How I built 9 streams of income by Age 23 — ALI ABDAAL (Chapter-3)

6 min readJul 15, 2021

Ali Abdaal is one of the new and brightest faces of the YouTube Community from Europe. He uploads videos about how he managed to gather the multiple arts and qualities in him, He also shares the way he did it, and the best part of him is that he wants his YouTube followers to learn from the mistakes he did and adapt the best of him. Recently, he uploaded a video talking about, how he managed to build 9 streams of income by Age 23? So, here’s a summary from our friend himself, Ali Abdaal.

He starts the video by distributing the streams of income in three different chapters.

· Chapter 1 — Trading time for Money.

· Chapter 2 — Productized Services.

· Chapter 3 — Digital Products.

CHAPTER 3 — Digital Products.

At this point, I was 21 years old and I had 5 different streams of income. I later realized that a lot of it was tied to my time and me being physically present there, making it a lot of hard work. At time, I was going through my med school at Cambridge University. Obviously, it was quite hard and, on the weekends, I’d be staying up late at night compiling our course manuals.

Digital Products

We would have physical books that were to be delivered to places / different venues and making sure they reached specific place at time. Making sure my partners reached the venues, and safely was a logistic headache for me for running these physical courses all around places. So, I knew the next thing would be digital products. One great specific thing about digital products is that you make them once then you can actually sell them a zillion time. And it doesn’t take any more effort to sell a million copies of a digital product than it takes to sell a single copy of a digital product. This automatically led to the idea of scale built into it.

1. EBOOKS — As I realized that we had more students than we could handle anymore. And with that, we had students outside of UK from Australia and Singapore or some people new into the UK. Listened about our courses. They were like can we access your course materials. I thought hang on. I turned the course manual I wrote into an E-book and I sold it on the website for £29 and the best part was that people bought it and I just sent them a pdf and that was that. It was like selling a digital product that didn’t take any extra effort. And even it felt like free money and with courses it never felt like that. But selling a digital product to someone I didn’t even know was feeling like free money.

2. BMAT NINJA — By the time I and my brother realized a need to create an online question bank for BMAT, using the Ninja domain name was because it was really inexpensive. In the summer, I decided to code the back-end design and my brother designed the front-end design of it. It was like a question bank and students could sign-up and subscribe to it for £29, then they would have the access to all the questions and answer available in the bank and as they would be doing it, they could also track their progress and it would give them an experience of achieving. So, this was like a dream digital product for me. Inside the business, this is known as SaaS (Software as a Service), we were basically selling access to this software that was a bank of questions. We did this over the period of summer of 2015. And it was loads of work and we were doing this for months. So, that is the power of DIGITAL PRODUCTS. The principle of this kind of business is that to keep the cost of entry for someone else really high. It was really easy for a random first-year student to take a course. But it is really hard for a random medical student to think, ‘let me create a coded question bank from a scratch’ so I and my brother actually had an unfair advantage as we taught ourselves all this from the days when we were at school.

3. UKCAT NINJA — Like the above one, this was also based on the same idea of digital products. In the Year 2015, I decided to code the back-end design and my brother designed the front-end design of it. It was like a question bank and students could sign-up and subscribe to it for £29, then they would have the access to all the questions and answer available in the bank and as they would be doing it, they could also track their progress and it would give them an experience of achieving. So, this was like a dream digital product for me. Inside the business, this is known as SaaS (Software as a Service), we were basically selling access to this software that was a bank of questions. We did this over the period of summer of 2015. And it was loads of work and we were doing this for months. So, that is the power of DIGITAL PRODUCTS. The principle of this kind of business is that to keep the cost of entry for someone else really high. It was really easy for a random first-year student to take a course. But it is really hard for a random medical student to think, ‘let me create a coded question bank from a scratch’ so I and my brother actually had an unfair advantage as we taught ourselves all this from the days when we were at school.

Selling digital products taught us a hard lesson about business and earning money was that you didn’t need to be physically present there at the place and did not have to always do the physical labor as being smart with that would get you out of it.

So, if you are really interested that how I did all this and learn about streams of income, I would suggest you three books that I would recommend: