12 Incredible Apps I Use to Run My $4m Business

hey friends welcome back to the channel so if you run your own business or if you want to one day run your own business then there's a lot of value in understanding the mechanics of the behind the scenes of how businesses operate so in this video I want to show you exactly how I use 12 specific apps to run and manage different aspects of the multi-million dollar business that I've been building over the last six years okay so the first app we're going to be talking about is slack now I've been using slack since 2019 to run various different aspects of this business and because we've been using it for so long and for so many things we sent the guys it's like an email and said hey would you be down to sponsor this video and they said yes and so Slack are in fact sponsoring this portion of the video and they've also included a special offer to try slack Pro for 50 off see the link in the description for more and slack is essentially a productivity and messaging and communication app for teams so slack has a bunch of like core features one of the main ones is channels and so you can see we've got an announcements Channel General feedback Daily Dump book marketing email podcast social media you can separate conversations into different channels so this is super handy as a way of keeping everything organized for example all of our conversations about this YouTube channel are in the YouTube channel on sac and we split up into content Squad and money Squad which are like the two different branches of the business content Squad is like make regular content money Squad is like our courses and customer success part of the business so channels are one way of communicating the other way of communicating is through DMs so I can just DM someone on my team and then I can send the message and then it will appear and I've organized everyone in my team on this little team folder as well so you can see all of these unread DMS that I have from people the reason I have all these unread DMS is because I messaged everyone saying yo I'm doing my 360 feedback for you but would love to know if you have any specific questions you'd like me to answer for you and send a voice message loom in response and this is just like a team feedback thing I struggle to give my team regular feedback and so sometimes I ask them for specific questions and then I know what I'm answering in my head so we've got channels and we've got DMS we also have threads and one of the really helpful things about slack is that every message can have threaded replies to them so we can see here this is an announcement that Angus made yesterday hope you've had a great weekend ready for another week it's week three of the Sprints almost halfway through already like nice and inspiring stuff and now people can Emoji react to the message which is cool and I can react with a fire I can react with a heart I can react with a picture of anger so I can react with a this this thing but also I can reply in a thread and so all of these replies are now organized within this thread which is super handy and I can send a reply I can tag people the people who get tagged will get a notification and it keeps it nice and organized which means conversations stay within a thread and then another great feature is called slack connect which means we can actually communicate with people from various different companies within our slack team itself and these are all the different companies that we communicate with within slack itself so for example Stefan is an absolutely amazing designer and we've been working with him on book cover designs and things like that so this is what the book design actually has ended up being um yoga productivity.com if you want to check it out but within the slack connect Channel with Stefan we had like all of these different like mock-ups but in the end we ended up going for sort of a variation on this which is what the publisher penguin initially designed and it was so handy having slack connect to be able to have this conversation so Stefan is only part of this channel he doesn't have access to all the conversations within our team but he can DM people and he can be part of the single channel so those are the basic features of slack I want to show you a few specific use cases of how we use it so firstly we've got this announcements Channel where Angus my CEO posts a lot of stuff that kind of just keep the team updated as to what is going on next we have a cool channel for team feedback now there is an app that integrates with slack this is another cool thing about slack they've got a lot of apps and Integrations this is called Mata or Mata bot and basically the idea here is that it's a way of giving feedback to team members I'll show you how this works so I can hit give kudos so Tintin is sitting next to me right now so I'm going to give him a Kudos these are our five core values as a team be a team player into the journey level up of a communicate take responsibility they spell bottle in the right order and so the idea is that to keep the core values front of mind we kind of shout people out for these relevant core values if you don't currently run a business and you don't have a team this is going to seem weird you're going to seem like what the hell is this corporate BS why are you doing this but and I thought this was the case too until I started running a team and now I realize the value of core values and the value of shouting them out and keeping them top of Mind anyway level up is one of our core values where it's like the idea is that we want people to be constantly leveling up and learning new things and the coins thing is cool