Ali Abdaal — From teaching study methods as a medical student to a £100,000-a-month channel

Ali Abdaal uploaded one to three YouTube videos every week while working as a doctor in a hospital. The channel, which began with medical school admissions preparation, grew to cover study methods, productivity, and technology and tools, and became a business supported by an editor and a writer. In a guide to running his YouTube channel published in 2023, he stated that his income from ads and brand sponsorships alone was over £100,000 a month.

Starting YouTube to Promote Admissions Courses

The starting point of the business was 6med, a medical school admissions education company co-founded in 2013. At the time, Ali and his friends, Cambridge medical students, thought the admissions courses they had taken were expensive and lacking in content. They agreed to offer better classes at a lower price, and Ali suggested building a website to recruit students from across the UK. Within a few months, five courses sold out, and more than 120 students took the classes.

His first goal for the YouTube channel he launched in 2017 was to promote these courses. He explained in free videos how to prepare for the medical school admissions test BMAT and interviews, so that applicants could hear his explanations before signing up for a course. He expected a flow in which students who watched the videos and found them helpful would open the description box and sign up for paid classes as well.

He learned how to handle a camera and edit videos through YouTube tutorials and searches. In an early vlog, he said that the first 50 videos would be amateurish, but that by making that many he would learn how to shoot proper videos. In fact, it took 52 videos over six months to reach 1,000 subscribers.

He began making money from ads around the time he had accumulated about 83 videos. His first income was about £5 a day, and he was thrilled that he now had money for lunch every day. By the time he started working as a doctor, his channel income had grown to about half of a junior doctor's salary. A few months later, it reached a level similar to the salary he received from the hospital.

Videos Explaining Study Methods and Tools

As Ali got hooked on the fun of making videos, the range of topics he covered also grew. In addition to admissions preparation methods, he showed a day in the life of a Cambridge medical student and introduced effective ways to study and the techniques and tools he used. In 2018, the channel reached 100,000 subscribers.

The study methods he shared were concrete enough to follow. He divided the material he needed to memorize in the flashcard app Anki and organized the structure of essay answers into a single diagram. He redrew the diagram from memory alone, found the parts where he got stuck, and reviewed them, while marking study dates and topics he needed to revisit with colors in a spreadsheet. He put the tools and the order he used while preparing for exams directly into his content.

Balancing Hospital Work and Video Production

His method for doing both hospital work and video production was batch filming. Ali explained that at the time he generally worked about 46 hours a week at the hospital. When he had two or three days off after night shifts, he filmed five or six videos in a row. In this way, he prepared in advance the content to post over the following month.

He also gathered topics in ordinary life. In a 2019 newsletter, he explained that when he heard an interesting section while listening to a podcast, he would pause playback, capture the timestamp, save it in Notion, and add his own thoughts. The notes that accumulated this way became material for his next videos and blog posts. It was a way in which the habit of learning and recording led into video production.

Editors, Writers, and YouTuber Education

Outsourcing editing was not a decision he made easily. Because of one experience in which outsourcing did not meet expectations, he thought it would be difficult to find someone who would edit in his style. After a mentor encouraged him to begin outsourcing editing in earnest in mid-2019, he gained significantly more time to do other work, and he later brought on editor Christian as a full-time employee.

Writer Angus first emailed Ali and joined him. At first, Angus worked only one day a week, then gradually increased his time with the team. Ali divided the work so that Angus turned what Ali explained in videos into blog posts, and they began distributing content made once across multiple platforms.

In August 2020, an unexpected turning point arrived. Ali had planned to take a break from hospital work in the UK and work for one year in emergency medicine in Australia, but the trip fell through when COVID-19 closed the borders. He poured the suddenly available time into YouTube and his business, and that year the channel reached 1,000,000 subscribers. What he could do outside the hospital was growing rapidly.

In November of the same year, he ran the 'Part-Time YouTuber Academy,' which teaches the experience of running a channel. The first course had 400 people participate live. Students were assigned to film, edit, and publish videos themselves every week, and by the end of the course they were required to upload at least four videos to their own channels. He translated the process he had learned from making dozens of videos into an educational product.

Leaving Medicine to Devote Himself to Creative Work

Whether to continue working as a doctor was still an open question. In April 2021, while writing in his journal about what he would want to do if he could not fail, he discovered a striking fact. Over the course of writing 800 words, he had said almost nothing about medicine except for teaching. The future he naturally wrote down included a life of traveling, writing books, and making videos.

He decided to test out working two days a week in emergency medicine and contacted the hospital. Even during several shifts, the thought repeatedly came to him that he wanted to gather with team members in a shared office to write books and make videos. After months of reflection, he decided to leave medical work entirely and devote himself to creative work and business.

Expenses of Running a Team and the First Book

As the company grew, new worries arrived. In December 2022, he disclosed that expenses had increased by USD 1,000,000 due to leasing a London studio, hiring, equipment purchases and coaching, while revenue stayed flat, so profit fell by the same amount. It was the first profit decline he had experienced since starting the YouTube business. Even though the company was still making a substantial profit, finding himself feeling like a failure because the number was down from the previous year was a bewildering experience for him.

In 2023 he published his first book, Feel-Good Productivity, which became a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. The book weaves together productivity strategies he had personally tested over more than a decade, research, and expert interviews to show how to get important work done while enjoying the process. In a piece introducing the book, he wrote that he wanted to spend his life continuing to learn new things, apply them to his own life, and pass them on to others. The small channel that began by explaining medical school admissions had, in effect, built him a career that allowed him to sustain that life.