How Ali Abdaal Made 2 Million Dollars In One Week (#530)

Shaan Puri

We have here today... I would say you did both. You fulfilled the brown man's obligation; you became a doctor. But then you fulfilled the dream in your heart and became a content creator. You are now one of the most popular YouTubers in the productivity space that people know on YouTube. This is Ali Abdaal. Welcome to the pod, man! I've been watching you for a while. It's fun to have you here.

Ali Abdaal

Thanks so much! I've been a fan of the pod for years now. It's hard to believe it's been years because I remember when you guys first started out. It was actually, you know, "How did you make your first million?" and I thought, "Oh, what a great concept for a podcast!" I was keeping up with you starting a podcast, and everyone needed an angle. The "My First Million" angle was just so good. I've been keeping up with you guys on Twitter and stuff for ages as well, so it's super nice to be here.

Sam Parr

You gave us a big shout-out early on in our podcast. I think you did a video where it was like "10 Podcasts That I Like Right Now" or something like that.

Ali Abdaal

that wasn't a

Sam Parr

big deal for us

Ali Abdaal

So that was when I got my first million. It was still a small podcast, and I was like, "I've discovered something!" There are these two guys who ask people how they made their first million. This is incredible stuff.

Shaan Puri

I remember when I DM'd Sam the name of the podcast. I was like, "I think I'm thinking about calling it this." Then he was just like, "It's so bad." I was coming up with my response when he said, "It's perfect." I asked, "Sam, why did you think it was so bad? What is it about it that's so bad that it's perfect?"

Sam Parr

Well, I'm not particularly good at naming things. My company was called "The Hustle," so I'm not good at naming things. Sean, you're actually quite good at naming things. For some reason, it just... I think that we've done a good job of appearing to be like internet marketing shady, almost like on the surface. When I go to the barber and they ask, "What do you do for a living?" I want to cringe when I say the name of the pod. But then I'm like, "But it's not what it sounds like." So, I think it's a good name because it grabs your attention. We've done a good job of staying on the right side of, I think, doing the right stuff and having good taste.

Ali Abdaal

That's why I'm saying I think it's a fantastic name. I came across some people on Twitter who like to hate on clips from the podcast. I think it's because you guys are so open about talking about money. There was a quote tweet that I saw saying, "LOL, I can't... what would you expect from a podcast called *My First Million*?" I was like, "It's perfect! That's exactly what you'd expect from a podcast called *My First Million*." I think the name is amazing, and I just love how brazen you guys are about talking about money. I loved the Neil Patel episode in particular. You were just asking him such specific questions. Huge, huge, huge fan of the show!

Shaan Puri

He, to this day, I give him credit. He's the only guy that has an absurdly high life burn rate. His burn rate per month was, I think, $180,000. He just said it matter-of-factly. He's like, "That's what I spend for a month." Me and Sam fell out of our chairs and we're like, "What are you spending $180,000 on?" And then he's like, "What do you mean? Of course I need that, here, I need that." And he explained it.

Ali Abdaal

oh my 3.90 my 2 housekeepers my all of that stuff yeah

Shaan Puri

That TikTok clip has like 10,000,000 views because the whole comment section actually just hates him for saying that. But I respect him for coming on here and standing up. He told his truth. What did the kids say? "That's your truth, man." You stood by your truth.

Ali Abdaal

So, interestingly, just on the Neil Patel note, I was at a mastermind that he was speaking at. I asked him a question because our business was doing, I don't know, $5,000,000 in revenue or something like that. He was like, "Man, why are you in the info products business? All you can make with info products is like $5,000,000. You should be in the agency business because you can make $100,000,000 in the agency business." I was like, "Oh, but I want a lifestyle business. I want to chill out. The agency seemed very stressful." He was like, "Man, I probably work less than you do. I work like 4, 5, or 6 hours a week and I've got a $100,000,000 agency." Then his CEO from the back of the room stood up and said, "No, no, hang on, hang on. Neil's bullshitting right now. We have 800 employees. We have so many people problems. He's stressed all the time. Do not think that running an agency is an easy business to be in."

Sam Parr

Just for the record, I love that. I love that his CEO called him out because, you know, our good friend Andrew Wilkinson, and I think Sean and I are also victims of this as well. We oversimplify things and we act like it's no big deal. It's very low.

Shaan Puri

stress

Sam Parr

And that's not the reality. I was just texting my friend Austin Reif, who runs Morning Brew. Morning Brew is a similar thing where, on paper, they're killing it. Behind the scenes, or in the public eye, they're killing it, and they are killing it.

Shaan Puri

and it's so simple just a newsletter wow what a newsletter yeah

Ali Abdaal

how how can it be yeah

Sam Parr

And you know what we were complaining about? We were both saying how we had the "Sunday scaries." I was like, "I've got to do this podcast. I gotta prepare. I've got this meeting and that meeting, and then I gotta go run this errand." I think that it is not... it looks cool. Just like your life, Holly. Your life particularly looks cool. You show your revenue, you're making a profit, you're living a nomadic life, you got a book coming out. You seem well... you know, you put together. All of our stuff stinks, and it's all significantly more stressful than it looks like.

Shaan Puri

what what's the what's the hot mess part of your life ali

Ali Abdaal

The hot mess part of my life is that I generally don't enjoy filming YouTube videos, which is "love what you do," right? Yeah, exactly. There are lots of aspects about being a YouTuber that I really like, and sometimes I enjoy making videos. But I've made like 750 videos to date where I just speak to the camera, and I've maybe enjoyed filming like 20 of them. It's kind of weird because I love the reading, the synthesizing, and the learning. But when it comes to sitting down, you know, I love doing podcasts because there's someone else on the other end. There's energy; it's more fun. But just speaking to a camera on my own is kind of depressing. But hey, you know, that's the price to get the message out there, and I do enjoy other aspects of the process.

Sam Parr

What else do you hate about it? You said that there are a few things you like, and there's a bunch of stuff you dislike. What else do you dislike?

Ali Abdaal

I don't like doing sponsorship ad reads. This is going to sound like very **first world problems** because, you know, a sponsored ad read is... I have to sort of stumble through my words, doing it every which way the brand says. They say, "Oh, you have to say the wording in this specific way," and then I'm kind of like, "Yeah, it takes me 20 minutes to do a 60-second ad read just because of all the stumbling and stuff that's going through there."

Sam Parr

by the way our producer ari

Ali Abdaal

to be honest

Sam Parr

Our producer, Ari, is like grimacing because Sean's actually pretty good with words. I stumble a lot, but I also use HubSpot. It's our main sponsor. I like the product, I own the stock, whatever. Still, I freaking hate reading what they tell me to say because they phrase it in such a way where I'm like, "That's not how I would say it." I don't even know this feature existed. So, like, it sucks, man. It'll take me an hour to do about 5 minutes' worth of reads.

Shaan Puri

Hey guys, it's Q4. It's winning time! Yeah, it's winning time with the new sales prospecting tool. It's like, "Oh God, do I have to? Are you sure I have to say this?"

Sam Parr

or listen to this I can even do it on our podcast

Shaan Puri

On the script, they write, "Read this word for word. Please do not change this one." Because, like, we have some... we get to improvise and some we don't.

Sam Parr

Or we'll do our reads and it's like, "Check out my first million," wherever you get your podcasts. You know, like, "Oh yeah, I got an option," like giving our reads.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, we actually switched to HubSpot about two weeks ago. We have started using HubSpot for our CRM because we never really had a CRM for our course sales, revenue operations, and all that stuff.

Shaan Puri

is that because it's q 4 and it's winning time

Ali Abdaal

It's Q4 and it's winning time! Actually, mate, I did my first HubSpot ad read yesterday because they are now sponsoring my videos as well, which is cool. As soon as we switched to them, they gave us a discount on the package. They're sponsoring the videos and they're really good. Ugh, love HubSpot! Check out HubSpot, everyone.

Hubspot

Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.

Ali Abdaal

I think I

Shaan Puri

I love our new CRM! Our software is the best: HubSpot, grow better. I wanted to ask you about some of your productivity tips. If I go to your YouTube channel, which I have many times, I'll be honest. When I usually go there, I'm like, "Okay, he seems like such a good guy, like someone you'd want to be friends with." But in terms of YouTube success, he's not the funniest, not the sexiest, he's not the smartest, and he's not the most successful guy on the platform. Yet, you really win and you do really well. One of the things you do well is you just share very useful information. I think "useful" is actually kind of underrated. Instead of trying to impress everybody, you just try to be a little bit helpful, like a friend helping you out. You had this list of productivity tips. You probably have like 50 YouTube videos about productivity, but you did this Twitter list that I thought was really good, which was about how you are more productive than the average person. I want to read you some of these and I want you to explain what they are because I didn't...

Sam Parr

But by the way, Sean, for the record, he ranks pretty high on the sexiest list. He's got the good London accent, he's a doctor, and he's dressed nicely.

Shaan Puri

He's at least two notches above average on all of those things. Yeah, I just think he's not the most in the world, right? Like, if I go on Twitch, there are some Twitch streamers where I'm like, "I understand why she's doing well. This makes sense to me why this would appeal to people on this platform." Right, I get it. Alright, so anyways, let's go back to your productivity stuff. So you have a technique you call the **daily highlight**. What is the daily highlight?

Ali Abdaal

One thing I would say before talking about this stuff is that the thread you're referencing was actually a bit of an experiment I did a year ago. I got ChatGPT to write the whole thing before ChatGPT was cool. So, the first two are legit, and the rest are just pure... it's all bullshit made up by AI and great. A few days.

Shaan Puri

I was blown away your best work I thought

Ali Abdaal

And a few days after I posted the thread, I did another thread talking about how that thread was AI-generated. Now it's not news anymore because everyone's doing this. But at the time, people were like, "Oh my God, AI is taking over our jobs! AI is taking over the world!" But the **daily highlight** is legit. The daily highlight is a technique where you ask yourself, "What is the most important thing I need to do today?" That's it. It's one of the most simple productivity tips you could possibly have, but it's so needle-moving because so few of us actually focus on what is the most important thing. I personally like to phrase it as, "What's today's adventure going to be?" Because my whole shtick is that to be productive, you have to find a way to enjoy the process. Even just reframing something in your mind as an adventure makes you way more likely to enjoy the process. It's so true! We are all children inside, and we can use all of these different tactics to make us feel good about the things that we're doing. Adventure framing is one of them. So that's the daily highlight.

Shaan Puri

With my kids, whenever I need them to do something or walk somewhere, if I just say, "Hey, let's go over here," they won't come. I'm like, "Come on, come on, let's go!" But if I say, "Hey guys, it's a mission! We have to find your jackets before we go outside," they get really excited. Then yesterday, by myself, I couldn't find my laptop. I was ready to do some work, but I had no idea where I put it in my house. I just told myself, "Sean, it's a mission."

Sam Parr

and I got kind of excited

Shaan Puri

I'm not gonna lie, the third-grade teacher technique works. Sam, do you do this kind of one high? Like, he calls it the "daily highlight." I call it the "one big thing," where I have a to-do list of one. Do you do something like that, or do you have a long to-do list every day?

Sam Parr

Look, I know what the audience is thinking. They think, "Sam, you're this wonderfully attractive man. You're so charismatic, you're so productive." The truth is, I actually struggle with this. I just have a to-do list. I keep a notebook here and I make my list in the morning. Frankly, I find it very stressful. My productivity scheme is, I find, very unproductive. What I believe—and I actually think Sean might do this too, and I think this is actually maybe wrong of us—is I leave a lot of open space and I just kind of follow my heart about what's going on. I used to tell myself, "Well, Paul Graham said it's the manager versus the maker's artist, the maker's schedule." It's okay to have open space, but I find myself getting really stressed when I have things on my calendar. I find myself just messing around far too often than I should be, probably.

Shaan Puri

The manager's schedule, the maker's schedule, and then the skater boy's schedule. We're saying I'm just floating around the house.

Sam Parr

You know, like what did Warren Buffett say? We made a joke, but it was real. Warren Buffett said he just reads all day. So I would just read fiction books and think, "Oh, I'm productive." It turns out he's reading annual reports, you know? He's actually working. But no, I find my productivity schedule to be pretty **shitty**. I actually wrote down the daily highlight, and then the next one you have is the hourglass. I find some of those little tricks actually helpful, but I don't do anything. Do you, Sean?

Shaan Puri

Well, I do the "one big thing." In fact, I had somebody build me a Chrome extension so that every time I opened a tab, it would say, "Your one big thing is..." and display a huge text of what's the one thing. The beauty of this is that I used to do a to-do list. Here's how I would do the to-do list: it would be written down with no particular order. I wouldn't rank it by urgency or importance; I would just sort of write down the things as they came to mind. Then, I would approach it like a plate of food. I would just go for the French fries first every time. So, I would always do the thing that's not actually the main thing.

Ali Abdaal

I'd eat

Sam Parr

this one yeah

Shaan Puri

I'd do the easy one. I would talk myself into, "Oh, it's giving me momentum," and then I would go on a tangent. I would just never get the important stuff done, and I would never finish the to-do list. Everything I did would just add more things to the to-do list. "Oh, I emailed this guy. Okay, I gotta follow up. He said send him the deck. Now I gotta make the deck." Right? So I was always adding, and it just was a source of stress. I had this coach, my trainer, and he said this thing to me. He goes, "You know what? If you did it a little bit differently, what's one thing where if you just had this one outcome of the day, the whole day is a success, whether you did anything else or not? Is there such a thing?" And if there's not, then you're sort of like hunting mice. You're just nibbling on little stuff. You don't have anything that's actually impactful that you're striving towards. But if you have one impactful thing, then that one thing should be enough for the day. Imagine just doing the one most important thing every day for 365 days out of the year. You would outpace all the productivity nerds out there.

Sam Parr

I've got these days, Ali, where it feels like I was busy all day, and at the end of the day, I've got nothing done. Do you know what I mean?

Ali Abdaal

mate I know exactly what you mean yeah

Sam Parr

I feel bad at the end of the day I don't feel good

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, I find that happens to me a lot when I have the day chockablock with calendar events. That's when I find that, like Sean said, I haven't made time to do the one big thing—the daily highlight, the adventure, whatever the heck you want to call it. Honestly, just doing that thing makes such a huge difference to everything else. It's like you've hunted the big thing, and now you can hunt the mice if you really want to. The small stuff does build up, and it's important to send that email, send the follow-up, all that stuff. But actually, the thing that's really going to get you to where you want to be is generally making big progress on that one big thing.

Shaan Puri

And by the way, it's not one big task. I don't do it as one task; it's one outcome you're going for. Like, "Oh, today I'm going to find the right person for this role," which might involve me doing five tasks: go through the applications, shortlist the best five, email them, and research them or whatever, right? Like, whatever it is, schedule a call with them. But like, it's one outcome that you're going for. What's this hourglass one? Is this for like time boxing?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, so the hourglass one is interesting. One of the things that I've discovered about procrastination, from doing a bunch of reading and interviewing professors about this, is that procrastination is generally a problem with getting started on the task. Usually, once you've gotten started, you have momentum, and it becomes a lot easier to sustain the task. So, how do we hack our brains into just starting a task? Back when I wasn't traveling around the world as a digital nomad, I would have a 5-minute hourglass on my desk. I would just say to myself, "Alright, I'm going to film the video for just 5 minutes." Then, I would turn the hourglass over and genuinely tell myself I'm just doing it for 5 minutes. Usually, I would get into the flow of it, and then the hourglass time would be long gone, and I would be fully engaged with the task. Sometimes, I would just do the task for 5 minutes, and it's just a little practical tip. I like physical tools that help boost my productivity because, yes, you could set a timer on your phone, but then you see notifications and all that. The phone is too much of a multitasking tool. An hourglass that measures 5 minutes has one purpose: to help me stop procrastinating.

Shaan Puri

That's fascinating. So you're saying that's a fascinating insight: procrastination is not "I'm putting off finishing the thing." It's "I'm putting off starting the thing." As soon as you start, you're light... you know, it's actually quite easy to just keep going and finish the thing for most people.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, absolutely. The law of inertia is like this: when I... I still struggle with working out, but if I just get myself to the gym and do something for 5 minutes, and I'm there already, I might as well keep going. It's kind of fun, and I get the endorphin rush and all that. But it's that first step of getting, you know, going downstairs to the hotel gym or wherever I am these days. That's actually just lifting the first weight. That's by far the hardest part. And that's the hardest part of any task: just getting started.

Sam Parr

I went to this conference on Thursday and Friday. Sean, do you know Nick Gray?

Shaan Puri

Of course, I know Nick Gray. He's the inventor of the **2-Hour Cocktail Party**. There really wasn't one until he made it.

Sam Parr

ollie do you know nick who have you seen nick gray

Ali Abdaal

yeah we hung out in austin a few months ago great guy

Sam Parr

Yeah, so he's a character. He's the type of guy where you think you're hanging out with him and you're like, "Is this a shtick? Are you just acting?" For example, my wife and I got lunch with him one day, and he goes, "Alright, I have a list of topics. First, I want to talk about my dating life. Then at 11:24, we're going to switch, Sarah, to what you're doing at work. And then at 11:44, Sam, I want to ask you for an update on this thing." That's like his real life, and it's exhausting at first. Then you realize it's pretty wonderful to hang out with him.

Shaan Puri

out with intentional he's like the walking equivalent of may I have a kiss

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's wild. For his 41st birthday, he wanted to host a conference. That's what he wanted to do. He convinced Cloudflare, which is a stock that he owns and loves, to let him have this 40-person event there. He had all these people come, and it was about 40 people or so. We basically just went into groups of 8 and discussed various topics. One topic could have been parenting, for example. There were a bunch of YouTubers there, including Patty Galloway, who is a really fascinating guy. I also met another guy I didn't know at the time, named Josh Wiseman. Have you guys heard of Josh Wiseman? He's a chef.

Ali Abdaal

he's a chef youtuber incredible youtuber like 9 minutes drive yeah or more

Sam Parr

I think it's like **$11,000,000**. It's a lot. He was in the investing one with me, so we were talking about finances. There were a bunch of other YouTubers there. First of all, it was one of the best events I've ever been to. I met so many interesting people. But second, there were maybe 10.

Shaan Puri

birthday conference you ever been to

Sam Parr

Best, best 41st birthday conference I've ever been to! Dude, there's this one time when Nick, who owns a bunch of Cloudflare stock, said, "Hey, I convinced the VP of Cloudflare to come down here to meet me." He had no idea what he was walking into. He goes, "When you guys get here, I need you to start cheering for him and telling him how much you love Cloudflare." So this guy, who is the VP of Engineering, just walks in, thinking he's just meeting Nick. We're like, "Woo! Is that the VP of Engineering of Cloudflare? Tell us your mission!" He goes, "Oh, Cloudflare's mission is to make sure the internet doesn't go down." And we're like, "I believe!" We're screaming and cheering. Nick convinced this guy, and he never told him that this was a joke. To this day, this guy still thinks we were there to discuss how much we love Cloudflare. It was amazing! But anyway, all these YouTubers were there, and about half of them... First of all, they're making so much money! I didn't realize it would be like a 26 or 27-year-old guy making maybe $10 million a year, if I had to guess. A lot of them didn't... And by the way, you wanna know the craziest thing? A lot of them, the biggest problem they were discussing was that they kept a lot of their cash just in a checking account, as opposed to investing it. They were afraid to put it even into a high-yield savings account, which blew my mind! So many successful people do that. But a lot of them seemed to not run their business like a business; they ran it almost like a hobby. But the numbers were astronomical—making $1 million a month, I imagine! It seems like you're running your business like a real business, and you've hired, like, I don't know, 15 or 20 people. Have you seen this with a lot of these YouTubers? It's like they're running it like a 26-year-old who's just creative, as opposed to a business.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, I see this quite a lot. This is like the biggest thing I talk about when I hang out with other YouTubers. I haven't met many who are like 27 and doing tens of millions without treating it like a business. I think that’s a very unusual state to be in. By the...

Sam Parr

I'm not referring to that guy, Josh. I'm just referring to people in general. I don't want to break any confidentiality.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, in general, what I find is that a lot of YouTubers are creatives at heart and not business people. That's why they started YouTube in the first place. They have this reliance on AdSense and brand deals in particular. I know a couple of people with millions of subscribers who are so stressed and kind of hate their lives because every video has to get a million views. If it doesn't get a million views, then their brand deal revenue is going to go down, and they need that brand deal revenue. Especially entertainment YouTubers find it really hard to monetize off of the platform because you can't just sell a course if you're an entertainment user. All you can do is sell a course on how to do YouTube, which your audience doesn't want anyway. We saw Yes Theory; you guys know Yes Theory, right? They have 10 million subscribers and tried to release a course about doing YouTube, and their audience hated them for it. Meanwhile, we released our course on the same day about how to do YouTube. We charged five times as much, and our audience loved us for it. So, there's this weird thing where entertainment YouTubers, in particular, are reliant on brand deals, and that's a very stressful existence. I think "businessifying" and operationalizing is the way a lot of these guys level up.

Sam Parr

There's this one guy there who had this big audience, and he said, "We're talking about cancelization, like getting canceled for saying the wrong thing," particularly with Israel and Palestine going on. The discussion was about taking a stand and whether you have to. This one guy was like, "I've basically created an audience that's going to cancel me sometime in the near future. I don't know when, but I know it's going to happen." It seemed like a really stressful life. He seemed to feel like, "I'm their monkey at the moment, and I'm dancing for them, but they're going to come after me eventually." It seemed really stressful to be living that life.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, it's a pretty stressful place to be. I know one of my big things is all about treating the creator thing more like a business. Almost no one that I speak to actually treats it like a business. I think if you learn the basics of business—like what an SOP is—and read books like *The E-Myth* and *Traction*, you end up with, "Oh shit, I can apply all of these principles of business, OKRs, and KPIs to my YouTube channel." Therefore, I can use a CRM, I can use HubSpot, and I can drive sales to a product. Oh, that's cool! You get this whole new skill set, which then serves you for the rest of your life, but also really benefits your YouTube channel or whatever the thing might be.

Shaan Puri

Well, let's put this up on the screen on YouTube. You're very open about how much money you make, and you show your revenue year by year. So, in 2017, you did $2.27, which was your AdSense revenue when you got started. But then it goes to $24,000, then $130,000. So, I want to point out that you're now three years in, and you were a doctor. In those three years, you're basically making less than what a traditional full-time doctor would make. I think you were in your, whatever the UK version of residency is, some version of that. But then in 2020, you jumped from $130,000 up to $1,200,000. What happened there in that jump? Was that when you released the course?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, so that was when we had a whole year of releasing classes on Skillshare, which made like, I don't know, $500K that year, probably $400K. We released my YouTube course, which was about how to be a part-time YouTuber. This is not at all what I'm known for; I should have released a productivity course. But I was like, "People keep asking me about this YouTube thing. Let me just make a course." It was during the pandemic, and live cohort courses were all the rage then, with Building a Second Brain, Rite of Passage, and all these other cohort-based courses. After speaking to Tiago Forte and David Perell, who ran these courses, they basically talked me into charging loads of money for a live cohort course. That course was meant to be a bit of a side hustle, but it ended up being the majority of our revenue for the next three-plus years. It is still the cash cow that funds the entire business, basically, because more than half of our revenue comes from this one course. It's now evergreen, and we've got a service-based offering on the back of it, along with a higher-ticket thing. Just randomly, this idea in a coffee shop of, "Hey, let me make a course about how to do YouTube," has now completely transformed our business. So that was the big jump from like $100K to a million.

Shaan Puri

A $130,000 to $1,200,000, then $4,000,000 in 2021. $4.6 million, I think that was the last one I saw in 2022. I think you finished a little higher than that maybe, and you're profiting. You know, the profit margins were very good. So when you made $1,200,000 in revenue, your profit was $950,000. Incredible profit margins! I don't know what that is; it's roughly 80% or something. Then you've done $2 to $2.5 million of profit the last couple of years. I'm curious about two things: 1. Why do you think your course hit when so many courses fail or just fail to get the same type of traction? 2. What do you attribute that to?