because people who get enough coins can then redeem the coins for like an Amazon gift card or a Starbucks gift card or something to that effect and then this goes into the channel and everyone can like see exactly what's what's going on say some nice things to the team and then the nice thing is that the team say nice things to each other as well and this is just a great way of people feeling heard and appreciated and praised and also for like core values to stay top of mind so another Channel that's interesting is our pleasantries Channel where anyone in the team if they see if they see a nice comment or something from someone in the audience or through emails or through DMs they might just screenshot it and just post it into this channel which is quite nice because then we get to see the impact that our work is having so for example recently we launched our part-time YouTuber Academy Evergreen course and you know this person has left a comment on me I love the analogy of the goose and the golden eggs brilliant this is an email we got through our support inbox when we reply to someone wow what wonderful people you are in this busy world you still have time for us I'll always keep you people in my heart you're providing such a value to me may God multiple this generous work of yours love it and so we share that within this pleasantries Channel people can respond to it and it's just really nice to see the positive comments that we get coming our way here's another fun one this is an app called team spective and what this does is give a pulse on how the team is feeling about things and so basically the idea is that what this slack bot does is is that every every week or so it will ask the team some questions so for example is it clear what you should focus on focus on and prioritize and then people will just take one of these answers and then me and Angus will get a report every week that shows numbers in terms of how engaged and how happy and how like well-being he is our team now that we have 14 people in the team it's kind of sometimes hard to keep track of every single person and ask them every week how you're doing but this just gives us a nice weekly pulse check on yeah team Vibes final thing to mention is that we don't just use slack within our own team internally we also use it externally for our students of the part-time YouTuber accelerator which is a coaching program that we have for people trying to grow their YouTube channels so we have announcements General feedback questions and the idea here is that our team offers office hours and so for example Becky says hello everyone I hope everyone had a good weekend this is your reminder the social media strategy office hours of tomorrow and we can book here and stuff then we have this General Channel where people are posting about meeting up Alison has posted you know I did a q a session and I mentioned a couple of like holy grail books that have really helped me.com Secrets 100 million offers and copywriting secrets and this is a message that's pinned so people can just sort of see the pinned messages on this channel and see exactly what's going on and then we have a questions Channel where the students can post any questions that they want and our team are in here every day answering questions related to YouTube or business or all this kind of stuff final thing to mention about slack is a new feature that they've just launched called slack canvas which basically creates this kind of interactive board situation that you can put in information and you can tie this to specific channels if you want and so the idea behind slack canvas is that it's a collaborative kind of whiteboard it's a canvas and so anyone in the team we could be having a team meeting and just open up a slack canvas page and then people can give feedback or write thoughts and this is helpful because it's directly within slack so rather than having to make a Google doc and then send people the link to the Google Docs and everyone clicks on the link and it's in the Google Doc it's just right within slack itself again we use slack for this rather than other platform because of just all the features of slack and because mostly it's a business focused audience who is who are students of our accelerator program they all know how to use slack because slack is really popular amongst businesses all right app number two that we use to run our business is called webflow and webflow is basically a really powerful website creation platform now we use webflow for a bunch of different sites that we've created over the years we often used it for the pages we were creating for our courses like our camera confidence course and our creator preneur course but most recently we've used webflow to design the website for my book for feelgoodproductivity.com and so this is what it looks like in the back end for example and so a web designer Henry made the website for feel good productivity.com directly in webflow and then webflow allows us to do really cool things like this entry animation like when you go on the website the book fades in and the things come along on the side and then we've got these buy links and these are cool because if you're in the UK and you hit the Amazon link it'll go to Amazon UK if you're in the US or go to the US link we've got us UK Canada International editions and then we've got some quotes of what various people have said about the book and then we've got this bit which is really cool where as you're scrolling through the book kind of a symbols and it zooms in all of these are like really cool animations that you can create within webflow if you're a pro web designer and then there's this really cool