How to Scale your Startup with Growth Levers: Matt Lerner | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

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You need to sort of figure out from first principles, how does your business grow, and then align whatever organizational pieces are required to make that happen?

Thick. All right, I'm sold.

These levers, these are the things, the actions that will have the biggest impact on the growth of your business.

Matt was one of the early stage employees at PayPal as they blitz scaled to a ridiculous valuation.

He has since helped over 200 startups find their big growth leavers as the founder of System.

And apparently, I didn't know this, an occasional guest lecturer at Stanford Business School.

Complexity kills businesses.

And the longer you can keep that at bay, the longer you're run with.

We start off with Matt giving a bit of a backstory about how he got into this business of helping other startups grow.

And then we talk through the four step model of identifying your North Star and your growth leavers and being able to run growth experiments to figure out how those can help grow your startup.

Back to the North Star then.

I think how you measure it might be hard, but it could either be something about number of lives changed or number of true fans or something that reflects the purpose.

One thing to think about is life changing is kind of a discrete event, but I get the sense that your customers are kind of always on a journey.

Yeah. That's a very good point.

Matt Lerner, welcome to the podcast.

How are you doing? Pretty good.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for coming.

So you are the author of this incredible book, Growth Leavers, which I read a few months ago.

And then I think I was speaking to a friend and he mentioned that you were in London and he mentioned he knew you and so he connected us.

So thank you for coming on the pod.

I was hoping we could, you know, you specialize in helping businesses grow.

So I was hoping we could talk a little bit about your background, a little bit about the book.

And then we could turn this into a bit of a live coaching session where you help talk me through the struggles we're facing in our business.

And then hopefully viewers and listeners can get some value out of however much of the podcast they decide to listen to.

How does that sound?

Sounds like a good plan.

Fantastic. So I guess to begin with, what is your backstory and how did you end up in this seat?

Yeah, it's not the obvious path.

I guess no one in a seat like this would be.

So I grew up in a place called Cleveland, Ohio.

I'd say my first real job actually was a summer job in an oil refinery of all things.

I was a lab technician and we may end up talking about the refinery when we get into this, but it was hard, hot, dirty work.

And I think I learned a bunch of stuff there.

Went to uni, graduated and ended up on the west coast working in tech pretty quickly.

And that was an exciting time definitely to be in tech.

First startup I joined was dead in nine months.

The second one I joined was dead in six months.

What sort of era was this?

When was this? This would have been 1996.

Oh, okay. So just before the big dot com boom or as things were happening.

Just as things were picking up.

It was a very exciting time.

Sure. The third company, we ended up selling it for $40 million, which one thing I learned is when you're backed by Excel partners, $40 million exit actually isn't very big.

I thought this sounded like a lot of money.

Anyways, so I took my little piece of that and went and traveled a bit, came back, and I got approached by someone who worked at PayPal in 2004, that was.

And so I joined their growth team originally doing some developer relations stuff.

But as you can imagine, the business grew very quickly.

I had various leadership, growth and general manager type roles over the years.

Stayed there for almost 11 years, moved to the UK.

Learned a lot during that time.

I'm sure we'll cover it at some point in the pod.

I left and became a VC at that point.

So I was the London partner for a Silicon Valley fund called 500 Startups.

Okay. They've backed over 2000 companies, including you may have heard of Canva, Twilio, Intercom.

So some Udemy, some pretty good names in there.

And the cool thing about being a VC is you get to see everyone's business from the inside out, like hundreds of pitches.

And that gave me a chance to sort of pattern match.

Which of these things I know was this weird quirk of the payments industry and which of these are really patterns.

And I did see startups making the same preventable mistakes over and over again and just squandering talent and tens of millions of dollars.

And so that led me to go and start my own business system, write this book.

And now I work with companies and help them find their growth levers.

Nice. That's a really interesting backstory.

I'm curious when, I've had a couple of people on the pod say that, oh, I was working in company X, whatever, and then I became a VC.

Is that code for I became so rich that I started investing my own money?

Or is it actually just, I applied for a job at a VC firm?

Like, yeah, why does someone suddenly switch from tech to becoming a VC?

Definitely closer to the latter in my case.

I was definitely at a point in my career where I wanted to change.

I wanted an opportunity to really increase the scale of learning.

And one of the original early PayPal people who I'd worked with ran this fund and we got to talking and he had wanted to expand into Europe anyway.

So we tried some stuff out and that kind of worked out.

So that's how I ended up in VC.

But my main goal I think was learning.

And it was really good in that way.

So what does your company system do now?

So in short, we work with early -stage startups.

So startups get to this point where they've got a product and some customers and they're struggling to find a way to really scale their customer acquisition and do things that do scale.

And so we work with them to find what we call the big growth levers, the things that are really gonna scale for them.

And the thinking behind that and that sort of mistake I see over and over again that I was alluding to is startups try to do a little bit of everything.

And one of the observations I had shortly after my time at PayPal was that if you, first I look back at my time at PayPal and I realized like 90 % of all of our growth came from like five things.

Oh, wait, how? So like, I mean, early on, before I got there, they got onto eBay and eBay sellers started using it and then they wrote a bot to start bidding on eBay items and pretending to be a buyer and asking if they would accept PayPal and the sellers were like, oh, yeah, sure.

And so eBay was a huge early growth engine, then reaching out to web developers because that's the people who are implementing e -commerce.

And then we figured out that about the time I got there, they figured out that a lot of e -commerce sites just get built on a platform, like the early versions of Shopify type businesses.

So we reached out to all the shopping carts and hosting companies and got pre -integrated with all of those.

And there were a few more things, international expansion and a few others, but really not many.

Okay, and what's your sense of how many things the team tried to grow of which five worked?

Right, so that's the rub, right?

They didn't just do six things.

When I left, they had 24 ,000 employees, they were spending $5 billion a year on stuff.

So they tried hundreds of things and launched dozens of products and wasted money on campaigns that didn't work.

And it didn't matter because they were printing money.

But if you're a little startup and you've got 12 months of runway and a million bucks in the bank, you don't have that luxury.

So in order to be successful, you've gotta figure out, if you assume that 90 % of your growth's gonna come from 10 % of the stuff you do, you've gotta find that 10 % as quickly as possible.

And that's what we help startups do.

Oh, 90 % of your growth.

So this is like the 80 -20 principle, just like even more extreme than that.

What other examples have you seen of this 90 -10 principle in action when it comes to like growing businesses?

I mean, if you read the great startup case studies, you'll find something like this in all of them.

For Dropbox, it was this kind of viral, product -led referral loop that Sean Ellis helped them develop.

Canva, they have about 750 ,000 landing pages out there for search terms like award certificate template and birthday card template and all these things.

Social media, post design, whatever.

And so people Google this stuff, they get to Canva, so that's part one.

And then part two is they have an incredibly optimized self -serve onboarding experience.

So you can just get in the tool with no Photoshop experience or anything and be successful right away.

So you know, those are a couple examples, but again, if you study HubSpot or any of these great startups, you'll find things like this.

Okay. So just sort of zooming out of it.

So I have only recently learned that like growth is a department in a business.

I guess, you know, a few years ago when I started reading business books for the first time, I realized that sales and marketing were a thing.

And I guess now that we're thinking about our business, we're thinking, okay, we kind of went ahead of growth for each of our major product lines and that person's role will be to try and grow the revenue of that particular product line.

And I guess thinking out loud, downstream of that, they're like, okay, let's say the goal is to grow our YouTuber Academy from 3 million a year to 10 million a year.

At that point, I guess this person figures out, okay, what is the menu of 100 possible things we could do?

And then they figure out what's the three or four things that will actually do that?

Is that the rough idea?

So there's a few questions in there.

You know, one is how does growth sit in the organization and then two is kind of - Yeah, so let's take the first one here.

Where does growth sit in the organization?

How is it different to sales and marketing?

And what's the thing?

It's really tricky.

With most early stage startups, my advice is unless you've had a very good reason, otherwise your founder is your head of growth.

Because the startup has one job.

You know, a startup is a company that grows fast, that's built to grow fast.

And to do growth effectively, first of all, you need to really understand the business every aspect from the board and the cash flow all the way through to the customers, every aspect of the product, every aspect of sales and marketing customer acquisition.

The one person who can do that typically is the founder.

You also need to be able to pull any and all of those levers.

And again, the one person in the organization who can tell an engineer to do one thing and tell a marketer to do another thing and tell the finance person, no, we're going to spend money on this, is the founder.

So it's a weird thing to put in a department because it's so cross -functional.

And even in larger orgs, that creates a problem.

And like when I was at PayPal and building my team, the number two thing I was always thinking about was how well is this person going to play with others?

Can they build relationships?

Can they get people in other departments to do things that their boss didn't tell them to do to help the grader go to the business?

So in that sense, sales and marketing are a subset of growth?

They're certainly a big piece of it, obviously, customer acquisition, but depending on your big levers and what they are, a lot of it could be driven by product.

It could be driven by all sorts of things like let's take, you know, the company Wyse, here in London, money remittances company.

So anyone who wants to work with a FinTech company, they have to go through this process called KYC, Know Your Customer, which means that Wyse is legally required to verify some documents, source of funds, who you are, you're not a fraudster, whatever.

So for most companies, that's just a giant pain and it's this thing you've got to do.

But if you go to your head of compliance and you say, listen, your job isn't, you know, if you hire a head of compliance, they're going to want to do a good job and be 100 % compliant.

And if you go to them and say, listen, that's not your job.

Your job is to get as many weekly active users or as much money going through our platform as possible while remaining compliant, they're going to think about their job differently.

So what Wyse did was they smoothed out that process in a way and just really spent a lot of time on optimizing the user journey just to make that really painless and help people get up and running quickly.

So in that sense, their compliance function became a component of their growth engine.

Or another weird example is Spotify.

So, you know, it didn't take a genius to figure out that people would rather listen to streaming music than like buy albums and only listen to one song on it, the problem was the record labels in the US didn't want that to happen.

So they started in Europe and they went into countries that have more favorable laws, eventually got enough momentum, enough of an audience, enough money and enough lawyers that they could then move into the US.

And in that sense, for a while, their growth team were their lawyers.

So it could be, I mean, I'm choosing extreme examples, but my point is it could be anywhere in the organization.

So you need to sort of figure out from first principles, how does your business grow and then align whatever organizational pieces are required to make that happen.

That's super interesting.

All right, I'm sold.

So then what does growth levers mean?

And why is that the title of the book?

And it's an American book.

So they're levers for the record.

Levers, sure, levers.

Yeah. It sounds so much better when you say it, anyways.

Levers, yeah. Levers.

So these levers are or levers or whatever they are, this is the work.

These are the things, the actions that will have the biggest impact on the growth of your business, that you need to identify.

Sure. Okay, so how do we do that?

So how do you do that?

There's four steps to the process.

The first step, why is it levers?

Lever is in process and not levers and process.

Anyway. There's four steps to this process.

The first thing, which I think we're gonna do today, is you sort of map your growth model, which is a mathematical representation of how your business acquires and delights and engages and retains and monetizes customers.

Okay. And once you've got some data in there, you can sort of mathematically derive where are the points of highest leverage?

Okay. Step two, is you need to really understand your customer's journey, which has nothing at all to do with your product.

Nobody, if you're a startup, nobody woke up in the morning looking for your product.

Often, nobody even woke up in the morning looking for your category.

But clearly, you could help these people if only they knew you existed.

So you've gotta figure out, what were they trying to do?

What do they think they were looking for?

Where were they looking for it?

And what questions would they have?

And how can you sort of turn up there and look like that thing?

Okay. So we started the customer journey.

Actually, I have a really cool example of that.

Oh, yep. So on the way here, I was walking in, the next muse over, I went and looked at the same house number.

And I figured out it wasn't your house, but the doorbell had a sticker on it.

It said 24 -hour emergency locksmith.

And I took a picture of it.

And I figured out, this locksmith could advertise anywhere in London, but the place I'm gonna be when I suddenly realize I need a locksmith is right here, locked out of my flat, right?

And so I was like, okay, that's a perfect example of growth hacking because you figured out, what are you gonna be looking for?

And where are you gonna be when you suddenly realize you need it and just turn up there and look like that thing?

Yeah, because no one wakes up in the morning thinking I need a locksmith.

They rock up at their door realizing I need a locksmith.

And if the guy's number's there, it's like, oh, I might as well call that number.

And if you heard a podcast and a locksmith sponsored it yesterday, you're not gonna remember that.

So step two is to map your customer journey.

We use a technique called jobs -to -be -done interviews.

Step three, then, is you're gonna have lots of ideas.

And so you're gonna wanna filter down the ideas first by looking at your growth model and saying, which of these will have the biggest impact?

Which of these are focused on our rate -limiting step where we can have the biggest impact on the business?

And then you're still gonna have more ideas and most of them are gonna be bad.

So the next thing you gotta do is experiment quickly.

So step three is to design and run growth experiments as quickly as possible.

And that's tricky because a lot of the ideas you're gonna have are hard.

I'm gonna publish a book.

That takes a long time, right?

I'm gonna do this or that, whatever.

Takes a lot of money, gonna build some product.

All those things are hard.

And you've gotta find a way to test them in like a week or two.

Oh, okay. So the way you'll do that is you'll look at this idea and you'll say, okay, all the things, the moving parts of this, what are the risky assumptions here?

What are the risky assumptions?

So if you're gonna publish a book, and suppose maybe you just really wanted to write a book, but maybe you're hoping the book's gonna be a creative to your business.

Yeah, so in my case, we sell a productivity, community course thing and I'll think, great, let me publish a book about productivity, which will take me three and a half years because hopefully people will read the book and then they'll sign up to my course.

Okay. Great idea, right?

So what are the risky assumptions here?

That Ali can write a book reasonably quickly, that it won't distract him from running his business, that people will actually wanna buy the book, people will like the book and that people who like the book will then sign up and take your course.

Yeah, all of these are quite risky assumptions.

Okay, a lot of risky assumptions.

The only way to test them all would be to write a book, but could you isolate one of those assumptions and find a way to test it?

Could you find a way to figure out in a week how hard writing a book is, or whether people would like a particular book title idea or a topic idea, or whether people who bought a book would then go, someone else's book maybe would go on and buy a course.

Yeah, so if I were thinking out loud with this example, I would be thinking, who do I know who has both a book and a course?

And in my position, I can just email them and be like, hey, quick question, to what extent did the book contribute to your course sales?

I, so I happen to know a handful of people who do this.

Some of them have said it basically did nothing because they already had a YouTube channel.

And the other one said it was massive because they didn't have a YouTube channel.

Those are like the two categories of like four people that I've spoken to who for whom this scenario applies.

Okay, great. So you've now in a week de -risked or ruled out a bad idea or de -risked an assumption.

So for each of your experiments that you're most excited about, you figure out what's the quickest way we can test this.

That's step three. And we can come back to any of these obviously, but then step four is a mindset shift.

So it turns out that to grow a startup quickly, you pretty much have to have the exact opposite mindset that it would take to be successful in school or successful in a normal job.

Oh, tell me more. And as you can imagine, people have trouble with this.

So what do you do? You were a good student in school.

How do you succeed in school?

You learn all the things really quickly, really thoroughly and you remember them and you apply them without making any mistakes.

Suppose you get a job as a consultant or a banker, an engineer, whatever.

So how do you get promoted in a company?

You do all the things they ask you to do plus a few more things, you do them really, really well and you don't make any mistakes.

Okay, so now you come into a startup and the deck is stacked against you.

You can't do all the things that you know you should do.

You've never done this before so you're absolutely gonna make mistakes and you need to move quickly, which means you can't do all the things and you've gotta make mistakes.

And the value is those mistakes because each of those mistakes brings a little bit of learning and gets you actually closer to your goal.

In theory, provided you learn from the mistake.

Provided you learn from the mistake.

Yeah, but I think it's something we've been quite bad at in that we've often done things and then only like two years later, we'll remember, oh yeah, we did that thing and we, yeah, we really should have written down what we learned from that because we've just made that mistake again.

Actually that was part of the experiment process is document your experiments we've done and document your learnings.

But it's even worse with the mindset piece because someone who is afraid to make mistakes and thinks they're gonna get a bad grade or fired or something isn't gonna talk about them.

And then you're not gonna learn from them.

And then someone else is gonna go make that mistake again.

Nice, okay, so we've got this four step process.

Can we try this out in our business and see what happens?

Yeah, absolutely, let's do that.

Cool, so let's say you and I are doing a business coaching, growth coaching session.

Where would we begin?

Do we start like sketching stuff out on paper or do you like ask me some questions or how does the process?

Yeah, so we're gonna start.

I'm gonna ask you a few questions just to get some context.

No right or wrong answers.

Just tell me kind of the current state of your thinking and where it's at.

First question is who's your ideal customer?

Oh, okay. I might take a few notes.

Yeah, no, please by all means.

Who's our ideal customer?

Okay, this feels like a hard one to answer.

Because we have multiple products with multiple different customer profiles.

And if I think of my YouTube channel as like a product and an end in itself, which it sort of is because even if I made all the money I still make YouTube videos.

For me it's not just a growth engine for a product.

It's like a thing itself.

That's got like five and a half million subscribers and it's just like I look at the analytics and it's so broad and I have no idea where even to begin when someone asks me.

Well, I have a vague idea of where to begin when someone asks me who's my ideal customer.

But it always feels a bit like hand wavy.

Okay, well let's tighten that up.

First of all, I appreciate the humility.

That's super important.

You knowing you don't know the answers is definitely the first step.

But think about your best customer.

Think about someone who buys a book, reads a book, recommends it to their friends, buys a course.

Who's that? Actually I can maybe make it simpler.

Why are they doing that?

What are they trying to achieve?

Okay, what are they trying to achieve?

They are trying to, I guess, achieve their fullest potential or something had wavy like that.

I guess the absolute dream person, if I were to think, who is the person that would, okay I'm just gonna think out loud here, I'm just gonna throw some stuff at you.

So there's like an ideal customer for the YouTube channel but then there is also an ideal customer for the courses.

And generally the only difference between the two is one of them has a lot of money and the other one does not.

So if we start with a YouTube channel, the ideal customer for the YouTube channel is someone who's a few years younger than me.

Maybe they're 25, they're in their first job, or maybe they're in like grad school or something like that.

They're not earning that much money but they're in a reasonable job.

They did reasonably well at school.

They're quite ambitious.

They enjoy reading personal development books.

They discover my YouTube channel because they wanna be more productive and they wanna try and apply those insights to their day job but they also aspire to start their own business someday.

And they see my stuff and the people I interview on the podcast sometimes and like, oh man how sick would it be if I could one day have the option of quitting my day job by making 5K a month in passive income, blah, blah, blah.

And so they start like dreaming of this entrepreneurial startup type route.

Some of them get started with the thing.

Some of them don't.

Some of them use the stuff in the videos to get ahead in their university or in their job.

But they sort of aspire to financial freedom but in a way that's like not hustle culture bro.

More like they want financial freedom but they also wanna enjoy their life.

They want it to be sustainable.

They also care about their health and relationships and sort of holistic personal development with a bit of a sprinkle of financial freedom thrown in.

That's like for the YouTube channel I would say.

All right so these are people who are very deliberate and they have goals and they're trying to achieve them and often those goals are gonna be around having an impact and achieving some kind of independence and freedom and self actualizing like really like using their potential while they're here on this earth.

Absolutely, yeah. What other ways could they, or what other means could they use to achieve those goals?

They could read personal development books.

Okay. So they've probably bought and or read Atomic Habits and a handful of others, other things.

They would like to read more but they struggle to find the time for reading.

Maybe they listen to audio books.

Maybe they've learned that listening to audio books at two or three times speed is more efficient than listening to them at one time speed.

They probably have come across podcasts like the Tim Ferriss Show, Dara over CEO.

They probably have tried listening to Hebrewman Lab but couldn't quite stick with it long enough because it's a bit too dense for them.

They'd like something a little bit more bite -sized than Hebrewman Lab.

They might've come across YouTube channels like I don't know Matt D 'Avella and Thomas Frank a few years ago and would be maybe, they would know what Notion is.

They would maybe have tried using Notion and they might've dabbled with a bunch of different to -do the steps over the years.

All in service of self -actualization.

Okay, I think. All right, so that's good.

You can sort of think of that as your competitive set.

What do you mean by that?

It's non -zero some because they'll buy all of these books but in a sense, your competitors are anything else that will help them achieve their goals.

Oh, interesting, okay, yeah.

Better than you. Cool.

So that's just a way to frame that up.

Okay, what's working well right now in terms of your business and achieving that goal?

I'm guessing your goal is helping more people make progress against their goals.

Yeah, help people build a life in life kind of thing.

What's working? What's working well?

What's working well is that our YouTube videos are seen by a lot of people.

We get really nice comments from people saying that this video, et cetera, changed my life.

When we launch products, provided we've thought about the way in which we launch the product, people tend to buy because there's like a high level of trust.

Our products are a higher ticket than a lot of our competitors, I guess, but people still buy, not like millions of people but like thousands of people will buy the products which is able to sustain the business.

The book has done reasonably well.

I'm still enjoying the process of doing this stuff and increasingly, I'm getting invited to do talks and things which is kind of cool.

It's a bit of a signal and then when I do the talks, like I gave a talk at Google a couple of weeks ago and I went in with a lot of imposter syndrome, thinking what could I possibly have to say to people at Google but dozens of people were lining up afterwards and they were like, I've been watching

your videos since I was like 20 and now I'm like 28 and I'm like, oh shit, like now they're working at Google and so there seems to be genuine impact that the videos and the content and the podcasts and stuff has on people and the fact that the business is profitable, I guess is also a sign that it's

working to some degree.

All right, that's great by the way.

What's not working?

Good question, what's not working?

I often feel like I don't have, I often feel like I'm running out of ideas.

I often feel like the videos are becoming a bit repetitive because I've made like 850 plus videos on the channel.

I've been sort of saying the same stuff for a long time.

The audience is sort of, you're sort of talking to a marching army rather than to a static audience because people have different viewing preferences and when you do something for long enough, it's like someone who subscribed to my channel seven years ago may not be still interested in the sort of stuff

I talk about because they may have moved on or they may have just lost interest.

So there's a sense in which I feel like I kind of need to repeat myself to get the same message across because the questions still keep coming and the answer is still broadly the same.

Like how do I start procrastinating?

How do I not get distracted?

How do I focus? How do I become rich?

And it's like I've made videos about all those things for the last like four years and like my thinking on those has sort of refined but I do sort of feel like it's getting a bit repetitive and occasionally we'll get comments from people being like, at least clearly run out of content ideas.

In fairness, that's like one in 3000 comments.

So maybe it's not a thing to take that seriously but I often feel like, often it feels like a bit of a struggle to come up with ideas for what would be valuable to make a video about.

So that's something that I would say is not working.

Another thing that I guess is not working is when I go to the US and hang out with other entrepreneurs, broadly they're making way more money than I am with way smaller audiences and they look at my YouTube channel, they're like, bro, you've got 5 .6 million subscribers.

You really should be doing at least 10 million a year in revenue.

Like what's going on?

And I'm like, really?

Tell me how, like, what's going on there?

So we did like 5 million USD I think revenue last year or something, 5 .5, thank you, Angus.

And I don't know, I'd quite like to get to 10 just cause it's a bit of a game and seems kind of fun but we're not there yet.

I think we're on the path to get there but it seems like we have different options, right?

Like I'll speak to one person who'll say that software is the way to go.

Another person will say B2B learning and development is the way to go.

Another would say B2B agencies, you should create YouTube channels for big businesses cause every business needs a YouTube channel to grow and blah, blah, blah.

Another someone would say, nah, you can easily get to 10 million by just running paid ads for your own self -paced courses.

Another person would say, membership communities are the way to go.

Another person would say, just focus on making YouTube videos, bro, you've already got enough money, who cares?

And I sort of feel like there's all these different directions that we could go in and then I come back to the team and I'm like, hey guys, so there's all these different directions we could go in and the team gets frustrated because they're like, well, what do you want to do?

And I'm like, well, I don't know, can you guys tell me what we should do?

And it becomes this sort of, I was having a chat with one of our team yesterday and I said, what is the biggest weakness in the business?

And she said, probably a sort of the vision is not clear enough.

And I was like, yeah, that's probably about right.

See what we can do about that.

But I think we have an amazing team and we could execute on almost all these ideas that we have if we only knew which ones to actually do and focus on.

I feel like when you've got a good team, it's like you could do anything, but you can't do everything.

And that's the rub.

I was laughing because I get this same thing.

I mean, I'm a much smaller audience in business, but I have most of my clients are entrepreneurs.

And so they always, oh, Matt, what's next for you?

Have you ever thought about this?

Have you ever thought about that?

And they just pampered me with all these ideas.

And I'm like, I must be an idiot.

How am I not doing that?

How am I not doing this?

And I'm like, wait a second.

They're not running my business, are they?

It's really easy to be an expert when it's not your business.

Anyway, so that definitely landed with me.

So how do you decide which work to do?

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Good question. How do we decide which work to do?

Partly it's, I mean, the process has changed over time.

Initially there was no process.

Now the broad process is we, like what we did this year is that we were, I was like, okay, you know, everyone says you should have a revenue goal.

This was before I read your book.

Everyone says you should have a revenue goal.

So let's aim for 10 million by the end of next year as the revenue goal.

Now, let's figure out how we break that down.

What are the things that we could do with our existing things like our sponsorship revenue and our YouTuber Academy revenue to get to that point?

Cool sponsorships, we can probably go from two to two and a half million.

I don't really like doing sponsors.

Don't tell the sponsors.

So we don't want to grow that too much because it would probably require more effort from me.

Our YouTuber Academy could probably grow and we could launch this new product productivity lab, which is a thing that I've had in my mind and seems kind of cool.

And it's like productivity and it's a community and it's membership and recurring revenue.

You know, it's the ninth wonder of the world, apparently, after compound interest being the eighth.

And so we thought, okay, cool, let's create this product.

And hopefully we can grow that to like 5 million or something, because it would be kind of cool.

We thought of, do we want to do B2B?

And we thought, we don't have the expertise in the team right now to do that.

So it would require having an external hire.

We spoke to a few people about it.

Some people were very bullish on it.

Some people were very bearish on it.

Either way, it would have required an expensive external hire.

And so we thought, let's not worry about that for now.

We could have done one -on -one productivity coaching, but that would have required scaling a team of coaches and then training them on a process that I hadn't quite figured out yet.

So we were like, okay, that's a, at some point in the future thing, we could have done a very high ticket entrepreneurs mastermind thing.

But I felt weird charging 50 grand to my friends because a lot of them would be my friends who would attend.

And I kind of want to do that stuff for free because it's kind of fun.

So we decided not that because Ali doesn't like charging his friends.

So it's like, we will have these ideas and then sort of eliminate based on what seems reasonable and what we've kind of already done and what we're kind of good at already.

That's the rough process about how we figure out what to do.

Okay. Is it worth talking about the dangers of having revenue?

Yes. Working backwards from revenue.

Yeah, do tell because, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you've read the book, but basically the example that I see time and again is there's a million and one ways to make money in a business.

And in a traditional established business, investors have a very simple kind of mental model, which is, you put some money into the machine and you hire a bunch of people and they do some work and money comes out the other side of the machine.

And if you run a chain of car washes or rental properties or a factory, how those businesses work, it's not too unlike that.

And you can hire people from the other car wash company.

But with the startup, you're having to figure out how you get customers, how you deliver value to them, who they are, all those things.

Sorry, can I just ask it like, what is the difference between a startup and like a small business in this lingo?

All right, yeah, let's define terms.

So a startup specifically, and I'll use a definition from a guy named Paul Graham who founded Y Combinator.

And he says, a startup is a company that's built to grow fast.

And so that is the unapologetic, the goal.

So if you think about like a Mercedes AMG, it's a fast car, right?

It's got a big engine, but it has seat warmers, cup holders, Dolby surround sound.

If you think about a Formula 1 car, it has a seatbelt.

And other than that, it's pretty much go fast.

It just does one thing.

So that's kind of the difference I'm talking about here.

Do you think my company is a startup then?

And to what extent do growth levers apply to non -startups?

Like the local car wash, for example?

They certainly, I mean, so whether your company's a startup or not, I think is really down to your personal goals and ambitions, unless you have a bunch of investors.

Ah, okay, because if you have a bunch of investors, it's probably.

Whatever they think the goal is.

And so obviously that's an important conversation to have.

The levers still apply.

It's just a question of what are you solving for and what are your priorities.

But in either case, typically a startup is doing something that is relatively new, a new business model, new market, new category, new solution to an old problem.

And so in that sense, you haven't yet figured out all the ways that the business works.

If you took a job, worked for a software company and you were a salesperson, they'd give you the scripts.

They'd give you the sales training.

They'd teach you what questions to ask.

They'd teach you which calls to return first.

They have a playbook.

And every piece of their business has a playbook.

For your business, there are some.

You can get some ideas from friends.

But ultimately you're still writing your playbook.

So if you sort of break the equation down from like, you do some work and you get some money and just add one more step, which is you deliver value to customers.

So you do work, deliver value to customers and that's why customers give you money, not crazy.

Now, if you look at those two links, right?

The link from you have lots of happy customers too, or lots of happy users too.

We make money is relatively straightforward.

I mean, I know you're thinking about monetization strategies but it's a lot easier to figure out how to monetize 5 million followers than it is to figure out how to get from zero to 5 million followers in the first place.

So you want to focus everyone first and foremost on getting the customers and value delivery.

Who are these customers?

How do we get more of them?

How do we deliver value to them?

If you can consistently do that, monetization is a secondary problem.

But if you try to boil that whole thing all at once, you come up with all these ideas which may be completely orthogonal to customer value.

If you're Netflix, you can crack down on password sharing.

That'll make you a lot of money.

It's not gonna accelerate your growth, right?

Yeah, okay. So Netflix should focus on how do we add more value to customers?

Well, they're a very mature business now.

So they're making tweaks around monetization and free cash flow for shareholders.

They're past hyper growth stage.

But in the early days?

But for your business, yeah.

Or in the early days of any business.

Anyway, so I guess back to where we were, where were we in there?

