my channel and we'll have a conversation about it and almost always the pattern will be video topic x does well i don't give a fuck about video topic x anymore i really want to do video topic y or just not make videos at all but i can't not i I can't because like actually sponsors and also sales and also like revenue.

1:22:07Ali Abdaal:Oh man, if I just keep this up for X amount more years, then I'll have Y amount in the bank and then I'll be able to chill out. What do you reckon? And I'm like, then we just sort of like explore. Okay. What does that exploration look like? Don't have to name names at all, but what are you? Exploration looks like asking the question, like if you won the lottery, would you still want to do YouTube videos or not? Like is what I'm trying to get at is, is YouTube a means to an end for you? Or is it like actually the infinite game you want to keep on playing? mostly for youtubers i've spoken to it's actually more like an infinite game but for some it's been like you know what i want to if if i if i had five mil 10 million bank etc etc i would just i would never make content ever again because i actually don't enjoy it and i don't like the fact that i'm somewhat known and i don't like being recognized on the street and i just want to i just want to a bakery and where no one knows who i am you know that kind of situation um and so then that's interesting so in that world it's like okay let's figure out a plan to get you to your financial goal.

1:22:58Ali Abdaal:Also, do you really need to hit that financial goal? What's really the point? Do you think 5 million is going to change your life compared to 4 or 3 or 2 or 6? How do we land on that number? What's our monetization mechanism within the business? Can we see ourselves running a lifestyle business where we're running a high-ticket coaching program and helping people, but not making content? Be like, oh yeah, I love the idea of helping people. I just want to work with a small number of people really one-to-one. Okay, cool. Did you know you could charge 100k for that like oh shit you know that kind of stuff so it's about figuring out what they actually want and then is the plan like what is the plan they're following to get what they want and is there alignment between their goal and the plan you've also gone through a little bit of a rebrand like so much of your content was focused around productivity and now it's a lot more about building a business did you struggle with that was like making content about productivity something that you're like i don't really want to make content about this anymore i'm really more interested in the business side of things?

1:23:54Ali Abdaal:Yes. Yeah. In the early days, when I was learning about how to be more productive, it was interesting for me to document what I was learning about how to be more productive. I was taking all these courses and building my second brain and trying all these apps and stuff. But really, the reason I cared about productivity in the first place was because I wanted the financial freedom through building my business. Like when I was in med school, I had to find a way to squeeze more efficiency out of my time. When I was working as a doctor, I had to figure out what's the how can I build a content engine that means I can do it part time, etc but now that like i've kind of gotten there for me talking about business is way more interesting and energizing than teaching someone how to focus a little bit better because i feel like i've done that to death and we've got a course about it we've got some apps about it and so i now i'm i still do productivity content but i'm trying to sort of position the brand so that it like focuses on this idea of freedom freedom to live life on your own terms like that's the thing that I care about.

1:24:48Ali Abdaal:And productivity is a vehicle to getting to that destination. Similarly, building a lifestyle business is a vehicle for getting to that destination. So I sort of view those as all reaching for the same kind of thing where you've got control over your time and you can spend it how you want. And do you feel like you've gotten to that point yourself, personally? Where I have control over my time and spend it how I want? Yeah, for the most part. Certainly, if I was content to make less money, I can literally do whatever I want with my time. I do have some financial goals that I haven't reached yet and so in that case I'm still doing somewhat doing stuff that in a world where I had 100 million in the bank I probably wouldn't be doing but also I try and make the stuff exciting and energizing and I still do the apps and I still really like the idea of building like an online business school whether or not it'll be a high ticket coaching offer or whatever Is 100 million your number?

1:25:34Ali Abdaal:Is 100 million not really I think actually 10 million is my number Okay but also I know people who've hit 10 million and then they say the number becomes 20 That's what I was going to ask I think it's more like an infinite game where it's like, there's always like another level to it. And as long as the process of getting there is like enjoyable and energizing and doesn't like fuck up the other areas of my life, like health and relationships and family and stuff, I'm content to play the video game. You mentioned a little bit earlier that you're really trying to focus on health. Was that something that you neglected in the past and something you're really trying to focus on now or no?

1:26:03Ali Abdaal:I definitely neglected it in the past. I'm a bit more focused on it now, especially now that I have a kid. I'm like, okay, cool. Let's do some zone two cardio. Let's like actually do some weight training. let me figure out fix my posture and shit so that like my hips and back doesn't hurt every time i like should we do a little stretch real quick oh that'll be good oh nice yeah i feel good yeah so stuff like that trying to resolve still not massive i in if if you if you kind of measure someone's priorities by the amount of hours per week they put into the thing i'm putting maybe six hours a week into my health which is not massive like there's people doing like more than that it's pretty good but it's way more than an hour a day hour a day yeah yeah yeah like three gym sessions which is three hours and then like maybe some like 40 half an hour 40 minute runs and something like stretch that's great throughout the week yeah yeah we've been we've been getting big while we've been at harry it's been fun we're hanging out we had a lift we had a little run run this morning or run yesterday morning it was great yeah it was really fantastic the water is a great place to run here so you're gorgeous a place to be yeah you guys have like a beautiful little city sky i also feel like i'm more productive if i get a workout in or run clears the head yes you just feel better you got the endorphins rolling yeah man what's your uh relationship like with failure i don't really think about the word failure at all like okay it's just so standard advice within this world that like nothing's ever a failure it's just data to learn from and i've sort of i've sort of internalized that so much to the point that like whenever the word failure comes up it almost registers a 404 in my mind just like like it's like failure in what world is failure other than quitting and like failure i guess would be torpedoing your marriage or your family relationships or like you know destroying your body through like i don't know drug abuse or alcohol abuse like those i would regard as failure but like a video didn't perform well or like we didn't hit our sales quota this month any of that shit it's just like oh i mean that's just that's just data data didn't form the next decision what do you do when when something like that doesn't work out for either a sales quota or a youtube video do you go do you guys go back to the drawing board do you talk about as a team like what are those processes look like yeah i mean basically everything just comes down to the maths equation right so we're like okay well why why do we think it didn't it didn't hit um on content is harder to figure out right like uh it's harder to figure out like why did that video not land compared to the other video we can come up with some ideas and then we're like all right do we want to change anything as a result of this usually the answer is nah not really we're still glad we put the video out because even though it only got 70 000 views in the first like we saw whatever it's still like and the comments on this are really good it's still lot of people.

1:28:29Ali Abdaal:It's still a really valuable video. I'm glad we did it. And I would do it again, even if it's not going to get as many views as the laziest AI business to start in 2026, you know, that kind of situation. So on the content side, we do that. And then on the product side, that's literally a math problem to be like, okay, we didn't get the number of sales. Was it, we didn't have enough traffic. Was it the conversion rate was bad relative to industry average? Was it no one took the upsell? What was our upsell rate? Was it like, um, we had loads of refunds in which case, why do we have loads of refunds?

1:28:55Ali Abdaal:And it's really only going to be one of those four things. Like it cannot be anything else because those are, you know, those are the only four numbers. And so, okay, well, which one do we want to focus on next time? Is it just a case of getting more leads into the top? Well, actually, no, it's not because actually our conversion rate was kind of shit. All right, cool. Let's do some A-B tests and figure out why our conversion rate sucked. Do we need to improve the offer? Do we need to just add more testimonials to the landing page? Do we need to do the sensible things that you would do to improve the conversion rate?

1:29:18Ali Abdaal:And then boom, conversion rate goes up. Nice. You know, that kind of thing. And it's just with a long enough time horizon, every single failure is a data point that then leads to the next thing. Then it's just, it's just always one, one foot in front of the other based on where we're trying to get to. And like, what's the mismatch between where we are and where we want to be great. What's the strategy that we're going to follow? How confident are we that that strategy is going to work? Have we spoken to mentors and staff and run the strategy by them to get their hot takes to be like, is there something else we're missing?

1:29:47Ali Abdaal:Oh, we can just, we can just delete the sales team okay cool like let's consider that as an experiment or oh we can just 5x the price let's run that as an experiment see what happens what have been your mistakes with growing the team either too fast or like finding this like happy spot at 12 people because i mean i think that's a something that a lot of people don't realize is they end up having to be a manager and they have to hire people and fire people and it's probably one of the more unfortunate parts of running a business is having to do that and having to manage people so what have you what have you learned would have been some of those mistakes.

1:30:18Ali Abdaal:Yeah. A big mistake early on was hiring too many people thinking that more people equals more output. So sometime in like 2021, I think we were like, okay, you know, this is working. We've got our YouTube Academy. It's printing cash. We will YouTube channel is doing well. The bottleneck is we just know not making enough videos. So instead of making one video a week, what if we made four videos a week? And so what's the bottleneck for that? Well, it's just the writing, right? So let's hire four writers and get four writers to write four scripts, like four scripts every week. And then I can just film the videos.

1:30:47Ali Abdaal:Turns out when you hire four writers to write scripts for you as a YouTuber, you actually end up producing like zero videos because all the time is being spent trying to read a script. I mean, like, that's kind of shit. Like, it's not it's not really hard to say, you know, they kind of miss the point. And then hours and hours and hours reworking a script when I don't even use a script anyway. And so me just like going from scratch and running off bullet points would have resulted in a better, faster video than a writer spending three days working on a word for word script. and then me spending a whole day trying to tweak it to my liking and all of that shit.

1:31:17Ali Abdaal:So that was a real mistake that we made in terms of, yeah, just thinking more people equals more output. I would have thought more writers, man, more videos. It makes sense, though, because, I mean, you know your voice the best and you know what the audience wants. You've grown it to a number for a reason, you know? Yeah, I think this is one of those areas where I was sort of underestimating the secret source of myself in the sense of I was like, I mean, it's not been that hard. like i just sort of locked into it like if i can do it anyone can do it like i'm not that special and then realizing oh actually even if this script is good it just doesn't vibe with me and i cannot bring myself to say something that doesn't vibe with me therefore you know maybe an objective outside observer could say that like you know these scripts are just as good as each other in reality one was one of the writers was clearly better than all the others um and it was really obvious from day one even from the interview um and so we should have just hired her but um even if an outside observer could see no difference between a writer's script and my script, the fact that it's my script still means I feel better about it.

1:32:17Ali Abdaal:Yeah. And so like the energy that goes into it from me knowing that I believe the things that I'm saying, that was the thing that I'd underestimated. What are the biggest misconceptions people have about making money online and building business when it comes to creating content in this whole YouTube, Instagram, social media sphere? Yeah, I think a big misconception people have is that A, you have to be famous to make money. Like you've got to have like millions of views and stuff but actually if you have if you sell a niche and high ticket product you don't need millions of views you just need like a couple of hundred and you'll probably get some clients i think another big misconception people have is if you have millions of views you are making millions of dollars and that correlation between like views and money i've seen repeatedly over time yeah there's a little bit of a correlation but it's not that strong because a lot of the people getting millions of views are attracting audiences with less money and don't have a product that's aligned with that.

1:33:09Ali Abdaal:So especially, you know, I've got a friend who's like an entertainment YouTuber. Every video has to go viral. Otherwise, the brand deal with money goes down. And he can't really sell anything other than merch because it's a broad entertainment audience. And so there's no way he could sell a course because they'd be like, bro, what are you doing? It's just not the right thing because it's an entertainment audience. And so he is constantly on like the viral video hamster wheel trying to figure out how do I up the ante and do something even more absurd for the next video so that we can get at least a million views so that NordVPN won't like cut the sponsorship deal or whatever.

