right so as you guys know i'm a huge fan
of multiple streams of income
especially in this last year a lot of
people have noticed that if you're
reliant on
your job as your only source of income
and you lose that job for whatever
reason a global pandemic or anything
else then that's quite an unsafe and
unsatisfying position to be in overall
and so the idea of building multiple
income streams is that if you lose any
of them then you've still got
other ways of adding money to your life
and we need money to survive and even if
you've got a job that's pretty safe like
being a doctor for example and having
multiple streams of income it gives you
the freedom and flexibility
to do things like go part-time if that's
what you want to do but chances are you
already knew that and you might have
seen mine and other people's videos
around our current streams of passive
income the problem with those is that
when someone's quite ahead of you in the
journey it can be very hard to relate to
it and so
in this video i want to take you back to
my school and university years where i
first started building up my streams of
income from xero and i'm going to show
you the nine different streams of income
i had by the age of 23 in three
different categories let's get into it
now there's nothing wrong with trading
time for money it's how
a lot of jobs work you put in the hours
and you get paid as a result of it and
when i was growing up i had four
different ways that i was trading my own
time for money i was providing services
and getting paid for them the first one
i started to do around the age of 13 and
that was freelance web development
so i learned how to code by following
free tutorials on the internet
at the time there was a website called
w3schools nowadays there are dozens and
hundreds of
other sources better sources to learn
how to code for free on the internet but
then once i was reasonably okay at
coding within a few months of dabbling
with my own personal projects
i started doing freelance web
development on a website called
getacoder.com these days fiverr and
upwork and people per hour
are the sort of freelance marketplaces
where if you're good at something
you can advertise your services and then
people will hire you to do the thing and
so while i was in school between the
ages of 13 and 17
i did a handful of these coding projects
some of them were quite long and took
absolutely ages and
you know my hourly rate was so was
probably really really really low but i
think in that period i made about a
thousand dollars in total
which at the time was quite a lot of
money for me because i was a kid i
didn't have any other streams of income
so i was like oh my god i'm making money
by designing websites with people on the
internet then we move on to stream
number two of income and that was when i
was 14 i got a job as
a part-time tutor at this math and
english study center called kumon
i was pretty good at maths not gonna lie
hashtag flex and so i asked the
instructor her name was alison i was
like hey alison i'm 14 now so i'm
legally allowed to work part-time
can i get a job as like a you know a
helper at the study center
and so i got a job where my salary was
initially four pounds per hour and then
after two years i got a pair raised to
five pounds an hour and then
when i was like 18 i got a pay raise to
six pounds an hour so
every week for between two and four
hours i'd be doing this thing
and again that was a lot of money for me
because i'd be getting like between
20 and 30 pounds a week and i was like
oh my god i'm rich i'm making so much
money this is so good and that was my
first real experience of like actually
having a job where i had to turn up and
actually had to have
proper hours and it was one of those
things like it was quite fun
when stuff was going on like i really
enjoyed teaching people when they came
to me for maths help
but i didn't enjoy marking work and
doing the grunt work that came with a
job
and at the time i kind of realized that
hmm this is the problem with the job
right like
some bits of it are going to be fun but
the other bits of it are going to be
boring and often it was just the banter
i had with the other tutors who were
there that made the job much more fun
but that was stream number two of income
and so with these two examples like
there's nothing particularly fancy about
these streams of income
i had a skill which i learned on the
internet or i just had
innately thanks to schooling and stuff
ie coding and maths
and i sought out jobs where people were
literally paying me to do that service
for them this is just how the world of
jobs works
and i get so many messages from people
being like hey how do i build passive
income
it's like you know it's quite hard to
build streams of income that are
completely passive and if you don't
currently have streams of income
starting out with active income are you
trading your time for money is a very
reasonable starting point
because it makes you build up the skills
and it helps you appreciate what it's
actually like to
work for a paycheck um outside of your
kind of standard job and that brings us
on to stream number three which was
close up magic so
when i was 17 i decided i wanted to be a
magician for various reasons
and then when i got to university in my
first three or four years i was
performing close-up magic
and getting paid for it to do it at
balls and parties and dinners and stuff
and that was kind of cool because i was
being paid
sometimes between 50 and 150 pounds per
hour
to like go around tables and go around
people at a ball
and like be like hey guys do you want to
see a magic trick and again in the grand
scheme of things this wasn't a lot of
money but it was a decent amount of
pocket money back in the day where when
it would get to the ball season and be
like oh i've got a few hundred pounds in
the bank that i didn't have before this
and again it's a sort of thing that
literally anyone can learn like there
was nothing special about me i just
found free tutorials on youtube and you
know random pdfs on the internet
i learned how to do like a few tricks
and if you're a professional magician
you actually don't need to
learn that many tricks all you need is
like nine things like three sets of
three and you just walk around doing
them and you can get paid for it and
there were a lot of people i knew
at university who were also vaguely into
magic and knew the same tricks as i did
they just didn't take that extra step
