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In this video, we'll break down the "steps to $1,000"-a step-by-step approach that will help you earn your first thousand dollars online. If you just follow the instructions in this video step by step, I guarantee it will help you get started on your entrepreneurial journey, and you can even make your thousand dollars just by following the advice in this free YouTube video. If we don't know each other yet, hello, my name is Ali. I am a doctor who became an entrepreneur. I've been documenting my journey to making money online since 2017, when I was a penniless medical student at Cambridge University. A few months ago, we held a "1K Challenge " for our audience, where tons of people from all over the world joined a six-week challenge to
try to earn their first $1,000. Many of them said that the experience of earning their first dollar, their first ten dollars, their first hundred dollars completely changed their lives. So the main idea of this journey from zero to a thousand dollars is not that you will instantly become rich with that thousand. The goal is to give you the first steps to learning self- employment skills through practice, not just watching videos in the hope of getting better. In this video, we'll go into detail on exactly how to make your first thousand dollars online, hopefully within the next 30 days. Even if you've never made money online before and don't have an audience to sell to. There are many different ways to make your first $1,000
online, but the one we teach our students is what I call the " 1K Steps." It is based on four missions. Mission number one- earn your first $1. Mission number two-earn your first $10. Mission number three is to earn your first $100, and you understand what it's all about. Mission number four-earn your first $1,000. I like this step-by-step, mission-oriented approach because it allows a newcomer to the world of entrepreneurship to immerse themselves gradually, step by step. So, let's start with mission number one- earn your first dollar online. Accomplishing mission number one is very simple. All you need is a way to accept payments online; just send someone a link and
ask them to support your business for just $1. This is the very first task we gave all our students as part of the "1K" challenge. Literally, you just need to register with the payment system and send your friends a link asking: "Hey, anyone want to support my entrepreneurial journey? It's only one dollar." And some people will pay you money. For example, Marcy said, "Today is one of the best days of my life. I never thought that one dollar could bring tears to my eyes. This is just my first challenge, but it has already changed my life because I will never be the same again." And then there's Sydney, who said, "
They weren't kidding about how emotional it was. The first dollar brought me to tears." And then there's Luka, who said, "It may seem like a small thing, but it's a huge thing for me. This one dollar represents action, commitment, and proof that I'm moving forward. I'm excited, energized, and ready for new challenges." These are the feelings you get when you earn your first dollar online. Personally, I earned my first dollar online at the age of 12, when I completed a freelance web design job for some guy on the internet. It completely changed my life and became my ticket into the world of entrepreneurship. So how do you actually earn your first dollar online? As I said, you simply register with a payment system through which you can send a link to
family and friends, and ask them to support your business for one dollar. Stan Store is a service that I usually recommend to beginners who are just starting to make money online. We have an affiliate agreement with them for a 30-day free trial. So if you need a free trial, the link will be somewhere below. Stan costs about $29 a month, right? So, if you are serious about making money online, I recommend signing up for Stan. It's kind of like Shopify, but mainly for selling products online. But if you are just starting out entrepreneurship, you can sign up for a platform like Gumroad, where there are no monthly fees, but they do take a 10% commission on each transaction. So for
some of our students who are serious about this and have the money, $29 a month is nothing. So, you just sign up with Stan. But for other students who are afraid of losing money and don't want a monthly subscription, they sign up for Gumroad and are willing to give 10% of the transaction volume. In addition to registering with one of these platforms, you will need a Stripe or PayPal account. Stripe is now accepted in many countries around the world. Here is a list of countries where Stripe works, so I recommend it. But if you're not on this list, then Stripe is n't supported in your region yet, and you can probably sign up for PayPal, which works
in almost every country in the world. And here we face the first obstacle to entrepreneurship. There is a certain level of complexity involved in registering a merchant account that allows you to receive payments. But believe me, you should overcome these difficulties, because that's how you will start making money online. You need a way for people to pay you. And the reason we made this the first task in the 1K challenge is because this difficulty is a barrier that stops a lot of people. Simply the logistical hassle of registering a Stripe account has been stopping people for years from even thinking about making money online, because it seems scary and complicated. Like, oh my god, do I need to register a business and all that? You
