- Hey, guys, welcome back to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Ali, I'm a Junior Doctor
working in Cambridge and in this video,
I wanna share 10 Top Tips for Entrepreneurs.
So this is stuff that I picked up over the last six years
of running a business called 6Med,
while I was a Medical Student at Cambridge University.
That business has made about 800,000 pounds of top line
revenue over the last six years, and if you convert that
into dollars it becomes a million dollars.
Anyway in this video, I'll start off by briefly sharing
the story of how my friends and I started this company
and how it grew, and then I'll go over 10 top tips
for students or anyone else interested in starting
your own business, becoming an entrepreneur,
making money online, all of that good jazz.
So I'll keep this part of the video brief
cause it's not really a story time video.
Basically in our second year of medical school,
me and some friends decided it would be cool
to run a course for one of the medical school admissions
tests called the BMAT.
We'd been on a few courses ourselves,
run by big corporations.
We thought they were a bit crap and they were charging
lots of money, so we thought we could do a better job
and charge less money and also we could give out
free places to students from low income backgrounds.
And when we started, we thought it would just be like
a small scale thing, we thought we'd just kind of
run a course at our local mosque.
But then quite early on I had the idea that because
I'd been making websites and stuff,
since like the age of 12, why don't we just
make a website for this and try and market it nationally
and then we'll get people up and down the country to join
our courses rather than just people in our local town.
And so from that we made the course material.
We made the website, we ran five sold out courses
that year to about 120 students and then we were like,
oh, my god, this is amazing, so the following year
we expanded into the UCAT course
and then we made a course of medical school interviews.
Then those did really really well.
Then we decided to make a question bank for the BMAT
and for the UCAT.
Those did really well, and so every year this company
kept on growing, we kept on getting more students
we expanded our locations, we taught a course
in Singapore, we taught a course in Hong Kong,
we taught a course in the Netherlands.
And it turned into this like surprisingly big thing,
but now let's talk about the value of this video,
which is 10 Top tips for Entrepreneurs.
So tip number one is don't wait for permission.
Often when we're starting something or when we're thinking
of starting a business or YouTube channel,
or a blog, or anything like that, we all have in our minds
this issue of I'm just not qualified.
Why would anyone care what I have to say?
And in a way we're kind of waiting for someone
to give us permission.
We're waiting for like an official degree to say
we're qualified, or a certificate from someone
to say that we're allowed to do this thing.
But like over the last six, seven years
of running this company I've realised and my friends
have realised that there are so few domains
in which you actually need to be qualified
before you can create some kind of product.
Like obviously if you're a doctor you need to be qualified
before you can start treating patients.
But in most realms of business, you can pretty much
just start doing it whenever you want
and if you're providing a good service
and people are happy to pay you money for it
and leaving good reviews,
that's all the qualification you really need.
Secondly I think it's really important when doing this
whole business startup entrepreneur
making money online thing
to stand on the shoulders of the giants
that have come before us.
Entrepreneurship and business isn't really a new thing
any more.
Like it's a very well trodden path that people have been
doing for decades if not centuries.
In like in the last few decades,
we've got loads and loads of books, podcasts,
websites, articles, interviews with people
who have set up their own businesses
and those people have done a really good job
of sharing all the things they know.
So specific resources that you'll find helpful:
Tim Ferriss's book the Four Hour Workweek,
absolutely incredible resource
of just thinking about entrepreneurship.
There's a website called Indie Hackers
that has interviews with founders of successful
internet businesses.
They've got about 100 podcast episodes so far.
Each of those are amazing, they're all incredibly inspiring
and you can learn a lot from these people.
There's a guy called Paul Graham, he's a partner
at Y Combinator, that's like the Ivy League
of startup accelerators in America.
He's written a tonne of essays on his website about
how to get startup ideas, how to start your own startup.
Seth Godin has a podcast called Startup School.
Y Combinator has a podcast
and also has a Startup School series of videos.
There's so much stuff out there for us to learn about
entrepreneurship and business that it's kind of like
trying to be a doctor without understanding
anatomy and physiology.
It's kind of the basics.
You probably should understand the basic literature
and then you know you can go off and do what you want.
But there's so much stuff out there
that we should definitely be standing on the shoulders
of giants before we're taking the plunge
into entrepreneurship.
Thirdly, if you're thinking of starting a business,
it's incredibly useful to at least know the basics
of how to code.
And this is for two main reasons.
So firstly, knowing how to code opens your mind up
to potential business ideas.
Like it's common startup advice that the best way to come up
with startup or business ideas is not to sit down
with your friends and brainstorm startup ideas,
but it's to identify problems that you have in your life,
day to day, that you might be able to solve by creating
a business or creating a product.
And if you know how to code, you kinda know the realms
of possibility like you know what can be done
and so if, let's say you're a doctor and you working
in healthcare and you discover some inefficiency
or, you know, you're a student and you discover
something that everyone's doing that could be done better.
Just the fact that you know how to code means
that you'll be discovering these possibilities a lot more
than someone who doesn't.
Secondly, knowing how to code is really helpful
because then when you have an idea,
let's say, you know, you're Mark Zuckerberg,
and you have the idea for Facebook or if you're me
and you have the idea for running these courses,
you can then just turn it into a business by yourself
without needing to rely on bringing someone else in
who knows how to code.
So for example with 6Med, if I didn't know how to make
a website, our course would've had 12 people at a
local mosque in Southend on Sea
and that would have been the end of it.
But just this ability like to create a website
is what allowed it to become a national
and then later international business.
Just like knowing how to code is so so helpful for that.
And if you're interested in learning how to code
there is a fantastic computer science fundamentals course
over at brilliant.org.
It takes you through the basic principals of algorithms,
computers and programmes and it guides you through
interesting and fun little problems along the way
to help solidify your understanding of these core concepts.
And after you've gone through that, you can go through
their programming with Python course,
Python is the world's most popular programming language,
and you can do pretty much anything with Python.
From building a simple website, all the way through
to writing machine learning algorithms.
If you're into this whole entrepreneurship thing
and you're interested in learning how to code
I highly recommend you head over to brillian.org/ali
and the first 200 people to visit that link
will get 20% off a premium subscription.
Yeah, a huge thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring
this video, and let's move on to the next point.
Fourthly and on a related note,
it's also really useful to kinda develop a taste for design
and develop a taste for what looks pretty and how
to make stuff look pretty.
And this ability to make stuff look pretty is an
absolute super power in the world that we live in today.
Just taking the example of 6Med, the business,
a big part of why it was successful initially,
even though we were competing against the big names
in the market, was just because our website looked pretty.
It looked legit, I'd been doing web design for ages,
I knew how to make a pretty looking website
and at the time, in like 2012-2013, it wasn't as easy
for just anyone to make a website with Squarespace
or Wix or whatever.
And like in my life, personally it's not just 6Med
the business that's benefited from my design background,
it's pretty much everything else I've ever done.
So for example within medicine, I've given presentations
at conferences and I've won those, you know,
I've won prizes for those
and the feedback has been, oh, your poster presentation
looked really good.
I've attended these like medical hackathons,
like programming competitions where you build something
and pitch it to judges.
And like three of them that I attended we ended up
winning first prize and I think a big part of that
was because our PowerPoint presentation
just looked prettier than everyone else's.
I even got invited to join the board of this like
international plastic surgery charity that does
reconstructive surgery missions abroad and that was
because they had a website, I offered my services.
I was like, hey, I can make your website look a bit prettier
and they were like sure, come on board.
And that gave me access to this network of amazing
plastic surgeons that I wouldn't have otherwise had
contact with and then also this YouTube channel.
Like, you know, the thumbnails have a similar design.
I think they look kind of pretty.
I think the production value of these videos
is quite reasonable.
That ability to add production value to everything
that you do is an amazing super power
that benefits everything you do in life,
not just in business.
And so, yeah, if you're sold on that and you wanna
teach yourself the basics of design, I'd recommend
installing a browser extension called Muz.li
and what that does is that replaces your new tab,
you know, on Chrome or Safari, with like web design
inspiration or some interesting typography or graphic
design examples.
It used to be a source of procrastination for me
to just browse web design inspiration.
And then as I discovered things I bookmark them
and then over time as you become exposed to good design,
you develop a taste for it and so when you're then
making your own stuff, making your own website,
or making your own posters, or even just, you know,
generating a flier for some event that you're running
at your local mosque or church or whatever.
Then you just have the ability to make it look pretty
and that ability to make it look pretty
just adds so much.
Point number five I think it's really helpful
to work with friends.
So there's that classic stair saying in startups or whatever
that if you wanna go fast you should go alone,
but if you wanna go far, you should go together.
And I think that's really important, but also
especially if you're a student, it's just,
actually even if you're not a student,
it's just so much more fun when you're building a
business, like doing stuff with your friends.
It's just like an amazing experience.
Like I kind of liken it to going camping,
like, you know, you're building your tent
and you're like building a fire and all that stuff.
It's just more enjoyable when you're doing it with friends,
people that you like, you've got people helping out
with it.
And yeah, you might have to sacrifice a little bit
of equity early on, but, you know, at the start
people are gonna be sacrificing their time,
they're gonna want equity.
