Ali Abdaal joins Sam and Shaan to break down how a single course launch generated $2 million in one week — and what changed after he read Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi. They dig into Ali’s public revenue numbers, his North Star for the business, the daily highlight productivity technique, and why creators should think more like business operators. The conversation ends with Ali’s book Feel-Good Productivity and a wide-ranging debate about whether Twitter can ever produce its own version of Mr. Beast.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Ali Abdaal (guest, YouTuber and author)
Welcome and the Podcast Name Origin [00:00:00]
Shaan: 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 you became a content creator. You are now one of the most popular productivity YouTubers 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: 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. I was like, “Who? What a great concept for a podcast.” Everyone needed an angle, and the My First Million angle was just so good. I’ve been keeping up with you guys on Twitter and stuff for ages. It’s super nice to be here.
Sam: You gave us a big shout-out early on in our podcast. I think you did a video like “10 podcasts I like right now” or something like that. That was a big deal for us. That was when My First Million was still a small podcast.
Ali: I was like, “I’ve discovered something. There’s these two guys who ask people how they made their first million.” This is incredible stuff.
Shaan: I remember when I DM’d Sam the name of the podcast. I was like, “I’m thinking about calling it this,” and he was just like, “It’s so bad.” I was coming up with my response, and he goes, “That’s why it’s perfect.”
Sam: Why did I think it was so bad? Well, I’m not particularly good at naming things — my company was called The Hustle, so that’s not a good reference point. Shaan, you’re actually quite good at naming things. But for some reason I just felt like we’ve done a good job of appearing to be internet-markety, shady almost on the surface. Like when I go to the barber and they ask what I do for a living, I want to cringe when I say the name of the pod. But then I’m like, it’s not what it sounds like. I think it’s a good name because it grabs your attention, and we’ve done a good job of staying on the right side of doing the right stuff and having good taste.
Ali: I think it’s a fantastic name. I occasionally see people on Twitter who like to hate on clips from the podcast, I think because you guys are so open about talking about money. There was a quote-tweet I saw being like, “LOL, what would you expect from a podcast called My First Million?” And I was like, that’s perfect. That’s exactly what you’d expect. I just love how brazen you guys are about talking about money. Loved the Neil Patel episode in particular — you were asking him such specific questions.
Shaan: To this day I give him credit — he’s the only guy who has an absurdly high life burn rate. His burn was $180,000 a month. 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. We’re like, “What are you spending $180,000 on?” And then he just explained it. That TikTok clip has like 10 million views — the comment section just hates him for it. But I respect him for coming on here and standing by it. He told his truth.
Sam: Interestingly, just on the Neil Patel note — I was at a mastermind where he was speaking. Our business was doing about $5 million in revenue. He was like, “Man, why are you in the info products business? All you can make with info products is like $5 million. You should be in the agency business. You can make $100 million in the agency business.” I was like, “I want a lifestyle business. Agencies seem very stressful.” And he was like, “Man, I probably work less than you do. I work four to six hours a week and I’ve got a hundred-million-dollar agency.” And then his CEO from the back of the room piped up and said, “No, no, no — 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 running an agency is an easy business.”
Shaan: I love that his CEO called him out. You know how our good friend Andrew Wilkinson — and I think Sam and I are also guilty of this — we oversimplify things and act like it’s no big deal, very low stress, and that’s not the reality.
The Hot Mess Beneath the Surface [00:05:30]
Sam: I was just texting my friend Austin Rief who runs Morning Brew. Morning Brew is a similar thing — in the public eye they’re killing it, and they are killing it. It’s so simple, it’s just a newsletter. How hard can it be? And you know what we were bitching to each other about? We both said we have the Sunday scaries. I was like, I’ve got to do this podcast, I’ve got to prepare, I’ve got this meeting and that meeting. It is not what it looks like. Your life, Ali — your life particularly looks cool. You share your revenue, you’re making profit, you’re living a nomadic life, you’ve got a book coming out. You seem put together. But all of our stuff stinks, and it’s all significantly more stressful than it looks. What’s the hot mess part of your life?
Ali: The hot mess part is that I generally don’t enjoy filming YouTube videos.
Sam: Right.
Ali: 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, the learning. When it comes to sitting down and talking to a camera on my own, it’s kind of depressing. 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 alone is kind of rough. Hey, that’s the price to get the message out there.
Sam: What else do you dislike? You said there’s a few things you like and a bunch of stuff you hate. What else?
