Many people have predicted that the future of work is in portfolio jobs made up of multiple income streams, including online courses. This week YouTuber and Junior Doctor, Ali Abdaal released his 2020 income that gives information on what that portfolio might look like and how someone might get there. Ali’s income revolves around his Youtube channel, which currently has 1.3 million subscribers.

Ali Abdaal’s 2020 Revenue – £1,013,000

A full-time job as a doctor £22,100 (First seven months of the year only)
Youtube Adsense £100,695
Affiliates £132,471
Sponsors £136,000
Skills share courses including affiliate links £350,000
Online Part-time YouTuber Academy course £220,000
Alumni inner circle membership £53,000

The online part-time Youtuber Academy course and Alumni Inner circle membership

Ali recently launched his first online cohort-based course. The course lasts four weeks and starts at $1495 for the Essential Edition. Premium and Executive editions cost $2495 and $4995 and provide additional features including lifetime access to future courses and further access to Ali and his team. The course’s first cohort had three hundred and sixty students enrol for a total income of £220,000. Ali chose to charge this amount to provide a premium service that would deliver meaningful change in his students. In the video, he explains that people need accountability and community to help them learn from a course in today’s world of unlimited online content. By charging a significant fee for a four-week part-time academy, he can get heavily involved. He delivers sessions live, provides access to himself and his team, and can do much more to help his students make it as creative entrepreneur’s on YouTuber.

If you build an audience over a long period of time who, know, like, and, trust you, then when you start charging real money for a product which is actually good, people will be happy to pay that money and pay for access to you.
Ali Abdaal

The course was so successful that the students asked for ongoing access to the community and Ali. An impressive one hundred and twenty-four students (34% progression rate) have signed up for membership of the Alumni inner circle service. Features of the Inner circle include a monthly coaching call with Ali, guest workshops, additional content, and weekly and daily events.

This idea of building a following via YouTube and social media and then providing access to you via an online course is an interesting one compared to the University model. Large institutions leverage their longstanding reputations and Government protection to attract students and charge them significant amounts of money to provide them with the content, accountability, and community Ali refers to. Courses like this one are beginning to develop sophisticated delivery models and provide motivated students with the skills they require to succeed at work. Will we start to see academics pursuing a portfolio job, working part-time for Universities while building a YouTube follow that they then use to deliver courses directly to students?

Building a portfolio job

Most of us rely almost entirely on a single source of income. This should scare us more than it does. For several years, Ali has asked his coworkers if they would continue to work in medicine if they won the lottery. Half respond they would leave immediately, and the other half say they would go part-time. When asked why they do not become part-time now, the answer is usually related to money. The video gives some useful advice for anyone wanting to start becoming a creative entrepreneur and making some, or all, of their living from the internet.

…If you want to seriously want to get to this level…of making money online, you have to put in large amounts of work over a very long period of time. But the good news is that all of this is really, really fun so it won’t feel like work hopefully.
Ali Abdaal

Ali’s full-time job is a tiny fraction of his full income, and he can hire two full-time employees and another part-time to help run it. He notes that all his various income streams result from posting useful videos to his YouTube channel, twice per week for the last three and a half years.

Like every good thing in life, the progress is slow, but if you keep at it consistently over a very long period of time, then hopefully things will start to compound.
Ali Abdaal

Google Adsense income from short video adverts and banner ads on Ali’s YoutTube videos. Monetising a YouTube channel through Adsence requires a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. He provides the annual growth of this income:

2017 – 59 videos – 1,600 subs – £0
2018 – 88 videos – 120k subs – £12,329
2019 – 62 videos – 450k subs – £33,186
2020 – 98 videos (307 total) – 1.3M subs – £100,695

Once the channel grew and the subscriptions and watch time increased, affiliates through Amazon affiliate links and similar, and sponsorship income started to grow. Again, Ali stresses that this income relies on the success of the YouTube channel. Ali also introduced several Skillshare courses in areas including productivity and study skills that are currently his highest income stream but rely on a massive scale driven by his YouTube channel’s popularity.

Success = work x luck x unfair advantage.

