- Startup Spells 🪄
- Posts
- Ali Abdaal's "Hey Friends": From $0 to $2 Million MRR with One Tweet
Ali Abdaal's "Hey Friends": From $0 to $2 Million MRR with One Tweet
PLUS: Open AI NEW Rumors - Projects & Voice
Startup Spells 🪄
December 08, 2024
Ali Abdaal's "Hey Friends": From $0 to $2 Million MRR with One Tweet
Two years ago, Ali Abdaal, a 27-year-old junior doctor, made over $1M through 5 income streams.
By the end of 2021, he'd scaled to $4.5M across 15 streams. In 2022, his numbers grew even further. In 2023, he generated $4.6M in revenue.
Ali Abdaal Income X Post
He will probably make over $10 million per year soon.
Ali Abdaal Income Over The Years
"Hey Friends": The Agency Play
Ali, recognizing his audience needed implementation not just information, co-founded Hey Friends with Hunter and Sahil. The agency offers YouTube-as-a-Service for $12,000/month.
Hey Friends Pricing
"One of my big things is all about like treating the creator thing more like a business because almost no one that I speak to actually treats it like a business."
One Tweet, $2 Million MRR
Ali announced "Hey Friends" on X in a sneaky smart way.
Hey Friends - Promotional X Post
"One tweet from me drove 2 million MRR worth of leads that they're still going through the sales calls and trying to shore up capacity because there's so many people."
Over 100 qualified prospects booked sales calls.
"There were like literally hundreds of people that signed up for a 14,000 a month sales call and we could only onboard like 1 or 2 people a month cuz we need to hire editors and script writers and all this kind of stuff." ~ Ali Abdaal
Content-agency fit is powerful. Influencers building agencies within their niche can leverage their audience for explosive growth. Shaan Puri did the same for an overseas hiring agency when he took them to $35m in 12 months.
Ali Abdaal was perfectly suited for YouTubers as he had a course Part-Time YouTuber Academy targeted at YouTubers that did extremely well.
Creators have a massive distribution advantage but do not know how to make products. Product people know how to make products but really struggle with distribution. So in theory, if you combine those 2 things, you can make lots of money fast.
"Hey Friends" exemplifies this, demonstrating the potential when an influencer's brand aligns with an agency's offering.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
Models like o1 suggest that people won’t generally notice AGI-ish systems that are better than humans at most intellectual tasks, but which are not autonomous or self-directed
Most folks don’t have a lot of tasks that bump up against limits of human intelligence, so won’t see it
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick)
12:47 AM • Dec 7, 2024
I literally said this in yesterday's newsletter but Ethan Mollick said it much better.
George Carlin once said, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
In ~2 years, robots will think of us humans like that. They are already much ahead of us if you know how to prompt.
2/
I have so much conviction that right now we have a two year window where we don’t realize we have AGI and can build things 5x faster and whoever builds now will win long term
— Jordan O'Connor (@jdnoc)
4:21 PM • Dec 7, 2024
I've told this same thing to multiple people irl. There has been no time in history where anyone could build a billion-dollar company in <2 years with so little capital and networking skills.
Learn to use AI at its limits now and you will become a different person within 2 years. And much richer.
From another comment by Jordan, "We have a window right now where people are price sensitive and don’t want another subscription to access premium LLMs. As soon as they’re free and funded with ads the playing field levels. I’m spending $10-$20+ a day in API credits for code mostly. I’m 5x more productive."
You only have 2 years though before it gets harder. This is the opportunity that made Jeff Bezos during The Internet Era. Same era where The PayPal Mafia was born. And then the next boom came when the App Store launched. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3/
I noticed during the "12 Days of OpenAI: Day 2" livestream today that the OpenAI Platform sidebar has a new icon, possibly related to one of the upcoming announcements - "Custom Voices"
- "Create a voice below or using the OpenAI API"
- "Create a voice sample of yourself by… x.com/i/web/status/1…— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91)
7:00 PM • Dec 6, 2024
Everyone saw OpenAI's Day 2 video but no one noticed this.
Open AI Projects and Custom Voices are coming. Claude finally has competition with projects which is one of the most used features of Claude.
Rabbit Holes
Build Your Failure Resume by Alex Hormozi
AI — Rumors & Dreams Community by X Communities
Headstart accelerates software development by up to 100x with Claude by Anthropic
What’d ya think of today’s newsletter? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know.
First time? Subscribe.
Follow me on X.
Reply