Ali: I don’t like doing sponsorship ad reads. This sounds very first-world-problems, because a sponsor ad read is where I have to stumble through my words. The brand says, “You have to say the wording this specific way.” And it takes me 20 minutes to do a 60-second ad read because of all the stumbling.
Sam: Our producer Ari is grimacing because Shaan’s actually pretty good with words. I stumble a lot. But HubSpot is our main sponsor, I use HubSpot, I like the product, I own the stock — and I still hate what they tell me to say because they phrase it in a way where I’m like, “That’s not how I would say that. I didn’t even know this feature existed.” I’ll take an hour to do about five minutes of reads.
Productivity: The Daily Highlight [00:10:00]
Sam: I wanted to ask you about some of your productivity stuff. If I go to your YouTube channel — I’ll be honest, when I usually go there I’m like, “He seems like such a good guy, someone you’d want to be friends with,” but in terms of YouTube success, you’re not the funniest, you’re not the sexiest, you’re not the smartest, you’re not the most successful guy on the platform. But you really win and you do really well. And one of the things you do well is you just share very useful things. Useful was kind of underrated. You had this Twitter list that I thought was really good — “How I am more productive than the average person.” I want to read you some of these and have you explain them. What’s the daily highlight?
Ali: One thing I’d say first — that thread was actually an experiment I did where I got ChatGPT to write the whole thing before ChatGPT was cool. The first two are legit, and the rest are pure AI-generated stuff.
Sam: That was your best work. I thought you were a genius.
Ali: A few days after I posted the thread, I did another thread talking about how it was AI-generated. It wasn’t news by then because everyone was doing it, but at the time people were like, “Oh my God, AI is taking over.” Anyway — the daily highlight is legit. It’s basically: ask yourself what is the most important thing I need to do today. It’s one of the simplest productivity tips you could possibly have, but it’s so needle-moving because so few of us actually focus down on what the most important thing is.
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’ve got to find a way to enjoy the process. Even just reframing something as an adventure makes you way more likely to enjoy the process.
Sam: It’s so true. We’re all children inside, and we can use all of these different tactics to make us feel good about things. 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. But if I’m like, “Hey guys, it’s a mission! We have to find your jackets before we go outside” — they get really excited. And yesterday, by myself, I couldn’t find my laptop. I was ready to do some work and had no idea where I put it. I just told myself, “Shaan, it’s a mission.” And I got kind of excited.
Ali: The third-grade teacher technique works.
Shaan: Sam, do you do this one-highlight thing? I call it the One Big Thing. My to-do list has one item.
Sam: Look, I know what the audience is thinking: “Sam, you’re this wonderfully attractive, charismatic, productive man.” But truth is I actually struggle with this. I just have a to-do list, I keep a notebook and make my list in the morning, and frankly I find it very stressful. My productivity scheme is not productive. What I believe — and I think Shaan might do this too, and I think it’s maybe wrong of us — I leave a lot of open space and just follow my heart. I used to tell myself, “Well, Paul Graham said it’s the manager versus the maker schedule. It’s okay to have open space.” But I found myself messing around far too often. The maker schedule and then the skater-boy schedule around the house.
Shaan: I do the One Big Thing. I actually had somebody build me a Chrome extension so that every time I open a tab it says “Your one big thing is:” in huge text. The beauty of it is — I used to do a to-do list, and here’s how I did it. It would be written down with no particular order, not ranked by urgency or importance, just things as they came to mind. Then, like a plate of food, I would go for the french fries first every time. I’d always do the easy thing, talking myself into “it’s getting me momentum.” Then I’d go on a tangent and never get the important stuff done. And everything I did would add stuff to the to-do list.
My trainer said this to me: “What’s the one thing where if you just had this one outcome, the whole day is a success whether you did anything else or not?” If there’s no such thing, then you’re hunting mice — nibbling on little stuff without anything impactful. But if you have one impactful thing, that one thing should be enough for the day. Imagine just doing the one most important thing every single day for 365 days. You would outpace all the productivity nerds out there.
Ali: I’ve got these days where it feels like I was busy all day and at the end I’ve got nothing done.
Sam: I know exactly what you mean. I feel bad at the end of those days.
Ali: For me that happens when I have the day chock-a-block with calendar events. That’s when I haven’t made time to do the one big thing — the daily highlight, the adventure, whatever you want to call it. Doing that thing makes such a huge difference because it’s like you’ve hunted the big thing and now you can hunt the mice if you want to. The small stuff does build up, but the thing that’s really going to get you where you want to be is making big progress on that one big thing.
