How I Helped Ali Abdaal Make $5M

If I challenge you to start a business that makes $5 million a year, how would you do it? You'd likely start an app, a tech startup, launch an info product, or one of these other trendy, fast money schemes. Now, what if I told you that Ali Abdaal, the productivity guru on YouTube, came to me with the same challenge, and I gave him the perfect five-step plan to make him $5 million with his new business, and you can copy every step? By the end of this video, the only thing standing in between Ali and 5 million, standing in between you and $5 million in annual revenue, Dude, what the actual ****? Man, you really know your stuff. This is good ----. And it will blow yours too. Here are the five steps to get your business to $5 million in annual revenue. What do you think are the chances that this will work? 100%. All right, so we just wrapped up the podcast. You flew in here to Dubai, looking to launch this new productivity course. A new business line. We would love to get to $5 million ARR this year. What exactly is the kind of premise for this? Community of ambitious entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals who want to double their productivity, focus, and consistency so that they can do more of what matters to them. So what if we could build like a sort of peloton for productivity where we do facilitated weekly reviews, a facilitated monthly planning session, quarterly planning sessions, regular workshops where we're doing goal setting and vision planning, and then every day, if we have like Zoom co-working sessions once or twice a day, different time zones, where you just get together on a Zoom call and you crank on your deep work. Because if people just did that even for a week, it would probably pay for the entire 12-month program. Great. Ollie has a goal and a brand to take him there. Let's jump right into step one of how we're going to scale Ollie's productivity lab to $5 million a year in revenue. Step one is to define the promise of the product. As a founder, it's hard to map out your client journey if you don't have a clear destination to guide them to. It's like giving someone directions when you don't even know where they're going. If you don't define the promise of your product, you won't scale, and you won't reach the freedom that you're looking for in your business. Time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. Without a promise, you may get leads, but you won't be able to convert them because people will have no idea why they should work with you. This is a guaranteed road to burnout and is where most founders quit. I will not let Ollie quit. However, this is only a question the founder can answer. So I put Ollie on the spot to give this product its promise. Okay, cool. So when you think about the details of like the actual product itself, right, what's the promise of this product? It's hard to define what that specifically means because productivity means different things for different people depending on what they're doing, but that is sort of what I've landed on. Double your productivity, focus, and consistency in anything that matters to you. In what duration? As a 12-month program. Okay, so let's for now just say the promise is double productivity. Ollie's response of double productivity is vague and it's kind of unclear. Number one, productivity's vague, and number two, I'm not sure how you're gonna measure doubling someone's productivity when most people can't even really define what productivity is in the first place. If I were to write a promise statement for Ollie, it would sound like I will help you get an extra $50,000 monthly revenue in your business in six months, or something like I will help you complete three important tasks every day for the next 90 days. But like I said, this is Ollie's journey, not mine. The good news is the second step in the journey will force Ollie to get more clarity around his idea. Step two is the map of the client journey. In order to help any founder get a better understanding of their client journey, they must have a grasp on the tactics and tools they'll provide to get customers to achieve the promise. And this is exactly what I asked Ollie to do. As part of this product, what are some of the deliverables you think are necessary to help someone actually double their productivity? They create a North Star document, which contains their life and work vision. They create a goalkeeper document, which is the document that holds their goals for the year. They will create a morning journaling template that I'm calling the AM5, which is just a check-in every morning that asks you what's the one thing you need to focus on. The fourth thing would be like a quest log, which is basically I use it to track my hours of deep work. Those would be the four key things that if they were to do them consistently would basically more than double their productivity. Perfect, we have some core offers within the product to build the brand around. Do the same with your business and identify your core offerings. You can complete this entire process in three steps over the next three weeks. Number one, determine your best client avatar. Leverage data from your audience to find who your best client is. You will use this to streamline your marketing, sales, and fulfillment efforts. Two, create a client journey map that is simple and easy for your team and clients to understand. You will use this map to onboard new clients and sell people on your product. Number three, implement systems across sales, marketing, copywriting, emails, payments, and automations. You will use this to pave the way for the client journey. Your customer journey map will look different depending on your business, but it should focus on client interaction at these stages. Purchase, onboarding, adoption, retention, expansion, referral. We've identified the tactics and tools Oli will use, but they're useless unless we put them into a strategic framework. Think a bit about like the framework behind this thing. When we think about like someone coming into productivity lab you're creating, what is it that people are coming to productivity lab for? Number one would be the kind of system which we're gonna teach them. Number two would be the accountability. Number three would be community. Oli is now clear on the tactics, tools, and framework that will allow clients to double their productivity with his productivity lab. There is now an opportunity to get more granular and ask what does