- So the other day,
I had a bunch of stuff stolen from my car,
including my Mac book, iPad, cameras, microphones,
and a bunch of other things.
And it got me thinking that if I genuinely lost everything
like my YouTube channel and my team
and all of the dollar in the business bank account
and all of the gear,
and potentially even all the skills that I have,
how would I get started rebuilding things
from the ground up?
Would I start a YouTube channel or a blog or a business,
or even a TikTok account,
by the way, please follow me on TikTok.
And so this video is gonna be my step-by-step guide
to how I would actually build wealth and passive income
and an audience, all that fun stuff from the ground up
if I had to start from scratch.
Let's start by talking about three foundational principles
of building this sort of stuff from scratch
and then we'll have the five,
I think steps that build on top of that.
Principle number one is to build in public
in a way that helps build an audience.
Now, having an audience,
having an audience of people who know, like and trust you,
whether it's people on YouTube or TikTok or Twitter
or your email list,
that's like a generally useful thing
because when you have these people who know, like,
and trust you, it means you can then monetize that audience
further down the line if you really want to.
But it also means that you have like more friends
and a network and connections that's just generally nice
and wholesome and friendly.
And the best way of building an audience
is to provide value to those people.
The problem is that providing value
is a bit like nebulous.
Like what does providing value even mean?
And how do you figure out what kind of value you provide?
And so an easy way to build the right sort of audience
is to like, when you're starting from scratch
and building your thing, to build it in public
i.e to document the journey of building your thing.
And so if I were to start any new business from scratch
or YouTube channel or a blog or a book,
or of any kind of venture,
I would be documenting the process
and like writing down or maybe even making YouTube videos
or blog posts about what it's like to do that,
what resources I'm using,
what interesting things I've learned.
Every time I read a book that helps me with my business,
I would be summarising the key insights
from that book that really helped me
and putting it out for free out there on a blog,
and then sharing the link on Twitter or my Facebook page
or my Instagram page or anything that helps get the word out
that, hey, this is me, I'm building in public
and you can follow along for the journey if you like.
That leads us on to principle number two,
which is to provide value first
and do not expect quick returns.
Let's hear from one of my mentors from afar,
Gary Vaynerchuk on this point.
- I was very focused on levelling up
and I really believe the one great piece of advice,
if you wanna take anything from this talk
is we have to start realising that giving
and doing things in business without expectation of return
from the other individual is probably the greatest leverage
that you could ever deploy in your business life,
though it is extremely rare in today's business environment
and it has absolutely been the bedrock
of what has allowed me to win.
- And so what Gary is saying here basically
is that provide value without the expectation
of anything in return.
And so while building my business, I'd be providing value
as we're gonna talk about in the steps,
but I'd also be building in public, documenting my journey
and all of this would be without the expectation
of anything in return.
I would not be trying to sell anything to my audience.
I wouldn't be trying overly hard to be pushy
and get them to sign up to my mailing list.
I would be creating this value, creating this content
without the expectation of anything in return.
And weirdly by doing that as a side effect,
I'm gonna build up an audience of people
who know, like and trust me alongside.
And principle number three, is that whatever I'm doing,
I wanna target a market that's filled with people
that I actually care about.
So for example, if it was me the market I'd be targeting
is YouTubers, creators, bloggers,
these sort of like creative entrepreneurial type
of people on the internet.
And I'd be trying my best to build a business
around that specific audience.
I wouldn't particularly try
and build a business for new mums
because I have no experience
of what it's like being a new mum,
but I've got friends who are new moms
who are very, very familiar with the audience
who love hanging out with new moms.
And therefore it would make sense
for them to build a business
around that particular audience.
And there's a really nice quote from Steve Jobs,
where he talks about this idea of passion.
- People say you have to have a lot of passion
for what you're doing and it's totally true.
And the reason is because it's so hard
that if you don't, any rational person would give up.
It's really hard
and you have to do it over a sustained period of time.
So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it,
you don't really love it, you're gonna give up.
- And then our late friend, Steve goes on to say
that if you look at anyone who's kind of successful
by society's definitions,
normally they found a way to enjoy
the thing that they're doing and they loved it so much
and that was what allowed them to persevere.
And so coming back to this idea
of building a business from scratch,
one way to increase our odds of enjoying
the thing that we're doing
is to target the right sort of audience,
to build a business for the people
that we already care about
rather than for a completely new audience,
that we have no empathy or enjoyment with.
So those were the three foundational principles,
let's now get into the five
kind of actionableish practical steps
that I would take if I was starting from scratch.
Step one is that I would learn a monetizable skill
that helps the people that I care about.