to start putting themselves out there
and start trying to make money from the
craft
and this is just a general attitude i
have towards life that if you enjoy
something for me at least if i enjoy
something
then i will often try and find a way to
make money from it
because when you find a way to monetize
your hobbies then
it's kind of cool because you're doing
the hobby which is fun and then you're
making money from it which is also fun
but you're doing the hobby in a way that
adds market value
i.e that's useful to other people like
with magicians a bit a big problem that
magicians have is that like if you're
learning magic it's very easy to just
sit in front of your camera or your
webcam and just do some card tricks and
learn these moves and stuff
but it's really when you go out into the
real world and actually affect people
that you can start making money from the
thing so i think becoming a sort of
semi-professional
sort of paid amateur close-up magician
really taught me the idea that if you
want to make money you do have to add
value to other people no one actually
cares about my magic what they cared
about was the experience i was giving
them
and i've taken that and applied it to
all the other streams of income as well
and there's a great book i'm reading at
the moment called the millionaire fast
lane where he says uh to make millions
you have to impact millions scott he
calls it the law of affection
and i think that's like a pretty nice
way of doing it to make money you just
have to impact people
whether it's doing trivial card tricks
or doing something a little bit more
meaningful than that no offense to any
magicians out there chapter two
productized services now the problem
with trading time for money is that it's
not particularly scalable and if you're
working on an hourly basis
you're valuing your time on an hourly
basis and
if you can get into the point where
you're productizing your services i.e
you're doing a service but
instead of charging per hour you're
packaging it up and turning it into a
little package that you can then sell to
people
then it becomes a lot easier to make
more money from basically doing the same
stuff and there's an amazing book by my
friend robin waite called
take your shot which is literally all
about this thing of like how to go from
being someone who earns per hour
to becoming the sort of person who earns
large amounts of money for productized
services and there were three main ways
that i did this when i was at university
so between the ages of about 19
and 23 the first one was app design i
had a bit of a web design portfolio at
this point
and i was you know often meeting people
who were creating
medical technology startups and they
would see that my design skills were
legit because i was going to hackathons
and like showing my services and that
kind of stuff
and they'd hire me to do kind of app
design for them
and some of these people i worked for
hourly on an hourly rate but i tried my
best to turn it into a package where
instead of me saying that hey you know
i'll do this for a certain number of
hours and you'll pay me this amount per
hour instead i was saying hey
i will design the first draft of your
app and i will give you all the files
and you can have two revisions and i
will charge you
800 pounds for that and i was quite
surprised when people said yes to that
because that wasn't going to take me
very long
but i could charge a premium for that
equally if someone said they wanted a
website built i would be like
i'd give them a quote for the whole
website design package rather than
a hey this is actually only going to
take me about half an hour to set up a
wordpress theme therefore i'm going to
charge you from half an hour of my time
instead i was thinking about like the
value that i'm giving to them
packaging it up and charging for the
whole package rather than per hour so
that was number four stream number five
that again used this concept of
productive services
was a course that i set up when i was 19
years old called the bmat
crash course now the bmat is an exam
that some medical schools in the uk
require if you want to apply to medical
school and before i packaged it up as
the bmac crash course i was helping
people with bmat like tutoring
one-on-one for like 20 pounds an hour
but then in the summer of my first year
of med school i had the idea that hey
why don't i turn this into a product why
don't i turn it into a productized
service
and i packaged up everything i knew
about how to teach the bmat into a one
day course which we called the bmap
crash course and i think in our first
year we were charging 69 pounds for the
whole day course which was like really
cheap as an hourly rate but it meant
that i could get 30 people in a
classroom
because they were signing up for this
product they were signing up for this
course and it was a thing
rather than me just being a private
tutor trading my time for money and the
nice thing about productive services is
that they do let you scale
often if you're charging per hour you
can't have 30 people in a class but if
you're charging for a course
you can suddenly have 30 people in a
class and so we were making like
2 000 pounds for a day of work for
teaching people and the teaching was
quite fun and we got really good reviews
and
we're making really good money and so
the bmac crash course became this thing
that me and my friends would run every
year and it was quite nice because it
ended up being a huge like
injection of funds into my life when i
was at university and then
stream number six of income again based
on productive services is a company
called six med that i founded while i
was at university that's still going to
this day
and six med was basically a combination
of the bmac crash course the uk
crash course and our interview crash
course along with like help for personal
statements and basically
everything we could do to help people
get into med school but again we were
never charging by the hour we were never
saying hey
we're going to charge you x amount per
hour to do private tutoring instead it
was all based on creating products these
different courses
that multiple people could sign up for
and that let us do this productized
service thing at scale and so while i
was at university every year i was
making around about
forty thousand pounds which is about
fifty thousand dollars which is more
than i was making when i'm in my first
two years of actually being a doctor and
i was making that money through med
school
on the side while teaching these courses
on weekends
and it was pretty sick and it was all
based around the principle of
productized services chapter number
three
digital products so at this point i'm
like 21 years old i've got these
productized services that are making
decent amounts of money
but the problem with all this kind of
stuff as i recognize and you know at
this point i had these like five streams
of income
the problem was that a lot of it was
tied to my time
and it was a lot of effort like i was
going through med school at cambridge
university it's supposed to be quite
hard it was it was quite hard in
fairness
and on the weekends i'd be basically
staying up being like oh my god
our course manuals you know we had these
physical books that we would get
delivered to the different venues all
around the country
have they been delivered on time have
jake and catherine made it to manchester
safely and have they
checked into their hotels so they can
check book things the next day has all
of our conference room burking's gone
and
there was a lot of logistical headache
around running these physical courses
and so while i was doing that i knew
that the next step up would be digital
products because the great thing about
digital products is that you make it
once and then you can sell it a zillion
times
and it doesn't take any more effort to
sell a million copies of a digital
product as it does to sell one copy of a
digital product and so automatically you
have this idea of scale built into it
and so stream number seven of income was
when i decided that hey hang on
we had more students than we could
handle wanting to sign up for our
courses and we also had students from
all around the world like there were
some people in australia and singapore
who knew people in the uk who'd gone to
our courses who said they were very good
and they were like can we have the
access to your course materials
and so i thought hang on this is
interesting and so what i did was that i
turned our course manual that i wrote
a few years ago for the course itself i
just turned it into an ebook
i just sold it on the website for like i
think 29 pounds or something like that
and people would buy it and i'd send
them the pdf and that was that and that
was a way of like
selling a digital product that didn't
take any effort other than me manually
emailing it to them
and i was just making money and it
really felt like free money at this
point
the courses never felt like free money
because it was a lot of work to run them
but selling digital products on the
internet to people around the world
who'd never met me
that really was like free money and then
we have the culmination of digital
products which was
stream number eight and nine and that
was when i was 21 my brother and i
decided that we needed to make an
online question bank for medical
applicants for the bmat
and for the ukcat these are two
different medical school entrance exams
and we called them bmat ninja and uk cat
ninja because the dot ninja domain name
i
i i had for a while i was like oh this
is kind of fun and so i coded the
back-end design he coded the front-end
design of these two websites
and the way it was it was like it was a
bank of questions and students could
sign up and they could subscribe to the
question bank for like 29 pounds or
whatever
and then they'd have access to all the
questions and all of the answers and all
that kind of stuff and then as they'd be
doing the questions it would
it would sort of track their progress it
would give them like an experience bar
to fill out and so this was like the
dream digital product this is called in
in the business
sas saas software as a service we were
basically selling
software we were selling access to this
bank of questions and the software
that we had put together from scratch to
create this bank of questions and again
this is the sort of thing that really
felt like free money like it was so much
work putting these question banks
together
like we i think we did it over the
summer of 2015 for the bmat ninja
and it was it was loads of work we were
basically working all day every day for
many months to actually put this
together but hey it was really fun
because coding and stuff is cool and me
and my brother both enjoy it and we were
like hanging out and working together
and we'd be sitting on the dining table
together i'd be doing my back-end stuff
he'd be doing his front and stuff and it
was kind of cute but then when students
started using it every time we'd get a
sale again that felt like free money
because
it doesn't take any more effort on our
pot to sell a zillion copies
or a zillion subscriptions to be manager
compared to selling one or two
subscriptions to be manager
and so that really is the power of
digital products and that was an area in
which it was very difficult for other
people to compete and there's a
principle of
building businesses like this one which
is that you kind of want the cost of
entry
for someone else to be quite high like
it's very easy for a random first year
medical student to think hey let me run
a course
it's not that hard anyone can do it it's
very difficult for a random medical
student to think you know what let me
create
a coded question bank completely from
scratch that takes a lot of work it
takes a lot of knowledge it takes a lot
of expertise
and my brother and i taught ourselves
this through like years while we were in
school and so we had this unfair
advantage of knowing how to code
while i was a medical student as well so
i knew what medical students wanted and
so by the time i was 23
these different streams of income i
think were making me in the region of 40
to 50 000 pounds a year which was really
really solid given that i was still a
medical student at the time if you want
to learn more about the streams of
income approach there are three books
that i'd recommend number one the
four-hour work week number two the
millionaire fast lane and number three
take your shot
by robin way or if you're looking for
something else to watch on youtube you
might like to check out this video here
which is my top 10 tips for
entrepreneurs the stuff i wished i'd
known when i started out on this
entrepreneurship journey and you can
click here to check out part two of this
video where i talk about my next nine
streams of income that i built by the
age of 26. so thank you so much for
watching do hit the subscribe button if
you aren't already and i'll see you in
the next video bye