Work in this equation involves consistently publishing content that is as useful as possible. Ali mentions that he is routinely spending upwards of six hours per night, developing his skills, researching, and producing content and has been for the last fourteen years. The luck is the type that comes from putting lots of work to take advantage of the opportunities when they arise. This luck includes the YouTube algorithm. Most of his videos get viewing figures around 20% of his subscription numbers, but his videos’ small fraction will often earn significantly more views. The challenge is there is no knowing which videos will go viral and which will get baseline figures. Unfair advantages are the things that you bring to the table that others can’t. Ali provides the example of when he started making videos and was studying medicine at Cambridge University. He used being a trainee doctor and Cambridge University’s reputation to attract people to his channel before proving himself as an individual. He made videos that played off these two elements to build his early subscriptions. Ali suggests that any new YouTuber works from their unfair advantages to help get their first views and subscribers.

So the challenge for any aspiring YouTuber: Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for at least two years, and you will get success.

Watch the full video on YouTube and subscribe to Ali Abdaal’s channel. Get in touch with me on Twitter to let me know what you think.

In the book, The 100-year life, the authors introduce the idea of a portfolio job. To provide an individual with autonomy in their working life, they step away from full employment in a single position to take on several smaller roles that together make up the required income and creative outlets that person desires. A portfolio job requires the individual to have developed mastery in a field that they can then exploit for revenue through various products and services. It is an attractive idea for those of us that have worked hard to develop a level of mastery in our chosen fields, but it is a step away from what most of us learned in school. For knowledge workers, the two big questions are who are our potential customers and what kind of products are services can we offer them?

1000 True Fans

Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired Magazine and author, wrote an article in 2008 titled 1,000 true fans in which he argued that to be a successful creator and make a living, you only need a thousand true fans. Kelly defines a true fan as someone that will buy anything that you produce and a living as earning $100,000 per year. To make $100,000 per year as income, you must create enough to earn $100 profit from each of these true fans and then sell them directly. This calculation assumes that it is better to sell more to your existing fans than it is to find new ones and that you get to keep all the purchase price from any sale instead of giving away a percentage to an intermediary.

The target of 1000 true fans is a number that is manageable for most people, that could be as simple as one per day for a few years. You can play with this formula depending on your field, so if you can earn more per true fan, you need fewer of them to hit the $100,000 mark. These true fans will also work for you through word of mouth marketing and attract regular fans that may purchase some but not all of your product so focusing your attention on them is far more valuable than other marketing approaches.

Kelly highlights two areas where this formula is becoming accessible to a larger group of creators. The first and more obvious reason is the internet has made it far easier to connect, build relationships, and have financial transactions directly to a vast pool of consumers. The second and less obvious reason is how network effects amplify the discoverability of niche products and put them one click away from that best selling ones.

Selling your creative output is an easy idea for traditional creatives such as musicians or artists, but what about knowledge workers?

The Full-Stack Freelancer

Tiago Forte has built a portfolio business as a freelancer in Forte Labs and suggests seven types of product that can make up a portfolio income in his blog post ‘The rise of the full-stack freelancer.’ These income streams can mix products and services, digital and physical, and passive and active income.

Social Media
Blog/subscriptions
Public workshops
Online courses
Phone coaching
Corporate training
Consulting

A portfolio of income streams takes advantage of opportunistic addition; doing each of these in moderation can add value and minimise the diminishing returns experienced when focusing exclusively on one area. Each of the products or services feed off each other and create a marketing funnel from free content to the higher value offerings. True fans can be developed in one direction through this funnel or move through multiple streams and back again with a monthly subscription to a premium blog, purchasing one-off highly interactive courses, and receiving a free monthly newsletter for example.

Creating a portfolio life

The idea of discovering and cultivating a relationship with a collection of individuals who will then purchase what you produce to give you a steady and comfortable living is exciting. A place to start could be to build a presence on social media such as Twitter or Instagram and begin to cultivate an audience, and an email list, through free longer-form content on blogs or podcasts. Once you have a following, you will introduce revenue-building products or services such as a book or an online course. Whatever route you choose, the portfolio life is an attractive one, and the internet has made it easier than ever to cultivate.

Have a conversation with me about this post on Twitter; I am interested to hear your thoughts.

Tag: portfolio job

Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for two years