- 4 months ago
Imagine turning your bedroom into a $5 million business — no fancy office, no investors, just pure strategy and hustle. In this video, discover the exact steps and mindset behind building a thriving online empire from scratch. Whether you're dreaming of quitting your 9-5 or scaling your side hustle, this breakdown will inspire and guide you every step of the way.
Don’t miss the insider tips, game-changing hacks, and real-world examples that make this possible
— all explained in simple terms anyone can follow. Ready to change your future?
Share this video if you want to start your own online empire!
Don’t miss the insider tips, game-changing hacks, and real-world examples that make this possible
— all explained in simple terms anyone can follow. Ready to change your future?
Share this video if you want to start your own online empire!
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LearningTranscript
00:00I know a chap who had 15,000 subscribers and built a million dollar business.
00:05Really, the way people get rich off of YouTube is by...
00:07This is Ali Abdaal, one of the biggest YouTubers and now literally the most followed productivity
00:12expert in the world. In this video, I went to Ali's house in London to hear why he left his
00:18job as a doctor to start a YouTube channel that now has over 4 million subscribers and is making
00:23millions of dollars a year. This video is an absolute masterclass. When you have attention
00:28again, like Ali does, you can make millions. You can add events, you can add communities,
00:33you can add products, sponsorships, ads, job boards, consulting, paywalls. The list goes on.
00:39So many ways to make money. The one key is you got to build up your audience or just copy Ali's
00:45homework. The people that I know who have succeeded on YouTube, the people who have been through our
00:48YouTuber Academy and friends of mine, they have all had some kind of unfair advantage that they
00:53have leveraged on their YouTube channel. It's really hard to succeed on YouTube and in the content
00:57business general, in general, if you don't have any unfair advantages, because all you can do then
01:01is just outwork the competition. Mr. Beast had zero unfair advantages and you see his videos, like 400
01:07videos to get to 10,000 subscribers. He's literally reading the dictionary for 36 hours.
01:11Domineering, Dominican, Dominion, Dominion, Domino effect, Domino, Don.
01:16He's literally saying Logan Paul's name 100,000 times for a 24-hour long video.
01:25That is the level of hard work that he's putting in to make up for the fact that he has zero unfair
01:29advantages in the space. And now obviously he's got his huge team and his huge setup,
01:33but unfair advantages, at least in the education space, you know, having expertise in a specific
01:36area and making videos about that, being particularly charismatic, being particularly good looking,
01:40like all of these are different unfair advantages that you could have. You have to figure out what your
01:44unfair advantages are and find a way to exploit those to skyrocket your growth.
01:49Ollie talks about his unfair advantage. I think about it like your unfair advantage diagram.
01:54You're basically finding where do unique skill sets overlap in a way that is uniquely you.
01:59So you had medicine, you had test taking, you had productivity, and you had teaching.
02:04Were those your unfair advantages? Those and I had Cambridge University branding behind me and I also had
02:10a business, which meant I had money that I could invest into camera gear, which means my production
02:14value from day one was just better than every other student on the platform because I could afford
02:17camera gear. I had the web design background. That meant I had a certain aesthetic sense for like
02:22graphic design and I'd been designing posters and brochures for like a decade at that point,
02:26even when I started. So my thumbnails look good and I kind of had a feel for like what titles and
02:31transitions and animations would look classy and not egregiously over the top or not like Microsoft Word
02:35art or yeah. And so all of those things combined, where are there a few things about me that aren't
02:42a triangle that's perfectly centered like everybody else, but slightly askew. Maybe you're that one weird
02:47person who pulls out a guitar at every single party. Maybe you love recording videos all the time and
02:54also happen to be really into spreadsheets like Miss Excel. Maybe you are obsessed with graphic design,
03:01but also philosophy like Jack Butcher. You want to find the few things that when you put them all
03:07together, make you completely priceless and unique in the world. Much easier than stacking tens and
03:14thousands of hours at being the best at one thing. We can't all be Michael Jordan, but we could
03:19certainly be slightly skew from the rest. Now, how would I start thinking about my first video? I'm going
03:25to get my first one up and I want to make the first hundred bucks that I'm going to make on YouTube
03:28through AdSense. Level one, get going. Level two, get good. Level three, get smart. So our person is
03:34like level one, get going. Usually that's like the first three to 10 videos where the objective
03:39is to not overthink it, to literally just put the content out there and just, just kind of see what
03:43happens. Usually there are a ton of emotional hurdles to getting videos out there, even for the
03:47Gen Zs that are TikTok native and stuff. It's still really freaking weird filming yourself and sticking
03:52it on YouTube and all of the stuff associated with like what my friends and family are going to think
03:57and all of those emotional hurdles. That is a massive barrier. And that is the biggest barrier
04:01that holds people back, which is why level one is just get going. Once you've gotten past the get
04:04going stage, at that point, you have to decide, do I want a casual relationship with YouTube or do I
04:10want a serious relationship with YouTube? Casual is, I will see each other whenever I feel like it.