the sales process look like? How will he onboard new members? What are the steps people take day by day when in the program to get results? But most importantly, what is the actual product? That is the next question we must answer to get Oli to $5 million a year. Step three, develop the actual product. The best marketing is an amazing product. A common mistake at this stage is prioritizing promotion over the product itself. Promotion is a pedal that constantly needs to be floored in order to get the customers to come to the product. But if you take your time to create an irresistible product, you can save time and money on the promotion side of things. Don't be afraid to step into the details because work put in there on the product, making it amazing, will compound down the line. Oli will need to nail down the pricing, duration, delivery, upsell, value, and then the content. Let's see how he does it. Let's figure out what kind of price you're looking to get this thing to and then the product that we need to have to get to $5 million a year, obviously, right? Let's start with, what's the price you're thinking of for this? Yeah, we were thinking $1,000 to $2,000 a year. I was initially thinking, without knowing much, that you would price this at, say, 5K for 90 days. Wow, interesting. Because if you're doubling someone's productivity and they're working on something serious, that's easily 50K plus of value, I would think, if they're working on some serious stuff. If they're working on serious stuff, yeah. Right? Clearly, Oli and I are at a fork in the road to 5 million. He is thinking of pricing the product at 1K to 2K for the whole year, and my initial thoughts were to price it between 5,000 and 6,000 for a few months. Pricing is the number one problem most founders face. And how do they screw up? They price too low. My worry is when people price their product at 1,000 bucks, it's hard to build a legit sales machine. You wanna be able to build a sales team that can be incentivized to make a 10% commission on each sale. If you only charge 1,000 bucks for your service, a salesperson can only make $100, assuming that 10% commission. Whereas if you charge $5,000, you can afford to pay that same salesperson $500 per sale. This allows you to get the best salespeople, not some scrubs, to sell your product. Sales is the first impression you give people, and it also gives you the margin to effectively invest in customer success managers, as well as an amazing product to ensure customers are blown away. Oli has been developing teaching systems for productivity online for 10 years. He has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube. He's a New York Times bestselling author. And along the way, he has created a successful business that does over $5 million a year. I think he's pricing himself short for just $1,000 for an entire year. The value of doubling productivity if someone is working on some pretty serious stuff far exceeds $1,000. If he were to price it higher, he would attract more serious folks to whom investing in their productivity would guarantee thousands of dollars of improvement. That way, Oli naturally attracts a client base where the impact of his product is far more significant. What would a $5,000 product look like for 90 days? And you get 1,000 people in that, you've made your 5 million. There's a world where after your 90 days, you've got a personal coach. We've been doing a great job with your productivity. We're doing a great job with these weekly reviews. Oh, your 90 days are up, but we've got a great thing going here. Why don't we just continue what we've got going? That's a good idea. The core thing is a 24K annual productivity mentorship. The downsell from this would be the three-month thing. We initially said 5K. You could start there, but there's a world where you want it to be a better deal for people to get into this. So you may actually make the three-month downsell between, like, let's just say it was like 8K. They really want to get in this. If they can't do that, well then, okay. They can get into three months, but it's gonna cost them more money. And this is your high-ticket productivity lab, call it or whatever. You could still go and price a low-ticket product at, say, like one to 2K. That's just these systems with some videos, which is like a productivity lite version, but it doesn't contain the 90% of the benefit, which is the accountability, access to you in the community. So it's all the same thing. It's just they get more access, more, you know, more touch points, more mentorship if they spend more. Bloody hell. So I think I just blew Ollie's mind. And you're probably thinking the same thing. How do we go from a $1,000 product to a $24,000 product? The average YouTuber with one million subscribers makes around $5,000 per month or 60K a year. If you want to scale that audience and squeeze more income out of the channel, $24,000 a year or $6,000 for three months is a smart amount to invest in growing that business and getting access to masters of the trade like Ollie. Or if you're a founder like me and you know that every four hours of deep work that you add into your schedule results in an extra $20,000 a month or 240,000 a year, it is a no brainer to unlock more revenue for my business by buying a $24,000 productivity solution. At $1,000 a year, Ollie would need to have a community of over 5,000 people. How do you ensure the happiness of 5,000 people and ensure they are all doubling their productivity when they have invested just a thousand bucks? You can't. Not out of the gates. $24,000 reflects the value and community that Ollie is excited to build long-term. From here, it's essential to remove all bottlenecks. A bottleneck is a clog in the work pipeline that slows your day-to-day production. Common bottlenecks include things like an unaligned team, outdated workflows, operational processes, and you. Yes, you. Most founders are their own worst bottleneck. Your own mindset is the lid on your success. And I think there are some lingering limiting beliefs of self-worth that are holding Ollie back from pricing the product at its true value. It can be an uncomfortable conversation, but these fears need to be confronted to reach Ollie's goal. Now, there's the concept of getting this thing to $5 million ARR, right? But I think at the core of where the bottleneck might be if we're building a business like this is your own mindset. I mean, I felt a lot of imposter syndrome around pricing our initial YouTube