Ali Abdaal on Running a $1M Online Course

Joining me this week for another one of our special live audience episodes is Ali Abdaal. Ali is a second-time guest on the show. In our first conversation – Episode 13 – we talked more about his journey from medical student at Cambridge, to YouTube celebrity where he now has close to 2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

In this episode, we do a deep dive into an online course which Ali now generates over a million dollars a year from teaching. The Part-Time Youtuber Academy is an absolute masterpiece of an online course. His cohorts sell out in hours. But originally, Ali didn’t even want to do a cohort-based course. In this conversation, we explore what motivated him to get started, what he learned from doing his first two cohorts, and what he was most excited about ahead of the launch of his third cohort.

There are tons of lessons here not only for course creators, but also for business owners on scaling your business, hiring, working with teams, designing operating procedures, and providing value to customers.

So please enjoy my second conversation with Ali Abdaal.

Full Episode

Guest Links

Show Notes

Ali talks about the Inner Circle Community, how they started and ended it. (00:03:24-00:08:40)
What is it like running a 400 person cohort? (00:08:41-00:11:18)
What do your six weeks look like when you’re running a cohort? (00:11:21-00:13:35)
Why Ali made the big changes from cohort one to cohort two and what were the benefits of making these changes? (00:13:37-00:15:27)
Why the course went from four to six weeks. (00:15:29-00:18:58)
What’s his system for capturing ideas for improvements? (00:19:15-00:20:20)
What Ali does to cater to people from vastly different experience levels. (00:20:21-00:24:05)
The balance between destination and journey content. (00:24:07-00:27:08)
Making refinements, adjustments, and structural changes to the course. (00:27:10-00:28:47)
The house system. (00:28:48-00:32:35)
How he matches up people together in a group. (00:32:43-00:34:00)
The format on how his group sessions are run. (00:34:04-00:35:35)
Ali’s insights on tiers and pricing, and how he thought about the value he was packaging into each tier. (00:35:55-00:38:06)
How does he setup an executive package? (00:38:07-00:41:22)
The Self Service Program. (00:41:24-00:43:42)
His ideas on a self-paced, introductory beginners package. (00:43:43-00:46:17)
Ali’s scholarship program and the process behind it. (00:46:18-00:49:56)
What house would Ali be in? (00:50:09-00:50:26)
Ali further discusses his pricing tiers. (00:50:35-00:52:15)
Things to look forward to in cohort three. (00:52:39-00:55:07)
Doubling down on the community. (00:55:08-00:55:57)
Where to find Ali. (00:55:58-00:56:35)

Selected Links from the Episode

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