That's absolutely fine, given that the whole point
of running a business, the whole point of doing anything
is really just cause we think it's gonna make us happier.
Why not make ourselves happier by getting friends
involved from day one?
And that was the thing that I did with 6Med
and really glad I did early on.
About half of the medics in my college ended up teaching
courses for us and we had a team of like 20, 25 people
all of whom, me and the founding people were friends with
and that just made like for a really fun environment.
And although there were challenges and stuff along the way,
just working with friends makes the whole experience
of running a business that much more enjoyable.
Point number six is that you should start off
really really small.
And this is a really important point because
whenever we're coming up with ideas for businesses
or thinking of starting something, it's far too easy
to get into this mindset where we keep on adding
features or oh, it would be amazing if our app had this,
or it would be cool to add that, and then the feature
list keeps on growing and eventually we just never
end up getting anything out the door
cause we're too concerned about trying to add new features,
trying to make the thing better.
And in the startup world there's this idea of an MVP,
a Minimal Viable Product, which is sort of
the smallest version of your product or your app,
or whatever that you can feasibly get in front of people.
So you start off really small, you build this tiny version,
you get it out in front of people and then over time,
using user feedback and stuff, you then iterate
on the design and you just add more and more features
over time and improve the product in small ways
and this doesn't even apply just for businesses.
It also applies to starting any kind of creative endeavour,
like, you know, the artist who wants to start off
by making their first piece the Mona Lisa, isn't gonna
get anywhere, but you know, you have your sketchbook,
you do these little drawings equally for YouTube channels.
If I had somewhat like, you know, a Peter McCain video
or a Matt D'Avella video as my sort of
I need to get this good before I release a video,
I would never have ended up releasing anything at all.
And the thing that I told myself regularly on
was that my first 50 or 100 videos are just gonna be
absolutely terrible anyway, so I might as well
just kind of get over that and then I can hopefully work
towards making good videos.
Point number seven is do things that don't scale.
And I think this advice originated from a chap
called Paul Graham, who is one of the partners
at Y Combinator that I mentioned earlier.
And I'll link the essay in which he talks about this
where he gives loads of really good examples.
But the main idea is that you wanna do things
that don't scale, ie at the start,
you wanna be putting in extra effort to make
your customers happy, to recruit new customers,
all that stuff.
Famous example, the guys who founded Airbnb.
Initially in their first 30 day period where, you know,
it was a bit sort of touch and go, no one really knew
what was gonna happen, they physically went door to door
in New York to all the Airbnb listings
and they offered to take professional photos
for those listings for free.
And that's the sort of thing that, you know,
obviously they just can't do any more
because they're now millions of people using Airbnb.
But at the start, it was that physical effort
that was needed to be put in by the founders
in order to make, you know, the snowball start to roll.
Equally there's a company called Wufoo
that's doing very well.
For their first few years they sent handwritten physical
thank you cards to each of their customers.
It's hard to imagine a company doing that
in this day and age.
But if you're starting a startup and you can put in
the extra physical effort of delighting your customers
and recruiting additional customers initially,
then you're well on your way to success.
And I read about all these stories,
so when we started 6Med what I did was for the first
couple of years, whenever we'd get a new order in,
I would email them personally and say, hey look,
thanks for signing up to our course.
This is a bit about who I am, this is our team.
We've got loads of expertise amongst us.
If you have any question at all
about the medicine application process,
about your A Levels, about studying,
about anything, just reply to this email
and we'll get back to you.
And we had lots of customers being like, oh, wow,
I didn't realise you guys were, you know,
so like personable.
That general vibe.
Do things that don't scale.
As Paul Graham says put in the effort to delight
your customers, your students, whatever, early on
and hopefully that will lead to rewards
further down the line.
And plus, you know, ideally we'd continue to have
this attitude of delighting our customers
as our business is growing.
All right point number eight, expect failure
because chances are your startup is gonna fail,
but you know the stats like 80% of them do,
80% of the ones that do succeed are not around
in five, ten years time.
Essentially chances are very very unlikely that your thing
will go well.
And in fact I had five failed businesses that I tried
to start up while I was in secondary school or high school
if you're American, five failed businesses,
me and my friend, James, each year we'd come out
with a new plan to make money
and it would fail every single time
and it was the sixth one that was this idea for the
BMAT crash course and that was eventually the thing
that blossomed into 6Med and that made a massive difference
to my life.
But the point I wanna make is that each time you fail
it's actually, you know, it's that classic cliche,
Failure is just a learning opportunity.
