Ali Abdaal — If I Started YouTube from Scratch in 2026, I’d do THIS
Source: YouTube Channel: Ali Abdaal (6620000 subs) Duration: 33:40 Views: 150821 · Likes: 4869 Video: Watch on YouTube
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Key Insights
So, I grew my YouTube channel from zero to over a million subscribers while I was working full-time as a doctor. But, that was back in 2017 through 2020, and things are very different. So, if I was starting from scratch again [music] today without any of my existing followers, but still knowing what I know, this is what I would do. So, in this video, we’re going to be talking about the three S’s that lead to success on YouTube. We’re going to talk about how the goal that you have for your YouTube channel and business changes the strategy that you need to follow for your channel. We’re going to talk about the most important skill you need to learn to drastically increase your chances of success. And we’re going to talk about the salient systems that you want to build into your YouTube channel if you are going for the goal of the three F’s: fun, [music] fulfillment, and financial freedom. And by the way, if we haven’t met, hello. My name is Ali. I’m a doctor turned entrepreneur and author of the New York Times best-seller Feel Good Productivity. And since 2017, here on this channel, I’ve been documenting my journey from broke ass medical student to working full-time as a doctor to then becoming an entrepreneur and an author. Building YouTube channel has completely and utterly changed my life, and so in this video, I’d love to share my perspective on this for whatever it’s worth. Okay, so the way to think about this is that there are three distinct factors that contribute to the success of a YouTube channel and help you build a YouTube channel that makes lots of money and helps you have lots of fun, fulfillment, and flexibility and freedom and all the fun stuff that we all want. Thing number one is your skills. Your skills at actually making decent content, content that gets people to click, content that gets people to watch, and content that gets people to know, like, and trust you as a human being. The second key thing that we need for a successful YouTube channel is strategy. It’s not just about knowing how to make good videos, because you can know how to make really good videos, but if your strategy sucks, if the way that you’re approaching the making of the videos is not very good, then you kind of end up with a YouTube channel where you’ve just got some like really solid high-quality videos, but like no one’s really watching, no one’s really following you, and you’re certainly not making any money out of it. And then the final part that makes this work sustainably is systems. You can have really good skills, and you can pair it with a really good strategy, but if you don’t have systems to help facilitate the content output of your YouTube channel, you’re going to burn out very quickly, and you’re not going to be doing it for long enough, consistently enough, and sustainably enough to actually see results. Now, I would like to double-click initially into the strategy point. So, we’re going to put skills and systems aside. We will definitely come back to those a little bit later. Now, in order to figure out what our strategy should be for our YouTube channel, we kind of need something that comes upstream of strategy, and that is we [music] need to have a goal. A strategy is basically a plan that gets you to a particular goal, and so in order to have a strategy, we need to know what our goal is. What is the goal for your YouTube channel? Now, in general, when it comes to goals for a YouTube channel, um most of us have some combination of three specific things that we want, and these are the three F’s of fun, fulfillment, and finances. We want a YouTube channel that is heaps of fun to run because we enjoy the idea of making videos, and it seems like a cool, fun, enjoyable thing to do. We want a YouTube channel that gives us fulfillment, so it has some kind of impact, and it makes us feel good that we’re using our strengths and using our skills to have an impact on other people. And of course, some of us want to be able to make
Transcript continues…
Chapters
- 00:00 — Introduction
- 00:58 — The three S’s
- 02:01 — The three F’s
- 04:50 — Alignment between you, content, and business
- 09:30 — Content-first vs. business-first approaches
- 15:15 — Get going, get good, get smart
- 18:41 — Practical questions to find your niche and business idea
- 20:05 — The four skills
- 22:07 — Why leaning into expertise makes monetisation far easier
- 26:10 — Practical questions to identify your expertise
- 29:07 — Systems for sustainable youtube channel
- 33:11 — Final thoughts