most likely do not need to register a business. In most countries, you can simply make money online if you really want to. And only when you reach a certain level of income will you think about registering a business. Honestly, I would just take your situation, ask ChatGPT, and he will give you perfectly sound financial advice on it. So, the idea is that step number one is you sign up with a payment provider. Step number two-you register on a platform like Stan or Gumroad that allows you to sell products. And you create a product called, for example, "Support My Business," and set the price at $1. And then you go to your friends and family and say, "Hi, mom, hi, dad, hi, sweetheart. This is a little
unexpected, but I'm taking my first steps into the world of entrepreneurship. Can you please support my business with one dollar? " And then they can pay through Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit card, or whatever, and congratulations, you've got your first dollar in your account. We ran this " 1K Challenge" like this: you had to send a screenshot as proof that you had earned at least one dollar before we opened the second challenge-earning your first ten dollars. We introduced this system of gradually opening tasks, and our students really appreciated it, because it literally forces you to act. Of course, there is no gradual
content discovery in this video, but if you are serious about making your first thousand dollars online and you don't yet have a way to accept payments or you haven't earned a single cent, I strongly advise you to pause the video and do so before continuing . Otherwise, this video will become just another one of hundreds of others you've watched about how to make money online, but never made a single penny. So, we asked our students to post reports on their assignments, and we had automation: as soon as someone posted " assignment completed" with a screenshot, it opened access to the next stage. Here's Gino, an intensive care nurse from Toronto, whose partner gave her a dollar or two, and here's a screenshot of her success. And
this is a screenshot of the income of one of our students from Greece, whose husband transferred $1 to her, so she received an online profit, as confirmed by her Stripe account. And here's a guy named Kevin, a high school student, whose mom and one of his friends supported him in a " support my business for $1" situation. Simply getting that one dollar and overcoming the hassle of setting up a payment account becomes a truly vital moment for many. So if you have n't done it yet, I 100% recommend you do. So, that was the first task. Congratulations, you are now an entrepreneur with a single-digit income. Well, before we move on to the second task, there's one thing that people often stumble over: at some point, you're going to have to tell people about
what you're selling. And here comes a great little tool that my team and I have been using for several months now. His name is Stanley, and they kindly sponsored this video. So Stanley is essentially your AI content director. It connects to your LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and Threads accounts, and learns your writing style across these platforms. It then helps generate ideas for content that might interest your audience, and even creates drafts of the posts themselves. And personally, we use it to repurpose content. I record videos for YouTube, write the newsletter myself, and also conduct live sessions for Lifestyle Business Academy, after which we receive transcripts. But if we want to take something I've already written or said and turn
it into different formats, it used to be a manual process involving a team: studying the transcript, finding key points, creating an Instagram carousel through Canva. Now we delegate most of this complex work to Stanley, because he can simply take the transcript and create a draft of the carousel. This saves my team a lot of time, as they only have to check the quality, make sure everything is good, and coordinate with me so that the content exactly matches my views. For example, you can use this for carousels to generate catchy phrases, or write long posts for LinkedIn or Twitter, getting already expanded content. Of course, I still make some edits, but it's very convenient to have a ready-made draft that I can edit instead of
writing everything from scratch. Another cool feature of Stanley is that you can simply write him a message. So, for example, if I'm out for a walk, I can literally send an iMessage to Stanley's number. If I have an idea, I just send it to Stanley and he immediately drafts it in my style, based on how I write on social media, which gives me more inspiration for the next post. So, if you're repurposing content and spending a lot of time rewriting the same idea for different formats, a tool like Stanley will help you save a lot of time. If you want to check it out, the link is below, and thank you very much to Stanley for sponsoring this video, and we're back on topic.
Next, we move on to mission number two-the Kickstarter method. You put a product on Kickstarter and people give you money for a product that hasn't been created yet. Essentially, they're taking pre-orders, and Kickstarter is a great way for entrepreneurs to test a product idea before building it. So, for the second mission, we're using the Kickstarter method and selling the product for $9. It can be any digital product you want. We sell it for $9, but the important thing is that we haven't built the product itself yet.