In my case, the people that I care about
would be creators, YouTubers, bloggers,
those sorts of people, probably YouTubers given that I have
so much familiarity with that space
and I can empathise with the needs of them.
And I enjoy hanging out with YouTubers
and they're just like cool people generally.
And so I'd be trying to learn a skill
that can help YouTubers.
Now, what are the skills that can help YouTubers?
Well the first one is video editing.
Every YouTuber beyond a certain size needs help
with their video editing.
And so if you can provide them a service as a video editor
for their videos, you can make friends with that YouTuber,
make friends with their network.
And that's a way of building a business
around this idea of creators.
Secondly, every YouTuber needs thumbnails.
If you're into graphic design,
you can become a thumbnail artist.
Thirdly, a lot of YouTubers need their stuff on YouTube
converted into blog posts
it's something that I do for my websites,
it's something that my friend Thomas Frank does as well.
A lot of YouTubers know they should be doing this,
but there's no one out there who says to them,
hey, look, I will literally write up all your videos
as a blog post for your website
and this will be really great for your SEO
and that kind of stuff.
Fourthly, a lot of YouTubers want their stuff written up
as Twitter threads so they can grow on Twitter.
Again, no one really provides the service,
so if you can be the person providing that service
to YouTube i.e a skill that is monetizable
then you're adding a lot of value leading with value,
and you're building a business
around this niche of YouTubers
or creators that you personally care about.
And so if it were me and I didn't know how to edit videos,
what I would do is I would get a part-time job
and I'd be saving up about 700 pounds
to get a secondhand MacBook.
And then I would learn how to edit videos
on iMovie by following either my Skillshare class,
which you can access for free in the video description
or by following free YouTube tutorials.
And then over a few by doing this a few hours a day,
I'd get pretty solid at video editing
and then I'd be able to move on to step two.
So step two is that once you figured out
what this market is that you care about,
who are these people that you wanna be friends with?
Step two is to work for them for free, without permission
and while documenting the journey.
And I think it's the for free part here that's crucial
because if I was just starting learning video editing
and I wasn't that good and I didn't have a portfolio
and it didn't have a track record,
I couldn't really approach a YouTuber
and say, hey, I want you to pay me to edit your videos
because like, why would they take a chance on me?
What I would do instead
is I would email a bunch of YouTubers that I like,
you know smaller YouTubers
but also bigger YouTubers just in case,
most of the bigger ones already have editors,
but certainly I'd be emailing smaller YouTubers
somewhere between the 10K to 100K subscriber range.
And I'd be saying to them, hey, you're a YouTuber,
I love your content.
I really like something very specific about your content.
So the email or the Twitter DM
or Instagram DM like speaks to them
because it's like, you've put some thought into this.
It's not just a copied and pasted message.
And I'd be saying to them that look,
I want to edit your next video for you completely for free.
All you have to do is send me a Dropbox
or a Google Drive or a WeTransfer link with the raw files.
And I will create and edit for you in your style
completely for free.
And you can have it and you can use it on your channel
and if you like it then we can talk about maybe working
with me on a paid basis, further down the line.
Now, if you do this with enough people,
there's almost no way that someone
isn't gonna reply to you and be like,
all right, yeah, this sounds like a good idea.
You're offering to do this for free,
here's the Google Drive link to my raw footage
from my latest video, let's see what you can do.
And now you have a project, you're working for free,
and if someone has given you the chance
where you've got the ability to actually edit their video
in as best a way as you can.
Now, video editing does require permission.
You do need to email someone
and ask them to send you their raw files
because most YouTubers don't like publicise their raw files,
but there are things that you can do
completely without permission as well.
One of those things is creating thumbnails.
So you can find a YouTuber
or a bunch of YouTubers channels that you like,
and you can redesign the thumbnails for them
based on what their current style is
and you can email them being like,
hey, here's some thumbnails I designed.
These might be an alternative to these sorts of thumbnails.
I think they would work better than the current thumbnails
you've got because of reasons, A, B and C.
And I've had two people in the past four years,
reach out to me that way by physically redesigning
thumbnails of my stuff
and saying, hey, why don't you try out these new thumbnails.
In both occasions, I was like, oh, okay,
this person has gone through the effort
of already doing the work for me.
And so I just ran A/B tests using TubeBuddy,
which lets you test thumbnails.
In the end it turned out that those two people,
their thumbnails were worse than my ones were anyway,
but the principal was good.
Like I really respect the hustle of them emailing me
with the work already done.
So it was very easy for me to say yes to,
and now if you're a thumbnail designer,
you can do this with basically any YouTuber.