04:14You know, I'll call in you when I feel like expressing my creative outlet.
04:16I apologize to you if I don't seem really eager to jump into a forced, awkward, intimate situation.
04:22Serious is I'm committing to doing one video a week at least. Now, if they decide serious,
04:26then we go to level two. Level two is get good. Now getting good involves making videos that are
04:31actually good. I'm kind of a big deal. And that's just like a lifelong journey. But I think there's
04:36two barometers of good. There is the internal barometer, which is I no longer cringe when I
04:41watch my own videos because I actually think, yeah, you know, this is reasonable. And that when you have
04:45that feeling that this is at least reasonable, then you know, your videos are good. And then there's
04:48the external stuff. There's like, okay, I'm seeing some amount of traction in the market. Like
04:52some people, the view kind of slightly going up. Maybe I'm getting 24 views rather than three.
04:57Maybe I'm getting three comments being like, oh, wow, this was actually helpful. Maybe I'm getting
05:00a few likes. You're starting to see some indicators of interest from the market. When you have those
05:04indicators of interest and you no longer feel cringe watching your own content, you then ask
05:08yourself the big question, is this a hobby or is this a business? And on the scale of zero being hobby
05:13and 10 being business, where do you land on that scale? And you're not allowed to pick five.
05:16Now, if you want to do it as a hobby, then great. Continue at level two. Do whatever you want. Make
05:20the content you like. It's a hobby, et cetera, et cetera. But if you want to do it as a business,
05:24at that point, we get to level three, which is get smart. And that is where business strategy
05:29starts to come into it. That's where we start to say to this person, okay, if you have made 15
05:33videos already, your videos are pretty solid. You think they're reasonable. They started to get a
05:36small amount of traction. You've maybe had two comments in one of your videos saying this was
05:39helpful. At this point, let's zoom out and let's think strategy. Let's figure out what is your niche?
05:45Who is your target audience? What is the value proposition? Let's do a competitor analysis. Who's big in the
05:49space? Let's spend like a whole two weeks, literally just like consuming every piece of
05:53content within your niche or adjacent niches to figure out. Like if you were starting an Italian
05:58restaurant, you wouldn't just randomly start an Italian restaurant. You would see, hey, what other
06:02restaurants are there on the street? What other Italian restaurants are there on the street? How can
06:05I differentiate myself? What actually are your unfair advantages? How can we leverage those?
06:09What's the kind of brand that we're trying to create here? What's the vibe you're trying to go for?
06:13That will then feed into the content. And so at level three, once people's videos are already good,
06:18most of the growth is to be found in really thinking about it as if you were a business,
06:22the business strategy, the competitive analysis. How do you stand out in a crowded market?
06:26And then you apply consistency and patience over time and you get the results.
06:31Riches and niches. Hate to break it to you, but you're probably not going to ever be the next Mr.