By the way — it’s not one big task. It’s one outcome. Like, “Today I’m going to find the right person for this role.” That might involve five tasks — go through applications, shortlist the best five, email them, research them, schedule a call. But it’s one outcome you’re going for.
The Hourglass Technique [00:17:00]
Sam: What’s the hourglass technique?
Ali: One of the things I’ve discovered about procrastination from reading and interviewing professors about this is that procrastination is generally a problem with getting started, not finishing. Once you’ve gotten started, you have momentum and can usually finish. So how do we hack our brains into just starting?
Back when I wasn’t traveling around the world as a digital nomad, I would have a five-minute hourglass on my desk. I’d just tell myself, “I’m going to film the video for just five minutes,” turn the hourglass over, and genuinely commit to just five minutes. Usually I’d get into the flow of it, and by the time the hourglass ran out I was already into the task. But sometimes I’d just do the thing for five minutes and stop. It’s a practical, physical thing. You could set a timer on your phone, but then you see notifications. The phone is too much of a multitasking tool. An hourglass has one function.
Shaan: That’s a fascinating insight — procrastination is about putting off starting, not finishing. As soon as you start, it’s actually quite easy to keep going.
Ali: Exactly. The law of inertia. I still struggle with working out, but if I just get myself to the gym and do something for five minutes — I’m there already, might as well keep going. It’s getting yourself downstairs to the hotel gym and lifting the first weight. That’s by far the hardest part of any task.
Nick Gray’s Birthday Conference [00:21:00]
Sam: I went to this conference on Thursday and Friday. Shaan, do you know Nick Gray?
Shaan: Of course. He’s the inventor of the two-hour cocktail party.
Sam: Ali, do you know Nick?
Ali: Yeah, we hung out in Austin a few months ago. Great guy.
Sam: He’s a character. You think you’re hanging out with him and you’re like, “Is this a bit?” It’s not. For example, my wife and I got lunch with him one day and he goes, “All right, I have a list of topics. First I want to talk about my dating life. At 11:24 we’re switching to what Sarah’s doing at work. At 11:44, Sam, I want an update on this thing.” That’s just his real life. It’s like exhausting at first, and then you realize it’s pretty wonderful.
For his 41st birthday, he wanted to host a conference. He convinced Cloudflare — a stock he owns and loves — to let him use their space. He had about 40 people come, and we basically went into groups of eight to discuss topics. Could be parenting, investing, whatever. There was a bunch of YouTubers there — Paddy Galloway, who’s a really fascinating guy, and this other guy named Josh Weissman. Have you guys heard of him?
Ali: The chef! He’s an incredible YouTuber. Like 11 million subscribers.
Sam: He was in the investing group with me. It was one of the best events I’ve ever been to. First of all — best 41st birthday conference I’ve ever attended. And Nick owns a bunch of Cloudflare stock, so he convinced a VP of Cloudflare to come down. The VP had no idea what he was walking into. Nick told us beforehand: “When he gets here, I need you to start cheering and telling him how much you love Cloudflare.” So this VP just walks in, thinking he’s meeting Nick, and we’re like, “Is that the VP of engineering from Cloudflare?! Tell us your mission!” The guy goes, “Cloudflare’s mission is to make sure the internet doesn’t go down,” and we’re all screaming. He never told the guy it was a joke. To this day that VP probably thinks we were all Cloudflare superfans.
YouTubers Who Don’t Run a Business [00:26:00]
Sam: About half the YouTubers there were making astronomical money — I’d guess a 26 or 27-year-old making maybe $10 million a year. A lot of them didn’t run their business like a business. They ran it like a hobby. And the biggest problem they were discussing was keeping a lot of their cash just sitting in a checking account instead of even a high-yield savings account, which blew my mind. But it seemed like they didn’t treat it like a real business. You seem like you run yours like a real business — you’ve hired 15 or 20 people. Have you seen this with a lot of YouTubers?
Ali: I see it quite a lot. This is the biggest thing I talk about when I hang out with other YouTubers. What I find is that a lot of YouTubers are creatives at heart, not business people at heart — which is why they started YouTube in the first place. They have this reliance on AdSense and brand deals. 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, their brand deal revenue goes down. And especially entertainment YouTubers find it really hard to monetize off-platform because you can’t just sell a course if you’re an entertainment channel. 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 know them, 10 million subscribers. They tried to release a course about doing YouTube and the audience hated them for it. We released our course on the same topic on basically the same day, charged five times as much, and our audience loved us for it. There’s this weird thing where entertainment YouTubers in particular are reliant on brand deals, and that’s a very stressful existence.