So we were like, what's working, what's not working.

Lack of a clear vision.

And we talked about, we were talking about why is revenue is that idea?

How do we decide which work to do?

Yeah, why is revenue as a thing, a bad idea to work back from.

Okay. All right, so then I asked you how you decide which work to do.

You said we work back from revenue.

I have lots of ideas.

I get lots of ideas.

We sort of evaluate them and see which ones make sense and aren't too hard and we try to sell them.

Okay. Are there any really contentious issues that you keep coming back to like Groundhog's Day having the same debates internally?

Do you mind sharing one of these?

Of course, yeah. So actually Angus had read out an Apple note that I sent him two and a half years ago that read like it could have been last week where it was like, man, I feel like I'm running out of ideas for videos.

I feel like the content is getting repetitive.

I don't really like doing sponsored videos because they make me feel bad and they put a deadline on me.

What would my life look like if we didn't have any sponsored videos?

How much do I really care about growing the business?

Cause I kind of have enough money now and it's like, I kind of like making videos without having to think too hard about monetization.

But at the same time, I also want to play the game of entrepreneurship and like, you know, the thought of going to 10 million or potentially starting a software thing that could have a hundred million exit, that just seems kind of fun.

It's like the thing that I do now, I'm an entrepreneur, it's just kind of cool.

And there's all of this back and forth around that centers around how far and fast do we actually want to grow the business?

How involved do I want to be in that process of growing the business?

And how the hell do we keep making good videos without me getting bored of the process?

All right, so there's some pretty deep existential stuff in there, but in short, it's stuff around keeping the content fresh and really, you know, what are we pushing towards?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, next question, I apologize, there's only two more questions.

This one's kind of a yucky one, but imagine we're three years out and this is just really fizzled.

You've lost audience engagement, you're not monetizing.

This business is really gone.

What likely went wrong?

We didn't find a way to keep the audience, sorry, to keep the content fresh.

A critical mass of the audience started to find the content on the YouTube channel and stuff repetitive and boring and they started to get the sense of, oh, he's just making this because he wants the sponsor money and there's actually no value in this video.

So people feel as if the videos are not delivering the value that they maybe once did.

YouTube is becoming increasingly more competitive every single year.

There are people who are making videos in the space of personal development and they're in this world where we fizzle out.

The other alternatives on YouTube are more compelling that they're taking quote market share because even though it's not really a zero sum game on like someone tends to, people have a finite number of amount of time that they watch YouTube videos for.

So the more competitors there are, the less, the more we are in a way competing for views against the other competitors, even though I don't like to think of it that way.

So that would be one big part of the pie that like the YouTube channel loses its kind of appeal in some capacity.

A reason why we might fail on the monetization front is that we, almost, I would say what's likely.

We maybe get too big for our boots and try and take our customers for granted in the sense of like, oh, we'll always have customers coming in because we've got a big enough audience, so we can sort of afford to not give them amazing customer service.

Hopefully we would never do this because, yeah.

And then the refund rate starts to creep up, people start to become unhappy.

And now the backbone of the business, which is not sponsors but is in fact revenue from our own products, starts to dry up.

People start making videos about how all of those courses are a scam and how you should stay away and that, you know, for price shopping, for customers to shop around results in lower sales for our courses.

The software plays that we are currently, you know, those calls we currently have in the fireplace all end up fizzling out and none of them does anything interesting.

We try B2B and we spend a load of time and money and we hire like someone who's got loads of experience and that ends up not going anywhere.

Those are reasons why the business could fizzle out three years from now.

Okay, so that answer tells me a few things about you.

The first thing it tells me is you have an internal locus of control.

So we ask these questions to every entrepreneur before we work with them.

And some of them, it's all exogenous.

You know, Google gives away a free version of our product, there's another pandemic, our use case disappears, blah, blah, blah.

The fact that all of the risks you've thought about are actually in your control, high sense of agency.

Very good sign. The second thing is you've actually thought about these risks in a lot of nuance.

And so I think the more nuance, I don't know if these are the right answers or the wrong answers, I'm not a YouTuber.

But I know that the more people have thought about these answers and the more level of detail, the better their understanding of the business and kind of their clear -eyed and realistic.

So I think those are good answers.

Last question, on a scale of one to 10.

Last question, on a scale of one to 10, how do you take your feedback?

Do you like it mild, medium, or spicy?

Oh, I like it spicy.

All right. We'll be direct.

Okay, so should we jump into mapping your growth model?

Absolutely, let's do it.

Okay, all right, so the first thing we have to figure out is your North Star metric.

And this is the number that increments when you deliver value to customers.

Ideally, it encompasses kind of the entire business from the acquisition funnel all the way through monetization and retention.

Okay, but we have different products.

So how do we think about this with, in a world where we have multiple products?

I mean, that's again, the nice thing about revenue is for all its flaws, it's easy to measure.

But how do you measure value delivered to customers?

So think about it this way.

If people absolutely loved your content, we're getting a lot of value from it, how would they naturally behave?

Sign up to my email list.

They would like the video, if I reminded them, because people tend not do that as a default action.

They may subscribe to the YouTube channel.

But if they're an existing subscriber, they've already subscribed.

They may leave a comment, maybe like 1 % of people who actually like the content will leave a comment saying they liked it.

They might buy the book if they feel like, oh, Ali's book is probably good.

And also, I'm the sort of person who reads books and therefore they may buy the book.

They may buy one of our courses, which is our YouTuber course, if they want to be a YouTuber or a productivity community, if they want to double their productivity.

But those are high -ish ticket things like starting at $1 ,000.

So they have to not be broke and also have a high enough willingness to pay to pay for those things.

So, don't know. Can you be delivering value to customers if they don't buy your courses in your book?

Yeah, that would be through the YouTube watch time number incrementing up.

Okay, so people who watch a lot of your videos.

Yeah, or the YouTube view number incrementing up.

But like, for example, a long form podcast will have a very high watch time, but a lower on like relatively number of views.

But if they've watched two hours of this podcast, they're probably getting a lot of value from this podcast compared to if they watch 30 seconds of a YouTube video, which still counts as a view.

So watch time is sort of the thing that combines views plus retention in a way.

All right, this is getting complicated.

And Angus was really helpful.

Ahead of the podcast, he sent me your master spreadsheet with all your data in it.

And it had, I think, 14 tabs.

Yeah, something like that.

And then, you know, 100 rows and 50 columns.

Yeah, one thing that might be helpful is that we are now, we got some advice from a few entrepreneurs and friends, and they suggest, like a lot of people suggested, don't think of your company as one company, think of it as three different companies.

Think of it as Ali Abdaal Media, which is your content arm.

Think of it as Productivity Lab, which is your productivity business, and think of it as YouTuber Academy, which is its own mini business.

And so if we think of these three things separately, everything starts to feel a lot more simple because now it's like, oh, okay, if you asked me who's the target customer, for each of these businesses, I could tell you, if you asked me what's the North Star, maybe I'd have a more coherent answer than what I

just spewed out. Okay, but I'm trying to get to simplicity.

And for me, I'm worried that breaking it into three businesses almost makes it more complicated at this stage.

So let's, and it is complicated.

Like when I was prepping for this podcast, I was trying to sketch out your growth model and like took like five tries and it is complicated.

So then, but if you think about it at the highest level, and I sort of thought about other famous influencers, I don't know their businesses at all, Mr.

Beast or Lenny Rachitsky or something.

It seems like at the base, basically you just, you get an audience, you deliver helpful content to them and you monetize them.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Fundamentally. Yeah, fundamentally.

And so the value delivery piece of that is delivering helpful content to them.

And if you can do that, like generally you're able to monetize them.

Yeah. So the key metrics out of that, to me sound like they're just gonna be like how many loyal true fans do you have?

Yeah, that would be a pretty solid metric.

On that note, one thing, an idea that was floating around in my mind sometime a year or two ago, was what would it look like if we sent out an annual survey to the audience or had like a thing always on the website, asking, is it going to sound grandiose for anyone listening to this?

So forgive me. But like, basically doing a survey of like, did we help you, like did we change your life in any way, essentially?

And people would be able to fill out this simple form that was like, how did we change your life?

Like how would you say that Ali Bell's content has changed my life?

Maybe for some people it would be like, you encouraged me to apply to med school.

Maybe for others it would be, you encouraged me to leave med school.

Maybe you encouraged me to start a business or you helped me get better grades.

And we'd be able to collect these sort of like real people testimonials, who crucially may not ever give us any money, but we would have this incrementing number of number of lives changed.

And I was thinking, oh, how cool would it be if number of lives changed, became our like North Star metric?

This was before I read your book, but there was something nice about this idea of being able to measure the number of lives that have been positively impacted by our content in some way or another.

I love that. And then you can get like a board and have all those answers to streaming through your living room every day.

And you can go, oh yeah, that would be cool.

Help me decide to leave med school then.

That's me, whatever they can.

Like how many doctors do we close to leave?

Leave the healthcare system, you know, that kind of stuff.

I love that because this isn't just entertainment, right?

This is entertainment with a purpose.

There was also, just on that note, another metric that I thought would be really cool, which is one thing that we're gonna do this year is donate 10 % of all the business profits to charities, but charities that have an ROI.

So for example, the Against Malaria Foundation cost on average $3 ,500 to save a life.

And so number of lives saved, which is a result of how much money have we donated to charities where they've figured out their ROI to be able to say that this year we donated, I don't know, a million to effective charities that has saved 3 ,000 lives or something like that, or like 300 lives.

Like that would be really cool as well, but it's not quite a direct measure of the impact because that's effectively a revenue target rather than a value target.

And it's even beyond that, it's a second order revenue target.

It's a second order revenue target, yeah.

It's a derivative of a revenue target, I'm just sorry.

All right, time for the 10 feedback.

You're very bright, you're a very capable leader and you understand this business and all of its nuance and complexity.

And that's been a good thing and that's gotten you to this point.

But as the business grows, one thing that can block you is that complexity.

So as a network grows, I mean there's different ways to measure complexity but they all tend to tell you that the network's complexity scales as a square function of the number of nodes.

Big companies, if you ever talk to people who work for big companies, they're like, yeah, I spend half, 5 % of my time figuring out what we should do in 95 % of my time doing stakeholder management and trying to convince the company to do it in politics and this and that and this and that.

So complexity kills businesses and the longer you can keep that at bay, the longer your runway.

There's a story, years ago when I worked at PayPal, I always admired Apple because I don't think most people realize this but Apple is playing a much harder game than any other company in tech.

So salesforce .com pushes out some software, oops, there's a bug, someone pulls an all nighter and they push an update and the next morning, everything's fine.

Apple shipping hardware.

Once those iPhones leave the factory and 10 million of them or whatever and go into stores, there's no fixing them.

You don't have to get everyone to update their iOS.

Everything has to work perfectly.

They're incredibly complicated devices.

They do software and hardware.

The software and hardware have to work together and the timing has to be perfect so their revenue forecast will say, okay, we're gonna ship on December 10th.

We have 21 days before the end of the fiscal year to make our money.

We'll make 100 million in iPhone sales per day.

If we ship a day late, we miss our earnings number by 100 million.

Like it has to be perfect and they do it every time and when Steve Jobs was alive, almost every product they launched was successful which is the complete opposite of every other company.

And I always wondered how did they do that?

And so I worked with a guy at PayPal named Alan Olivo who used to work for Steve and I pulled him aside one day and I said, how does Apple do it?

And he said, Matt, it's so simple.

He said, Steve stands up at the beginning of the year and he said, this year is about version two of the iPhone.

This year we're gonna make an MP3 player a thousand songs in your pocket.

Whatever the thing for the year was he'd stand up.

There's one thing and Steve was not a nice patient man.

And you knew that one thing was your job and if you were doing anything else, you were gonna get fired and it was that simple and everyone who came in in the morning, if you're in procurement, you're procuring parts for the new iPhone and everyone knew exactly what they had to do because it was so simple.

And that's a company that had 30 ,000 people and $37 billion in revenue.

And that focus just becomes so critical.

And so that's why, as we're going, I'm gonna keep asking you to peel things back, consolidate and simplify.

Right. So, all right, so back to the North Star then.

I think how you measure it might be hard but it could either be something about number of lives changed or number of true fans or something that reflects the purpose.

I guess one thing to think about it is life changing is kind of a discreet event but I get the sense that your customers are kind of always on a journey.

Yeah, good point. That's a very good point.

So, whatever you end up naming it, I like the idea of having something on mission.

It's the number of people that you're helping achieve their goals in some form.

How you measure it and I don't wanna get into all the weeds as well.

What behavior on Twitter indicates there are true fan versus just but you know you've got over five million followers but every video you put up doesn't get five million views.

So, there's some subset of those followers and those email subscribers and whatever other platforms you're on, podcasts, who are true fans and there's some who aren't and it would be helpful to come up with some proxy metrics that you can hide all this complexity from the team but you and Angus have some

proxy metrics so you'll sorta know this is roughly the ratio of, for however many views we get, however many subscribers we get, this is how many of those are true fans and you can sort of dedupe across platforms.

What, you can sort of what across platforms?

You can sort of use estimates to dedupe across platforms.

So, someone who's deduplicate.

Oh, okay, right, yeah, cool.

Cause some people are gonna like your podcast and your channel and some people are gonna be only podcast and only channel.

But you'll still get a directionally accurate number.

I feel like I've tried doing this so many times and I've never landed on a number that feels even vaguely.

Even vaguely legit.

Unless I'm overthinking it and, yeah.

That's what I'm worried about.

If you can come up with rough proxies, I think it'll give you a sense for it.

Enough to steer the business.

I mean, there are numbers that if they move in the extreme, it's gonna be obvious.

And if they don't move in the extreme, you're not making progress towards your goal.

So don't worry about it.

What are some other companies, just so you can give me a flavor of what's the sort of thing we should be thinking about for a North Star metric.

So I'm thinking whether the analogy is right or wrong, I'm thinking about your business like a software company.

Because a software company or a meditation app is gonna wanna have weekly active users, weekly active consumers of their content.

And so that's what I'm thinking about.

Is the right cadence for your customer is weekly, daily or monthly?

Probably monthly. Okay, then you're gonna have something like monthly active listeners or consumers of content.

We do have a metric in YouTube, hidden deep within YouTube analytics, which is monthly returning viewers.

Okay, that could be very useful.

That's probably a reasonable proxy for true fans.

Yeah, because if that number were to grow 10X, we would be getting millions of views in each video.

Okay, so what do we call that?

So you said monthly returning viewers.

Yeah, that's people who are, yeah, I mean, I can start quibbling with that and think, well, someone might have gotten a lot of value from the content three years ago, but they're not getting it now, in which case they wouldn't show up in that number.

They're not just turning.

Probably a good thing, yeah.

In that they shouldn't show up in that number because we're not continuing to provide value to them.

If we were, they would be a monthly returning viewer.

And so, yeah, monthly returning viewers, that's probably, we can go with that for now.

Okay, yeah. Do you wanna stress test that?

Is there anything about that that makes you nervous?

One thing about it that makes me nervous is the fact that stuff that helps grow a YouTube channel is often different to stuff that keeps people wanting to watch.