06:35Beast. Me either, by the way. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of followers across multiple platforms
06:40doing these crazy challenges. Not really my style. And, uh, you know, I don't appeal to like 17 year
06:45old boys on YouTube, which is like the predominance of the audience. And so that's not going to work
06:49for me. I had to think when I was creating my audience, how could I come up with an audience
06:53that I could actually serve that wants the things that I know about? And how could I make, let's say,
06:58enough money to build a business around this particular audience that is going to be one
07:03100th of the size of Mr. Beast. That's when I realized that the higher the niche, the higher the rich.
07:10And what do I mean by that? I mean that when you have a very specific skillset that you focus on,
07:17the people who want that thing are typically willing to pay more.
07:20Shut up and take my money.
07:22Then let's say people are willing to pay when you have hundreds of millions of followers like Mr.
07:27Beast. Mr. Beast can sell a chocolate bar because he can get one 100th of his audience to buy it and
07:32have a business that does tens of millions of dollars a year. You and I have to be more specific.
07:37I actually started out on YouTube trying to make singing videos. I thought I was going to be the
07:43next Boyce Avenue, the next Hugo Schneider. I was going to play all the instruments. My friends
07:47would sing and I would sing occasionally, but I'm not, I'm not that good.
07:49I found a love for me. Darling, just dive right in and follow my lead.
07:59I'm going to play the guitar. It's well long, you know, it's a whole portion of it.
08:01And my first like five or six videos on YouTube are music covers of Payphone by Maroon 5 and
08:06When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars and all this kind of stuff. Had I tried to succeed in YouTube
08:10on there, I have no unfair advantages there. It's just a dumb area. It's not, it's not an
08:14interesting niche. Find something that the market actually wants because a lot of people will treat
08:18YouTube as like, oh, I should be able to creatively express myself and then good things should just
08:23happen, right? But no, if you're treating it like a business, which is my whole thing, you know,
08:27treat a YouTube channel like a business. If it's a creative hobby, then let's call it a creative hobby.
08:31But if it's a business, a business needs to solve a need that the market has. The market
08:34had no need for my shitty singing skills, shitty guitar playing skills, inability to kind of
08:40string to two notes together. But the market had a need for me teaching people how to get
08:44into med school. What are the things you enjoy? What are the things people would say you're
08:47good at? If you were on a desert island and you had to give a talk about something, what
08:51are the five topics you might give a talk about? What are the things you wish you had known
08:55two years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago? What are the things that people are
08:58asking you for advice on? What is the thing that you would do even if you weren't making
09:01money for it? All of those are trying to figure out the who am I component. And then we're
09:07trying to figure out the what value can add to my audience component. So what groups are
09:11you familiar with, like medical students, chess players, doctors, high school students?
09:15What's the kind of content that you consume? What were you like two years ago, five years
09:19ago, 10 years ago? Can we try and get you into the mind of who this person is that you're
09:23speaking to? And then can we bridge that with some kind of value proposition?
09:26Really, the way people get rich off of YouTube is by selling their own products. It's just
09:30a business plan. I know a chap who had 15,000 subscribers and built a million dollar business
09:36off of that because it was a very niche audience. He was doing very, very, very detailed videos
09:41about how to build operation systems in Notion. And then his course was about how to build operation
09:46systems in Notion and did like 400K in his first six months of running that business with
09:53a relatively small audience of, quote, only 15,000 subscribers. The people who I know
09:57who've made money off of YouTube with even less than that have maybe sort of a few hundred
10:02to a few thousand subscribers, but they target a very niche audience who have money to pay
10:08for one-on-one consulting or coaching services, because that is where the money is at. If you
10:13can land a 2K a month, 5K a month client, you just need two of those people. And so if you
10:17have a couple of hundred subscribers who really love your stuff and it's the right niche
10:21and they crucially have money and are willing to spend money to solve this problem, you can make
10:25a six, sometimes even seven figure business, although it's harder to seven figure, at least
10:28a six figure business off the back of selling one-on-one coaching or consulting.
10:32I had to think, what is the niche that is going to make me rich? And that niche for me is finance.
10:37If people specifically want to learn how to buy small businesses, I'm your gal. Now, how many
10:42people are going to want to buy small businesses? I don't know, one out of a hundred, but that one
10:47will be willing to pay a lot to learn how to do it. And the skill that I'm teaching them
10:51can take them from investing, let's say a thousand dollars to making a hundred thousand or a million.
10:57You can't really make money by buying a chocolate bar. People are paying for your videos. They're not
11:03paying with their money, but they're paying with something arguably even more valuable, which is
11:06their time and their attention, which is the only limited resource that they have. And so would
11:10someone actually choose to pay you for your content? Does it provide enough value to their life
11:14to warrant the amount of life force and time that they're paying for it? If the answer is no,
11:20then let's get to a point where it is. And if the answer is yes, then you've got potentially a chance
11:24on YouTube. So the better model your niche is, the more rich you and your business will become.
11:30If you're one of those business buyers, here's a free little something for you down in the corner,
11:35the first three things you need to know if you're going to go look to buy a bar in business.
11:39And that right there, you guys, what I just did, where I said, hey, if you're my audience,
11:44if you're one in a hundred that wants to buy a small business, and then I point you to something
11:48that only those of you who are going to do this cares about, that's how you don't oversell to
11:53people. Because for people that aren't interested, what do you do? You just keep watching the video,
11:56ignore it, doesn't matter. How do you do a business where you sell things online
12:00in a way that feels really good to you? Yeah, this is something I really struggled with.
12:04So when I first created our YouTuber Academy, we were charging $400 for it. I had never charged $400
12:12for anything before in my life. And so I had a lot of kind of, in hindsight, emotions and feelings
12:18around the ickiness and the pain of like, oh, I don't want to come across as that used car salesman.
12:23Look at the size of that trunk. You could put three bodies in there.
12:27And it was speaking to some other friends of ours who kind of helped me change my mindset around
12:33selling and helped me see that selling is not an evil thing. Selling is almost education.
12:38You're educating people on your product. And if they want it, they will buy it. And if they don't
12:43want it, it's not like you're trying to shove it down their throats. And after trying this and,
12:48you know, putting it slowly out there into the world and seeing, oh my God, people don't hate
12:53me for charging money. People are getting lots of value from the course. We're giving out loads of
12:56scholarships to people who can't afford it anyway. We have a basically zero questions,
13:00ask refund policy, like all of those things. In particular, I think the refund policy made me feel very
13:04okay with selling because if someone doesn't like it, they'll literally just ask for their money back.
13:07And now I don't have to worry too much. And now that's the advice that I give to people,
13:11like, because I speak to so many people who are struggling to sell. And I say,
13:14because they don't want their audience to hate them or whatever, just offer a refund policy and
13:18it's probably going to be fine. Can you find your point of pain and solve it? Your point of pain,
13:25not somebody else's. Here's a perfect example. This is Danny Austin. Danny, online influencer,
13:31schlepping out a bunch of affiliates to dresses and jeans and shorts, things that, you know,
13:36we don't really need, but influencers like to talk about online. All of a sudden, Danny started
13:41losing her hair a little bit. She was getting stressed at a young age. She was staying up late
13:45with her business and like a lot of women was losing hair and not talking about it because this
13:50is really faux pas for women to lose hair, right? This was her pain. She started sharing it on the
13:54internet again and again and again. Like, look at this. Does anybody else have it? All of a sudden,
13:58she found a bunch of other humans who shared that pain. They had the same issue and nobody else was
14:04really talking about it. So as she continued to share her pain and some small little solutions,
14:08she also started behind the scenes creating products to fix it. Enter Divi, her brand that
14:15solved this one unique issue of women losing their hair early. All of a sudden, she spent months priming
14:22her audience to want the thing that she has created to solve hers and now their pain point. That means she
14:30has no what I call audience degradation in sales. If you go out and you try to shill something to
14:36your audience, something that they don't really want or need, it feels like you're pushing a giant
14:40boulder up the hill. If instead you allow them to do something that gets out of the way of the boulder
14:45that is already careening towards them, that's where you make millions and you don't have to sell
14:49your soul. So find your pain because that's where the profit is. So if you're wondering what to do
14:54next, how do I also grow my audience? You should watch this video. It's got all the answers you want.
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