text effect that we've got here as well like I just love this as we scroll look what happens to the text boom yeah and then you've got feel good productivity and the dot comes in and then that's like oh it's a Vibe if you haven't yet checked this website out I'd love it if you would if it's it's different on mobile as well it's like it's really cool on mobile as well it's just going feelgoodproductivity.com and you can pre-order the book if you feel like it it would really help me out if you do and also if you do then please save your receipt because we're going to be sending you a bunch of bonuses that are going to be absolutely sick so please save your receipt if you pre-order the book but this is what it looks like on the back end so you can see that this like you know we can edit all of this kind of stuff and there's a lot that's going on here and it obviously doesn't look good can't see your country like question mark you know you can see I can just write stuff here if you're not familiar with webflow there's tons and tons of free tutorials out there on YouTube and it's a really powerful tool that you can use to basically make an absolutely sick looking website all right next up we have kajabi which is a course creation platform that you might not be familiar with we make a lot of money through kajabi and I want to show you exactly what it is to hopefully give you some ideas of what you could potentially do with a platform like kajabi and basically what it is is that it's an online platform that lets you host and sell courses and coaching and a community so for example for our part-time YouTuber Academy all of this academy.oliberal.com is entirely hosted on kajabi all of our courses you know our video editing course thumbnail Master Class editing wizard like part-time YouTuber academy part time YouTube accelerator camera confidence great printer Academy foundations all of these are video courses that are hosted on kajaba you can see we've got 3 800 people there 3798 people over there 768 people over there and so if you want to make a course a podcast a community or coaching then you can just make it on kajabi and it's super easy so let's say if I just make a new course here course details I don't know how to play guitar 101 this course will teach you the basics of how to play guitar use this info to generate a sample course outline this is like an AI feature so we can hit continue let's say this is a paid course let's sell it for I don't know 99 let customers pay what they want that's fun that's a new feature I didn't know and then payment type we can be stripe save and finish and so now this is generating the AI course outline for my how to play guitar 101. but I'll show you what it looks like let's say for a part-time YouTuber Academy so this is a whole product that we've created within kajabi and so what you can do is you can create these different modules like module one how to find your perfect Niche how to stand out how to generate endless ideas and then within those we've got all of the different video lessons that are part of this and you can see there's like tons and tons of stuff but the really nice thing about kajabi is that it makes it super easy to organize on our end and then super easy for students to go through the course on their end so we've got 3741 customers for this and if I hit this view button you can see what this product looks like in the sort of preview mode so for example welcome to the part-time YouTuber Academy this is the first lesson [Music] and so you can see this of the course and as people are going through it we've got this stuff underneath people can leave a comment wow this course is massive thank you to early and his team it's going to save me massive amount of pain nice all this kind of stuff and then as you flick through you can just like identifying your target Avatar or like oh my God there's a lot of videos in here and the nice thing is that this is a theme on kajabi and as people go through the course they can get little Badges and it says like congratulations you finished this aspect of the course and it just sort of keeps the momentum going the other cool thing with kajabi is I can hit customize and then I can customize the different aspects of what this looks like they've got a bunch of different templates for courses and so if I hit customize on this but basically I can like change things up and change the typography and yeah these are our badges that we've got for the course I can change settings colors naming change the header there's a bunch of different customizations you can make to the course itself now kajabi also gives you landing pages and websites so I'll show you exactly what this looks like on our end okay so this is our page for the party metric Academy and it's kind of nice look at this you've got these graphs we've got all this kind of stuff with testimonials etc etc but then what this looks like on the back end is if I hit customize it's not quite as powerful as webflow because kajabi is not like fully designed for just websites it's like trying to do a lot of different things but it's really helpful because again you can just change stuff there's a lot of custom CSS that that we've written to make this look really pretty and if we look at settings custom code we can see that there is some custom CSS code that I've written for all this stuff but it's actually in the grand scheme of things this is not a huge amount of CSS code to be writing to make a website look this pretty in a kind of what you see is what you get website builder when you build a course you can then build a landing page for the course you can do that all the way over then kajabi and then at the