Why Ali Abdaal Thinks 6-Figure Freedom Beats a 9-Figure Exit

When I think about my happiness, it's like there's a lot less of my day that I would choose to fast forward now, now that I have money. Ali Abduld didn't get rich the way we typically see on this show. He didn't sell a startup for millions, he didn't inherit a bunch of money, he didn't even build a business that he could one day maybe even sell. Instead he built an entire business and an entire ecosystem around his own personality. Ali has a YouTuber and he's therefore on the YouTube content hamster wheel. But he doesn't see it as a grind. He's actually spending his time doing exactly what he wants. So if I had a hundred million in the bank what would I do? Well I'd still make YouTube videos. I think once you do six figures a year and profit through a business that gives you like the sort of fun fulfillment flexibility, it doesn't get much better than that. Though that doesn't mean he isn't trying to grow his wealth beyond his own brand. In fact he's already seen some success expanding his income. My name's Harry Morton and this is Moneywise, a podcast not about how to get rich but about how your life changes once you're there. We're about to go really deeply into Ali Abduld's personal finances, is the experience as a YouTuber and being on the content creation hamster wheel and how he thinks money makes him happier and also how it doesn't. And by the way this is a podcast for the community of high net worth founders over at Hampton. If you're a founder doing at least three million in annual revenue go and check it out at joinhampton.com. Now down to business. Let's talk money. What's your net worth? My wife is uncomfortable me showing the exact number but I can say it's more than one million less than ten. Okay. Okay. Seven figure liquid net worth. And this is excluding equity in like the software and stuff and like yeah because I know some people are like oh well my software technically is worth. Right. Whatever. So do you value the channel? Do you value Ali Abduld? Absolutely nothing. Okay fine. That makes total sense. So how does that break down? How does this let's call it mid seven figure net worth? How does that break down? It's maybe like 20% in maybe like 30% real estate and be like 10% crypto and the rest is in the S&P. I wish I'd never done the real estate thing. I wish I'd just cloud into the S&P. This is what so many people that it's like angel investing in real estate. Yeah. Sounds really cool. I want to do it. I'm not like do you want to do angel investing. I don't even come back. Yeah. Any of that. So I forget that happened. Okay. Do you rent in Hong Kong? No, you rent in Hong Kong. It's really expensive. Earning in Hong Kong. Hong Kong. This is what I understand. Absolutely. Absolutely. I've been there once and I had incredible time and I've got some cancees friends and it's just such a cool culture. I could absolutely see myself living there. What's the cost of living in Hong Kong? Is it a pricey place to live? I would say it's similar to London. Rental prices I would say are maybe a bit more expensive than London. If you want like a nice area. Yeah. Our place is like £8,000 a month in rent. That's about 11K USD by the way. And it's like a fairly nice area and a fairly big apartment by Hong Kong standards. And then like food prices and stuff are slightly cheaper but it's sort of like the rental thing. It's basically like similar to London. But if you want to buy a house or like the house that we live in, if we were to buy it would be about £7 million. Wow. Which is completely absurd. Bro, what is that like a three-bedded apartment? It's like a four-bedded apartment. That's like 1600 square foot. Okay. Yeah. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money but house prices in Hong Kong have been inflated because of mainland China. Money and stuff and then they're coming down. Okay. I don't think we'll buy a place any time soon. Right. Okay. I'm also a big fan of renting in general. We'll get to more of Ali's numbers but first all of this almost never happened because Ali was planning to stay in medicine until Covid forced his hand. I decided to apply for medicine because it was a few decisions. One was that everyone says university is the best time of your life, right? And a medical degree in the UK is six years and everything else is like three or four. So I thought, well, you know, if it's the best time of my life I might as well long it out. The second reason was that my mum's a doctor and everyone we knew was doctors, like all of our friends, parents and stuff. And the third reason was I was into like web design and coding and stuff when I was a kid. And so I thought, okay, maybe I could do computer science. But then I thought, if I do computer science, I'm just like every other nerd who's doing computer science. Whereas if I do medicine and then do the coding on the side, I'm now a doctor who knows how to code. If you had all these coding skills, why are you a YouTuber? Yeah, sort of happened accidentally. I'd been trying to do the coding things from like age 13. On words, I started like various different like failed side projects. And then when I was 18, I got scammed out of a thousand pounds. I like had scrounged and saved a thousand pounds through like private tutoring and I was working like a Kumon study center and through my few hundred dollars that I'd made from this like website design stuff. And I was going to buy my first Apple product because I couldn't afford Apple products before then. I was going to go to university, I'm going to buy a MacBook Air. And instead of buying it at the app store like a normal person, I thought, why don't I look on gum tree, which is sort of the UK version of Craigslist. And I found a guy selling like the beefed out model that would normally be like two and a half grand because you know, all the upsells and all the one terabyte or whatever it was. And I met him in Paddington station and I forked over a thousand pounds in cash and he handed me a MacBook. And then I found out on the train on the way back, it was actually like a four year old model and he'd scratched out the serial number so you can you can enter a set and I tried getting the money back and it didn't work out. And so my mom very kindly said, you know, forget this guy, you're about to start university and she just bought me a MacBook and I was like, okay, I need to use this laptop to make back the money that I've lost. Okay. And so I made an ever-note file back in 2012 being like, what am I actually good at and what and like what kind of business can I make? And I was like, okay, well, I'm good at teaching because I've been doing maths tutoring and stuff ages. I did really well in the med school entrance exams and I know how to make websites. And I was like, okay, how do I combine these things? So what if I teach courses for medical school applicants teaching this exam thing and what if I make a website to market it like nationally and undercut the competition? And so that was the first business that I made. I remember thinking at the time, man, if I could 10X, if I could make 10 grand from this business, that would like, this would be like a good origin story or something like that. I want to turn this loss of like, you know, I've lost all my life savings into a win. And then that business sort of