Using Kit and social media together, Ali and his team scaled to $5 million in revenue in two years, grew his list by hundreds of thousands, and gave Ali back the freedom to create on his own terms again.
This is how they did it.
Challenge: Breaking dependence on earning through sponsored content but only having social media to sell your online course
Ali Abdaal left his job as a doctor in 2020 to become a full-time creator and YouTuber, where he made most of his money from creating sponsored content.
During medical school, Ali learned that making work fun was the best way to get out of the grind and enjoy the day-to-day, which became the basis of his content and, later, his new book Feel-Good Productivity coming out in December 2023.
He was grateful to be building a creator business where he had more freedom, but deep down, he felt trapped creating content based on what sponsors needed. Making money from brand-sponsored content felt like he was doing everything on other brands’ terms instead of his own.
You lose some freedom and autonomy to create content in the way you want. You’re tied to deadlines.
And you’re beholden to trying to get views because often a brand will say, “Oh, you got less views on that video therefore we’re going to cut your rate.”
On all these platforms, you can’t control how many views you get. All of that stuff is putting your destiny in someone else’s hands.
Ali knew the only way to put his creator destiny back into his own hands was to make his own products to sell.
He got an idea for an online course to teach other people how to become part-time YouTubers like he did during medical school. But that presented another challenge: selling via a social media platform.
Getting someone to click a link takes them off the platform, so the algorithms penalize trying to do a call to action in a YouTube video. You’re going to get fewer views on that video because it’s a call to action that takes people off the platform.
Selling a course would help him be less beholden to algorithms and brands. But selling something to everyone on his social media platforms seemed like a fast way to alienate his audience. That’s when he started thinking about getting more focused on email.
Solution: Ali switched to Kit to unlock the power of email marketing
Ali had an email list for a few years but was only using it to write a newsletter and wasn’t making any money from it.
But he saw a lot of other professional creators using Kit and decided to give it a try. He was nervous because of how expensive it was for his large list (he migrated over 100,000 subscribers), so he was motivated to make the most of it quickly.
First, he hired someone to help map out the customer journey via Kit automations.
Then, he developed lead magnets that took people from watching a YouTube video to signing up for his email list, where they receive emails about his course only if they said they were interested (by using tags and segments).
Strategy: Make email marketing the backbone of promotion and sales
1. Segment your audience (and avoid alienating them)
Ali says one of the biggest mistakes creators make is trying to sell a product to their entire audience.
Only people who have opted into hearing about our YouTube course get emails about the course.
When someone joins Ali’s email list, only those who say they are interested in becoming a YouTuber (via a course waitlist) will get sales emails. Everyone else will simply get his Sunday newsletter.
Segmenting, Ali says, is the key to selling in a way that doesn’t come across as “salesy.”
Thanks to all of Kit’s tools, we made two million dollars with our final cohort and got no hate for it online.
2. Add lead magnets to social content to move your social media audience to your email list
When Ali first started using email, he would mention his newsletter once in a while in passing during a YouTube video.
But, once he decided to sell a course, he wanted to focus more on email and started adding more specific lead magnets to some of his videos.
First, he did a giveaway to celebrate his channel growing to 4 million subscribers, which got him 80,000 more people on his list. But, he says, one of the best lead magnets he ever created was a bit of a surprise.
He was making a video about how he manages his time and was showing a Google Sheet template he uses. At the last minute, he thought maybe people watching the video might also want access to this simple template, so he quickly turned it into a lead magnet using Kit and added the link to the bottom of his video which helped grow his list even further.
3. Learn about email marketing automations and tags (or hire someone)
Creating landing pages, automations, and segmenting a list can be simple, but it does take some time to set up your ideal system. Once it’s set up, it gets easier and easier. But the initial setup can be daunting.
For some creators, it comes pretty easily.
But others decide to hire help.
Ali looked to Jakub on his team to help with Kit. Jakub was originally hired to be a writer, but since he also had some email marketing background, Ali thought he would be perfect for this role.
Jakub took Brennan Dunn’s course on Mastering Kit, read a few books like Copywriting Secrets, and began creating automations inside Kit that would help sell Ali’s course.
Ali’s advice for hiring?
I think creators have an unfair advantage because you can always find someone in your audience. The bigger your audience is, the more likely there is someone there who is the perfect person who would love to work for you.
I also think you don’t have to have a background in marketing. If you just know how to write really well and you read a few helpful books and take a course, you can get someone from no experience to pretty good. And Kit has Creator University which also has a bunch of resources and articles about how to use the different features.
4. Sell your products through your email list instead of social media
Growing an email list, just like growing a social media following, can be great, especially when it comes to amassing brand deals.
But, as Ali learned, without having his own products (and automations to sell them), he felt obligated to create content at an unsustainable pace.
Email has so many benefits, and when you speak to anyone who makes stupid amounts of money online as a creator, it is very unusual for it to be from anything other than selling their own products.
And it’s very unusual for the top marketing channel for their own products to be anything other than email.
Ali says he doesn’t get negative reactions when he sells in his emails, especially because he focuses on delivering value in his content first and then mentioning his products in a “PS” at the bottom.
People don’t get annoyed about that kind of stuff. If you’re worried about alienating your audience on social media, I get it. But the kind of people who read and respond to their email are in fact different to people who just browse social media.
I think if you want to sell anything to your audience, having your own email list is one of the absolute best channels—probably the single best channel—you could possibly have to sell something to your audience. Because when you have your own email list, you can contact them. They’ve opted into it.
Once a subscriber opts in, Ali recommends segmenting those who might be most interested in and helped by whatever product you’ve created into a separate segment and focusing sales there. (It won’t be everyone, and that’s a good thing.)
Maybe it’s a course, a coaching program, a workshop, a template, or a seminar. Whatever the thing might be, email is always the number one channel for selling anything.
As a creator you’ve got to have an email list. If you don’t, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Result: $5 million in revenue and making content at your own pace
Ali will never forget the day this year when he was on a beach in Mexico, and his Head of Marketing, Jakub, was on his honeymoon in the Maldives, and they kept getting sales notifications.
They made $528,000 through one Kit automation they’d set up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday to sell the Part-Time YouTuber Academy course.
Jakub was chilling on a beach in the Maldives for his honeymoon and not logging into Kit, but it was all set up ahead of time. Because we segmented the list and had an automated sequence, it generated half a million dollars in four days. It was absolutely insane.
It almost sounds cliche to make money while you’re on a beach, but Ali, Jakub, and the team put in a lot of work ahead of time to make that happen. Even then, there are no guarantees. They were so relieved and excited that it worked.
Ali was nervous when he first switched to Kit because at the time it was the most expensive software they had. But, once they implemented these strategies, he says, “it immediately started making us way more money than we were spending on it.”
Our email list is way more powerful than having a social media audience, and I would rather have a 500,000 email list than 5 million YouTube subscribers.
He’s also not always selling to these subscribers and focuses on giving value from his Sunday newsletter.
But when it does come time to sell something, he’s grateful to have such an engaged audience he can contact directly, especially with his new book coming out, Feel-Good Productivity, which he’s spent years working on.
When you have an email list and you sell stuff to that email list, you’re putting your destiny in your own hands.
And you don’t have to sell to them when you don’t want to because there’s no deadline. There’s no brand telling you to do it.
Thanks to the fact that we sell our own product through our email list now, I have the freedom to live, learn, and teach on my own terms, which is the thing I care about.
If you found this case study helpful, please show Ali some support by buying his book. You can also learn more at aliabdaal.com.
Photography by Henry Thong