So for example, returning viewers are way more likely to want to watch my vlog, or I document my life and stuff, but a new viewer doesn't give a shit what my vlog is because they don't know who I am.

A new viewer is more likely to click on a video titled something like, I don't know, nine passive income ideas.

But a returning viewer might sigh a bit internally and think Ali sold out.

That he's like, oh, he's doing another one of these videos just to get the views.

So the incentives of appealing to the existing audience versus trying to get new audiences sort of feel like they're often adults.

I don't know if other companies have this as well.

I'm sure they probably do.

But are they actually at odds?

Like if someone sees another nine passive income ideas video, are they gonna unfollow you, or are they gonna be a true fan and see what your next video is and watch it if it's what they're like?

If, no, in fairness, if they felt sufficiently high trust with me that they knew that every time Ali puts out a video, it's at least worth seeing what he's talking about rather than writing it off by just looking at the title, then, yeah, they would probably watch at least some of it.

Okay. Or unless they're in the sort of, I don't know, 60 % of our audience who, like there are various members of my team, for example, who wouldn't click on a video just purely because of the topic.

They wouldn't click on the passive income ideas video because they care more.

They're not like, they don't aspire to be entrepreneurs.

So only aspiring entrepreneurs really are gonna click on that video.

The people who are like, you know what?

I just want a chill nine to five job where I'm doing work I'm proud of and I've got a work life balance and I can chill with the boys in the evening.

That's a significant chunk of my audience that would not click on that particular video, even though that video might get like, I don't know, five million views from other people outside of that core audience.

Okay, so there's a piece of this model we're gonna have to think about, which is how do you get loyal subscribers?

How do you get followers?

And then there's gonna be this other piece which is how do you engage them and retain them?

And then there's gonna be this other piece which is how do you monetize them?

Yeah, nice. I think it's that simple, right?

Yeah, it's pretty simple.

Get viewers, engage and retain and monetize.

Yeah, the other thing that makes me nervous about viewers as a metric, as a North Star metric, is that I worry that that will get me on the hamster wheel of feeling the pressure that every video I make has to then hit a certain view count, which to me is always something that I've rebelled against because it

sort of takes some of the joy out of creating the videos to worry about like, well, what's this gonna do to our view target kind of thing?

So remember, these are gonna be returning visitors.

So the goal is to deliver a drumbeat of content that they find valuable rather than one specific hit.

Yeah, good point. I'm guessing, because I see this with my LinkedIn posts that I just have bangers that generate the line share of my impressions, the line share of my audience.

And I have other ones that mostly just my loyal readers engage with.

And no matter how clever I try to be and make them all bangers, I'm just not.

And then when I analyze other people's content, I see they all have roughly the same distribution.

People who I think are much better creators than me also have their duds and also have their bangers.

But ultimately, the more videos you make, the more good videos you're gonna make.

And also, if I think of monthly returning viewers as like one question we've been thinking about to get really inside baseball here is like, should we put our vlogs on the main channel or on our second vlog channel?

And I've sort of been wanting to put them on the main channel because they get more views and it's like, it's kind of nice and feels cool to have a big YouTube channel that has some sit down, talk to camera educational bits, but also some more chilled out bits that are a bit more lifestyle -y and stuff.

And a lot of the core true fans love the vlogs because they think, oh my God, I love seeing what Ali's up to.

But they get like the guaranteed to get way fewer views than a sit down and talk to the camera and explain how to make more money video.

But I like putting the vlogs in there as well.

So it'd be nice for the monthly returning viewers metric, to be honest, to be able to put the vlogs there.

I mean, so that is, is there a way to do an experiment and find out if that's a good idea or not?

Yeah, we're doing that for the next probably few months to put vlogs in the main channel instead of the second channel and see what happens.

Okay. Yeah. So this does get easier.

The North Star is definitely the hardest piece of this.

And once you've done that, most of it kind of naturally flows from this.

Okay. I'm, I think it's a little ambitious to think we're going to be able to tightly define the North Star is this metrics from this system, you know, averaged over 90 days or whatever.

Yeah. I think we can agree on the principle that it's going to be some measurement of who are people who remember you and know you and like you and royally consume your content, presumably because they find it helpful.

Yeah. Would it be easier if we thought of our like courses business rather than our content business and thought of it?

Because in that case, like our North Star would be like weekly active users of Productivity Lab because that's like membership software, it's recurring revenue.

It feels like it's a lot easier that like if someone's getting value from the product, that number will go up.

And if our growth is, our growth, they was a good, that number will go up.

Weekly active users of our productivity lab feels a lot simpler than trying to define when we do content on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram and blah, blah, blah, and an email, and we have sponsors and we have affiliates and we try and get people to buy the book and the course.

That feels very complex to try and put all of those into that single metric, if that makes sense.

And we can, but then what's the driver that brings you active course users?

Well, then we get into the thing of, it requires having people to go to the course sales page and to convert.

And then one of the ways we get people to the course sales page is my YouTube channel.

Another would be my Twitter, another would be my Instagram, but another would be paid ads that have nothing to do with me.

Another would be affiliates from other people, another would be sponsoring other influencers.

So now we have multiple growth channels to get people to our course sales page, which then gets people through our system and then they become weekly active users.

I don't know if that's, yeah.

I mean, we can do that if you want, but then I mean, that's already, I guess, a whole other business.

I was sort of hoping in my mind that as goes the size of your audience, so goes the sales of your courses.

Maybe that's too hopeful of a dream.

Our bucket is very leaky right now.

In the sense that if we get, up until like a month ago, we only had one product to sell and that was our YouTuber course.

And the size of my audience, if my YouTube channel was about how to grow on YouTube, yeah, there would be a great correlation between size of audience and course sales and therefore, weekly active users.

But because my YouTube channel is about personal development and a tiny subset of that audience wants to cares about starting a YouTube channel, this one product that we had didn't adequately, it was just a very leaky bucket.

So now we have a productivity product, which even now is still leaky because it's close to the public because we're still in private beta and blah, blah, blah.

But yeah, we would love to get to a point where as audience number goes up, so to do does the courses and the communities and the software and all of those really are somewhat downstream of viewer number going up.

Okay. If that makes sense.

Let's start to map this out from the North side that we've got here.

And I think we agree in principle what it means, how you measure it, could be quite thorny.

But I know like you mentioned Andrew Heuberman earlier, I'm a loyal Andrew Heuberman listener.

Every time he drops a podcast, I'm making dinner, I'm listening to Andrew Heuberman, even if it's about like menstrual health or something, I'm like, why am I listening?

But I am, I listen to every one of us.

And so, you know, and some subset of his audience are that and some subset are like a dude who just heard, oh, you know, I know you've got anxiety.

He just made a great podcast about anxiety, you should go listen.

So you've got some subset of your audience who are those loyal listeners.

We're going to try to estimate using some metrics who they are.

The loyalists, we can call them the loyalists.

So then above that, right?

We've got some way of getting more, right?

You know, lots of ways of getting more.

So if you had to sort of quantify just like on a scale of one to 10 or whatever, what are like the top five main sources of new audience for you?

And it sounds like one of them is these certain kinds of videos that go viral that bring you lots of followers.

Yes, viral videos, would be one.

Viral videos. I've never thought about this in this way.

So this is interesting.

Yeah, viral videos would be one.

Because my first reaction to this was, I mean, there's only one source.

That's the YouTube algorithm.

But no, you're right.

What are the levers though?

Yeah, that's the thing.

Yeah, viral videos would be one.

A video that is, it's pretty much just viral videos.

Okay, no, it's not viral videos.

Viral videos help new audiences discover the channel.

There is the category of kind of from the heart, from the soul personal videos that really appeals to long -term fans of the channel.

Okay, so I'm gonna...

Like honest, authentic, raw, that sort of thing.

What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna come up with a separate side here that we're gonna talk about retention and deepening engagement.

Okay, yeah. Anything else to use your podcast or your social lever bring you?

YouTube audience or it's more downstream of that.

Yeah, it's more downstream of that.

There's very little...

Whenever we've tried to promote videos on Instagram, the crossover is basically zero.

Okay, do you do collaborations with other creators to help people discover you?

I'm guessing. No, no, no, that's a good question.

Do we vary occasionally but collabs of also don't really have the discoverability potential that they once used to back in the day.

Unless there's a massive discrepancy.

If I did a collaboration with, I don't know, PewDiePie or something with 100 million subscribers, like yeah, it might do something, but also his audience is not quite...

And as our channel gets bigger in the space, it's like there are so few other people for whom a collab with them would make a meaningful difference that it really comes down to viral videos, weirdly.

Great, something simple in this business.

Yeah, yeah. Congratulations, that's good.

Viral videos are the single biggest growth lever of the channel.

Okay, now, so great, we've got our top of funnel.

So the next thing then is, not everyone who sees a viral video is gonna become a loyal subscriber.

So every startup will have this, who's got a retention game like software, will have this idea of an aha moment, which is where they go from like, I'm playing with the free trial to, okay, I get how this software is gonna help me, I'm gonna use it.

Headspace, you do a couple of meditations, wow, that was really helpful, okay, I'm gonna keep doing it.

Or oh, that guy's voice is annoying, not for me.

Netflix, this was like, first time you use it back in the day, can you find three titles that you wanna add to your queue in the first 90 seconds?

Yeah, Facebook, oh shit, I can add three friends to the thing and now my newsfeed is populated.

It was like me for seven friends, getting to seven friends right away, something.

So do you have any sense of what has to happen to turn a new subscriber into a loyal subscriber?

If I were to really simplify, I would probably say, at the point where they watch three videos, they might feel, oh, and if they watch three videos and vibe with my vibe, then yeah, they may become a loyal subscriber, maybe, maybe.

All right, and by the way, if you can find people who maybe became a loyal subscriber in the last month and just ask them, walk me through your experience, you might start to hear some patterns.

Good chat, actually.

That's a very good chat.

We could even just post on Instagram to be like, hey, I'm curious.

Are you, you know, have you been a long time fan of the YouTube channel?

How did you first discover it?

We could almost do a survey.

Yeah, ideally find people who maybe became loyal in the last three months so they can remember what was the first video you saw.

Yeah. And why did you then not bounce?

Nice, that's kind of the idea, yeah.

Okay. So it'd be good to understand what has to happen at the end of that, in that viral video or at the end to get them to watch a second or a third video and like, you know, they're coming in probably with some questions in their mind.

Is this guy a clown?

Can he help me with this problem?

Do I have a problem in my life?

He can help me with whatever it is.

So something's kind of got to happen in there.

And then it'll be good if you can kind of get a sense for this proxy number of like what percent of your new followers become loyal followers.

Okay, yeah. And right now, just, you know, what percent of your total followers are loyal followers?

Will watch anything you drop or most things you drop.

Like right now, what's that number?

Well, we can kind of infer it, right?

Because you've got five and a half million subscribers.

Yeah. But any video you drop is gonna get some, looked at as like what, between 300 ,000 and 1 .1 million?

Yeah, unless it's a vlog, in which case it'll probably get like around 80 to 100 ,000 views.

Okay. Yeah. So, but on your main channel then, we'll say 600 ,000 and six million to make the math easy about.

Sure, yeah. Probably, 10 % of your followers would be loyal?

Yeah, yeah. I guess so.

I mean, or it may not be that there are people that would watch every single video, but it may be that on average 10 % of our subscriber converts to the average video kind of idea, yeah.

All right. So you get a roughly a sense for that.

And then maybe you'll start to get a sense for what content brings people in.

Which content gets heavy play, I mean, it sounds like you have this among your existing audience versus not.

So you can try to...

Yeah, we can definitely see those numbers.

Can I? Well, Angus, please.

I think you put in here second or third videos.

I think what turns somebody who watched a viral video into a monthly turning viewer is actually getting them to take action.

And that could either be watching second and third video or influencing what they would have in the video.

Oh. That is such a good insight.

Good shout, Angus. Okay.

When they take insight, they're more likely to see an impact.

It's more likely for them to return.

Nice. All right. Okay, so Angus has very kindly suggested that if a viewer takes action from watching one video, then they're also more likely to become a loyal fan.

And I would actually say an action could be paper by second and third video.

Or it could be filling the template.

Because we heard last year the Euroglass template has been referenced so many times as the thing that made people kind of consume more content.

And so instead of seeing those things as these magnets, we just see it as a way for people to take action to become loyal subscribers.

Oh yeah, nice. So we had a spreadsheet that we released last year, the year at a glance template, and 150 ,000 people down into that template.

And so many people even said to me in talks and stuff that, oh, I loved your template, I've been using it for the last six months.

And I'm like, oh, that's cool.

So by giving people tools that are helpful for free, that also helps them become monthly returning viewers.

Wonderful, and it's on goal, right?

Because your goal is to help them make progress in their lives.

And if they're taking action, then they're actually making progress in their lives, which is great.

Okay, so I think now that we've kind of identified this step, it'll be good going forward to sort of understand that stage of like, in software I'd call it, from trial to habituation of, you know, first time you use software, you're gonna want to know certain things, certain experiences are gonna have to

happen. That's different from a very experienced user.

So what are those things?

What is that early life?

Maybe it's take action.

Maybe it's a certain type of video.

Maybe it's a certain ending in the video on which thing you recommend they watch next.

So you can start to have some thought around that.

Then what are the different levers that are gonna keep your engaged subscribers engaged?

So you mentioned from the heart videos.

Yeah, I think actually a broad range of topics is somewhat engaging.

I have heard from some people that they like the fact that our channel has some videos about productivity, some about health, one or two about relationships, some about business, some about personal stuff.

And so there's something about content variety that means that even if someone's not in problem solving mode, where it's like, you know, they might be like, oh, I don't wanna watch this video about procrastination, but I'll watch a vlog, or but I'll watch this video about relationships or I'll watch

this video about tech.

There's something about variety that helps keep existing viewers engaged.

Okay, so from the heart videos, variety.

And any others? I mean, this doesn't have to be exhaustive.

I think that the vlogs may well keep, vlogs on the main channel would, I think, boost the monthly returning viewer's number.

All right. Because there are some people that may have, you know, like personal development content, it can be tiring if you watch too much of it.

And so someone may have been a fan two years ago and then they got sick of personal development and because they, I don't know, achieved their goals and now they're chilling out and so they don't need to watch productivity content anymore.

But they might still enjoy being saying, oh, I wonder what Ali's up to?

Let me see what this vlog is about.

Maybe. Okay, that's an experiment.

Yeah. All right. So you've got those, are we missing a piece here at the top of the middle of the funnel?

There is also sort of the general, just the general, the standard video, the kind of 500 ,000 view.

I sit down and talk to the camera about a topic that I know a lot about, that people struggle with and I try and give useful advice.

It may not be a viral video, but it definitely, if the title is broadly appealing, we'll grow the monthly returning viewers because it's just a generally reasonable video.

It's just like a single hitter kind of.

All right, so I'll just call that a super useful video?

Yeah, sure, super useful video, nice.

Won't capitalize it.

An SUV. Yeah, okay.

And then another thing that's super important in growth is positive feedback loops.

And we've got some here, so I'm just gonna throw them on the chart, right?

So the number of viewers you get helps your visibility, which helps your viral videos in the sense that the algorithm's gonna show it to more people and also in the sense that it teaches you what plays, it gives you more feedback.