Sam: There was a guy at that event who had a big audience and said something that stuck with me. We were talking about the whole getting-canceled thing — taking a stand on something, particularly with Israel and Palestine going on. And this one guy said, “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.” He seemed really stressed about it. He was like, “They’re going to come after me eventually.” Pretty stressful way to live.
Ali: Yeah. I know one of my big things is about treating the creator thing more like a business. Almost no one I speak to actually does. If you learn even the basics — what is an SOP, reading The E-Myth and Traction and things like that — you suddenly realize, “Oh, I can apply all of these principles of business, OKRs and KPIs, to my YouTube channel.” You can use a CRM, you can drive sales to a product. You get this whole new skill set that serves you for the rest of your life.
Ali’s Revenue Numbers Year by Year [00:31:00]
Sam: Let’s pull up your revenue. You’re very open about how much money you make, and you show it year by year. In 2017 you did $227, which was your AdSense revenue when you got started. Then $24,000, then $130,000. I want to point out — you’re three years in making less than a traditional full-on doctor, and you were basically in the UK version of residency. Then in 2020 you jump from $130,000 up to $1.2 million. What happened there?
Ali: That was when we had a whole year of classes on Skillshare, which probably made $400K. And we released my YouTube course — Part-Time YouTuber Academy — which is not at all what I’m known for. I should have released a productivity course, but people kept asking me about YouTube, so I made that.
It was the pandemic. Live cohort courses were all the rage with Building a Second Brain and right 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 a lot of money for a live cohort course. It 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’s still the cash cow that funds the entire business. More than half our revenue comes from this one course. It’s now evergreen and we’ve got a service-based offering on the back of it. Just randomly — this idea in a coffee shop of “let me make a course about how to do YouTube” has completely transformed the business.
Sam: Then $4 million in 2021, $4.6 million I think in 2022. And your profit margins were very good. When you made $1.2 million in revenue, your profit was $950K — roughly 80%. And you’ve done about $2 to $2.5 million in profit the last couple of years.
I’m curious: why did your course hit when so many courses fail?
Ali: I think we got really lucky with the timing in the pandemic. The thing I would do differently is spend a lot more time crafting the offer. At the time $100M Offers hadn’t come out. I didn’t even know what an offer was. I’d been on Russell Brunson and Neil Patel’s email list since I was 13 but always thought they were a bit scammy. I was like, “What could they possibly teach me? It’s all just clickfunnels stuff.”
When the course first launched, we got lucky because it happened to hit at the right time. But when the course made real money was the final cohort — after I’d read $100M Offers, DotCom Secrets, Copywriting Secrets. We revamped the entire landing page and the entire offer purely based on the advice from Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi, just literally following the step-by-step method. That was when a single launch of the course did $2 million in a week.
Sam: That’s hilarious — I went through the exact same thing where I’m like, “Russell Brunson, Neil Patel, scam.” And then I start reading their stuff and I’m like, “No, this is really helpful.”
Ali: 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.”
The Offer vs. The Fulfillment [00:37:00]
Sam: What was the before-and-after in how you thought about selling?
Ali: Before, when I was selling a course, I was like, “I’m making a course and then selling the course.” Very unsophisticated. I didn’t have any formula for writing a landing page — I was just making stuff up as I went along.
Two years later, after reading $100M Offers and DotCom Secrets and exploring marketing a bit more, I realized: people have been selling courses online for 20-plus 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 people are buying is the offer. The offer needs to be a grand-slam offer to the point where people feel like a dumbass for saying no. Then you can worry about fulfillment later. Now when we make a course, we focus on the offer first. Until the offer is amazing and the landing page is amazing, we’re not even going to bother creating the course. What’s the point?
Sam: My issue with those books — and I think they’re awesome — is that Alex Hormozi was saying something like, “We’ll prove that you can spend $40K with us and make $150K in additional revenue. And if you don’t, you get your money back.” That’s irresistible. But figuring out how to actually deliver on that is challenging.
Ali: One of the big insights from Hormozi’s book was: what’s the dream outcome? What is the actual thing you’re selling? I didn’t really have a sense of that when we first launched the course. With YouTuber Academy, the thing we’re selling is time. We’re saying, “We will save you time.” We’re not saying we’re going to make you money — that’s a promise we can’t fulfill because very few YouTube channels succeed. But we can absolutely save you time. As soon as we changed all of our messaging to “we just save you time,” everything clicked. Saving time is a very easy promise to fulfill, and we massively overdeliver on it. We also have a 30-day money-back guarantee. If someone doesn’t like it, we just give them their money back.
