Who Should You Hire First?

Hey folks 👋

In last week’s newsletter we shared some information about Ali’s team, and we got a few replies asking about the order in which he hired everyone. So that’s what we’re going to break down this week.

Before we get into that though, we've made a notion template with Ali's pre-filming warm-up plan, camera drills and presenting style tips into this free notion template if you want to check it out. If you do download and give it a try, you’ll also be signed up for updates on our upcoming Camera Confidence course. 📸

🤫 Behind the Scenes

Back in 2019, after 2 years on YouTube, Ali had roughly 100,000 subscribers and he decided that editing should be the first thing he outsourced. It was the biggest time sink for him and his style could be relatively easily replicated by someone else, so the return on investment would be highest there. He went through a few freelancers websites, and after a few different trials, found someone called Christian on People Per Hour and amazingly, Ali has had the same editor since September 2019. He hired Christian full-time immediately though, which is unusual as most creatorpreneurs would hire someone part-time to begin with and steadily increase from there, but Ali had just started making enough to cover a full-time employee.

He then hired a writer in January 2020 called Angus, who started part time working 1 day a week writing scripts, and then went full time in April 2020, picking up all sorts of tasks, and today is the general manager of the business. At the time, this meant that Ali could pump out even more videos, averaging 2 a week during this period, as he constantly had stuff scripted and someone to edit everything. All he had to do was record, wouldn’t that be nice.

Ali’s third hire was a personal assistant called Elizabeth Filips later in 2020, who now has a very successful channel of her own. Elizabeth looked after any kind of personal admin like emails and scheduling stuff, you can check out a video she made about working for Ali at the time here.

Ali started his flagship course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, later in 2020 as well so that team of 4 ran the first cohort. Then throughout 2021 and 2022 Ali has hired more people to look after running the course, a few more writers and a head of social media, and a few part time people to help with various things like his book.

It’s all pretty mental for someone who started out making videos in their bedroom, but what we can all learn is the value of treating your creative side hustle like a business.

Let us know by replying to this email if there's anything else you'd like to know :)

💡Creatorpreneur Insight: The Power of Leverage

Leverage is the secret sauce to scaling any business. Ali is able to get unreasonable returns because he spends money, a form of leverage, to hire people who can multiply his output. Social media platforms are also a good example of leverage, they can show your videos to millions of people and you don’t even have to pay for it. It’s free leverage.

When creators hire a team, the total amount of time dedicated to their business is suddenly much greater, and they also become more able to leverage their own skills, instead of wasting time doing stuff they're not as good at.

The quickest way to take advantage of leverage as a creator is to outsource certain tasks. Not only do you get back time, you can focus that time on things that leverage your skills better.

🤔 Creatorpreneur Diaries

A weekly update from Gareth and Tintin on their journeys as Creatorpreneurs.

Gareth

There's something very powerful about accountability. When we hold ourself accountable to our goals, we're making it clear to ourself (and everyone else) that the goal is a priority - it's not just something that may or may not get done. So, here's my goal until the end of the year: I'm going to release at least one video on my YouTube channel every week.

I've been pretty inconsistent recently, so this is going to be tough, especially while doing it alongside a full-time job. But, I also know that if I want to grow, the best fuel is consistency. If you want, you can check out my first video here haha.

How are you going to hold yourself accountable on your creator journey? Hit reply and let me know - I'd love to hear from you 🙂

Tintin

You might think that working for a full time YouTuber should make everything super easy and you could grow your YouTube channel without thinking. It’s not, at least for me 😆. However, it does come with a few benefits like seeing what it takes to succeed and being able to write in a newsletter like this for accountability.

My current Creatorpreneur goal is to find and outsource editing, as per the above leverage argument. I’ve been going back and forth on it for a few months trying to find someone through recommendations, but two weeks ago I posted to UpWork (as I couldn’t find anyone I liked on Fiverr) and I had a few good applications, and I'm now going through a few trial videos. All it required was me sitting down for a few hours, writing the job posting and then asking people who had a good portfolio if they wanted to do a trail video. It was a lot easier than I thought, and a top tip is to just have a folder with some footage and notes ready to go, which you can send to anyone who's applied. It speeds up the process a lot. Will update next week.

🧰 The Creator Toolbox

• The Sweet Setup shares updates on cool software and ideas on how to save time with tech.
• Film Booth's latest video about mistakes people make trying to grow on YouTube.
• Naval Ravikant’s (very long) podcast about building wealth and the power of leverage.
• PluralEyes automatically syncs multi-camera video and audio footage, quite expensive but saves lots of time.

📝 Written by: Tintin & Gareth       🕴 Editor: Ali Abdaal

🚀 Free 5 Day Creatorpreneur Crash Course

If you like these Creatorpreneur newsletters, you might like our free 5 day email crash course, where Ali Abdaal shares everything he knows about becoming a 'professional' Creatorpreneur. Over the 5 days you'll receive the tools, resources, and knowledge to kickstart your journey as a Creatorpreneur and build a scalable and sustainable business.