If You Want to Make Money From YouTube, Do This (Case Study)

A few years ago, my friend Jeff Su decided while working at Google that he was going to start a YouTube channel. He made $98 in his first six months. And then a few years later, last year, he made $835,000 from his YouTube channel. The cool thing about Jeff's story is that he never planned to be an entrepreneur. He wasn't even intending to make money from YouTube. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I'm extremely risk averse. I thought I was just going to like die at Google. And yet he was able to build such an incredible business, doing it on the side of his full-time demanding corporate job. So in this case study, we're going to break down Jeff's entire journey from like total noob on YouTube all the way to basically building a million dollar business and how he was able to do all of that while still being a high performer at his job. Along the way, as we go through the journey, I'm gonna be interjecting with my own thoughts on Jeff's story. So hopefully this won't just feel like a podcast, it'll be a conversation with some actionable takeaways that you can apply to your life. Step one, find your itch and pick your vehicle. So before we get into all of this, I asked Jeff to talk us through his revenue trajectory so you can see how the numbers changed over time. I actually prepared a spreadsheet. in anticipation of this question, but I can walk you through the sort of high level first before we dive into the numbers. When I first started YouTube, I literally did not know what the monetization strategy was. I was just like, oh, there's advertising on YouTube. I could just switch that on. I'd make money, passive income for the rest of my life and not have to work. like one minute longer than i have to right turns out that wasn't the case it wasn't that easy so my by the end of my first year um my first ever youtube video was uploaded on june 3rd 2020 i remember that and by the end of that year so six months later i made a whopping 98 through advertising which was actually pretty impressive considering i didn't think i was going to monetize in the first like two years or something fast forward though i would say the first thing i ever like sold is my PDF version of my resume that got me to Google. And I use air quotes because I actually shared it for free. And a month later, after I shared it for free on Gumroad, I literally received an email saying I made a thousand US dollars. So I was like, must be a mistake or a scam i log in and it's from donation people have donated ranging from one dollar to twenty dollars even when they could have just downloaded for free and that broke my mind that was the first time i understood oh if i shared massive value for free online people notice and they sort of respect that and they reward you for it so fast forward up to now i have more than like 40 templates on gumroad 90 of which are free and it's people are still donating it's it's it's amazing yeah so that's sort of the first taste of selling products that I experienced. Nice. In 2020, you made $98. In 2021, you made $52,000. 2023, we've got $449,000. And 2025, this year so far, $835,000. And you're on track to do about $900 by the end of the year. Something like that. Yeah, we'll see how this podcast goes. And then how much were you making at Google back when you worked there? I'm going to say the number, but I have to give a little bit of important context. I started off working at Google Hong Kong, and I took a 60% pay cut. to work in google china like mainland china and not only uh is that region the low one of the lowest paid i think globally for google but one of the highest tax brackets so for example at hong kong the tax cap wrapped um maxed out at around like 15 but like mainland china that's like 35 so i want to just set some important context by the time i left i was at l5 and i was making my base salary i believe 60 something thousand rmb per month but that's not taking into account number one the equity that has sort of um aggregated over the past nine years and the annual bonus so just for discussion's sake i'd say let's say 100k rmb all in every month by the time i quit so you're working working at google and you're making around about 150 000 us dollars a year yeah but you're in mainland china which is like super low paid if you were in like san francisco for example how much would you have been earning in the equivalent job at google 300 400 000 us dollars now quite a lot of people in my audience certainly people who sign up to our lifestyle business academy which is our online business school to help people start businesses lots of y'all are in a similar sort of position where you might have one of these high-paying corporate jobs. And what I hear from y'all at my events and workshops and stuff is that you appreciate the fact that you have this stable and secure job, but really you have this itch of really wanting freedom. You want freedom from the shackles of full-time employment. You want the freedom to live life on your own terms. And so I was curious, and I asked Jeff, to what extent did he resonate with that particular idea of freedom? So I'll be very honest with you, Ali. I wish I could follow up on that and tell you that's exactly how I felt. That's exactly what I resonate with 100%. But I never had that plan, if I'm being very honest. I never wanted to be entrepreneur. I'm extremely risk averse. I thought I was just going to like die at Google with some like a lot of, you know, stock options and, you know. having experienced free food and coffee for the last like 40 years right i thought i literally thought that was playing because i really enjoyed my time that really i enjoyed working the people i watched that interview with sohel right where you he was okay with dipping into one year savings i was like not about that chinese mentality you should never dip in your savings until you know you're married or you know you're buying a house and it honestly just sort of happened because i fell in love with teaching For context, at Google, we have something called, or they had something called G2G, Googler to Googler workshops, whereby anyone can raise their hand and be like, hey, I have a topic I want to talk about, and people want to sign up. I ran workshops for inbox zero, email management, productivity workflows, and even health and fitness. Although not many people came to that for whatever reason. And I realized I really want to do that forever, basically. And I thought making videos would be a great way to scale that. And that's literally how I started making videos. I didn't think I was... going to quit one day. It was more like, oh, this is more scalable because people keep asking me for the same content. Okay. So you didn't set out to make money. No, you set out to simply give back. Well, okay. So that makes me sound really selfless. The selfish part of that is I like, I like the attention and I like the sound of my own voice and I like. like being smarter than other people in that specific context. If I'm being very honest, but yes, I always like, I also like to teach. Yes. Now, by the way, if you are anything like me, you probably spend way too much time dealing with your email inbox, which is where the sponsor of this video comes in, Superhuman Mail. Superhuman Mail is an AI native inbox upgrade. 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Like if you wanna find a frequent flyer number, instead of having to then use the search and then troll through all the emails and figure out where the thing is, just ask the ai and it's really good at getting you the right answer and then being able to reference the email that it got the answer from you should totally upgrade your inbox with superhuman mail today and you can get one month completely for free with the link in the video description so thank you so much superhuman mail for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it why did you decide YouTube was the way to go back in 2020 rather than, I mean, at the time TikTok was a thing that you could have done Instagram stuff, you could have started a blog, you could have started an email newsletter, Substack had just gotten started, like you could have started a podcast. What was it about YouTube making YouTube videos that appealed at the time? So two reasons. The first one, at the risk of sounding like a brown nosing, like Ali Abdel fan, your videos back then came at a perfect time whereby when I started thinking about making these sort of content online. A lot of your videos back then in 2020 was talking about exactly your experience making YouTube videos. So number one, I'm going to stop there because it just makes it sound like I'm like... I love the validation. I love it. It's great. Keep going. Yeah. So your videos basically had a step-by-step blueprint and how to succeed on YouTube. And number two, I would say is because inherently I didn't want to sell anything. And I knew from watching your videos that youtube just paid you sort of like an advertising like cut of their advertising revenue so you didn't have to like hard pitch anything to make money i knew i didn't have to be like oh you should come to my workshop pay me and then i'll deliver this it was more like okay i'm gonna make a video on this topic If you want to watch, come watch. And I think I'll make some pocket change. And if you don't, that's totally cool. That was a vibe I was going for. Nice. So you're going squarely with this is just a side hustle. I'm just doing this for the vibes. To be honest, that was kind of how I started as well. I had no intention of leaving medicine. I was like, oh, my dream would be if I could work three days a week. Right. I was like, cool, I need 3000 pounds a month. And then I felt like I was selling courses in like real life, teaching these workshops and like, oh, YouTube videos as a sort of lead generation mechanism. That seems kind of cool. and i remember like my first video that went viral was like how to study for exams yeah and that was actually a workshop i did in real life like five years prior at university i held a workshop on how to study for exams and it was really fun and those people showed up and they loved it and it was like a facebook event back in the day back when people cared about facebook events and the the the response to that workshop Stayed in my mind for like five years makes sense when I started my YouTube channel I was like at some point I want to make that video about how to study for exams because I think it's gonna bang and so that was sort of like Sort of from from a similar place. I wasn't really expecting that it would become a full-time living, right? It was more like hey, this is a vehicle for teaching I'm already kind of selling these like classroom courses Let me just sort of combine the love of teaching and then make some pocket money on the side, right? was it for med school but i'm just curious was it like for med school applications or just studying in general i was studying in general yeah oh studying in general yeah so i ran a workshop at at the university where which anyone could attend that was like evidence-based study tips on how to study for exams in general and there were people from all sorts of subjects there and so that was when i knew i had something i guess similar to you like you would have loved the gdg workshop program at google like you would have just definitely shared a lot of what you learned yeah So all the OG YouTubers who started out in the early 2010s, if we think iJustine, like Linus, if we think Marques Brownlee, almost none of them started out because they wanted to make money. They started out because of the love for the craft. Increasingly over time, people are starting YouTube channels and wanting to build these lifestyle businesses for the money. Do you have any friends, any experiences, any data points you can point to of people who've sort of gone in with the money intention first rather than the teaching intention first, if that makes sense? I'm trying really hard to think. I can't think of anyone who has quote unquote succeeded so far. They're like doing it right now, but they haven't succeeded just yet, if that makes sense. Put simply. If you were to ask me today which path I would choose, I would still go with a creator-led or creative first sort of journey. The reason is because I feel it's more organic. To give you a very specific example, I mentioned just now that my first product was a free PDF version of my resume, right? I uploaded that onto Gumroad to complement my resume video. I wanted viewers to have something next to them. so they can reference as they watch my video to optimize their resume i didn't expect them to donate and after they donated i got questions like hey do you mind if you share a google docs version that i can edit myself i'd actually pay you for it i was like okay it's the same thing but okay sure and i charged like 4.99 4.99 for it and that was another incremental 1k a month in in revenue right i think with my personality i would have found it very very difficult to start with a product idea and go with suhello's path whereby he knew he was going to quit his job. He did user interviews. He did