North Star and Business Ambition [00:43:00]
Sam: You’re living nomadically now, you said you’re going to do $5-point-something million in revenue. Do you have a North Star — like, where can the business get to? Are you one of these guys who wants to get to a billion-dollar business?
Ali: I actually don’t. I’d love 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 I was a nice dude and my stuff helped them in some way. My whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize, and teach forever.
I’m super inspired by people like Tony Robbins — he’s been doing this stuff for 47 years and millions of people say his stuff changed their life. Tim Ferriss has been doing this for nearly 20 years. I would say Tim Ferriss changed my life. That’s pretty cool. So the North Star is: how do I just keep playing the infinite game? The only objective that makes sense is to be able to continue playing. So I don’t have Revenue goals, I don’t have profit goals beyond “let’s make at least as much as last year.”
We are building a SaaS product on the side that I’m a co-founder in. I subscribe to Trends just to see if there’s anything interesting I can come up with. But honestly for me, the main thing is how do I just keep making content, writing books, making videos, doing podcasts?
Please do challenge me on that, because I don’t know if I’m bullshitting myself.
Shaan: Well, I think you’re definitely telling yourself a story. But we all do. That one sounds like it serves you pretty well, so keep it. What I think would be more true is: you love teaching, and if someone offered you an easy way to get to $10 million, you wouldn’t say no. But the funeral thing — that part smells like something we borrow from others rather than what’s actually true in our core.
What you’ve really said is you love the learning part. You like the teaching part. You may not actually like the format you teach today — you admitted you enjoyed maybe 20 of the 700 videos you made. But you really enjoyed the research and learning. My therapy prescription for you: if your learning is a 10 out of 10 today, find a way to turn the teaching into a 10 out of 10 and you’ve won. Then you’re literally just doing what you truly enjoy, and you can do that forever in the infinite game.
Sam: I also think, Ali, my BS detector was going off when you were telling me your goals — because you can have multiple goals. I believe what you’re saying about how you want to be remembered. But it sounds crude to say, “I’d like to hit $10 million in revenue by year eight.” Maybe you didn’t say it because it sounds crude, but it’s a perfectly wonderful goal. It’s like training for a 5K — you’re not going to be devastated if you don’t hit the time, but it’s just a really fun goal to chase. I think it’s exciting. When it’s like, “Man, this new SaaS thing I’m working on — maybe one day this could make this much in revenue” — that’s exciting. It’s okay to admit that.
Ali: I don’t know. The thing that excites me — and this could just be a story — is that focus on the process, focus on things that are in my control, has led to the score taking care of itself.
The $1,000 MacBook Loss and the Origin Story [00:50:00]
Sam: You had this story about the first business you ever launched. You were 18 years old and it didn’t go well. Tell the story of this thousand-dollar business.
Ali: From age 16 to 18 I was doing private tutoring, teaching people how to do well in maths and science exams, and I saved up about $1,000. I was like, “I’m rich now. I can buy my first Apple product.” I went out to find a MacBook Air and bought one from some dude on Craigslist. It turned out he sold me a model that didn’t work. I was a dumbass — I didn’t realize he was selling me a dead MacBook. So this $1,000 I’d spent years of my life working for, at like $10 an hour doing tutoring, just disappeared.
I was like, “I need to find a way to recoup these losses. I need to build a business.” I still have the Evernote file from 2012 when I was 18. I asked myself: what am I good at? I’m good at teaching, I’m good at med school entrance exams, I know how to make websites. Let me build a business that combines all those things.
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 first business actually succeeded. It did £10K in year one, £100K in year two, £150K in year three. I actually sold that business a few years ago to go full-time on YouTube. My YouTube channel originally started as content marketing for that original business — teaching courses on how to get into med school. The channel and everything around it has probably done over £10 million in revenue total. My $1,000 loss, which felt life-changing at the time, transformed into a $10 million upside.
Sam: Have you ever had a big L that turned into a W? My whole thing was growing up where my parents controlled money. They’d say, “If you’re living under my roof you’re going to do this.” There were many times at a very young age where I was like, “All right, money equals power then.” Everything I’ve done since has basically been because my parents said no a handful of times and I said, “All right, I’m going to be completely free.” Money is one way to achieve that freedom.