1:33:37Ali Abdaal:and that's a hot place to be. I'm so glad we're not in here. Yeah, I'm so happy. God, value, or I mean, entertainment seems so tough. So, so difficult. It seems very difficult and it, I feel like can look really sexy and really fun. You're like, you're this fucking awesome, fun YouTuber. You have people, you have community, people love you. Yep. Because nobody, like the fan bases ride the hardest for entertainment YouTubers. Yeah. And it seems like this sexy thing to do. Yeah. I think also that fan base skews very young like generally the younger you are the more of a stan you are for like particular entertainment youtubers or boy bands or girl bands whatever the thing might be and generally as people get older they tend to mellow out a bit and generally as people get older they tend to make more money and have more money to spend on educational things so like it's just when you attract an audience of like kids who love your entertainment content it's actually quite hard to build a business on that unless you're selling a feastables or a yeah prime or or whatever and then that is itself its own challenge off on the side were you a super fan of anything growing up harry potter yeah that's probably the thing i'm still a super fan of now yeah have you been to harry potter world i actually haven't i used to live 20 minutes from there but i used to live 20 minutes from there and so i just never went out of the uk yeah you're a big fan of it huh that's funny it's nostalgic it is nostalgic dude they had it all on on china air we might need to rip that on my home yeah i might need what every every freaking episode we might you think you could get through?

1:35:00Yeah, for sure. Every episode? I'd be talking in a British act over the time we landed, dude. God, this has been so epic. Do you have anything else for Ali?

1:35:09Ali Abdaal:I've recently also gotten into Harry Potter fan fiction. I mean, love it. That's been a recent discovery. Yeah, it's so good. Wait, like fans writing? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's actually so sick. Huh. Interesting. Interesting. Anything else for Ali? What house would you be in? Ravenclaw, probably. I could see that. Yeah. Be a Gryffindor guy? what are you I might just go Slytherin just to shake things out I love green yeah just to shake yeah god this has been so epic thank you so much for coming on the show we came all the way out to Hong Kong to make this happen it's been an absolute blast so thank you for welcoming us in the studio ladies and gentlemen this has been episode 182 with Ali Abdaal if you're still here please hit the subscribe button drop us a comment leave us a like we'll see you guys all next week peace

1:35:59personal brand kickstart. What's in it? Okay, we got five prompts for you. It's going to help you define your personal brand, get clarity, and start posting content that really resonates with your audience. It'll literally take you less than 10 minutes. And it's been super apparent with all the guests that we've had on our show. They have really strong personal brands and it's allowed them to scale their businesses. So go check it out. Top link. Let's keep it rolling. Welcome back to the PPD. Come on. This is the best time. Some say they just come for this part. That's what people say that's what people are saying what a fun episode one of my favorites a little stressful little stressful little stressful we uh we had a cord right before ali walked in okay uk plugs uk are really confused with their voltages on the plugs plug it in just pop goes crazy this is the first time we're taking the pod internationally and something we didn't really think about was the fact that they use different voltage different outlets um so we've been having trouble with like power banks and like extension cords and all that kind of stuff.

1:36:59Too much power into one power bank. Love it. Love it. But if you've made it this far, this is where we break down what happened in the episode. Yeah. Our biggest takeaway, some things that we want you to reminisce on and really think about. And then we'll tell you some updates because we're out here in Hong Kong all the way from the United States. We got updates. We got lots of updates for you guys, which is, which is amazing. Something I want to bring up right off the bat is Ali talking about it's way easier to sell something expensive. I own a production company that's why I do during the day and it's really interesting because we deal with like these really large commercial brands okay like we just shot a commercial or we just did a photo campaign for Venmo and in this line of work if you are bidding on a project and you come in way too short we kind of briefly touched on this during the pod you're seen as like an amateur you're not really solving like a big problem for these brands they immediately are like oh my god it's too cheap i can't even imagine that they would be able to to do this it's like it's a little scary so if anyone out there if you're promising like oh my god i'm gonna save you a hundred thousand dollars on your taxes let's say that's your business you're like a tax consultant like how much is it it's 25 dollars you were you all gonna believe that there's a lot of psychology behind how you price your product or your offer for sure and i think i think the big thing that you guys need to realize if whatever phase of this journey you're on and whatever niche that you're in, you want to solve problems for a customer that has more money to spend with you.