bottom of it people can hit the enroll button and now they can buy the course for 995 with a coupon or with payment plans it's just super easy it's very secure it's good vibes now the really cool thing about kajaba is that you can see exactly what your sales are so for example we can see this is our net revenue all time we switched over to kajabi I think in January of this year so this is from like 2023 and we can see this has been the revenue over the last 30 days and within analytics you can even see graphs of exactly what's going on so if we look at over the last six months for example this was when we launched our final cohort live cohort of the YouTuber Academy and you can see that we did you know this 387 000 within within the first day and then you can see what the sales look like and then we stopped and then we closed the cohort so these are all just sort of payment plans that are trickling in we've got a few refunds and then like this day on July 12th was when we launched the Evergreen self-serve version of the ptya so you can see that on day one we generated 245 000 of Revenue and it's all here within kajabi and it's super nice to see obviously you have to actually have a good product and have an audience to then buy the product but for everything else kajabi makes it super easy and it's another platform that I recommend for anyone who wants to start and Market an online course or a digital product of any sort all right next we have canva gosh this is going to be a really long video so I hope you're skipping around in the timestamps if you feel like it canva is great canva is basically the software that we use for a lot of our thumbnails and graphic design and so for example this is how we made this thumbnail this evidence-based brain care thumbnail you can see kind of how this how this formulated so this MKBHD thumbnail was kind of a little bit of the inspiration for this where you know this idea of you know him doing this thing so that was like a little bit of the inspiration for the photo that we took and then uh tinted my YouTube producer kind of worked in canva to get all of this sort of stuff to happen like you know cutting out the background before after you can see that we're sort of playing around with all these different designs this was another option this was another option it's just a fairly simple to use platform that's entirely web-based so you don't have to download any software and if you're not particularly good at graphic design yourself or you don't have someone doing it for you then what you can do is you can create a design so let's say YouTube thumbnail for example and now you can choose from a bunch of different templates so it's like absolute classic YouTube thumbnail I would get rid of this watch now because who needs that how to make online money I would I would say how to make money online because that's more legit three thousand dollars a week let's do a little comma there you know you can see what you can do in canva so you could replace that with a photo of yourself if you really wanted to go full Ham on there oh my God odd kind of thing so this would be a thumbnail that you can make and let's say you want to create a design that's not a YouTube thumbnail so again let's stick with YouTube and let's say you want a YouTube Banner now these are kind of annoying to design but again you can design based on canva thumbnails and usually the thing that I recommend to my students in the YouTuber Academy is don't bother designing your own stuff from scratch just find a design on canva that you like and then it'll work so if this was my channel Ali abdall I don't know let's say beauty vlogger so this could well be the banner for like a YouTube channel that I would have now this looks kind of weird because YouTube channel Banners are annoyingly quite large because they show on TVs but it would be this middle bit that shows up in the YouTube Banner itself and this is why I love using pre-made themes because it just takes a lot of the work out of doing the thing yourself alright next up on the list we have Google Sheets now Google Sheets is a bit basic but we actually use it in a really fun way for our company scorecard this is what our company scorecard looks like now this is kind of complicated and we keep on iterating this but essentially let's say if we take the YouTube channel for example basically since the start of the year this is we can see on the columns we've got the weeks down the side and these are the different things that we're tracking for the YouTube channel so how many videos did we release how many shorts how many videos do we have awaiting editing what's our end of your Target in terms of subscriber count so where we were going for 5.5 million not sure if we're gonna hit it but whatevs what is the total subscribers that we have and therefore if that were to be our Target this is a Formula that's figuring out like how are we tracking based on that particular Target and then this column figures out the difference between those two things like we're currently on 4.5 million but if we wanted to be on track for 5.5 million we are about 140 000 subscribers underneath that it's fine whatevs but it's generally useful to track these targets because you know going for 5 million subscribers is very different than going for 50 million subscribers so it just sort of informs some of the things that we can do now we do this for all of our different platforms so we have it for our podcast deep dive Instagram Facebook Tick Tock the newsletter Sunday Snippets Twitter LinkedIn the website and we're tracking all these numbers and the people in charge of the relevant platforms every Monday they just fill in