lasted seven years and then I sold it in 2019 and then that was the start of my YouTube channel. And overall, like, we've made over like 10 million selling courses and stuff over the years. And it's all because this random guy called Matthew scammed me out of a thousand pounds when I was 18. Matthew from Tornton, Somerset. I thought I'm from Somerset. No way. Yeah. If you know Matthew White from Tornton, Somerset, I remember you were certainly going to be out on the go at this. This was like 2012. But it was like the worst thing that ever happened to me was like, and I was losing sleep over it. And I've led a very privileged life that the worst thing that ever happened to me was like losing a thousand pounds. But it was like five years worth of life savings. It was like a huge deal. But that's now turned into over 10 million. So thank you Matthew. I owe Matthew a great debt of gratitude for being a scammer. Thank you Matthew. I'm a slash. Thank you. And you ran that all through uni. That was your sort of uni business. How much money did you make from it? Like what was the profit from that? How much were you working? What did you sell it for? Just tell me the story of that business. So it started off selling classroom courses physically in a classroom. And I was charging like 60 pounds per head. So my first course had three people in it, which was kids from my school. Because my brother was in the year below and there were plankton medicines. So I got three kids in my living room. And then I got like one level up. I rented a room at the local mosque in South and on C-Six where I lived. I got seven people for the next one. And I made like 400 quid that day. And then when I started to make the website to market it nationally. I think in the first year we made like 10 grand revenue. And I was working through the summer holidays to like write the course materials and like find a printing company and like get all the questions and this and that and the other. So we did 10K year one, like 90K year two, 150K year three, four, five, like we sort of plateaued at 150K. Okay. And they're like, you have five or something? I mean, I was like, we who's we? We are basically me and a couple of friends I'd recruited from university. Yes, so it was me and like a friend who would be teaching the courses. And like eventually it sort of morphed into sort of there were like 10 of us in total who would like teach courses alternatingly. The fun thing there is that initially it was like me and a few of like my friends from the Pakistan society. So we were all like brown dudes from Cambridge. And so I needed to ask them of my white male, female friends for to become diversity hires. So I'd be like, like Molly and Jake and Anna and you know, I need you to like all the time. I need to be able to make this feel like not just like an Asian operation. And so me personally, I was taking home maybe like 30, 40K pounds a year while like university. Sick when you're in the 20s. Yeah, which is great. That's like the salary of a junior doctor. And then you said you sold it. How did that come about? What did you set it for? What was that kind of exit like? Sold it for like 200K. It was okay. Okay. Basically nothing back in 2019. But basically now you're saying basically nothing about how old you 20, 20, 20, 90. Oh, that was what I was like 23, 24. Okay. I probably didn't feel like, did it feel like nothing? We like fuck this. I'm just already on to something else. I just want to get out of the way. Like a 23, 200K is like nothing is it? Yeah, but like it was split between, you know, we had, I had a sort of co-founder and I kind of gave a bunch to the people who were part of the courses and stuff because we had profit share agreements and it felt weird to sell it for 200K and then not actually honor the profit share agreements that we sort of had even though it wasn't really equity. Yeah. So I ended up taking home maybe like 100 or something like that. Okay. Which at the time was like, okay, but that was 2019 where my YouTube channel had quarter of a million subscribers and she'd already built the second thing. I was like, okay, I really just want to get rid of this thing. Sure. And the way it happened is actually back in 2016 when I started my personal website, I wrote a blog post lamenting like how the business had plateaued in revenue and it'd been like five years of that point and I didn't really enjoy it anymore. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to focus on Med School and it's going to be, it's okay if the business sort of slowly crumbles over time because I'm not really that interested in it. And some guy called Rohan read that blog post and in like two years later and he was like, oh, opportunity here. And so he reached out via third party and he ran another like medical admissions company type thing. So he and I then became friends and then he bought the company sort of absorbed it in and now it's been sold to some private equity firm like the whole thing. So still going thing. It's still going. Yeah. Great. I still have like a 0.5% ownership stake in that thing. So what did drive you to YouTube? Why YouTube? Yeah. So I've been wanting to be a YouTuber since like 2010. I used to watch a lot of like musicians on YouTube like cover artists, Kush Nidor, Sands, UE, Tyler War. There's all these people who would like these like college kids who would do covers of popular songs. Because like, man, I want to be a YouTuber. That'll be so sick. What were you enjoying at that point? Like what was fun about what you were doing then? Just really cool. Like I'd never really made videos before. But I really enjoyed the process of doing it like figuring out cameras. Do you really? Because you just said voiceover is like your least favorite thing ever. But that's the podcasting I guess. We might not air this part. But I think having done it for eight years, everything like loses, it's lost her after a while. - I've had this conversation. I heard you say that in the most recent video you had the workshop in Hong Kong, and you talk about your friend who says everything gets boring. I've had that exact conversation with Oli. I don't know if it is Oli that said that to you, but I've had that exact conversation. It doesn't matter how shiny and sexy a business looks. Three years in, it's gonna be just as boring as the one you're already running. - Everything feels like work after a while. - Yeah, so at the start, it didn't feel like work. It felt like on the evenings I was making this thing, I was thinking like, "Oh, I've got one new subscriber today "and I'd be refreshing the YouTube analytics and stuff." And then I'd be learning how to edit in Premiere Pro and then switching to Final Cut and then trying all these like, After Effects, plugins and stuff to make the videos look a bit shinier and then using Adobe Spark, which is now called Adobe Express to make the thumbnails, it was so cool. And I discovered like batch filming and I could interview my friends kind of like this kind of model where I would get like my friends to answer the same series of 20 questions about getting into Med School and then splice them up into 20 different videos and I was like, "Oh my God, this is incredible." So it was this sort of stuff. And then after about 52 videos, I got a thousand subscribers. I was like, "Oh my God, a thousand subscribers, "1,000 people." And then after about 85 videos, I got like 5,000 subscribers and that was when the channel got monetized. And then I was like making a few dollars each day and I was like, "Wow, YouTube is funding my coffee "and then YouTube is funding a takeaway." And then, "Whoa, I could eat dinner out every day "for the rest of my life." - Was that exciting? Was that money exciting though? 