- 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.