some of these numbers because it's easy enough to get access to these numbers and then these numbers roll up into this kind of main dashboard which is the thing that I look at every week how many long form views do we get short form views text views that were long so this is like website article reads text views that were short so this is like Twitter Impressions LinkedIn Impressions what was our total weekly watch time on YouTube and how's that doing and then what's our weekly follow Again on YouTube and off of YouTube so it's sort of our net new followers and because of the sort of conditional formatting we have on this I don't really care about the numbers but what I care about is getting an idea of what is the pattern so for example we can see here we grew quite a lot there's a lot of green that's sort of clustered around here so we had a couple of videos go viral and we gained 46 000 subscribers that week and 44 000 the following week and what we're looking at also is our email list gain so this is how many email subscribers or email list has gained over the last well year but then something interesting happened there and there and there so we got 16 000 that week 17 000 23 000 68 000 17 000 so we're like all right cool we clearly did something that was interesting and I know exactly what it was we put a lead magnet in some of the videos and we did a giveaway which drives a lot of email subscribers and then we're looking at Revenue this is a little bit out of date but this is the revenue that's coming in from content which is sort of AdSense and brand deals and then this is revenue that's coming in from the courses so we can see we've got a lot of Revenue coming in from our courses when we launched our YouTuber Academy but then every week it's sort of been a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of pounds which is reasonable but it's super nice having something like this scorecard where a the team are reporting in their numbers every single week which means they actually look at their numbers which is useful and B it lets us sort of zoom out and see like okay how are we doing relative to how we were doing earlier in the year but then this is a level of detail that me as like the Visionary of the business I don't really need to care about this in that much detail but for example Amber a podcast producer will be looking at the numbers for the podcast and if we see that there's a bit of a problem in the business or if if something is either doing way better or way less good than we expect it to based on what we think our targets are then we can zoom into that and see what are the reasons that we can hypothesize for why this particular thing is going either really well or not very well at all I always used to be anti-numbers but then over time especially working with my latest CEO coach Eric I've realized the value of actually putting numbers to things what I found having a team of 14 people now is that actually it's very helpful for me to give Clarity to the team on what sort of Target we're shooting for because people want to know that they're doing a good job and that they're doing the right things to get to a goal the other thing we do in the Google sheet is that we also use this sort of annual planning thing as a way of showing what is interesting that's happening so we put birthday so this is Bob's birthday that's happening very soon and it knows his birthday is over there this is where I'm speaking at the International Fitness Summit LOL that'll be fun when interesting things are happening in the business we just put him over here so that everyone can get a bit of a bird's eye view as to what is the business calendar looking like so they can start planning their lives around it and the very exciting thing is we're now working on a new updated dashboard the biggies 5.0 this has iterated so much over time but it's like the big things that I care about so most recently it's been team happiness which we need to work out long form views net new followers new email Subs operating profit and customer happiness so this is really cool I love this stuff like this is the sophisticated version of running a business um actually having access to the numbers and things it just gives us Clarity and it's good vibes and feels good all right next up on the list we have an app that we use all the time and this is Loom and Loom basically lets you record video walkthroughs kind of like this but this one is fancy because it's recording in screenflow and I'm recording on the camera but Loom just lets you do screen recordings in a very very easy way so for example this is a screen recording that Dan has done just like updating well on website progress and these are all just like internal videos that the team is making this is super handy because Dan can share a screen and talk through exactly what's going on and then I can leave a comment on each of these different time stamps and you can see that I've sort of hot reacted to a bunch of these like you know when Dan says something nice like here's what's happening on a Google analytics setup I'm like yeah this is good stuff and we can also watch these at two times speed at 2.5 times speed and so it just becomes a way more efficient way of sharing information rather than booking a meeting or asking people to read a load of text you can just record on loom the other thing as well that's cool here is that every month as of May we've been asking everyone in the team to create a level up Loom which is basically a presentation that they're doing for what they've learned that month so for example this is Tintin's Loom where he's just giving a little summary and he's explaining what he's been