Shaan: When I sold Milk Road, I asked the guys — they’d been doing different businesses for so long, pretty interesting track record, small wins, big wins. I was like, “What’s the driver? Once you’ve banked a hundred million and you’re still taking risk and starting businesses, you’re not doing it for the money.” And one of them said, matter-of-factly — this wasn’t on the podcast, this wasn’t to look cool, just hanging out — “This girl rejected me when I was 14 years old and I felt like shit. I was like, I don’t want to be rejected again. How do I make myself awesome?” He didn’t know the answer, but he immediately started going into overdrive. The other guy had the same story — he was the odd man out when his friends got a house that only had five rooms for six people. He said, “I went into a hole and I’m going to come out a different guy.”
I had a few things like this. I went to this accelerator called MassChallenge, and they had these speakers come in. Ben from Ben & Jerry’s was there. He told the whole starting story — how they were both the fat kids in PE class who would walk the mile at the back. How one of them tried to get into med school and failed the entrance exam five or six times. So they took a $5 ice cream making course instead. They open a shop in Vermont in the freezing cold winter and are about to go out of business in month three because nobody wants ice cream in a blizzard. So they came up with this promotion — a long acronym that meant one cent off per degree Celsius below freezing. It was funny, people came, it took them through the winter.
Eventually they start making pints, getting into corner stores. The business is working. Then one day they stop getting orders from a whole area and find out Häagen-Dazs — which is owned by Pillsbury — sent letters to stores saying, “Stop selling Ben & Jerry’s or we’ll pull all Pillsbury products from your shelves.” The store owner is like, “Guys, I need my crescent rolls. I’m so sorry.”
The guys are like, “Screw this.” But they had this value: turn the disadvantage into an advantage. So they created this campaign called “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” They printed posters — a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with giant Pillsbury Doughboy hands about to strangle it. On every pint they sold, they put a message: “We’re under attack. Call this number to hear what’s going on. If you think this is screwed up, buy some pints just to show Pillsbury you won’t be bullied.” They recorded a three-minute answering machine message telling the story. Eventually the New Yorker took the story. Jerry’s standing outside Pillsbury headquarters by himself picketing like a protester, and they run the picture. Pillsbury had to completely back off because it looked terrible, and a whole bunch of people who’d never heard of Ben & Jerry’s found out about it because the story was way more interesting than just “here’s a cool ice cream brand from Vermont.”
I remember hearing that and thinking: everything that would happen in our first business — every rejection, every cease-and-desist — we’d be like, “This is our Pillsbury moment. What’s the Doughboy afraid of? How do we flip this?” Very quickly, anything bad got us hyped because it was like this could be our story someday. That just became embedded in my mind.
Ali: Welcome to my life — I asked Shaan a question, he tells me this amazing story where I’m totally enthralled, and I’m like, I don’t even know what to say.
Sam: I don’t even remember what I asked. But keep going.
Title Strategy and Viral Replication [00:61:00]
Ali: Let me learn from you guys. About titles — I think one of the reasons your course does so well is that it’s not called “How to Be Famous on YouTube.” It’s called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. “Part-time” just appeals to a whole different segment of people. I think about these choices a lot. When you see the title of something, you don’t see the 50 other options that were considered. If I go to your YouTube channel — some of your titles are just really good. “How I Type Really Fast — 156 Words Per Minute.” “How I Ranked First at Cambridge University.” “My Evidence-Based Skincare Routine.” Even though I said you weren’t the most beautiful guy, you’ve got good skin, but saying “my evidence-based skincare routine” is so different from just “my skincare routine.” What’s your method for getting good at titles?
Ali: We think a lot about titles. What we’ve found is that the only thing that allows us to predict the performance of a video is the title. It’s not even the thumbnail — on an educational channel, my thumbnails look broadly similar. It’s very rarely the thumbnail. It just tends to be the title. If the title is good, by default the content is going to be at least reasonable and useful. A video will fly or flop based on the title.
Sam: How do you know the title will be good, though? By the way, that’s the same principle as separating the offer from the delivery.
Ali: Exactly. Same thing for the book — it took about 100 iterations to land on “Feel-Good Productivity.” I still have my Apple Notes folder with hundreds of title options. The title actually came to me in the shower, two years into writing the book. One thing I would do differently next time: have the title nailed before trying to write the book, because 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 the title, to make sure everything matched the promise.
When it comes to YouTube videos, we do what we cutely call “viral replication.” The way to grow a YouTube channel is to get a viral video, and the easiest way to get a viral video is to copy the title of another video that’s already gone viral. We look around YouTube — sometimes within a niche, sometimes outside — and look at the view-to-subscriber ratio of a particular video. Back in the day I saw some guy who made a video called “How I Use My iPad as an Engineering Student.” The video had 2 million views and the dude had 20,000 subscribers. I thought: “How I Use My iPad as a Medical Student sounds cool.” I made that video and it was the first one on the channel to go viral — 6 million views.