'Cause you were already earning like decent revenue off this other business at the same time. - Yeah, but I had to work for it. - Yeah. (laughing) - So I think there's like the moment where you make your first dollar on the internet, there's like changes in your life. And then when you make money independently, there changes in life. But then when you make money in a way, there's a decoupled from your time. - Sure. - That completely sort of breaks the brain. - Yep. - And so it was like, I was making these videos anyway and I could then see that like that video that I made three months ago has generated $111 in revenue. Wow. And I could see the graph going up and I'd be watching YouTubers like Graham Stefan to, he was making like $5,000 a day. And I'm like, "Holy fuck, that's like a monthly salary "of a doctor and he's making it in a single day "from his back catalog of videos." That's so cool. - Yep. - And so it felt like building these like little assets that were all just like contributing like little trickles to the thing. Which was way more fun than going and teaching a classroom course to help people get into it. - Did you ever play around with like a, 'cause it's almost like affiliate marketing. Did you ever get into like, you know, 'cause you built websites and stuff. Did you ever play with that stuff as well? - Yeah, I played with it in my, that was one of my money making schemes back in the day that didn't work out. But then actually a big chunk of the revenue from the early days of the channel came from affiliate marketing. There was this paper like screen protector for the iPad. And I made a video about the iPad that kind of went semi viral. And I reached out to this like paper like company to give me an affiliate deal. And they offered, I don't know, 20%. And then I got loads of sales through that. And I was making like thousands a month from just plugging this like iPad screen protector. And so the paper like screen protector was making a few thousand a month. I found this like mechanical keyboard that I really liked, a colorful one that was on my desk at all times. And I emailed them being like, hey, can we do an affiliate deal? And they initially said, oh no, we don't know how to do that. But I figured out that they were on Shopify found on affiliate platform. And I was like, people like using this platform called VWA, which is a Shopify add-on. And within a couple of weeks, there's random Chinese company based in Chengen called Ike Unix had created an affiliate scheme just for you. And we drove over a million euros in sales for that keyboard. Wow. And we got like a 15%. So I made like a 150 grand. Amazing. I'm like plugging this mechanical keyboard, which was again, completely mind-boggling because a full-time consultant, Dr. In the UK does not even earn a 150 grand in a year. Right. And I was doing that passively through making a video about how I tied pretty fast. About a keyboard is mental. Real quick, today's episode is sponsored by Ocean's Talent. If you're trying to hide our great EA or ops person right now, you're looking at 80 to $100,000 sometimes more. And I know a lot of founders have tried to go the remote route before and gotten burned. Sometimes they get ghosted, the work sloppy, you end up redoing everything yourself. I've heard the stories before and I've even personally lived them. Ocean's Talent is completely different. They pre-vette every single candidate with thorough skills assessments. So whoever they match you with is ready to go on day one. And it's not just EA's. They do marketing ops, finance, HR sales, even AI workflows. I've hired people personally through Ocean's Talent and I'm blown away by the quality of work they produce. Sam Parr has his personal assistant through Oceans and he describes her like this. She runs my life. I couldn't live without her. I have total trust in her and I don't trust anyone. That's the bar they set. So if you're a founder drowning and stuff, a great hire should be handling, check out Ocean's Talent at oceanstalent.com/moneywise. So Ali's clearly enjoying life and making good money, but he still kept one foot in the door of medicine, just in case, until this. So in medicine in the UK, you have two years of foundation training where you're sort of doing a bit of everything after you graduate and then you decide what to specialize in. Now usually in between that, people take a bit of a gap year. And in my gap year, that was 2020. I was going to go to Australia to do emergency medicine because I thought it would be cool to go to Australia for a bit and like lots of times, I was going to go to Australia and I was going to go to Australia and be cool to go to Australia for a bit. And lots of doctors in the UK go to Australia. And so I started to get the ball rolling and contacting doctors in Australia and I was even looking into working on a cruise ship but I wasn't quite experienced enough. And then COVID hit. And so I finished up my two years in August of 2020 and Australia closed their borders. And so I accidentally ended up becoming a full-time YouTuber even though that was never really the plan. The plan was always part-time medicine, part-time something else. And then while doing this full-time YouTuber thing, that was when we launched our YouTube course, that drove like, I was expecting like 10 people to sign up. 350 people signed up. I mean, we made like, I don't know, $300,000 in revenue in like a week, which would have been like seven years of working as a doctor and we made that in a week from just selling this course on how to do YouTube. And then I was still in the, okay, I'm still going to do part-time medicine kind of thing. And then like a year later, I was actually being interviewed on Lewis House podcast. This is their school of greatness. And he was asking me about passive income ideas and stuff. And I told him, you know, I just casually dropped it. Yeah, I'm still going to do part-time medicine. And he basically, the podcast basically flipped and it turned into him basically coaching me through my fears and anxieties around losing the badger status of being a doctor and stuff. - Love that. - And so after that conversation I realized, wow, it's literally just fear holding me back from like just going all in on this entrepreneurial YouTuber thing. And at that time, I also had a book deal and I was like, you know what? I'm probably not going to regret it. And I had a chat with a colleague of mine, a senior colleague who I really respected. And he told me about one of his mates who had the opportunity to join the Royal Air Force and become like a fighter pilot. And had to leave medicine for a bit. And so this mate of his went to the RAF for 16 years, became a fighter pilot. And then 16 years later, just went back to medicine. So this guy, Dr. Adcock was basically like, like you've got the opportunity to like, you know, take a plunge, just like go for it. And you can always come back to medicine if you need