focus groups. He had alpha testing, had beta testing, gone through all those sort of challenges and roadblocks, right? Of people saying, oh, this box sucks. How dare you ask me to try that, right? Like I've thin skin sort of, so that would have been difficult for me and him having to reach out. Like he sent what 50 to a hundred cold emails a day, right? For three months and cold calls. Although I come from a sales background, I would, I still find it very, very difficult to ask. for things when I don't have like a lot of value to give. So that's my sort of perspective there. Interesting, yeah. So I think your perspective is what most people in my audience would actually want. Like almost no one listening to this would be comfortable sending 50 to 100 DMs a day. and facing the rejection. We have people who've paid to be in our program that are uncomfortable making their first post on LinkedIn because they're worried about what their colleagues will think, you know, that kind of idea. So when people ask me for advice on this, like how to make money on the internet thing, I broadly sketch out these two different paths. There's the creator first approach and then there's the business first approach. The business first approach is what my friend Sahel took. He's the founder of an app called Firecut that made like a million dollars in annual recurring revenue within like 18 months. We have another case study with him on the channel that you might've seen. We'll link it down below if you wanna check it out. But the business first approach is where you're like, I wanna create a product first, a business first, and then I'll worry about building an audience second. So in my friend Sahil's case, he built this product called Firecut, which is a software that helps video editors save time using AI. He didn't particularly have a massive love for video editors or something. I mean, he dabbled with a little bit of video editing in his own time, but he built it because he saw a gap in the market and he recognized that actually he could build a product that could potentially add value to these people's lives and make a lot of money along the way. And then like two years into this journey, He and his wife have now started creating content on Instagram and on Twitter and stuff as a way of like getting leads to the business. This is sort of like the business first approach to making money on the internet. But then you have the creator first approach. And the creator first approach is often taken by people who don't care that much about the monetization side, at least not initially. So Jeff is an example of someone who took the creator first approach. He started doing content because he liked the idea of teaching. And over time, he managed to build an audience of people who knew, liked and trusted him. And over time, he was able to then turn it into a business by selling his PDFs and selling his programs and selling his speaking gigs and all that kind of stuff. That was not the intention from day one. So the homework would be, and I'd love to hear it in a comment if you feel like leaving a comment. If let's say a university hired you to teach a lecture course about whatever you wanted, and you just knew that once a week you had to teach something around a certain theme, what would that theme be? What would you like the idea of teaching about? That might give you an idea. If you want to take this sort of educational creative first approach, that might give you an idea as to what that thing might be. I actually just got reminded of... one of my friends who's on the flip side like the business first do you mind if i share that experience so for context a total of 37 googlers reached out to me while i was doing youtube over the course of five years if you don't mind ali can you guess how many of those googlers who are all extremely smart extremely intelligent many of them much smarter more competent than me very ambitious how many took action after scheduling a one-on-one with me asking for specific advice on how to start youtube oh okay i would guess that seven of them made their first video and two of them made more than 10. Sorry, I'm just smirking because obviously I know the answer. One person took action. One person. 37 Googlers. And the reason, again, a reason I know because I just find them in the Gmail, right? So 37 Googlers reached out to me. One person took action. The first action I told them to do was even simpler than what you expected, like making the first video. Your product has already been discontinued, but I told them. your first step is to take ollie's one dollar course oh do you remember that yeah we had a one dollar course already had a one dollar course it's like four hours of content about how to make your first youtube video or something it was one dollar literally a dollar that's nothing to to to most people especially if you knew you wanted to do something right one person took that course one person took that course one i didn't hear from the other 36 again and her right now he has a respectable newsletter of over 5 000 subscribers the reason why he was business first is because this might be tmi He broke his leg and he couldn't do anything for six months. So in those six months, he wrote a book. It's called Taking This Offline. It's basically how to have an executive presence in the workplace and be tactical and smart about it, right? He wrote the book. He published himself and he was selling it for like $10 or $15 on Gumroad. No sales. I wonder why, right? Because he had no distribution channel, no audience, none of that. So actually he approached me after the book. He was like, hey, I'm trying to sell this product. Like, what should I do? I'm like, I'll be honest. I don't know. But I think it would be much easier if you had people to sell it to. He was like, so what should I do? I was like, since it's more like professional focused LinkedIn platform, you could start posting on there and add a link to the book in your description or something and maybe start a newsletter because that's what I was doing. I'm trying to sell my products. He was like, cool. And that's what he did. And then after he started a newsletter, after I think two months, he made his first sale. Yeah, and then he turned that book, he chopped that book up into lead magnets, free lead magnets to get people to sign up for a newsletter and so on and so forth. So yeah, it was a virtual cycle after that. Okay, I'm so glad you brought this up. So why do you think one out of 37 people took action? Like, what was it about the other 36? These are smart people. They're very competent in the workplace. They're clearly succeeding in life. What is stopping them from doing the thing that they claimed to have wanted to stop? i'll be i'll say this up front and then i'll share my thoughts the short answer is i don't know but i've thought about it a lot because i was pretty shocked that none of them got back to me and one of one or two of them when i ran into them was like oh how's it going they're like oh i haven't really started yet right i was pretty shocked because in my mind i was i thought the only reason people would not do something if they wanted to is they don't know how to do it for example to your um going back to your workshop on how to study right all students want to be you know uh want to get a's they want to get good grades most of them probably don't know about specific tactics and that's why going to you go in your workshop they can learn it and they sort of execute theoretically 100 of those students should execute and just follow your you know studying tips right theoretically speaking um but i'm sure i'm sure 100 did not follow those tactics they they went and they went back and they didn't change anything so my hypothesis is that honestly the motivation for them to start didn't align with what they had to do. I think it's about intrinsic extrinsic motivation at the end of the day. And again, I learned this from you. So for those of you who've never come across this concept, extrinsic motivation comes from outcomes you cannot control, right? For example, views, that's controlled by YouTube algorithm, an audience, and like say promotion at work because that's corporate politics and who likes who and all that fun stuff, headcount, budget, all that fun stuff. Extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic motivation whereby it comes from outcomes you do control, right? how many videos I upload a week or a month or a year, how many meetings I volunteer to share something, um, about that as something I learned this week in the workplace, right. To, to, to establish presence. Right. So I think the 36 people, they wanted more of that extrinsic validation, like, Oh, it'll be nice to make money. It'd be nice to make, I have views. It would be nice to have something on the side. It'd be nice to quit one, one, like one day in the future versus I think the people who actually take action. they set the intrinsic goals. They're like, okay, not sure how this will turn out, but I'm going to commit to writing one newsletter a week for two years, which is what Hearn sort of did. Right. So I think that to me, that that's the biggest difference between those two groups. Yeah. I think, yeah. I think there's also something around like everyone wants the outcome, right? Like if you asked anyone, Hey, would you like a multi six figure, seven figure business where you're just like able to talk about whatever you want and people will just buy your stuff and you would never have to be feel salesy. Like almost everyone would be like, Oh, hell yeah, sign me up. But similarly, if you were to ask most people, hey, would you like to be in like amazing health where you wake up every day feeling energized and like, you know, people sort of give you compliments at the beach about your six pack abs? Most dudes at least would be like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. I would say that sounds pretty good. And then I'm like, and then if you're like, okay, well, this is the process it involves to get there. All of a sudden for the health example, I'm like, ah, yeah. You know, the juice just doesn't seem worth the squeeze. I don't care about this enough to go through what seems to be a painful process. And I think for people starting YouTube channels or starting online businesses and stuff, in your case and in my case, I get the impression, certainly for me, I actually enjoyed the process of making YouTube videos because I enjoy teaching. If I didn't enjoy the process of making YouTube videos, there's no freaking way I'd have made 90 videos before anything took off or like, you know, grinded out for a whole year to make $8 or like whatever the thing is. um and i think i think a lot of people come in with that outcome in mind but then realize the process is really painful and they don't want to do the process anymore which i think is also fine like yeah yeah and there are parts of the process both of us don't like that much right for example let's say the video editing initially especially in the beginning was it was very tedious but you know it was part of the sharing and teaching process so it was okay like overall it was uh it was it was a win for us yeah so of the 37 googlers that asked jeff about this thing one of them took action would you like to be one of the one would you like to be one of the 36 And then people think, man, do I have to like quit my job to start something else? But you were sort of like maintaining the side hustle for years before you just recently quit. Yeah. So I think for context, I followed your premise of upload one video a week for two years and your life will change. So that was my. goal from the outset it was just going to be two years it wasn't going to be five it wouldn't be seven it was going to be three it was just two years right so i quote unquote what the young kids these days were called locked in for those two years whereby every day i'd be the first person in the office i'd arrive like 6 30 7 a.m in the morning and the reason i arrived that early is because i knew no one else would be in the office to bother me with stuff so from seven to eight i would review like the upcoming day and the next few days of like workload and plan around that and this is called my review session i have three review sessions every day to make sure nothing slipped to the cracks so seven to eight like review what i have to do for the upcoming day eight to 8 30 breakfast 8 30 8 40 after like coffee to 11 45 would be work the reason i say 11 45 because 11 30 is when lunch started in the office and i didn't want to waste time waiting in line So if you went at 11.45, you could just get the food and go back to your desk or eat really quickly and get back to work, right? So 11.45 to 12.30, lunch. 12.30 all the way to 5 would be Google work. And I got to leave at 5 because I got there at 6.30, 7 a.m., right? 