Okay, great. And these are all kind of, these three, the super useful video from there, those are kind of implicit loops because they bring people back again and again.

All right, so the next piece of this is monetization.

Yup. And I'm calling it monetization, but it's more than that, right?

It's owned ways to deliver value to your customers.

Wait, is my North Star metric allowed to have stuff upstream and downstream of it?

Absolutely. Oh, okay.

I mean, ultimately revenue is gonna be the end.

Yeah. It's just not the North Star.

Yeah. Obviously, it's important in business.

Oh, okay, because I guess I've been thinking in North Star of like all roads must lead to this.

But I guess, yeah, monthly returning viewers makes, now makes more sense to me as North Star because it's like, oh, downstream of that is monetization.

In your case. Yeah, in our case, yeah.

It is. I could imagine in a theoretical world, a business where it wouldn't be like, suppose you had a software business and some of your customers were really gigantic, they were 100 times bigger than other customers.

Yup. Then your total number of active customers wouldn't be a very helpful number.

Sure. This sort of monetization or usage rate becomes much more important.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But in your case, your customers are, there are some who are just worth the ad and the sponsorship revenue, there's a handful who buy a course, but you don't have enterprise customers.

No, exactly. We don't have like million dollar deals and things like that, yeah.

Now I'm not gonna, I mean, you've got a few ways that you monetize, right?

Meaningfully. So you've got sponsorships.

Yup, sponsorships. Actually.

Okay. We've got YouTuber Academy course.

That has within it like three different products, but we can, I guess, to simplify it, it's like one value ladder, really.

Okay. We've got Productivity Lab, which is another thing that we sell.

We've got my book. Okay.

Which is not great in monetization, but.

What is the main, what is the book's main job in the business?

To be a lead magnet for everything else.

Okay, so it's between monthly returning viewers and monetization, it's the first step on the value ladder, kind of?

Yeah, that's, it's a first step that may be sidestepped or maybe ignored or whatever, but it's, yeah.

Just get it in there, okay.

So something like this.

It's a road to the sort of monetization, let's make like a monetization box here.

Okay. Yeah, hmm. In some ways, sponsorships, I might sort of put outside of them, well, I don't know.

I guess we're thinking simply here.

But I'm kind of tempted to put sponsorships outside of the main monetization bucket because YouTube Academy and Productivity Lab are our own products and so we control lots of stuff about them.

Whereas someone signing up to a sponsor link or like affiliates, sponsorships and affiliates to me feel like a different category of monetization, but it's monetization all the same.

Okay, let's do that.

Let's call these, should we say, active and passive monetization?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, or our own versus others.

Own versus, okay. But you own your sponsorship relationships, I mean.

We own the relationships, yeah.

But yeah, that's more like.

I mean, you don't own the AdSense revenue, but like Google could just go ahead and change that anytime.

It's a simple uncontrollable linear function of the number of views.

Yeah. But sponsorship, you could just sell bigger, better sponsorships.

Yeah, we could, yeah.

So yeah, so we do control that to an extent.

Okay, so I'll move this out here.

And we've also got affiliates.

Which also, we control to an extent in that we could negotiate higher deals with affiliates.

Or choose different affiliates.

Or choose, yeah. Whatever.

Yeah, that's a good point, actually.

Maybe it's helpful to think of those as part of the monetization books.

Well. Because if the monthly returning viewer's number goes up, like some customers are just never gonna convert to our YouTuber academy, but they may well convert to a Notion affiliate link or a Squarespace affiliate link or something like that.

And that's totally on mission for you.

Because your goal is to help people, not help rich people.

And if these marketers and these affiliates enable you to produce and deliver more content, you're able to help more people.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, okay, that makes me feel better about sponsorships.

It's totally on mission.

Sponsorship's great, I like sponsors.

Okay, I mean, there's a purpose to it.

So, for a while I was coming in, I was like, I don't know how that clickety clack keyboard is on mission for him, but then I was like, no, wait a second, it helps him.

Because it helps him expand his reach, okay.

So, one way or another, wherever these things sit, you've got these kind of monetization boxes here and the YouTuber academy.

Okay, I'll just stick that in there for now.

Any other monetization boxes that we have?

I think that's about it.

I think significant.

Nothing significant, yeah.

All right, now a few more things I wanna add here.

We're gonna need some ratios and conversion rates and metrics.

So, we're gonna wanna know, and I usually use ratios more as arrows than boxes, so I'm just gonna sort of just drop these on here.

So you're gonna have some sort of, we talked about, I'm gonna call this a habituation rate, or whatever your sort of conversion rate, so I'm not that bigger.

What do we wanna call this sort of conversion rate from I watch one to I'm a loyal subscriber.

There's some sort of thing that has to happen there.

Right, what do you mean?

So, I watch a viral video.

And maybe I subscribe or maybe I don't.

And then something happens and I turn into a loyal viewer.

And every time I get notified, I watch the video.

So, some mindset change happens there because I took an action, because I watched a second and a third video and I've decided in my heart, Ali Abdaal is part of my journey.

Yeah. So there's some ratio there.

We just need to figure out what to call that.

Because you're gonna wanna make that number go up.

Sure, okay, so I know that roughly our conversion rate from a viewer to a subscriber is about 2%.

Okay. I don't know if that helps.

But then even a subscriber isn't a loyal viewer.

No, because it's hard to say.

Okay, so if we look at our monthly returning viewers.

Angus, can you look at your, what's that monthly returning viewers?

There is average views per viewer in ekkshi.

Average views per viewer, yeah.

So hold on. That means of all the people who watch videos in the denominator, so average views per viewer says, yeah, the average viewer watches like 2 .3 videos or something, whatever it is.

We've also got returning views and unique views, but the average views per viewer is another one that might be an in -brand this.

Could be, it just feels like that's gonna bounce around.

If you have a viral video, it's gonna bring you some more followers and that's good, but your average views per viewer isn't a plummet, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong.

Not everyone who likes the viral video is.

No exactly, I do think monthly returning viewers is pretty solid.

So what is that number at the moment?

1 .7, for the last 28 days, 7 million.

Really, oh, that's big.

1 .7 million? No way.

Okay great, so we're gonna start to put some numbers in here.

I would have guessed like 300 ,000, so that's really reassuring.

All right, and great, so there's your number, and then you also know that you've got whatever, 5 .5 million subscribers, so that means you got about a 20 % ratio.

Okay, that's not bad.

So you're gonna wanna make that number, you may wanna make that number go up, and more specifically, thinking about new people, people who watch one of your videos for the first time.

Because if someone is a subscriber from three years ago and doesn't watch your videos, that's probably not addressable, they probably forgot who you were, or abandoned their dreams.

But for someone who signs up tomorrow, they're gonna watch one video, we really wanna make sure they have a great experience so that they watch videos two, three, take some actions and bump up that monthly returning viewers.

So I'm just for now gonna call that a habituation rate.

It sounds kind of clinical, but if you can come up with a better term for it.

I'm just thinking it this way now has given me a lot of like, oh, okay, so when we do a video that we know is gonna be appealing to a new audience, there are specific things we should do in that video, like we should say who I am, and we should, for example, give something really valuable away for free.

How do you end that video?

We usually ask them to watch another one.

Okay. But I mean, there's always a plummeting retention curve, anyway, so very few people get to the end of that.

But we do always recommend that they watch another one.

And so we can in fact, when we can measure the end screen click -through rate to see how many people actually clicked through to that next video that we asked them to watch.

And that's a number that if we make go up, helps really grow the channel.

Okay, so that's a micro conversion rate that lives in this sort of habituation rate.

So this, ultimately, this is gonna be the highest order simplest first page of the spreadsheet.

Then you're gonna have more detail on each of these.

So one of the numbers that drive habituation rate, last screen click -through rate is gonna be one of those.

Second video watch rate, if you can track that, anything like that.

Yeah, watch time on a video, average percentage viewed.

If a video has longer average percentage viewed, or rather percentage of people that actually watched through to the end rather than average percentage viewed.

But particularly for your viral videos.

Yeah. Because from the hard videos are mostly your loyal customers and they're probably gonna watch through anyways.

And that doesn't tell you if you're doing a good job of welcoming new people into the phone.

Good point, yeah. Yeah, welcoming videos are like, yeah, maybe they don't even go viral, but we know that the goal of this video is to reach new audiences.

So for my email list, whenever I get a new subscriber, I have a welcome sequence of emails where I engage them and hopefully increase the chance they're gonna open.

Or at least I'll make it into their inbox in future.

Sort of something like that.

Yeah, nice, okay. In the last year I would say the average is two rather than 1 .7.

1 .7 is the baseline.

Wow. So you're like pushing 40%.

About two million monthly returning viewers in the last like 12 months, ish.

Alright. Nice, solid.

Amazing. Not bad. Now, um.

And sorry, can we see how that number has changed over time over the last like five years?

Is that a thing? Yeah.

Okay, cool. Alright.

So the stuff on the left of your monthly returning viewers call that your engagement and retention content.

Do you need a number to tell you if you're winning?

There. What do you mean do I need a number?

Like do you need a metric you can watch at a high level to tell you if you're doing enough super useful videos from the higher videos?

And if they're good enough?

In a way. Or in other words, is there a number that if it's going up you probably won't churn too many subs?

Number of comments.

Okay. Which is interesting because there was, at one point like a YouTube growth course that I took like five years ago that said the goal of a discoverable video is to get them to watch another one.

The goal of a community video is to get them to comment.

There's your answer.

And that's actually a pretty, I mean, I can quibble with that thing, but like it's directionally correct.

Where actually community content and discoverable content is how these guys' video creators described it.

And this can be an absolute.

Like if you had a million comments last month and three million comments this month.

Great. Yeah, assuming they're not like hate comments.

But we don't usually get hate comments.

Is that a risk? No, not really.

Okay, sometimes you'll need like a check metric or something to make sure you're not, but that's not a risk you're gonna suddenly start putting out controversial political stuff like.

No, yeah, there's no risk of that.

Thanks, Scott. I think it's just having a heart attack.

You'd be like, what?

All right, the next thing I'm gonna suggest you put here is a monetization rate.

Yep. And the top level metric, I'm gonna say there is something like dollars per monthly returning viewer.

Oh, interesting. Okay, that's nice.

And would you say that that is for if we take all the revenue of the entire business and divide it by the monthly returning viewers, or would you say that's if we take the courses revenue from the products that we sell and divide by the number of returning viewers?

Any monetization that is core to the business is dependent on the audience.

Yeah, which is all of the stuff.

Yeah, sponsorships for sure, AdSense obviously, course sales, yeah.

And then at some point, I mean, soon we're gonna get to a point where we were gonna have other acquisition channels for customers for YouTuber Academy and for a productivity lab that are not me.

Okay. So. At that point, you could segment that revenue out.

Okay, fine, but for now, let's keep it simple.

Yeah. Nice. And now you can think about how you break that down.

What are the levers that drive that?

It could be percentage of monthly returning viewers who are buying, are actively monetized versus passively monetized.

And I'll let you figure out which bucket affiliates goes into it.

But for example, and you could have an average value of an actively monetized versus passively monetized, you could try to move some from active to passive, you can change the product lineup.

Yep, that's the thing we can do, yeah.

The levers you could map that into, maybe on your next episode that we recorded, for now we'll just leave it at that.

Yeah, for now we'll keep it simple.

All right. Is this missing any important piece of your business?

There is a sense of like, well, within our YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab, we have customer satisfaction metrics and stuff like that.

Check metrics, nuance.

Okay, great. So there's this whole other bucket of metrics.

You shouldn't have too many of them.

And these are not your drivers, and they're not North Star.

And they're not numbers you're trying to actively optimize, but you want to keep an eye on them to make sure you're not screwing anything up.

Yes, like refund rate, and average rating of our course when we ask for testimonials and stuff.

Let's do that. Okay.

So I'll call those check metrics.

And they are refund rate.

What else was there?

Customer satisfaction score.

Okay. Anything tell you if your content's becoming stale or offensive?

In a way, number of dislikes, but we never look at that metric and YouTube doesn't even show that metric.

And I don't think, if you don't like a video, they actually bother pressing the dislike button.

Not for you anyway.

Well, yeah. Because we don't really do anything that controversial.

Anything else that you just would want to keep an eye on to make sure you're not screwing something up?

I don't wanna keep an eye on our email open rate.

Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah, we don't have email subscribers, people signing up to the email list in this.

I don't know if we need it.

I don't either. So that's my next question.

There's a lot of things on you.

So I watched this video.

You sent me with 15 things you do in your business.

Yep. In your business.

Steve Jobs makes $30 billion and the company has one priority and you make them like five million.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Like 15 priorities.

There's a lot of things on that list that aren't really on here.

TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, email list, even kind of like we had to shoehorn the book in, like, well, where should the book go?

The point of all these things is to plant seeds for long -term success.

So technically we don't really need an email list to be able to sell stuff because we have a big enough YouTube audience.

But there are risks associated with YouTube.

Obviously the fact that it's not on our platform, et cetera, et cetera, we own the audience with email, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so an email list makes sense.

Then we think, okay, well, people like following me on different social platforms and actually it's very worthwhile having Instagram and TikTok audience because they seem to convert to book buyers as a thing.

And long -term, I wouldn't be writing books over the next like couple of decades.

So great, let's spend some amount of team resources in growing on Instagram and TikTok.

And at the very least, the YouTube shorts that we make on YouTube will just copy and paste onto Instagram.

Plus I like posting pictures of me on Instagram, you know?

And then at one point we were like, you know what, we should probably have a podcast.

And again the podcast is not core to the business.

If the podcast was just deleted, it probably wouldn't make a dent in anything we do, but it's kind of nice having a podcast.

And without a podcast, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation.

It's kind of cool. And occasionally the podcast gets chopped up into a main channel YouTube video which then could become a viral video or could become a normal video.

So there's this stuff that we're doing on the side that like is not in the 80 -20.

It's not the 80%, but it's the other 20 % that I think has value.

But if I had to fire 80 % of the team, it would probably be those things that don't make the cut rather than like the YouTube channel and the courses which is like the fundamental thing, backbone of the business.

I guess what I'm worried about is that those things are the reason you would have to fire 80 % of the team.

Oh. So you're a really bright guy and you've built this business with all of its moving parts.

And to be fair, it's a lifestyle business and doesn't have to do hyper growth.

It has to do whatever you want it to do because it's your business.

But you just said, well, we've got, I think you listed eight or 10 things we're doing.

First, they were seeds for maybe the future, partially they were because you just really like doing them, partially it's because they weren't that hard and it's not entirely clear why you're doing all of these things.

But they are taking cycles, taking people's attention, adding complexity to the business.

Now, suppose like everyone you hired was as bright as you and they could all do 15 things, keep 15s in their head, which is unlikely, but possible.

You're still gonna have problems because one person's gonna come to work and think, yesterday Ali was talking about project number seven.

So I'm gonna do project number seven.

Then another person's gonna come in and think, project number nine is where we make all the money.

So I'm gonna do project number nine.

The next person's gonna come in and say, project number four is the most fun and it's aligned with my skills.

So I'm gonna work on project number four.

