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 dollars by the 12-month mark. Now, these numbers are pretty insane, at least for me. 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 scratch. 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 and 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.

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 that you can work towards what I call the five Fs: 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 six-figure business while I was a medical student at Cambridge. I built my next business to six 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 two 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, 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 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 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 the word. Have you heard of Mark Manson? What is the one word you associate with Mark Manson? It's probably not the word subtle; it's probably a different word.

Have you heard of James Clear? Of course, you've heard of James Clear. What is the one word you associate with James Clear? I don't even need to say what that word is; it's obvious what the one word that most people associate with James Clear is. Now, if you hear the name Ali Abdaal, what is the one word that you associate with the name Ali Abdaal? 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 is like a high, you know, it's evergreen. People are always interested in being more productive. It is like, it's got longevity to it in the sense of like let's say back like 2017, if someone was watching my YouTube channel and they were seeing videos about how to get into med school, if someone was describing Ali Abdaal, 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 last forever.

Similarly, if you look back to the channel in 2018, it's like, "Who is Ali? 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 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 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.

I didn’t think about it consciously at the time like that, "Oh, this is a good word," 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 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, 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, "Hey, 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 making more money in like a week than I would have in six years working as a doctor, and that 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 4Xed 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, it was not about YouTube. The YouTuber Academy was our primary product, which is kind of weird, right? Like it was a bit of a weird place to be.

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, a 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.

But then, as Gareth was doing the market research for this course about productivity, he landed on this idea of community. This was late 2023, and community seems to be all the craze. 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.

Gareth did a little bit of kind of market research on this. We went on, 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 up-to-date performance metrics for all the reels 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 GPT 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 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 competitor 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 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, gamified, the better it will be—like flares or prize challenges or weekly productivity exercises. I wanted it 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 a good insight. I also don’t want us to think about this in the same way as the YouTuber Academy Community. The 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.

Ang doesn’t like the name the name Clubhouse because of the defunct social. I don’t know, I quite like clubhouse as a word. 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 one of the things that Amazon does is that they insist on sort of written memos for 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—this what a notion thing looks like—SOPs, standard operating procedures, partners, affiliates, product roadmap, surveys, feedback, marketing assets, ideas like this is interesting, might be potentially interesting to look at.

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 where 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 Labs was on our competitor list. 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 are doing. Even though I'm friends with 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, 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; they should. Figma, if you're watching this, reach up please.

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, part-time Labs, book business, marketing, YouTube channel, deep dive, rebrand, courses, design assets, software level up, content product, 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 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. 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 dream outcome: 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 in your work and your life while enjoying the journey along the way.” It’s like, “Okay, 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, 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 this book about? What is this product? 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 freak are we actually creating? This is the thing that we 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 productivity 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 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 kind of mean like for me, I have a vague mental sense of like 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 a bit abstract; you can’t like 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, let’s just stick with double productivity. And at the time we couldn’t come up with a better framing of the thing, and so we went down the double productivity angle, but I think in hindsight the mental model—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 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—are they talking about, “Oh my goodness, the flight to Tenerife 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 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, those are the things that people want.

And double your productivity is a vehicle to get you there. By positioning the product through virtue of selling the vehicle, we actually, I think, made a mistake there. So I should have listened to the team and not used double your productivity as like the angle. Sell the destination, not the vehicle. I think ultimately we landed on achieve your goals as 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 title of this Figma board where we were like, “All right, so we know that 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 rather 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, like, no one takes action. We found this with our YouTuber Academy. We have thousands 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 thousand students signed up for a live cohort; they’ve paid $2,000 to join this live cohort course for six weeks where we take them through and we give them homework assignments and everything. 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 is 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 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: what are the things that help me execute on stuff? We had this sort of whole goal planning system—like this GPS system—which is now featuring as part of the course, which is now part of the Lab, etc., etc.

You 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 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 or 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 where true power lies.

You know, we’re just throwing out phrases and stuff. I think someone—that either came from me or someone in the team, I can't remember. And so here we’re like, “All right 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 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.