Ali Abdaal

Why did our course hit? I think we got really lucky. We got really lucky with the timing during the pandemic. The thing that I would tell myself, the thing that I would do differently, is to spend a lot of time crafting the offer. At the time, "$100,000,000 Offers" hadn't come out. I didn't even know what an offer was. I'd never read a book about marketing. I'd been on Russell Brunson and Neil Patel's email list since I was like 13, but I always thought they were a bit scammy. I was like, "What could they possibly teach me? It's all just scammy click-funnel bullshit." So, when we first made the course, I think we got very lucky just because it happened to hit at the right time. When the course made real money, it was the final cohort after I'd read "$100,000,000 Offers," "DotCom Secrets," and "Copywriting Secrets." We revamped the entire landing page, the entire offer, and the entire product purely based on the advice of what Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi have written in their books. We literally followed the step-by-step method, and that was when a single launch of the course did like $2,000,000 in a week.

Sam Parr

Isn't that hilarious? I went through the exact same thing where I'm like, "Russell Brunson, Neil Patel, scam." Then I started reading their stuff and I'm like, "No, it's not a scam at all." Maybe I think a lot of scammers consume that stuff and implement it, but it's definitely not. It's really helpful stuff.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, it's incredible stuff. When I first read *DotCom Secrets*, I was like, "I cannot believe I've been sitting on this for 15 years!" I should have been reading all the Russell Brunson stuff from day one. Essentially, the before and after was this: before, when I was selling a course, I was like, "Oh, I'm making a course and then selling the course." It was a very unsophisticated way of doing things. I didn't have any formula for writing a landing page. I was just thinking, "Maybe this should go on it." I was just sort of making things up as I went along. Two years later, when I read *$100,000,000 Offers* and *DotCom Secrets* and explored this world of marketing a little bit more, that was when I realized, "Hang on, people have been selling courses online for like 20 years!" They've got a playbook; they've done all the testing. One of the big mindset shifts was separating the offer from the fulfillment of the offer. The thing that people are buying is the offer, and the offer needs to be a grand slam offer.

Ali Abdaal

That people feel like they're a dumbass for saying no to it. Then you can always worry about the fulfillment later. There's something weird about separating it into those two aspects. Like, "Oh, okay, cool." So now when we make a course, we just focus on the offer. We're like, "Until the offer is amazing and the landing page is amazing, we're not even going to bother creating the course." The creation of the course will be based on what the offer is, which involves talking to users and engaging with people in our audience. We ask, "Hey, what do you need to know about productivity?" Then we just follow a formula for funnels in terms of upsells and downsells, as per the Russell Brunson method. There's a really good book, *Copywriting Secrets* by Jim Edwards. He's like one of Russell's acolytes, and that's really freaking good. I realized, "Oh, the headline's really important. The subhead is really important." This is the structure of a landing page. You should talk about the user's problems. Okay, let's just do that. We did that, and that final cohort of the course did like $2,000,000 in a week. I was like, "Fuck, I wish I'd done this earlier."

Sam Parr

So, my issue with the thing is, I've read all those books too, and I think they're awesome. My personal challenge has always been with examples like in Alex Ramosi's book. He was saying, for Gym Launch or whatever business he had, "You know, we'll prove that if you spend $40 with us, you'll make $150,000 in additional revenue. If you don't, you get your money back." So, he was like, "You gotta make it irresistible." Of course, you shouldn't spend $40,000 to make $150,000, and I was like, "Yeah, that's irresistible." But I gotta figure out how to do that, and that's actually quite challenging. I mean, it was hard just to come up with it. I could make a landing page sound amazing, but it's actually quite challenging. With the course, it's a bit easier because it's sometimes a one-time purchase. You just have to be like, "Well, here's just the information that I've got to give them." How do you bridge that gap between fulfillment and promise?

Ali Abdaal

yeah this was another big sort of before and after moment

Shaan Puri

the beauty of it you don't you don't

Ali Abdaal

exactly yeah that's one

Sam Parr

of your team's values is just fuck them yeah exactly

Ali Abdaal

Well, one of the big insights from Homer Huw Mosey's book was this idea of, "What's the dream outcome? What is the actual thing that you're selling?" I didn't really have a sense of this when we launched the course initially. I've been selling courses online since, like, 2013 or something, and I just never had a sense of what the actual thing we were selling was. What I realized after reading the book is that with our course, the YouTuber Academy, the thing we're selling is **time**. We're saying, "We will save you time," and that is all we're saying. We're not saying we're going to make you money because we cannot fulfill that promise. Very few YouTube channels succeed; people have to put in the work and all that. But we can absolutely save you time. As soon as we changed all of our messaging to, "Hey, we just saved you time. If you value your time, you should take our course because we've done all the work." Yes, you can troll the internet and find all this stuff for free if you want to, but if you value your time, join our course because we'll save you time. Saving time is a very easy promise to fulfill because, obviously, we're going to fulfill it and massively over-deliver on it. Also, we have a 30-day money-back guarantee. If someone doesn't like it for whatever reason, we literally just give them their money back because we don't need the money. So those two things: we save time and we give you your money back if you don't like it. That gives us all of the conviction we need that, like, actually, this is already a **great** product because we are not promising, "Hey, we'll make you money."

Sam Parr

Do you have a... So, the business is going well. I think in your latest video, you said you're living nomadically now. You mentioned you're going to do $5. Something million in revenue. What's your "north star"? Do you have a target where you're like, "I think the business can get to here"? Are you one of those guys who wants to get to a $50 million, $100 million, or even a $1 billion business? What is your ambition, and what businesses are you going to launch to get there?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, that's a great question. I actually don't, and I'd love to get your guys' take on this. My north star is when I'm dead and people are speaking at my funeral. I just want them to say, "A, I was a nice dude," but "B, that my stuff helped them in some way, like helped them live a better life or that I taught them something." My whole north star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize, and teach forever. I'm super inspired by, for example, people like Tony Robbins. He's got his downsides, but the cool thing is he's been doing this stuff for 47 years, and millions of people around the world say his stuff changed their life. That's pretty cool. Tim Ferriss has been doing this stuff for nearly 20 years, and loads of people around the world would say he changed their life. I would say Tim Ferriss changed my life. That's pretty cool. So that's the north star. It's like, how do I just... it's that thing of like once you're playing your infinite game, which is what I'm playing right now, the only objective that makes sense is to be able to continue playing the game. I don't have any revenue goals. I don't have any profit goals. I have a bit of a profit goal; it's like let's just make as much profit as the year before, at least, please. But beyond that, I'm not shooting for $10, $20, $50, or $100 million. We are building a SaaS product on the side that I'm a sort of co-founder in. You know, I like hearing the ideas that you guys come up with in the podcast. I'm a subscriber to Trends just to see if there's anything interesting that I can come up with here. But honestly, for me, the main thing is how do I just keep on being able to make content, write books, make videos, do podcasts, whatever formats are going to come along in the future to be able to teach. So being a good teacher is my north star. So please do challenge me on that because I don't know if I'm bullshitting myself. Well, I think...

Shaan Puri

You're definitely telling yourself a story. But we all tell ourselves whatever the answer is. It's a story that sounds like it serves you pretty well, so keep it. I would say, you know, it is probably worth questioning. Like, if I just asked you, what would be a more true answer?

Ali Abdaal

I think what would be more true is that I love teaching. If someone offered me an easy way to get to $10,000,000, I wouldn't say no to it. But if... yeah.