to. - Totally. Can you break down for me the sort of like year to year? So let's start, I don't know, 2017 feels like the kind of beginning-ish. Like what was that sort of like annual revenue journey, do you think? - Oh, if so 2017 was zero. - Yeah, 2018 was also would have been like a few thousand dollars from like sponsorships and stuff. - Yep. - 2019 would have probably been about 100K. - Yep. - 2020 was when we went from 100K to like 1.2 million in revenue that year. 2021, we went from 1.2 to 4.6 million in revenue. - Okay. - Pre-mental. And then since then, we've sort of like hovered around somewhere between four and five million. - Okay. - I think in 2023, we did like six points, something in US dollars. But it sort of hovered around that amount. - And is that for lack of trying to grow it? Or is that for like lifestyle design, which I know you're big on and we'll get to in a minute, but like, why is that that? That's plateaued, you think? - It's not for lack of trying. We tried lots of things. What I've realized over time, and this could just be a cope. But what I've realized over time is that there kind of is a natural plateau to any kind of personal brand-based business. Where yes, a subscriber count was going up, but the percentage of people that are qualified and warm and like sufficiently ready to buy something, that number actually goes down over time unless you're consistently replenishing it with like new leaves. - Sure, that makes sense. - And also nurturing them and understand the other. And so because we also never had any recurring revenue, it's like every month we're starting from zero and we're having to acquire new customers for a one-off payment. We've, over the years, slowly tried to do some like recurring revenue things, 'cause, you know, recurring revenue. If Compign Interest is the eighth wonder of the world, recurring revenue is the ninth. And so we've been trying and seeing what other people are doing in the space, it's rare for like an info product business to go beyond $10 million in revenue. And the ones that do scale with, they generally have high ticket offers, with like a sales team, a customer success team, generally run a lot of ads. We don't really run many ads. And so it's like, it's there in the back of my mind that like, I obviously wouldn't say no if I could pay for Match 1 and something to do $10 million in revenue rather than five. - Yeah. - But whenever we've tried and having spoken to a bunch of sort of mentors who've done that journey, they say that you have to kind of dip in profitability for a while while you hire the team, build the system, start doing ads, and then you hope that like, you know, over time, your revenue growth goes up. So whenever we've tried this, our costs have gone up and our revenue has stayed static, and then we've had to sort of fire a bunch of people or make them run or whatever or cut things off to try and get the profitability back down. So it's been a bit of a struggle. I think I'm not a particularly good entrepreneur. I think given that we've had such a big audience, that's a real hack that masks a lot of, like if I had no audience, you know, there are people making $10 million from Info Product Marketing to have zero audience because they've just nailed ads. Those people I think are just way better entrepreneurs in that their ability to generate revenue and profit is better than mine. But because I've just had a big audience, anything we do gets some traction. - A better business person maybe. A better like, you know, better at spreadsheets and, you know, an MBA. But, you know, define being good as an entrepreneur. You know, you're either, you're probably, at least in my experience, you're either like a marketing heavy, like a product or marketing heavy, style entrepreneur or you're an operator. - Yeah, I think most of us always really been about teaching. Like I love the creator side of it. I love the teaching side of it. I actually don't really enjoy the running of business side of things. So, you know, tell me more about that. - Yeah, so at the moment our setup is, your team aren't listening, it's fine. - Yeah. (laughing) - So our setup is something that a mentor of mine, Daniel Priestley, kind of introduced us to a few years ago. The way, he describes it was that if you want a lifestyle boutique, he defines a sort of under 12 employees. His whole stake is that as soon as you get to the 13th, everything starts to break. And then in between like 13 and about 40 people, you're in the sort of no-man's land where you're too big to be small, too small to be big. You know, and I can definitely remember. On the other side of that, you've got like middle management and like teams of teams and blah, blah, blah. Then you have a way higher costs than like what he encouraged us to do is really decide, do you want to be a lifestyle business or do you want to be a performance business? Are we going for like the team of 40 and like 10 million plus? Are we going for team of 10, keeping it chill, good vibes, fun, flexibility for film and blah, blah. And whenever I've had that conversation, I've always been like, the thing I really want is just the lifestyle business. Yeah. I don't really, I care about being able to do stuff that I want to do. And my guiding North Star has always been if I had 100 million in the bank, what would I spend my time actually doing? Mm-hmm. And I want my actual calendar to be as close to that 100 million vision as is humanly possible. And so if I had 100 million in the bank, what would I do? Well, I'd still make YouTube videos because it's fun and I enjoy teaching. I still write books because it's fun and it's cool. And I'd still make apps. And we're doing a few apps and we can talk about that. But I wouldn't do courses and I wouldn't do sponsorships. Okay. So courses and sponsorships are like the revenue generating activities that I'm primarily doing for the money. Super high margin, right? Yeah, really high margin is good vibes. Yeah. So it's like in that category of things I do for the money, I try and optimize my hourly rate and to the margins and just make it as fun as possible. [Music] A lifestyle business sounds great and it is. One of our fan favorite episodes is with my friend Laura Roda who intentionally keeps her company small. But even in a lifestyle business, you've always got the opportunity to sell one day if you want to. The problem with being a creator is that that exit door doesn't really exist. If Ali doesn't keep making content, the money doesn't flow. Lucky for him, he absolutely loves it. But even so, he's still building more income streams that don't rely on the Ali Abdel brand. Which I'll get to in a moment, but I'm just going to take a minute to talk about why this podcast even exists. Hampton makes this show so that we can connect with more founders who are looking for community and guidance while dealing with all of the kinds of things that Ali and I are talking about right now. Hampton's a private community of high net worth founders and what makes it different is it's not just theory, it's not consultants, it's other operators, it's other people like you. Who have scaled to eight figures and nine figures, people who've wrestled with hiring headaches, flat revenue, exit dilemmas, even burnout, right? Inside Hampton, you'll find small curated peer groups where you can actually be honest about what's working and what isn't. Plus, in-person retreats, private events, and a slack that's way more valuable than scrolling through Twitter for advice. I'm a member of myself and it's one of the best decisions I've made as a founder. If you're a business doing at least three million in annual revenue or more, I can't recommend it enough. Check it out at joinhampton.com. Okay, back to how Ali is adding to his income streams so he's not entirely dependent on his own personal brand. So what was that about two years ago? I started hearing on the grapevine, this whole thing around. You know the stuff in the startup world that I first time found his focus on product, second time found his focus on distribution. And creators with audiences have lots of distribution, but they suck at making products. And they don't want to make products because if you make products, then that takes the eye of the ball of the content. Mr. Beast often says that creators will make the mistake of trying to build a physical product business or something else. And then they're a golden goose, which is their YouTube channel or their social media following will crumble because it hasn't got the focus. And so I think a lot of people sort of somewhat independently arrived at the conclusion that okay, SaaS is amazing because you've got MRR. You've got exit value. Creators are amazing because they've got distribution. What if creators could partner with a product person who builds the thing, creators get the initial distribution and then you get product-led growth to grow the thing. So conveniently around this time, about a year ago, a friend of mine called Pablo had just exited his second company. And here are really good friends. He's also based in London. I was saying, "Hey, Pablo, you've built and sold these two companies. Do you want to do consumer productivity apps?" So about 12 months ago, middle of 2025, we launched an app called VoicePel, which is a sort of AI, sorry, 2024. We launched a conversational writing app. That took a few couple of months to build and get to a point where it was released. And then we released it and immediately it got to 10K MRR just through my distribution. And then over time, it's just sort of been growing by 4 to 5,000 MRR per month, over the last 12 months. And now it's on just under 70,000 a month in growing revenue, which is really cool. And the even cooler thing is, last time we surveyed the audience, only half of them knew who I was. So of our paid subscribers, half of them have no idea who I'll end up with. Right. They're just absolutely fun and fantastic because it means that people are finding about the app through word of mouth and stuff. We have like 20, 25% stake in this and then Pablo and the teams have the rest of the equity. So it's not like I own 100% of the revenue here. Do you think you'd be happier with like a traditional exit? It could happen for the software, but it's not really something we're actively thinking about or actively aiming for. I don't really feel any pho-mo about it. I know a lot of people who have exited and basically all of them have said that yeah, it was nice for a bit. And then I got depressed because I realized I had nothing to do. And then I decided to start a new business or become a YouTuber or write a book or all three. So I'm like, I'm already kind of doing the thing that I would be doing if I had the exit. If I had 100 million, I'd still be doing YouTube videos, I'd still be writing a book and I'd still be trying to make new software. So like, what's the point of the exit? Yeah. And then I speak to someone who's exited and they're like, oh no, the point of the exit is that you get like a massive, they're like a couple of tens of millions and one transaction and now you can buy a really nice house and now you can go house shopping and then you can pick whatever you want. So I'm like, okay, that would be cool. I wouldn't say no to that. But beyond that, beyond actually being able to buy a nice house in Hong Kong, I am very content with my current situation and it's not something that I aspire to have a big exit. Yeah, fair. Although I wouldn't say no to it if anyone's interested. No, absolutely. Yeah, let us know. Yeah. So yes, Ali says he's already living the life he wants with the money that he has. But what are those upgrades that wealth actually brought him that given the satisfaction outside of work freedom? I asked him that question and the answer was very familiar indeed. I really like flying business class. Whenever I do, I try not to take it for granted. I try and do the whole gratitude stuff because I'm like, this would have been like, I wouldn't even have entertained the possibility. I'd be like, how fucking dumb do you have to eat fly business class? Like, economy takes you in the same direction. Everyone's getting the same destination. Totally. I just absolutely love flying business class and I love living in a big-ish house where we can have the team over for co-working. We can have friends over whenever we want and I have a nice YouTube studio where I can film stuff. And it goes to me, I like the two big levers for lifestyle upgrading and having tried other levers, they don't really do it for me, which is really nice. I've deliberately not gotten into watches because I know that as soon as I start getting into the watch thing, that's just a pit. And I've also deliberately not gotten into the cars thing. When I was in the UK, I had a Tesla Model 3. And I started to notice videos about Porsche's on my feet now. Maybe at some point I got a report. I don't know the details. But I have friends who are freaking love supercars and now for them, you need way more money to get to whatever. So again, I like to say to the Porsche this, which is figure out your money dials, figure out which areas of life you personally value and then just dial up the spending on those and dial it down in the other areas. So I'm big on convenience rather than luxury, particularly. Yeah, awesome. So are you happier with more money than you ever before? Yes, but the happiness increases have come from the removal of things that we're annoying. So for example, I quite enjoyed my job as a doctor, but I was still going to get the Sunday night scary. Like on a Sunday night, I'm going to go to work next morning. And then wake up at like 6.30, I don't know. I don't really feel like going in, but there's not even big consideration. It's like, of course I'm going to go to work. I'm not going to go into work. I like it to work. And then if I'm busy and I fit interesting, then great. But if I'm working with a colleague or I don't really get on with it, it's just like, clock watching some of the time. If it's not that busy, then it's like, there's all these moments where, you know, there's a, I came across this method that sociologists use to measure people's like satisfaction with life. And they'll do these like randomised surveys where you'll either get a notification on your phone or like a page or something. And the question will be, in this moment, would you press a button to fast forward to the end of this current thing that you're doing? Sure. And then they look at how much of their lives people would fast forward. And a lot of people would fast forward the time at work. If you look at these kind of studies. In my case, I actually would fast forward my time at the gym, which to me means that I'm not actually enjoying the gym. I'm using it as an instrumental thing. Yep. And when I was a doctor, even though I enjoyed it, I actually would have chosen to fast forward a lot, quite a lot of my time. Yeah, sure. With the exception of when I was teaching, I absolutely love the teaching aspect of it. And I love sort of explaining something to a patient, but that was like maybe 10% of it rather than 90% of it. And so when I think about my happiness, it's like, there's a lot less of my day that I would choose to fast forward now, now that I have money. And in particular, the money that's bought freedom from the 95, like I wouldn't choose to fast forward this. This is just really fun. It's nice having the conversation. But in that sense, yes, I'm happier. In the sense that like I never really enjoyed taking out the trash, but I would do it. And I don't have to take out the trash. Sure. I'm happier. But like broadly, again, hit on a adaptation, I would say if I were to look at my global happiness levels like these days compared to when I was a university student compared to when I had a job, it's actually broadly the same. Like making way more money doesn't really seem to have moved the needle on like overall life satisfaction. It's just optimized how much of my time I'm spending doing things I want to be doing rather than things I don't want to be doing. Even though that weirdly doesn't actually make much of an impact on happiness. Well, what's been like for me is just the things that I'm stressed about are different. Have you come across Joe Hudson's stuff? No. Oh, man, you should really have him on the podcast. He's great. So he's like an executive coach in Silicon Valley. Okay. He works with open AI and these big tech companies. He does a lot of this stuff around sort of accepting emotions and dealing with emotions and things like that. So one of his things that I found really helpful on this front is that I've always sort of, for me, a lot of the anxieties ultimately lead to ending up broken homeless. Like that thing, like if the business crumbles, what if the YouTube channel dies, what if like our course doesn't sell, what if dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, I'll end up broken homeless. What I think that Joe says is that either is really common for everyone on like any level of wealth. think Matt Mushari in his book The Great See-O within says, "Once you get to a 100 million net worth, you stop caring about that." But Joe says in his experience, even at a 100 million net worth, there's still a subconscious scarcity mindset that comes to that. It's worried about being broken homeless. And that's what people say, like, you know, how much money do you ask anybody? How much money do you need to be happy? Almost everyone on university will say, twice, but I have a right now. Yeah, twice or three times what I have right now. But sort of Joe's whole take on this is that, why are you worried about being homeless? It's usually because you're worried that the feelings you'll have when you're homeless will be unpleasant, that like, you'll feel some bad internal bodily sensations. Yeah. So really, you're not really worried about being homeless. What you're worried about is the fear of some sort of internal bodily sensation. And what if I told you that like, "Hey, you might end up homeless, sure." But like, you'll be super, feel super blissful and super peaceful and you'll be loving life. All of a sudden, the fear of homelessness goes away. Caviar, if you have kids, you know, your knowledge may vary. But really, what that means is that the things that we're afraid of, it's literally just internal sensations, feelings. And if we think some how-res meditation, every feeling is just an appearance and consciousness, even the seemingly unpleasant ones are merely just thoughts and feelings appearing in consciousness. Getting that loop and like, whenever I feel any kind of anxiety about the money thing, I remind myself appearance and consciousness with like Sam Harris's voice. It's merely an appearance and consciousness. And that actually does take quite a lot of the anxiety away. I have a lot of time. So it's not been the money increase. It's been the sort of just going on a retreat with Joe Hudson and like watching all this content and stuff that I feel has helped reduce the anxieties a little bit. Awesome. Great. Well, I'm fixed. I'm not anxious anymore. That's perfect. Obviously having no money and no home is still not the ideal situation to maximize happiness. But when I asked Ali what he thought the sweet spot was for money to happiness return, it was actually far lower than a lot of other guests have said. So I've pulled so many people about this who are sort of at different stages of the journey and also like over a thousand people who are in our sort of course community thing who have not yet gotten to that point. I think once you do six figures a year in profit through a business that gives you like the sort of fun fulfillment flexibility, it doesn't get much better than that. Yeah. Man, me and obviously adjust if you're in New York or in like Bay Area and obviously. Sure. But the whole like six figure lifestyle business, which I would kind of define as like six figures in profit, you're making kind of an upper middle class-ish living. Yeah, you're not going to be rich off of 100K a year profit. But like once you're doing 100K a year in profit, it's not that hard to grow it to like 200 or 300. And as long as you've got like, I think about as like the freedom profile, like the four F's of fun fulfillment, flexibility and finances, finances 100K a year in profit, if you've got enough flexibility where you're not having to be somewhere, you're not having to be on Zoom calls either one, you're able to pick up your kids from school. If the work is kind of fun, I mean it's never going to be fully fun 100% of the time. But like for the most part you actually kind of enjoy it and it feels fulfilling because you feel like you're helping people. Just that combination of things seems to be the absolute sweet spot. And then if you can maintain the three F's while the numbers are going up, that seems to be the recipe for happiness. Whereas numbers going up at the expense of fun, flexibility or fulfillment, people seem to sort of regret that over a long enough time horizon. Yeah. And one thing that I often think about is that up until a certain point, freedom comes from making more money. But then after a certain point, freedom comes from leaving money on the table. Yeah. This is something the Bill Perkins talks about in "Diver Zero" and I was able to spend like an afternoon with him and he was really bullish on this that like all of these entrepreneurs that are striving for more and more money, they'll say to him, "But Bill, I enjoy my job." Like, what's wrong with making more money in my job? It feels like a video game to me. And he's like, "Come on." Like, this is just bullshit. Like, are you really telling me that like of all the million things you could be doing with your time, the thing you landed on, the thing you enjoy most happens to be also the one that drives shareholder returns. Fucking like, you're just like deleting yourself, man. And his view on this is that once an entrepreneur starts, like they can't stop. Yeah. And even though it comes at the risk at the expense of like their personal life or their fulfillment or their health or their relationships, the drive to earn more money takes a lot of people off the track. Yep. And so I really, I try and think about this a lot when it comes to when it's a choice between fund flexibility and fulfillment versus finances. It's like weighing that up and beyond a couple hundred K-year, you don't really need much more than that in any kind of city to have a pretty good life. Why make the trade? Totally. Well, because it, I mean, this is something I think about all the time. Like, do I want to strive to be the guy that can be on business class like have the private jet? Or does it feel like giving up to go, do you know what? I'm not, I'm not going to even try. Like, where I'm at now is where I need to be. And I just, if happiness is truly what I'm going after, then just relax into it and enjoy it, rather than fighting this urge to like do more for the sake of the next, the next bucket, the next bracket, the next seat at the table, the next whatever. Yeah, I find it interesting when I go to like masterminds and stuff in the US. I was at this event in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago where it was like this yacht party for e-commerce founders who were doing over 50 million year in revenue. And the only reason I was invited, because I mean, my wife, my wife, our friends with the organizers. So they're like, you know, you guys come a lot of time, we've got some space. I look great. Why not? And then with these people giving, like, one guy was some jewelry company doing 800 million year in revenue revenue. And just speaking to these people. And like, in the moment, I have this thing of like, I thought, we're only doing five, like, oh the fuck, like, you know, we should be making more money. And then my team have this rule that we've developed over time, like four years ago, which is the 72 hour button, which is whenever Ali comes back from a trip to be speaking to another entrepreneur. If he has any kind of idea, we press the 72 hour button. And if he's still excited about it three days later, then maybe we'll talk about it. Usually, it's like, I was in Miami for this mastermind, Neil Patel was there. He's got like the $700 million business. And he was like, oh, dude, it's just screw info products. Like you should start an agency. And his CEO was in the back being like, no, no, does don't agency. Neil Patel came on this podcast and said that he bought bed sheets for $10,000. So Neil Patel can, yeah, I love to talk about it my first many where he was like, he said his burn was like $280,000. Yeah, yeah. How do you even do that? Wow. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. But basically his argument was, this was like a couple of years ago, this mastermind in Miami. He was like, look, Ali, I've got more of a lifestyle business than you do because I'm, you know, I'm doing a million revenue, you know, way more money and stuff. And then his CEO in the back was like, no, actually, it's fires all the time. We're constantly stressed as all 800 employees to manage. Like, honestly, if you're happy doing five million a year, selling courses, stay there. You don't need to try and do anything. Right. And so it's interesting having those two very different perspectives from like Neil and his CEO. How did you find, by the way, your status was in the room. Like as someone that has an audience, did that sort of level the playing field somewhat? Like, I think it's kind of interesting your particular mode of how you make money almost sort of eradicates the numbers themselves. Yeah. Did you find that to be true? I had a chat with Chris Williamson about this who has really found this to be true. Right. Because he like, I don't really hang out with rich people very much. But Chris Williamson really does. And well, one thing he said to me was that, why do you think just because I think he's in the US and there's just way more of them in the US and like podcast and stuff. But he gets invited to like loads of things that are for like exclusive high net worth type people, even though he's nowhere near as rich as them. But because they have what he wants, which is the following. Yeah. What he found is that once people get rich, then they want to be famous. Yeah. Okay. And so if you have the fame, then in a way, one, another person, I might have been Bill Perkins for saying that like, in the game of making money, actually, everyone's got money. Yeah. But in the name of being of having influence and being famous, actually, that is much more scarce. What are your financial goals for next five to ten years? Probably trying to do two million profit every year. And over time, trying to make as much of that not reliant on the content hamster wheel as possible. So as our software portfolio grows, hopefully, we'll be able to make that money fairly easily without me having to make YouTube videos. Yeah. Which means then I will only make YouTube videos when I feel like it, rather than once a week, because it's quite sweet, because like consistently is good. Why too? Why two million? Yeah, why that number? Oh, it's come very arbitrary. I just thought, you know, if we really upgrade the lifetime, when then our burn becomes, I don't know, 50k a month or something like that. I haven't spoken to a couple of people who are way richer than we are. They've all kind of landed at 50k a month, being like a good sweet spot where it's hard to spend more than that. And I'm sure I'm really going all out. And so just running some back of an envelope calculation is like, okay, well, if our burn was let's say 500k a year, and then we wanted to put a million into investments every year, and then another 500 just for the vibes, just in case the buffer kind of thing, or like taxes or whatever, that is a very arbitrary round number. Yeah, but I find that having the arbitrary round number is actually quite nice. Yeah, because you need that goal. Yeah, because when there is an arbitrary number, it's like, well, I mean, we could do one, we could do two, we could do three, we could aim for five, there's all sorts of uncertainty in terms of what the strategy is that I found whenever I just landed, I'm just like, you know what, two millions of my goal. One needs to be true to get there. Yeah, exactly. It just makes strategy prioritization time management focus management way easier. Do you fear that that wealth could just go away? Sometimes I used too much more. I used to, the thing that would keep me up at night is like, what if the YouTube channel like Crumbles, what if I lose my internet fame that I currently have, what if it doesn't buy that stuff, like, what if I end up broken homeless kind of thing? I really stopped worrying about that now. I think going through the Joe Hudson stuff has really helped in terms of recognizing the emotion that's underlying all of that. Yeah. Also recognizing actually as I've started to coach other entrepreneurs through starting their businesses, just realizing that holy shit, like I've gained so many skills over the last 15 years of trying to make money, that like if push came to shove and I lost everything and I had no followers, I can almost guarantee I'd make at least a six figure business within a year. And so just the confidence that that gives in terms of just being able to