And that's gonna really lead to a lot of distraction when we figured out what you really need to do is make some amazing viral videos to build the audience, create amazing content to retain the audience all on YouTube and think about ways to maximize monetization of that audience.

Yes, but also, okay.

So for example, Melina, who's our head of social media, comes into work thinking, great, I'm responsible for social media.

This quarter, we've decided that we're gonna take Instagram super seriously.

So she thinks how to grow Instagram.

Tenton is a YouTube producer with the YouTube thing.

I don't know, Alison is our customer.

Oh, actually, no, that doesn't count.

Irim is my assistant and helps schedule the episodes for this podcast and it only takes a few hours because it's like, you know, might as well.

Dan is our website guy and we know the website is kind of important because actually being able to have SEO as a traffic source for our courses in the future, and the website's already getting a million hits a month, that's pretty good.

The YouTube plan is getting two million monthly returning viewers but the website's getting a million hits a month.

So if we were to say, hey, Dan, your focus is the website, now the website becomes another acquisition channel for our courses and stuff.

And all of those things feel like they are worthwhile.

And as long as I'm not the one having to do them, then the fact that we could hire a full -time team member, pay them whatever and then get them to focus on that thing, it's on mission because, you know, some people don't watch YouTube videos but may read along from blog posts.

Some people might not know who I am on YouTube but might discover an Instagram reel.

Some people might not have, might not even have YouTube on their phone but might watch TikTok.

It grows the mission by helping us reach more people.

It helps us monetize a bit more because Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn do drive some leads.

That's the 20 % of leads rather than the 80 % of leads for our courses but it's still 20 % and those numbers are easy to grow.

Those channels can grow without massive input from me whereas the YouTube channel cannot grow without massive input from me.

Is it okay that we're doing those things?

If you were to give me to an uptown feedback.

and I were on your board, I'd say absolutely not.

I would say the goal is to maximize revenue.

Let's figure out for each of these things, which of these could become a core piece of our growth engine?

What assumptions do we have to validate?

What muscles do we have to build?

Double down on those and cut everything else.

But you're not a venture -backed business and I'm not on your board.

So it's very much a personal decision but I think it's a really good object lesson in what kills venture -backed startups.

Say raise a bunch of money, they get a bunch of people and they try to do everything on the list.

And then when things are patently stupid and not working, it's easy enough to cut them.

We tried this bad idea, no one wants the product, nobody uses this channel, whatever.

But there's all these sevens.

So if you score everything in terms of usefulness in like a seven out of 10, your viral videos are gonna be a 10.

And the ones you're gonna cut.

But there's all these sevens.

Now, there's a VC named Sarah Tovel at Benchmark Capital and she has this expression.

She says, sevens kill companies.

And that has meaning on a lot of levels.

But each of these sevens doesn't take a lot of your time and attention but it's a head count.

You've got to hire, you've got to manage.

And every time you add a piece of complexity to your business, you're spreading yourself thinner, you're spreading your resources thinner.

You're making your proposition to customers more complicated.

Should you try to get to the volume on Instagram or the podcast or should they buy the book?

You're making the product harder to maintain.

So overall, it slows you down and it stops your focus.

And then if you're lucky enough to get to a point you've got 20, 30, 50, 100 employees, everyone's running in different directions, your life becomes quite miserable trying to manage all that.

Sevens kill companies.

So when we work with startups who are struggling, the hardest part is we get to this exact point in the program and they're like, great, I know what we need to be doing, what about business as usual?

What about the other stuff?

We have to keep posting on Instagram.

We have to keep doing this, we have to keep doing that, we have to keep getting the podcast episodes out.

And I realize I may be talking myself out of another podcast appearance.

And those are the hard decisions because I can't tell you which ones to kill or not.

But think hard about the reasons you're doing each one.

And there's good reasons, I love this, it's a passion project.

I wrote my book, I don't know if it's gonna help my business but I need it to write that book.

Or it might be, we need to become independent of YouTube and have acquisition channels and we think these are our best bets.

But then de -risk them, figure out, yeah these really are the best, SEO.

Is there search volume for the sort of content that you or the kind of software you would sell?

Is there even search volume at all?

Okay, who's ranking for those terms?

What is their domain authority?

Could we ever rank for those terms in a million years if we were the best SEO people in the world or not?

No, okay, well then let's not do SEO, right?

Okay, paid ads. Are the products expensive enough that they justify paid ads or not?

Would our audience look out and click on ads or not?

Are we technologically strong enough to really do all the tracking and attribution and convert and write and optimize landing pages?

Do we have enough free cashflow that we'll be able to fund ads that don't pay for themselves until we sell our product three months later?

So there's all these sort of questions you can ask about each of these ideas to sort of, before you do a lot of work and investment, just validate does this road go somewhere that we wanna be?

Oh, okay, I love this shit, this is good, this is very good.

So a few months ago, I came to the conclusion that the podcast was not on that, it was a seven.

It was like YouTube channel courses and book were like the three main things and podcast was the fourth and the podcast was starting to kill me.

And so we revamped the podcast to make it more chill.

So not having an upload schedule, I only do interviews with people I wanna talk to, which is why I reached out to you.

So I'm like, Matt, come on the podcast.

This conversation, a few months ago would have been too niche for us to do because it's not gonna go viral because people wanna know how to start a business, not how to grow a business because there's a thousand times more people that haven't yet got a business than the people who are.

But the podcast has now become a passion project and that's why we're doing it.

It doesn't really do anything for the business.

Well, it sort of does, occasionally we'll make a video out of it and stuff.

But it's nice, it's nice to have, it's about to hit 500 ,000 subscribers, it's a bit of a passion project.

And then a couple of weeks ago on a team retreat, we were in Turkey and we were thinking about our social media channels and we were trying to grow on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and TikTok and Instagram.

And we thought, why don't we just focus on Instagram?

Because we've seen that Instagram was our second, after YouTube and our email list, Instagram was our third biggest lead gen channel for book sales.

And so we were like, oh, that's interesting.

Instagram is also something that I personally enjoy behind the scenes -y type stuff.

And we also have so much stuff where I've been on other people's podcasts where the team can chop it up and turn it into Instagram reels.

So growing the Instagram actually does not rely on me, particularly sitting in front of the camera and doing extra bits.

And we decided to just hit pause on the other four social media platforms.

And it felt scary, because it was like, oh shit, we're not posting on TikTok, we're not posting on Twitter or LinkedIn.

And then we kind of realized, so what?

That's fine actually.

And like, since like, like a week after we started focusing on Instagram, I get a message from my friend Sihill Bloom, he's like, how are you growing so fast on Instagram?

What are you guys doing?

And I was like, oh, well, last week we decided to focus on it.

And Ken cut all of the other social media platforms.

And so we just started doing things that were growing Instagram.

And so that's it for Instagram.

But even then, it's like, what?

I guess it's useful to ask questions like, is it useful to ask questions like, why am I doing this podcast at all?

I could have just reached out to you and said, hey, Matt, do you wanna grab lunch?

And you probably have said yes.

So why do I feel the need to do it on a podcast?

I still hope you publish this podcast.

Cause I gotta sell more books.

But yeah, that is exactly the question.

And then for Instagram, fine.

So now we've gotta decide, is it a passion project or is it a future potential incubated growth lever?

If it's a growth lever, then do the math.

How does it look at scale?

How do you get your audience?

How is it synergistic or not with the YouTube side of the business?

What's the bottom of the funnel?

How do you monetize those people?

How do you turn them into monthly returning viewers?

And is that a realistic ambition for you or not?

Or it's a passion project.

What if it's a future growth lever where the goal is to turn people into monthly returning viewers of my Instagram page as a thing, as an asset that is distinct from the YouTube channel, somewhat related.

And then this growth engine just is copy and pasted onto Instagram, where it's like, well, we try and grow a number of monthly interested account followers on Instagram.

And also then we drive leads to the book, to our YouTube Academy, to our productivity lab and to our sponsors and stuff.

Great. But I wouldn't even make it a separate parallel growth engine.

I would just call your active engaged Instagram followers part of your monthly returning viewers.

And anyone who's opening your emails every time you send them, I'd lump them into that audience too.

And you can use some estimates again, to kind of create, you know, estimate uniqueness.

How many of my, what percent of my podcast visitors are also YouTube loyalists.

And so I can subtract that number to try to get like, Yeah.

absolute number. But I think those are all the same thing.

Those are your North star, which is.

Monthly returning, yeah.

Monthly consumers of your content, and value.

Because if someone is a true fan, they're actually more likely to follow me on Instagram and open my emails than they are to just watch loads of YouTube videos.

Okay. Because we just produce too much content.

So if we were to, is it okay to make the North Star metric like a sum or a weird janky equation that weights like a YouTube viewer is slightly different from an email opener versus.

Yeah. So Facebook is, I think weekly or daily active users, meta, and that includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook numbers all lumped in together there.

The two things I say, one is, as you share it with the team, I would, or with the world or whoever, I would hide some of the complexity of the math of how you calculate that number.

And just, you know, say this includes these audiences.

True. And again, in your own head, don't over -complicate how you think about it.

It doesn't have to be that precise.

Okay. If you get another million followers on Instagram or a million followers or wherever you're at, that's definitely going to be a good thing for the business.

So it's hard to imagine a world where it's not.

Yeah, exactly. And it's better than 100 ,000 and it's less good than 3 million.

Sure. So you don't want that.

That's fine. I love it when a conversation makes me think about cutting errors in the business.

I don't think my team likes it, but.

Let's talk about the team.

Because I think that's the hardest part for every leader.

It's like, well, these are people's jobs, these are people's lives.

So two thoughts on that.

First of all, was it Alina, who makes sure, what's the name of the person who does your stuff?

Oh, Malina. Malina.

She's probably super bright and super talented because I'm guessing you hire super bright, talented people.

Angus told me his story where he started as a writer and now he's a general manager of your entire business.

So if she's super bright and super talented, you'll probably find a use for a super bright, super talented person if your business is doubling every year.

Yeah, true. And if for some reason she's like, no, no, I will only do Instagram and Instagram is a seven and we're not doing it, you have five million followers.

You can help her find a much better job.

Yes. She would love to do something else.

So yeah. If someone else wants an Instagram person, you share that with your network, she'll have like five job offers.

This kind of reminds me of something, I don't know where I read it, but like this startup aphorism that growth solves a lot of problems or something like that.

If the business is growing, then there are actually more things that need to be done than there are people to do them.

So like, yeah. It's tough when the business is kind of going sideways.

You have all these ideas and you don't know which ones are good and which ones to invest in.

When one of them really works, it makes those decisions so much easier.

If you're like, oh, let's just pour more fuel into this bucket, because this thing's really working.

Yeah. So let's say you're, I don't know, a headspace or something in the early days.

And they're thinking, well, what are our growth channels?

And they're thinking, well, we could do Instagram, we could do TikTok, we could do YouTube, we could do podcasts, we could do our own blah, blah, blah.

If I were to have lunch with a founder of Headspace and they were like, yeah, Instagram's really working and all the others are a bit shit.

I'd be like, bro, just focus on Instagram until it stops working.

And then worry about the other stuff, probably.

I think what most companies do is just try all the things and see what works.

And the reason I don't like that strategy, you probably know, is because it's hard to do all the things.

And it's hard to do any one of those things well.

You know, Instagram algorithm is ruthless.

It's gonna show only the best stuff, right?

I'm guessing, I don't know, your number is for YouTube, but I certainly know for LinkedIn, 90, 80 % of all my new followers and impressions come from 10 % of my posts.

Yeah, I would say that's pretty accurate for YouTube as well.

Okay, and then, again, within that, so that's a power law distribution.

And then also within creators, there's a power law distribution.

So 5 % of the creators probably have 80 % of all the followers.

So any of these channels that you enter, SEO, there's gonna be 100 ,000 search results for a term.

People are gonna click on the first three only ever.

Yeah, pretty much. So any one of these things you decide to do, you have to be incredibly good at it to make it work.

So if you sort of half -assed, try seven things, none of them are gonna work.

So what you gotta do is figure out which of these on paper in theory could work.

So the way to do that is first of all, there's, I said seven, but actually, I think there's like six things.

If you include B2B and B2C businesses, how would you learn about a new product?

Maybe from a salesperson, maybe because you saw an ad, maybe from a partner, maybe because of content or an influencer, maybe because of SEO, maybe because of a referral, because someone invited you to join the platform.

So that's six possible channels.

Each of those channels, you can just sort of think through, does this make sense on paper for me?

If you are selling Wart remover cream, you're not gonna grow by referrals because no one is gonna talk about their Warts and no one's gonna ask their friends, do you have Warts?

Because if you do, I have a product for you, right?

So like some of these just don't make sense.

We talked earlier, if your product doesn't monetize quickly at a high rate, ads probably won't make sense for you.

If you're not very good at conversion optimization in the funnel, ads don't make sense for you.

So you can sort of think, you know, if no one's searching for anything related to your product, SEO doesn't make sense for you.

So if you just cross off out of this list of only six things, three or four or five of them, you've already narrowed it down.

And then the next question is, which of these is in harmony with my business?

That's another way to put it.

Yeah, which of these plays to my strengths?

So your strength is content creation.

Which of these absolutely depends on content creation?

Yeah, that would be the organic stuff.

So you can just apply that process and just pick two channels or one channel that should make sense for you.

And then focus all your energy on becoming the best in the world at it cause you have to be to win in any channel.

So that's what I tell the Headspace founder, but clearly they've already figured that out.

Okay, question. Let's say if we think of the YouTube channel and we're looking at this thing, we've got viral videos, super useful videos, videos from the Heart Variety, vlogs are main channel.

Really viral videos is the thing that grows it.

Three years ago, I had this realization that well, viral videos grow the YouTube channel.

So let's just make more viral videos.

And like, okay, well, what's stopping us from making more viral videos?

Well, we've got enough idea.

Idea generation is not the problem.

And I mean, filming me, filming stuff is always gonna be bottleneck because I'm the one filming it.

But like writing is really the thing.

If I had loads of videos to film that were written by the people, then we would get more viral videos.

And so we went out and hired four writers and turns out our production ground to a halt when we had four writers trying to write videos in my voice.

That was scripted for me, that I would spend hours trying to edit.

By which time I may as well have just done the video myself and it just sort of went to shit.

There were all sorts of mistakes we made at that time.

But I would pose a question to you of like, is it normal that we actually don't know how to make a viral video and have a formula that replicates that and that adding more people to this and putting more effort into it may not actually result in a more viral video and a growing YouTube channel?

I think it's very normal.

I mean, it's really hard to think in any creative industry of a person or organization who has really sustained freshness and good new content over time.

I mean, entire production studios have like gotten tired and Disney buys up their back library and they go out of business.

Yeah, it's incredibly hard to do that well so far.

AI may be in six weeks.

We'll have that creative spark and we'll pass us all but it's not there yet.

Chat GPT is great, it's not out writing the best writers.

I think we're clearly well outside of my space of expertise now.

But what I see from the people who do it well is they can build some core creative organization and process like a writer's room for Big Bang Theory or Sam Parr built the hustle and he didn't write the newsletters himself but he hired a handful of really good journalists and had some process of ideation and vetting

to just keep amazing newsletter coming, content coming out.

So there is some kind of organization, the right kind of team and creative process.