5 to 6, gym, because for me, actually the number one thing that matters in my life is health, for sure. Like my mom said, there's no point having money if... you're sick so uh five to six gym six to six thirty dinner and then from six thirty to eleven or sometimes twelve to one you just be working on youtube nice weekends eight to eight eight a.m to eight p.m youtube nice i love that yes yeah fantastic that is music to my ears i love it well it sucked back then though that's so good um i think people really underestimate the amount of time you have to give to something for it to work i was listening to um james clear on diary of a ceo while i was on a run yesterday and they were talking about this like four bonus theory there's like four burners yeah that's sort of like you've got this these four burners on the stove and you know one of them is like career one of them is health one of them is like uh family one of them is friends i think side hustle would be like a fifth burner and at the most only two of them can be burning at full blast at any given time And if you want all of them to be burning, like you have to, you gotta, like, it's just like life is a series of trade-offs. Yeah. I mean, Scott Galloway, right? Like you can have it all, but not the same, not everything at once, basically. Yeah, exactly. And this is something that I've heard from a lot of women in the workplace as well, that like this idea that like, yes, you can have the family and you can do the work thing. It's just difficult to do at the same time, unless you're going to give up other things in your life. And so it sounds like in your case, you were taking care of your health with your one hour of gym a day. Oh, for sure. maintaining good progress at the corporate job but then all of the rest of your time seemingly was focused on the youtube thing i want to be very mindful of how i describe this because in the end it pays off and i'm not trying to promote this lifestyle if that makes sense right it really has everyone has their own personal preferences and choices but for me it was extremely painful And we can talk about this later, but I used to party a lot. I used to go out a lot. I grew up in Hong Kong and started going out when I was 14, Ali. 14 years old. 14? Bloody hell. I was playing World of Warcraft when I was working. I was gaming too. I was playing World of Warcraft Theater, Frozen Throne, but I was also going out. Funny story, one of the nights I literally couldn't go back home because after drinking, I didn't want my parents when I was drinking, I slept in an internet cafe. I was gaming until 6 a.m. and then went back home. Nice. Sorry, Mom. Living the dream. Living the dream. I love it. yeah but i had to give all that up for two years and that's why i started off saying i only i was only committed two years for two years i i i went out maybe once a quarter and there was never a moment where a friend was like hey can we get dinner next friday i was like no we have to like we have to I have to schedule one month in advance because if I got dinner with you, then the video, you know, I upload one video a week, then I couldn't do the video, but not committed to video. So, you know, I have to plan around that. There were literally times whereby to make a wedding or a big event, I had to front load two videos in a week and basically not sleep. And then to go to the wedding. right it was it was crazy crazy like that and the worst part was i would say um this might be tmi i'm usually a very happy optimistic person i would say i lost like i would say 70 of my friends during that time because people just stopped inviting me to stuff and the worst part of that was that it was my problem not theirs like for example if a girl rejected me i'd be like i don't like her anyways she's not even pretty or like if i didn't get the promotion that was a manager's fault right it's not me you could also sort of blame someone but current friends would tell me they were like party friends. Anyways, it doesn't matter. But I would say at that moment, it was really, really hard on me. Yeah. Was it worth it? Yeah, yes, for sure. Of course, it was worth it. Because at the end of the day, my motivation to do this for the past five years was okay, do I want to trade my five years of utility happy pleasure for 50 years of freedom, right? Because we both have heard stories about parents who had to miss important milestones of their kids because they had to work and provide for the family, right? It's like, oh, I'm so sorry, I can't make it to your soccer, football, sorry, football practice or football game rather because daddy has to go to a conference or something along those lines, right? I want the opportunity to ignore my kids myself. No, I want the opportunity to be there for them if I wanted to be. the looking back it was obviously the right choice but in that moment it was difficult so it's like you're choosing to pay the cost right now rather than in the future because i think most people forget that it's a very virtuous flywheel and the growth comes exponentially but it's not like oh you give a five years for like five years of good good stuff and they have to give five years again that's not how it works it's more like you give a five years and for the next like decade two decades three decades it just keeps getting easier and easier because you already know what to expect so that's how i think about it So Jeff traded two years of his social life for what will hopefully be, you know, a couple of decades worth of freedom. And along the way, he says he lost 70% of his friends and he had to say no to almost everything in his life. You might be interested to know what was the real deep, dark motivation underneath this that made him want to do this grind. And we talk about that a little bit later on in the video. So that will be coming up in step number seven, I think. Okay, so you're grinding it out for these two years, spending a ton of time. To what extent, like we talked about the friends piece, but to what extent did it feel like a grind versus feel like actually you were having fun because you're working on this thing that's like quite exhilarating and it's yeah ah i've actually a very interesting perspective on this because it's happening to me recently so during that period of time i didn't even have time to think whether or not i was grinding because everything was so sort of set in stone so to speak because i knew what i had to do every single day So for the first two years, that was my life. I didn't overthink it. So I would say actually, this is one of my unfair advantages. This is sort of how I'm built. Once I commit to something, I just don't renegotiate with myself and I don't follow basketball. But I saw this clip from Kobe Bryant where he was saying how, and I'm going to butcher the terminology. So people in the comments are probably going to. call it out but long story short for basketball players like him um during their off season or something they have summer training sessions so they have to like three months where they just train right and apparently what kobe bryan did was he would sign a contract with himself saying i'm going to train 12 hours a day and this is going to be my training plan and once that's signed he cannot renegotiate with himself he just can't change anything so he just has to do it so he doesn't think he just does it right and so to answer the first part of your question i would say for the first two years that was like my mindset i'm like okay i'm just gonna do the thing and we'll figure it out after funnily enough it's not until after i quit google where i was like oh i've quote unquote made it i quit and i have some sort of financial security i can do what i want when that question came into play like oh what would i what i do now like do i do i do i continue doing this like how does my day look like suddenly at all these free hours Do I go out? Do I go clubbing? Do I, you know, do I go out and party and make up for those lost time? That doesn't sound right. I should keep growing. So that was actually when I became a bit more confused and lost. It was after I quit, not during the time. Yeah. Yeah. Same for me. I remember distinctly, like sort of even from one day to the next, like, you know, my final week of working as a doctor, it was during the pandemic. I had shifts on all the time and we released and we filmed three videos that week. Oh, wow. the week i left medicine because i was going to go to australia for emergency medicine etc etc and they closed their borders but the week i was unemployed i filmed nothing i was like oh i've got the whole day like what do i do and i found that for me the negotiation the renegotiation of the contract started when i quit the job and when my only thing was like okay well i can i can do whatever i want so like what the hell do i want to do whereas when you've got a job and you're just sort of squeezing it in because you've got to pump out those one or two videos a week like that it's a it's an additional full-time job to figure out how to pump out these extra one or two videos a week consistently while juggling everything and everything else in life which doesn't leave a lot of room for hmm am i really enjoying this is this really my purpose is this my mission i don't really want to be doing this it's like no and especially when you're on a wave and you're riding the wave of like okay things are working like um growth can mask a lot of kind of misalignment sometimes for sure it's like when the numbers are going up you just don't think too hard about it yeah it's when the numbers stop going up or when you have a lot of free time, you start to think like, hmm. So now we move on to step three, which is to suck less with each rep. But before we go there, I wanted to ask Jeff the thorny question that's in a lot of people's minds, which is what if you try this and it doesn't work out? There was a lovely young lady who came to one of our events when I was in London a few months ago, and she had taken our YouTube course a few years ago. And also. Swore by the you know, I'm gonna be gonna stay consistent for two years and it's gonna change my life And in those two years she'd made 300 something videos They're all vlogs of like her life in London and she had 700 subscribers and was not yet monetized At what point do you cut your losses? At what point do you decide like things need to change like how? Yeah, my answer is twofold. I would say first One of my friends in China because China has a different sort of creator ecosystem. They have Xiaohongshu like Little Red Book and Bilibili And I've actually also seen creators who stay consistent and might not gain traction on the Chinese sort of social media platforms. I used to tell them as long as you upload one video a week for two years, you're going to succeed. But after analyzing their performance, I realized the most crucial part. You have to upload a video every week for two years. That's given. But you have to suck less with each video. You have to make at least a 1% improvement. And looking back. I did that, but I didn't really internalize. I didn't know what I was doing that. For example, my first video was absolute dog shit. I spent 40 hours on it. It was absolutely terrible. No one watched it. Makes sense. I was like, oh, it's because my lighting sucks. So I changed the lighting. That's the only thing I changed in the second video. It still sucked. And then I was like, oh, actually the color scheme is kind of all over the place. Like orange, yellow, red, and blue. Let's stick with one. And then it made the color scheme change. And then I got better audio, so on and so forth. And this leads to the second part of my answer, the student who spoke with you and my creator friends. It seems like the student needed to find a painful problem to solve. Like at some point, yes, you get good at making videos, but you might not be making content and making videos people need or want. And I think that's going to be the crossroads in which you have to make a decision whether to cut your losses. Because let's say the student realizes, oh, My vlogs are not going to take off. I have to pivot to, let's say, how to be a better real estate agent. Sorry, I'm just making this up, right? At that point, she has to ask herself, do I really want to talk about this for like two, three years? Do I really want to go on? Am I passionate about it? I'm good at this, sure, but do I really want to do this, right? If the answer is no, maybe, you know, sticking with a more full-time thing that brings you better utility is better. But if the answer is, yeah, it's like not bad. I could see myself doing this. Then you would just pivot. I think the pivot, I was missing the pivot. part when I was telling people, hey, if you just upload one of your two years, you'll wood at life. That was what I was missing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen this pattern play out quite a lot as well. Sometimes I'll see comments on my videos from someone with like a username that's like a jumble of characters. And they'll say, Ali, I've been making YouTube videos for two years and nothing's happening. And I'm like, huh. I look at their channel. And all of the videos for the last two years, they're random topics. They don't have their face. They're like three minutes long. They're throwing spaghetti at the wall using whiteboard animation software and now AI animation software, voiceovers that are clearly AI generated, and missing the crucial strategy component of like, yeah, sure, you can just make YouTube videos, just like anyone can publish a book and stick it on Amazon. But ultimately, people need to pay for your videos. If they're not paying with their money, they're paying with their time and attention, which is in many ways more valuable than their money. So what is the thing? And if you were starting YouTube today, would you... think about niche from day one or would you throw spaghetti at the wall in terms of making some videos or like yeah so i like this question because i think i have a good answer uh and it's it's something i've told other people other budding creators who've asked me like hey jeff like what would you literally what would you do if you started today right i'll be like copy find someone to copy i think i've i've told you this a few times before i tried my best to copy your style when i started i tried my best i couldn't do it Because I'm not you, right? Like, I could try to be like, okay, what's the font Ollie's using? What's the color? What are the packs that he's using in like Final Cut Pro? I took a Skillshare course. I'm going to use everything he said in that course. I'm just going to make the same video. Not even close to being the same video, right? And I have this saved in my Google Photos albums. It wasn't until a year in someone was like, oh, this guy is like the Asian Ollie Abdaal. I have that like to this day. I was so happy to see that, but it took someone a year to figure that out that was trying to copy you. Like, wow, I did a terrible job in copying you, right? So the point I'm trying to make here is, if you're starting today, find someone you respect and copy the crap out of them. And people are like, oh no, that's plagiarism. Well, no, unless you're literally downloading the videos and uploading it onto your channel, there's no way you could possibly copy them well. Because you don't have the experience, you haven't put in the reps yet, right? but you have an image of what good looks like so you know you have like what the gap is and if you allow me to be a nerd here ali that's exactly why context engineering is so important for ai right it's so much better to give ai like an example of a good output for example a youtube video script then say write me a good youtube video script and the tone of voice of ali abdallah jeff sue right if you could get the script it's going to be much closer exact same way so in a nutshell what i would tell people is find someone you respect right now in whatever social media platform um they're on study them copy them at some point along your journey you are going to find your own brand and your own voice and it will just come naturally come out you're not going to have to force it because you'll realize oh i i i disagree with ali and jeff here this is this is my point of view It's just going to come naturally. Yeah, I completely agree. When I started in 2017, I was trying to be Peter McKinnon. So when I was doing like my I would watch his Lightroom tutorials. I was like, man, I just love how the camera switches seamlessly between like the screen share and the thing. And so and how he's like so vibrant about it. So then when I was doing videos about like, this is how you prepare for how you prepare for BMAT section one. I was trying to channel Peter McKinnon and just. This lens is really expensive. Oh, but he uses like a 50 millimeter prime for his B-roll. Oh, okay, fine. I'm going to save up and get that 50 millimeter because that's what's going to make my B-roll. I'll be carrying two lenses, one for the A-roll, a 16 millimeter. That's what Peter McKinnon does. And then a freaking like 50 millimeter for the B-roll. Try to do the cinematic things. Back in the day, he was doing the thing where it changes the aspect ratio to 16 by nine by adding the black bars. Right. Like fading those in. Making it cinematic, right? Yeah, making it cinematic. I was like, it's cinematic B-roll. Never has anyone ever said. man you're like peter mckinnon but for nerds or whatever and i'm like god damn it that's what i was trying so hard to go for but in the process of trying to do that like my own kind of voice emerged this is going to be the first mean comment ali and i say this with love you know i love you but you're not even close there was never a moment because i watch his videos too i would i would say i there was no correlation or like you know connection there's not a second when i watch your videos i was like oh that reminds me of peter mckinnon's video i love you but yeah no I'd say that that would be one of your few failures. Yes. Yeah, no. Yeah, what can you do? There's still hope. There's still time. I can still try and be- Sure, tell yourself that, but yeah. So all of this maps onto a framework that we teach our YouTuber Academy students a lot, which is step one is get going, step two is get good, and then step three is get smart. And a lot of people get really stuck on like figuring out the question of like, what's my niche before they've even made a handful of videos. It's like a whole thing that we try and teach people is like, just make the videos first. It's okay that you will feel like you suck at them. You've got to embrace the suck because you can't really learn any skills. You can't grow while also being afraid to suck at the thing, right? So you just make shitty videos. You try and imitate other people in the space. And in the process of imitating those other people in the space, your skills at making videos will improve naturally. You'll develop your own authentic voice. And then as Jeff worked out, you start to suck less with each rep. And then in stage three, get smart. hopefully, if the content is resonating with people, you'll find that people are naturally asking you for the products that you can then create. You don't have to do it in a way that feels salesy. And so your action point from this, if you are interested in building a creative business like mine or Jeff's, for example, is figure out who are some of the creators that you look up to and how can you try your best to imitate their style. And regardless of whether you succeed or not, the point is you'll at least have a model to aim for. And each time you do a video or content or whatever, you'll get closer to that model. And then in the process, you'll develop your own authentic voice. So now we move on to step number four, which is to build the machine. Now at this point, it's 2023. Jeff has made like 150 YouTube videos and he's got a little bit of a machine, a system behind it. And in this segment of the video, we're going to dive deep into the system that Jeff built to try and systemize the production of YouTube videos. This is a fairly long aspect of the video. We were thinking of cutting it out, but then realized actually it's more valuable if we keep it in because so few people actually show you the behind the scenes of like what's literally happening on their computer screen as they're making the content. If you don't care, you can always skip to the next timestamp, but we're going to dive deep into Jeff's. machine for YouTube content creation. I think one of the biggest differences between us, Ali, you excel at like what I call off the cup improvisation, if that makes sense. Because if I remember correctly, if you haven't changed your workflow, you sort of have a rough structure of every video. And you're able to sort of riff off that and speak extremely articulately. I am not that. So I would I would I would say even with this, with this episode where I have fully prepped, if viewers put a side by side they're gonna be like oh jeff sort of stutters a little bit he's he's i sort of get what he's saying but he's not very articulate or focused with his phrasing or words or whatever that's one of my i think biggest issues the reason i'm saying this is because for all of my videos i've like come every word scripted out oh wow every single word i i could share some of the scripts with you every single word and i just i just literally memorize it say it screw up cut Memorize it again, say it and just keep going. And so everyone thinks, oh my God, Jeff speaks flawlessly. Not even close. Can we have a look at one of your scripts? Like what is it? Let me pull out the latest one. Great. Master Gemini 3.0. By the way, Gemini 3 is doing great. I'm not just saying that because I used to work. It's a very solid, solid, solid update. Do you see like everything on the left? This is every single word. For example, Gemini 3.0 is a fantastic model, but the sheer volume of updates is honestly overwhelming and not every new feature deserves your attention. That's literally how I sound in the video. Can you, so imagine you were talking to that camera. Yeah. Or like, what does the process look like of you like reading, look at... Oh yeah, sure. So let's say I'm looking at that camera. I'm like, Gemini 3.0 is a fantastic model, but the sheer volume is honestly... Okay, Gemini 3.0, okay. Gemini 3.0 is a fantastic model, but not every new... Okay, but the sheer volume of update is honestly... Gemini 3.0 is... Gemini 3.0 is a fantastic model, but the sheer volume of updates is honestly overwhelming and not every new feature deserves your attention. That's how it looks. Yeah. And then I keep going. So it takes me roughly an hour to film every single video. And on the right, it's the instructions from my editor. I know it's completely different than how you do it, but that's a lot. This is so interesting. This is why you're crushing it and I'm not anymore. The amount of effort that goes into this is insane. Especially I think for AI content, if I don't use the right terminology or explain it in a visual way, it doesn't work. Another one of my unfair advantages is I'm really able to visualize complex topics in a very easy to understand way. let me give you a very specific example i mean i'm preaching to acquire here ali because i sort of learned this from you if i told you right now gemini 3 has a much larger context window than claude you'd be like okay i understand that intellectually so what but i'm like oh if you think about gemini 3's context window as a big box to store information it's a massive box in the store your entire apartments of furniture in there claude can only store one chair You got okay, that makes sense and I'm assuming the furniture is like information and data like yeah Gemini can process all that all at once whereas Clark can just process one chair. What does the process of writing one of these like word-for-word scripts look like? This is really fun because now it's empowered by AI. I used to have to spend 10 hours writing a mediocre script. Now with AI, I use 10 hours and write, I think, a much better script, objectively speaking, than my previous scripts. So I could just walk you through the workflow. Okay, sure. So do you see on the right-hand side here, my new video template is followed by 8.0? It means I've gone through eight iterations of a new video template in Notion over the past five years, like continuous iteration, right? Because previously it was not good, then it got better, it sucked less, blah, blah, blah. And now it's 8.0. All right. So the first thing I always do after filling in the properties up here, obviously, is to capture as much information as possible about the video when I first had the idea. Because again, you know much better than me, our brains are for having ideas, not storing them, right? And I have ideas in the weirdest places, running, working out, like in a team meeting at Google, right? I have this idea. I capture it on, let's say, Todoist right away. And then I immediately move that over here. so that it can be way to be processed. I don't forget about it, right? So I might come back to this capturing information two, three, four weeks later, and I'd be like, oh, this is what I want. Now, here's what I think most people don't get wrong about making, in my opinion, the creative process of making consistently good YouTube videos. 