Had I not gone through those five failures beforehand,
you know, if I'd given up after the first one,
I wouldn't have known how to code in PHB,
I wouldn't have known how to make websites,
I wouldn't have known what goes in to accepting payments
online, any of this sort of stuff.
It was going through those failures that ultimately
led to the success.
And the nice thing about starting a business
is while it's that you don't really have any startup
capital and any startup costs these days,
especially if you're starting an internet business.
You know, for a few dollars, you can get a website domain,
get web hosting, and start accepting
credit card payments online, literally immediately.
So in a weekend and by spending maybe 10, $20,
you've got this whole set up
and you can build your online business based on that.
So your costs are essentially zero,
and the potential upside is absolutely massive.
Again that reference to Indie Hackers,
that website I mentioned earlier, they've got loads
of interviews on that podcast of people like you and me
who have set up websites, or apps, or whatever
from their bedrooms for practically zero money,
who are then making tens of thousands of dollars
a month further down the line.
If you treat it as a learning opportunity,
don't be too put out if your thing fails,
because it's not really a failure.
It's you know, you've learned stuff and then that will
set you up for success further down the line.
Poin number nine and this is something that I try
to tell myself a lot is that we should always ask
ourselves why we're really doing it.
So, you know, it's easy enough to get caught up
in the hype of it once you start a business
and it's growing, it's all very exciting,
but then, like for me, it was about 2015-2016,
around the point where our revenue started to sort of
stagnate, decline a little bit, and then more competitors
came into the market and then I was kinda thinking,
oh, damn, you know, I have to put in all this work,
but I'm not really enjoying running this business
anymore and then I came across a fantastic book
by an amazing chap called Derek Sivers,
and that book is called Anything You Want,
40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur.
And I featured that in one of my videos.
Three books that changed my life,
cause this book really did change my life.
And in this book, he talks about, it's very short,
it takes about 20 minutes to read,
but he talks about lessons for entrepreneurs,
kind of like this video but just much better.
He's talking about lessons for entrepreneurs
that he gained from setting up a company called CD Baby
and then selling it eventually for $22 million.
And there's a quote in it, which is probably
my favourite quote of all time, and that's a quote
that I remind myself of whenever I'm feeling down
or whenever I'm too focused on the numbers.
Never forget why you're really doing what you're doing.
Are you helping people?
Are they happy?
Are you happy?
Are you profitable?
Isn't that enough?
And this is just like an absolutely amazing philosophy
that, you know, the only reason we run businesses
is because we think it's gonna make us happy
and it'll help people.
So if we're happy running it, and we're helping people
and we're profitable, we're not losing money,
then why does it matter what the numbers are,
why does it matter what our growth rate is,
why does it matter what our retained earnings as
percentage of gross, all this stuff,
it doesn't matter, you know, as long we're enjoying it,
as long as we're having fun,
as long as we're helping people.
And I think that's a really important thing
to remind ourselves.
Especially, you know, even with things like YouTube,
anytime I start to get too focused on the numbers,
oh, that video only got 20,000 views, I was hoping
it would get 70,000 views, it's just such a pointless
game to play.
This is still fun, I'm having a good time,
hopefully helping out people
and that's all that's really needed.
And finally point number 10 is just start.
If you're interested in entrepreneurship,
if you've gone through this really long video so far
and you're at this point, you probably don't really need
any more information.
You don't need more knowledge before you start something,
even if you don't know how to code.
Just like get an idea and start working on it
and then you can learn the stuff you need to know
as you go along.
People liken it to, you know, the analogy of, you know,
like going to the gym, like people don't get ripped
by reading about going to the gym,
or reading about workouts.
They get ripped by, you know, putting in consistent effort
and toning up and eating healthily
over a very long period of time.
It's the same in anything in life.
It's the same in the startups, entrepreneurs, business,
so much so there's become such a cliche that you get these
wantrepreneurs who read everything and consume
all the products and all the information about
entrepreneurship and yet never actually start something.
So, yeah, it's good to stand on the shoulders of giants,
it's good to listen to Tim Farriss and read his book
and listen to Indie Hackers and watch all the
Y Combinators stuff, but don't think that that's
a substitute for actually doing your own thing
because when you start that is when you really start
to learn and then you can apply all the lessons
you're learning from this stuff as you're going along.
So those were my 10 Top Tips for Budding Entrepreneurs.
Hope you found that useful.
I'll put loads of links in the video description
to podcasts, interviews, articles, books, et cetera,
that I've personally found helpful.
But the point I wanna make, ultimately is that
you should just start.
If you're thinking of starting a business
and you've gotten to this point in the video,
just go for it, I promise you, it'll be an incredible
experience and it will change your life.
So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.
(guitar music)