1:38:25So that way you guys can all live on your own terms. You can be financially free. And it's funny because in my line of work, there's this like meme that's like$500 client, $50 ,000 client. And the$500 client is like, Hey man, just checking in on the project. Like want to let you know about everything that's going on. Like it's either life. This is a huge investment, huge investment for us. And the$50 ,000 clients like, Hey, the invoice has been consent, appreciate you. And it's, it's real. It's actually crazy. Cause I've been at both ends of the spectrum. I've charged$50 for videos that I've created.

1:38:57We've charged 50 ,000 for videos that we've created. It's a lot easier going with a more going with a client. It's a lot easier to go with a clientele that understands what their money is being used for. And like, they see the value in you. You know what I'm saying? They really understand like, okay, if I spend this money, this is the outcome that I'm trying to get. Yeah. And when it comes to selling cohorts or courses or anything digitally, a service, if you service a customer or an audience at a higher price point, they're already probably looking to spend their money to like improve or fix their problem.

1:39:38A lot of times when you're selling something cheap, you're going after an audience that probably doesn't even know that they have a problem. They're not even aware of the problem. Exactly. And it sounds so counterintuitive, but like it really is so much easier to sell a more expensive product because then all you have to do is like focus on the transformation that you're going to give or promise to said individual. And you're not really going to get pushback on price. If someone is willing or able to spend five or$10 ,000 on a product to solve their problem, they're not worried about the price.

1:40:15You're not really going to get resistance on price. They're just willing to spend any amount of money that it takes to fix their problem. Or if you're selling something low ticket, then you get a lot of like, oh man, I know I want to do this. I know this would help me out. But like, I just bought... I bought the shoes. I just got the off-whites. I got the new off-whites. I just bought a new lens. Like, I can't really afford this right now. Like, maybe later. or you get a lot of like, I can't afford this, but I would like to do it. If you sell something more expensive, they're just like, can this help me or not?

1:40:49Price isn't really an issue. One thousand percent. I think it's also really important to note you have to be great at anything to sell a service. Like you really have like whatever your promises, you got to be able to deliver that repeatedly. It's not like, oh, I can do that for every one out of 10 people that get my thing. You know, I'm going to I'm going to clean their. I'm going to if I if you have a car detailing business, let's just use that as an example. It's like service, right? You have a service based industry and you're like, hey, it's six hundred fifty dollars, but this person only goes after really nice cars.

1:41:17They do a crazy job. It takes them hours to do this specific thing. Right. You got to do the damn thing. Yeah. You can't just like, oh, we just half ass like these three. We only do one really well out of four. Like you got to crush it with whatever thing it is. If you're in a service based industry, like you got to knock it out of the park. That's how you get referrals. That's how people keep coming back to you. And then your testimonials, testimonials. Your business will start to grow without you having to run ads or post content and do all that stuff. I also really valued and liked what he said about when you're crafting your offer, it has to be super tangible.

1:41:49It can't just be like, I'm going to help you overcome your imposter syndrome. Like it's very like foo-foo. When it comes to this, like you want to be able to make a promise that you know you can track. for example, he's like, I'm going to help you make$100 ,000 with the lifestyle business in 12 months. It's very tangible, very practical, as opposed to something a little bit more foo-foo-woo-woo, like, hey, I'm going to help you with mindset. Yeah. And I think there used to be a huge misconception online and Ali referenced this of like, build the audience first and then come out with something to sell.