Sam Parr

so there is a 10,000,000 yeah

Shaan Puri

The funeral thing, I think, is the part that smelled like... you know, where we borrow from others versus what's actually true in our core. Like, what makes us want to do something? I personally have never been very motivated by my actual funeral. I do think it's a good signal; it's a good side effect of a life well lived. But it's not something I would get excited about. It's like, "I'm gonna do this because at my funeral, this will be remembered," you know, that sort of thing. Whereas it sounds like what you really have said is you love the learning part. You like the teaching part. You may not actually like the format you teach today, which is like YouTube videos. You kind of admitted that you liked maybe 20 of the 700 videos that you enjoyed making. But you really enjoyed the research and the learning part. That resonates with me. I remember we did a set of interviews in LA where we tried to book bigger name guests, like Mark Manson and Brian Johnson. We booked all these guests, and to do it, I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna do the best job I possibly can. I'm gonna research as deep as I can go on all these people." I spent basically 2 or 3 full days researching each of those people. You spend 2 or 3 full days researching somebody, you have a PhD. I have a PhD in Mark Manson. I fully researched it. I went and found that he had this pickup artist alter ego back in the day, and I went and read all his stuff. Then I read his first book that nobody even talks about, *Models*, rather than *The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck*.

Ali Abdaal

great bud

Shaan Puri

Read all of it, right? I had so much fun doing it. I didn't do three days because it needed three days. Frankly, it probably needed three hours. But I got into it, and I could justify it because I had this big interview booked, and we booked the studio. So I could justify doing whatever the hell I wanted. I indulged myself and just went further because I was enjoying it. Then came the actual interview. He's a great guy, and the interview turned out fine, but it was like a 7 or 8 compared to the fun I had in actually going down the rabbit hole myself and trying to learn things. It sounds like that might be true for you too, where the 10 out of 10 is the learning, and the 7 out of 10 is recording the content for YouTube.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, I think for me, the learning is **10 out of 10**. I also think teaching in real life is a **10 out of 10**. When I go back through my life and think of the most meaningful moments, I quite enjoyed being a doctor. However, I enjoyed it way more when I had a medical student attached to me or someone I could teach along the way. On days where I didn't have someone I was teaching, I would kind of be looking forward to going home so I could make YouTube videos. But on days where I did have someone I was teaching alongside, the time would just fly. I wouldn't be thinking, "Oh, when's the day gonna end?" I'd be thinking, "I fucking love this! This is so fun!" So, I want to do more live seminars and live teaching-type things next year. That's something we've got in the pipeline.

Shaan Puri

My therapy, my end of my therapy session for you is: I think the actual north star should be, if your learning is a 10 out of 10 today, find a way to turn the teaching into a 10 out of 10. Then you've won, right? Because then you're...

Ali Abdaal

yeah

Shaan Puri

Literally just doing the shit you truly enjoy in the infinite game, you could do that forever.

Sam Parr

I also think, Ali, that my **bullshit detector** was going off when you were telling me what your goals are. I believe you can have multiple goals. I think that what you're saying about how you want to be remembered is valid, but it sounds a bit crude to say, "Well, I would like to hit $10,000,000 in revenue maybe by year 8," or whatever. I think that maybe you didn't say that because it sounds crude, but I believe that's a wonderful goal. Personally, I think of this business thing as being past the point where you have security. It's similar to exercising; you might say, "I want to run a 5K at this time." I'm not going to be devastated if I don't achieve it, but it's just a really fun goal to chase after. I think that's the same with a lot of business objectives. You might want a certain net worth by a specific age, or you want your business to hit a certain amount in revenue, profit, or users. I don't think you need to stake your personal self-esteem or self-worth on it, but I still think it's exciting. For example, when I think about this new SaaS thing I'm working on, I think, "Maybe one day this could make this much in revenue." And if it doesn't, it could still be awesome as long as I enjoyed it. That's just exciting, you know? It's an exciting thing to shoot for, and I think it's okay to admit that. For some reason, it seems like you didn't want to.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, I don't know. The thing that excites me is... and again, this could just be a story, but it honestly is that thing of I just want to learn and share cool stuff. That focus on the process, on the things that are in my control, has led to the idea that the score takes care of itself when you focus on the things that are in your control.

Shaan Puri

Let me ask you a question. You had this story about the first business you ever launched when you were 18 years old, and it didn't go well. Tell the story of this $1,000 business that you had when you were 18 years old. What happened?

Ali Abdaal

With, yeah, so this was from age 16 to 18. I was doing some private tutoring. I was teaching people how to do well in math and science exams and stuff. I saved up about $1,000 and then I was like, "Okay, I'm rich now! I can buy my first Apple product." I was like, "Yeah, I can finally afford an Apple product." So, I went out to try and find a MacBook Air. I bought one from some dude on Craigslist, but it turned out, after what had transpired, that he'd sold me a model that didn't work. It was really old, and I was a dumbass. I didn't realize that he was selling me a kind of dead MacBook. So, this $1,000 that I'd spent years of my life working for—every week, hours of private tutoring at $10 an hour to get to this $1,000—suddenly all that disappeared. I was like, "Cool, I need to find a way to recoup these losses. I need to find a way to build a business that allows me to make this money back." I still have the Evernote file from 2012 when I was 18, where that happened. I was like, "Okay, what am I good at? I'm good at teaching. I'm good at med school entrance exams. I know how to make websites. So, let me build a business that combines all those things." That was my first business. I've been trying to make money on the internet since age 13, hence why I was on Russell Brunson and Neil Patel's email list since then. But that was the first business I made that actually succeeded. I had this strong desire to do it and found this combination of things that I was already good at. That business did like $10,000 a year, $100,000 a year, and then $150,000.

Sam Parr

a year

Ali Abdaal

I actually sold that business a few years ago to go full-time on the YouTube channel. My YouTube channel originally started off as content marketing for that original business, which was teaching courses on how to get into med school. I've probably, I don't know, in total, the YouTube channel and all the stuff around it has probably generated over $10,000,000 in revenue. So my $1,000 loss, which felt life-changing at the time, has now transformed into like a $10,000,000 upside. I feel kind of like that's cool. At the time, I thought to myself, "I'm going to find a way to turn this $1,000 loss into a really good opportunity." That was when that first business really started and took off.

Shaan Puri

Sam, have you ever had a big loss that felt like a big "L" in the moment, but then turned into a "W"?

Sam Parr

My whole thing was growing up in an environment where my parents controlled money. It was like, "You're not allowed to do this," or, you know, when your parents say, "Well, if you're living under my roof, you're going to do this." There have been many times, even at a very young age, when I thought, "Alright, fine. Money equals power then." Everything I've done since then has been influenced by my parents, probably because they said no to me a handful of times. I decided, "Alright, then I'm going to be completely free," and money is one way to achieve that freedom. Yeah, I mean, it all stems from the idea that every great businessperson probably stems from some type of childhood trauma. Whether it's your parents telling you no, or you see your mother being poor, or you get scammed out of a MacBook.

Shaan Puri

When we sold The Milk Road, I asked the guys, "Man, you guys have been doing different businesses for so long, and you have a pretty interesting track record—like small wins, big wins, shit like that." I was like, "What's the driver?" Because, you know, once you bank $100,000,000 and you're still taking risks in starting businesses, you're not doing it for the money, I don't believe. I asked, "What's the driver?" And then he said, "I don't know what it is now." He continued, "But for a long time, both of them had the same story. This wasn't on the podcast; this wasn't to look cool. This was like us hanging out." He said it matter-of-factly, "Yeah, this girl rejected me when I was like 14 years old." He added, "I literally felt like shit, and I was like, 'Okay, I don't want to be rejected again. How do I make myself awesome?'" He said he didn't know what the answer was, but he immediately started to think, "Oh, if I'm okay at this, I'm good at this. I'm going to become awesome at this instead." He mentioned that he was good at the internet, making websites, stuff like that, and he just went into overdrive. He said the other guy had the same story. "Yeah, I lived this," he said. "I had six friends in college, and we wanted to live off-campus together. They got a house that only had five rooms, and I was the odd man out. I was just like, 'Fuck these guys. I'm going to go live by myself, but I'm going to go into the hole, and I'm going to come out a different guy.'"