We're just trying to find at least one person who will pay us $9 as a pre-order for a product we haven't created yet, and of course we warn them that it's a pre-order, and once we get the money, we'll spend a week or however long it takes to create the product and send it to them as a thank you for supporting our business. Again, you go to the Stand Store, create a new product, decide what it will be, make a sales page, set the price at $9, and then send the link out to friends and family to see if anyone wants to buy or pre-order the thing before you create it. By the way, if you have no idea what this $9 digital product will be like, don't worry. We created a special GPT just for you. Well, not really for you, it was for our students in the "1K
Challenge," but that's in the past. You just chat with this GPT, it asks a bunch of questions about your experience, your hobbies, etc., and then suggests tons of ideas and even helps you write a pre-order page or sales page for your $9 product . So the phrase " I have no ideas" should not be an excuse for not taking action, because I literally hand you everything on a plate and I don't even ask for money for it. Here are some examples of products our students created with the "1K Challenge." For example, Ming Yao. Ming Yao is like a marathon runner or something, so he created a sort of 3x3 endurance pre-order formula. He says, "When I posted this
in the morning and sent the link to a few friends, I was skeptical, but within an hour I had my first sale. I thanked my supporter and was busy the rest of the day. I didn't check the revenue page until the evening. It's still a pre-order, but the response surprised me. There's actually demand for my offer. 16 people have trusted me, and at last count it was about $120." So, in Ming Yao's case, he literally made his first $100 without even building a product because he just offered his friends and family a pre-order link, and they were like, "Oh, this looks cool. Sign me up." They paid him $9 each, then he spent a week creating the product and emailed it to them; They were satisfied, and he was happy because he got money, and they got a product opportunity
to support a friend. We have a post from Grace, who earned $10 from a digital product called "Your First 90 Days in Dubai"-an e-book about the rookie mistakes I made when I first moved there and how to avoid them. That's all you need to know before booking a ticket. I share these as real-life examples of people just like you who decided to take a risk and try to make money online, and no, I'm not trying to sell you any courses. Uh, the 1K challenge was a one-time event we did last year. Maybe we'll do it again this year at some point. So if you are interested in joining, you can subscribe to my mailing list. A video like this is aimed at a complete beginner who has probably been thinking about starting a business and trying to make
money for a long time. But if you haven't taken the first step yet, I hope these stories of real people will inspire you to take action. Don't wait for us to call before you take action if you're already at this stage of the video. Anyway, Grace's biggest fear before starting was that I wouldn't get any sales. I even thought about buying it myself at some point. I'm glad I didn't do that. What really happened? I told myself that I only needed one sale to start. So, I suggested it to my mom, and she bought it. Did Grace's mom really want to spend 90 days in Dubai? Probably not, but she did it to support her daughter, and now her daughter has earned $10 online.
Surprisingly. Of course, offering something to your mom isn't the best business strategy for building a profitable business in the long term, but it's a great way to get started. Again, the idea is that we take the first steps to earn our first dollar, our first $10. Another example: a guy named Tobias created a system of "soft boundaries." What did he feel? He was excited and nervous. His biggest fear was that no one would be interested. What happened? Almost no one was interested. But after days of busy rewriting the pre- order page over and over again, I finally posted it on Instagram, and almost immediately an old friend bought it. It turns out she just wanted to support me, so I'm not sure if this really proves there's a market, but
ultimately, it's baby steps. It's all part of the process. That's right. This is 100% true. You can start a service business and simply sell a product for $1,000 to one person. But often, especially if you tend to overthink things, if you like to do things right the first time, and if you're a little more cautious about taking risks, entrepreneurship can seem very scary if you jump right in. But it becomes entirely doable if you make a dollar, then nine, then some more, and take small steps here and there. We have Alessandro who sold the course "18 Days to Better Sleep and Less Stress." We have Vicki who sold a guide to polycystic ovary syndrome for women.