1:42:27This can work in any industry, I personally really into bonsai trees. Okay. One of the people that I follow, he's like this older gentleman and he makes some of the most calming, soothing videos about bonsais. He has a program teaching you about bonsai trees and like how the art of it and how to sculpt your first tree and do all of this stuff. I don't know if he sold it later on or if he sold it earlier, but if I was just finding him and I'm getting into this, like I'd get it. And I learn about, oh, this is an amazing craft. And I wouldn't think it's weird for this person to sell this thing. He puts out amazing free value on YouTube.

1:42:59He like talks about breaking down his trees and like why he does certain things. It wouldn't be weird for him to do that from day one. Or if he has a ton of subscribers, put it out then it's like you guys all, if whatever the thing is that you're into, you build up knowledge of it. Someone's always going to be getting into it and you can help that person with, you can, and you can have it at a varying price points. It doesn't just have to be, you know, when in doubt, if you're struggling to think about like what to sell or what offer you want to create or what niche you want to go into just think about yourself five years ago how can you help yourself five years ago get to where you are now because you might not think you have a lot to teach but like i think it was uh with jeff he's like it's the information uh what's the fucking term it's like size it's when you do something so often that it's just second nature to you that you don't realize that beginners like don't understand the very basics of uh of what you can do um so yeah always think about you five years ago how can you help that person um and yeah start like if you also start with your offer from the get and you figure out what problems specifically you are solving it makes creating content and it it makes the clarity around your personal brand a lot easier because you're focused on like okay if i'm trying to sell this thing or this is my offer this is my this is going to be a part of my business then the content that you need to make to be able to like position yourself as an authority figure or generate leads to that specific product or your offer becomes a lot more clear if you don't have an offer you're like i want to build a personal brand around this but like i don't know i don't have as much clarity as like what i want the end result to be building leads is the entire thing In my line of work, if we don't have leads, we don't make these videos for brands.

1:44:54We don't make the photos for brands. We starve. You have to have leads. Anything. Literally anything. Any business. Any business in the world. I strongly advise that you guys get into some sort of long form piece of content. Because then you guys have an engine to be able to go put onto TikTok and on Instagram and onto LinkedIn and shorts and do all of that stuff. But it can come from this long form thing. It works for any sort of industry. I'm going to give you like another example in the service-based industry. Let's use a barbershop. If you ran a barbershop and you're a service-based provider, right?

1:45:27I would probably start with like a YouTube series following like the day in the life of the shop and like servicing all of your clients. Then you have, let's say you do eight people a day. Fantastic. Now we have eight videos that we can chop up of all these cuts and we can throw them onto Instagram, YouTube shorts. We could potentially run an ad with them. now we have eyeballs and we can turn that into traffic to then book for your barbershop and for a barber like you have such uh it's not low-hanging fruit but it's like you have a clear before and after boom boom p2 people are coming in they're hurting man we're thinking about how good you look after you get a haircut dude especially you um another thing that he touched on is qualifying leads and that's something that we learned from daniel priestly and so did he is like yes you want a lot of leads obviously the more leads you get equals more business and more money but you need qualified leads and sometimes it's as easy as like having somebody qualify themselves through a form and we've also learned this like through Colin from Amalfi Jets if you make if you create actually more friction in how you qualify and how hard it is for someone to qualify themselves for your product, it creates a more qualified lead because you know that they want to work with you because they're actually taking the time.

1:46:43If it's a little bit harder to fill out the form, if they have to take a few extra steps, they like, you know, they really want what you're offering. Without a doubt. Information products are deader than a doornail. I guess so. Chat kind of destroyed that. Chris Doe talked to us about this like a year and a half ago. We first had Chris Doe on our podcast. I remember after chatting, he's like, dude, there's going to be a slow decline of anyone who like sells information products. Like you're going to have to sell a transformation or you're going to have to build community around something, bringing people together, doing live workshops.

1:47:15It can't just be like, oh, this little informational product because you can ask any of these AI bots and they're going to tell you exactly what it is in 10 seconds. If information is all people needed, everyone would be a millionaire and have a six pack. Yeah, we'd all be ripped. Yeah. And so something that I underestimated when we first started doing our first cohort to help videographers land bigger and better clients, I thought it was just like, we're going to teach you guys how to land these bigger clients. What I didn't, or what I underestimated is how valuable the actual community is and the, um, the, uh, accountability.