YouTubers are always on the lookout
for like what is the best thumbnail for my video.
And so if someone does the work for them
and you can say, hey, you can use TubeBuddy to A/B test it.
Link to TubeBuddy in the video description,
if you wanna check it out, free trial, et cetera, et cetera.
They can literally test the thumbnail
and see if it performs better.
And that is the ultimate way of testing
are your skills as a thumbnail designer good enough
and if not, you can just improve those skills over time.
Equally, let's say you wanna be a writer
and create Twitter threads for people.
You can reach out to your favourite YouTuber
and say, hey, this video that you made about
like eight habits of being a millionaire,
I've actually converted that into a tweet thread for you
that you can just copy and paste onto Twitter
and then that'll help you grow your Twitter audience.
What do you think?
If you like it let me know
and we can talk about potentially working together
further down the line.
These are ways that you can work
for the people you care about, in my case YouTubers,
without asking them necessarily for permission
and you can do it for free to get your foot in the door.
And then of course, while doing all this,
I'd be documenting the journey.
I'd be having my own YouTube channel
where I talk about, all right, guys,
I've just sent 18 emails today to my favourite YouTubers.
Let's see who responds.
Oh my God, this person responded,
all right time to edit that video.
I'd be documenting the journey.
And if starting a YouTube channel is too hard,
I just do it through the form of a blog and Twitter threads
and stuff like that.
And so step two, work for free for your favourite people
like this target market that you care about,
do it without permission if you can
and document your journey while doing so.
And then once we've done enough of that,
we now have a portfolio.
So I'd be building like a personal website
using something like Ghost or Squarespace or Notion,
or there's all sorts of free ways to build a website
or even very cheap ways to build a website.
And now I've got my portfolio, I've got my showreel,
I've got examples of the Twitter threads
or the website, thumbnails or graphic,
whatever that I can make.
We now go into step number three,
which is turning this into a paid gig.
And at this point it's pretty easy to do
to turn it into a paid gig
because if you've got like decent samples of work
and you're actually good at the thing, which you will be
because you're following tutorials on the internet
and improving your skills over time,
and you've got decent testimonials from the people
that you've worked for for free.
At this point, you can now start reaching out
to those same people and say,
hey, this is how much I would charge per hour
if we wanted to work together, what do you think?
And they probably say, yes if it's reasonable
and you can then reach out to other YouTubers and say,
or other people in this market that you care about
and offer your service for free initially,
and then make like a page that has your prices
and you can have different pricing plans.
And essentially you can then
very easily turn this into a paid gig
because your work will speak for itself.
Of course, I'd be documenting the whole journey
of doing that as well.
Reading books about the psychology of pricing,
figuring out how to price my services for the hour,
reading everything I could get my hands on
about how to be a freelancer,
because at this point I'd be a freelancer
and I'd be sharing my journey.
I'd be documenting the process as it went along
on my blog and on my Twitter.
Then after doing this for a while,
after building up some money in the bank,
I'd be moving on to step four,
which is to productize the service.
I've got a friend Robin Waite,
who's written a really good book about this,
it's called "Take your Shot."
And that book changed the way that I approached pricing
because basically it...
It's like genuinely a very engaging story book.
And it tells a story of this golf teacher
who was charging by the hour.
And then one day he gets a client who wants to learn golf,
but this client happens to be a business coach
and the business coach talks him through
and coaches him about how he can convert his hourly pricing
into a suite of products,
like six lessons for X amount,
or this is the outcome you're gonna get,
this is the money-back guarantee.
And it's just so interesting seeing
how you can just transform your income basically overnight
by moving from an hourly charging rate
to a productized charging rate.
And so again, if I was a video editor,
I'd be putting together some kind of package
like I don't know, four videos a month
for X amount of dollars.
If I was a graphic designer,
I'd be doing like three thumbnails per video,
four times a month or four times a week
or three times a week for this amount.
If I was a writer,
I'd be talking about this sort of Twitter thread
for this amount and here is the money-back guarantee,
all of the things like that.
Read the book, "Take your Shot," it's very good.
And so with me, for example, right now I do almost nothing
that charges by the hour
because I don't like charging by the hour,
instead I think how can I turn this into a product?
How can I turn it into a course?
So we've got a Part-Time YouTuber Academy,
which is my live online course.
People always say, like their message would be like,
hey, how much do you charge for one-on-one coaching?
And I always say that I don't do one-on-one coaching
'cause I don't believe in charging by the hour
instead I believe in creating products
that can then offer that same service to multiple people
with a more like productized system.