doing to level up this month and so the idea is that anyone the team can watch the Looms so that we all benefit from everyone else's leveling up stuff so this is a new initiative that we are trying again thanks to loom because it's so makes it so easy to record this sort of stuff now as you might have gathered next on the list is notion because notion is the app that we use to track a lot of this project management type stuff across the business so slack is what we use for real-time and asynchronous communication and announcements and a notion tends to be what we use for project management so you can see this is all notion over here I've done a bunch of different videos about notion we'll link some of them down in the video description if you want to check them out but notion is what we use to manage our content calendar as well so these are some videos that are coming out over the next few weeks to months we also use notion to track our okrs so for example everyone in the team has one maximum two different objectives or we call them Quests for this particular Sprint because we work in six week Cycles so Yakov is launch and optimized PTY funnel LSN is to build the accelerator CRM for our part-time Egypt accelerator students and Angus is Operation free Angus which is involves time tracking to make sure that like Angus currently works like 70 hours a week and we're trying to trying to get that down to a more reasonable 40 to 50 hours a week and so the idea is that every week they give updates as to what's been happening this is interesting we have DOD which means the definition of done which is facts feelings and functionality so like what are the facts around what this project looks like what are the feelings how will it feel and what's the functionality and then what are the potential milestones if you're interested in more details about specifically how we manage our entire production Empire for this YouTube channel in the business around it this is all the stuff that we teach on the course part-time YouTuber Academy I'll link it down below if you want to check it out but it would be wait it's like literally 40 hours of content so there's way too much to go into in this video Even though this video is ending up being quite long this is our YouTube hub for example where we've got like main channel strategy and the thumbnail and the goose the Gosling and titles and thumbnails and best practices and the side hustle database and a b tests and all the hooks and there's just so much so much stuff that's going on we call the YouTube channel the goose because it's like it's a long story but like this is kind of what we're trying to do like Ali can film whenever he wants but not whatever he wants like I get told what to film because titles and thumbnails are important but then I can film it whenever I want we value the audience's time and attention Above All Else and this is kind of like the ideal month where we want to have a book club productivity Tech study Tech Creator Health money create a personal book money you know this kind of stuff this would be our absolute dream upload schedule we're not there yet we certainly do one or two videos a week but we'd love to get to a point where we're putting out three videos a week that are all really valuable across all of these different topic areas all right we have some more apps to talk about and the next one on the list is figma it's sort of like a web designy type thing I'm just going to show you how I use it and then you can like see what it is so basically if we look at the website for example and it basically lets you drag and drop it yeah it's like a web design platform so this is like the website olivedale.com and I designed the website on figma and then Dan coded it up into WordPress and so for example one thing that Dan our website manager was working on is like where do we plug the book and so initially he had it over here but then the other day I was working through and I thought we could maybe do something like this where we just replaced the home page with this sort of thing um this was in fact inspired by jamesclere.com when you go on jamesclare.com the first thing you see is the book whereas for my website it was like in a pre-book launch is like fair enough there's a lot of text over here but I think post book launch we wanted it to look more like the main thing we want people to do is to order the book so please if you if you if you've gone this far in the video You're Gonna you're gonna like the book please pre-order the book would love it if you do anyway so I was sort of playing around with these little rectangles moving them around and like okay cool let's make that color let's I don't know make that the yellow and let's put that up in there or something that looks kind of nice and so just trying to play around to see like okay what is a design style that makes sense alternatively if I wanted to I could duplicate that okay let's put all this off to side let's grab these and align them that way move it like this align that like this boom boom stick that over there that would be another way of doing like the exactly that could look quite nice if you're trying to do this level of mock-ups in something like WordPress or webflow we'll just take ages because you have to deal with the confines of the code whereas this is literally just a design platform so the book has a bunch of diagrams in it and we basically made all of them in illustrator and figma so for example this is a diagram I was making about the motivation Spectrum which is something that's in the book this is one of the chapters which is about power and sort of playing around with like what would it look like to have