1:47:57And so community and accountability and transformation, like those are so valuable and just because like to charge more money you don't have to like provide more information you have to provide things that are going to help them have a transformation faster without a doubt this has been a crazy trip i i still can't yeah it's like wild to think that we you know we've taken the podcast all around the u.s we've been to tons of places in the united states it's been so fun and to come out here and take it international baggage fees bit us in the ass it's all good we okay we learned we learned a lot about these bags yo you ever you guys ever had a carry-on get weighed at the airport what's up with that what are we doing y 'all you know what i also don't understand what drives me freaking crazy we had one bag that let's say was like 15 pounds under yes okay why can't we do pem das for the for the baggage right we should be able to say hey this bag's 55 pounds well that bag is 20 pounds under we can do a little mix and match it's going to the same place it's both going under the plane that was my argument it didn't work let's say she won and then she's telling us and then she's telling us you got to take it out of the check bags and put it into the carry-on what does it fucking matter if it's going above or beyond above or below the plane it's still going on the plane math isn't math in here you know what i mean and dude i felt like i was in a we were in a haggle fest this was i feel like i was at a farmer's market dude to the plane she's like could be a thousand yeah it's gonna be 800 i was like there's no way they're like i'm just relaying what the system's telling me it's like sounds like you're just saying a random fucking number um that was crazy dude i haggled at this airport you guys for like yeah 30 plus minutes maybe 45 minutes and i get nervous because in my the back of my head i'm like dude they might tell us that like we can't get on this plane and i'm like chill fig chill but it ended up being fine we ended up having to spend 500 bucks in in overage fees we learned a lot about international travel but dude sebastian maniscalco has the funniest fucking bit about TSA and bag overage he's like dude you know the best part was she said it was a she was a huge safety hazard I go yeah she goes but you could pay no yeah yeah yeah he goes he goes uh he goes you're worried about what three pounds is but the dude behind me is fucking 300 pounds and you're worried about a sock the dude behind me doesn't need a weight limit which is hilarious dude I remember I asked her if we were because there was a lady to our left they didn't weigh her carry and i'm like we're just letting anybody through she goes it's not me i'm not with them i'm like you are no she said different airline oh different airline different airline she's like sir all airlines are different yeah she you're an idiot i was like oh god what has been also really cool is so podcasting abroad awesome getting to explore a new city really dope we've ate some incredible food listen the michelin star guide if you're going anywhere I mean we've had the best duck best Thai food best Chinese yeah they got it going on here in Hong Kong the food has been immaculate and we also got to hang out with Daniel Daylin it's been super fun it's been awesome we got coffee went out to dinner that was a blast and he's really opened our eyes like just know that we're gonna start making YouTube videos on another channel do you remember we said this we said this like four months ago yeah the 505 studios whatever we teased you guys a little bit maybe 55 people went over 100 people went and subscribed but yeah Our first video is going to come out from this trip.

1:51:24And I, yeah, I think, um, so we've been vlogging and it's really fun. Our big realization is we love the podcast, but everything is featured around the guest. Correct. We want to give you guys more of us, which is why we started doing the PPD, which I love. Dude, hopefully you're here. We want to show you guys behind the scenes of growing the podcast, the different stuff that we're doing with our businesses. We want to start a fucking clothing line of sorts, merch, and bring you guys along more and show you guys our lives out in LA, what we're doing for the podcast, what we're doing for our businesses, give you some more game on personal brand.

1:52:08And it used to be a, this will be really cool, eventually we'll do it. Now we're like, oh, it needs to actually be a number one priority. Numero uno priority. God, it's been such a fun episode. Hey, if you're still here, please hit the subscribe button. Drop us a comment. Leave us a like. Let us know what your favorite part of the episode was. And we'll see you guys all next week. Peace. Peace.