make stuff happen has eliminated basically all of the fear of losing all the stuff. What's your main driver? Is it being a creative person? That's the sense I have, or is it money or is it something else? I don't know, man. So I don't know if you have this feeling, but like in the early days of a business, it's like exhilarating. Yeah. Because the fire of motivation is there. You wake up every morning feeling like, yes, I'm like building this thing. And I still, I feel like I'm still chasing that old fire of motivation that I used to have before getting to this place. And like a couple of weeks ago, I was working on like some new course materials and every day I was waking up feeling excited to grind on this thing and I did that for a whole week straight. And then it was like back down to baseline of like, you know, I wake up and you know, the stuff on the calendar is like, I should probably work in the next video. But you know, let me just like have a monitor of the coffee shop. I'm going to play with the kid for a little bit because it's just kind of, it's just a very kind of, it's not a high dopamine state that I have. And I love, I kind of miss the addictive feeling of the high dopamine state that I used to have back when I was like in the grind stage. Yeah. So in terms of what's motivating me now, the two words I often land on are, it's going to sound trite, but connection and contribution. I did a Tony Robbins event actually. I called it a date with destiny. It was really good. But one of the things in that is, you know, it's got this thing where it's like, you know, there's the needs of the ego and then the needs of the soul. And the needs of the ego are things like security, variety, status, significance, you know, that kind of thing. But then there's two needs of the soul and those are growth and contribution. And so in general, his whole stick is that the more successful you become, the more you hopefully shift away from like driving towards status and significance and security and more towards just like growth and contribution. Yeah. So I think about that a lot. And I think for me, it's like when I'm growing or like working on something that it involves learning a scale or like trying to build a new bit of the business that I haven't done before, that feels really good. And when I feel the impact of the stuff that I'm doing in some kind of way, it's really hard to feel that impact on like YouTube because the numbers just, it's just numbers. But when this is why we do events in real life as well, like seeing like 50 people around and then asking questions and stuff. And I can sort of feel more of that impact. So that's kind of the thing that drives me around like when I'm on my deathbed or when someone's like saying my euda geo or whatever, the feeling of having had the impact on other people that like someone like Tim Ferriss had on me where it sort of nudged me into a different life trajectory. And then could I help other people with a similar transformation? Yeah. That is honestly like beyond the yes, I want to make my two million a year or whatever. That's the thing that where I'm like, okay, I'm going to work on the video for that reason. That's pretty cool. And partly I wonder am I just trying to style up myself to thinking that there's a meaning behind any of this? I mean, it's all this. I just want the fucking money. I mean, it's all this just a coat because I'm like, I just want the fucking money and like, actually the money itself stops being motivated after a while. But like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, that's cool. Because I don't know. I'm interested in like what motivates you in the beginning because I've so speaking for myself, there's a lot of similarities like grew up single mother, didn't have a lot of money, definitely couldn't afford the PlayStation, all that kind of stuff growing up. And a lot of that is my driver for sure. It's just this like sense of like, I was the eldest of two siblings, a certain amount of sort of responsibility or kind of like, I don't know, there's, so I agree. As things shift and you kind of, you know, if we're just living now, like where I am today, my drivers are not a million miles away from what you're suggesting there. Like, it's more about fulfillment than it is like about needs. But if I think about like what's driving me at the core level of stuff, shit, I talked to my therapist about it's all that kind of like early stage stuff. Is there like a fire in your belly, do you think from, you know, that you've had since you're a kid? I definitely had it. And then I lost it when really, I think around 2021 when the business started making way more money than I needed. Yeah. That was when the fire of like continuing to the need to grow the thing just really kind of went away. I think for me, a big part of the motivator of the business as well was I was projecting out and speaking to doctors who were like five years of me, ahead of me, their creatinia is ahead of me and a lot of them were kind of miserable. Yeah. And I was like, okay, the reason I'm building this business is because I don't want to be chained to a job that I might not enjoy. Right. And once you get to about 100k here, it's like, well, okay, you're no longer chained to a job that you might not enjoy. And then so that like really strong motivator then disappeared. And even the stuff around growth and contribution and fulfillment and stuff, it's kind of annoying, but it feels less strong than the motivation to avoid the negative thing. I guess it's sort of like fears and negativity's loom way larger in our minds than the positive thing. So like striving for fulfillment doesn't feel anywhere near as like the burning fire that like trying to get away from like the chains of a job that I don't, I might not enjoy. Ali found happiness escaping the grind by turning himself into the product. Product he loves to deliver. And that may mean that a hundred million dollar exit is just not on the cards for him. But what does it matter if he's already happy living the life that he wants? I think that's something that all of us can learn from no matter what our stage of wealth is. It does mean though that he has less cash to burn personally. And since he mentioned Neil Patel, I'll go ahead and remind you that Neil is quite the opposite in terms of financial goals and spending based on what he told us here on this show. He also made some pretty compelling arguments though. And if you want to hear them, you should go and check out that episode. And as always, I've got to remind you that this podcast is made for the Hampton community. It's a private community for high net worth founders. And I can tell you from the inside, it's an incredible place to get real practical advice from people who are in the trenches building companies doing the thing that you are doing. So if your business is doing at least three million in annual revenue, you should definitely go and check it out at joinhampton.com. And if you're curious about podcasting, maybe you want to launch this podcast, maybe you want to level up the one you've already got, that's exactly what we do at my company. It's called Lois Street. We produce shows like this one, Moneywise, and we love to help you with yours. You can find us at Lois Street.co. Alright, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.