course at $400. Just feels scary to charge so much. Because in my mind, I'm kind of thinking, these systems are nothing special. I mean, anyone can do this. They're just not doing it, but they could do it. Is it really worth $24K a year? You already have a plan to make something like what we've talked about. You just weren't going to make it now. You were gonna make some lower ticket stuff. I was gonna do a roundabout way to get to the goal. Right, whereas you could just build a thing now of people that you genuinely enjoy serving that are more at your level, but are looking to now kind of maybe bridge that gap between kind of creator to entrepreneur and get the level of systems that you've done to grow a YouTube channel to five mil, grow a business to five mil, and release a book all in the last year. It's weirder that I find myself saying this because I say this to other people when they struggle with stuff. And I would say to someone, well, if it's not valuable enough, you just give them their money back and ask them for feedback. And then it becomes more valuable over time. It's not that deep. But there's something about thousands of dollars that feels different to hundreds of dollars. But because I'm comfortable with hundreds of dollars and I'm not yet comfortable with thousands of dollars, this feels like a whole different ballgame. But it's all the same stuff. Everyone can start a productivity course for anyone. Right? Anyone can make a productivity community and do Zoom co-working sessions. Very few people can go upmarket, given your experience, and teach people how to be both a creator and entrepreneur and free up more time in their schedule and do deep work and manage a team of 20 plus people. Like, this is a unique background that you have that you offer people. And for that unique background, you should be charging a higher price, which is a signal that you really know what you're doing. Interesting. Again, the bottleneck in any of these businesses will be really look at them deeply. It oftentimes is just us. And I'm sure where your team's getting stuck right now and where you're getting a bit stuck is like, oh ----, what do I actually want to do? I could just sell these low-ticket things and do the part-time YouTuber thing again in the productivity space, rinse and repeat, do that. Did that bring me happiness? Did I like that model before? It has its pros and cons. When you fuel your energy into yourself, is it a whole body, yes? Where you're like, hell yes, let's replicate what we did there, here. You need to work on things that are a whole body, yes. Spend your time on a business that aligns with your mind, body, soul, and spirit. I wouldn't be where I'm at if I didn't love what I do. I love helping founders, I love building systems, I love growing FounderOS, and I love building an amazing community. But I only get to do this because I stop chasing anything that's not perfectly aligned with that vision. You owe it to yourself and everyone that is building your business with you to keep your eyes on the prize. For Ollie, I know that means setting the gold standard for productivity as a professional solution, not just some SEO buzzword in the title of YouTube videos. Once you've made it this far, the last, final, and fifth step is to say no to all distractions. This may sound like an obvious step, but even Ollie almost fell into this trap, starting to chase other opportunities too far. Take a look. I've never done it before with like 5,000 customers, but 5,000 customers paying 1,000 a year to get to 5 million feels weirdly lower lift than fewer people paying more. I could be wrong about this though. The one thing that I don't like though about what you just said is it feels like you're going back into a hamster wheel of something you just tried to get out of with part-time YouTuber Academy. You almost like having built that through seven cohorts, got it to a stage, and also learned a lot about yourself, feel good productivity, building a feel good business that you're like, okay, I'm gonna get myself out of this cohort thing. This is starting to feel like a little bit of like a factory around Ollie. And as much as I wanna help people, it can't be under this model anymore. To get to $5 million ARR, like you just need one thing, driving traffic from the source that you already have, which is YouTube. And then just a good customer success and sales rhythm. Yeah, because at the moment we sort of have like, okay, let's do the Productivity Lab, which is $1,000 product for the normal people. Then we have our YouTuber thing, which is 6,500 for the normal people who wanna start a YouTube channel. And then we have our entrepreneur thing, which is maybe like, I don't know, 10K a year for people who wanna grow a business. Then we'll do our mastermind next year. And it starts to get like quite complicated. I think like all these other like, oh, we start this low ticket, then I'll do this other low ticket and this cohort. And then one day we'll go to that. It's like, you're just adding so much complexity when you really just need one thing that's amazing that you feel good about, that you can do for a long time, right? Which is like this productivity stuff and you put the book around it. You have it, like you're the guy. Just focus on the one thing that can get you there and say no to all these distractions for a bit. Okay, this is good stuff. What do you think are the chances that this will work? 100%. Really? Yeah. Damn, okay. 100% this works, like there's nothing. I need to move to Dubai and hang out with you guys more. Well, I mean, that's also something you need to do, yeah. If this actually works, then like the fact that we've documented this whole process. Okay, first off, it will work. It's gonna be so sick. When this works, it will be sick. It will be absolutely sick. These five steps are universal. One, define the promise of the product. Two, map out the client journey. Three, develop the product. Four, remove all the bottlenecks. And five, say no to all distractions. This five-step system will get Ollie to $5 million with this new sustainable business model and can be applied to nearly every business model when it comes time to launch and then scale. Save this lesson or share it with your mentor and start scaling with this system. And my door's always open to any of you founders seeking to take your business to the next level. And that's it, man. That is the plan to $5 million plus a year. What the hell? Good ----. What the actual ****?