a little diagram like this these icons are from Flat icon but then we hired a designer Stefan to redo all the icons just so we had our own custom icons and they were all the same kind of style final thing I want to show you is fig Jam so figma has sort of two different bits in it this figma which is like this design software that I've just shown you and then this fig Jam which is more like an interactive White body type thing so here's a fun little thing this is like that Meme where you know that guy is just like doing all the stuff with this is full of Pepe and I was trying to figure out like what is like what does the business look like if we put it turn it and turned it into boxes and arrows on the page and so it's like okay well how do we grow our email list is the email list the main thing and I was like okay what about if we thought of it like this you know we get views we get followers we get email Subs we get Revenue through our YouTuber Academy we get profit we've reinvest The Profit that gets us views then we're trying to figure out like where does Book Sales come into this this is like a whole thing that I took again students of my part-time YouTuber accelerated through because this is way too Niche for this YouTube channel I think figma and fig Jam have a really good free plan so if you don't want to pay for it like it's actually very good I've been using it for years next up on the list we have convertkit which is the platform that we use to grow our email list and to send my Weekly Newsletter and basically this is an email marketing platform but we broadly use it for the newsletter so for example what would you do if you knew you can fail this was the latest newsletter that I sent and we can see it was sent to 368 000 people 42 opened it 1 322 people hit the unsubscribe button this always happens every time I send an email we always get like a thousand plus unsubscribes and then you can see like how is the email list growing over time so I think we yeah we started using convertkit properly in April 2021 and these were just email Subs that were imported from other platforms uh because the thing that was on review which is then was bought by Twitter and then shut down and we can see that like you know April 2021 through to here is like this is what the growth of our email list is looking like this was a big Month in May 2023 we got 128 000 net new subscribers you can see that our average open rate is 52.5 percent and we've sent four million emails over the last like two years which is pretty awesome and we can also see how our total subscribers has changed over time so this is fun you can see we started out at zero in 2020 50k 100K 100K etc etc now we're on in total 482 915 subscribers across all the different Meeting Lists now the cool thing about convertkit is that you can send broadcast but you can also send sequences and so for example as part of our YouTuber Academy we have I think a five day or seven day part-time YouTuber crash course which is a series of seven emails that people get every day but that is a sequence so we don't have to send those manually we just write the sequence ones so for example this is our seven day part-time YouTuber crash course where it's like you can see day one day two day three it's like each day what we're trying to do is you know a YouTube channel can change your life the five biggest myths around starting a YouTube channel five productivity tips for part-time YouTubers creating valuable educational content is a skill so this is our seven day email sequence which is just like cool because you can do that in convertkit and so if you're considering adding in email marketing to your business or you want to at some point further in life I have a link down below you can check it out if you want next on the list we have help Scout which is an app a specific app that we use to manage customer support so if anyone emails the customer support address for our YouTuber Academy students initially it was all handled on a Gmail account that it ends up becoming a total absolute nightmare because we get like lots and lots of emails every day from our students and we have multiple people our customer support people responding to those emails and then Gmail just breaks very quickly so what helpscout basically is is that anytime someone emails that address it goes into helps Scout so for example this is what the part-time YouTuber Academy mailbox looks like you can see that this is basically an email inbox but then if I click on one of these emails what I can do is I can assign it to someone in the team or if someone in the team is replying to one of these emails and then once I go into the email I can either choose to reply to the email myself in which case it will show that I am the one replying to the email or I can assign it to someone else in the team who's be who's going to be more legit at replying to the email and then what you can do is you can see like the data of your customer support team over time so we've had 4473 customers since starting this about a year ago you can see that in that time we've had 25 000 total conversations with 8 100 different people which is on average 27 conversations per day whenever we run a run a cohort of our YouTuber Academy we've got a spike in email support traffic like this was April 2023 where we had our biggest cohort ever we got 3 800 emails that month with various things that were going on and so our customer support team is working overdrive to reply to all those emails but it's still way way more efficient doing it on help Scout than it is trying to do it on Gmail and again what we can also do is at the end of every email it says please rate this reply