And in fact, right now I'm working on my own,
"Productivity for Lazy People Course,"
which you can sign up to the mailing list
follow a link in the video description.
That is taking all of my insights about productivity
that I've picked up over the last, like decade of my life
and turning it into a nicely packaged course
that includes my productivity system for lazy people.
So yeah, link to the mailing list in video description,
if you wanna get early bird access
to that at some point when it comes out.
And finally that moves us on to step five,
once we've productized our services,
and now we've got even more money in the bank.
At that point, I'd be looking to hire people.
I'd be reading books like "The E-Myth Revisited,"
and "Traction," and these sorts of business books
that once you're a profitable business
as a solo entrepreneur slash freelancer,
how do you then bring other people on board,
either as freelancers or part-time or even full-time,
if you've got the money for that?
How do you bring other people on board
to help leverage your own skills and your own time?
And so I'm pretty confident if I were to start from scratch
over the course of maybe two, three years,
I'd get to the point where my editing business for YouTubers
or my writing business for YouTubers
or my graphic design business for YouTubers,
that I would get to the point
where I could comfortably be able to hire people,
offload some of the work from myself,
leverage my own time and my own skills,
and then think about building a business around it
so that the results are either the videos
or the graphics or the writing or whatever my thing is
so that the results would be generated by the business
and by the system as Michael Gerber talks about
in "The E-Myth Revisited,"
link in the video description if you wanna check it out.
The results would be delivered by the system
rather than by the individuals themselves.
And of course, throughout all five of these steps,
I'd be building up my own personal audience
by documenting what it's like
to build a business for YouTubers from the ground up.
At this point, I probably have a few thousand
maybe even tens of thousands of subscribers on my email list
or on my Twitter.
And then if I really wanted to,
I could turn it into a course about,
hey, here's how I did this thing over the last three years.
Here's how I started from scratch
and grew a six-figure income by video editing
and here's how you can do the same.
If I wanted to, I could do that further down the line,
but to be honest,
at that point I'd have my successful business,
I'd be having fun, I'd be profitable.
I wouldn't really need to peddle courses
to my audience in that context.
Now, if you're in the market for a monetizable skill
that you can learn that would add value
to a lot of different people,
one thing I always recommend to people
is to learn how to code.
Because coding is like such an in demand skill these days,
like there is a constant shortage
of software engineers, software developers.
And it's like, if you know how to code
to a reasonable standard,
it's actually not that hard to get a job
where you're either working for someone else
and doing coding type stuff for them,
or you're building your own stuff,
building your own businesses, building your own websites
and using your coding knowledge to do that well.
And certainly learning how to code was how I got started
on this entire journey of entrepreneurship
when I was around 13 years old.
Back in the day, I used to use really crappy resources,
like free stuff on the internet
and random books that I would get from charity shops.
These days, there are tonnes of other better ways
to learn how to code.
One of my favourites is by doing
an online course over at Brilliant,
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
If you haven't heard, Brilliant is a fantastic platform
for online courses in maths, science and computer science.
And the courses are really great
because they're interactive, they're friendly,
they're engaging and they make it fun to learn the thing.
And there are so many people
that I know who have thought about learning how to code
and done some like online course.
And it's just so boring that they just never actually bring
themselves to doing it.
Personally my favourite courses on Brilliant,
are their computer science series.
When I was applying to med school,
I was torn between med school and computer science.
And I went with medicine in the end,
but I always had this kind of love of computer science
and love of coding in my mind.
And so the Brilliant courses on computer algorithms
and like how cryptocurrencies work
are all really interesting.
So if that sounds up your street,
and if you wanna level up your thinking
or learn how to code or get pro at computer science
head over to brilliant.org/Ali
and the first 200 people
to hit that link in the video description
will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
So summing up the journey, three principles:
Principle number one, build in public,
principle number two, provide value for free
without the expectation of anything in return
and principle number three, target the market
that has the people that you already like
and think you would get on with.
And then we build a five steps on top of that.
Number one, learn a monetizable skill
that helps that market.
Number two, offer that service for free
preferably without permission,
while documenting your journey.
Number three, start charging for it.
Number four, productize your services
and read the book, "Take your Shot."
And number five, at that point you can hire and expand
and turn this into your own business empire.
If you like this video and you wanna learn more ways
of generating passive income, building business,
all that kind of stuff.
Check out this video over here,
which is like nine passive income ideas.
And it shows how I make $27,000 per week
at the time of that recording it's a little bit more now,
in passive income by following these methods.
So thank you so much for watching,
do hit the subscribe button if haven't already,
and I'll see you in the next video, bye.