284. How Dr. Ali Abdaal Accidentally Built A $6M Business

How Dr. Ali Abdaal Accidentally Built A $6M Business

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Timestamps:

00:00 — The accidental 6M-subscriber story
01:00 — Doctor by day, YouTuber by night
03:00 — How Ali found 40 extra hours a week
06:00 — The LASER method for service businesses
13:00 — Why LinkedIn beats YouTube in 2026
17:00 — The bullseye: niching without losing clients
23:00 — Become the "AI person" for your niche
27:00 — Paper tigers and paper walls
30:00 — The 4 levels of AI tools
34:00 — Turning conversations into content
36:00 — AI, privacy & data security
45:00 — Final advice: pay the price for what you want 

Ash Roy  and Ali Abdaal Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):

Ali: Anyone listening to this right now could decide to do that and become a head of almost every single person in their niche. Hey, I'm Holly Bell, and you're listening to a conversation between me and my friend Ash Roy on productive insights.

Ash: Today I've got a very special guest, the author for a Feel Good Productivity, and we are gonna be talking about how to build a business for service-based business owners.

Mm-hmm. Like CFOs, lawyers.

Ali: Yeah.

Ash: Fractional CMOs. Give us a bit of a background on how you ended up in this situation, Ali. Because I remember watching my television in 2018 and there was this affable looking guy who was a doctor and he was talking about productivity and I was like, what's going on here?

And then I followed your journey for eight years. Yeah. And I watched it go from a few hundred thousand subscribers in YouTube to 6 million. Tell us a little bit about how you decided to, to move from being a medical doctor all the way through to now becoming an entrepreneur.

Ali: Yeah. It all sort of happened accidentally.

Uh, my goal when I started my YouTube channel and [00:01:00] my business, my business before then was to make an extra 3000 pounds a month in income. Uh, because I was working as a doctor in the UK where I was, I would've been earning 40 KA year, and if I'd gotten to a consultant level, I would've been earning a hundred KA year, um, pounds.

So like 200 K Australian or whatever you can do. The conversion and the happiest doctors I knew were the ones working part-time. And so I reasoned that like, okay. If I work as a doctor three days a week, that will probably be the, uh, sort of ally fulfilling. Uh, whereas four days a week, five days a week, six days a week, eight days a week, it starts to get a little like burning out.

And so I thought I needed an extra three grand a month to make this part-time working thing feasible. And so that was why I started my first business, which was helping kids get into med school. Um, so I did that from 2012 through to 2019, and then my YouTube channel started as a marketing channel for that courses business.

Um, and then the YouTube channel kind of took off and sort of accidentally, I ended up becoming known as a productivity expert, even though the goal was just to make an extra few, few grand a month. So, so that I could work as a doctor [00:02:00] part-time.

Ash: So you were working as a doctor full-time and you were finding time to do YouTube videos, which takes a lot of work.

How did you manage that?

Ali: Uh, in my case, it really wasn't that hard. The reason it wasn't that hard was because. I just had a lot of time. Um, you know, I was single at the time, living with a flatmate who was a friend of mine from uni. Did not have any kids, did not have any family obligations or anything like that.

Um, I would go to work in the morning, get home around like six, 7:00 PM and just grind on the YouTube channel until 11:00 PM for four hours, and then I'd sleep, repeat the cycle. Uh, on weekends, I would spend most of my weekends working on the YouTube channel and the business when I would have days off, because if I was doing like a night shift, like night shifts for a week, then they'd give you an extra few days off.

And so I would have one day of like recovery from the nights, and then day two, day three, day four, I'd be like cranking out YouTube videos and working on the business. So in my life at the time, all I did was go work, come home, [00:03:00] hang out with friends occasionally, and grind on business. And when you're spending years just doing that, of course the thing is gonna succeed.

Ash: Didn't you find that draining not having any kind of a social life? I mean, I understand that you enjoy making YouTube videos and, and so that was kind of your recreation, but, uh, did you feel like, man, I'm not getting any time to myself?

Ali: No, not really. Um, I, it, it didn't feel like much of a sacrifice, uh. I was living with a housemate who was a friend of mine from university.

So she and I would just like hang out. I would see my family like once a week, drive over to my mom's place, which is like an hour away for a few hours. Um, see friends on the weekends and stuff in the evenings like, but. People often ask me this question, like, how did you find time to do the thing? But, and I, I, I created this like 1 68 hour spreadsheet just to show it, show what it was.

You know, there's eight hours. We spend about 56 of them sleeping and about 12 doing like food and toileting and stuff, which leaves about a hours [00:04:00] now. I was working for somewhere between 14 and 60 hours week. So there's still 40 hours left and 40 hours is a long time, and I found ways to just not do things that would otherwise take up time.

My screen time was basically zero. I didn't spend time scrolling on stuff. I had a rule for myself that I'm not allowed to watch TV if I'm, if I'm on, I'm on my own. The average American spends three hours a day tv. The average Gen Z spends eight hours a day scrolling. TikTok, like when you just cut those things out, you end up with quite a lot of time.

I also didn't, I never cooked, I only got takeaway, uh, which probably did bad things to my health, but that meant that my food time, which on average takes people like somewhere between one and two hours a day plummeted to like 15 minutes a day. I got a cleaner part-time to clean my house every other week, so I never had to do any cleaning.

At one time, I experimented with like a laundry service because I didn't even wanna do the laundry, and so I would pay 20 pounds for them to collect my laundry and give it back like a couple of days later. I was just trying to find all the possible ways I could. Having to do things I didn't wanna do, so that I focus on work, social life, and like running on business.[00:05:00]

You know, I've got a kid now, it's a different situation. Married, it's different situation. It's like if I was working fulltime with a family, with a wife, with kids, it's a different,

Ash: right. Well that's a.

Professionals of some kind have recently their own business and.

Attract better quality clients and they wanna get off the feast and famine cycle being where either they have a whole lot of clients and they have to deliver to them, and so they have to protect, completely lost in delivery, and then suddenly the client pipeline dries out and now they've gotta scramble to get clients.

Yeah. So what would your advice be for someone like that?

Ali: Oh, [00:06:00] that's. That's a very big question for the, like, how do you grow business? Um, what would my advice be? There's a method that we teach in our, to our students or that we're about to teach to our students, um, in my like online business school, which are part of, uh, it's called the laser method, L-A-S-E-R.

And so it's sort of like these are five things that you ask yourself to figure out where you should focus on the problem when you are growing business and your time is scattered in all these directions. How should you be focusing on client deliveries? What about like lead generation? What about taking sales calls?

What about attending a networking event? What about like whatever, building a user channel? LinkedIn, there's all these things you could be doing. You don't have all the time in the world. Even when you're a full-time entrepreneur, you don't have all the time in the world. So the key to growing business is figuring out what is the current thing you need to focus on.

And so this laser method, L-A-S-E-R helps you figure that out. So l stands for lifestyle. I'm not kind a big believer that like your business should serve your life, not the other way around. Mm-hmm. And so we do a [00:07:00] lifestyle check being like how you currently feel about your lifestyle. Is it like reasonable?

Um, you might be in a season where you're sort of grinding, hustling to get your business off the ground, but are you like miserable there or are you like, you know what? This is a short term sacrifice for a long term, a long term outcome. If there are issues with the lifestyle where you're burning out, you're not spending time with friends and family, your health sucks, your relationship sucks or anything, anything like that, that of course is gonna be business.

And so we kind of need to start with a lifestyle question. You're like, how do you feel about your life if it's all right? And we're like, okay, cool. Let's not think about business. If the lifestyle is not all right. We fix the life first before we try and pick the business because usually that's the order operations.

Then it comes to a, so A is what area of the business is a constraint. So area of constraint. Um. There are only three areas in business. There is, I think them as attract, convert, and delight attract is am I giving people's attention? Lead generation convert is, am I convert to sales with at a reasonable enough conversion rate and delight is, am I giving my clients a good time so that [00:08:00] they give me the four R, which is results, reviews, referrals, and renewals.

Um, that's we're.

Where is the constraint right now? Do we need more sales? Or C can we not handle the, can we not handle these sales? Got them already. That tells us which area to focus on. Is it a track, is it convert or delight? 95% of the time service providers just need more sales because more sales solves lot problems.

But you know, um, speaking to one of our students the other day, she's got seven clients already. She's working 15 hours a week. She's got a full-time job. She's got two kids. Um, and if she were to take on the, or the ninth, the 10th. Something would break her life, would break business, would break, et cetera, et cetera.

She genuinely has a capacity constraint. IE she cannot possibly take on more clients without things falling apart. So in her case, she focuses on, uh, the, the area of constrain is the side of business. We wanna figure out ways to systemize that. In most other people's cases, the constraint in the business is we just need more sales.[00:09:00]

You, you don't have an attract problem. You have a convert problem. If you're not even getting three to five sales force per week, which is where most people are at, you have an problem. So we need to focus on generation. So that's a, we've got lifestyle, we've got carrier of constraint, then we have s. S is the five s scam.

So there are five s, five S's, um, in any particular area. So let's say, uh, we are constrained because we need more leaks. Yes. Um, that's our, we we're constrained in the attract area. We figure out, okay. Firstly, what components do I currently use for lead generation? It might be for this kind of audience.

LinkedIn might be the primary method, and maybe there's a secondary method of doing networking events. But like, let's focus on LinkedIn because that's like the primary thing spending, you know, if you, 80% of your clients coming from LinkedIn, your primary track mechanism.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: Within that you're asking about the five S's.

The five S are strategy, skills, self systems, and scale. [00:10:00] So strategy is, do I know what to do? Skills is do I know how to actually do it? Like how are my skills at doing things? Self is have I got emotional blockers that are getting in my way? Systems is have I got some kind of system to do this sustainably?

And scale becomes relevant once your six figure in revenue, which is, can I get someone else to do this for me? And what we get our students to do is to traffic like each of these areas, regular green. Um, so it might be LinkedIn strategy. Do I actually know what I'm doing on LinkedIn? Do you agree skills?

How do I feel about my ability to create these content on LinkedIn? So do I feel like anything is currently limiting me in terms of mindset, emotional blockers, anything like that as regards to getting, getting times through LinkedIn ready on green systems? How are my systems around posting on LinkedIn?

Am I just doing it one at time, typing on LinkedIn, or do I have some kind of production system to make this more sustainable, ready on green? And then we don't need to worry about scale Because mostly I suspect your audience audiences under a hundred annual revenue from from business. And now you figured out like, all right.

Where is the constrain? So which one is red? Let's fix the red one and try and take it to [00:11:00] yellow. That takes us to e and R, which stands for experiment and review. So let's say I've decided that like, okay, my LinkedIn strategy is okay, my skills are okay. Self, it's like, uh, I mean I still feel weird about posting on LinkedIn, but like that's fine.

Systems. Systems is red. I don't have any systems aren't posting on. Okay, great. At that point, we think, what is the experiment that I can run in the next month? So a monthly experiment cycle that would take my systems on LinkedIn from red to yellow, or. We figure out an experiment. We run the experiment for a month, and then r we review after a month to see like, okay, did I improve my LinkedIn systems that month?

Now this helps you identify what is the primary thing to focus on, and then it goes into like a priority system. Like priority number one is always helping the clients get results. So like, you know, X number of hours every week are gonna be servicing your clients in the remainder of the time that you have.

80% of it should be on the constraint that we just identified and 20% of it on everything else. The mistake people make is when they try to do everything at once, like, oh, I've got post on LinkedIn and I've also [00:12:00] networking event, and I gotta do all this cold outreach on sales navigator. I by the cold email as well.

Oh shit. And I've got these clients deliver before I, the way I wanna build an online course on the side and start podcast agency, because I've heard, I've heard that's a good, a good business model when you're trying to do seven things at once, all of them will totally suck, which is why the key to business growth is figuring out what is the constraint.

On that constraint.

Ash: Absolutely. Love that. Thank

Ali: coming that talk.

Ash: Thank you for sharing it. It was, it was fantastic. I have been as guilty as anybody else of doing 27 things at once for the longest time. The funny thing is that every one of those seven things can work. They just can't all work at the same time.

And so you've got to pick one. And as Apple often says, you know, we say a thousand nos for every Yes. You've got to get better at saying no. Which is something I learned from Seth do. And he told me about leadership being about saying, no, not only leadership of other people, but leadership of yourself as well.

Uh, interesting book in that. Is [00:13:00] Theory of constraints. Yeah.

Ali: One of in quite often.

Ash: The next thing I wanna talk about is content creation. Now you've been creating content for a long time. You really understand how to content, what is your approach to content creation? And if you were starting today in 2026. Would you start a YouTube channel? Which channel would you use?

Where as, as you often say, we're in a trust procession, which I agree with. How would you approach content marketing?

Ali: Hmm. It really depends on the goal. Uh, so it depends on the type of business, depends on the subject. Uh,

Ash: service based professionals.

Ali: Yeah. So probably LinkedIn. I won't bother with YouTube. Uh, YouTube is really hot.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: Uh, YouTube requires so much more work than LinkedIn does. To create a all for YouTube video, as you know, which take absolutely ages. Um, and if I'm a service based professional and [00:14:00] I'm not yet comfortable, but I haven't yet made 50 to a hundred videos to actually get good at the craft of making videos and or I'm not comfortable speaking on camera.

And or I don't have like a charismatic magnetic personality that people around me have been telling me, man, you know, you're really good at public speaking. If I, if I, if, if I didn't have any of that stuff going for me. It's just really hard to make YouTube work.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: Um, for most people, unless you can just think a lot of time to improving that skill, everything's a skill.

Everything can be learned. It's just how long you wanna spend doing it. One thing Alex often talks about is that like, you know, you can train anyone to be a brain surgeon. It's just how long do you wanna take? It'll take 15 years to train those people to be a brain surgeon. Do you have 15 years? Similarly, I think it will take most normal.

Boring service professionals a long time to get good enough at YouTube for, to use it as as a method of client client acquisition. Um, I think it's a lot easier to just do it on LinkedIn. So I would focus on LinkedIn. I focus on getting good at LinkedIn and use that as my primary method of degeneration.

Uh, the goal of content would not be to get famous. The goal of content would be to get conversations.[00:15:00]

Try and convert them to a discovery call or a sales call or sales meeting or something like that to see if I can in some kind of way.

Ash: Okay, so I agree LinkedIn right now. LinkedIn is an interesting beast. I spoke to Justin Welch about his approach to LinkedIn and I did a lot of work around LinkedIn. Ago, LinkedIn changed recently the 360 algorithm has changed things, but I grew my following from 2000 to nine followers and it was a lot of work.

What I've over time is it's important to really get very clear on your specific niche and a specific problem and really understand that specific target market so you can send more relevant messages, short, but relevant ones and you can sort of. Other person

Ali: if we're going outbound. I mean ideally we, our[00:16:00]

problems.

Ash: Great point.

Ali: I think a lot of people to, because don't get,

Ash: okay.

Ali: I think outreach is like a good accelerant if you are just starting up. Um,

Ash: interesting.

Ali: Yeah. But like. I.

Ash: Niche, I'm leaving all these opportunities on the table and that's paradoxical or that, you know, the opposite is true. It's counterintuitive, but actually the more niche you go, the more likely you get traction. I loved what you talk about in the course in your lifestyle business academy about the bullseye technique, and that really was a, was a needle mover for me at least psychologically, because I realized that when you.

Bull bull. You don't have to hit the [00:17:00] bullseye. Now, I'm not gonna your, I want you to explain that to our listeners.

Ali: Um, yeah. It's, it's, it's my attempt to try and understand this whole thing of like, you should target a particular niche. You should go like, so narrow, narrow, narrow in your, your target. And the, the metaphor I found best for this is that imagine you are like an archer shooting arrows towards a target.

Firstly, you wanna have a target in first place. Uh, rather than, oh, I help anyone with blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's not, that's not particularly a target. It's, it's worth like defining roughly what even is my target. Um, and then it's worth spending a little bit of time spending, not very much time initially, but then refining this over time through conversations with actual people to be like, okay, who's the absolute perfect client for me?

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: So I know with our online business school, the absolute perfect client is. Actually someone who's probably in their forties, they have a very specialist professional skillset. They are sufficiently competent at that skillset and have an experience and have a network that they've already done the thing for other people.

And so starting a business is not very hard for them. They are [00:18:00] good at public speaking and understand how to create good educational content in that space just intuitively because they're, they've been teaching this sort stuff to other people throughout, and when they start a business, it becomes, it's a very easy step for to do.

That's the bullseye. 5% of our customers are in that bull site. The other 95% are varying degrees away from that bull site. And our question is then is, is basically like who do we say yes to and who do we say no to? But we say yes to a lot more people than just bull target. Um, but it's just worth knowing that that's bull target because then messaging.

If I was targeting a 17-year-old from, uh, the UK who wants to make money on the internet, which is what certain YouTubers are targeting, uh, I would probably a 17-year-old dude, I would probably lean into Lamborghini and like talking about the girls you can get and stuff like that. But that stuff is not gonna fly for you.

For example, if I had lambs in myself, you certainly would not be. Yeah. You wouldn't, you wouldn't resonate with that.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: Um, so it's like, because I know who my bullseye is, I know what my. We wanna not get fixated on that, especially if we're just starting out because you wanna [00:19:00] know, it's just an educated guess.

Um, but that educated guess gets refined over time. As you find in your case, you've worked with a bunch of clients over the years, you figure out like, okay, what are the characteristics of the clients I love to work with and I can get the best results for? And who are happiest to pay money? So this combination of do I like them, can I help them?

Or they have to pay, which I got from one of my mentors. Talking more actually here in Australia. Uh, that combination helps you define, define your bullseye. But like if someone is slightly outside of it, maybe in your case you target fractional. If a fractional C comes into your funnel and says, Hey, wanna work you, you probably wouldn't turn them away unless you've got so much demand that you're being like, no, no.

So much fraction. Take on fraction. Then it's a different kind of, but for most owners, you kind of start with a of a approach where you sort of taking, anyone will pay you and over time you narrow to the sniper approach of like aiming for the bull.

Ash: Okay. I wanna come back to talking about paper. Tigers was a really lovely metaphor that I found very helpful, but I'll circle back to that.

Let's jump back to [00:20:00] what you said about creating good quality content, because once you've figured out your niche, you now know what content to create and what problem to solve because you understand your niche problem. So you said earlier that you're not a big fan of outreach, which actually surprised me a little bit.

Ali: I mean, I would do it if I was just starting out and I didn't have an audience because. Gotta,

Ash: yeah. Yeah.

Ali: Ideally I would get to a point pretty quickly where I didn't have to do any, any.

Ash: So how

Ali: do you outbound outreach. Yeah.

Ash: How do you make such good content that people come to you and more importantly, let's say my target market is lawyers.

Ali: Okay.

Ash: I go for the bullseye, the lawyer, but then I might have other people to reach out to me as well. Some of them might not even be a good fit, like, you know, a lifestyle coach, for example, may not be a good fit for me. Okay. How do you create content just for the lawyer? And then if these people outside of your niche do reach out to you, do you work with them?

Do you take the discovery call with them? Or do you just say, no, I think you're not a good [00:21:00] fit. And I totally understand it's, it's about how much demand you have. Can you talk around that a little bit more and give a, give us a bit of a feel for, how do you find that balance?

Ali: How do create good, um.

I don't think there is a trick to it. I think you just have to have experience, expertise, credibility, something, some kind of interesting point of view that stands out within the market that you're trying to target. And, and, and, and this is why sort of this, the niche selection thing is very important because if I was just calling out, I wouldn't target lawyers because I know nothing about lawyers.

I don't, I, I have one, I have like three friends who are lawyers, but I don't talk to them that much these days. And so like how would I be able to really understand what problems lawyers have?

Ash: Right?

Ali: If I was a CPA and I've been a CPA for 30 years, I'd be targeting people who are CPAs,

Ash: right?

Ali: Because I've been in in that industry for 30 years.

If I was a doctor, I'd be trying to figure out, can I target doctors or people like [00:22:00] adjacent medical rather than trying to.

You know, every, everyone has experience in something or another, right? Yes. It's just like, and the more you can align the niche that you've chosen with what you have already done in the past, the more of a leg up you have compared to trying to target a token new niche where you're having to learn the language from scratch, um, or compared to someone who doesn't have an experience.

So I would really figure out like the targeting of the niche, and then the content becomes, how can I share my own perspectives? The stuff that's working on LinkedIn these days, um, is rather than how to, how to get clients, the how I, you know, uh, here's how I got five new clients from my high ticket program or whatever.

It's like the personal experience is the stuff that cannot be recreated by, because the content on LinkedIn is AI generated these days. So the way to stand out is to not.[00:23:00]

And then some people are like, oh, I don't have any personal experience and personal credibility. I was like, okay, well you can just pick something and develop personal experience and personal credibility in it. There are a lot of people who developed the credibility in the world of AI over the last like two years.

You could right now actively decide I'm gonna become the AI guy for CPAs. There's not that many AI guys. With CPAs, you could totally do it and within like a week you could learn way more than the average CPA about how to use ai. Within two weeks, you could become cutting edge because people aren't willing to do that because they think, oh my god.

I already have, or like AI so hard or like whatever, but the people making millions off of ai. AI wasn't around like three years ago from scratch. So it's like into the experience and credibility. You create content around this how stuff and develop an interesting expertise in something else. Content.

Content create content, right?

Ash: It me of Google's eight acronym that then became. [00:24:00] Expertise, authority it or something. And then came EAT, which was experience e authority, Dan doing some interesting stuff in the space. Watch a lot of his content.

Ali: But here's the thing, like anyone can do, what doing Dan is, is absolutely crushing it in terms of general broad mass market appeal.

Here are five tragedy prompts that will make you unstoppable. Here's how, uh, here are the five new AI tools that, that you should use. And he's going super, super broad. So he's obviously getting millions of followers by going super, super broad. No one listening to this should be trying to go super, super broad,

Ash: right?

Ali: It's like become the Dan Martel AI coach for your specific niche. Who is on LinkedIn, who's like AI for lawyers, AI professional CPAs, AI for medical professionals, even profess too broad like AI for surgeons, AI firms, spinal surgeons. Like once you find your niche, to be honest, you can slap AI four. And probably become like a fault leader in that space within like the next six months if you put [00:25:00] enough time and effort into it.

Ash: Wow. That's definitely something to think about.

Ali: I've been so, you know, for the last couple of years, few years I've been using like everyone else using it on a super basic level of like type shit into the app and then copy and past it into the relevant whatever. And then like three weeks ago I discovered open and discovered code.

This stuff put off previous code, but.

You know, is this like 1981? Like why would I be interacting with fricking terminal? That seems scary. And I watched a couple YouTube videos and I tried it out over weekend, and now I'm so like in the AI tool space that I've literally spent the last three weeks building our own custom software for our business academy.

And like right now, while we're doing this, I've got code in the background on my laptop at home, uh, in, in the Airbnb improving various things that we're doing for our students. This is, I just discovered this three weeks ago. I'm not like a AI native. I was using chat like everyone else, but I decided to play around three weeks ago over the weekend to install open.

See? What about realized, oh my goodness. Paradigm shift, [00:26:00] and now I'm like ahead of 99.9% people. I've been doing it three. Anyone listening to this right now could decide to do that and become head of almost every single person in their niche by just deciding to lean into code cowork, these kind of AI tools that are beyond basic Ask, copy, and paste from the free version of chat into,

Ash: after looking at the bot that you built in Lifestyle Business Academy, I reverse engineered it and I built one for my own community and it was so easy.

Um, I literally asked. How it told me what to do, and I just followed its instructions, and now I've customized a custom GT for my community. I started playing with this on the weekend, so that was Saturday. Today is today, this is Wednesday. I can't see how I would go back and do anything without first asking, can I build a custom GPT for this, even for myself?

Um, and, and

Ali: then a week from now [00:27:00] you'll evolve from custom GPTs into a custom platform, but that, that's, that's the next seven days.

Ash: I wanna jump back to paper tigers and paper walls. A lot of our fears look like tigers, but they're paper tigers and a lot of obstacles look like brick walls, but they paper walls.

Yeah. And AI is one of those things, right. A lot of us sort of think it's really difficult until we actually go and poke it.

Ali: Yeah.

Ash: Or touch it, and then it's suddenly a whole lot easier.

Ali: Yeah. Um, especially these days, like, you know, to previously to learn any technology, you had to find tutorials on how to use the technology.

Like back when I was learning to code, I had to find tutorials on the internet, about half that code these days to learn how to use ai. You just talk to AI about how to use ai. You can go on the free version of chat, the T and you can start talking to it and ask it to be like, Hey, I'm trying to improve my skills to ai.

I heard you talking about code, code. Can you explain to me what code code actually is these days while I'm building stuff? Uh, with my virtual private server and, and doing all those things. I'm just talking to the AI to understand how things work. Um, it's, [00:28:00] there's never been a time where you could literally talk to the tool, which will teach you how to use the tool itself.

Yes. So it's just so easy to say.

Ash: And speaking of talking to tools, I think you mean that literally, because I've learned from you about Super Whisper and there's another tool, I can't remember what what it's called, but it works with the AI things, but you don't have to type anymore. And I found that the act of.

Actually using my voice literally makes it conversational and I feel the barrier to sharing information with the AI tool, it has significantly dropped because I can just sit there and say, oh man, I'm struggling with this so and so. You know, I just speak like I'm speaking to you and the thing picks it all up perfectly.

Voice to text on max crap compared to Super Whisper.

Ali: Yeah,

Ash: super is just incredible.

Ali: Yeah. Whisper. There's a

Ash: whisper flow. That was the other one. Yeah.

Ali: Bunch of tools that turn voice into

Ash: and they do it very accurately too. Yeah. So like if you, it'll put in a full stop or [00:29:00] it is far more cognizant of. Like if you ask a question, it picks up the inflection that, you know, upward inflection, that puts a question mark on it, so it's brilliant.

Which AI tools do you, which is your weapon of choice, which do you use the most right now?

Ali: Um, mostly called Code and Open.

Ash: I know nothing about open floor. What, what does Open do and why is it so special? Uh,

Ali: okay. So, um, mm-hmm. Number one of AI tools is going on chat com or AI and typing into the chat box and then you get stuff, then you copy past.

Great.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: Everyone's doing that. Yeah. Level two of AI tools is when you use them to create stuff. So you hook up like the word document extension. Yeah. To Claude uh, or like you hook up a slide creator or whatever, and then you say to Claude, still on the cloud web app or the change key web app, Hey, create me a set of slides for blah, blah, blah.

It will look at the skill that it's got, slide creation and give you a [00:30:00] PowerPoint file. Great. Amazing. That's like level two. Level three would be something like flawed code. Or called cowork, which is like, you can ask it to do stuff and if it doesn't have the skills already, it will figure out what skill it needs, download it from the internet and then create it for you.

So instead of saying, so, you can say to it, Hey, I'm trying to create a uh, tool for our Lifestyle Business Academy students. That helps them validate the niche it offers. It will come up with some ideas and as.

On. And then level four is where you have sort of these autonomous agents where something like Open, which is sort of like code, but um, uh, with less security permission attached to it. So it has control over your entire computer and can do anything.

Ash: I wanna say something that really stood out for me as you were speaking there.

One word, curiosity. I think that that is so important for [00:31:00] people who want to build a successful business or life in today's post AI world. If you're not curious, I think you get by by what's coming. I think it's so important to be curious, to be interested and learn what you just described. Okay, tell me about this.

You keep pulling the thread and that's how you learn. And I have learned so much in the last two years using AI because I just use it as a way to ask questions and just dig deeper. Your learning can be so targeted. But yet under your control, you don't have the benefit of having the context that structural learning imposes on.

You say you could do a medical degree or a accounting degree or whatever. You have to learn certain things. Here you are kind of in control of your learning and you may go down too far down one tiny path, but there are benefits for that too.

Ali: Yeah, and I think it's sort of like when I, when [00:32:00] I learn how to code, I think a lot of people try and learn how to code by going on some online course that teaches them how to code.

But I've always found, and, and the people I know who are actually good coding have found that if you just try and build your own project, if you're trying to build something in your life or in your business, that will help you, not just like. To that you're never gonna use just because you wanna learn code, but you're actually building something.

Ash: Yeah. And that's a really important thing, uh, I wanna draw out, which is bias towards action and learning by doing.

Ali: Yes.

Ash: Particularly for professionals. We have been trained to be served, uh.

Ali: We're trained, be sort of like, you must learn first and take action second.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: But like the changed sort, take action.

And then in the process taking action, you do the learning to fill the holes.

Ash: Correct.

Ali: And you can just keep pulling the thread for as long as you want. You can get like a master's degree in like server infrastructure if you really want. By just enough s

Ash: Yeah. Yeah.

Ali: If you want,

Ash: and this is actually a, a mental hurdle I find a lot of my clients struggle with [00:33:00] because they've all been trained in traditional universities and all that sort of stuff, but that world is.

Pretty much changed or changing. Uh, I'm not saying university degrees are not useful. There probably are. There's certain benefits to it. You learn content, you learn structure, you learn how to learn, and those things are definitely always gonna be valuable. But people seem to stop learning after they finish university and they start a job.

I think just learning by taking action and starting with the smallest possible experiment, which is another important word that I heard you say the other day. I asked you, how did you build your business to Million, and you said, I started small and just kept running experiments. That would be my advice.

Would you, would you add anything to that?

Ali: No, that's pretty much it. Like, yeah, start small, run experiments, set a goal, figure out what's needed to make the goal happen, run an experiment to try and get there. Run these sort of monthly experiment cycles or biweekly or like six weekly depending on the of your business.

And just keep it. And over time, there's no way you're not gonna succeed. [00:34:00] It's sort of like if you're, if you kind what the destination is, then you start walking the path. Look at the destination, look at how you come, how far you come, see what needs to change. Keep walking the keep, keep walking the path.

Eventually destination.

Ash: Advice, somebody who hasn't created content before and you know, have content, they know they content out their niche, but what does quality content look? Let's say they using and. Everyone is concerned about the, you know, adding to the AI slot. So yes. You talked about how I versus how to, yeah. Great. Is there anything else we could be doing to create really great quality content that makes our audience stop scrolling?

Ali: Yeah.

Ash: And want to reach out to us?

Ali: My view these days is that good content comes through convers. So I record every single conversation I have. I have with any of my students with Business Academy. Yeah. Even [00:35:00] this

Ash: one.

Ali: After this, I'm gonna ask you for the MP3 file of everything that I've said.

Ash: Yes.

Ali: Uh, because I can then take the MP3 file of everything I've said.

Turn it into a transcript. Yeah. Put it into my quote code project and be like, okay, what are the things that I've said in this conversation with you? That can be turned into LinkedIn post ideas or Instagram para here YouTube video ideas. Um, and I, I found that like, like the way I explained laser, I was like, huh, that's interesting.

Like, I haven't really thought about that. You, the thing you said about paper tigers and uh, paper walls. I was like, huh. I, I actually haven't made a post about that, but that's interesting. So it's sort of like through a conversation with a real person and you know, right now we're, we're, we're like just, just having kind of like a casual chat.

Yes, this cameras and stuff, but I'm able to think out loud about the stuff that I know about. 'cause you're asking me about it. Um, similarly, any, I had a one on call with one of our students yesterday. Uh, she is already doing a hundred grand a year in front of Seattle, a million a year without taking up all her time.

Ash: Mm-hmm.

Ali: And so, like, huh? The, the stuff I, I said in that was stuff that I, well, it, it would've been hard for me to sit down and be like, I need to write a LinkedIn post today. What do I write it about? But because I'm already having a conversation, the trans AI to help tease out the ideas. [00:36:00] I'm able to use that to figure out like what are, what are my like unique point of views?

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: I mean, so it's not really unique. Um, but like still

Ash: I know exactly what you mean. There's, there's something about it isn't, we're social s basically, and I think a lot of our, uh, cognition or the, you know, the, the sparks happen when we're in social interactions. In conversation with each other, which is interesting because um, the way technology is going, it's kind of reducing that.

But I'm actually running more and more in-person workshops, uh, because people love it. I'll be funding one in the boardroom here on Friday at CP Australia, which is where we recording this. Let's talk a little bit about privacy. Privacy is something that I'm very concerned about, but I dunno enough about it.

I dunno what I dunno. And you mentioned earlier on, you've got. Server VPN server and I'm gonna go home and look it up and I'm gonna do exactly what you did. Just take this conversation and see what I can learn from it. If I'm using ai, say I'm using AI to [00:37:00] analyze conversations that I've been having with people, what are the privacy implications and you know, how do I know whether I'm doing something that's not compliant?

Ali: Yeah. Um, okay. Good question. My first answer with that to that is that you can just ask the AI.

Okay.

Ali: Just literally ask it. Hey, I'm having conversations with people. I'm using call to analyze them. What are the privacy issues here? Uh, what I suspect it will say is something like, well, if you're just using call the web app, you don't have too much to worry about.

But yes, the conversation lives on the servers of Claude. Uh, and if you have a free plan or a pro plan, uh, Andro will use your data, your data to train the model, but it'll be anonymized and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you have an enterprise plan, even like, opt out of that so that they, they never even see your data, for example.

Um, if you are using something more beefy with less security options, again, you can literally ask it being like, okay, I have a bunch of student data in my, on my virtual private server. What are the security implications behind this? And then it says, blah, blah, whatever, whatever. Uh, I would recommend you actually use a secure [00:38:00] database rather than storing it in sq life files.

I'm like, huh? What mean files do mean secure database. Oh, you should use literal designed, et, et cetera. Have security, which means that like even if someone were to get a and password, they would still need to get access to your like Google account credentials to see. Okay, cool. And then if it's helpful, it's like, would you like me to implement the security?

Please? Depends.

Secure and how compliant you wanna be with your data. Depending on like what the situation is, if it's health, if it's legal, obviously there's like higher requirements for stuff compared to if it's your own business, you've got three clients.

Ash: Now a lawyer would probably say, ah, not so fast, Ellie just, uh, you have to look at the fine plan.

You can't just assume that AI is gonna you. Good advice. Um, I wanna put that caveat out there because. If [00:39:00] you are using AI to get advice, don't assume it's always hundred percent correct.

Ali: Sure, yeah. I mean, yeah, good point. That in my opinion, that kind of goes without saying, but it's, it's worth, it's worth saying it.

Ash: Yeah. Worth,

Ali: worth saying it. So the more, the better the models are, the better the advice is. So using the free version of chat is like way worse than using like the latest chat g BT 5.4, which just came out like two days ago. Or like using, which.

Like each month as they release new models, they hallucinate, they make up stuff less and I think are like, they're the latest. March 26. Um, but of course, even then you should check the horses and make sure that like, actually legit.

Ash: Maybe that's the, that's my training coming out. But um, as a professional we always say, I'm your, I'm APA not your cpa.

I'm sure you would say the same if you're talking to a patient, not that you talk to them anymore, but you know, I, okay. You mentioned earlier on that you're taking all these [00:40:00] conversations and you're putting it into an ai, you're getting it to analyze. Conversations you must have of data. How doing this?

Ali: Oh, conversations, kilobytes, terabytes

Ash: have so many conversations. So my question is, how do you manage, can you talk a bit about the process? How do you, I mean, what do you take? Just copy the transcript and just dump it, uh, Claude and ask it to give the insights. What's your

Ali: Yeah, I mean, so that's like the easy way doing it, take for insights.

Um, that's like one, uh, level two is. For example, in Notion, we set up a database called Raw Transcripts. So anytime I run a workshop, anytime I do a coaching clinic, anytime I make a YouTube video, anytime I'm on a podcast, we take the raw, uh, transcript of what I've said and put it into a notion database, uh, notion AI is a feature.

So you just click on the Notion AI and say. What interesting things have I said in the last two weeks And because in the last two weeks, three videos, podcast, two workshops for business academy and three s, there's lot data there. [00:41:00] I can be like, okay, what are some topics I can talk about in my newsletter?

So something, paper versus Tiger be Interesting. Okay, cool. Um, write the first draft or like ask me clarifying questions so that I can my own. I tend not to just get it to write stuff because I wanna, I, I tend to get it to surface the insights and ask me questions. Notion ai, uh, that's like level two.

Level three is you stick all the trans into a folder code or one of these, like more autonomous AI and query that next level. Beyond that is what we're doing, which. Transcript things are happening, putting them into database, very secure database. Um, and then there is a job, which basically means a program that runs every X number of times.

So I have a job that runs every, that runs every day in the nighttime Hong Kong Times. So I'm not around, uh, that takes all of the recent transcripts and pulls out struggles that students are having. Mm-hmm. Um, and gives it to me in a curriculum [00:42:00] refinery. Page on this custom dashboard that I've built that then me and my team can look at to see like, okay, this week, in the last week, in the last four weeks, in the last three months, in the last six months, what are the struggles that students are having prioritized By severity, we can filter it based on like is the student in the ideation stage and the validation stage or in the momentum stage.

Right now we know that the biggest struggle people are having in momentum stage is time management and LinkedIn. So we know LinkedIn is the next thing we're working on. We know the biggest struggle people are having in the validation stage is not enough people to reach out to. Uh, with outreach, like, so we know that that's the thing that we need to focus on.

And so this is now happening all automatically behind the scenes without me having to copy and paste a transcript into Claude and get it to analyze stuff. Um, that's different.

Ash: I've been paying for, I, so I need to go home and understanding how that thing works. Yeah, I assumed I would expect no less because the founders of Notion are pretty Yeah,

Ali: it's very, really good,

Ash: very smart people.

In a couple of sentences, what does it do? How is it different to Claude?

Ali: [00:43:00] Uh, it, it is basically Claude, but it has access to everything in your notion, workspace. So for example, you can choose the model, right? So I use Claude over 4.6 within Notion ai.

Ash: Oh, so it hooks into not Claude.

Ali: Yeah. Oh, like they just wanna, it's, it's not their own ai.

You can choose, you can choose gt, you can choose Claude, you can choose auto. I think auto chooses like a cheap one. Yeah, it's probably expensive for them to run the most expensive bottle, but I'm like, well, I'm paying for Notion ai. They currently don't have the usage limits on it, so I'm just gonna use the most expensive bottle that's currently out, which is pulled over 4.6.

It underst, it knows everything in the in within notion, so I can ask it things like, Hey, take a look at all these student notes that we've got for Roy. Help me figure out why he's struggling to grow his business. And it will actually do a really, really good job of like,

Ash: wow,

Ali: taking the notes that the coaches have written about you through the conversations they've had, et cetera.

Taking a look at the pulses that you've submitted every week that are in your CRM record within Notion and being able to, uh, does it have access to your workbook? Uh, I don't think you did much of the workbook because you already had not work, but like, um, it could theoretically pull into people's workbooks, look at their scorecards when they're filling [00:44:00] in to be like, okay, Ash's problem is that he is, uh, X, Y, and Z.

So recommendation for coaches is to talk about A, B, and C things. That's like insane level.

Ash: Yeah. So I'm still clear on how that information getting funneled into your secure server and how did you, what? What does that mean? Like you said you've a secure server, is that right?

Ali: Yeah, so most people listen to this building like programs.

You probably don't need to build your own server and build your own database. You could just into notion, as long as you have sensible settings on notion, ie. You don't have like public access to all the pages and stuff like that. Yeah. Then like Notion data is pretty secure, so you just have it with Notion and now the AI can access anything that's within Notion.

So as long as you don't like willy-nilly, give access to your notion to run team members or whatever. Or, or like random contractors that are, you know, you keep an eye on notion security settings, but like enormous enterprises run with all, all, all of their data on notion. So I'm not too concerned about notion data security.

Um, provided the access levels are legit. Um. So, yeah, the AI can just read all [00:45:00] that kind of stuff and pull out insights and ask

Ash: mindset traps. And, you know, you, you talked about, and I've talked about this too, you know, just get started. Just begin. Two of the most valuable words I got said. Gordon told me this and I implemented as often as I can.

Uh, someone as terrified to put themselves out online publicly. What's the smallest first step they can take?

Ali: I think it's useful to, it's, it's good to have a reason to do it. Um, I'm assuming we're talking to people who are trying to grow the business or we're talking, if, if we're talking to a random person, a random person is like, I'm, I'm terrified to put myself out online.

It's like, okay, why do you wanna,

if there's not a complaining reason to do it, it's hard to, it is hard to overcome the, the, the paper walls, even if they are paper walls. It's just not having a compelling drive behind it. But it's like if you have a business that you're trying to grow because you want financial freedom. And you know that like all marketing these days is online social media marketing.

Do you care about becoming financially free or do you care about staying within [00:46:00] your comfort zone? I care about being financially free. Okay, so the price is discomfort. Are you willing to pay the discomfort of posting on LinkedIn if it means that you could work towards becoming financially free? You know what?

When you put it that way, okay, fine or not, it's entirely up to you. It's like some, some things are not worth the cost, right? I don't have six pack apps. If I really wanted to, I could get six back apps. I back myself to do it. I just don't want it enough to pay the cost. Um, I don't want to be a billionaire.

If I wanted to, could I do it? Probably I back myself, but like, I just know I, I don't wanna pay the cost because I've seen on the internet like what it takes. Everything you want is on the other side of like a particular cost. Like if I want a ira.

The problem arises when you want something without being willing to pay the, because then you're like sort of misaligned. You're like, I already want this thing, but I'm not willing pay price. Stop wanting the thing or be willing to pay price.

Ash: You said something important though that [00:47:00] you, you're making an assumption I think when you say, I back myself, you back yourself, but not everybody is comfortable backing themselves what you have to say to those people.

Not everybody feels that confidence that you seem to have. You. If I decide to get six pack apps, I wanna do it. I back my myself. You believe that?

Ali: Yep.

Ash: Uh, not everybody believes that if they do the work, they'll get the result and so they don't stop.

Ali: Okay. Yeah, I can see it. I can see why that would be the case.

The thing is like, okay, okay, so there's inputs, outputs, and cos inputs would be like, um. Let me spend four hours a week on LinkedIn. It's an input of time. Outputs would be that four hours a week on LinkedIn is generating five LinkedIn posts. Let's the output, my output is five LinkedIn posts.

Ash: Yeah.

Ali: For example, the outcome is I'm aiming for, uh, five sales calls.

We booked each week on my, from my LinkedIn. The outcome is [00:48:00] less within your control than the inputs in the outcome. I can fully control how many hours a week I put into my LinkedIn. I can pretty much control what the number of the output or what number of outputs that input of time is producing. I cannot really control the outcome of that, but I can't to a degree, right?

Like if the outputs are good, good, um, and if I'm sufficiently good at producing the outputs, then is it reasonable that the outcomes would follow? Are there other people who are generating five sales calls a week from content? Yeah, so it's not impossible. It's doesn't.

Ash: Last question. If I trying to, starting out on LinkedIn, I know who my niche market is.

I post, post week LinkedIn, so I have people reaching out to me. Um. Given all the stuff we've talked about today, including AI models and all that sort of stuff, how would you go about doing that in 2026? [00:49:00]

Ali: Oh, figure out who my niche is. What problems do they have? What expertise or credibility or like advantages can I bring into that?

I need to stand up. No, I just make really good content.

Ash: How, how do people find out about you and what you are doing right now, uh, and your book?

Ali: Um, yeah, I've just searched my name Al, or I'm sure there'll be a link somewhere in video description. Wherever you're watching this. Uh, you can find out more if you're interested.

Ash: And do you have any final words you wanna share with our audience?

Ali: Um, the journey to financial freedom is not easy, but it's totally worth it. Nice. And so provided you are setting a sensible goal, doing sensible things to get there, keep kind of focusing on the right things, iterating the process and making sure you're learning how to use AI along the way and ideally stay staying as close to the cutting edge as you can.

There's no way you're not gonna be successful if you do it long enough.

Ash: Great. Well thanks very much for being on the show.

Ali: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.