was it good was it great was it mediocre and based on that it will calculate like 93 of people who got emails from us are happy three percent are okay and four percent there are 25 people that said that their response was not good I think this might have been people asking for discounts where we said sorry we don't do discounts whatever that might be but it gives us a happiness score and then we can monitor that happiness score over the long term all right two more apps and the next one on our list is QuickBooks which is the software that we use to handle all of our accounting and finances and so QuickBooks is basically where we do all of our Finance and Accounting I don't spend much time in QuickBooks because we have Angus our CEO who spends a lot of time in there we have our accountants who spend a lot of time in there we have Dan who's kind of our internal accounting liaison person who spends a lot of time in there basically everything is done within QuickBooks so if I go if I go on reports and so we can see exactly how much money is coming in and how much money we're spending on all the things let's say it's like a software my software software and subscriptions you can see that so far this year we've spent 64 648 pounds on software and subscriptions and then I can click on that and I can see a list of all the transactions that are going in on this transaction drill down report in terms of all of the software and stuff that we pay for there's a lot of software there's a lot of stuff going on and it's great because every month we get these monthly management accounts and some of the time we actually share these on Twitter so if you follow me on Twitter you'll see you'll see some of these and that's super helpful as for me as the business owner to be able to see every single month like how much money is coming in how much money is going out what are the trends how's the profitability doing like that is the stuff that I'm now thinking of every month as the business owner but thankfully because I've got Angus as my CEO managing all the stuff I don't have to think about it too hard I just look at the numbers and make sure everything is legit because for me the thing that I love about doing this sort of thing is filming videos and sharing stuff and talking to people and giving talks I don't really enjoy drilling into the finances but Angus loves a spreadsheet so it's good to have people in your team who have the skills and the interests that you don't particularly want to do yourself or not particularly good at and then the final app I want to talk about is stripe which is what we use for our payment processing and the great thing about stripe is that it just lets you accept payments from most places in the world so we can see our courses business us this is how much money we make today this is how much money we made yesterday and this is our gross volume for this year so far oh we've just crossed that threshold which is which is very nice indeed and we can see how many succeeded payments refunded payments how many failed payments and subscribe is just amazing like if we ever have an issue with someone asking a refund we can do it via stripe if someone is it says like a payment's not going through we can go into stripe and see exactly why the payment is not going through through our customer support team and then they can sort it out now if you go to the end of this video I would love it if you can leave a clover Emoji down in the comments I'm just so cute this is going to be a really probably one of the longest videos I've ever done but I would love to know like if in the comments below did you find this sort of thing useful these sorts of walkthrough videos always take ages because there's so much going on behind the scenes of this business and I never know what detail to go into on the YouTube channel because it's it's a bit Niche but I'm hoping if you're watching this message at this point in the video you've got some kind of value from it I'd love to hear in the comments like you can leave a clover Emoji to let me know you've gotten this far but also what did you like about this video what what would you like to see more of what would you like to see less of what would you like more detail on super help for me to know that so I can then make these videos in future because I just love I just love this stuff like this is my day-to-day life running this business and I almost never show what's going on because it just feels a bit too Niche but anyway if you enjoyed this video um I would love it if you can please pre-order copy my book I guarantee it'll be good it's called feel good productivity how to do more of what matters to you it's coming out in a few months but if you pre-order it and save your receipt you're going to get some very special bonuses including some stuff related to the behind the scenes of running a business and if you enjoyed this video and you're looking for something else to watch that contains more consumer apps rather than business facing apps check out this video over here which is the top apps that are on my Mac that has helped me level up in my personal productivity so thank you so much for watching have a great day and I'll see in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 227,279

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, ali abdaal, business apps, apps for your business, converkit, notion, webflow, helpscout, loom, rize, kajabi, quickbooks, how to build a business, app tutorial, app workflow, app walkthrough, make money online, make money from home, how to make money online, best way to make money online

Id: rjcejdY_iNU

Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023