80% of my success, I would say comes from the checklist on the right here. Like if you look at one thing on the left, like don't look at the left. Like if you just look at the checklist here, I would say that's. 80% of my success because I follow this every single video for 195 videos. And people are like, no way. Aren't creatives supposed to have this viral idea and just go with it. You publish it and you're like suddenly like famous. That might work once or twice, but to have consistently viral good ideas. it's literally checkbox by checkbox by checkbox yeah nice and the reason i'm bringing this in the first place if you see this link right here ali is my it's a link to my pre-production prompts for youtube where i have a set of ai enabled workflows and prompts that help me i draft better outlines um come up with a better hook uh brainstorm better titles and uh thumbnails and i literally just follow this every single time So it says right here, use GPT articulate on rough thoughts. What does that mean? So remember how just now I said, I'm not very good at articulating some concepts. I'm like, Oh, maybe like for example, different AI models are all getting better and they're like catching up to each other. And so it doesn't really matter which AI model you pick. That sounds very vague, right? Okay. So, uh, GPT, uh, GPT articulate. So once I type in that last, um, letter, it expands to a fully French articulation prompt. Right. So I've optimized this over like last two years. And then I paste my raw thoughts here. AI models are all getting better. So it doesn't really matter which one you pick. We're going to let that run. And we'll come back to this in like a minute. But I repeat that process for every single stage of the YouTube production process. I have production prompts for YouTube. I have post-production prompts. Post-production prompts for YouTube. So pre-production prompts, follow all this, one, two, three, four, five, production prompts, one, two, three, four, five, post-production prompts, one, two, three, four, five. And that helps me produce consistently clear and concise YouTube scripts. Okay, mate, I love this. This is sort of like what we do, but like on steroids. Because we've got like video template V4, which is V4 is really more like V16 because we've just been iterating over it through time. And we have periods of time where i i get very bullish on the checklist and like okay we're just following a series of actions and then stuff slips and then i stop bothering with the checklist the team stops bothering with the checklist we've got the checklist but no one like clicks on any of the items of the checklist and i was looking at the checklist yesterday i was like huh this is actually a pretty good checklist man we should go through this more often kind of thing and seeing like your checklist i'm like ah that's it being a magic consultant for two years and being a guru for nine years really hammered that home in me um don't get me wrong i'll be the first person to list all the issues Google has as a company, for sure. But they do a lot of things right. And one of which is, okay, we're going to give you a really, really structured process to follow in your job. You will have flexibility for sure, especially back then, we had a lot more autonomy. But this is like what good looks like, follow this framework, and you'll achieve like this sort of outcome. So that I learned that from Yeah, it's the same in medicine to be honest, like surgical safety checklists and all that kind of stuff that like, hey, we follow the same checklist for every procedure. And yes, of course, then there's like the skill of the operator and stuff. But like, ideally, you want to minimize the amount the skill of the operator makes on the outcome of the patient, because then you're so dependent on that person having a good day. And so the more you can systemize an SOP if I turn into a checklist, the more the healthcare system as a whole is delivering outcomes for sure, rather than any individual contributor. oh yeah i mean let me be very specific here i physically cannot move do okay let me uncheck this so you can read it better so the last task here is proceed after the title and thumbnail have been confirmed that is as clear as it gets right you Did the thumbnail, is the thumbnail confirmed? No, I cannot proceed. And this is the thumbnail and title sort of stage. So I have to be happy with how this looks first. Final thumbnail, I use the pre-production prompts to think through what the title should be like using creative hooks frameworks and then brainstorming thumbnail ideas. Okay, proceed. Okay, now. Ah, I'm scripting. So I need to find a hook first because hook is more important than the script outline. Oh, how do I write a great hook? These are the three things I need to remember. And then I have that in my pre-production prompts as well. And then it just goes from there. And literally as you go all the way down, I've not published this video yet. It will be published on Tuesday, this upcoming Tuesday, but post-production hasn't happened. So none of this is checked. I want to be very clear. It's not that I forgot, but you know, it hasn't been published yet. Mate. I love it. How long does it take to prepare each video before you film it? I would say every video takes around 20 hours for me to produce from end to end. Great. And what's the split of that process in pre-production, filming, production, post-production? Eight to 10 hours of scripting. And when I say scripting, I'm talking about all the pre-production tasks from ideation to title thumbnail to thinking through the outline of the script and writing the script. Previously, while I was editing my videos, it took another eight to 10 hours to edit it. Now it takes around four to five hours, you might be crazy about four to five hours, because especially for AI content, I need to explain to the editor or brief editor how I want the motion graphics to look like to make sure people really understand. Right. So so I need to leave a lot of instructions and guess I can even show you this. This is going to surprise you, I think because I don't think this I don't think this is normal, but I do. In order to make it easier for me to explain to the video editor what I want, I literally have a Canva design and mock-up screenshots for them to create. Wow. These seem very familiar, given that I've seen your videos. Yeah. Nice. The idea is if you have a system, for example, this graph, right? With a system, effort goes down over time. It's like our YouTube process. You've got a system, so effort goes down over time. We don't have a system, or rather we have a system, but we don't follow it, and therefore... it stays difficult right yeah and in this particular instance if i didn't show the editor a screenshot he or she may not understand exactly how to convey the concept or the topic yeah yeah so yeah so so so this is why it takes me four to five hours to still brief editor i still have to come with instructions uh review the first draft and then we're good to go but i have a fantastic uh guy working with me so it's just gotten easier and easier over time and so if you're so as you're going through the script if you're adding in like b-roll instructions if so it's you're thinking Okay, this would benefit from a visualization. Hmm. Okay, let me just draw it out in Canva. Exactly. Or now I can use Excalibur. I haven't really used this that much. As you can see, I've only done a couple of things here. But now I realize maybe it's easier with Excalibur. I'm just testing that out now too. Yeah. That's really cool. So you got eight to 10 hours actually writing the script, going through all the tasks, the pre-production tasks, et cetera. And then it takes you an hour to film the video because you're doing the back and forth, all of that kind of stuff. Then you send the footage to the editor. Four to five hours of... briefing editor, reviewing just one draft and like having it ready to be published. Nice. To what extent do you enjoy this process? I have to say getting started every time is the hardest part. But once I get in the flow and zone, I find myself loving it. So the hardest part is always be like, okay, what's the angle for this video? Because that's the part you really need to like bunker down i think yeah you know it's like what's my point of view on this i can't i i don't think i agree with what everyone else is saying like what is my point of view and i'm just sitting there for like good 30 to 60 minutes just like thinking doodling like being distracted that that's the hardest part but once i have a like crystal concept for example this one gemini theory has generally a lot of hype but for good reason and for good reason the update is significant but there's a lot of noise so can i answer the question how can non-technical knowledge work as best you guys join my 3.0 right like practical advice once i figured that out that's the video i really really like testing out all the use cases and doing the thing i'm like oh does this work for example oh this is the proudest uh there's a proudest step from this video ali and i'm leaking it to you first john method you guys got so good that it can take everything in google drive google calendar gmail to do stuff for you If you were working at a company, a corporate company, one of the most tedious things is performance reviews. It is boring. It is useless, but necessary to get promoted and get a raise and all that stuff. And usually it takes people weeks because they put it off. Now you can, and I'll do it in real time, at Workspace, go through everything you know about me and write a performance review. For the past six months, pay attention to targets and attainments and quantifiable attainments. And we'll come back to this. It's going to work for quite a few minutes. It will give you a finished performance review with all accurate information because it has access to everything. Mate, that's so good. So when I found this out, when I tested this out, the high I got was I was really, really, really happy because it's really practical and people can really use this. That's a lot of effort on every single video. Wow. Wow. It was reminding me when I had the conversation with Mr. Who's the Boss, and he was like, yeah, he spends 40 to 60 hours writing the script for every single video. Yeah, that's crazy. Holy shit. I watched that episode. That's a lot. Yeah. He's the sort of person who can't, who cannot do that. Yeah. His personality is very, like, detail-oriented, and that's why the videos are so good. I love it. So what I'm really taking away from this is that, like, and, you know, this has sort of been the whole thesis of our YouTuber Academy for the last five years as well, which is that... it's really, really hard if you don't have a system. Like if you're having to think of one video idea every single time and then you publish the video and now you're thinking about the new video idea, then life becomes hard. But if you have a system for capturing ideas, if you have a system for like generating titles and thumbnails that are broadly in a house style, rather than having to reinvent the wheel for each one, if you have some sort of system that you're following to like script your hooks or script your videos and do the talking points of the video, some sort of post-production system, just some kind of system takes quite a lot of the heavy lifting off your plate. And it means that your thing gets better over time, even though you're still putting out the same amount of output. For sure. Yeah. And again, I'm preaching to the choir here, but just for everyone else, it just takes the mental or decision fatigue out of the equation because you know exactly what we're doing next. Sick. This is amazing stuff. Anything else you've given that this is a show and tell? Any other thing? Oh, yeah. So there we go. It's done. And obviously this is for my business, but literally it's able to like. like pull everything out and write a very very comprehensive and accurate more importantly accurate sort of report uh the one other thing i'd bring up is for example this is my command center right and in tune with not having to worry about decision fatigue like my new like it's all about systems i've managed my life system i click new day and this is literally everything i need to do today I don't think I just I just do it right. Review the calendar, figure that out. I have to wish people happy birthday. It's on there. I read all the comments from social media. So social media down here, read all the comments, reply, so on and so forth. Like today, my priority is, oh, prepare for Ali's episode, like, you know, before I do the other thing. So in line with sort of like having systems, I think that's that's another thing I want. I wanted to share. Nice. What's the make time bit Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Oh, this is something silly. Probably not relevant to you, but. i read made time after you recommended it one of my favorite books in the world and one of their things as you might recall is yeah highlight yeah ghl is what i would put in my physical journal there you go yeah so like i'm grateful for like oh yeah i didn't plan this by the way i was like oh it'd be nice to be grateful to be invited you know to film something and then like for example let go and what i mean by this is i was actually kind of worried because most my content is very educational and I don't have that much opportunity to share the personal side of myself. And I think a lot of people have a false impression like, oh, Jeff is this really kind, generous, smart person when in reality, not really, you know. So I was a little bit anxious, I think, to share that side of myself. And I wrote here, I get to share a side of myself my viewers haven't really seen. So to position in a more positive light, I get to do this versus I have to do it. do you have a system for like time blocking on your calendar like how do you how do you organize your calendar oh yeah um i prepared this in anticipation for this sort of interview i mocked up something that would look like my schedule back when i was at google yeah obviously there's not much that much open space i didn't want to like just fill up with random stuff but the key thing i want to highlight was like my my my review sessions um in blue i think 99 of people don't do this and this is probably the biggest reason why things slip through the cracks it's all good and fine for us me and you to tell people you need to capture everything immediately you have to store in you have to make the capture process seamless right you have to assign due dates to tasks you have to tag ideas and thoughts you have if you don't review them you might not you might as well not have captured them so my biggest sort of hack when i was at google is as long as i can review all my inboxes my gmail inbox google keep inbox drive inbox and google test inbox nothing slips through the cracks yeah yeah wow yeah right here and i have a link straight to it like i could click into it and it goes to my google keep inbox so this is my google keep inbox and once it's processed i'll click e and it's archived yeah nice yeah so i'm gonna bring that back but yeah that that's sort of like the the review process right there sick and to what extent do you still do that now that you're a full-time entrepreneur oh i still do exactly this button notion so the reason i had to do this using let's say google keep google tasks because when you're working on Google, you're not allowed to use any other platform to do any work stuff. I do the exact same thing by Notion. So this workflow, I would say is platform agnostic. As long as you capture, organize, review, engage core workflow, you can use any tool platform and get things done. How much do you procrastinate? Oh, I do. So the problem is now I procrastinate frequently throughout the day. That breaks up my deep work. So let me explain. I still work quite a lot right now. i would but i don't see it as work because i have a lot of fun doing this i would say i work from let's say nine to eight every day yeah 9am to 8pm not too bad right but but yeah the problem with my procrastination right now is whenever i finish what i think to be a decent chunk of work I reach for my phone, I open YouTube, I'm like, I reward myself. And the reason why that's a problem is because even though I procrastinated when I was like grinding and hustling hard, I didn't have time to procrastinate like so frequently. There were like dedicated sessions. I'm like, okay, it's a write-off day, right? Like what Ollie calls a write-off day, right? But now I'm like, oh, you know, I could get to this half time. And then it becomes, it becomes, it was like 30 minutes. I'm like, oh shit. And then I have to come back and stuff like that. So the short answer is I do procrastinate. I still haven't really figured out a way to beat it. What other tips do you find helpful for staying focused when you're on task? Because a lot of people really struggle with focus, attention span, all of that stuff. For me, it's simple because I've internalized this. Basically, it's a two-minute rule, five-minute rule, right? It was a two or five-minute rule. I can't remember exactly what five-minute rule. Yeah, it depends on who you ask. So basically, I turn on the timer in the app, super focused app, and I'm like, literally, I'm like, okay, five minutes. I'm just gonna sit there and then I start thinking, by the time the alarm rings, I'm already thinking, I'm okay, stop. And I'm like thinking about the next step. So that trick really works really well on me. So I don't really need to force myself to focus, to be very honest. And so let's say you have a day where you've got like, I don't know, eight different things you have to do, but like one of them is the priority. How are you scheduling in the eight different things? The one thing, is it that you're time blocking the one thing and just focusing on that? Is it that you don't need a time block because you just know it's the priority? How are you triaging stuff? Oh yeah. So going back to my Notion command center here. So the thing I forgot to mention just now is whatever the priority is, it goes right in the calendar. That's a non-negotiable. Everything else is like negotiable, if that makes sense. And I've gotten in a really good habit of not over committing because I've had so... like the last 11 years to sort of figure that out right from my first job in management consulting all the way till now so i know for a fact i have more than enough time during that day to get the one thing done everything else is sort of negotiable but nice to have if that makes sense the beauty of having this in a list instead of just having a task um database here which i also do have is you can move this around like the okay the highlight can be moved but let's say i want to do this afterwards i can move that and that visually gives me permission to be like ah i will move this around it's not set in stone except for the highlight that makes sense and i can throw some stuff to tomorrow as well if i don't have the time so this just gives me permission to move tasks as things change throughout the day for flexibility nice and then can you talk us through your project management thing so let's say you have a project that's like uh japan trip with jonathan or something like that oh how do you how do you keep that organized and the tasks and various things you have to do for that. So I have to give a bit of context here. I promise I'm not trying to promote my Notion course. You can promote as much as you like. Okay, perfect. So I've been making one YouTube video a year on my Notion command center or life OS system since 2021. And I think I really cracked the code this past year. And I'm using that right now. It's called like Builder. I call it command center. And the course is called Builder Command Center in Notion. And I'm using Tiago Forte's pair method. project areas, resources, archived or version of it in this sort of Notion command center. So let me just go through a real project with you. Let's say I create a new project, right? Launch a high ticket AI product. All right. End date, I don't know, a couple of months later. All right. I'll usually add the Google Drive link here and related area. This is related to my products area. Why is that important? Well, because product strategy. Well, because I want to be able to find this project. at any point right to make sure i'm surfacing information as as they come so i'm just gonna uh expand this and again i just go through sort of a mental checklist i'm gonna put the project overview here when conditions op center just simply means are there any links or ai chats i want to throw on here so i can reference very easily related tasks resources and notes and the beauty of this is everything is everything is related in a way that i could create a new task do user research and it's automatically related to this project. So even though I can find this in my master task database, the task is surfaced in a contextually relevant location. Sick. And we'll put a link to the Notion course down below. And by the way, all of this system stuff is exactly what we teach in our part-time YouTuber Academy. You get all the systems that I've been using for my channel for the last like eight years and all of the scripts, all the templates, all the Notion stuff. If you want it, there's a link down below. So now we move on to step number five, which is to do all of this while navigating the day job. When you were at Google, to what extent were you worried about like, oh, what if my employer finds out that I'm doing stuff on the side? Like, how did you navigate? I mean, I guess it's YouTube. Google owns YouTube. So presumably they're okay with it, especially because you're saying nice things about Gemini and Google Keep and Google Mail and stuff. But like, yeah, how did you navigate the negotiating with your employer to allow you to do a side hustle? Are you talking about from a... professional standpoint or from a compliance standpoint because those two surprise you you might be surprised to know are completely different oh yeah tell me more because essentially like we have a bunch of people in our lifestyle business academy who are like oh i work at insert big company x here uh i'm not sure i can really build a business on the side Have you got any advice? In that case, let me start with the compliance side and I'll move on to the professional side. And you'll see why those two are completely different things, especially these large tech companies. So from a compliance standpoint, I'm a very risk averse person. I had emailed the ethics and compliance team. Even before I started, I uploaded my first video. They gave me a bunch of rules to follow. And I'm like, okay, cool. Eight months later, they audited my channel. And they were like, Jeff, overall, it's okay. But we found some problems. Number one. you are not allowed to talk about Google products. You're forbidden because it's surprising, right? You'd obviously want to talk about your own products. No, because there's a conflict of interest. Viewers or external people might think you had inside information that they did not have access to. For the record, I never had any insider information, right? And they were like, number two, you're not allowed to film the Google office. So I had to take some videos down. And then a year later, the audit again is fine, right? Yeah. And to Google's credit, again, I'll be the first person to say negative things about Google because they're not a perfect company, not even close. But to Google's credit, I sincerely believe the people there always try to do the right thing. Because I know people from Meta, from Apple, from Spotify, from these other companies who got fired basically immediately with no recourse for having some sort of social media presence. Obviously, their content might've been a bit more dodgy, to use the word you use, right? But they were just basically fired immediately, right? Whereas Google's like, look, Jeff, we see you're doing job search, you're doing your productivity, you're trying to help people, you're trying to teach people, just be careful, but you're good, right? So that's a compliance aspect. Just on that note, let's say if someone is watching this and they're like, man, I really want to build a side business or a YouTube channel or start posting on LinkedIn, but I do have one of these jobs where I'm like, I'm kind of worried about what my employer is going to say. What advice would you have for that person? who's worried about the compliance perspective like because they don't want to get fired oh okay then for sure reach out the compliance team first i think that's what saved me because i think they saw because the compliance team has like records of all these sort of like the the communication right they saw i try to do the right thing by reaching out first as opposed to asking for forgiveness later right and for the record i'm usually someone who always does a thing first and asks for forgiveness but in this specific case ask for permission first they gave me the benefit of the doubt Yeah. So I do generally think if you're worried about being like fired for compliance issues, you should definitely reach out to the compliance team first and not your manager. Because in these big tech companies, the managers don't know. They love it. They're like, wow, my manager literally was like, Jeff, I love these videos. Do more and do workshops for us. But she didn't know whether or not they were compliant. So when I had to take, let's say my Google videos down back in the day, she was like, wait, why? What? That's crazy. Why would they make you do that? Right? Like our initial reaction as well. So my manager, she's fucking fantastic. The reason I actually didn't leave earlier is because of her. I want to stay longer for her. She was extremely supportive and she was basically like, look, Jeff, I understand. I don't even need to say it, but you're not going to let this interfere your full-time job as long as that's the case. Keep going. Love it. Yeah. that was a more professional side of things. The other thing people are worried about in this context is like, okay, technically it's compliant, but if like my manager finds out, if my colleagues find out, if my manager's manager finds out, like technically I'm not breaking any rules, but will it look badly on me that like I'm trying to do commercial activity on the side or something? Will they think, oh, she's got one foot in, one foot out, you know, all that kind of stuff. In my experience, and you've said this countless times, no one cares, really no one cares. I initially, and I felt the same time, initially I thought, oh, people are talking behind my back. Do you see Jeff Su's latest video? Like, he sounds so stupid. That's never happened, right? Maybe someone made a comment like, oh, I saw your video. It's like, how's that going? It's like, oh, interesting video. Cool. That was the extent. No one cares. Everyone has their own problems. Everyone thinking about the next paycheck, thinking about the promotion, thinking about their next project, like complaining about other people. Like, no one cares about this. So as long as your content is, again, not dodgy, right? I think it's a spotlight effect at play. We overestimate how much other people are thinking about us. We have a bunch of students right now in the academy who have been procrastinating for about three weeks on making their very first LinkedIn post. Oh, wow. Because they're like, I can't post on LinkedIn because all the previous colleagues I've ever had in my life are all on my LinkedIn. And like, am I going to post on my LinkedIn saying, hey, guys, I'm just introducing myself. And all of the cringe associated with being someone who posts on LinkedIn gets in the way. Any tips? there are so many content types and formats that are arbitrarily objectively safe. We had offsite, these are top three learnings. No one's gonna, no one could possibly judge that. And actually your current colleagues would advocate for that. of course the next worry might be what if i butcher it or i sound like an idiot that's i think that's a whole nother thing right i think i think there is another worry on that front i think some people are like oh no i can't even post that because they're gonna think i'm a tryhard they're gonna say that like oh lord did you see jane's posted about learning from the off site what a fucking like wetter that it's like this is genuinely a worry that people have the reason i'm smirking is like wait try hard is not a compliment wait a minute like i would that was that was what i was trying to go for I think where most people try hard is not a compliment. It's like an insult that they try very, very hard to avoid. Okay. Got it. Wow. Thanks for letting me know, Ollie. I'm 33 and thank you. I appreciate that. I'm putting myself in professional shoes and I saw someone I dislike, right? Posting on LinkedIn. What my first reaction would be like, oh, this person is trying so hard. He or she, like they have nothing to offer, nothing to say. But then my argument, I'd forget about it. I'd judge maybe for a second or so, then I'd forget about it. I don't think anyone in their right mind would take a screenshot of that, send it to a group chat and be like, ha ha, look at this guy. Like, I can't believe they're trying so hard. Yeah, I think this is like literally the thing people are scared of. They're like, what if they... Is it LinkedIn specific or like YouTube? LinkedIn specific in the sense of A, a lot of our students post on LinkedIn and B, because if you make a YouTube video, no one's going to see it ever. But if you post on LinkedIn, automatically all of your connections might see that. because you have zero followers. And so the only people that will ever see that will see initially are the people that you've already already connected to, which is your current colleagues and your former colleagues. And people try very, very hard to avoid judgment from current and former colleagues as like a sort of ego defense mechanism or something. Wow. OK, I have to I have to admit that I'm so far removed from that point. I I can't really relate, nor do I have that good because now that you say it like that, yes, if I let's say back in the day, I like 89 connections. And if I had to post something, yeah, I probably had the same concerns. I don't remember how I got through it. I got over it. I mean, the thing we're just trying to tell people is like, guys, you're going to have to post every day on LinkedIn. So the more you overthink your first post, the slower you're going to build your business. You can take as long as you want. It's just that like, you know, Ricardo over there, he's done his first post, he's got his first few sales already. Kelsey's got his first few sales. These guys have got the first few sales. And they just kind of did the thing. Yeah. And then LinkedIn sales navigator. Guys, you're going to have to send 200 connection requests a week on LinkedIn. and just DM everyone who talks to you. You're going to do this every week for the next five years if you want to build your lifestyle business to a million dollars. Oh, for sure. So why are we overthinking the first message, bro? This is one message out of 58,000 you're going to be sending over the course of the next few years. Come on, let's go. And so eventually there's enough of that that gets people over the edge to realize they can just do it. And then they realize no one gives a fuck. And then the whole thing becomes easier. Exactly. No one cares. Everyone has their own priorities. Including people like Jeff, people like me. My hospital knew all about my YouTube. videos and stuff. My med school knew about them. I wasn't trying to do this stuff secretly on the side. From what we've heard from our Lifestyle Business Academy students as well, if you are able to have a conversation with your manager, your boss, your HR, your compliance team about stuff, and they give you the green light with some restrictions or whatever, that takes an enormous burden off of your shoulders because you're not lying awake at night wondering, will they find out about this secret side hustle that I've got? Your mileage may vary. We also have some students who do it in secret on the side until it gets big enough, and then they decide to quit their job. But generally, that's a more stressful way of running this hustle. So now we move on to step six of Jeff's journey, which is to let the products come to you. And there is a framework from our friend and mentor Daniel Priestley, who's featured on the channel quite a lot, that Jeff discovered that helped him figure out what products to create. I mentioned just now that my first product was a free PDF version of my resume, right? I uploaded that onto Gumroad to complement my resume video. I wanted viewers to have something next to them. so they can reference as they watch my video to optimize their resumes. I thought that just made sense, right? I didn't expect them to donate. And after they donated, I got questions like, hey, do you mind if you share a Google Docs version that I can edit myself? I'd actually pay you for it. I was like, okay, it's the same thing, but okay, sure. And I charged like $4.99 for it. And that was another incremental 1K a month in revenue, right? So that was my first experience with Daniel Priestley's sort of like product frameworks. I do it yourself, do it done with you. done for you or something along those lines, right? So do it yourself as a PDF version done with you sort of is like the Google Docs editable version. So the point I'm trying to make here, it came very naturally like, oh, I thought those would be a useful resource. Here you go. Oh, you want an edible version? Huh? Okay. I guess I could charge for it. And this sort of is built from there. I know a lot of people who have like elaborate notion systems and including me. and then we use them for like a week and then we're like ah this is i don't know you're on a flight or something notion offline kind of sucks still and so then you're like it goes out the window you go on holiday for a week and it goes out the window and then like the inertia of getting back to the system it's just like i'll just go back to apple notes like i've i've gone through this cycle of build a system follow the system for a week uh-huh life happens forget about it and go back to pen and paper every six months for the last like eight years um how do you stick to the system i'm trying to think of any sort of framework or principles i can bring up here but if i'm being just very honest it goes back to number one i think with just my personality i like mr who's a boss i have somewhat of an uptight anal personality whereby i love structure so this comes this makes me happy like fault check checking off things in checkboxes and following this makes me happy. If I were to say a framework or a principle or something, I would say most people fail, especially in Notion, when they don't build it themselves. Yeah. When they download someone else's template. Thomas Frank's ultimate brain. It's like... Oh my god. I bought that and I gave up. Not even a week, three days, I gave up. I love Thomas Frank. He and you are the reason I use Notion. I've watched many of his videos. I've commented on his videos and you've seen my comments. But his ultimate brain 3.0 is crazy, right? There's no way I need 60 properties for a task. That doesn't make any sense. So for my course to get over that. Oh, by the way, just a little bit more virtual signal here. It's the number one course on the PPA platform. The education platform. Link down below, guys. Check it out. I purposely... gave them only the raw databases and the course walks them through exactly how to connect them using the relations property how to add their own areas of life how to manage their tasks and that has i think improved like student retention for the system they're sort of building the furniture exactly so i think that really helps so you can't give someone like just a straight up template and i'll be honest ali it was really painful because you have no idea how hard it is to turn multiple raw databases to a externally friendly shareable view without leaving like small pockets of random information inside or they copy the wrong thing and stuff like that so this this setup took me I think two to three months. And that's probably why a lot more creators don't do that because it takes so much finessing. But yeah, I think it's worth it. I think students need to build it themselves. And there's this sort of product spectrum that has these three areas. There's do it yourself, done with you and done for you. And there are actually different schools of thought around this. If you're going creator first, it is often easiest to start with a do it yourself product. For example, the templates that Jeff was selling on Gumroad. It's just a template. The user has to buy it. download it and use it themselves. It's a DIY product. Those generally tend to be the cheapest things. Then you might ascend to something that's done with you. Maybe this is sort of like a course with a community element added to it. It's sort of like you as the creator, you're live in there, you're doing workshops, or maybe it's like a sort of one-on-one coaching program where it... You might be helping someone improve their productivity or build their notion systems or start a business. They're doing the work and you're sort of helping them out alongside. This is sort of done with you. And then generally on the highest end of the spectrum, you have done for you where you sell a fully done for you service where you are doing the work for your client. For example, our part time YouTuber Academy is a sort of do it yourself course where we do a lot of coaching, me and my team and workshops and stuff with one on one support and everything that helps students build their own businesses. That's done with you. But then done for you would be if, for example, we started offering YouTube video production as a service to other businesses. It's like the business would film the content and we would do everything, the editing, the packaging, the titles, the thumbnails, the strategy, et cetera, et cetera. That's, for example, a done for you service. So you could totally start DIY and then go done with you and then go done for you if you want to or not. Or you actually could start the other way around. This is actually the way that a lot of online businesses start. They start with a done for you service where they're doing the work for their clients. Once they've gotten enough results, they're able to then turn it into a done with you where they're coaching people through the process. And once they're sick of coaching people through the process and showing that they're able to get results and decent testimonials stuff they then graduate like downstream into something like an online course which becomes more scalable but costs less money and so you just have to sort of weigh up how scalable you want it versus how much you want to be charging in Jeff's case a lot of this emerged naturally he built his first thing because the audience seemed to want it and then he built the next thing because his audience seemed to want it he didn't really have this sort of like grand vision of like becoming a millionaire it just sort of happened sort of accidentally but also You know, accidental things like this take a lot of work, a lot of patience. As you've seen, the amount of effort that goes into Jeff's videos, the way he does his content, the way he navigated his full-time job, the sacrifices he had to give up along the way. When you're putting in that level of work and you're able to build an audience of people who know, like and trust you, then the monetization almost takes care of itself without you having to force it, which is what I love about Jeff's journey. Anyway, we now come to step seven, which is to figure out your real why. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're vibing with your story. Let's say they've got a corporate job of some description and they really want to do the thing on the side. and they're looking at your story as an inspiration to be like, man, Jeff managed to do it. He managed to keep up his corporate career, did a great job, et cetera, et cetera, got promoted to a pretty good level. And then he was able to build his thing up to the point that it 3xed his salary and now he's able to quit. That's like the dream trajectory for a lot of people I know who are working in corporate. Do you have any other bits of advice, any advice you would give someone in that situation? I've thought about this. It's because inherently the question is asking, what piece of advice would you give someone who wants to go through the exact journal you did, right? Although I'm all about practical, actionable advice, like tactics, the tactics, it doesn't matter in this question. The only thing that matters if it boils down to it is the motivation, the initial motivation, why you want to do the thing. The reason, and that sounds cliche and that sounds so generic, right? Why, Jeff, would you say that that's weird? Because I sincerely believe the real motivation powering what you want is something very hidden and dark that very few people will ever get to know. I'm going to take a plunge and share something I've never really shared before. My motivation, to give you some context, I was a terrible student in high school. Out of a 4.0 GPA, I'm not sure how the UK does it, out of a 4.0 GPA, my GPA was like 2.8, 2.9. It was terrible. I was lucky enough to go to, in my opinion, the best college in the world, Emory University, where I received a world-class education and got introduced to Akash who referred me to Google. I barely scraped by. I was on the wait list and I got in. The reason I turned my life around in college and I graduated top 10 in my class is because I was angry. I was pissed off that... People I didn't think were as capable were getting better grades. I was like, I'm going to show them. Fuck that. I'm not an idiot. I studied my ass off and I got good grades. The motivation is not noble. It's just like trying to prove people wrong. But in my opinion, for a lot of things in life, maybe the intent or the motivation doesn't matter as much as the outcome. Because if it got me to, let's say, good grades, a good job offer. who's to say the anger motivation or the anger sort of, you know, reason you sort of work your ass off is was bad. You know what I mean? I know I'm rambling a lot. I know I'm ranting a lot. But I think that does directly apply to sort of how to like, go through this journey and succeed in the end, you really need to be honest with yourself why you want to do if it's something surface level, like making money or freedom. I don't think that's a serious sustainable as be really part of core of who you are and it's so different for everyone i don't even know how i would start explaining how to find it yourself i can only share that in my case especially for the college days i was just angry because i didn't want to be seen as an idiot and i want to prove people wrong that sounds so terrible to say it out loud you're supposed to say if i like like i realized that in college anything was possible and i in order to do that i was gonna have to put in the hard work like no it was it was it was part of who i am i didn't want to i didn't want to look bad yeah so again that's my honest answer there's no framework or principle that derives from that but if there's one person could sort of think about them be like okay let's be honest about why do I really want this I want the fame I really want to be liked I wanted like like hook up with girls that's okay like you know just channel that through it sounds terrible say loud but yeah whatever gets you there so was it still like the anger like I want to prove people wrong that caused you to start the YouTube channel and like So I think there's two things. So number one, when I started, it was definitely for the love of teaching. For sure. The teaching thing definitely got me started. I think through like at some point during the five years, I also did want to prove people wrong in that I didn't need the Google brand anymore because I still am. I'm a pretty vain person. Having the Google brand was great. Being like, oh, I'm working with Google. I'm a Googler, right? Not a great look, but like I'm trying to be honest, authentic here, right? Having that brand was great. and my my ex-fiance my ex-girlfriend she's very smart much smarter than me she said jeff one day you're gonna leave google whether you like it or not you can't you have to divorce yourself from the brand to do anything she's not talking about youtube channel she's like for anything right you you can't see yourself as a googler and the wake-up call for me ollie was when google laid off a bunch of people back you know a couple years ago and it came out of shock to many googlers who saw themselves as googlers right instead of just employees of a large corporate designed to maximize your whole value and a lot of people had a really tough time sort of getting through that that was a wake-up call for me as well i was like okay yeah i can't see myself just google anymore so the youtube thing was one way for me to get myself out of that i'm just like okay i'm an educator i'm a youtuber i'm an educator i'm not just a google yeah that was the hidden motivation there as well. So it's like diversifying your identity away from putting all your eggs in the, I work at Google basket. I am a Googler. And more into sort of, yeah, just like spread the eggs out a little bit. Exactly. But don't get me wrong. Right now, I think on my LinkedIn, my headline's still like, Google turned educated. I still want to sort of leverage a Google brand. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I still have doctor turned entrepreneur, so it's like, you know. Yeah, there you go. You might as well lean into the... And so your homework from this action point is what is the real reason why you are continuing to watch this video? Why do you want? What's the real dark reason behind why you want financial freedom or you want to build a business or create a business or whatever? Like, what's the thing? Being aware of that is generally a good idea. And then finally, we come to step number eight, which is to set the quit date. You quit the job recently. Yeah, April this year. Congratulations. Thank you. How did you decide to quit the job now? And I mean, looking at your revenue stats. you could have quit like three years ago uh so why did you not there are a couple of reasons i think so number one i'm so risk averse that i would not have been okay with anything less than three times my salary like my three times my full-time salary i say that's the first reason and don't ask me why i reached i i how i arrived at the three times it was literally just sounded good i was like okay if i it's one-on-one it's one-to-one well use is volatile i might not i might not i might make a lot less yeah if it's two times well if it got halved i'd be back to where i started if it's three times at least if i got half it could be 1.5 times that's literally how i thought about it not very scientific but it is what it is like vibes basically right number two for context i had planned to quit a couple quarters before the actual date because i knew if i didn't sign that imaginary contract with myself i'd just stay forever i really like the team i really like the work um surprisingly enough like People are smart. They're hardworking. My director, Persica, she's fantastic. I love her. But I knew if I didn't set a date or a quarter to quit, I would just stay. So I was like, okay, Q2 of 2025. I have to leave. I have to leave in these 90 days. And so to make that happen, I literally emailed or brought it up with my manager back then in January to force it to happen. I can't take it back anymore. To be very honest with you, Ali, I should have quit a year sooner. Because over the last year, work on both sides suffered. And I still feel a little bit iffy about it because I care about my personal brand a lot. And I care about the work. I care about doing a good job. And I realized over that year, there was no way I could go 110% in both. It just didn't make any sense. The YouTube video suffered. There weren't great topics, didn't do very well. My work at Google suffered. People were like, are you okay? Are you sick? Like, what's going on? Like, this is not usually the Jeff Steve standard, right? So if I could, I would probably have quit a year earlier. And why do you think you didn't? I was too greedy. I was way too greedy. I wanted to have that Google lifestyle, that Google brand, the free food. Half-jokingly, free food's great, Ali. You were there, yeah, you've had the free food. It was great to not have to cook or order out, right? The free food, the support system, the team, right? I was too greedy. I wanted everything I wanted, and that's not how it works. So you've got two full-time team members now? Yes. Yeah, basically. In person, remote, like what's the setup? Remote, completely remote. So the one right now, the one who has been working with me for the past year or so, she actually joined, she actually quit Google first, and then she took a leap of faith and joined me. She's based in Guangzhou, so remote. And the newly hired one is based out of Taipei. What are your goals for your business these days? If I could share sort of the vision, is to actually build the lifestyle business that Daniel Preece talked about and oversubscribe. So as, oh, I didn't tell you yet. I told Angus, I hired my second full-time hire. Oh, nice. She's awesome. Sweet. Wharton, recent grad, super enthusiastic about education AI. And I could see her, you know, in the future joining the, being part of the core team, growing the business with me and building that up. Because at Google, I'll be very honest, one of the things I really disliked was managing people. I'm not a great manager. I'm impatient. I am short-tempered. I shout at people. I've made people cry. I hold people to unrealistically high standards. They're like, Jeff, we're not saving patients. You're not a doctor. I'm all those things. So that's one of the reasons actually I also love Google. I don't want to manage people. But having smart and... motivated people working alongside with you, I think is a great feeling. I'm sure you agree. Look at those two people here, right? So I think that's my next goal. You know, it's not to like sell, maybe not to sell another product or not to make like YouTube videos. I'll keep doing those for sure. I'll keep writing my newsletter. I keep writing LinkedIn posts. But I think the goal for the next three or five years is build a team of people who are invested as invested in the mission as I am. There we go. As invested in the vision and mission as I am. Yeah. To increase the world's productivity by 10%. That's sort of the... the mission. Nice. Jeffsie, thank you very much. This has been absolutely wonderful. Any final words of wisdom, anything else you would like to share with people? Oh, well, people are going to think I'm just riffing here, but I've been recommending PTYA for a lot of my friends who are trying to start YouTube. For example, Austin Bellsack, he's massive LinkedIn, but he just started YouTube recently. And I was like, yo, Austin, if you want to just throw money at the problem, PTYA. Because it sort of cuts the trial and error out of the way. Great. Well, thank you very much for that plug. Love it. Thanks, Ali. High five. So as you just heard from Jeff, the part of YouTuber Academy is very good. There's a link down below. But if you're interested in more free advice on how to start and grow a YouTube channel, there'd be a video right over here or something that talks about that. So if you are interested in potentially mirroring mine or Jeff's journey and becoming rich through creating content on the internet, check out that video over there. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you, Jeff, for being awesome. And I will catch you later. Bye-bye.

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Hey friends, my friend Jeff Su spent nine years at Google and, on the side, built a YouTube business that allowed him to quit his job without ever taking a big scary leap. In this video, we break down his entire playbook, from making $98 in his first six months to $835,000 last year, and situations where being risk-averse works to your advantage. Hope you enjoy xx

🔗 LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO 

- Jeff's YouTube channel: @JeffSu 
- Jeff's Gumroad templates: https://jeffsu.gumroad.com/
- He Built a $1M Business in 12 Months - Every Step Explained (Case Study): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7IECetqDLY&t=7s
- From Zero to 10 Million YouTube Subscribers - Mrwhosetheboss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQqKOi8UGG4&t=3807s
📕 Oversubscribed: https://geni.us/8wpuu
📗 Make Time: https://geni.us/CoEKrA
📕 Let's Take this Offline: https://geni.us/AhHlws

⌚️ TIMESTAMPS 

0:00 From $98 to $835K: Jeff's Journey
0:45 Step 1: Find Your Itch & Pick Your Vehicle
7:06 Why Jeff Chose YouTube
9:48 Creator-First vs Business-First
13:56 Why Most People Never Start
20:33 Step 2: Lock In & Pay the Price
22:43 The Four Burners Theory
31:01 Step 3: Suck Less With Each Rep
39:36 Step 4: Build the Machine
44:36 "80% of My Success Comes From This Checklist"
49:14 How Long Does Each Video Take?
55:16 Jeff's Daily Command Center
58:24 Beating Procrastination & Staying Focused
1:03:21 Step 5: Navigating the Day Job
1:07:08 Nobody Cares About Your Side Hustle
1:12:04 Step 6: Let the Products Come to You
1:18:10 Step 7: Figure Out Your Real Why
1:19:15 Jeff's Hidden Motivation
1:23:33 Step 8: Set the Quit Date

PS: I donate 10% of my income to charity every year. Would you like to join me? Learn more about the 10% Pledge: https://aliabdaal.com/giving-what-we-can/