How I Built a New $1m Business in 12 Months

all right so this year we launched a new product that's generated $869,000 in sales over the last 7 months and is on track to do over a million doar by the 12-month Mark now these numbers are pretty insane at least for me and back when I had a day job earning 50k a year working as a doctor in the UK I never would have imagined that it would even be vaguely possible for me to build a business that does these sorts of numbers at all let alone with a single product so this video is going

to be a very long very chatty behind the- scenes look at how my team and I built this product completely from scrp we're going to talk about the concept the name the audience validation the designs the process of creating the educational material and we'll also talk about the challenges the emotional roller coaster of building a product and running a business the fact that my vision for the product you know the team's giving me negative feedback and the audience is giving me negative feedback about the thing the fact that we've had a load of refund requests

from customers who did not get value from the product and how all of that stuff feels and how I as an entrepreneur and me as my team deal with that sort of thing if you're interested in maybe starting your own business someday or you already have a business then I'm hoping a video like this will give you a little bit more context into what the process for creating and selling a product from idea to execution actually looks like now of course everyone's process for Building Product is going to be different but when I started my

own entrepreneurial journey I always got a lot of inspiration and even practical tips from seeing how different businesses make different types of products and that really helped me on my own Journey from broke medical student to doctor to now seven figure entrepreneur and so this video is a special behind the- scenes episode of business class the ongoing Series where we explore strategies to start and grow your online business so so that you can work towards what I call the five FS of fun fulfillment flexibility and Financial Freedom if we haven't yet met hello my name

is Ali and I've been doing this online business thing for the last 10 plus years I built and sold my first sixf fig business while I was a medical student at Cambridge I built my next business to sixf figures while working full-time as a doctor and a few years ago I was able to then quit the day job to focus on building the business which now generates seven figures a year in profit in this series my goal is to share everything I've learned and everything I'm continuing to learn along the way so if that sounds

interesting you might consider subscribing to the channel and perhaps even joining my free email list where I share even more behind the scenes stuff that can hopefully help you in your own Journey now this is a very long video that I filmed across 2 days so let's get into it all right so the whole thing started in October of 2023 when Gareth one of my team members uh was doing some research some Market Research into figuring out what should we do with a productivity course now why do we want to release a productivity course well

our business is kind of weird in that you know the thing that I seem to be known for is productivity my book is about productivity productivity is like the thing which is you know it's it's a cool it's a cool word to be associated with um a bit of a tangent this whole video is going to be lots and lots of tangents so whatever there's a fun little game that I got from my friends Dicky Bush and Nicholas Cole which is that like have you have you heard of Ryan holiday if you've heard of Ryan

holiday what is the one word you most associate with Ryan holiday it's probably the word stoicism he's written a bunch of books about stoicism that's it's the word have you heard of Mark Manson what is the one word word you associate with Mark Manson it's probably not the word subtle it's probably a different word have you heard of James CLE of course you've heard of James CLE what is the one word you associate with James CLE I don't even need to say what that word is it's obvious what the one word that most people associate

with James CLE is now if you hear the name Ali abdal what is the one word that you associate with the name Ali abdal for most people most people would say that word is productivity now that is actually a very good word to be associated with because this sort of brand association with productivity productivity is like a high you know it's it's Evergreen people are always interested in being more productive it is like it it's got longevity to it in the sense of like let's say back like 2017 um if someone was watching my YouTube

channel and they were seeing videos about how to get into med school if someone was describing Ali abdal they would be like oh he's that YouTuber that helps people get into med school now that is not a good place to be for the long term because obviously YouTuber who helps people get into med school doesn't really have longevity it's not a brand it's not a brand Association that can can last forever similarly if you look back to the channel in 2018 it's like who is Al oh he's that guy who gives studying advice helps people

study for exams that is also not a good sort of longevity play here because one thing I I often used to think about and still do is what does the 10 20 30 year version of this internet thought leader online blah blah blah entrepreneur career look like and I don't think it goes anywhere if you're stuck in the student Market because you age out of the student Market very quickly I don't think it goes many places if you're stuck helping people get into med school because you age out of it quickly I also kind of

think that lifestyle lifestyle brands also don't have much longevity because Trends come and go and so a big thing when I started my YouTube channel was really trying to figure out like what's the what does the long-term trajectory of this look like like where are we trying to go here and when I landed on the word productivity I think I just randomly made a video like 50 videos in called my productivity desk setup and that went really well and people vibed with the word productivity and I didn't think about it consciously at the time like

that o this is a good word uh but then people just kept on asking like how are you so productive how are you so productive how are you so productive and then I started sort of Leaning into this word productivity you know apps for productivity tech for productivity my insanely productive Valentine's Day my insanely productive birthday my insanely productive day in the life and it kind of became a bit of a meme you know a a few years into my channel I realized that like I'm the productivity guy and actually that is a very good

place to be it's a good place to be the productivity guy so why am I saying all this the reason I'm saying all this is because our business is weird because even though I'm the productivity guy I have never really had a product about productivity other than my book which came out last year by the way if you haven't read my book you should feel your productivity a guide to how to do more of what matters to you without burning out now back in 2020 uh I had just quit my job as a doctor and

I had the idea randomly for a course on helping people start YouTube channels because I was like H people keep asking about it and the part-time YouTuber Academy which was what that course was ended up becoming like a massive thing like we did I don't know $300,000 in sales for the first cohort which is more money than I'd ever seen in my life my doctor salary was like 50,000 and so I was I made more money in like a week than I would have in six years working as a doctor and that was just like

blew my mind then in 2021 during the pandemic we had even more of a boom thanks to the pandemic boom in live cohorts our YouTuber Academy basically helped take the business from like $1 million a year to like $4 million a year in Revenue which was just like a massive jump we 4X the business as a result of the pandemic and then the YouTuber Academy sort of became this sort of main thing in the business like even though I was known as the productivity guy and most of my content was about productivity and personal development

and not about YouTube YouTuber Academy was our primary product which is kind of weird right like it was a bit bit of a weird place to be and so for years we've been thinking internally all right we need to build a productivity product it just makes sense right we've got the book great book is a nice $20 $15 whatever thing cool we should probably make a course about productivity and we are in fact working on a course about productivity uh but then as Gareth was doing the market research for this course about productivity he landed

on this idea of community um this was late 2023 and Community seems to be all the craze um and also Community seems to add a lot of value to people this was around the time where school was starting to take off Circle was a community platform Mighty networks as a community platform a lot of people are doing this you know moving away from courses and moving more into community and so Gareth made the case to me and to the rest of the team that hey sure let's build a $300 productivity course but let's also attach

it to some sort of productivity Community I was like okay that's interesting that is where the idea started of this product and this product was initially called productivity Club um and Gareth did a little bit of kind of market research on this we went on uh this is a cool site so circle is the platform that we use for all of our community stuff now one particularly important part of growing my business has been using great software and finding ways to automate things which is where make comes in the sponsor of today's video make is

an incredibly versatile automation tool that connects everything from tasks and workflows to apps and systems allowing you to build and automate pretty much anything you need in one powerful visual platform one of the key things we currently use make for is automating all of the different parts of our social media workflow so basically by connecting our apps with notion where we organize our content we're able to pull in data from the various social platforms and visualize all of our analytics in one place which gives us a clear overview without any manual input so every day

we've got a scheduled scenario running in make that connects Instagram with notion using apify Instagram scraper the scraper collects upto-date performance metrics for all the reals that we've posted over the last week including our key stats like views and reach and engagement and these metrics which are not easily accessible through Instagram standard API those then get automatically imported into our notion database another thing that we're using make for is that we love turning these YouTube videos into written content for social media and for my website and Linkedin and stuff and so make basically lets us

connect to notion and Chad gbt to take a transcript from these YouTube videos and generate a new notion card with a nicely written version of the YouTube video and all of this happens 100% automatically which wouldn't be possible without make all of this has saved me and my team a lot of time which we can then redirect towards actually creating content or focusing on growing the business which is ultimately way more valuable than doing these manual tasks so if any of that sounds interesting you can start using make for free with their one- Monon Pro

Plan which includes 10,000 operations just check out the link in the video description to sign up and you can have a look at what kind of fun automations you can build so thank you make for sponsoring this video for various reasons we decided to use Circle rather than School rather than Mighty networks had a couple of chats with Sam ovens nice guy had a couple of chats with Gina who's the CEO of Mighty networks great gal but for various reasons we decided to go with circle we've been with circle since day one so actually if

you're building a community product I actually would recommend Circle they're not paying me to say this even though Circle if you're watching this you should pay us to say this circle has this Community Showcase where you can see a bunch of different communities that have been built on Circle and so we just of went through a bunch of these and did a bit of market research to see like all right you know let's say we were to build some sort of productivity Community what might it look like so we've got some like screenshots we've got

this like you know top coach community and it's like okay that's interesting we've got this show up Society Community it's like okay that's interesting we've got this Forge agency Community thing and that's kind of interesting so this is Gareth doing the competi analysis where we're sort of looking at like okay what other productivity communities are out there um always generally useful to see um we thought about pricing it's like okay should we should we do it as a low ticket thing should we do it as a mid ticket thing or as a high ticket thing

the action Academy Clubhouse online space of productivity enthusiasts I'm sure this was helped generate helped generate which which CH GPT and we were just sort of playing around with various different like back and forth for what could this community productivity Community look like and then as you can see here we've got various team members sort of commenting on this sort of stuff like the more that we can make the community feel fun game ify the better will be like flares or Price challenges or weekly productivity exercises I wanted to feel like we're doing everything we

can to help people Crush their goals regardless of who they are and what their goal is help people set targets be ruthlessly accountable and overcome any obstacles along the way this is this is a good Insight I also don't want us to think about this in the same way as the YouTuber Academy Community YouTuber Academy Community is very technical how do I do X whereas this is going to be more emotional I want to do X I'm struggling with why and actually a lot of building a community is encouragement and Good Vibes uh Ang doesn't

like the name the name Clubhouse because of the defun social I don't know I quite like clubhouse as a word um Angus you know doesn't like the phrase productivity enthusiasts is this too exclusionary not everyone would identify or want to identify as a productivity Enthusiast perhaps we want to exclude people like that but I suspect we don't want to be more inclusive as you can see like generally the way that we do stuff is uh one of the one of the things that Amazon does is that they insist on sort of written memos for anytime

anytime a new idea is being proposed or a new sort of business venture is happening because writing out a memo kind of forces you to confront your thinking about the topic in a clearer way than doing it in slides or just talking through it in the end it ended up being called productivity lab but we've got various things you this what a notion thing looks like Sops standard operating procedures Partners Affiliates product road map surveys feedback marketing assets ideas like this is interesting might be potentially interesting to look at um and now we've got like

a whole thing for like this productivity Summit challenge that we're doing and stuff but anyway for this video I'm going to stay focused on how we built productivity lab and like the kind of lessons and learnings along the way okay so at this point it's like October 2023 we have the idea that we want to do this productivity Club kind of community that is all the idea is we've done a little bit of market research we've seen what the competitors are I don't like to think of people as competitors like Nest laabs was on our

competitor list and Lori is a good friend of mine I don't think of her as a competitor but you know competitor analysis it's worth seeing what other people in the market Market are doing even though I'm M with like half of them it's still worth seeing like what's in the market what sort of price points what are they offering so that we know that like hey this is you know we we have a sense of what the market is for the thing that we're offering so then I was like all right cool what we know

we know we want to make some sort of productivity Club Community type thing but like what actually is it like what is the product and this is where this fig Jam board came along figma not unfortunately not sponsoring this video uh they should figma if you're watching this reach up please um we use fig Jam boards for absolutely everything I'll show you just this this is what our figma looks like Instagram website thumbnails YouTuber Academy not overthinking my podcast parttime Labs book business marketing YouTube channel Deep dive Rebrand courses design assets software level up content

prodct Etc basically for anything that we're trying to do in the business if we need to sketch out stuff and do designs or do like brainstorming or wireframes whatever it's all 100% done in figma and they're not sponsoring this video at all we pay a lot of money each month to figma um but what's in the club from 10 months ago this is the question and so the place where we wanted to start was the the dream outcome like what do what would people want and the way that I often think about this stuff is

like what is the language we would use on the sales page of the product and so this was the kind of the first thing we came up with productivity Club helps you double your productivity and your work and your life while enjoying the journey along the way it's like okay seem seems reasonable productivity Club helps you make meaningful progress towards your most important goals with a community of like-minded high Achievers to help you be more productive achieve your goals do more what matters to you etc etc dream outcome is double your productivity maybe like uh

not really sure or is that the right thing it's like what is productivity well productivity is using your time in a way that's intentional effective and enjoyable and you can see we're just sort of chucking ideas onto this figma board here and if we zoom out a bit you can see that there's all these kind of Post-it notes lying around and there's this big question of like what are we actually doing this is like the fundamental question of like what the hell even is this product one of the things that I learned throughout the book

writing process as well for feel good productivity is that at every stage of the journey you need to keep on asking yourself the question of like what actually is this about like what is this book about what is this book about what is what is this book about what is this product what what is it about is it a community is it a membership is it a how what is it if you are an entrepreneur watching this and you've tried to design products you might have had this experience like what the what the freak are

we actually creating this is the thing that we keep on keep on having to go back to what are we actually doing what are we actually doing here like what is the point and actually one of the things I wish we had done more of is look at this Post-It note more like what are we actually doing because I think some of the mistakes that we made along the way of creating product acity lab was in losing the focus and losing the sense of what even is this thing I'll come to that later on in

the video now the dream outcome here was double your productivity ah this was this was a bad idea I don't like double your productivity the reason I don't like double your productivity and pretty much everyone in the team was saying this especially Ang my general manager is that it's just a bit vague like what does double your productivity even mean it's it kind of mean like for me I I have a vague mental sense of like what what would it mean if I doubled my productivity do I want to double my productivity sure yeah I'll

take that but for like a working professional what does it mean to double your productivity for an entrepreneur what does it mean to double your productivity for a Creator what does it mean to like is it doubling your output of video production is it like SP doing twice as much in the same amount of time is it doing half as sort of taking half as much time to do the same like what does it mean to double your productivity it's it's a bit abstract you can't like you can't like hold it you can't put your

you can't put your finger on what does double your productivity mean my approach to this at the time was sort of like well I mean unless we can come up with a better idea we let's just stick with dou productivity and at the time we couldn't come up with a better framing of the thing and so we went down the dou productivity angle but I I think in hindsight the mental model the the thing we should think about when designing new products is what is the tangible outcome like what is the thing that people actually

want ah here it is so this is this might be interesting when it comes to building a product there's this thing of the destination so you've got the start you've got the destination and you have the vehicle right so this is your starting point this is your destination and this is the vehicle that gets you to the destination now if you think about a beach holiday the beach is the destination and the vehicle that gets you there is the airplane now if you were designing an offer to encourage people to buy your airplane ticket would

you sell the airplane ticket or would you try and sell the beach when you go on these package holidays are they talking about like are they talking about oh my goodness the flight to tenor reef is going to be really good because like you'll be able to get up food on the plane and stuff no of course not they're not talking about the flight they're talking about the destination they're trying to sell the beach rather than sell the vehicle that gets you there the problem with double your productivity is that that is actually a vehicle

2x so want double your productivity unfortunately that is a vehicle like no one actually wants to double their productivity specifically they are thinking of double your productivity sorry there's some hoovering happening in the background if you can hear the background noise but whatever they're thinking of double your productivity as a vehicle that gets them to the actual destination that they want which is I don't know maybe it's achieving their goals maybe it's having a fulfilled life maybe it's being happier maybe it's making more money growing their business growing the business yeah that those are the

things that people want and double your productivity as a vehicle to get you there by positioning the product through virtue of selling the vehicle we actually I think I think made a mistake there so I should have listened to the team and not used to double your productivity as like the the angle sell the destination not the vehicle I think ultimately we landed on achieve your goals is like the thing that's that's the thing that people want to achieve their goals and productivity lab is sort of one of the vehicles that helps them get there

so then we were like all right cool so how like what actually what's actually in the club you can see what's in the club question mark question mark That's like the the title of this this fig Jam board where we were like all right so we know that we we kind of had the sense of like people want to achieve their goals so how do we help them do that well one mental model that we came up with is that really achieving your goals and being more productive or ra being more productive and achieving your

goals is really only 20% about the knowledge but 80% it's about the execution it's about actually doing the thing we did a bunch of surveys for the audience and it seemed like the thing that people were struggling with was doing the thing not like learning about doing the thing but just doing the thing all of my YouTube videos my book it's all about it's all giving you knowledge it's about like teaching people how to do the thing but then the like no one takes action we found this with our YouTuber Academy we have thousands of

and thousands of students like 20,000 plus students have taken our YouTuber foundations and YouTuber Academy course I would say over 50% have not taken a single iota of action having bought the course and it's kind of sad right like even when we were even when we were running live cohorts we would get like I don't know a few hundred to over a th000 students signed up for a life cohort they've paid $2,000 to join this life cohort course for 6 weeks where we take them through and we give them homework assignments and everything and only

50% of people submitted the first assignment so half of the people did not even do the work for week one and by the time you got to the week six homework assignment the numbers were down to 15% 15 so like no one signs up to a course like this not intending to do the action not intending to execute but 85% of people are not even finishing the thing 50% of people are not even taking action on day one maybe this a problem you're having in your life where you've maybe got enough knowledge you've consumed the

content you watched the stuff but you struggle to take the action so that was what we realized that people really struggle to take action people struggle with execution and so we're like okay cool hm maybe productivity club or lab as it became to be as it came to be known is trying to solve this problem of execution all right cool nice that's good that is a very specific pain point we're trying to solve so how do we do that well we came up with a bunch of different things I figured out in my own life

like what is what are the things that help me execute on stuff we had this sort of whole goal plan system like this GPS system which is now featuring as part of the course which is not part of the lab etc etc you kind kind of kind of came with this idea that the true secret to productivity is accountability execution implementation actually doing the thing not consuming content about doing the thing you'll have heard about the techniques we do here this isn't about the theory it's about helping you actually do the stuff helping you execute

and what you what you know you should be doing the learning page needs to sell the idea that the reason people are struggling with productivity is not because they don't have the tools of hacks it's because they don't have the implementation habit productivity Club will solve this fingers crossed knowledge is no longer power it's about the application of knowledge that's which we power lies you know we're just throwing out phrases and stuff I think someone that either that came from me or someone in the team I can't remember and so here we're like all right

cool cool we know that now productivity Club is solving this problem of helping people execute but how do we actually do that and that was where we kind of came up with the idea of like okay well in theory if we could get people to make a plan I.E figure out what their goals actually are through maybe like a Life vision Workshop a goal setting Workshop using the GPS framework if maybe we could do a one-on-one onboarding where a coach you know we could we be like okay cool let's hire a bunch of productivity coaches

which we have ended up doing we've hired a bunch of productivity coaches who are all very nice and very good what if we get them to do a one-onone onboarding every time a student signs up to productivity lab and you know we can help them set the goals and stuff okay that's a good start like step one is to set the goal nice that's good the way that I think about this stuff often is like what what is the three-step process it's like like like this thing over here we still yeah so we've got the

start point where they are where they're struggling to take action we got the destination where they're taking action or in our case doubling your productivity but that was just a bad a bad way of framing this and so the question I think about is what are the three or four steps along the bridge that will get them there like how do we turn this into a three or four step framework that actually helps people take action and so Step One is set the goal we were like all right cool that's easy enough obviously makes sense

we did a bunch of surveys to the audience like I had a sense based on comments on my YouTube Channel people really struggle to know what they actually want like it's a it's a real thing it's like maybe if you're I don't know in your late in your late 20s or early 30s and you've been in a job for a while and you're like H this job that I'm doing is not actually the thing that I wanted to be doing and I'm like I'm not really sure and it's like I feel like I could be

going in all these different directions should I become an entrepreneur should I be a YouTuber should I be an influencer should I change career should I go to med school should I sign up to an NBA like this is the sort of stuff that like pretty much everyone my age is struggling with and they're like okay setting goals is like a key thing the second thing is take action on set goals and so we were like all right cool well number one set goals then how do we help people to take action and this was

where the idea of sort of Zoom co-working sessions came about back in the day when I was in med school I got a lot of action done by getting together with a bunch of friends all in the Emanuel College Cambridge Library I would get loads of more work done than if I was just working on my own similarly during the pandemic I joined this thing called London writers Salon that would host these sort of Zoom co-working sessions and I got a lot of value out of those and then I would host my own Zoom co-working

sessions for free at like 9:00 in the morning UK time during the pandemic and I did that for a month or two while writing my book and people like hundreds of people joined those and they got a lot of value from it and when I stopped doing them I was like inundated with messages from people being like hey where are those Zoom co-working sessions like we got a lot of value out of those and so we thought okay what if we built a what if we built this productivity Club around this idea of Zoom co-working

sessions I like okay you know that makes sense so we like all right what if we could have like you know a few hours a day there's like Zoom co-working sessions going on maybe I facilitate some of them maybe a coach facilitates some of them that would be cool like all right interesting then we were like all right cool so then you take action and then there's got to be some sort of reflection thing um one of the big one of the big productivity habits that really helps people is doing a weekly review where you

sort of review your week and then you oops and then you plan your next week and so some kind of reflection Workshop built into this could be quite interesting you know basically since like from January to April I was hosting three weekly reflection workshops where a couple of dozen to a few hundred people were joining these again free on zoom and I was just taking people through a weekly review a weekly reflection every Sunday and people were getting loads of value from that we had loads of comments being like Oh my God this is the

most productive half an hour of my life this is amazing and so we thought okay cool what if productivity Club was about this execution piece that people struggle with and what if it was like okay step one set the goal step two take action step three sort of reflection and celebration sort of like celebrating how far you've come and then you sort of repeat the process that would be really cool and we thought maybe like a fourth thing is sort of help people build and refine their productivity system and this was where we were like

all right cool maybe we add a course element to it maybe I teach a course on productivity and we attach that to the community and then I had the bright idea of why don't I do it as a live cohort we're quite experienced with running life cohorts as we did for our YouTuber Academy I I had I thought I'd sworn off them but it' been like a year since we ran a life cohort and so I thought you know what I generally prefer to teach stuff when there's someone on the other end of the zoom

call like teaching it live with slides and stuff and diagrams and all this camera switching and all this nonsense I generally prefer that rather than just trying to pre-record a self-paced course and with a lot of this it was like okay once we nail like these are the three or four pillars of the thing then it's sort of like okay well what are the features now that we know that this is the framework that we're going to take people through if we were to help someone set their goals take action reflect and build a system

would they reach the destination of doubling the productivity achieving their goals taking action it's like yeah 100% they Absol would if you watching this right now if you actually set goals take action and do them reflect refine the process and build your own productivity system of course you're going to achieve whatever goal you set out to it's just an inevitability of course it's going to happen and that's the kind of conviction that we were like we kind of had of like okay we now have a sense of what this product is this whole process by

the way took like two months maybe not two months maybe like one month it was like a lot of back and forth I kind of wish we had done it sooner than that because I think one of one of the mistakes we made with this was we made the mistake of trying to do uh trying to do the trying to do the consistency approach there's like two approaches when it comes to building a product or anything in life there's consistency versus intensity and this is another key learning for next time we make products consistency sucks

when you're trying to build a new product from scratch intensity is the way to go there is a fantastic book I've been reading recently it's not here right now it's called Ready fire aim by Michael masterton it's really really good and his whole thesis is that like the thing that takes you from 1 million to 10 million in annual revenue is basically building new products and making them good and doing it very fast the quicker you can make make and release new products the more likely you are to get to 10 million Revenue uh quickly

whereas the thing that takes you from 0 to 1 million is having one product nailing it and like finding the perfect way to sell it so from 0 to 1 million that was our YouTuber Academy that took us from there like we're currently at like 5 million a year in Revenue something like that and so want to get to 10 million is the next goal cuz why not it's a fun video game and so the thing we need to do is basically new products and one of the things he argues in the book is that

basically he has a little formula which is which is kind of fun which is um G is in is is directly proportional to I v^ 2 I love this sort of stuff well well what he actually says is 0.8 of G so G is growth it's a bit of a dodic formula um I is innovation and V squ is and is velocity but it's velocity squared and so he's saying that it's like 80% of your growth between $1 and $10 million a year in Revenue directly was it equals directly comes from your Innovation I.E your

ability to create new stuff that's actually good multiplied by your velocity of creating new stuff squared like that's how much he believes in this like speed matters so much when it comes to creating new products and one of the things he says and it's unfortunate that I only read this book chapter like recently because had I had this in my head like a year ago this product would have been quite would have been quite different it still did okay but like you know there were various ups and downs anyway the faster you make something the

faster you go from idea to execution for a particular product the better the product tends to be because generally when you give things time time sucks the energy out of the new product development process it sucks the energy out of the creative process and that's why consistency sucks when trying to make a new product so the way we tried to build this was kind of like hey we've got the idea in October let's like iterate on it a little bit let's talk about it in November and then like we'll talk about it in December and

then maybe in January I'll get together with a team and every week we'll like make a little bit more progress on this thing and that is a terrible way to build a product I do not want to do that method of new product development I wish someone had told me this a year ago because it's just so much better to just be like all right we have an idea for a product within 24 hours we need to have a sales page whipped up this is something that Michael Master whatever his name is says in the

book a sales page needs to be whipped up or at least the basics of the sales page written with in 24 hours of having the idea because the sales page is fundamentally the thing that like condenses the idea into its like into its sellable form and then basically you want to have almost like daily check-ins to see on the update of this product this something Alex hosi talks about as well if you want to move faster just have daily check-ins rather than weekly check-ins weekly check-ins move you seven times slower than daily check-ins because daily

check-ins means there's always stuff happening and there's always sort of progress and movement on this particular thing uh that's something we've now incorporated into our new product development process uh daily check-in the other thing that I wish we' done with this is just have two whole days day one and day two with like a handful of team members like I don't know three four or five of us or six maybe like more than that starts to get excessive where we all get together in person ideally but it can be done over Zoom if it has

to where like those two days are just purely dedicated to fleshing out the product I think sort of a burst of intensity like that gets so many better ideas onto the table and would have made productivity lab happen faster and also better and also probably more profitably had we done like an intensity approach of like creating the new thing very very quickly and then of course we can iterate on it over time to make it to make it really good rather than trying to do the slow consistent process of new product development I don't like

the slow process anything good that we've made in the past has been through bursts of intensity rather than a slow Focus consistency grind over time and this whole like ready fire aim analogy is sort of ready is like you sort of make sure that like you know you can't really make sure but you have a reasonable sense that like what you're doing is likely to work obviously there are no guarantees but you have a sense that maybe this is likely to work fire is where you just build the thing and get it out there and

then aim is a slow process of iteration and improvement over time so we sort of did that with productivity lab we made we we got it ready within like in like January and February we launched it in like April 2024 and now it's I'm currently filming this in November 2024 and we are now in the process and have been for the last 6 months of like iteration and Improvement so we sort of followed this but I really wish we'd just done it way quicker um cuz it it took too long to come together and it

was just too much of a elongated elongated process so intensity burst of intensity when it comes to new new product development so we figured out okay cool productivity Club is going to be this sort of idea of you know maybe we'll do some like review and integration uh where we do weekly reviews monthly reviews quarterly planning workshops monthly planning workshops you know that kind of thing and I was just sort of building out sort of reverse engineering my own productivity system and turning it into this sort of community structure so that's all well and good

then we had to come up with a name now the name of a product is really really really really important it started off as productivity Club but I uh reached out to a friend of mine Greg Eisenberg who is great guy check out his YouTube channel it's awesome and we actually recorded a conversation in like Fe January or February 2024 I I don't think we ever uploaded that it's it's a bit it's a bit too Niche to upload on the main Channel but I will um oh I might put it on my deep dive Channel

actually yeah maybe we'll put it on the Deep T channel that could be could be kind of interesting either way like either we'll put it as an unlisted video or as a video on deept channel and we'll link it down below if you're interested in watching this whole like hourong brainstorm where me and Greg are talking mostly about name ideas so the place where we started with the name is like what's the destination or the outcome and we're like all right these are sort of all of the things that people want do more of a

m to while feeling good along the way have fun in your work be richer make more money be less dressed work sustainably be happier reach goals faster blah blah blah and then we did a whole iterative process of like coming up with names we're like all right um and Greg's view was that the name is like 90% of the value of a community and so we're like all right Hobbits Quest Man adventure Squad Nirvana ecstasy druggies good feelers feel goodies productivity mules Freedom Chasers load balances effortless balances feel gooders keyboard Surfers web Surfers Focus friends

athletes brain leads mind leads intentional intention EAS the journey Squad mindful dumble doers brainiacs mind benders nerd Fighters obviously not our name but like fun employed a journey before destination we were just sort of throwing out onto this figma board as many different potential naming ideas that we could potentially think of uh stuff that I focused on I put in green I was like okay you know the undisciplined that's kind of interesting wayfinders kind of interesting keyboard Warriors kind of interesting but you can see here just like time Lords like okay that's kind of interesting

prob Bros gang Focus mates worker bees Focus Squad FOC like we were just trying to come up with like anything around like what this name could be and um eventually the thing weirdly that I was campaigning for was this name this is sort of become a running joke in the team now because I was campaigning for the name productivity Pirates I still think productivity Pirates is a cool name but like pretty much everyone in the team was against it I was like oh it' be so cool we we use the pirate Emoji like join the

crew W productivity productivity pirates.com unfortunately it was taken but it's like jointhe crew.net it's like it would be so fun it would be so cool to May name it productivity Pirates if you're at this point in the video I'd be curious to hear in a comment like what do you think of the name productivity Pirates and I just started whipping together like okay what would the logo look like I think I got this as an icon from Flat icon um I was like hm creators Cove maybe could be the thing like productivity Pirates could have

this little like ship icon it could have this little skullet crossbones it could have this little pirate icon or this and I'm just sort of playing around with the designs pirate hat it's kind of cool the general Vibe of the team was like look this does not sound professional it kind of sucks I was like oh we you know we could lean into the pirate thing and like maybe in 2025 we released the Marauders Mastermind which is sort of like yeah Mastermind group where people get to hang out with me and like uh and maybe

our YouTuber Academy Community could be could be called Creator's Cove and we could lean into this pirate terminology and basically I was talked out of it by the team um and productivity pirat has now become a bit of a joke I still think it would have been fun it would have been more fun than productivity lab but whatever anyway so we then we put out a tweet being like Hey we're thinking of putting out of building this community anyone got any name ideas and someone came up with the name productivity lab and so we donated

$1,000 to a charity of their choice um and and we bought the domain name I think it was about $10,000 we spent a lot of money on domain names so we bought the domain productivity lab and ended up calling it productivity lab uh conveniently we also previously when we were doing stuff had hired a designer it was really good actually to build like make these little icons for us uh that we ended up not really using and so we had this sort of flask icon um this was you know back in the day A couple

of years ago we were playing around with different icons for our YouTuber academy and our creator preneur of course and our creator Academy and Camera confidence and we had this designer like make us some of these logos and we had we had the license for this like flask logo so we thought huh productivity lab flask logo great let's just reuse the thing that we paid for like two years ago and now we can now we have a reason to use the flask logo so that was where the name productivity lab came from I still feel

weird about the name productiv I think it's a reasonable name it's not as fun as productivity Pirates but um what's this Pirates Jam what's on what's on this figma board yeah I was like you know we could have the ol Academy and then within that's Pirates and then you can get like you can have different ranks like crew mate and comrade and Soldier and pirate and then like I I had this whole like World building around the IDE of pirates yeah and then based on this flask icon like sort of this was sort of the

logo we ended up with I think this was the font what font was that I think it might have been circular yeah circular which is the font that Loom and Spotify use I believe and so we just sort of mopped up a few different few different logos double your productivity enjoy the journeys that that sort of thing and it ended up being this purple branding and ended up being productivity lab all right I've been filming for a while it is now time for lunch so I will see you shortly all righty it is another day

turns out I actually filmed for ages yesterday and one thing that I found with filming these sorts of videos over time is that if I give myself permission to film it over 2 days it means I'm less likely to burn out and the whole thing feels a little bit more sustainable also you know this video is getting kind of long but it's kind of Chatty but if you're still here in the video then I hope you're getting at least some value out of it um hopefully I don't think we're going to try too hard to

like retention edit a video like this it's a behind the scenes type thing a thing that I need to I'm kind of saying this to the camera not sure if we're going to keep this in maybe we'll kind actually yeah we might as well keep in we we might as well keep this in a big part of shooting a video like this one is like you know for me is there's always a thing in the back of my mind of is this actually going to be useful to anyone like does anyone actually give a about

this sort of stuff um but that sort of the editor critic voice is not a helpful voice to have in one's mind when one is filming a video um stuff can be cut out in post if we really wanted to once a video is made we don't even have to post it I mean we inevitably always do it's sort of like with the process of writing my book um on the days where I sort of was trying to edit it as I went along or I was trying to write with the editor in mind or

the reader in mind or thinking like oh no this this isn't good this is bad really just focusing on getting the stuff out there and doing it in whatever way feels enjoyable and natural and connected or whatever and then we could always edit things out after the fact so even you know I I say stuff like this in the videos some of the time if I just need to give myself a bit a bit of a pep talk like even yesterday like there was this whole like um sort of heaviness to filming a video like

this cuz in in my mind I was like H what's the point does anyone actually care this video is not going to get as many views as a 10 productivity tips video our our views on the channel are sort of 10% down compared to 2023 all of that kind of stuff just adds a lot of heaviness to the whole process and often when it comes to making decisions for what to do on the YouTube channel and also for what to do on the business I will ask myself the question of what would I do if

I didn't care about the money and was purely doing it for the enjoyment and service now in that context what would I do would I make a video like this one yeah of course I would I love doing behind the scenes stuff I got incredible value out of people doing behind the scenes stuff usually in podcasts and books and things and in real life and I would like to almost sort of return that favor um for for the people that that care about this sort of stuff um and the people that don't are not going

to watch it anyway and that's okay like I I would if I had 100 million in the bank and never needed to make money again I would still do a video like this I'd be like how I got to the point where I had 100 million in the bank and I would want to show the whole process and show the behind the scenes and maybe those videos only get only get 100 views or 1,000 views or 10,000 views or whatever the thing might be maybe they don't go viral they probably won't but but that's okay

I would still want to do that and so when it comes to building productivity lab when it comes to building you know doing videos on this channel I think that's like that's something I like to always return to and actually it feels I'm finding myself feeling that it's helpful for me to tell you this and helpful for me to say this out loud to the camera because it's easy to forget that it's easy to think when I'm in kind of YouTube filming mode that like you know I should care about retention I should sort of

try and be try and maximize the amount of value I'm giving per second of content but for a video like this like ah who cares it's fine anyway I don't know how we got on to that but let's so so far in the journey we have gone to around January February 2024 earlier this year when we came up with the idea and between productivity Pirates and productivity lab I actually tested it on Instagram here we go I said hey hey gang we're finalizing the branding for our upcoming course and Community what's a better name productivity

Pirates productivity lab neither if you have a better idea please see the next slide and on the next slide um I said this is going to be a community of ambitious entrepreneurs creators and professionals to help double your productivity focus and consistency so you can do more of M to while enjoying the journey along the way bit of a mouthful I kind of wish I'd I kind of wish we'd had you know as I said before double your productivity it's like I wish we had a more like succinct like what actually is this kind of

thing which is this community beamed and various people gave various suggestions like the dopamine Hut climbers productivity dream catchers the prod hub prub productivity Hub productivity Society the getalong productivity the masterminds the go-getters the Keen and all this sort of stuff but much to my dismay the audience said clearly 18% of people you know thank you if you clicked on that now one liked productivity Pirates 60% of people like productivity lab 22% said neither and so it was like okay it kind of has to be productivity Lab at this point so at this point we

know exactly what the name is we've got the logo we started building a weit list um this was in 18th of March for the last couple of months my team and I have been working on building a productivity Community it's finally here uh joined the weight list so once we set up a weight list page we started getting people to join the email list they didn't know what the price point was going to be we knew we wanted to do it like $1,000 per year or something like that we were thinking of doing doing monthly

pricing or quarterly pricing but we thought initially the problem with a community thing like this or sort of me any kind of membership is that you're always dealing with churn and at the start we wanted to collect the money up front and get that commitment for a whole year from people because we didn't want to deal with like you know if we have a big onboarding experience some people come in they check it out for a month and they unsubscribe and now it's like we've sort of wasted the effort that that's put into that person

CU they they're only with us for a month was is was it a good idea making this $1,000 a year if I had my time differently would I do it monthly pricing quite possibly I quite possibly would have done this with monthly pricing rather than annual annual is good because you don't have to worry about CH so much but the problem is the problem with annual is that and I'm going to talk about like the refund request that we've got cuz we've got a lot of refund requests and that's like an interesting part of this

process that I I want I want to talk about annual is fine because you don't have to deal with churn and you get the money up front it's like great and people get the commitment for a year the problem with annual is that unless someone asks for a refund you can't you don't really get a sense of are people using the thing I've subscribed to a bunch of annual programs I've logged in once or twice and then I've never logged in again but I'm not the sort of person that would just email and be like

hey I want a refund for the thing I I just probably wouldn't do that probably like it's my you know I've got this like I'll log in at some point it's useful to have but then you end up in a situation where you have a large amount of paying users who paid the ,000 some percentage of those are going to request a refund if they find themselves not using it so generally people who are more broke more price sensitive people for whom $1,000 is a lot of money would be like I better get value out

of this and if I don't then I'm going to request a refund which is totally fine that's the whole point of our refund policy more on that in a little bit but there's this whole other s of people people like me who wouldn't request the refund but wouldn't use the product and with this whole ready fire aim approach of launching this thing ready is sort of like do all the prep work fire get it out there and then aim over time iterate the product to make it world class someone canceling their monthly subscription like I

would cancel a monthly subscription if I wasn't getting value out of the thing or if I wasn't using the thing I just wouldn't bother requesting a refund for the annual so in a way monthly pricing would keep would have kept us and our me and my team more honest in that it would have given us a more honest sense of do people actually get value from this because people are only going to pay monthly for something that they're genuinely getting value from and the aim for this product for this year for 2024 the goal was

actually not to make money yeah we did like I don't know $800,000 like whatever the number is yeah we did that in Revenue but the goal was not Revenue the goal the goal was to iterate the product to a point where we were really happy with it and where users were getting a lot of value from it and I think actually by doing annual pricing upfront and only offering annual as a member option as a membership option we missed an opportunity to really put our money where our mouth was and we missed an opportunity to

just see what would happen when we allowed people to build monthly CU we would have had way better analytics way better tracking we would have seen every single month holy like how many people have canceled their subscription we could have actively reached out to those people be like hey we'd love to hop on a call with you to understand why you canceled your subscription it's really interesting to us and I think possibly probably most likely we could have improved the product quicker by allowing people to cancel their membership I I'm I'm I'm still not sure

about this I I spoke to so many people about this I spoke to a lot of people who run communities a lot of people were like don't do monthly because monthly is going to result in churn almost everyone I know who has some sort of paid membership customers only stay for about 3 or 4 months and so at that point if you're selling a $100 a month thing you may as well just sell them a $300 course because that's 3 months worth of a membership and then you don't have to deal but like memberships are

off like you know recurring Revenue requires recurring work there's a lot of as we're going to talk about with our productivity coaches there's a a large amount of work that it takes to um fulfill on a membership where you're trying to constantly add value every single day every single week every single month it's a lot of work a lot of Manpower required for that so you may as well just make a course and sell it for $300 and then had we made this into a course and sold it for $300 which we are actually are

going to do at some point in January had we done that we would have made we would have made as much money in a way easier way with just a different vehicle like a a self-paced course is obviously a different vehicle from a sort of $97 a month membership product anyway all that said that was sort of how we decided around the pricing for this we thought about do we want to do lower ticket do we want to do $5 a month $10 a month $19 a month 29 $39 49 we sort of ran the

whole gamut and this was sort of a gut feeling like again and also me having spoken to a bunch of people who run lower ticket Community type things like cheaper memberships I didn't I would rather have fewer people paying more money than more people paying less money to get to a million a year we we only need a th000 people to be joining every year for for this to be a million dollar a year product if it was I $50 a month we would need 2,000 people if it was $30 a month we would need

3,000 people if it was $10 a month we would need 10,000 people and the complexity of a community or a membership scales with the number of people that you've got you get more customer service requirements you have to do more events you have to split up your events into smaller people because like it loses the intimacy of the community there's like 10,000 people in it you've got to design it in a way for that scales to 10 to 10,000 members and I just didn't really want to do that I wanted to be more premium $100

a month $97 a month whatever and I knew that for the right person it's a total no-brainer it is not for everyone like one of the one of the mistakes people make when trying to build products is like thinking that this is a product for everyone what if students can't afford $97 a month it's like yes students cannot afford $97 a month this is not a product for students it's a prod product for working professionals and entrepreneurs and that's fine we do stuff for students we have free content on on the YouTube channel this product

does not have to be accessible to students and I like well aren't you cutting out a big proportion of your audience because a big proportion of your audience are students yes absolutely similarly students can't afford my ,000 YouTuber Academy course students can afford my book but it's like every not every product needs to be for everyone um Apple has like the budget version of the iPhone the budget version of the Apple watch and they have the Mac Pro which is for $30,000 and it's just it just appeals to different people um in general I am

a fan of charging more money for a fewer people because then generally you get a people say this in the entrepreneurship world you get a higher quality customer if they're paying you more money and there's sort of memes about this in the in the sort of business Community things like hey if you charge someone $500 for a project um they're going to be like hey you know like you know can I get a refund of like $50 because like actually you know you know you were a bit late with delivering the thing and they're really

quibbling over the pennies if you charge $50,000 for a project you send them the invoice they'll say thanks invoice paid and that's it they'll just pay the 50 Grand and again this was just this is like a weird thing that unless you've been in that position where you're just dropping 50k on an invoice or whatever it's so hard to appreciate that this is how certain customers think but essentially the more of someone's net worth or the more of their income the more the the greater percentage of their income or net worth they're spending on a

thing the more like attached they're going to be to the thing the more they're going to have customer service complains and requirements and want you to hold their hand and be sending loads of emails and stuff and you can generally avoid a lot of that stuff by not selling low ticket products by selling higher ticket products if you cut out broke people if you cut out students from being able to afford the thing you know it's pros and cons of that you make it easier to fulfill on the product at some point once the product

is live we want we want to offer offer scholarships we've been offering scholarships for years for our YouTuber Academy but especially while the product is getting its feet we did not want to deal with people who actually couldn't afford it which is why we didn't want to go low ticket and high volume we could have done but we didn't want to go down that route maybe we will at some point and actually do a proper low ticket Community but for now we were like all right this is going to be a $97 a month thing

okay so what actually is the product well after a bunch of back and forth we realized okay we wanted to be this community which is sort of going to be hosted on Circle as we talked about earlier um we're going to have daily Zoom co-working sessions and so we hired some productivity coaches more than those later uh to run these daily Zoom co-working sessions we would have weekly reflection workshops on Fridays and Sundays for multiple time zones depending on where people are we would have monthly planning sessions we would have have quarterly planning sessions and

that would be kind of the main thing the main thing is you show up to these Zoom co-working sessions to take action and get your work done and you show up to the reflection workshops to reflect on your week and do a weekly review and each month we were going to have like an expert Workshop doing a talk about something or other um we were thinking maybe we'd have a monthly book club and that's it you know that's the that's the idea for someone who doesn't want to attend Zoom co-working sessions this is another product

for them because like that's literally the whole point the whole point is that it is a membership for people who struggle to take action on their goals and maybe people who work from home work remotely it can be a little bit demotivating when it's just you in your little office all on your own doing stuff being on these Zoom co-working sessions in theory will allow people to do it with a community of people around them and would actually help them take action and since then we've actually had a bunch of really successful members of productivity

lab um achieve certain goals by joining the zoom co-working sessions we call them the focus lab so for example we had a guy who'd been procrastinating for 5 years on building his software side project um and then he attended like Focus lab sessions for a couple of weeks and he built his minimum viable product his MVP that was really really cool oh man I wish I had screenshots of how this is evolved over time because right now this is what it looks like so this is our kind of circle Community essentially people get access you

know there's a start here page it's a little video from me showing what productivity lab is and how it works and stuff we've refilmed this a bunch of times this you can see is V3 welcome video we haven't even changed the title of this we should probably change the title of that then there's like this whole onboarding thing where you set up your profile you schedule your onboarding call we are now offering one-on-one onboarding calls with our productivity coaches you complete your productivity Catalyst which is like this quiz thing at the start that gives you

a sort of productivity score across the five different key skills and then you can figure out what areas of the course or membership are going to be best for you you RSVP to your first event there's like a tour that I think kin or Gio did about like all of the different spaces and like what the point of each of the different Circle spaces is there's quite like an elaborate Community we have an announcements thing we're working on like a redesign for the graphics um I'm not a huge fan of these Graphics but like we're

working on it actually I'll show you what it looks like um can I show you what it looks like so these are the latest designs I'm sure by the time this video comes out when it when it gets edited um these will have changed but that's okay I'm showing you kind of like how the sausage is being made um so we've got like like this is what my website is going to look [Music] like and this is something that will launch I think next month uh whenever you're watching this maybe it's launch already you can

check it out al.com and it's sort of this kind of thing how can I help you be more productive grow YouTube channel build a business boost your grades a little bit about me popular videos podcast all of this sort of stuff um and we kind of went through multiple rounds of kind of changes and mock-ups with the web design agency it's been it's been really cool working with them actually and then we said to them hey look can we use the same style of branding but do it for the AL abdal Academy and so this

is kind of what the sort of design design of the circle workspaces is going to look like yeah it's going to be like this um so you can compare it to this you know this is a bit Jank and it's going to look more like this where each of the product it's going to have his own color scheme so olll Academy which is going to be sort of the free section is going to be blue then we'll have parttime YouTuber Academy which is our Flagship course and Community for YouTubers that's going to be red and

then productivity lab is going to be purple and I'm looking forward to seeing what designs they come up with and a logo for productivity lab maybe it'll change from this maybe not but we're we're doing like a whole refresh for this and then there's a Gio our community manager and she sort of posts updates about like what's going on in the productivity lab community and membership like what are all the changes this is a little video that I I put out um last month from one of our team Retreats and there's like a there's a

ton of stuff going on here um it didn't start out this way but we've been iterating on this over the last 6 seven months I'm not going to show you the introductions cuz then you'll see people's actual data and this is only for members uh introductions there's a chat there's this area where people can set their goals and celebrate their wins there's Focus lab these are the sort of Zoom co-working sessions and you can see there's all these events that you can RSVP to you can add them to your calendar you can see them on

a calendar view if I go on events so you can see that like literally every day there's like multiple events happening like there are six events happening today and I can RSVP to any of these if I want to join one of the focus lab sessions some of these are led by our productivity coaches some of these are led by our members who we call Alchemists and so this is what the product actually looks like um maybe at some point in the future if this is useful leave a comment down below I'll do like a

whole like how we actually built the insides of it but I mean I don't want to focus too much on that cuz it's like I mean SoCal the platform does all the work socalo the all-in-one Community platform for DOT do dot I think it's loading for creators for entrepreneurs etc etc and so you can see like I personally prefer Circle to school sorry Sam I'm sure you're not watching this but yeah circle is really cool um it's good design good vibe and we've been using Circle since day one four years ago with our YouTuber Academy

as well so we've been quite used to the platform um I'll put maybe have we got an affiliate link I don't know maybe I'll put in a f Ling down below if you want to check out Circle um but yeah so this is what productivity lab actually looks like it is a circle workspace with events and with Community engagement and with a course that we call the life productivity system that's baked into it let's now talk about how the course came together because I think this is interesting um we realized that we didn't just want

to do a community we actually wanted to do a course like a curric a structured curriculum that helps people be more productive and actually achieve their goals we wanted to do it alongside this was a good idea but it was a hell of a lot of work so I'm just going to show you like we took a lot of pictures as this was happening this is a co-working session with my friend Sahel and my friend Sam that I was in London in February of 2024 it was a random weekend and I just messaged these guys

cuz I used to work with them where we all went to University together and we would get together in like my College library to study for our exams and both of them are building their own businesses sah is building an app called fire cut which is like a Premier Pro editing plugin that makes editing faster and Sam is working on his stoic teacher Instagram account and he has like this stoic weight loss program so they're building their businesses so I reached out to them we like hey should we just all get together in a we

work in London in Paddington on a Saturday and just grind on our work all day they were like yeah and it was actually really fun like this is sort of this is a little bit of the philosophy behind productivity lab that like when you get together with other people who are also working on similarish stuff even if it's different stuff it just makes you more productive and it makes it way more fun then um this is my friend Charlotte who we worked with and one of her colleagues Katie uh Katie is a learning designer Charlotte

is I'm not sure what Charlotte is Charlotte is an entrepreneur and also learning designer and like coach and so we're working with Charlotte and Katie to put together the curriculum for the course now what did that involve it involved lots and lots of brainstorming and putting ideas onto you know this sort of thing Post-it notes absolutely everywhere this was you know April 2024 this was over about a 3- we period where we get got together like twice a week for full days just really trying to figure out what's my own Philosophy for productivity we were

taking the stuff from the book and combining it with productivity systems and trying to figure out like how do we teach you know I've got my own productivity system that I've been using for years and I I always sort of tweak it over time but how do we simplify it and how do we turn it into a thing that we can actually teach cuz even though I've been using my own productivity system for years I haven't really tried to teach it and it's sort of like a bit of an amalgamation a bit of a Frankenstein's

creation of stuff evolving over time and I wanted to streamline and simplify the whole thing and really think how do we teach productivity from first principles how do we incorporate the stuff that we talked about in the book with like the Feelgood enjoyable sustainable Vibes but turn it into an actual system and basically throughout this process we generated like dozens of pages of this sort of Post-It note A3 A1 paper sharpas markers everywhere we also had a massive mirror board aha here we go this is a mirror board that we were working on from like

the start of April up until the end of April when we launched when we sort of finished creating all the stuff we're trying to figure out okay what's like the system um Life vision annual goals quartly Quest weeks joyful days hours and all the different methods we're talking about um we had all of our different kind of Post-it notes uh this was ah here we go question to clarify this is a good thing I'm sure Charlotte won't mind if I share these um I put put links to stuff down below if you want to check

her out um what are the Learners wins along their Journey what are levels of progress like what are the minimum things that a learner needs to have done to develop a habit in the end of their measurable performance outcomes rituals and connections behaviors skills what you need to practice so it's like all of these different questions were all about like how do we create an amazing learning experience for the students that are going through the course so then we had Post-it notes and diagrams and like the whole shebang and then really trying to to figure

out like how do we slice and dice these and is it a 4-we program is it a sixe program is it a twoe program is it a self-paced program um again just showing you a sense of the amount of different ways feel free to pause this at any point and just have a look if you really care about this stuff um all of the different ways to execute this initially we were sort of you you know I have this whole like GPS system which we kind of included in the course but kind of didn't cuz

they ended up sort of complicating a few things um but you know we were thinking like okay is it about navigation and execution is it about vision and action what are the pillars within that like what are the techniques that we're teaching within that is the way that we're teaching those techniques does it actually make sense what are the sorts of visuals like how would we kind of uh visualize this whole thing um you know one of the key insights of working with Charlotte is that we kind of need visual mental models to help students

understand and like get a sense of what the material is in their heads so that it's not just sort of walls of text and walls of slides so this was one iteration of this process of you know productivity is about you know you got your foundation your mindset your rituals and then it's like how do you make focused intentional hours those lad up to joyful days those lad up to weeks ideal weeks or weekly actions then you have your quarterly quests your annual goals and your North Star life compass that was one way of doing

it this was another way of doing it like you know goal plan system is it about this GPS method can we weave in some of the stuff from the book into this and at some point throughout this whole thing we were like like okay maybe it's does this GPS thing work is that like is it clear enough for it to be useful but simple enough for for it to be memorable and all of this stuff just was constant iteration over time uh through multiple meetings and multiple like real life sessions and multiple Zoom calls over

a period of like 3 or 4 weeks where this was like pretty much the only thing I was focused on in that time this was something um that we were doing at one point um I think we ended up not quite using this as the structure of the course but we were talking about okay Foundation navigation and execution within Foundation you've got sleep stress diet and exercise within navigation you've got your North Star and your GPS that works within execution you've got Focus energize unblock sustain which brings in the stuff from the book that's cool

but then this was also getting like really complicated and there was like a lot of stuff uh we were using this diagram I think this is from Dan Co and we're like okay you know this is cool like you know this idea of things sort of laddering up so what would our version of this be um okay we came across this I think this is from IO eago Forte we're like okay you know a lot of people are using this sort of pyramid diagram can we make our own version of this um I wrote a

few bits and bobs for this like your productivity score is a combination of the four pillars of productivity Foundation navigation execution reflection and I'm showing you all of this just to give you a sense of the amount of like stuff that goes into brainstorming something like this you've seen all of these like these like little drawings that we're doing all of this stuff we're like eventually we landed on a boat analogy which is I think the thing that we stuck with the waters of Life the system can like should we visualize like your goal setting

as a sale or should we visualize your goal setting as a compass it's quite cool looking at this stuff because I think the course that we've now created is actually really good um and we're still we're now on like version four of the course cuz we still we keep on like putting it out to the students getting feedback putting it out getting feedback simplifying even like all this stuff the main feedback we've had is like damn it's still too complicated okay so how do we even further simplify things and then eventually like once we sort

of landed on the sort of sketch structure of the course me and SEF one of my team members we then worked on like the initial visuals for this and so we created those in figma again just zooming out you can see that there's a lot of stuff going on here and we were sort of this was the kind of vibe we were going for we were like okay you know these are the five key skills and we've got the logo and like you know this is kind of cool align Focus reflect organize and recharge do

we want to add these little doodles to them like how do we want to how do we want to make this work um saf created these sort of graphics for our Feelgood productivity stuff and so we sort of reused some of these and then we're like all right cool so I'm just giving away the course here but that's okay you know this is some of the material and this is what it takes to have a focused hour align organize focused recharge reflect and we were sort of playing around with the positioning of these like little

Doodles and stuff cuz the thing we were trying to do for the visuals here was combining analog and digital that's something I really like doing I like combining analog and digital that's why we've got an overhead camera recording this so so it's like analog notebook digital stuff digital I like I I really like the interplay of analog and digital so this was part of the sort of visual identity this is sort of one of the iterations of the slides for our weekly reflection workshops 10 minutes on the line 10 minutes on reflect 10 minutes on

organized and then an optional connection bit we're like all right how do we visualize the life productivity system here this needs to go like that probably yeah it's about the compass the engine the skills and the core this was also just too complicated as we found out after delivering version one and so we sort of simplified some of this stuff um we're trying to sort of use this boat metaphor of like is it different parts of a ship as part of your life productivity system is it this kind of thing that we're going for is

are the skills like a pentagon or a pentagram or a list of things or like boxes um I used this diagram from I think this was from Tim Urban and we were like okay can we adapt this kind of diagram and make it sort of this kind of thing um Direction momentum skills and core like how do we teach our productivity system in a way that is simple and easy to visualize this was another another way of doing it um focused hours joyful days balanced weeks quot Quest anual goals Life vision this was another way

of doing it like Foundation execution navigation surrounding system skills and after a ton of playing around with like dozens of different ways to visualize this we eventually landed on where where is it and this is also all changed now now now that we've gotten feedback or to try and even further simplify it we're like okay so your life productivity system is four s's your system your skills yourself and your space here we go within system you've got life Compass annual goals and quarterly quests which works nicely with like these cute little Graphics then you've got

balanced weeks joyful days focused hours within system you've got Direction and drive but even now looking at it like 6 months later after it's been through so many more changes and again I'll do another behind thes scenes video about that probably sometime next year once we've got more data for the new version of the course in the system it's also like a bit complicated it looks cool it looks pretty and nice and like looked looked really great and we we had a lot of feedback from it but the main piece of feedback we got was

damn this is still too complicated um for people who are like super into productivity and who've got loads of time to go through the materials and do all the work and stuff it was great the system makes sense but what we found after running the first cohort of this with like 500 people who joined productivity lab um we found out that actually a lot of people who joined didn't have much time on their hands they were a lot of them were like entrepreneurs a lot of them were 9 to5 professionals a lot of them were

parents all of them wanted to do this side hustle thing and actually like taking a few hours every week to go through the course material and really do the work it was just too much it was it's too much for most people and I think I sort of lost sight of that a little bit when I was sort of doing this as a full-time gig for like a whole month trying to figure out like what's the most simple way to do the course my version of simple simple is clearly not most people's version of simple

so we've even further simplified all of this sort of stuff so that was the process of creating the course then we had them all in slides we had it as a four-week course which I delivered for the first time in like May 2024 as a life cohort I enjoy delivering courses as a life cohort because there's Zoom people on zoom on the other side this is kind of what my uh setup looked like back when I was in London so I I still have this monitor actually I've got this little screen that's just underneath my

camera that you can't see so when I do live sessions for productivity lab or for a YouTuber Academy I can have my slides down here where you can't see them and I can look at the camera there and the slides are just directly down so I don't have to look at the screen like in this sort of way and the way we launched it was through doing this quarterly alignment Workshop so we had I think over 10,000 people registered for this and we wanted this to be a free workshop and actually this is something we're

continuing doing basically every quarter I run a an a sort of quarterly planning workshop where you reflect on the last 3 months and then you set your quarterly Quests for the next 3 months and then at the end of these workshops these workshops are completely free they're 2 hours long but at the end of the workshop I encourage people to join productivity lab so the first time we did this was the first time we launched productivity lab we got about 500 people signed up within like 48 hours which was awesome let me see do I

have screenshots of our yeah you know within we had 27 refund requests yeah here we had 615 sales we did $458,000 we got to 50,000 Mr Means monthly recurring revenue and yeah we had 8,4 $400 worth of refunds I think because some people just signed up and they changed their mind last minute they're like okay fair enough we just give them the refund this was sort of basically as soon as we launched the thing within a few days and that was solid then we did another round in like June July for the next quarter and

we got another like 300 or so students we did another one we got another like 200 so students um and so overall we've now got about a thousand is people in productivity lab uh but and here's where it gets interesting some of those people are getting value from it and we have some solid testimonials and stuff but some of the people are not getting value from it and we have actually had quite a lot of refund requests let's talk about refund requests cuz refund requests are interesting so when we launched productivity lab um I knew

that we were launching a product where we weren't entirely sure what the product is yet this is often the case when you launch a product you don't entirely know what is the thing that you're launching you have a sense of what it is and you know you're going to need to it iterate on it over time and you know that when you launch it that's like the worst it's ever going to be because it only gets better from there as you get feedback and as you improve things now the way I get around this and

I I used to really struggle with sales four years ago before I launched my YouTuber Academy but the way we get around this is that we just have a really really really liberal refund policy I think the way I phrased it for this I think we called it our ludicrous money back guarantee we said to people that look you're paying $1,000 you're signing up for the whole year but at any point even 11 months later if you tell us you don't like it we will refund you we will refund the money you've paid for the

whole year no one does this people will give you a prata refund to be like hey you know you canceled six months in so we'll give you a refund for the final six months we're like no no no we're not even going to do that we're going to do a ludicrous money back garantee where we will just give you all of your money back and I found a cool way of talking about this which we now referred to as the help early sleep at night money back guarantee where you I stole this idea from an

Instagram ad from one Peak creative who does really good Instagram ads if anyone from one Peak is watching this stuff um but they said I I can't remember exactly what they said but like I basically paraphrased something that they used in one of their their like guarantees which I thought was really cool which is the help early sleep at night money back guarantee where I said something like hey look you know I care a lot what people think about me I shouldn't have become a YouTuber because I care excessively about what people think about me

if you're a customer of one of my product and you don't like it I will literally lose sleep over that and it's not worth it for me you know I've got the money already I don't need the money I'll take the money but I don't need the money um and so we have a help early sleep at night my money back guarantee if at any point you decide you don't like our product just email my team and we will literally give you your money back we'll ask you one question which is what could we have

done to improve the product and then we'll just give you your money back because I will lose sleep if you're upset because you don't like our product and we've taken your money we don't want to take your money you know that kind of thing I sort of really hammed up this idea now what does that do what that does is that it reduces the risk to basically zero for a new person signing up what it does it also helps me and my team feel better about releasing a product because otherwise we would be Quagmire in

this overthinking Perfection analysis paralysis type situation where we're like we couldn't possibly release something unless it's really really good but it's really hard to make something really really good unless you've got people actually using it because then they give you feedback and then you can iterate it on it and improve it over time again to quote Michael Masterson or whatever his name is where is it boom ready fire aim you get ready which is the thing we were doing from like January February March and April with all of this stuff that I've shown you the

screenshots the boards the mirror boards the the boards the sketching out all that stuff is us getting ready then we fire we put the product out there into the world with a ludicrous money back guarantee and then we aim once people are in the product and they're using it and they're giving us feedback and we we can see how they're using it and we're doing onboarding calls and student support calls and we're answering all emails within 24 hours and me and my team are in there like seeing how people are interacting with it and with

our YouTuber Academy we host physical meetups dinners for our accelerator students and free meetups for our Academy students and I am there my team is there and we're always asking people what do you like about the course what do you not like about the course what can we improve about the course we're sending people feedback surveys and encouraging all of that data that we're Gathering is how we then aim the product how we improve it iteratively over time to make it world class so a ludicrous money back guarantee lowers the risk for the customer number

two it helps us feel better about it but number three what it does is then we start getting refund requests so we get some refunds that are like this at first I think about having a support system to improve my productivity would help me to do so but then it turns out I only use it once once and after that I never use it again classic so I think maybe it's just me it's not fit with the system this is a it's not you it's me kind of thing this is reasonable of course we'll give

I mean we give everyone the money back and here's another one I think the product does not fit my needs I tried hard to use it but with my setup it's not possible it's like we don't get much data out of that then we have something like this was very disappointed with the onboarding process have not gained value from the program at all oh damn that feels bad oh they didn't even experience the program because they thought the onboarding experience was so crap ah what a nightmare that's annoying let's see did someone in our team

repli to this complete when we saw that I remember thinking like oh okay we we have literally completely revamped our onboarding experience as a result of just this one refund request so like you know it feels bad initially but you're like okay cool got to improve the thing here's another one I think productivity lab is a great program just not for me I was trying to fit into a mod of productivity that doesn't fit my lifestyle in reality I just have less time right now and the time I do have various from day-to-day week to

week what did you find valuable they enjoy the weekly reviews in the community spaces weekly reviews definitely give me a sense of where in relation to where I want to go and the community was really great too it's just more my stage of life isn't in line with the system so like actually more than half of our refund requests are like hey the timings don't work out for me I realized it's not really compatible with my life but some of them you know some of them are like this you know some proportion of refund requests

are this kind of thing the program has a lot to explore I felt a bit overwhelmed I sometimes got lost instead of focusing on things it takes time for me to explore and understand it might just be me uh also I'm in Asia um oh interesting when I joined the lab at the beginning I don't see Ali's engagement very much in the community I understand he's busy but most of the members are his fans perhaps he may consider for more engagement that's also feedback we've had from a few people wanting more from me okay so

there's two points here number one people feeling overwhelmed when they join the product which is a sign for us that we need to simplify and improve the onboarding experience and make it feel less overwhelming to my point earlier about how the course I thought it was simple but clearly it wasn't simple enough because people are still overwhelmed because I get it people are busy they don't have time they're not most people in this in our most of our members probably haven't read all of the productivity books in the world uh and so like actually it

is on us to simplify the product even further and to make it feel less overwhelming something I spoke to a friend of mine who runs a bunch of membership programs said that overwhelm is the biggest reason why people cancel memberships for things um which is interesting so we're like we need to what we're working on what we have been working on over the last six months is making it feel less overwhelming but secondly we' had we've had a bunch of people saying they want me to engage more with the community so one thing doing it

now increasingly it was like a monthly Q&A but what I wanted to do and the reason why we kind of a b a big part of one of the the the rationals behind this product is that we do not want this to be a you get access to Ali type product we're going to release a you get access to Al type product in sometime in 2025 that's going to be a mastermind it's probably going to cost like $30,000 a year this is one that this is 30 times cheaper than that people are getting value from

the thing that we that we've created rather than people getting value because they've got access to me also access to me would be way more expensive than we have relativity lab but you know that's a that's a side point and so for stuff like this we're like yes I get it but for for certain refund requests we've got to be like okay the feedback we're hearing is people want more of Ali in the community is that something we are willing to do okay I can do a monthly Q&A or a monthly Workshop I'm totally down

for doing that that's fun but do I want to be hosting sessions every week probably not do I want to be I want to be attending the sessions but I don't want to be hosting them um because it's too much effort for me to host the session we've got a team to be able to do that do I want to be engaging with the community and saying well done guys on your wins etc etc I would like to but I don't really have the time for that we've got coaches productivity coaches who can help with

that one of the one of the difficulties about having a personal brand it's like it's really nice that people want to hang out with me more but my time is stretched and I need to do the highest leverage things which is not engaging with people in the community I love engaging with people in real life I love doing my q&as and my workshops and stuff where people can ask questions then but then I'm sort of like I'm out and I'm focusing on making videos and creating the next product and writing the next rather than engaging

with people in the community this is why like I get loads of emails I would love to reply to all the emails but replying to all the emails I get would be a full-time job and so for something like this we've got to say okay the person wanted more from Ali we're not willing to give them more of Ali so of course we're going to give them a refund but let's just make sure that on the sales page for the product we've framed the expectations clearly M let's make sure we've got an FAQ of like

how much access will I have to have to Ally in this program answer basically none you can show up to a weekly Q&A sorry you can show up to a monthly Q&A and you can potentially ask him a question but like this is not an access type product ah okay this one's interesting this course was not what I thought it would be nor did it provide me with the results I was looking for I did complete the modules on the capitalist but the results in my productivity didn't justify the price nor does the current method

of joining life cohorts work for me I may return in the future but once you have an offering that allows more one-onone support in self-paced learning okay interesting um clearly did not get the results that they wanted to fair enough the theory itself is good but I don't like having to make time to join Focus sessions yeah fair this did not work for my lifestyle I also think there's a lot to be work a lot of work to be done in the videos Ali is great but talks too fast it doesn't feel like the material

applies at times to me as a mom and working professional I think more teachers should be added in to allow more students to benefit okay interesting the community spaces are overwhelming and give me anxiety the same anxiety is being on social media I don't have the time and field pressure to join these I don't necessarily want to connect with others I just want to improve my productivity yeah so stuff like that we do get stuff like that some from time to time most of our refund requests are it's not you it's me most of them

are like I don't have don't have the time to engage with this but some of them are hey I went through the course and actually there's not much new here one of the guys um I remember I remember this quite clearly he said hey I went through all the materials and I learned absolutely nothing he he also said In fairness I'm 56 I have been into productivity for the last 40 years I have read all the productivity books I already do my daily Focus sessions I already do a weekly review I'm already familiar with all

the techniques that Ali's talking about like fair enough of course have a refund the course was not you I get it it's understandable re refunds are one of those interesting things like I've spoken to a bunch of my team members about this as well and everyone I know who you know we we take refund requests very personally or we have a tendency to take refund requests very personally it's like someone has paid you money and then they have gone through the effort of emailing you to say I don't think your product is good enough for

me and therefore I want my money back oh that can feel bad at times um I try and reframe my you know and initially when we getting refund request I was like I was like losing sleep over every single one but then I kind of realized that that was the whole point the whole point of offering a ludicrous money back guarantee is to make it super easy for people to get refunds if someone wants a refund we'll just give it to them and we'll ask them a question that would helps us improve the product the

product has improved massively over the last 6 months as a result of the fact we've got people going through it and as a result of the fact that we have some people who have asked for refunds because it's not for them one of the things that I often say to new entrepreneurs or creators who trying to build businesses who worry about the selling thing is refunds are your best friend just offer an unlimited no questions asked money back guarantee or one question asked like how how can we improve the product I think that's usually a

good question to ask to actually improve the product because you actually don't want the money of someone that doesn't think your thing is valuable you only want the money for people who are getting value out of the thing and refunds are a perfect way to give people the option to try the thing out and if they don't like it they'll just get a refund easy enough um but I can't deny that like seeing I know we've had over a 100 refund requ at this point maybe even like 200 no probably not 200 maybe like 100

100 refund requests at this point and each one initially when I see the notification for like re a refund request I'm like oh no I know I'm going to feel bad about this but it's you know part of the spiritual challenge of Entrepreneurship part of the spiritual challenge of building a business is you got to be okay with that you got to feel the emotion feel the punch to the gut of like someone didn't like my thing uh my thing was for them okay okay okay I'm going to feel that I'm going to feel the

emotion I'm going to feel the emotion that's okay okay nice let's give him the money back of course it's basically an automated process with the team team dealing with the operations and finance side of things and let's see what can we improve about the product based on this we don't want to overcorrect the product based on one person's feedback but if we're seeing like a handful of people are like it's too overwhelming okay cool it's probably too overwhelming let's like change something about that if we're seeing a bunch of people saying Ali speaks too fast

these are a paying customers I should probably slow down my rate of speech when I'm teaching a course because it's just a little bit more accessible if we're seeing a bunch of refund requests because the time zones weren't right for them we start thinking okay cool should we add more time zones or should we reframe expectations like what's what's the balance here cuz I guess when it comes to building a product there's always like two things that you're balancing you're balancing what is the offer I.E what is the expectation in the mind of the audience

and then what are you actually delivering and ideally you want those to be perfectly in sync you want the audience you want the customer to know what they're getting and to be getting it and ideally more than what they got what they sign up for you ideally want to overd deliver on the expectation but sometimes because of the way we phrase things and because like oh I didn't realize that the way we said that thing on our sales page that person who is actually in an asia-pacific time zone we didn't exactly specify that that was

400 p.m. GMT they assumed it was 4 p.m. hkt so they assumed they'd be able to attend that thing but actually wouldn't be able to attend that thing so actually the expectation that we set was wrong we should just tweak the languaging on the sales page or in the video sales letter or any of that kind of stuff to make sure that the expectation is aligned with reality man even just looking through this thing about refund makes me feel bad I'm like oh there's people who signed up for a thing and they're asking for refunds

oh no oh no oh no no no but I have to remind myself that it's part of the process part of releasing any kind of product is to open yourself up to refund requests and to negative reviews and that's okay as long as we are doing whatever is in our power to make the product really good which we are it's really good now um and we are yeah giving people the money back if they they don't want us to have the money that's totally okay refunds refunds refunds refunds that's interesting all right I think this

video has gone on for long enough there are still a few things that we haven't quite talked about we haven't talked about like the Personnel requir requirements behind this that would be a lot to go into and there's a few other things um I have a segment of my newsletter called business class if you're here you should probably sign up there'll be a link down below where at some point we'll do a behind the scenes look at how specifically we structure the team and the onboarding and like the operations and the finances and the HR

side of of this business and maybe my business as a whole if you have gotten to this point in the video I would love to hear in the comments down below like what more like what what did you get out of this I'm so I'm so curious as to how many people will be at this point in the video because this is a really really really freaking long video what did you get out of this uh because should we do more of this and I mean we will do more of this sort of stuff but

I I would love to know what was useful what was less useful what would you like to see more of what would you like to see less of what's interesting about this sort of thing and in what way is it potentially helping you on your own journey I would love to know that in the comments down below if you'd like to leave a comment that uh and the the common thing is too long on YouTube or it gets cut out or whatever feel free to DM me on Instagram my team looks at all the messages

and we they sort of screenshot and post interesting things into our feedback channels if it's feedback about a stuff or about our video so I would love to get a DM on Instagram if you want to whatever or email me Al al.com would love to know what you thought of this video anyway thank you so much for watching have a lovely day and I'll see you hopefully in the next one bye-bye