What if we get them to do a one-on-one 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; step one is to set the goal. Nice, that's good. The way that I think about this stuff often is like, 'What is the three-step process?' It's 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 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; it’s a real thing. It’s like maybe if you're, I don’t know, 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 for an MBA?

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 to 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 Emmanuel College Cambridge Library. I would get loads of work done; 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.

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. People—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, cool! What if we built this productivity Club around this idea of Zoom co-working sessions?" I was like, "Okay, you know, that makes sense." So we were 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, "Alright, 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. 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 plan your next week. And so some kind of reflection workshop built into this could be quite interesting. You know, basically from like 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.

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. 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 had I thought I’d sworn off them, but it’s 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 their productivity, achieving their goals, taking action? It’s like, yeah, 100% they absolutely would. If you're 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 the mistakes we made with this was we made the mistake of 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’s a fantastic book I’ve been reading recently; it’s not here right now, it’s called “Ready, Fire, Aim” by Michael Masterson. 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 and release new products, the more likely you are to get to 10 million revenue 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 we want to get to 10 million, that’s the next goal because why not—it’s a fun video game.

And so the thing we need to do is basically new products. One of the things he argues in the book is that basically he has a little formula which is kind of fun, which is G is in—is directly proportional to I times V squared. I love this sort of stuff. Well, what he actually says is 0.8 of G, so G is growth; it’s a bit of a dodgy formula. Um, I is innovation, and V 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 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 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 the 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 Masterson says in the book—a sales page needs to be whipped up or at least the basics of the sales page written within 24 hours of having the idea because the sales page is fundamentally the thing that condenses the idea 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 is something Alex Hormozi 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. That’s something we’ve now incorporated into our new product development process—daily check-in.

The other thing that I wish we’d 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 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 got it ready in like January and February; we launched it in like April 2024. And now I’m currently filming this in November 2024, and we are now in the process and have been for the last six months of like iteration and improvement.

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, 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 reached out to a friend of mine, Greg Eisenberg, who is a great guy. Check out his YouTube channel; it’s awesome. And we actually recorded a conversation in like February 2024. I don’t think we ever uploaded that; it’s a bit too niche to upload on the main channel but I will—I might put it on my deep dive channel, actually. Yeah, maybe we’ll put it on the deep dive channel; that could be kind of interesting.

Either way, like either we’ll put it as an unlisted video or as a video on the deep dive channel and we’ll link it down below if you’re interested in watching this whole like hour-long 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 what matters to them while feeling good along the way; have fun in your work, be richer, make more money, be less stressed, 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-gooders, productivity mules, Freedom Chasers, load balances, effortless balances, feel gooders, keyboard surfers, web surfers, Focus friends, athletes, brain leads, mind leads, intentional intention.”

Uh, the Journey Squad, mindful dumbbell 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. 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 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'd be so cool, we’d use the pirate emoji. Like join the crew with productivity pirates.com.” Unfortunately, it was taken, but it's like jointhecrew.net; it would be so fun, it would be so cool to 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. I was like, “Hm, creators cove maybe could be the thing.” Like Productivity Pirates could have this little 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 release the Marauders Mastermind which is sort of like yeah, a mastermind group where people get to hang out with me.” And like, uh, and maybe our YouTuber Academy community 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, and Productivity Pirates 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 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. Um, conveniently, we also previously when we were doing stuff had hired a designer who 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 course and our Creator Academy and Camera Confidence, and we had this designer like make us some of these logos and we had—I think 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—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 Productivity Lab; 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, it's pirates, and then you can get like, you can have different ranks like crewmate and comrade and soldier and pirate. And then, like— I had this whole like world-building around the idea 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 logos—double your productivity, enjoy the journey, that sort of thing—and it ended up being this purple branding, and it 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 two 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 of... actually—yeah, we might as well keep it 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 f*%k 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 isn’t good, this is bad,” it’s 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 say stuff like this in the videos some of the time if I just need to give myself a bit of a pep talk. Like even yesterday, like there was this whole heaviness to filming a video like this because 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 views on the channel are sort of down 10% 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 for the people that care about this sort of stuff.