Well, her first sale was from a friend who had recently been diagnosed with it. We have Dominik, who created a simple application that allows you to organize folders on your Mac. We have Susan, who developed a 30-pound weight loss meal plan that she sold to her friends and family. And you can see that a lot of these are just random products where someone took something they've already done or have some experience with and packaged their knowledge or ideas into a Notion template, a PDF, a worksheet, a mini- app, or something like that, very simple. Importantly, in the second task, you sell the product before you create it, using the Kickstarter method. Some of our students asked, "Wait, is n't this a scam? How can you sell something without creating it? I
replied, "It's only a scam when you mislead people, right? You warn them, " I don't have the product ready yet, it's a pre-order, but you'll get it within 7 days." And then when you get a sale, that gives you a good reason to actually build the product in 7 days, right? Quite simple. So, at this point we are already entrepreneurs with single-digit profits because we asked friends to support us with one dollar, and now we are entrepreneurs with double-digit profits because $1 + $9 = $ 10. So, you earned $ 10 on the Internet, even though you didn't earn anything there before. This, again, is life-changing. The first and second tasks are actually very, very, very simple. Almost all challenge participants coped with the first and second tasks. The third
task is where it gets really hard, because in the third task you take your $9 product that you've already created, right? Because someone placed a pre-order, and you created it in 7 days, using everything you needed for development. Now you have a product that you can actually sell. So, to become a triple-digit income entrepreneur, to earn your first $100 online, you have to sell it to 10 other people. So you need to find 10 people who will buy your product for $9. This is where a lot of our challenge students lost their cool because they said, "Oh my God, I'm never going to find 10 people." In fact, it is possible, because you can simply write to acquaintances, friends, relatives, or people in group chats. If you have a network of contacts on
LinkedIn, you can write there, you can post stories on Instagram, or write in WhatsApp groups. For example, one of our students said: "I can't believe I did that. It was difficult because I changed direction and had to make two products, but we managed. The feeling is so surreal that I even cried a little. She made $130. We asked, "What advice would you give to someone trying to reach the $100 mark?" "She says, 'Reach out to people.'" I know it's scary and rejection is heartbreaking. But, strangely enough, when it happens, you quickly get over it and it doesn't matter anymore. "I completely agree." Next we have Omar, who created this alchemical product. Turn everyday things into 10 unforgettable experiences that spark curiosity and connection
with your child, or something like that. So, he's a father and he makes a kind of product for parents. He said, " I reached the $100 mark and became a three-figure entrepreneur. Honestly, I have mixed feelings. I pride myself on consistency, but it was hard. All of my sales were through warm referrals to friends and family. Not surprisingly, I had never sold anything to a stranger before, and that was the hardest part . I see views and clicks, but not a single unknown buyer. Still, I keep moving forward. Welcome to the emotional roller coaster of entrepreneurship.
Advice to others: just keep doing something and learning. If you can't make a sale through warm contact, it might be worth rethinking everything. Or it could just be a specific niche audience. As for me, I'm still aiming for that first unknown client and will celebrate it when it happens. Then we have Vernon. Vernon had a cool product. What was Vernon's product? It seems like it was a mini- guide on how to stand up for your opinion at work. He says: "I am amazed. I fully created my proposal a few days ago and started watching the third mission video over the weekend. I got to the lesson on sending messages and made sure I wrote to at least five people.
I ended up sharing this in several group chats. I sent a few private messages. I posted on LinkedIn and even went on Facebook for the first time in a long time to share a post there. It definitely helped that I managed to make three sales during the second mission, but I reached my goal in less than 24 hours." We asked Vernon, "What was the most difficult part of the third mission?" That is, trying to make 10 sales of your product for $9. I was completely and utterly calm about the publications, very, very relaxed. But now more sales have come in. Damn it. The stress level has increased incredibly. Now I'm more worried that everyone will think the product is crap. Well, that's kind of
normal, because this is my first digital product, and it's okay, great. And this annoys me, because some of the people who bought it are not just professional colleagues, they are my real friends. What was the most useful thing about the course so far? One of the many recurring themes in all the calls, expert sessions, and freedom sessions is that what you want is on the other side of what you are avoiding. There is no way to escape the need to do this. No. What advice would you give to someone trying to reach the $100 mark? Similar to the lesson I shared from Mr. 2: make sure you tell as many people as possible about your offer. And don't worry about posting on the internet. Most people don't even try to achieve what we set out to do. Far fewer people
stick with it long enough to achieve their goal. Let the reason we fail to achieve our goals not be that we were too concerned with what others thought. So it's all very simple, right? For $1, you simply ask a friend to back you with one dollar. For $10, you simply create a pre- order page for a $9 digital product. And for $100, you're just trying to sell it to 10 people. Yes, it requires some hustle, and the skill you develop as an entrepreneur is the ability to approach people, try to sell something, and take risks with yourself, which is really scary. And if you've never done it before, it's even scarier. And you 'll think, "Oh my God, what will my colleagues think, what will my friends think, what will my family think?"