Clearly, Mr. Beast has mastered it.

I don't know what it is.

You probably know people who do.

Yeah, Johnny Harris gets three million views on every video and they're just really good.

I'm always like, how the hell do they do it?

And I could just email him and be like, hey Johnny, can I come hang out with you?

He'd probably be like, yeah, sure.

I just have never done that.

The one caveat I'd say with views, and actually I guess one of the questions he asked me in the excellent prep for this was should we be thinking about viewers or views?

And to tell you the truth, I went back and forth, prepped for this podcast like for days, flipping back and forth on them.

And the reason I settled on viewers, first of all, is like, that's kind of how you do it in tech or anything.

It's ultimately, it's about the viewers.

A person who views your video might go away and never come back.

If you just wanted views, whatever, like someone sneaks fart spray into the Vatican and what happens?

But then they're gonna see the rest of your videos and be like productivity, dude, that's so boring.

You're not gonna get subscribers.

So I don't think it's views, but I think it is creating better and fresher and newer content for your audience.

And I guess if I think about it, even though I say Instagram doesn't take much time.

Yesterday we had two hours of filming shorts for Instagram, even though the podcast is a passion project that doesn't take much time.

In a two week period, I've got like four or five podcast interviews.

Which I schedule, all of which are people I've really wanna talk to, like you, Cal Newport.

There's like Jordan Harpinghoo is coming along.

I'm on that list. Yeah, it's great.

Cause I like reading people's books.

And I often will find a way to email the author and be like, hey, do you wanna come on the podcast?

But I mean, I probably wouldn't cut that because I do enjoy it.

And this is a lifestyle business at the end of the day.

But if I did cut that, that would be an extra 20 hours to think about how I can serve my audience best by making a YouTube video.

Which has a way longer lever than these five podcast episodes that I'm doing.

Even though the five episodes are fun.

Are there deep synergies there?

Can you really just turn, pretty easily turn YouTube content into good Insta?

Can you turn these podcast interviews into good YouTube?

Yeah, I think we actually can.

So that's something we've been experimenting, but we haven't nailed that process.

But actually that process of, in my dream world every time I do a podcast interview, it would also become a banger YouTube video.

Now I'm doing podcast interviews all day long.

Cause I'm like, yes, we finally unlocked a way of creating super useful videos that don't rely on me having to provide all the insights.

Cause there is a limit to my expertise.

And so I can bring someone like you on the podcast with someone like Cal Newport and talk to them about their thing, which is really fun for me.

And then we can get the right sound bites out.

We can figure out the scripting.

We can figure out the diagrams.

We can do some nice animations.

And now the podcast serves as a lead in to really good YouTube videos.

And we've done this a number, like a couple of dozen times and it's worked really well most of the time.

We just don't do it very often.

And so this is making me think, huh, we have a back over like 120 plus podcast episodes, at least a hundred of them could probably be turned into like a really solid YouTube video with a little bit of thought.

Hmm, that feeds our monthly returning viewers.

That's a good idea.

Okay. Nice. It's worth exploring.

It's worth exploring.

And it's probably the podcast in its current format is an optimal for that.

And you can sort of figure out, I built most of my audience on LinkedIn, and I figured I write a newsletter, I have very high open rates.

And it just took me a little while to figure out the formula of how to turn an email newsletter into a good LinkedIn post.

And it's 80 % the same and 20 % different hook.

And I've got to come up with an image.

So I managed to develop that synergy, but it took a little work.

Okay, this is good.

So I have a last question for you about this growth model thing.

So when I was prepping for this, you sent me, we've got all this revenue coming from 15 different things, which is more, how many employees do you have?

Like now 22. Okay, so, 15 different things going with 22 people making five million.

It was just, it was too complicated, lacking focus.

So here's the problem.

I'm going to walk out of here and you're going to do whatever you're going to do.

And there's going to be a lot of organizational inertia to bring you back to trying to do 15 things.

Yep. And you're extremely capable and effective leader.

And I'm sure the reason you got to those 15 things in the first place is because that was serving you well.

You had some mental model in your mind where that outcome was the right goal for you.

You were committed to some outcome that involved complexity.

So I think if you want to change that, and if you want that change to stick in your own mind and in your organization, I think you need to go back and ask yourself, what was it that led me to be doing 15 things in the first place?

And why did I think that was a good idea?

And am I still comfortable with those assumptions?

Sorry, that's a long question.

Good question. Is it definitely something I will have to think about outside of this, but if I were to think about it right now, I would say a big part of what encouraged me to do 15 things, part of it was this fear of platform reliance.

Like, oh, we should probably diversify from YouTube because I don't know.

I mean, I don't realistically think YouTube as a platform will be gone a year from now, but I don't know, maybe my stuff becomes less relevant over time and bloody blind.

So it's useful to build an audience across platforms A, B, C, D and E.

Plus it's easy enough to, it's a seven in terms of, it's a three in terms of effort to build an audience in platforms A, B, C, D and E.

And so like, I guess we might as well do it.

That was one big part of it.

Another big part of it was that we don't just wanna monetize doing one thing because our audience is so broad.

So we kind of wanna monetize through affiliates and sponsorships and YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab and we should probably try and make different products for each different vertical of our audience and stuff.

Actually I was visiting a friend the other day and this friend was like, what if all that time and effort you spend into making courses and shit?

Who just really focused on making one piece of software that like would, that would vibe with 80 % of your audience.

And that could be $100 million business.

I was like, maybe partnering with someone who is a third time founder or whatever and building a productivity app.

That as a vehicle is way more, has way bigger upside than continuing to churn out more courses that are capped at like, I don't know, a few million a year in terms of revenue or if you're a world class, a few tons a million.

So there was this thing around like, I think I was somewhat, I didn't know what I didn't know.

In the sense that I didn't know anything other than you make money through selling courses.

And now that we know there are other ways to make money, we still make money selling courses.

We've got, we're working on the software stuff on the side and we know that this BTP thing is on the horizon.

16, 17? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Okay, so one idea was this diversification thing.

One idea was... Felt exposed, being totally dependent on YouTube, which...

Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.

I think another was, another was genuinely not knowing how to deploy extra excess capital, excess cash.

So we've got like, I don't know, we do a course launch and then we end up with a million quid sitting in the bank.

I mean, the best thing I could do with that is chuck it into the S &P at the moment and that returns 7%.

So surely there is something we could do with that money that would return more than 7%.

I know, why don't we hire a social media person?

Or why don't we hire a person to just focus on LinkedIn?

Cause you know, if we had 500 ,000 followers on LinkedIn, that would be good for the business.

That probably make more than 7 % returns based on the extra leads and stuff.

So let's just do that.

And now let's do that again, because that same argument then can be copy and pasted to end up with doing 15 things, because hiring someone full -time for 50 grand a year to do that thing would probably generate more than 50 grand a year in terms of returns, which is probably better than the S &P.

So why not kind of thing?

And so I felt weird about having all this excess cash sitting there.

And felt weird, like the best thing I could do with it was chuck it into the S &P.

Okay. Do you still agree without thinking?

No. I don't think so.

I think actually it's kind of useful to have cash in the S &P because it de risks the business and it means like I'm a bit more chill for a start, but secondly, if for example, we just had one product and that product, I don't know was a productivity lab or something and all channels led to trying to

just convert people to productivity lab and growing weekly active users for that.

And if the entire team was razor focused, we've got our content team that's like razor focused on helping make amazing YouTube videos so we get monthly returning viewers, everyone else focused on like, how do we turn those viewers into productivity lab customers?

And how do we grow productivity lab through other acquisition channels and stuff?

Just growing that one product would probably be more, would be maybe simpler and also make more money than having 15 team members scattered like someone's in sponsorship, someone's an affiliate, someone's on Instagram, someone's on YouTube Academy, someone's on there, someone's that like that scattered

way of thinking. But then I mentioned this to my CEO, Co.

Jarek and he was like, well, yeah, you could just have one product or you could have multiple products and that's fine as well.

And it's like, because we have a YouTube Academy and our productivity lab, and we've already got the YouTube Academy, which is already a $3 million business and you don't just throw away a $3 million business, right?

Any of that make sense?

It does, it does. I think the other cost here is the cost of organizational complexity.

You know, when it's just you and Angus here on the couch and you're both smart enough to understand the 14 tabs in your spreadsheet and the 6 ,000 rows, that's fine.

But every time you start adding more things, it's gonna distract everybody's focus and prioritization.

And I just, I've seen so many companies that just aren't able to move forward because they're too complicated.

Complicated to sell, complicated to explain, complicated to manage and run.

Now, one way to start to think through these decisions, and I don't know if you wanna, we can go back to the growth model, but we haven't talked about this idea of a rate -limiting step, and that's an important one.

So I mentioned in the intro, I used to work in an oil refinery.

An oil refinery is a very simple business.

Dirty oil comes in, clean oil goes out, and you get paid per gallon of clean oil.

The problem with an oil refinery is all your costs are delineated in hours, salaries, leases on trucks and equipment, whatever.

And so the way you make money is the more gallons you refine per hour, the more money you make.

And this refinery, it's literally a flow -based system.

Dirty oil goes in one end, stuff happens to it, clean oil comes out the other end.

And the way it was explained to me when I had this job was, somewhere in the system, there's a bottleneck.

There's a narrowest point that is constraining the throughput rate of the entire system.

And it might be some centrifuges that are blocked.

It might be a filter that's not working.

It might be a furnace that's not hot enough.

It might be there's no trucks to unload, nobody to unload the trucks full of dirty oil.

It doesn't matter, it moves around.

Point is, if you focus, if you can identify that bottleneck, that rate limiting step and open it up, the entire business grows, the entire business goes faster.

And if you apply resources anywhere else in the business, it will be ineffective.

Now your business is more, most tech businesses are more complicated than an oil refinery.

But the beauty of that system was everybody in this refinery, and most of these people didn't go to college and they didn't understand the dynamics of the business or operations management, but they all knew what they needed to be doing every day.

They needed to be getting as many gallons as possible through their machine or truck or whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.

And they knew at any given time which thing was top priority.

Actually, that was my job, was to walk around the refinery every hour with a clipboard and look at flow rates on machines and tell the shift supervisor where the bottleneck was so he could go yell at somebody to open it up.

So wouldn't it be useful to know, in your growth model, where is your rate limiting step?

Hmm. The thing that immediately came to mind, so I also recently read the book The Goal.

So that's what this is, The Theory of Constraints by L .A.

Goldratt. Yeah. And as you were saying that, the thing that really came to mind was the rate limiting step for this growth model is the amount of time I have to focus on my YouTube channel.

Which at the moment is one day a week, because I have one filming day a week, and in that filming day, we try and bang out two videos, and every now and then, one of them will go viral.

What another friend and mentor, Dan Priestley, who you might know.

Dan's great. Told me a few weeks ago, was like, why the fuck do you only have one filming day?

Like your YouTube channel is your thing.

You're currently, like, shining bright on YouTube.

It's not gonna happen forever.

Like, bro, what are you doing?

Make hey. And I was like, oh, maybe I should have two filming days.

And then I added two filming days to the calendar, and then all of the other shit that was coming up in the business.

I was like, I don't really want to do two filming days, because, well, Tuesdays has to be meetings, and, well, we've got these courses and stuff, so I have to do some stuff.

And I guess it's useful to have some time for podcast interviews in the daytime, because I like doing the podcast as a bit of a passion project, and doing the software stuff so that needs a bit of time.

So actually, I quite like having one filming day.

But if I could clone myself, and that clone of me could do another filming day, man, we just unlocked a massive bottleneck.

Okay, any other ideas?

Or if I could just do less shits in my calendar so I could free up more of my time to do the filming days.

We've just unlocked another massive bottleneck.

Or we find acquisition channels for our paid products that are not tied to me filming stuff.

Either I film more stuff, or we find growth channels that don't rely on me filming more stuff.

The problem with me filming more stuff is not just that I'm also doing other shit in the business, because I could just say to the team, guys, I'm not doing anything.

I'm gonna film more videos.

And the team would be delighted.

It's that I feel like I run out of ideas.

So when I'm filming two videos a week, I feel like that's about reasonable.

I can come up with two things to say each week.

I'm trying to think of three or four things to say each week.

That starts to feel like a bit of a grind.

You think that's an absolute limit to your creative capacity?

Or do you think you don't have time to do deep work in thinking because you're doing other stuff?

Or do you think it's a creative process bottleneck?

Thanks, yeah. You're equating work on the YouTube channel to filming days.

Work on my YouTube channel doesn't necessarily make filming.

Yeah. In the sense of the bottleneck is work on the YouTube channel?

As in? Not only filming.

Yes, as in I think the only work that I think does on the YouTube channel is filming.

And therefore the time allocated to working on the YouTube channel from the conversation we've just had is like two filming days rather than one day working on ideas, one day filming.

Yeah. It would, yeah.

So I guess, yeah, part of the, to answer your question, I don't think it's a physical, I don't think it's a law of physics that I can only make two videos a week.

I think it is a, one, it is a problem with the creative process.

And number two, it's, in a world where I had an extra 30 hours a week of deep work to think about video ideas and to be reading more books and to be in the, I don't know, in the waters or whatever and coming up with ideas, that would generate more videos.

In a world, also in a world where we had a more refined to creative process where for example, this thing of just let's go through all of the podcast episodes we've ever done in the last three years that we have not yet turned into YouTube videos and turn them into YouTube videos.

That's the thing that the team can broadly do with minimal input from me that I can then see the transcripts and stuff and then I can generate the video.

It's like that would work too.

It just needs more time.

And when I look at my calendar, again, this is one of those problems that keeps on coming up and has done for the last three years since the team grew beyond me in Angus, where it's like we know that the best use of Ali's time is either to write his book or to make YouTube videos.

But Ali's doing a lot of things that are not writing the book and making it.

And now the book's done, so just making YouTube videos.

The single best use of my time is making YouTube videos.

Or occasionally doing a live once a week thing for our productivity lab.

But basically, the only thing I should be doing is doing YouTube videos.

But inevitably, I end up doing way more than that.

And so YouTube videos get squeezed one day a week and that is the bottleneck.

If that bottleneck were relieved, I'd probably be more chill and happier because now the only thing that I have to think about is exploring ideas and being able to make YouTube videos and occasionally chatting to people and having coffees with friends and getting ideas from that conversation and turning

into a video here and there.

Okay, so now we're back to the question I asked before, which is what unconscious beliefs or commitments have led you to a point where you have 15 priorities.

And you gave me a bunch of answers around diversification, derisking the business, future sources of revenue.

But I pause it since we're gonna be spicy with the food I get.

I think it's a lot deeper than that.

So you studied medicine at Cambridge, right?

So you probably did pretty well on your GCSEs.

How many GCSEs did you take?

Like 14, 13 and a half tech.

So you, we're back to that number again, 14, 13 and a half.

You did incredibly well in secondary school at 14 different things.

And then you did so many levels, right?

And probably did incredibly well at those.

And then never made mistakes.

Yeah, pretty much. As few as possible and then you get to medical school and then you're a practicing doctor and your job is to treat as many patients as possible and make absolutely no mistakes.

And now you're running a business where you need to do fewer things and make more mistakes.