Sam: Are you using software to help with this, or just browsing?
Ali: Mostly browsing, but we use VidIQ, the Chrome extension, which shows us the subscriber count of a channel right next to their name. We’ve also started doing more sophisticated A/B testing with thumbnail test.com, which tests the hell out of our back catalog. That generates a bunch of free views every day because we can refresh an old video that’s three years old by just giving it a new title or thumbnail.
We often have 20 titles to choose from. If we’re really not sure, we’ll test it on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube community posts — “which of these four titles would you be more likely to click?” — and often there’s a clear winner. We make sure we don’t even think about writing the video until we’ve nailed a title, because the framing of the title and thumbnail radically informs how you do the video.
Voicepal and the Creator-Product Co-Founder Model [00:68:00]
Sam: What’s the software thing you’re building? I bet you’ve seen a lot of interesting creators launch cool businesses. Why this one, and what is it?
Ali: We’re actually launching this week. It’s called Voicepal. It’s like voice notes meets AI transcription meets converting your voice note into a summary, which you can then turn into a tweet thread, a LinkedIn post, a journal entry, whatever you want. It’s at voice.me, though whenever people are listening to this it will have launched already.
The idea I’ve had floating in the back of my mind — partly thanks to listening to your guys’ pod for a few years — is that creators have a massive distribution advantage but don’t know how to make products. Product people know how to make products but really struggle with distribution. So in theory, if you can pair a creator with a product that fits their audience, you’re winning. The product guy makes a product, the creator has the distribution.
I partnered up with a friend who’s a third-time founder — he’s exited two companies. We’re launching this week for our thousand beta testers. We’re thinking $10 a month initially. We already have 20 paying users from an alpha friends-and-family test where about 20 of the 30 people converted to paid when Pablo, the co-founder, reached out offering early access. A bunch of people are using it for journalists, lawyers recording depositions, and a bunch are using it for journaling.
Shaan: I think that’s so smart — you’re not going to get to where you want to go through content revenue itself.
Sam: Have you guys seen Opal? It’s opal.so. It’s screen time software where somehow they’ve made it so I can’t bypass the screen time restriction. Between 8 or 9 AM and 6 PM, I cannot go on social media. It’s like $120, they’ve got a crazy amount of reviews. That’s the kind of thing I could see you launching. I think what’s going to happen is that these focus and screen time apps are going to do pretty well. If I’m you, I’d just look at what are the best productivity apps, who’s spending the most on advertising, and how do I acquire a small part of those companies or something similar. My margin will be their advertising budget.
Ali: That is exactly the way we’re thinking about it. A barbell strategy. There are a couple of companies I’ve invested in to get a small equity stake — Rise is one of them, a focused time-tracking thing I’ve been using for two years. We invested sponsorship dollars into the company — however much four sponsorships were worth. It’s great because I use it every day, I love it, it’s easy to recommend, and when I say I’ve invested in it, people are like, “He liked it so much he actually invested.”
On the other side we’re trying to do the co-founding software approach for a 20 or 30% equity stake. I’m particularly bullish on building our own stuff because that’s where I get to mold the direction of the product in a way that personally suits me. And one of the cool things is finding apps where I can share a screenshot of the thing that promotes the app without it looking like a promotion. Like whenever I do a workout I use the app Strong and I just screenshot it and post it on my Instagram story. I always get dozens of comments saying “what app is that?” And it’s an app I don’t own. But if I did own a workout tracker and was just posting screenshots of my workouts — no one would think I’m plugging a product, they’d just think I’m sharing my workouts.
Sam: There was a time Shaan brought up some company on the pod that does taxes. He had no stake, just had met the guy and thought it was cool. I ended up using their product. He hollered at them two weeks later and was like, “Did you see a bump?” And the guy was raving. Their calendar was booked out four months. It was a substantial number.
Shaan: We both had a light bulb moment. There’s something there.
Sam: Of course you have to pick and choose which ones you do. You probably should only do one at a time for a certain period. But yeah, same moment for us.
Hey Friends Studio and the Twitter vs. YouTube Business Question [00:77:00]
Ali: We recently launched a studio called Hey Friends — with Hunter and Sahil.
Sam: Oh yeah!