All these people will laugh at me behind my back. All the students in our challenge had these concerns, and the ones who published and did it and made money said, "Oh, no one really cared." I was just thinking too much and worrying too much about what others would think of me, and everyone just didn't care, and that's great. It's so liberating when you can make money online this way. So, we finally move on to mission number four, which is the most difficult. How do you go from 10 random people among friends, family, and acquaintances buying a mediocre digital product for $9 to actually making a thousand dollars online? Well, you need to earn another $900. Now, at this point, I'm introducing people in our
little challenge to the price and headcount metrics, let's say. So, this is the price, and this is the people. So, let's say a thousand dollars, just to keep the numbers even. How to earn a thousand dollars? Well, you can sell one product for a thousand dollars to one person. Yes? You can sell an item for $1,000 to one person. Or you can sell an item for $500 to two people. Quite simple. Or you can sell the item for $330 to three people. Or you can sell the item for $250 to four people. Or you can sell an item for $200 to five people. Or you can sell an item for $10 to a hundred people. Uh, and it's a very hard sell, you know
, if you thought selling your digital product for $10 to nine people was hard, then good luck trying to sell it to a hundred. I think one of our students in the challenge really succeeded. Uh, but she already had like 50,000 followers on Instagram, so she was able to just post it on her Instagram, and about 120 people bought her PDF, and she made $1,000. Surprisingly. Uh , I suspect you don't have 50,000 followers on Instagram, so you're probably not in that situation. And first of all, people were absolutely blown away by this very simple chart, that if you want to make $1,000, there's really no secret to it, it's
just a matter of how much you charge and how many clients you get. And the way we encouraged people to make that thousand dollars was to one-on-one coaching, where you essentially sell your time on a Zoom call and become a sort of mini- online coach for whatever you're an expert at or what you think you're good at and that other people are potentially willing to pay for. For example, this is a quote from Kelsey's post. Hi everyone, I have officially earned £1185, which means I have completed the 1K challenge. Surprisingly. I improvised a bit and offered £400 for a 90-minute coaching session with me or £1,500 for six 60- minute sessions. The £750 you see below is my first
£1,500 client who agreed to pay in two installments. Surprisingly. This is the most I have ever made online in over 10 years of trying to make money online. I am so grateful for the skills I gained from this course. Interestingly, Kelsey later joined our Lifestyle Business Academy, and she recently quit her job and is now earning tens of thousands of dollars online through a similar coaching offering. Then we had Susan. My God, I can't believe this. A week and a half before the end of the challenge, I reached my goal of $1,000. Five weeks ago, I was worried about everything, afraid to ask for money, afraid of how I would combine this with a full-time job, afraid to post a
video on Instagram where I was talking to the camera. But I was determined to give it my all and do whatever Ali said. Thank God he didn't ask me to jump into the fire. I decided that I would overcome my fear and doubts and just follow the instructions, even when I didn't want to. I feel like I jumped off a cliff, constantly stepping out of my comfort zone at every step, and I still do, but I'm learning a lot, including how to do it even when it's awkward. Instagram posts, requests for money, follow-up emails, first Zoom calls. So in her case, the $1,000 came from selling my product for $10 -- a meal plan, a few psychotherapy clients, because she's a therapist, through one-on-one Zoom calls, and
about five fitness clients who paid me £100 for a month of support, including Zoom calls, and me helping them lose weight. Don't let your mind, doubts, or fears stop you. So many times I told myself, "I don't care, I'll do it anyway." I know you all can do it too. Surprisingly. Next we have Aman, who says, "This seems unreal. I reached the $1,000 mark last night, a month after starting the challenge. My worldview is expanding as to what is possible. I created a coaching package, posted on LinkedIn, and sent out offers a little shamelessly. One of them responded in private messages, we called, and now he is my first dear public speaking coaching client. Aman is good at public speaking, he offered public
speaking coaching to anyone who wanted it, and that's how he earned his $1,000. So the whole idea of Mission 4 is that instead of trying to sell a scalable digital product, you take existing expertise and offer tutoring sessions on that. For example, I once did private tutoring. I did well in exams at school, so I helped younger children prepare for exams in math, physics, and other subjects. One of my friends was a great piano player, so even when I was a kid, offered piano lessons, so it's.it's not that difficult, right? You already have a job you are good at, or even several such jobs. There are people who are quite willing to pay you to
become a kind of mini- coach or teacher for them and help them with this matter. You don't need to be an expert, just be a few steps ahead of them, and that's how many of our Weekly Challenge students earned their first $1,000. Again, if you have no idea what your expertise is, there is a link to GPT below, you can give it a try, so there is no excuse not to do it. But this is the " ladder to $1,000," this is how you earn your first thousand online. Of course, the way you earn your first $1,000 is very different from the way you might earn your first $100,000. So if you're interested in a step-by-step plan on how to actually make $100,000 online, not just $1,000, here's a video that lays out the plan in detail, so check it out.
Thanks for watching, see you in the next video. See you later.