Ali Abdaal

what's there

Sam Parr

sean because you seem like you've had your act together I mean you seem emotionally stable

Shaan Puri

yeah I've had a few things like this probably not like not like some huge disrespect or nothing that I was that aware of but I do remember like I remember hearing this story so I went to this got in this random accelerator that I don't even know if it exists anymore it's called the mass challenge and they used to invite these speakers in it was in massachusetts and one time it was at this this event they had and ben from ben and jerry's was there and he told this story about ben and about the starting story of ben and jerry's there's all these like interesting funny things like he started off being like yeah I met jerry because we were both like in pe class and I was like you know the people like did you guys get along right away he's like no but we were both the fat kids so like we would have to run the mile every day and we were just walking at the back and like first we didn't talk for the 1st 2 weeks and finally it was like alright sup man like you know it's you again and so they became friends that way and he talks about like you know they start this they they take this 5 doll he he one of them was trying to get into med school and he failed the entrance exam 5 or 6 times in a row so like you know he basically for several years couldn't get into med school and so they instead took a $5 ice cream making course together and that's like you know part of how they learned how to make ice cream for ben and jerry's so they opened up the shop and it wasn't like pints like you see today it was a shop but it was in vermont in the freezing cold winter and so they're about to go out of business like in month 3 because nobody wants ice cream when it's already they're snowing outside it's like a blizzard outside and so they you know they they're alright what do we do we're screwed so what do we do and they had this they came up with this promotion it's like this long acronym like 9 letters long and it stood for 1¢ off per degree celsius under you know freezing or whatever and so you got like 12¢ off if it was 12 below freezing and so they and that like that promotion was funny people liked it so they like came and like pitied them and basically bought bought a little ice cream took them through the winter so then they were like still struggling and they started the strategy of like making pints they're like oh let's go to restaurants and give them the pints because otherwise it's just gonna melt here nobody's coming to our shop and eventually they get into corner stores and they start selling and finally the business is working and they're like oh my god this is great we sell we sell pints to these corner stores and they sell our product for us this is a good business and then one day like they stopped getting orders from like a whole area in where they lived and and they were like what the hell happened they go and they talk to the store owner he's like oh guys I didn't wanna tell you this but you know I got word from from big ice cream he's like what he's like yeah haagen dazs came to us and haagen dazs which is owned by pillsbury pillsbury sent us this letter said I don't know who this ben and jerry is but like you need to stop selling their stuff only sell haagen dazs or we're pulling all pillsbury products from your shelves he's like dude I he's like I need my crescent rolls I can't do I can't do this guys I'm so sorry and so the guys are like shit we're screwed but they had this value which was like turn the disadvantage into an advantage and so they were like alright how can we use this and so they created this whole campaign called what's the doughboy afraid of and they would put up a they would print these like posters that were like the pint of ben and jerry's with the giant like dope pillsbury doughboy hands about to strangle it and it would just say what's the doughboy afraid of and then on every pint of ice cream they sold they said we're under attack call this number to hear the story about what's going on why pillsbury is trying to put out your favorite ice cream brand and then they recorded like a answering machine that would just tell the 3 minute story and say like if you think this is screwed up buy these stickers and buy a pint of ice cream just to you know show pillsbury you won't you won't be bullied and eventually the new yorker takes the story and you know jerry's standing outside of pillsbury's headquarters by himself picketing as if he's a protester and they take this picture they run this in the new yorker and pillsbury has to like completely back off because it looks terrible for them as a you know as a brand to be doing this and secondly a whole bunch of people found out about ben and jerry's that didn't know about it before because this story was a lot more interesting than just here's a cool ice cream brand started with these 2 hippies in vermont and so then it's they exploded in sales and then they became successful and I remember hearing that and so everything that would happen in our first business like we were you know 20 years old basically trying to start the sushi chain everything that would happen we get rejected or we get a cease and desist letter or whatever it was we were like this is our pillsbury moment alright what's the doable you're afraid of how do we flip this and so very quickly it went from like anything that was bad we got hyped because it was like this could be our story that we're telling someday and that just became like embedded in my mind and so I almost don't even remember the individual like kinda like rejection moments because it was all like alright how are we gonna use this to go viral how are we gonna use this to to our advantage and that's just like I don't know what I've been doing for like 15 years since

Sam Parr

By the way, Ali, welcome to my life. I asked Sean a question, and he tells me this amazing story where I'm totally enthralled. I was into it. He does such a good job of telling the story, and I'm like, I don't even...

Ali Abdaal

know what

Sam Parr

I'm interested. Just... yeah, don't worry. I fall down a little bit. I don't even remember what I asked, but like, yeah, what else you got? Keep telling me. Tell me another.

Shaan Puri

Tell me another story from you, Ollie. I want to learn about titles. I think that one of the reasons your course does so well is that it's not called, you know, "How to Be Famous on YouTube." It's called "The Part-Time YouTuber Academy." The term "part-time" appeals to a whole different segment of people. I always think about these choices because when you see the title, what you don't see is the 50 other options that were considered. I think about this with your entire channel. If I go to your YouTube channel right now, and I, let's say, look at some of your popular titles, some of them are just really good. For example, "How I Type Really Fast: 156 Words Per Minute" or "How I Ranked First at Cambridge University." In your thumbnails, you're holding up a notebook that looks like it's got, you know, the secret instructions inside. Then there's "My Evidence-Based Skin Care Routine." So even though I said you weren't the most beautiful guy, you've got good skin. But saying "My Evidence-Based Skin Care Routine" is so different than just saying "My Skin Care Routine." I'm curious, what's your method to madness on getting good at titles? How do you come up with this stuff?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, nice. We think a lot about titles. What we found, basically, is that the only thing that allows us to predict the performance of a video is just the title. It's not even the thumbnail. Some people like thumbnails, but in an educational channel, my thumbnails look broadly similar. It's very rarely the thumbnail; it just tends to be the title. If we know that the title is good, then by default, the content is going to be at least reasonable and useful. That's our main thing: is this useful? So, the video is going to fly or flop based on the performance of the title.

Sam Parr

how do you know the title will be good though

Shaan Puri

By the way, that's the same offer. Separating the offer from the delivery of the offer is the same principle, right?

Ali Abdaal

Exactly! It was the same thing for the book. You know, it took about a hundred iterations to land on "Feel Good Productivity" as the title we had. I still have my Apple Notes filled with hundreds of title options, trying to capture this idea of being productive in a nice, fun, joyful sort of way. The title actually came to me in the shower, like two years into the journey of writing the book. On that note, one thing I would do differently next time is, for any future book that I write, I would make sure I've got the title nailed down before trying to write the book. The title informs the concept and the hook, which informs everything else. There was so much "surgery" we had to do on the book once we came up with that title. It was like, "Oh, okay, that's the title! Now let's rejig everything in the book to make sure it matches the promise, you know, the offer, the title, and the thumbnail of the book." But when it comes to YouTube videos, we just do a lot of iteration.

Shaan Puri

Like, he's like, "How do you know a good title from a bad one?" When you're trying to decide, what are your... obviously, it's just a judgment call. Over time, you get a bunch of intuition. But is there anything you do or anything that led you to be better at titles?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, we do a lot. We have a strategy that we actually call **viral replication**. The way you grow a YouTube channel is by getting a viral video. The easiest way to get a viral video is to just copy the title of another video that's already gone viral. So, a lot of our best titles have come from looking around on YouTube, sometimes within our niche and sometimes outside of it, and examining the view-to-subscriber ratio of those particular videos. For example, back in the day, I saw a guy who made a video titled "How I Use My iPad as an Engineering Student." I thought, "Okay, interesting." But that video had like 2,000,000 views, and the dude had only about 20,000 subscribers. I thought, "That's interesting. There's something about that title that's really popped." So, I came up with "How I Use My iPad as a Medical Student." That sounded cool, so I made that video. It was the first video on the channel that went viral, and it got over 1,000,000 views. I was like...

Shaan Puri

yeah 60000000 views and it's how I take notes on my ipad pro in medical school is that the one

Ali Abdaal

yeah that's the one and that was the that that was about a year into my channel yeah

Sam Parr

are you using software to help you do this or are you just browsing

Ali Abdaal

We're browsing and using **VidIQ**, the Chrome extension, which shows us the subscriber count of the channel just next to their name. Otherwise, you have to click on it to see what the subscriber count is. We've also now started becoming more sophisticated with A/B testing titles and thumbnails. We use **Thumbnailest.com**, which is made by one of our Twitter friends, to test the back catalog. That generates a bunch of free views basically every day because we can refresh an old video that's like three years old by just giving it a new title or a new thumbnail. It's a lot of repeating that process over and over again before landing on a title. We often have like 20 titles to choose from, and sometimes if we're really not sure, we'll test it on Twitter, Instagram, and on YouTube community posts. We'll say, "Hey, which of these four titles would you be more likely to click on?" Often, there's a clear winner, and we're like, "Okay, cool, let's just do that." We make sure we don't even think about writing the video until we have nailed a title because obviously, the framing of the title and thumbnail radically informs the way you can do the video.

Sam Parr

Our producer, by the way, I just saw her look down. She's taking notes on how we can improve our channel. What's the software that you're fooling around with? Because I bet you've seen a lot of interesting creators launch cool businesses. I bet you've had a lot of opportunities run by you. Why did you sell this one, and what is it?

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, so this week, we're actually launching something called **Voicepell**. It's like a combination of voice notes, AI transcription, and converting your voice note into a summary. You can then turn that summary into a tweet thread, a LinkedIn post, a journal entry, or whatever you want. It's not launched yet, but you can check it out at **voicepell.me**. By the time people are listening to this, it will have been launched. This idea has been floating in the back of my mind, partly thanks to listening to your podcast for a few years. Creators have a massive distribution advantage but often do not know how to make products. On the other hand, product people know how to make products but really struggle with distribution. So, in theory, if you can combine those two things—pairing a creator with a product that fits their audience nicely—now you're winning. The product person makes a product, and the creator has the distribution. I partnered up with a friend of mine who's a second-time founder; he's exited two companies. He said, "Hey, we should totally build some cool productivity software together," and I was like, "Yes, we absolutely should!" The first idea we're launching is this thing called **Voicepell**. You record a voice note, it transcribes it, and it can turn it into whatever you want. We're trying to figure out the messaging around this, like "double your productivity using your voice" or something to that effect. We're going to be launching this week for our 1,000 beta testers. I'll post it on Twitter, LinkedIn, and the newsletter, and hopefully, we'll get those 1,000 people very quickly.

Sam Parr

how much are you gonna charge

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, we're thinking like **$10 a month** initially. We've already got about **20 paying users** from the alpha friends and family test that we did. We found **30 people**, and **20 of them** were like super, super power users. Almost all of them converted to paid when Pablo, the co-founder, reached out to them to say, "Hey, would you like to buy early access to this?" A lot of people are using it already, like journalists and lawyers, for recording depositions and things like that. A bunch of people are also using it for journaling. So, one thing that I'm really bullish on is, you know, to your point about, "Wouldn't it be cool to get to **$10 million** in revenue?" I think the way we get there is not by trying to get there through content, but by building cool software products on the side that I use personally. I would think, "Oh, I would love a journaling app that does this," or "I'd love a to-do list app that's different from Things or other to-do lists, but does this." I think that's the way forward.

Sam Parr

that's so smart

Ali Abdaal

and then we plug it to our audience

Sam Parr

I think that's... I think I would agree with that theory. You're not going to get to where you want to go by doing the content revenue itself. Have you guys seen the app Opal? So it's opal.so. It's like...

Ali Abdaal

no

Sam Parr

Man, you guys gotta check this out. So, Opel.s0 says, "Find your focus. Make the most of every day with the world's greatest screen time software." The problem with iPhone software is that, you know, like the screen time feature, you could just click "bypass" or whatever. So somehow these guys made it to where I can't bypass it. Between 8 or 9 AM and 6 PM, I cannot go on social media on my phone. They've done it in such a way that I literally can't bypass it, and it's like $120. They've got a crazy amount of reviews. What I think is gonna happen is that there are already a lot of these screen time focus session apps. Historically, they have done pretty well. There are a few from the past couple of years, and there are Chrome plugins for this, but this one in particular is the only one that has stuck with me.

Ali Abdaal

I

Sam Parr

I have no idea who these guys are. This isn't like a promotion; I just thought it was cool. I could see you launching something like this. I think they charge $200 to $300 for a lifetime license and then $100 a year. But I really like, like, if I'm you, I would just look at what are the best apps out there for productivity. Who's spending the most on advertising? How do I acquire a small part of their company or launch something similar? Because I don't have to; my margin will be their advertising budget.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, that is exactly the way we're thinking. We're sort of considering it as a **barbell strategy**. There are a couple of companies that I've invested in to get a small equity stake. **Rize** is one of them. R-I-Z-E. They're focused on time tracking, and I've been using it for about two years. We invested in them, but we invested sponsorship dollars—like, however much it was, about four sponsorships worth of investment into the company. It's great because I use it every day. I love it, and it's easy to recommend. When I say I've invested in something, people are like, "Oh, he liked it so much he actually invested in it." So that's for a small equity stake. On the other side, we're trying to do these co-founding software products for about a 20 or 30% equity stake. I'm trying to experiment with both, but I'm particularly bullish on building our own products because I think that's where I get to mold the direction of the product in a way that personally suits me. One of the cool things about that is that I love trying to find apps where I can share a screenshot of the thing, which promotes the app without it looking like a promotion. For example, whenever I do a workout, I use the app **Strong**. I just screenshot it and post it on my Instagram story, and I will always get dozens of comments asking, "What app is that?"

Sam Parr

and it'll annoys

Ali Abdaal

I'm sorry, but it seems there was an error in my response. Here is the cleaned transcription: Me, because I'm like, this is an app I don't own, and it's just really good. But if I did own the app, Strong, or a workout tracker, and I was just posting screenshots of my workouts, no one would think I'm plugging a product. They would think, "Oh, he's sharing screenshots of his product."

Shaan Puri

right

Ali Abdaal

I'm always looking for these organic promotion opportunities that don't look like they're out.

Sam Parr

Or like another one is Scrivener. Is that what it's called? I know you love that app, that writing app, which I think is just like a guy in Montana or something, you know, a little bit random like that, who owns that writing tool. But you should acquire stakes in these businesses or launch some of your own, and I think you'd be very successful at that.

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, one thing I've been thinking a lot about is that with a lot of these productivity apps, they tend not to be differentiated on the product itself. Fundamentally, all to-do list apps do the same thing. When you watch reviews of them, it's like, "Oh, Things 3 has slightly nicer animations," and "Todoist has teams," and "This one is available on iPad, so you should get that." The product features that differentiate these apps are so small. So, if we could, in theory, just clone one of these in our own way, in our own design language, whatever, and we've got feature parity on the product side, we would have a distribution advantage. The market for these productivity apps is so huge that, you know, a few users would be pretty good.

Sam Parr

How many users, let's say if you owned Scrivener or Opal, could a handful of your videos drive, do you think?

Ali Abdaal

Probably 1,000 to tens of thousands, based on what the users are that we drive to, like Skillshare and Brilliant, and these other sponsor-type things. If there's a good fit with the audience, then yeah.

Sam Parr

There was a time when Sean brought up some company that does accounting or his taxes on the podcast. Afterwards, he asked, "I don't think Sean, you didn't have any... he didn't. He had no stake. He was just like, 'I just met this guy and it was cool.' I ended up using the product and it was interesting. Here's what it was." Then he hollered at them two weeks later and was like, "Do you see a bump?" The guy was raving. You know, I don't know what numbers I'm allowed to say or not, but Sean, you could decide if you want to say it or not. But it was like a substantial sum.

Shaan Puri

and

Sam Parr

then that

Shaan Puri

where calendly was booked out like 4 months or something

Ali Abdaal

I don't know if they didn't

Shaan Puri

That was great for them when that happened.

Sam Parr

But then we both had a light bulb moment and we were like, "Yeah, oh, there's something there." You know what I mean? Now, of course, you have to pick and choose which ones you do, and you can't do too many at one time. You probably should only do one at a time for a certain amount of time. But yeah, like we had that same moment as well.

Ali Abdaal

So, one thing that we did... We recently launched, well, recently, a few months ago, a studio called "Hey Friends," which is like a dumb idea.

Sam Parr

sporty and sahil

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, with Hunter and Sahil. Oh yeah, because you guys are working with them as well. One tweet from me drove $2,000,000 in MRR worth of leads. They're still going through the sales calls and trying to shore up capacity because there are so many people running this $14,000 in MRR worth of leads. Obviously, yeah.

Sam Parr

wow okay that's a shit yeah

Ali Abdaal

There were literally a hundred people that signed up for a $14,000 a month sales call. They were like, "Shit, we can only onboard one or two people a month because we need to hire editors, script writers, and all this kind of stuff." It was just one tweet, and Twitter isn't even on any platform. But I guess it's why people like you guys are more likely to read a tweet of mine than watch a video. So if I'm like, "Hey, I've got this $15,000 a month YouTube as a service thing," it's like that drove so many leads. We're like, "That's interesting."

Sam Parr

and sean and

Ali Abdaal

I past you now

Sam Parr

We did this thing, I think, two years ago, Sean, or maybe... no, maybe a year ago. We were like, "Okay, so we understand how there are these $1,000,000,000 businesses built on Instagram." That's been done maybe a couple of times with the Kardashians and a handful of other people. It's very plausible that it's happening or has already happened with YouTube, like Mr. Beast, and there are many more that have built businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even more, on YouTube. It hasn't happened yet with Twitter, and our prediction was, "This is going to happen more." The reason it's going to happen more is because, A, there's a business audience on Twitter, a bit more than those other platforms, so you can sell higher-priced things. And B, the conversion's quite high. I don't know what the click-through rate on your video is, so how many people click a link to your products. It probably is less than 1%. On Twitter, it's not crazy for it to be 5% at times where you post a link and 5% of people click it. We were like, "Wow, we could just drive way more traffic to a website." It hasn't happened yet, but I think it's in the process of happening. Hopefully, Sean and I, along with a couple of our friends, are en route to doing that. I think it's going to happen in the next five issues.

Shaan Puri

I've been Twitter famous, right? Like, I can go on YouTube and Instagram, and I know, like, oh...

Ali Abdaal

I don't know

Shaan Puri

Who Charli D'Amelio is? I know that she's a person who's TikTok famous. She started on that platform, got huge on that platform, and has a huge fan base on that platform. You could say Dan Bilzerian and others were doing that on Instagram when it first came out. On YouTube, you had tons of people like Mr. Beast and others. I don't even know who that would be on Twitter. Who the hell is Twitter famous?

Sam Parr

Like Sahel. Maybe Sahel's our friend. Sahel, the most Twitter-famous guy on Earth. That makes sense.

Shaan Puri

The biggest... like, no offense to Sahel, Sahel's great, but like, shouldn't it be a famous person? Like, you know, shouldn't there be like the whoever? You know, like Mr. Beast is massive, PewDiePie was massive. These were like massive, massive creators. Who is that on Twitter? I don't even know. Like, is there? And I'm on Twitter all the time.

Sam Parr

the time I guess you or our friends I

Shaan Puri

don't I don't know it can't be the the the the the the

Ali Abdaal

the the the the why

Shaan Puri

does it not have that that's insane

Ali Abdaal

I think it also really depends on what audience you're going up against. Normal people have never heard of Cyhill Bloom. The only people who have are those who are in our sort of business.

Shaan Puri

yeah that's what I'm saying so like

Ali Abdaal

who is the mass market

Shaan Puri

Like, you know, on Instagram, it was like beautiful people who were the mass market famous people. Right? And then on YouTube, it's like the funny vlogger types. On Twitch, it was like the greatest Fortnite player in the world. Alright, Fortnite's super popular, makes sense that Ninja's super popular. Doctor Disrespect, these guys, Shroud, whoever. I don't even know who those people are on Twitter. Who is it? Is it Elon? Is he the only guy who is famous on Twitter? Oh yeah, Trump. Like, there's... and Trump is saying famous. They were famous off Twitter, which is why they're big on Twitter. Like, is there anybody who's just natively so good at tweeting that they just got huge? Because if not, something is broken about this platform.

Sam Parr

It's not broken, my... it's small. So, how many users does Twitter have? I don't know, 300 or 400 million? 100 million?

Ali Abdaal

yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, the fraction compared to what the other platforms have is just small. Also, it's text-based, so it's a little bit less exciting. You don't exactly see the view count like you do on YouTube. For example, I see Ali's video that has 6,000,000 views, and I'm like, "Oh, many other people know this person." I'll see a tweet just randomly through my feed, and I don't know that other people are consuming it. It's more one-to-one versus one-to-many. So, I don't know that other people are consuming it, but that's okay. There are no famous people, but that's okay. I think you could still build a big business because there are people like Ali, or you, or I on there who will spend more money.

Shaan Puri

Twitter's like 20 years old. If it's not big now, it's never getting big. It's a 20-year-old product. There are 300 million people. What, like, who's more than 10 million followers? Is there anyone who is not already famous? Like Trump and Elon, take them out. Who has more than 10 million followers organically? I don't know. I know people who have blogs that got popular, right? Like, you know, that's insane to me. Maybe it's like a couple. Yeah, there are maybe some of these crazy accounts, you know, like F Jerry. Is there even an F Jerry type of account on Twitter?

Sam Parr

I don't know I don't think so

Shaan Puri

sure there is somebody who knows is just yelling at their podcast player right now like why aren't they saying

Ali Abdaal

blah blah blah the obvious so we're all friends with the most famous guy on twitter sal bloom

Shaan Puri

yeah congrats on that

Ali Abdaal

saying yeah

Shaan Puri

and what is it that you say a a dwarf amongst midgets you know like yeah

Sam Parr

That's basically what's going on here. The only reason he's famous is because he's Indian, so he has a billion potential fans. He's ripped, so he's going to attract all the dudes. By the way, it's never women that are attracted to the ripped dudes; it's always other men, like me, who see a ripped guy and he talks about productivity. So he's got this whole other angle. He's a triple assassin.

Shaan Puri

So, he's Indian; he gets Indian followers. He's not Indian, he's also half Indian, so he's super hot. Also, right? Like, yeah, he's a combination of things. If, dude, if he had Ali's accent, it'd be over.

Sam Parr

Yeah, if he had a British or a London accent and sounded all proper, he's got it all. He'd be a... he had everything. Ali, thanks for doing this, man. The name of the book, what is it? "Feel Good Productivity." It's coming out in January or December 26th, right?

Ali Abdaal

yeah december 26th feel good productivity it's about how to do more of a budget to

Shaan Puri

you in

Ali Abdaal

a way that's right after enjoyable meaningful sustainable

Sam Parr

yeah yeah did you not know that most gifts are bought literally 3 days before that

Ali Abdaal

exactly shit good.

Shaan Puri

Procrastination date for the production

Ali Abdaal

There was this whole astrology that the publishers did where they were like, "Well, if we go before Christmas, we're competing with cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. Those are often gifted over Christmas rather than self-help books." But if we go just after Christmas, people are on a "new year, new me" kind of thing. So maybe that's when it'll hit.

Shaan Puri

oh okay

Ali Abdaal

I'm not sure how much of this was astrology versus actual data, but I mean, they seem pretty switched on. So maybe there was some data behind it as well.

Sam Parr

and your cover looks like an air table spreadsheet

Ali Abdaal

The cover... Okay, here's the thing with these sorts of books. The reason *Atomic Habits* was so successful is because it was picked up by the demographic of women in their thirties in the Midwest, apparently. This is by far the biggest demographic of people who buy books, especially self-help books. It really hit that crowd sometime during the pandemic.

Sam Parr

like kinsey's of the world like when a bunch of a bunch of ladies named kinsey

Ali Abdaal

Yeah, that kind of thing, you know? They were two kids. That's good stuff. So the publisher was like, "Look, productivity is too bro-y. We need to have a cover that will be a bit more gender neutral, feel a bit more fresh and inviting." And you know, that's why productivity is like...

Shaan Puri

an by alison abdaal yeah

Ali Abdaal

That's what good. Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah, but that's why the cover is all bright and colorful. That's also my vibe; I like bright and colorful.

Sam Parr

well the landing page is beautiful it looks good man you're gonna kill it congratulations on all this

Ali Abdaal

thanks man thanks karl

Sam Parr

Thanks for giving us shout outs. We'll have to repay you in some way when your book comes out, and we'll share it. We appreciate you coming on, and we'll wrap up here. That's the part.