Ali: One tweet from me drove $2 million MRR worth of leads that they’re still going through sales calls for. Like hundreds of people that signed up for a $14,000-a-month service. They were like, “We can only onboard one or two people a month because we need to hire editors and scriptwriters.” Just one tweet, and Twitter isn’t even my main platform. But I guess it’s where people like you guys are more likely to see something of mine than watch a video.
Shaan: We did this thing maybe a year ago where we asked: okay, so we understand that there are billion-dollar businesses built on Instagram. The Kardashians and a handful of other people. It’s very plausible that it’s happened or is happening with YouTube — Mr. Beast and others who’ve built businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It hasn’t happened yet with Twitter, right? Our prediction was: this is going to happen more. And the reason is — A, there’s a business audience on Twitter more than on other platforms, so you can sell higher-priced things, and B, the conversion rate is quite high. I don’t know what the click-through rate is on your videos, but it’s probably less than 1%. On Twitter, it’s not crazy to have 5% click-through sometimes.
Sam: Who’s even Twitter famous, though? Like, I can go on YouTube and Instagram and I know who the big people are. I know Charlie D’Amelio was TikTok famous. I know people who were Instagram famous. On YouTube there’s Mr. Beast, tons of other people. I don’t even know who that would be on Twitter. Who the hell is natively Twitter famous?
Ali: I don’t think there is anyone.
Sam: That’s insane to me. Twitter is like 20 years old. It’s a 300-million-user product. It’s not getting bigger. Is there a single person with more than 10 million followers who’s not already famous from somewhere else — take out Trump and Elon?
Shaan: Maybe a couple.
Sam: There’s maybe some like crazy accounts, but there’s no fjerry-equivalent, no one who just natively blew up on Twitter the way people blew up on YouTube or TikTok.
Shaan: I think it also really depends on the audience. Like, normal people have never heard of Sahil Bloom. The only people who have are in our sort of business world.
Sam: That’s what I’m saying — who’s mass market on Twitter? On Instagram it was beautiful people. On YouTube it was the funny vlogger types. On Twitch it was the best Fortnite players in the world. On Twitter — is it Elon? Is he the only guy who’s famous on Twitter? They were famous elsewhere first, which is why they’re big on Twitter. Is there anybody who’s just natively so good at tweeting that they got huge?
Shaan: My point is it’s just small. How many users does Twitter have — 300, 400 million? A fraction of the other platforms. And it’s text-based, so it’s less visual, less exciting. You see Ali’s video with 6 million views and you’re like, oh, lots of people know this person. I see a tweet come through my feed and I don’t necessarily know that other people are consuming it. It’s more one-to-one versus one-to-many.
Sam: We’re all friends with the most famous guy on Twitter — Sahil Bloom. And what did you say — a dwarf amongst midgets?
Shaan: Basically. And the only reason he’s famous is because he’s Indian so he has a billion potential fans, he’s ripped so he attracts all the dudes, and he talks about productivity so he’s got this whole angle. He’s a triple threat. You should see him with Ali’s accent — if he had a London accent, it’d be over. He’d have everything.
Wrapping Up and Feel-Good Productivity [00:85:00]
Sam: Ali, thanks for doing this, man. The name of the book — what is it?
Ali: Feel-Good Productivity. Coming out December 26th. It’s about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that’s enjoyable, meaningful, and sustainable.
Sam: Did you not know that most gifts are bought literally three days before Christmas?
Ali: Good point. The procrastinator’s dream launch date.
Shaan: There was actual strategy behind the date — the publishers were like, “If we go before Christmas, we’re competing with cookbooks and celebrity memoirs, which are often gifted over Christmas. But if we go just after Christmas, people are on the New Year, New Me thing.” I’m not sure how much of that was astrology versus actual data, but they seemed pretty switched on.
Sam: And your cover — it looks like an Airtable spreadsheet.
Ali: Okay, here’s the thing. The reason Atomic Habits was so successful is because it was picked up by women in their 30s in the Midwest — by far the biggest demographic of people who buy self-help books. The publisher was like, “Look, productivity is too bro-y. We need a cover that’s more gender neutral, more fresh and inviting.” And yeah, productivity as a word sounds kind of dry.
Sam: Good point.
Ali: But that’s why the cover is all bright and colorful. And it’s also my vibe — I like bright and colorful.
Sam: Well, the landing page is beautiful. It looks good, man. You’re going to kill it. Congratulations on all this. Thanks for giving us shout-outs over the years. We’ll share the book when it comes out. We appreciate you coming on. That’s the pod.