And the people that don’t are not going to watch it anyway, and that’s okay. Like 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 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 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 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 what matters to you 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—like I wish we had a more 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 get-along 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, thanked you if you clicked on that.

Now one liked Productivity Pirates, 60% of people liked 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 waitlist.

This was on the 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! Join the waitlist! So once we set up a waitlist 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 monthly pricing or quarterly pricing, but we thought initially—the problem with a community thing like this or sort of any kind of membership is that you’re always dealing with churn. And at the start, we wanted to collect the money upfront 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’s put into that person CU; they’re only with us for a month.

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 churn so much, but the problem is—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 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 just probably wouldn’t do that. Probably be 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 $1,000; 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 aspect 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 have kept us 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 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. We missed an opportunity to just see what would happen when we allowed people to build monthly. We would have had way better analytics, way better tracking. We would have seen every single month, “Holy sh*t! 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.” I think possibly, probably, most likely, we could have improved the product quicker by allowing people to cancel their membership.

I’m still not sure about this. 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, often 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 large amount of work that it takes to 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—I actually am going to do at some point in January. Had we done that, we would have made as much money in a way easier way with just a different vehicle.

Like 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 only need a thousand people to be joining every year for this to be a million-dollar-a-year product. If it was a $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. 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 10,000 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’s not for everyone. Like 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 product for working professionals and entrepreneurs, and that’s fine.

We do stuff for students; we have free content 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 $1,000 YouTuber Academy course; students can afford my book.

But it’s like every—not every product needs to be for everyone. 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 just appeals to different people.

In general, I am a fan of charging more money for fewer people because then generally you get a higher quality customer if they’re paying you more money. And there’s sort of memes about this in the sort of business community—things like, “Hey, if you charge someone $500 for a project, they’re going to be like, ‘Hey, you know, like, can I get a refund of like $50 because like actually, 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 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 greater percentage of their income or net worth they’re spending on a thing, the more attached they’re going to be to the thing, the more they’re going to have customer service complaints 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 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. We’re going to have daily Zoom co-working sessions. And so we hired some productivity coaches—more on those later—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 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. 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.

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 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 five years on building his software side project, 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.

You can see this 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 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. 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’s when it gets edited, 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.

Whenever you’re watching this, maybe it’s launched already; you can check it out at AliAbdaal.com, and it’s sort of this kind of thing—how can I help you be more productive, grow a YouTube channel, build a business, boost your grades? A little bit about me, popular videos, podcast, all of this sort of stuff, and we kind of went through multiple rounds of kind of changes and mock-ups with the web design agency. 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 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 its own color scheme.

So OL Academy, which is going to be sort of the free section, is going to be blue; then we’ll have part-time 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 doing like a whole refresh for this. And then there’s 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 put out last month from one of our team retreats, and there’s like 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 six, seven months. I’m not going to show you the introductions because then you’ll see people’s actual data, and this is only for members. 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 because it’s like—I mean Circle, the platform, does all the work; Circle is the all-in-one community platform for dot, dot, 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—the? Have we got an affiliate link? I don’t know; maybe I’ll put an affiliate link 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 curriculum—a structured curriculum that helps people be more productive and actually achieve their goals. We wanted to do it alongside this—it 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. I was in London in February of 2024; it was a random weekend, and I just messaged these guys because 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. Both of them are building their own businesses. Sahel is building an app called FireCut which is like a Premiere 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 were like, "Hey, should we just all get together in a WeWork 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 similar-ish stuff, even if it’s different stuff, it just makes you more productive, and it makes it way more fun.

Then, this is my friend Charlotte who we worked with and one of her colleagues, Katie. Katie is a learning designer; Charlotte is—I'm not sure what Charlotte is. Charlotte is an entrepreneur and also a 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 in April 2024; this was over about a three-week period where we 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 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?

Because 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 feel-good, 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, Sharpies, 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