And that is hard, that is not who you are.

Oh, nice. The job is to do fewer things and make more mistakes.

Do fewer things and make more mistakes.

Yeah, one thing I do feel about, like if we just think practically about the YouTube channel is that I don't feel I'm very, I'm experimental enough with the content because I've got my rhythm of, I have my five talking points and I talk and it works because we get the 600 ,000 views of whatever the thing

might be. And I'm like, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, kind of thing and like I can squeeze that into one day a week and yeah, we can make a video in a few hours.

But if I think of, like I know what the creative process looks like for YouTubers who are getting 10 million views on each of their videos, it's way longer than three hours.

And their entire machine is focused on just doing that one thing really well.

Doing fewer things and making more mistakes.

What else would you say now that you've known me for like, I don't know if I was, with this 10 out of 10 feedback?

I guess that to elaborate on the making, this is my read, to elaborate on the making fewer mistakes.

I think that's on two levels.

First of all, the creative process is full of experimentation.

You're just gonna have to try stuff, the bombs and be okay with that.

As a creator, I hate that, but I understand it's part of the process.

But the other piece is a lot of the things on your list of 15, a lot of the reasons you were doing them, were to de -risk future potential bad things that could happen.

Yes, yes. Yeah. And I think with the startups I see that take too long to make decisions and have trouble prioritizing, they spend a lot of time thinking about all the things that could go wrong with a course of action and trying to de -risk those things and offset them.

And then they do the thing and something completely unexpected goes wrong.

And I tell them spend less time worrying about what could go wrong and more time figuring out what did.

Because it's a process of experimentation and learning.

Nice. Anything else?

I'm super impressed.

I mean, I know what you want is constructive feedback, but I'm just amazed at the business you built and the creative engine that you've already come up with.

I think that's just the hardest thing in the world to do.

I feel like we have to do a part two now.

Once I've had a few weeks to, you'll let the inertia of the business.

And then the things we need to do here that we would do in 10 weeks with a company, I think one of them is to more, I think you're probably right about the rate limiting step, but really go through the model and say, okay, what is our conversion rate of new viewers to active subscribers?

What is our engagement rate?

What percentage of our followers are active viewers?

What is our monetization rate?

And sort of mathematically, which of these could we 10X?

And would it 10X the business?

Like realistically, could you 10X how much money you make per subscriber?

Would you be the weirdest outlier monetizer in the history of YouTube?

Could you 10X your number of followers?

Are there more than 5 million people in the world who want what you're offering?

I think it would be very hard to 10X number of followers.

It would be a lot easier to 10X monetization per follower.

I think us getting the business to 50 million feels way more doable than getting to 50 million followers with the content that we currently do because there are no educational channels that have 50 million followers.

But there are lots of businesses that do 50 million revenue.

So I would go through it in that rate.

The other big piece, which we really haven't talked about is the customer journey.

I asked you, who's your customer?

And he's out there for a good minute and puzzled.

I think you have a very good sense of what content they like, but the broader context of how do they find you?

What else do they consume?

Where do they get content?

Who else do they listen to?

What makes good content for them?

What anxieties do they have about content?

They like you before they buy a course.

What three or four questions are they really gonna need answered before they're comfortable?

Plunk it on their credit card.

They have really specific questions, I'm sure.

So I think understanding their customer journey better.

Yeah, through surveys and talking to customers and stuff?

I don't like surveys.

I think you need something richer.

So I would do customer interviews of recent customers.

I use this job to be done framework.

There's a few other ways to do it, but basically what I'm trying to understand is nothing at all about what they think of you or your YouTube content.

I wanna understand their life.

How did you get on this journey of saying, no, I don't just want a job.

I don't just wanna, you know, this.

Where did that start for you?

What did you do first?

Where did you look?

Who did you ask? Who was the first person?

Oh, Tim Ferriss or whatever.

Where does, how did that come up short?

Why did you stop listening to that?

What else were you looking for?

What's something you paid for?

Why did you pay for that?

What were you hoping it would do?

How did that come up short?

I think if you understand this journey, you'll find all these points where you can insert yourself, where you can add products, where you have topics for videos.

Hmm. Will that be something that I would do or that the team would do?

Or like how would you recommend when you go about that?

I think it's very important, whether you're the interrogator or not, I think depends on how good you are doing customer interviews.

I'm guessing since literally you are a podcaster, you're probably pretty good at asking the right questions and listening with open mind, but it's hard.

Someone, but someone who's very good at running interviews and asking the right questions and emptying their mind of all their preconceived biases needs to do them, you need to listen to them and develop a big empty curiosity.

So one of the reasons, this is a bit of a tension, but I'll bring it back.

But the best growth people I've ever hired in my time at PayPal or anywhere, categorically, they were not marketers.

What they had in common, and there were two or three of them, is they all used to be scientists.

And scientists have a few good things about them.

First of all, they're just generally rigorous thinkers.

Second of all, they understand there's a difference between causation and correlation, and one can design experiments and tease out those differences.

But the big thing about scientists is they have a really clear sense of the edge of their knowledge.

So I think most entrepreneurs, most business people, most people, most subjects sort of feel like everything I know is everything.

And we sort of walk around with this implicit belief that we're omniscient until we're like, oops, we're wrong, and it's really awkward, and it smacks us in the face.

Whereas scientists will work on their domain, and they'll say, okay, we understand in this signaling pathway, this happens, triggers this, then something happens in the cell, and eventually this happens.

And they know exactly where the limits of their domain are.

Physicists know there's a thing called dark matter, there has to be, they don't know what it is.

And so I think the same thing in business, if you can sort of figure out, there are limits to your understanding of your customer, and there's these huge, open questions, right?

What starts people on these journeys?

Where do they look for it?

How do they evaluate different solutions?

How do they decide what's right for them?

How do they think about paying for it or not?

If you can develop a curiosity around that, then you'll be able to go in with kind of an empty mind, and ask the questions to find out all this stuff.

But it's a very different mindset.

Some people can do it really well, most people struggle.

Okay, a specific question, which is somewhat unrelated to everything we've talked about, but relates to that point around splitting the business into these three different zones.

At the moment, we've got this particular growth model, we've got like a bunch of different social media platforms which funnel into the email list, which somewhat funnels into our two paid products, so YouTube of course, and our productivity thing, Productivity Lab.

Ideally, we would like to get to the business to a point where sort of my personal thing, Ambition, is like, I wanna keep building cool shit and keep making videos about it and stuff.

But I would really like to have a business that is de -correlated from how many videos I feel like making in a given week, on a given month, or even in a given year, because I would love to have the option of taking time off from filming YouTube videos without feeling as if the business is gonna crumble

around me. The place we've landed to with that is, for example, with our YouTube Academy and Productivity Lab, thinking of those two teams as being sort of like separate squads.

Each of them has a head of growth, and that person figures out the growth levers for the specific products and tries to run these kind of growth experiments to figure out, okay, what is the one or two non -ALI growth channels that we can use to grow a YouTube Academy into a Productivity Lab?

I would hope that they will do all that stuff over by themselves while I'm spending more of my calendar just focusing on doing the video stuff and keeping the ideas fresh and exciting.

To what extent does that sound reasonable?

What do you like about that?

What do you not like about that idea?

Okay, so if you came to me as an entrepreneur and said, okay, I have these two business ideas, and we have enough customers in our core business and enough cash that we can see them, and I want to hire or use two of my existing employees to start to grow those businesses.

Basically, what you're saying is, can I hire employees who can grow two startups from scratch?

Yeah, I mean, they're already at seven figures.

Can they get them to multi -seven figures or eight?

Well, but your business broadly is at seven figures, but these two things that you're trying to build independent of your YouTube audience.

Ah, not independent of my YouTube channel.

Independent of my YouTube audience, they're at zero.

Right. Yeah. So when I was at VC, we invested in 2000 companies.

All of the fund returns, and I looked, the first fund is at 11X in 11 years.

I mean, it's insanely successful.

All of those returns came from the top 3 % of companies.

So what's 3 %? About 60 companies?

All the return. 50, 60 % of those companies are out of business, and the rest are somewhere between 1X and 5X, their initial value.

So if I told you, statistically speaking, you're gonna start two businesses, and you're gonna try to figure out how to get customers for them from scratch, and you're gonna try to find product market fit, and you're gonna try and build products, and you're gonna try to maintain products.

I'm gonna say, if your ambition is to get really big success, you've got about a 3 % chance on each of those.

If the founder is building the business, but you're not doing that, you're saying I'm gonna have an employee, not a person who's already built and sold companies before.

I'm gonna hire an employee who's gonna do that.

I'd say you're, again, taking you out of it and just looking at the data, I'd say it sounds like a pretty long odds that that's happening.

Now, your advantages here, one is you've got you, and you're a super smart entrepreneur, but if you're willing to devote time to this, and two, is you have this audience and this knowledge of these people to start from.

So if you can take that base and say, we've got all these super happy, loyal, engaged customers, I just need to figure out where else they go besides YouTube so I can go find them there.

And I can validate the product by selling it to them.

So I already know it's the right product, and I just need to find other channels, and I already know their proposition because I know which YouTube videos get people to actually buy the products, which messages work or not.

You're de -risking a lot of that, then it's more a channel discovery exercise.

It's a what, sorry?

A channel discovery.

It's more of a channel discovery optimization exercise.

Like what extra channels can we discover?

It's pretty easy to hire people who know how to run a channel.

It's very hard to find people who can figure out which channel to do and kind of zero to one in that channel.

I'm surprised that you would put the odds so low, which is interesting because you know way more about this business stuff than I do.

So because in my mind it was like, okay, well let's take our productivity lab.

We validated the offer and people are happy because we've sold it to my audience initially.

Or actually, you know, for a simple example, let's take our YouTuber Academy.

We've had 5 ,000 students go through it, broadly people are happy, it's a good product.

We know there are things, looking at our refund requests, people want specifics about AI and YouTube.

It's like, okay cool, we can do a mini course on that that I don't have to film.

We know people want a guest workshop about this, A, B and C.

We can bring in guest speakers, blah blah blah.

We know that, we suspect that if someone on my team were to start a YouTuber specific podcast where they just interviewed big YouTubers, of which I might be one of them but there would be hundreds more, that would probably be a reasonable growth channel for this business.

We know that we could certainly reach out to every influencer who does content about how to grow on YouTube and now we do influence marketing.

We get them to, we know we could set up with affiliates and we know how to run the affiliate playbook.

All of these are leveraging Ali's existing connections and stuff because I know all these people and I'm gonna be like, hey can someone on your team talk to someone on my team?

Boom, sorted, that kind of idea.

To me it feels like, how hard can it be to find these extra channels for let's say something like a YouTuber Academy.

So the stats I gave you, I specifically said this isn't specific to you, this is like, startup in general, someone off the street.

Every one of those founders was sure they were gonna be part of that 3%, otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

They would go back to being a doctor or whatever.

But I do think you're very much de -risked because you have an existing audience that you can validate the product and the messaging against.

So it's much more an exercise of finding other channels to do that and building a very talented team who can get a business from maybe not zero to one but from like two to 10.

Yeah, what do you think of the sort of holding company portfolio of small businesses kind of thing whereby let's say YouTuber Academy, I don't know, spits off a million or two profit a year.

Productivity Lab, a million or two in profit.

Let's do a software play X and Y with a friend of mine who is in fact a third time exit founder and has got devs and designers and stuff.

I don't know. I'm his like.

Ask Dan Priestley. Yeah.

I hope like the super focused single purpose we're gonna be worth a billion dollars kind of companies.

I really don't know much about running this.

No, fair play. Yeah, Dan Priestley is bullish on that particular model because he feels it's if you want a lifestyle business, it's way nicer having eight than having one because then you feel a bit more chill about all of them.

Yeah, and he's done that and that's super impressive.

Okay, nice. Can you talk to me about like these sort of growth sprints or experiments or like what would that look like?

Let's say we identify that, okay, these are 10 possible growth channels for our product.

Yeah. And you mentioned sort of running experiments to test them.

Like what does that practically look like on the ground?

Okay, so you're gonna come up with lots and lots of ideas.

You're clearly an idea factory.

So you write them all down.

First cut is are these focused on the right stuff?

You know, is this focused on our rate limiting step or we have this discrete goal of can we build a second channel to drive traffic outside of YouTube to this product?

Next cut is if this works, how big could it be?

Yeah, nice. Because it can be big, don't start.

The third cut is is this risky in any way?

So could this backfire, is this hard, is this expensive, is this distracting?

If you can't think of a reason why it's risky and it's probably a good idea, it's not an experiment.

You just do it and see what happens.

You don't sort of waste the organizational overhead instead of running an experiment.

Sorry, so if you think it's not risky, it moves your rate limiting step and it is a good idea, a big idea, then you just do it.

Yeah, nice. Like a simple example for a software company, if you have no customer testimonials on your site and a customer gave you a great testimonial, I can't think of a reason not to put it on your site.

It takes 30 seconds, right?

So, and then the last thing is, and this is even a reason it's important enough to trump how big can it be is will this teach us something important about our business or our customers?

So, if you keep having this debate about a certain topic over and over again, do our customers like this kind of video?

Would they pay for this product?

Is there just an experiment you can bottom that out?

So, those are the experiments that you're gonna decide to prioritize because you can only run a finite number.

And then the experimentation process, and your background in the sciences, but for everyone else, you write a well -formed hypothesis.

We believe X, therefore, we predict that if we do this thing, this number will move in this direction by this amount.

And if we are right, we will do this thing differently in our business.

Yep, nice. Because if you don't have that last thing, then there's no point in writing the experiment.

And we wanna start with we think this, and it's usually an assumption about your customers or something around your executional ability just to document your thinking ahead of time and you make a prediction always.

I predict it's gonna move in this amount.

And that's to eliminate hindsight bias when we look at the results.

Anyways, so you make a prediction, have the whole team make predictions, place bets, make a game out of it, run the experiment, look at the results.

Something's probably gonna surprise you.

Document the learning, document any open questions, just jot them down, screenshot everything, screenshot the other version, screenshot the analytics tool, and save it all so that when you hire someone, they're like, I have this great idea, we should do this thing.

You'll be like, here's what happened last time we tried it.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, and most experiments fail, but every time you're learning something, taking bad ideas off the table, realizing your ability to execute is compromised, then you're getting value from those experiments.

Nice. Thank you. Sure.

It's been great. Any final comments based on all the things, any extra feedback for me or any kind of thing for listeners who've listened to the last two and a half hours of us chatting about this stuff?

If anyone's still listening, yeah, I sincerely hope that you find this thinking helpful.

I realize it's a pretty counterintuitive way to think about growing a business, but it's all based on first principles, and I hope some of it's actionable and useful.

Matt, thank you so much.

My pleasure. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.

Thank you so much for watching or listening.

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Bye -bye.

[Mastering Startup Growth: A Strategic Framework for Scaling]-[How to Scale your Startup with Growth Levers: Matt Lerner]

📋 Summary

Unlocking Startup Growth: The Four-Step Framework

1. Map the Growth Model

2. Understand the Customer Journey

3. Run Rapid Growth Experiments

4. Adopt a Growth Mindset

Identifying the North Star

The Danger of "Sevens"

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript