"I’m in a very fortunate position where I get to do stuff that I enjoy already for work. I just happen to also make money with it."
"Sometimes you've got to go through a little bit of struggle here and there to have that delayed gratification."
"It’s important to have a mix of both—living every day as if it’s your last and thinking about the long term."
hello and welcome to deep dive the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs creators and other inspiring people to uncover their journeys towards finding joy and fulfillment at work and in life my name is ali and in each episode i chat to my guests about the philosophies strategies and tools that have helped them along the path to living a life of happiness and meaning this week i sat down with web designer content creator and entrepreneur olia known for his polished minimalist aesthetic online and premium tech blog ultralinks olya has built a following of over a hundred thousand to which he shares his tips on tech lifestyle and financial independence in our conversation we talk about everything from dropping out of school and making six hundred thousand dollars from selling tumblr themes i'm in a very fortunate position where i get to do stuff that i enjoy already for work i just happen to also make money with it to the art of dropshipping and the lessons he learned from beating cancer all right olio welcome to the podcast how are you doing i'm doing okay we still don't have a name for the podcast we were brainstorming podcast names earlier this morning i liked unplugged unplugged okay but but but it's not my podcast i mean unplugged could work afternoon tea deep dive i'm sure afternoon i'm sure by the time this goes out we actually will have a name for the podcast and so when i do my intro about you i'll say hey friends welcome back to the podcast and people won't know that this is uh um anyway first thing i wanted to ask you how the hell have you made over 600 thousand dollars from selling tumblr themes like what's going on there what was the story okay so this is a good story so i've done a video on it before but i'll just go through i can't remember exactly what i said but um obviously i i was into i was into tumblr i was anti-using tumblr i had my tumblr blog and was to post images and stuff it was literally like having a mood board that's what that's how i use tumblr i used it as a mood board i liked posting images on there and i thought hey i want to modify my tumblr website i want i want to i want to make it look more like what i wanted to look like you know i want it to be more me so i started messing around with the code and stuff messing around with the design and stuff i thought hey you know let's let's see what i can do and i sort of just fell into messing around and making tumblr themes it was literally by chance and then i could see you know hey tumblr had a ton of theme garden they were selling themes on there i had no idea how much people were making on there to be honest i thought it was maybe like a thousand dollars two thousand dollars a month um so then i started just making themes going into it not really having high expectations went into it and then here i was one or two months where i made like 30 000 a month and i was i was just like what i was like 21 at the time so you can imagine 21 year old having that sort of money it's just like holy crap like what am i going to do now i feel like that was actually a very big turning point in my life because before that i was earning quite little money um but the timeless themes definitely transformed my life tumblr probably don't know that i don't know that i actually literally changed my life in terms of what i could do and the possibilities that came along from that so you had a tumblr blog and you decided you wanted to modify your own page to make it look more like you and then you thought let's sell sell how much how much were you selling these themes for so tumblr has three different pricing models well three percent pricing tiers nine dollars nineteen dollars and forty nine dollars i was trying to make themes on the higher end forty nine dollars there were some more simpler themes that were not nineteen dollars but most of them were forty nine dollars each okay and so you make the theme once and then you can sell it multiple times 49 whoever wants to use that theme to make that tumblr page look like yours can use it exactly yeah exactly how how did you know how to make tumblr themes like yeah well tumblr luckily have a very easy documentation that you can follow and it's nowhere near as complicated as some of the other sort of platforms out there like wordpress you could say tumblr is very very simple i think anyone who learns html css can learn to make a tumblr theme it is very very simple fair play so how old were you when you stumbled onto this gold mine of tumblr themes well um i knew of tumblr since i was like 18 19. but making actual tumblr things and making money i was around like 20 21 oh if i play okay so i wonder if we can rewind back to sort of early life so let's say you know what were you like in in secondary school sort of age age 11 to 18 how did you spend your time were you like a massive nerd back then as well like what was the vibe i feel like i was one of those kids that sort of sat in the background at school and i i would i wouldn't say i was a nerd but i also wouldn't say i was like oh really popular kid you know i was just passively going through school mainly because i didn't enjoy school um but yeah like my school life i i didn't really enjoy school that much if i'm always i'm not a very academic person okay and then you didn't go to university no so what did what did you do instead so i went to college because i didn't even do a-levels i went to college and i did like a level three course level four courses like that um on accounting and business because i thought i was going to become an accountant i'm really glad that didn't happen but whilst i was doing that that's when i started getting into computers and stuff that's when i started getting into websites and stuff like that because i started my blog the ultralinks.com that i don't really post on it anymore it's kind of dead now but i started posting on that 2010 2010 and what sparked that was an android phone that i bought at the time i bought an android phone i wanted to customize it you know changing your icons and wallpapers was like a really big thing it's quite a nerdy thing to do and i would share it on the blog and i guess that's where i started when it comes to building any sort of online presence were you would have been around 17-ish at the time um yeah yeah well they're about 17-18 yeah okay so it's a it's a pretty random thought process to have at the age of 17. you know what i want to customize my android phone therefore i'm going to start a blog like what was the what was the link there so the first place that i actually started finding people customizing their phones was a forum it was just a forum online and people were posting their their screens on the forum they're posting their customizations on the forum and i just thought to myself hey you know why i can post another forum but i can also post it on a blog my own sort of little corner of the internet you could say um so i'd post it there and then i'd get people to come to my blog as well and that's how i sort of built it and that's what sort of sparked me to make the blog okay and this was a tumblr blog no this was actually just a normal like like wordpress so it wasn't even wordpress it was google blogspot oh well it's like a really old school but i moved it over to wordpress i think in 2012. okay so two years later yeah so what sort of stuff were you posting on the blog for that two year period two year period i was just posting i was posting anything i found interesting okay i was obviously interested in like design and stuff and product design all these different things i post like i'd even post like apple news or like new phone news smartphone news all these different things literally whatever i found interesting there wasn't any rigid structure um but it was just whatever i liked and what sort of traffic were you getting to the blog between in that time period so i think 2012 2013 2013 i was getting around half a million views a month bloody hell so that's a lot but you say that at the time um i wasn't really making much money from it okay because i didn't really know how to monetize it and cpms weren't that high back then either um so yeah i wasn't really making much money from my blog until around 2013. okay hang on so see so you started the blog in 2010 posting about these android things or posting random stuff that you were interested in how did it get so popular so to have 500 000 views a month i honestly don't know yeah okay i honestly don't know i think it is just a matter of people like seeing the customizations i guess it goes down to another reason why i guess people like follow me on instagram or youtube they like my sort of this sounds so pompous but they like myself style and aesthetic you could say you've even said it before like i had this like sort of certain aesthetic and i think that's why people liked it okay that's what people like to tell me anyway and how did you develop this aesthetic over time oh yeah i honestly don't know either i think it is just one of those things where i was like hey i like this hair like that um i think i i didn't really have anyone where they sort of sparked my interest in that aesthetic yep i think it was just a matter of hey you know i grew up in a house where everything was really messy yep and now i want everything to be like really sort of clean and minimal got it so i think that's what maybe sparkle just wanted the opposite so let's say we're in 2010 you've posted your first blog post presumably no one is reading the blog at this point because it's your first blog post and then presumably you had to post fairly consistently to build kind of the the authority and the the blog over time how did you bring yourself to continue to post on it in the early days when you weren't getting that feedback of views and comments and stuff yeah of course i think obviously when you're like 17 18 19 20 that sort of age range i feel like you kind of just a lot of the things you do you do it because you enjoy it right you you don't go into it making money um into it like make thinking that you're gonna make a lot of money and that is literally i just enjoyed sharing that stuff online i enjoyed sharing like like you do like you know you make these videos everyone makes these videos youtubers make their videos because they want to share their opinions um whatever they're making whatever they're doing same sort of thing for me and i wanted to do it on a blog so now we're in 2013 your blog is getting half a million hits a month like what do you what does it what does a day in your life look like so at the time obviously i was at college i was studying and stuff um learning at college and i'd only go to college i think three or four times a week so the rest of the time i had a lot of free time and it's why i would post on the blog it's why i would do that sort of stuff um again my schedule was very open um like it is now i don't i don't like to have a rigid structure um but i did obviously nearly every day post stuff on on the blog because i enjoyed doing it you know if i had a few hours here and there i would just do it because i enjoyed doing it okay so at what point did it turn from something you enjoy doing into more of like a business if if ever 2013 i think um when i left college i thought to myself okay i can either go to university or i can carry on with this blog thing um like i said i wasn't really making any money i wasn't making much money and i thought to myself let's give myself 12 months if i can make say two grand a month for example then i'm rolling like two grand a month that's 24 000 pounds for a year for me and i'm 21. that's great for money for me at the time and yeah like 2013 the blog was making that sort of money and then i remember there were some months where it was making like five grand a month five thousand dollars a month um how how was it making money in the early days through banner ads like google adsense stuff yeah you're making up to 5k a month from google adsense on the blog yeah and sponsored posts as well so sometimes like you know a brand would be like hey can we post our product can we post a link or whatever um and i would charge for that damn okay so you've got this blog that was then going what was your next sort of hustle that you added to the to the mix it was my themes so um the themes theme really took over because obviously the themes making 20 30 000 a month um that's much more of a lucrative thing to do than the blog so that's where i focus a lot of my time and that's why i focus my time for around two years three years okay um it's like making more and more themes or yeah making more themes and supporting the themes because obviously there'll be a lot of people who buy one and they need to customize it or they need to change something and i had quite a few i say famous people like justin bieber for example was used but i'm sure it wasn't justin bieber himself i'm sure it was his team for example um i had brands like bmw and some other random brands as well something like big companies use my my tumblr themes which is actually really great to see like it sort of gave me that sort of seal of approval you could say showing that hey if these brands are using it then surely i'm doing something right yeah i remember around around that time like 2013 to 2015 i i was getting i i was using wordpress quite a lot for my business that i'd set up at the time sure and on places like themeforest i was seeing just how much money people were making through wordpress themes and i tried to dabble with wordpress theme development myself one summer and i just it went down the rabbit hole and it was just so hard that i thought you know what i see why these guys are making the big bucks from from selling these teams for fifty dollars um so you're working on this on this for two years what did that what did that feel like that first month where you suddenly make thirty thousand dollars that's just completely insane for like a 21 year old 21 making that sort of money in fact even even like now you know yeah that's like a doctor's salary for a whole year that you've made in a month off of selling website themes no you're completely right making that sort of money even now is just insane um but yeah at 21 i just thought to myself i luckily didn't go off the rails i didn't i didn't go crazy anything hey i'm making all this money let's spend this right away i saved a lot of it i saved a lot of it because i realized like just growing up with that money anyway like my parents you know they didn't have they didn't have a lot of money didn't have like any high paying jobs or whatever um and i knew that you know making this sort of money this is some of the most money ever like even my parents have ever seen so i knew that i couldn't waste it i knew that i had to put it away and do something with it so i knew from quite early on maybe since i was like 19 20 that was important to save up for like a deposit for a house for example i knew that was important that's what i did i saved a lot of it just so that i could buy my own place and not be dependent on my parents i really like this point that you made about how in the in the early days you're not you're not really doing it for the money you're doing it because you enjoy it um i wanted to ask did you enjoy like 100 of it or like 80 of it like what were the because because everything has bits that are like less fun like how do you how did you think about those back in the day yeah sure so the way i see it is sometimes you've got to go through a little bit of struggle here and there to have like that delayed gratification you could say where you know going through a struggle for a label or just doing something you don't like means that it can you can do something that you do like almost in a way it's like it's like a vice versa sort of exchange almost in a way that's how i see it um i still i still sort of stand by that i saw sort of things myself hey you know if i work hard now if i do this now if i just get it done now i don't have to think about it later even for example you know i don't know you probably don't know what this is like but i hate having my kitchen dirty for example i ain't having the dishes out of stuff i just think to myself it only takes me five minutes to put my dishes away i just do it now because once it's done i don't have to think about it later on okay it's that sort of thing for me okay so what was the what were the areas of struggle that that were the equivalent to the putting the dishes away sure in this sort of business so when when i was doing the tumblr themes for example the hardest part was doing the more complex coding so i wasn't very good with javascript for example so something like that i really didn't enjoy it i didn't want to learn it so with the themes that i had made the simpler themes i used the money that i made from those teams to hire an external developer to make and do the more complex stuff for me and you can hire someone to do that quite cheaply if you find someone online you know doesn't have to be someone in the uk it can be it can be something you go somewhere in the us but finding a javascript developer just to make a few changes here in there to add some things to a theme that you've already made is quite affordable okay no fair play and and just on this note of like having having fun with stuff do you think for you you do you think you for you it was more that you found something that you happen to find fun or alternatively that you found ways to make this thing fun for yourself like what yeah i think i found something that was just fun like i i wasn't looking for it i just i literally just stumbled across it like i was into customizing my phone at the time anyway like you know when i when we talk about the blog starting the blog and stuff i just enjoy customizing my phone the side benefit was hey i can share this with other people and then obviously you just sort of spiraled into doing all these different things and now here i am doing this with you i guess which is just so hilarious when you when i think back like all these little things have led me here yeah and do you think would it be fair to say that you were like kind of just chasing the things that you found fun at eat junction and it happened to lead you here or was there more of a sort of strategic vision behind any of this stuff there is some strategic sort of strategic sort of vision um but i i don't think it's it's like very i don't like i said i don't really have a proper structure um i sort of just think to myself hey okay what is it i enjoy doing now like as an adult now as a 28 year old i think to myself what is it i enjoy doing now and you know can i can i make money from it is it something i can i can see myself doing in say two years five years ten years or whatever um that's how i see things now but i wasn't like that when i was like 20 years old 21 years old i kind of just thought hey let's just see what happens let's see how things go because you just don't know you don't have the life experience right so you just don't know okay so so sounds like 2010 to 2013 it was like your blog days and then 2013 through 2015 was your tumblr theme heyday yeah yeah so now it's it's 2015. what what what's what's all you're doing in 2015. yeah so 2015 was a big year not in terms of money in terms of um what i was going to do next so 2015 was actually when i got my first office and made my first hire so 2015 june 2015 i've got my own office space and that's actually where i started making youtube videos as well my first youtube video is a tour of my office space okay that i made with my iphone you don't even see my face on it yep this is just me going around showing my office space why did you get an office space um just because i was still at home living at home with my parents okay um working from a room which was like three by three it was absolutely tiny i couldn't even fit a wardrobe in it i had like a bed and a desk okay so you're making 30k a month and you're thinking you know what let's let's like upgrade the live setup yeah okay so i ended up getting an office for quite cheap it was only like 9 000 pounds a year so very very cheap without an office space um but it was like the size of my parents house so i just thought hey this is good yeah it's investing and it means i don't have my parents always sort of like coming in and being like hey ollie you can't do this can you do that yeah you know i don't have people walking in randomly you know whatever say i have a proper office space where i can actually work from and where i can have employees yeah whatever so who was your first hire so charlie um was my first i went to college with him we kept in touch like because i left college like 2012. we kept in touch over the years and yeah i was just like hey charlie do you wanna come work for me and i was like yeah let's do it and he's been working for me since what was charlie doing for you in the early days so in the early days charlie was actually posting on the blog he was he took over the blog pretty much he was managing that that website and then his role in the business in the company changed it keeps changing to be honest he doesn't have a specific role i like to call him operations manager oh because it makes him you know it sounds important yeah i mean that's similar to angus title which is operations director so you know i'm just like hey charlie i need this thing only that dude can you do it whatever yeah charlie's very flexible person it's nice having a person like that and i'm sure you know because you have angus be that person for you yeah just sort of doing anything and everything if like anything comes up and you don't have the time or maybe you just you literally just can't do it you need someone else to do it yep nice so it's 2015 you've got your office space what prompted you to turn it into a youtube video because that was also a bit of a weird thing to do in 2015 that it it's not a thought process a lot of people would have had that hey let me let me film a youtube video of my office true yeah so when i got my office space i was like any person start looking for inspiration yep for office space setups and stuff like that right of course both of our channels are like our office workspace setups are some of the most popular videos right so i saw all these little setups on on youtube and stuff and i thought to myself hey i can just share my one because i was also posting on instagram at the time and i will share a picture of my workspace on instagram and i used to get a lot of comments of people asking me hey can you post a video on it on youtube have you ever seen it okay um and that's where i sort of fell into just doing youtube we're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode and that is brilliant i've been using brilliant for the last two plus years they're a fantastic platform for learning maths science and computer science with engaging and interactive online courses and the great thing about brilliant is that they really teach stuff from a very first principles based approach it's almost like the way that we were taught in places like oxford and cambridge where you learn a concept and then you apply the concept to an interesting problem rather than just being spoon-fed stuff like we initially learned in school my favorite courses on brilliant are the computer science ones as some of you guys might know i was torn between applying to medicine and computer science i went for medicine in the end but i always had an affinity to computer science and taking the courses on brilliant like their introduction to algorithms and their introduction to python really helped me get more of a grasp of computer science than i've ever had before it's also great for learning how to code which is an incredibly useful skill to have especially if you want to start a business and i attribute like 98 of my business success to the fact that i learned how to code when i was in secondary school so if you want to check out the courses on math science and computer science and head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive and the first 200 people to sign up with that link will get 20 off for the annual premium subscription so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this episode okay so your first video was the office tour at what point did you decide hey i'm i'm going to become a youtuber and start actually making youtube videos well it's funny because i still don't see myself as a youtuber okay because i don't do youtube full-time i still do youtube probably two or two days a week okay oh you're a part-time youtuber yeah i'm a part-time youtuber um i don't know when i decided hey you know i can just start doing youtube videos i think it is just because i know the thing that you like to always say is you need to be consistent if you want to build a youtube channel you need to consistently post yeah but for me it wasn't like that for me i was posting whenever i just wanted a post i didn't have a schedule okay i maybe post two videos a week some and then i might not place like a month because i was still running other parts of my business but as youtube started growing and as as the income started growing from youtube i realized hey i'm on to something here and i started dedicating more time to it and that's why now i dedicate two days a week to it but i don't ever see youtube becoming a full-time thing for me ideally i don't actually want it to be okay mainly because i like doing other stuff i like starting other businesses i like running other businesses um i i just can't see myself doing youtube full-time okay how how did you get your first let's say one one thousand to ten thousand subscribers through instagram okay so on instagram if we go back a bit on instagram i was posting pictures of setups and products and things like that um and i was going very quickly on instagram instagram algorithm at the time was very favorable to me i was gaining around 10 000 followers a month at one point well which is just crazy i don't think i've ever had a month on youtube where i've got 10 000 subscribers um but yeah from there it just i i started directing people yeah being like hey come to my youtube channel i've uploaded a video there and i realized from doing that that i enjoyed making videos i enjoyed doing all the stuff that goes into videos and also i realized that hey i can make quite a bit more money on youtube compared to instagram and i'll also realize that instagram was sort of they change the algorithm they change the way things like instagram is not the same as it was 2015 2015 all you could do on instagram was post photos i think you couldn't post videos you couldn't post and i think you could even post portrait photos i think it was still square and yeah so so i focus a lot more on youtube now compared to any of my other social channels yeah so if we it's it sounds like the the trajectory of things from like 2010 to 2015-ish was you you find this thing that you enjoy i.e product design and this sort of aesthetic you post about it alongside like phone customizations and stuff on the blog you start posting on the blog consistently the tumblr theme thing sort of is a bit of a side gig that's not fully related to that but i suppose your aesthetic kind of comes into that as well i think one thing we didn't talk about was in that time i'd say between 2013 and 2017 20 yeah 20 i i was doing a lot of client work as well kind of work so what we're doing for clients for example designing websites designing apps things like that okay um and that also came about because i was obviously customizing my android phone yeah to customize your android phone yep you have to go into photoshop and you have to mess around with graphics and ui elements and stuff like that and again it's just nothing i enjoy doing and over time i agree i've got the confidence of like maybe i can charge money for this maybe i can maybe i can you know post my my designs online and see if anyone hires me and i used to post on the website called dribble.com oh yeah so dribble was very popular from like 2012 to 2015 2016 at the time um and i got a lot of a lot of clients through dribble okay so and they were all very i say all most of them were quite high paying clients so at the time of things going i had the blog going and i was doing design work so i had a good sort of three four income streams there doing all sorts of stuff and i enjoyed doing all of it yeah i just enjoyed doing all of it i wasn't always busy because i didn't have client work all the time but the client work it was great like i enjoyed doing stuff for other for other companies and just having that experience okay and it sounded like it all sort of stemmed from this decision in 2010 to post on a blog yeah um because one thing i often say to people is that like starting a blog can literally change your life and that seems like that's been the case for you probably one of the best cases of that right nice okay so getting back to the story so we're 2015 at this point you've got your blog you've got your tumblr themes that are selling you've got your client workers on the side you've got your instagram and you've just started youtube yeah what does kind of olia's empire look like for the next few years so from 2015 to 2019 i was going to the office every day okay um is it 2019. yeah i was pretty much going to office every day um but in 2017 i bought my own house i purchased my house and ever since i bought my own house i was sort of splitting the time between the office and home mainly because this is going to sound so ridiculous but it was half an hour commute and i just thought hey i could do a lot of my work at home yep and then let's go to the office because at home it's just me there's no one to disturb me i don't have any sort of distractions from family or anything so yes it's sort of those sort of years i was doing the same sort of stuff i was doing themes i was doing design work i was doing youtube and instagram and stuff but i also started a shopify store i started ulex.com eulexstore.com in 2017 2016 2017 okay i was experimenting with shopify at the time i actually started a few shopify stores yep um because drop shipping was a big thing at the time okay and i started doing drop shipping just to see what it's like and i realized drop shipping at the time it was a bit of a i feel like i got a bad rep okay so for people who might be listening who don't know what shopify or drop shipping are or what how would you describe those so shopify is just the platform so use shopify to sell products online physical products online and then drop shipping is when you have products on your store but then you don't actually have the products in stock with you you have someone else send their products maybe a factory in china or a factory in the uk or a manufacturer or it could just be old jim who lives down the road and makes makes leather wallets in his little shed or whatever you know he you would just send an order to to that person to the drop shipper and they would send the order directly to the customer so there's no you don't have to get involved with the actual product management and shipping the product you're sort of just making the sale getting the customer okay so customer buys from your site but what the customer probably doesn't realize is that behind the scenes jim has got his collection of leather goods and jim is the one sending him the thing yes but it's as if you're the one sending him the thing okay how does how does that work like why does that work so it's funny because i feel like drop shipping gets a bad rep because of long shipping times and things like that but what i think a lot of people don't realize is that every single major company in the world apart from amazon does drop shipping even apple does drop shipping wait how so because apple obviously have a fulfillment center in ireland for example um for the uk and that's where all the products are shipped from and that fulfillment center might not actually be run by apple it might be run by completely third party yeah when i get apple products they're from like synctron or some some company like that i'm like what the hell is exactly yeah it's just it's just a third party handling all the logistics and the and the shipping and everything for apple and that's a very common thing okay which people don't seem to realize drop shipping isn't a new thing it's been around for decades it's been around for a long time because i guess when you hear drop shipping you think scam yeah exactly yeah which is such a shame it's like it's like the word entrepreneur now yeah it's a little bit cringe yeah same with drop shipping i think that's exactly what's happening okay so you were one of the og well i guess 2017 wasn't really og but like you you were doubling it dabbling and drop shipping and i was making maybe a couple of thousand dollars a month but it wasn't very profitable and it wasn't a good business okay so how are you making a couple of thousand dollars a month from drop shipping like what what does that look like so a couple thousand dollars a month because that seems pretty good yeah it looks pretty good um but it wasn't very profitable oh and then revenue-wise as opposed to profit wise yeah so what sort of stuff were you selling so it would have been like macbook sleeves and and felt desk mats and things like that okay um you know i had i i'd buy them from china or whatever but i realized that doing drop shipping like that the shipping times are just way too long for customers so i took it a step further and i thought to myself hey why don't i have the space i have this this office space i can store the products here so i would bulk buy products like any normal retailer like any normal business i'd buy the products i store them in my office space and we would send them out from here we would send them to customers in the uk in the eu and the us because it's much quicker than having a supplier in china do it for us okay so you would buy like a thousand units in bulk of like a macbook sleeve from china exactly store them in your house office yeah and physically like ship them to people around the world because you have a lot more control over the customer service yeah and the sort of the way the business works um it's also quite a bit more profitable because obviously you're buying products in bulk rather than buying each time a customer buys okay so you're selling this stuff on a shopify store and how did how did things grow from that kind of 2017 onwards so i realized that hey you know i'm making money and i if we go back to your question about how was i making money i was marketing it mainly through my instagram profile yep i'd post the products on my instagram profile and i'd have followers and stuff who were interested by it you know that's how it started with drop shipping and stuff i realized hey you know if i want to make more money if i want to do this properly i need to start designing my own products so i started designing my own products in photoshop in sketch just literally writing down on paper if i have to and i would come up with other products that i like the look of put it all together in like a pdf document send it off to a manufacturer in china and i'd be like hey can you make this can you make this for me with my logo on it yeah um it's funny because it sounds very like half ass in a way but it's a very common thing that most people do but um so you can just do that you can just design something on a napkin and send it to someone in china and they will be like yes our factory can make this for you exactly that's pretty cool yeah exactly it's i think the toughest part of it is you do need capital obviously because to buy a thousand units um to buy sample products it does cost a lot of money like a sample can cost anybody seen a hundred to like a thousand dollars for example because they're only making one unit and sometimes they have to adjust the tooling adjust the manufacturing all that sort of stuff to just make a sample yeah but then once you've made at some point you're happy with it you make a bug order sometimes they actually take off the sample fee which is pretty nice can anyone just do this like is there a website that you go on where you can just like find a factory in china to make a thing for you like how does it work there's a website i feel like most people know of who are in that sort of world called alibaba.com where you can go to and you can find manufacturers and stuff and you can work with them and making your own custom products so do you like ring them up or have a zoom how does that actually work like if i let's say i wanted to design the perfect backpack for my everyday carry sure which is the thing i want to do at some point you know perfectly sized for a 13-inch macbook 11-inch ipad that would be that would be really cool so what would that process look like i don't like i i have a vision for like the perfect backpack so like i said the first thing you need to do is come up with a sketch come up with any features that you like come up with anything that you'd want in the backpack any sort of key requirements that you want look at other backpacks you like the look of um take the best bits of them and then mix and mash them together almost send that off to a manufacturer you go on alibaba you can put in an rfq which is request for quite okay and you upload your design file or designs or whatever you tell them the measurements the materials that you like and then you usually have like a bunch of supplies get back in touch with you and then from there you do have to spend quite a bit of time researching each supplier seeing what other products they've made in the past seeing if they have any products that are similar to what you've already made because obviously if they have made similar products it's going to be much easier working with them in making the product that you want okay and what does like working with them look like like on a day-to-day basis do you like go to china and talk to them how how does it how does that how does that like i literally know nothing about what it's like to so i'm a complete noob about this so i've never been to china in my life okay it's all done online and it's all done on alibaba.com you can even have the orders done through there okay alibaba provide like protection yeah so say you ordered ten thousand dollars worth of stock and it doesn't meet the spec that you sent to them say there's something off you can get you can sometimes get your money back really depends it can it can depend um and yeah it's all just done through alibaba just through dms pretty much yeah you can send them if you have slack or whatsapp you can send them your contact details and you can talk to them through there as if like they were a friend but obviously the biggest issue with that is that there is a language barrier of course they do speak the chinese most of them and they sometimes have a rep who can speak english but even then it's quite it's quite broken english sometimes you'll get some people who are great you can speak english very well but some people are quite broken english and again it's just something you have to work through and figure out okay so how long does it take from like kind of idea for designing a product to getting a sample in your hand from a factory in china for you good question good question so designing a product coming up with the designer stuff can maybe take me a couple of days because usually these product designs just come alongs randomly i'm like hey i want to make this product designing it whatever two or three days sending it off on alibaba looking for a manufacturer that can take maybe a week or two figuring out who to make a sample with you who should make your sample and then getting a sample may can sometimes take up to 60 days it can take a long time two months and then once you're happy with the sample because maybe you're not happy with the first sample you might have to get another one maybe so it means another two months but once you're happy with the sample again it can be anywhere between 60 to 120 days until you actually get the products in in your hands okay and do you ever have to worry about quality control for the samples for the for the bulk order yeah of course of course so there are different ways you can do this you can hire a third party in china to check the products for you or you can just have the manufacturer send you pictures and stuff see what the products are like um there's always risk involved as anything like this there's always risk um but it's just one of the things of making products online making physical products what's been the biggest kind of uh mistake slash downside like bad thing that has happened to you as a result of trying to sell physical stuff online yeah i've actually shared this in a video before i can't remember the exact amount that i lost but i think it was i can't remember i can't remember if it was ten i know i've lost more than ten thousand dollars i think it was maybe thirty thousand dollars something like that where i bought some stock and it wasn't up to scratch and i just couldn't get a refund i went through the bank i went through alibaba and i i couldn't sell these products like they worked and everything but the logo just wasn't right it just didn't look good enough yep so you'll just have to write it off yeah i just had to write it off at least you had to throw it in the bin which is a shame because it's a waste of resources it's a waste of money it's a waste of materials like it's just also not very good for a penny either so um that's probably one of the biggest things and thankfully that's never happened since because i've learned my lesson okay well what what what else was that i think it was just a matter of being a lot more giving a lot more attention to the samples giving a lot more attention to the bulk order yeah making sure they send me high resolution pictures of the bulk order yup of like maybe uh maybe i'll get them to send me pictures of like five or six items in the blog order just to see what they look like and making sure that the spec i've written is as detailed as it can possibly be because then i can go to alibaba and be like hey you know look they haven't followed the spec so they haven't made the product okay to my requirements i want my money back oh and you can just like say to the factory hey i want photos and they'll be like all right here you go yes most most factories most good factories anyway would be happy to send you photos and they'll even send you photos if you like on the inside of the factory yep so you can see working conditions and things like that make sure you know if things are things that's going up to scratch and that there's no children working in there for example because i know i'll see that can be a big thing yeah when working with manufacturers and you just got to hope you know unless you can visit the factory yourself you just got to hope that there are children working there and alibaba usually does vet all the manufacturers that they have on their website um to make sure obviously that they meet the the rules and the laws that are in place okay so how if you if you're open to sharing how profitable is it to run a sort of physical products business that you where you design stuff manufacture in china bring it back to the uk and ship it from the uk what does that look like it can really really vary it can really really vary so um you know it can be anything like maybe five percent profit margins so like 60 70 i've seen some businesses that makes 60 70 profit margins because maybe they already for example like you already have an audience so they don't only spend money online marketing for example because marketing i think is the biggest expense for any any business which is selling products physical products um so yeah it can vary a lot okay so if i wanted to make the sort of work with you to design this like perfect backpack yeah that would fit my everyday carrier take the office every day maybe in three different colors and then spin up a shopify store pitch it to the audience what do you think will what would be your estimate of like ballpark costs and how much we sell this for like what would that look like if we were constructing a business out of this again it just varies so much it depends on backpack materials the spec of the backpack pockets and whatever okay but let's just say let's just say you wanted quite a hike yeah i want something sort of peak design style slash like you know high-end i think it would cost you anywhere between 20 to 50 per unit oh okay so per unit yep and then sell it for like 200 per unit exactly i think that's a big surprise a lot of people don't seem to have they think oh you know iphones cost two hundred dollars three hundred dollars to make but then they sell them for a thousand dollars i think a lot of people don't realize that's just the material cost yep there's so much cost involved for example your time of making the backpack logistics shipping because most likely you're gonna offer free shipping yeah shipping is expensive man very very expensive i feel like we've all gone used to free shipping yeah amazon but amazon it cost them a lot of money yeah they've got a lot of efficiency efficient things in place that's why they can do it yeah but yeah like it's actually quite standard to see a 200 250 backpack that only costs 50 to make okay that's quite a that's quite a standard thing and so 50 for the cost of the backpack what would be the ballpark costs for the other stuff associated with selling a backpack on the internet i i don't know really with ballpark cosplayers because like shipping how much how much does shipping cost like when you're selling when you're sending your stuff out so for example shipping a backpack for example to someone in the u.s can cost us like thirty dollars forty dollars bloody hill okay exactly more than the actual product itself yeah which is very common okay very very common thing and then i guess if you're running ads and things then it all adds up but the nice thing about ads is you can really track the roi return on investment of the ads yeah so you would you would hope that you can spend let's say 10 000 a month put it on your american express get the points and you will literally see a return of maybe 30 000 a month from those ads 30 000 is on the high end okay so a good ballpark is is like around two so for every dollar you spend you make two dollars but again it very much depends on the product so for example say you're selling an electric scooter that's a thousand dollars you know the roi on that could be around one or two or three but because the product is a lot more expensive spending 500 on an ad to make a thousand dollars you made a 500 profit there or 500 margin which is obviously like say 10 20 iphone cases or even more like you know 50 iphone cases so yeah like it just varies so much from product to product okay so you you started this thing in in 2017 what are what are things looking like now with the physical products that you're that you're selling what does the store look like so in the last year um you know with ulextor.com we generated a million dollars over a million dollars um which is obviously like for me that's amazing like that's a crazy amount of money to make in a business i've never had a business which has made that much money in 12 months um so yeah like it's doing pretty well but um again i don't focus my full time on it luckily i have three other people working on that business so they manage it for me i have charlie obviously doing the operations doing the shipments customer service stuff like that i have um ivan who's doing product sourcing product management because obviously talking to my talking to manufacturers talking to people on whatsapp takes up a lot of time and it's something that i outsource to him he works full time and then i have a guy um in new zealand who's doing my advertising for me marketing facebook instagram advertising stuff like that okay that's pretty cool and so what is your like right now in 2021 what does your sort of your your empire look like you've got you've got the store what else what else do you have in your i've got the youtube channel yep um i've got i guess digital products on my website things like lightroom presets and um wallpapers and icons and stuff you know they don't make an absolute ton of money well i say they don't make a ton of money they still make quite good money around you know it can be well they can vary so when i was doing the icons for example remember when i ios 14 ideas really blew up um you know i was making tens of thousands a month um so yeah it can vary so much but icons and digital products i sometimes take on client work so consulting you know someone might hire me for even just half an hour and because they want feedback on a product so they want feedback on their business um and i can hopefully provide some value to them um and that's it right now i think yeah okay what's next for you like how do you how do you how do you think about what you want to do next because you've got like a pretty comfortable sort of suite of products yeah you could sit back and essentially live off this for the foreseeable future sure how do you think about what to do next so i think at some point i would like to sell your lxstore.com i'd like to sell it um mainly because i think my interest in doing freezer products has has sort of shifted quite a bit i realized that i want to do more i feel like i want to start a software as a service business i don't know what yeah trying to dabble in some ideas um i think that's my next step doing software as a service and of course going to youtube posting on youtube and stuff um because i think it's always nice to have an audience that you can speak to that you can share things with yeah awesome so we've talked a lot about kind of the business side of life i wonder if we can talk about some personal stuff um and so was it a year ago that or longer than that that you got first first diagnosed with with cancer oh yeah what was the story there it's august 3rd now yeah so i was diagnosed july 7th last year 2020. yeah so sort of peak peak lock down yeah and yeah so it's funny because i had i i think i've spoken to to you about this before i had symptoms since like april and it was since i came back from l.a when i came back from being in l.a um and i think the first symptom was just lower back pain had a lot of lower back pain i thought at first it was sitting at computer all day yeah you know we both said computers just having a bad back not sitting properly yep that's what i thought he was at first yeah just positions the other just our position not slouching um but it just didn't get better and it was a very weird sort of eight campaign went to my doctors and stuff went to a e and stuff and they thought it was like kidney stones or whatever they didn't find anything and then it went we went for a little while and then um july i woke up one morning and i just found it very difficult to breathe and i was like what's going on here i thought hey you know why am i out of breath it's like it's like you know when you go for a very intense sprint yeah run a sprint up and then you suddenly stop and you have to like bend over like take your breath yeah that's what it was like on a monday morning bloody hell that's been scary yeah it was it was very scary because i was just like i was just like well i can't speak yeah um sudden ambulance came a little drama an ambulance came picked me up took me to the hospital they did a bunch of testing stuff and the first thing they found was that i had two blood clots two uh pulmonary embolisms one in each lung um i was just like what um and they asked me had i traveled recently and i go yes i had been to la um so they think well part of the reason why i had the blood clots was because i was on a 12-hour flight and i didn't get up once in that fight i didn't even go to the toilet so blood pulls in your feet it doesn't go up through your body but over time that those blood clots have obviously come up and been introduced into my lungs but what was also another factor in having those blood clots was the lumps in my lungs that i had from the cancer so i had 12 lumps in my lungs 12 12 lumps in my lungs they were the biggest was around 18 millimeters in my lungs yeah they were sort of just all spread around my lungs and stuff um and obviously that was making it difficult for the blood to go through my lungs yeah so i asked my doctor well my oncologist how how long do you think i've had the cancer for and he goes we think you might have had it for around 12 months and i was like what whoa i was like because i i had no other symptoms yeah um you know i because usually i think with testicular cancer everyone expects like you're down there to become enlarged it wasn't like that for me i had a different type and yeah so like july 7th i was diagnosed um i was in the hospital for like two days three days okay and then i started chemo on the last week of july yeah last week until i say within three weeks i was on chemo i was doing chemotherapy what did that feel like when you because you're you're like young you're like you would have been like 27 at the time and i'm imagining like if we had a 27 year old on the ward who's come in with shortness of breath and we're like oh they've got two pulmonary embolisms oh and also they've got 18 sort of 18 metastases are from a testicular cancer primary uh like in in their lungs it's just absolutely mind-blowing as the doctor on the other end like what what was it like for you as as the patient i think that was the shock the other doctors had like just like you know doctors seeing all that were like what the hell how did that happen um honestly at the time i was just like what i i was just like is this really happening to me because um i was fit and healthy before i got my cancer i was actually probably in the best shape i've ever i had ever been better shape than when i was a teenager going to the gym four or five times a week i was eating properly you know i was quite slim i wasn't absolutely shredded or ripped but i was just in very good shape and that's what shocked me even more because i was like you know how how do you even get this yeah so like the first thing i did was i researched an absolute ton i spoke to doctors i suppose i looked online i looked at all these different things and getting testicular cancer is literally just almost like a random generator yeah like it is completely random there's no there's no things that cause it the only thing i think people say that cause it is maybe if you've had it previously in family but none of my family have ever had it no one in my family has ever had that type of cancer so yeah like for me i was just like okay i don't even know what to do i don't even know what's what's next i i did very much sort of take i took the week sort of just week by week because i knew okay i've got to do this week of chemo i've got to do this this i'm going to do that yeah um and i kind of just thought to myself especially looking at all the studies of testicular cancer seeing that is it crazy to say it's the best cancer to happen yeah it's often described particularly yeah yeah because it's the most curable yeah i think it's the only cancer that's curable as well there are no other types of cancer that are um so i was obviously quite positive about it in that way too at the same time i was like hysterical crying and whatever you know because who wouldn't if you if you get told you have cancer like what yeah how can this happen to me so yeah i'll just take giving week by week pretty much okay yeah that's just like yeah i can't even even begin to imagine what what that was like for you i messaged you you did yeah i messaged you and i'll because i can't remember why i messaged you or what yeah i i can't remember why i messaged you or what i messaged you about because i'll say i was very emotional at the time yeah i remember i think i was telling you i was just really angry yeah yeah yeah we talked about this at the time because like i was just like how did it not get caught earlier i think that was my biggest issue like because i said i went to a e or i went to hospital in april with a lower back pain how did they not catch it then um but yeah it's just crazy i think about it now so what was the experience of starting chemo like oh chemo is the worst thing i can eat it's the worst thing to describe i feel like i don't really know how to explain it's like being a zombie okay it is like being a zombie it's like it's like you you have this body and you have this brain that you can't control but you still you can still understand what's going on but you can't control anything like i could i couldn't even look at a tv i couldn't look at my phone i couldn't look i couldn't focus i couldn't drive i couldn't do anything when i was on keyboard it was just nice it is literally just walking like you're half dead that's that's the only way i can explain it people obviously say chemo as hell but honestly like it's it's it's worse than like you can even think it it's like it's it's okay it's awful so it's fair to say you won't want to do it again no no okay not unless obviously i have to yeah so how long were you in zombie mode for so i had i had 10 weeks of chemo um and it was in three cycles four yeah three three and a half cycles sort of so i'm going for the first week and i'm going for three days eight hours a day oh so i would be sitting there with a drip in me um iv or whatever i don't know what their technical term is all my all of my arms are just ruined from all of it but i'd have the machine just pumping the fluid through me eight houses eight hours of the day the second and the third week i would just go in once um once a week for around two or three hours um and then i'll repeat the cycle again you know eight hours a day for three days for the for the next cycle and then two weeks what were the conversations with the other patients like so i was by far the youngest patient there yeah i was by far everyone there was much older than i was but honestly the people who took care of me they were amazing because i don't know how they do it day in day out but they're the happiest people ever they they literally keep you happy they literally keep you keep you positive and all the people there as well like the because everything everyone's a lot older than me 60s 70s 80s sort of people and everyone's it's almost like a big family because everyone's going through the same thing everyone obviously everyone's got different types of cancer but i was going through the same thing i'm just sitting in the chair yep having chemo and it's interesting hearing their stories because obviously they have a lot more life experience than i do yeah so there's so many interesting stuff i feel like old people always have the best ideas right yeah i guess it's it's unusual to spend eight hours sitting next to a random old person and like talking about their lives this is the other thing because my council was spread so so far and was so bad i was only i was one of the only people there that would actually stay eight hours some of the other people would come and go okay so most of the time i actually wouldn't have the same person sat next to me okay so maybe halfway through the day there'll be someone else who comes to his next okay who's coming in for their treatment so i met so many different people it was it was great i said it was great obviously yeah but it was great speaking to all these people and just socializing with them so what are the like what is the social etiquette around someone sits next to you in the chemo chair is it like a bus where you or a bit on the underground where you're not gonna make eye contact is it like an airplane like what how what does it look like everyone says hello everybody's like hey how's it going and everyone the first question they ask each other is um what are you here for okay what's your cancer yeah what's your key chemo like you know what's your treatment like okay and then obviously the most common question i got was how old are you yeah because i was just i just looked like a young person so you would say 27 between i was 27 how would people respond to that people just feel sorry yeah i've just feel sorry for me they're like oh you pull thing yeah or you don't deserve this yeah obviously it's like it's really nice because all these old people like they treat you as if like they're your son you're their son even um you know they treat you as if you know that they they need to take care of you in a way yeah which is nice because like you know it's nice having all this support from all these just strangers people who just we just want to see you get through it yeah which is great because because you don't you sort of strike me as similar to me in that i feel like you're not big on sharing your emotions and getting emotional support from other people generally correct me oh you are okay so i guess there's should i say online yeah i guess that's not really the the persona that you no i i can understand that especially on my youtube channel yeah i think i feel like you you you put across a very like put together like i think it'd be quite interesting seeing when people watch this yeah because i feel like there's a lot more casual yeah you're more smiley here than i've ever seen you on your youtube channel yeah i know and we're talking and we're talking about you having cancer so yeah i think i think i definitely haven't i am an emotional person but i was really lucky to have people friends around me at the time for emotional support and like supporting me and stuff making sure i was okay i had friends with like trying to visit me obviously at the time i had to be very careful because clover was going around yeah and when you have chemo your white blood cells just disappear right so i couldn't see anyone really but people would call me people facebook time me message me they would always ask how i was there and i remember before i actually started the chemo i literally had all of my friends and family all come and visit me in like three weeks like people hadn't seen for years have come and seen me and it was just nice it was nice having that support and it was nice like just knowing that i can call any of these people and be like i need this and they would be there for me it was very sick what sort of life lessons do you learn from the old people that you were chatting to in that time if any i feel like old people love importing wisdom on younger people so i imagine you would have you would have got a lot of that well i think i was lucky in a way with most of the people that i spoke to um they were just very much just like happy-go-lucky okay just like do whatever the hell you want because that literally like everyone says life is just too short like you know if everything is too serious everything is too too like if you take everything too seriously nothing is fun and like you know just enjoy as much as you can and i think i i was like that anyway luckily i think i i'm already in that sort of mindset of hey you know i'm in a very fortunate position where i get to do stuff that i enjoy already for work i just happen to also make money with it that's the great thing and you know i live comfortably and stuff and i enjoy myself i see friends and family i socialize like look i'm here with you socializing you know i enjoy this sort of stuff i enjoy i enjoy socializing with people hanging out with other people and i thought that's what a lot of these older people taught me having experiences with other people and just taking things as they go pretty much okay and i think that's also why with the cancer i'm just like hey i've done it now it's done like i've completed it was just another another section of my life yep i never saw it as like oh my god like you know i do sometimes think see myself think to myself oh my god i can't believe i did that well i think hmm that was a good experience i don't want to do it again but yeah exactly how do you think about the balance between live every day as if it's your last versus kind of the more think about the long term i think i think it's good to have a mix of both i think a lot of people think oh you need to have one or the other no no no i think it's important to have a mix of both because you don't want to for example i know people say oh you know when you're young you should you should enjoy yourself spend all your money you know get drunk eat whatever you want but you know what if when you're 50 60 years old and you start having health issues but if you don't have enough money for retirement you've got to think about both you've got to have a good balance of of the two i think and i've found from you know things like being in just going to the gym i wouldn't say you know i'm like properly in shape but i try to i try to be and i try to eat healthy and like we were talking this morning i don't drink coffee really um because i i want to just be able to be 50 60 years old and be like oh you know i'm still i'm still fine i'm still going through life completely fine i'm still fit as a fiddle i'm still doing whatever i want to do and i don't have any other sort of health issues so you don't drink either no i don't drink alcohol yeah and like i guess like when when a lot of young people hear that someone is tea turtle they think oh oh well aren't you sacrificing enjoyment of life yeah the amount of times where i've been to a restaurant or a bar and i said i don't drink and the looks i've gotten people like oh you must be well boring or you must not have had fun i'm thinking like it actually says a lot about you because it means you have to get a bit drunk or a bit tipsy to have fun why don't you have fun as you are like that's how i see it because i think i think if you can't find a happiness in just like not having any sort of drugs in you then you know there's another underlying issue there nice so uh other than i mean i was obviously going going through the experience and it sounds like the cancer has taught you to to double down on this thing of enjoy every day on its own merit but also think about kind of long-term stuff have you had any other kind of lessons that you've that you've learned from it that you would kind of share with other people i think the biggest the biggest thing i definitely know from cancer is not giving well giving less of a then caring a lot less about what other people think of what other people say that's why i shared the video of me sharing that i have cancer because i thought to myself there are going to be some people who comment this that and the other saying that hey you know you deserve to have it or some trolling or whatever yeah but i know there's always going to be some people who are going to benefit from it and you know there have been people other people who have reached out to me where they're like hey i'm so glad you shared your cancer story because if it wasn't for you i wouldn't have discovered that i also have cancer that i've i wouldn't have known the symptoms i wouldn't have known what what it's like so i've realized i just need to yeah like i realized i i need to stop caring a lot less about what other people think and just do whatever i think is best but i feel like you need to have a good balance there because obviously you don't want to come across as an either of course yeah you know you don't want to be going around thinking you're you're all that basically you want to you want to be able to have a good balance okay so just in terms of like a a public health announcement what what are the things that you would encourage people to be looking for with regards to testicular cancer slash any others i'm not sure i'm the right person because and you've been through it like i've got a bullet point list from med school that i barely remember but yeah but the thing with with cancer and with cancer in general obviously it affects everyone differently so the symptoms you might have are different um i feel like i don't really want to say the symptoms on camera because because mainly because something someone could have that symptom but they actually might not have cancer so i would just recommend for example going on a actual cancer research website or the nhs website and seeing the actual information on there because that's where i found the information that i needed and that's how i realized because i remember the day when i went to hospital and i remember sitting on a bed and then telling me i had cancer i feel like i knew before then that i had it all of the symptoms all the things i i had already read about and i had met basically the criteria it was just a matter of having an actual doctor telling me that hey you've got it i think it is literally just a matter of taking care of yourself and and just looking at proper official medical websites for life symptoms rather than some random job blogger yeah you know how how how often do you do self-examination and stuff these days self-examination yeah well clearly not often enough i do i do it maybe once every few months when i'm in the shower and i remember i it's often when i just sort of i just i just think of you and then i think i should do something exactly guys ali's just mentioned to me that he thinks of me when he some of the time maybe maybe once every few months i don't know whether i should be impressed or disgusted i mean it's weird because like actually i should i guess i shouldn't be proud of that because it means that i've had that impact on you right yeah i've had the impact on your way like hey my you know olly my friend has had cancer maybe i should just check yeah you know which i think yeah maybe whoever's watching this check yourself make sure you think of me as weird as that sounds so i've got a few things i wanted to ask you specifically about so you you say quite a lot in your youtube videos uh words to the effect of damn i'm a lucky dude i'm so grateful for the life i'm living um i am honestly very very grateful to be in the position yeah how how much would you feel a luck has played a role in your success so this is a weird thing good luck because it's not a thing that you can measure no but i like the idea and the phrase that a lot of people say where you make your own look you put yourself in positions you you you sort of um try try to make all these different things align to work together and i think i think that's where maybe i've gotten a bit lucky for example i feel like i'm being i'm lucky here to be on the podcast with you to be on this video with you because inevitably obviously you have a lot more subscribers i do have 2 million subscribers i have like 200 000 i have the 10th that you do but you know here i am because we get along because we're good friends here i am and hopefully some of the people who are going to be watching this are going to also come over to my channel yeah everyone subscribe to ollie a link below definitely subscribe otherwise um i think those sorts of things are a mix of luck and a mix of just being in the right position right place but that's also not really luck though that's like sort of you see yeah everyone has their own interpretation right yeah i guess the way that i that i think of it it's it's that luck is sort of two things number one is like how often do lucky events happen to you and then secondly what is your ability to capitalize on those lucky events sure and so i think of for the first one how often do lucky events happen to you by sticking yourself on the internet you just 5000x is the amount of lucky things that can happen to you just because more people know of you and more people are exposed to you and i've been following your videos for a long time and so when when we first i i don't know i think it was like instagram dm or something well no this is the funny thing i think you followed me before i even knew who you were yeah i've been following you for ages you just go to the vibe and then the apartment setups and stuff i think my friends watch more of your videos than they do of mine because they're like oh my god oh you know have you got that tv you know the lg sponsorship that ollie you're gone you should definitely get one of those absolutely yeah so the first time i came across you was you actually left a comment on one of my videos oh you left a comment on one of my videos and then i went to your channel yeah and i just thought hey who's this sally guy i didn't really know who you were and then i think you left another comment on one of my videos and i was like oh this this guy seems like a nice guy like he's a youtuber from the uk and then i can't remember how he actually i don't know how he first connected it must be an instagram dm no no it wasn't because now cause you don't follow me yeah i think it was twitter oh it twittered me yeah yes i think it was yeah but i can't remember our first conversation i'll be honest i feel like it might have been around the counter time really possibly i don't know because i had a call we had a call yeah we did have a call and that was before was that before the cancer stuff that was before because obviously i would have been like hey you know oh i can't remember let's have a look i think it was very very close to the cancer stuff going through old messages yeah we have quite a lot of twitter dms oh it was when you got the tesla and i messaged you saying in november 2019 saying did you get this as a business expense i've been trying to research that side of things but couldn't find much in the way of information and then we kind of got talking about your your tesla and then six months later in may you messaged me being like enjoyed your video surprised how much you earn surprised you haven't got yourself a tesla yet and then we talked about skillshare and about like sponsorships and stuff nice so funny yeah but so i think so kind of going back to this luck thing it was like you just expose yourself in a non-weird way to look by putting stuff on the internet and then you capitalize on lucky lucky breaks by just being a generally nice person and being kind of taking initiative and stuff um at least that's kind of how i how i think about it yeah the thing with luck is as well is i hate it when people say for example like you or you or me we've built our our youtube channels we've we've built our online businesses from nothing like we've not had anyone help us do those okay you haven't had any money injection have you no but i had a huge unfair advantage of the whole like cambridge thing medicine thing like i i was really leaning heavily on those at the start because how many doctors still just do uh yeah how many doctors are still doing whatever they do um you still took that that step of putting yourself online or start of teaching other people of starting your med um remember coming backs after what it's called but you had like a teacher studios and stuff yeah you did all that sort of stuff a lot of people aren't going to bother to do that sort of stuff and i feel like a lot some people will say oh you you're lucky to have this you like to have that no no no no like all of that sort of stuff came because you took that first step yeah yeah i guess so because i'm sure you get a lot of messages because i get these sort of messages hey how do i start my youtube channel hey how do i start my business hey you know and instead of well you didn't ask anyone when you started what did you do hey what do you think should i start a youtube channel yeah i did it because i just wanted to yeah i think that's that's what that's one of the keys that i hear from from almost anyone whereby there are so few people who kind of do something and it becomes successful with a kind of logical strategic i want to make money i want to achieve this thing in the future therefore i will do it steps abc most people that i've spoken to who are kind of traditionally successful it's been much more about let me do this thing because it seems cool and fun and interesting right now and at the same time it also seems a little bit sensible because like doing heroin is like fun but you know from what i've heard but it's also kind of like um we will keep that keep that one on the dl um but you know stuff like starting youtube channel or starting a business there is an element of you know this this would be a sensible thing to at least try there's also a big element of this seems kind of cool it seems kind of fun and the people who can enjoy the journey are the ones who end up kind of reaching the destination but i find that often you realize that actually it's not really about the destination it was actually more about the journey all along and yeah i agree because you i've always seen you say that online it's not about getting to a destination because because once you're there you're always like oh whatever yeah very much is about the journey and i agree i agree with that statement because i think to myself hey you know i'm doing all this sort of stuff but what's the actual end goal here i don't actually know i don't know what the end goal is i feel like what ends up happening is like you get a nice thing you get a customize to that nice thing you're like okay i want the next nicer thing which is a very bad trap to fall into yeah and i think a lot of people do that and you have to sometimes pull yourself back and think to yourself damn man i'm so lucky to have the house that i have or have the car that i have and that's why i like you know what i say i always like to say in my videos i'm lucky well i'm in a fortunate position to have all these different things because there are so many people who don't there's some people who who are still you know doing who are still living paycheck to paycheck and stuff but i know for me for example if i lost all of my work if i lost all of my income and stuff i have enough money i have enough like savings and stuff where i could be jobless for like two or three years and i'd be completely fine and unfortunately not everyone is in that same position do you have any kind of gratitude meditation journaling type practice for this sort of stuff i don't have any sort of um like i don't write anything down journaling i feel like is something i should really do because journaling is such a good way to see what you did on a specific day instead of all the days becoming a blur but there are moments like where i'll just sit at my computer i sit in bed it can be anywhere i'm just like man i'll just reflect i'll just be like yeah but i'm just so lucky i'm just so lucky to do the things i do yeah to really not have many complaints especially when i see like other people other friends when i see you know when you see news stories i feel like reading news online is probably not a good way good mental health thing but you know even like for example with the black lives matter thing all that sort of stuff i think to myself man like there are some people going through some really hard stuff and here i am like you know pretty easy yeah like you know i'm just living quite comfortably really good time making youtube videos and like i wish everyone could experience the same thing i really i really wish everyone could if someone was in your position as a teenager who didn't want to go to university and they're struggling to find what to do what would be your advice to them for whatever that's worth i'm sure you do yes and it's a really really difficult question to answer because it varies from person to person if i could actually go back and do computer science at university i would because it's what i enjoy doing so finding that thing you enjoy i think is the tough part because a lot of people and i think they they really know what they enjoy yep um in our sort of day and age you could say i sound like an old man saying that but you know you can you can literally find a career in playing computer games which is just absurd when i was i'm sure when you were a kid when i was a kid playing computer games and making money that's the most craziest thing ever like he what so it's hard i think it it is really hard question to answer i don't have an answer if i'm honest um but i think it really is just a matter of finding what you love to do and seeing how you can monetize that thing yeah the way i kind of think of this is that if you if you can do that then that's fantastic like if you genuinely find something that you love to do and can also monetize it then you're you're kind of winning winning already the thing i often think about is what if like for the people who a don't really know what they love to do slash the thing they love to do i.e i don't know baking or playing the guitar is a probabilistically unlikely thing to actually be able to make money from um like people are unlikely to become the next john mayer or to become the next insert baker name here um and so in that in that context often like yeah do you how how would you think about like if you knew someone who's in that position someone in that position i i think i would tell them to try everything yeah it's like dabble with a lot of stuff yeah dabble with all sorts of like types of jobs um because especially when you're young you're in a very good position i think when you're when you're when you're 16 17 18 19 even i thought i've got up to 25 even up to 30. you can do so much you can do so many different things and i feel like you're most likely going to come across something that you're like i could see myself doing this in 10 20 years because i think that's an important thing for me as well whenever i do anything whenever i start anything i think to myself you know even if this didn't make a lot of money now could i still do it in five or ten years and if i can then i then then i think okay i'm gonna do this because even if it doesn't make me money for the first year or two or even if it's not monetizable for however long as long as i can keep doing it as long as i can enjoy doing it then let's just see how you guys say yeah that was a really good quote from uh when uh marquez brandley was interviewed on the y combinator podcast uh where he said that to be honest the secret to success is pick something and work on it for 10 years and like if you genuinely if you enjoy working on something for 10 years it is almost it's unfathomable that it wouldn't be successful in some way and basically yeah i can't remember is it like a thousand hours or ten thousand hours when you put ten thousand hours into something you're most likely like yeah pretty one percent pretty good yeah you're probably going to be one of the best in it which makes a lot of sense because you know this is like going sorry like i was saying earlier i'm a big gamer i like playing computer games a lot apex legends is one of my favorite games right now yeah i've invested 1500 hours into playing that game i sound pretty good you know for the nerds out there my kb is like five my win percentage is like 28 something ridiculous like that um but like i think to myself you know if i if i kept playing if i kept putting more hours into that i could probably be one of the best in the world and with that i could naturally maybe make a youtube channel maybe get into esports and stuff and that's again another great way to make money but you just got to make that commitment like you like markets are saying like you're saying if you can see yourself doing it for 10 years and you do it for 10 years you're most likely going to be one of the best in it if you had 20 million in the bank and you never had to worry about money ever again what would you do if i had 20 million in the bank i still play games okay still playing video games yeah do you mean work-wise i mean what i okay i love it be more specific like what would your day and an ordinary day in your life look like that is different to what it and and to what extent is that different from what it is now it's a good question because i think when you hear a lot of people who've made that sort of money their lives don't really change that much in terms of what they do because they still keep doing what they're doing before but if i think of it from my position where i am right now i think to myself i would probably still do still be doing youtube okay i'd probably do more photography yep i'd probably i would probably travel a bit more because i could afford to go first class everywhere and i would spend a lot more time with friends and family because for example david dobrik great example he just goes out and buys cars for friends i would absolutely love to just ask a friend be like hey what do you need here's the money and instantly make their life better just because i could like something like that would be so gratifying for me and i feel like that is literally what i try to do okay so i mean apart from that last bit around kind of buying fancy ass cars for your friends and a bit about flying first class everywhere yeah what's stopping you from doing the rest of it like right now i think i do do quite quite a bit of it already like gaming for example investing by investing it's not investing just like playing fifteen hundred hours yeah over the last two years and i do it because i can like i'm in a position where i can i can i can spend a few hours every day it's my way of focusing on something else because obviously when i'm playing this game i'm not thinking about anything else i'm thinking about the tactics of how to play i'm thinking about what i need to do i like to become tunnel vision when i do something i like to become very sort of focused on that thing so i think i am doing a mix of those um the traveling like you said yeah i think it's just a matter of like i i don't enjoy traveling so if i can make it as comfortable as possible then i'd love to but yep yeah i think like sort of the um first class is like a different level of wealth um and then apparently the next one is private jet which is like an even more like obscene yeah i mean yeah because i'm sure you've seen like the craziest thing about a private jet is you don't have to go to an airport you just turn up on the strip and you go on to the gym and you just go like what yeah wow and you can just be like to the pilot hey let's go here and they'll just go like what that's just absurd to me but what a position to be in if you ever do get into that amazing i think that's a pretty solid place to end this i guess uh final question is any any final parting words that you would like to share with anyone listening yeah subscribe to my channel now honestly like um i think like like if we go back to the cancer thing i think it is just a matter of i think the biggest thing i've learned is not caring about what other people think and just just doing whatever you want doing whatever is healthy but doing whatever you want really just not caring about what other people think good place to leave things yeah i feel like i i often have this with regards to the medicine stuff where my mum has a very strong preference that i do medicine and super crazy typically and i have a strong preference of like medicine is fun but it's just not as fun as the stuff i'm doing right now and given that i feel like i'm in this very very privileged position where i can do what i want um you know full-time medicine certainly wouldn't be on that list of things but yeah anyway good shout out thank you for coming on the podcast thank you for having me everyone subscribe to alia and um we'll see you on the next episode of whatever we end up calling this podcast
Subscribe to LifeNotes 👉 https://go.aliabdaal.com/lifenotes_deepdive In this episode Ali has a conversation with with web designer, content creator and entrepreneur, @Oliur. Known for his polished, minimalist aesthetic online and premium tech blog Ultralix, Oliur has built a following of over 100,000 to which he shares his tips on tech, lifestyle and financial independence. In the episode Oliur talks to Ali about his journey dropping out of school and making $600,000 from Tumblr themes, to the art of dropshipping and the lessons he has learnt from beating cancer. First 200 get 20% off the annual premium subscription for Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/deepdive 📚 Check Out My New York Times Bestselling Book Feel-Good Productivity! 👉 https://go.feelgoodproductivity.com/podcast 📧 Sign up for LifeNotes - my weekly newsletter where I share actionable productivity tips, practical life advice, and high-quality insights from across the web directly to your inbox. 👉https://go.aliabdaal.com/lifenotes/podcast 🔗 CONNECT WITH OLIUR 🎥 YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/Oliur 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/UltraLinx?s=20 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ultralinx/?hl=enr 👥 Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliur/?originalSubdomain=uk 💻 Website - https://oliur.com/ ULX Store - https://ulxstore.com/ LinxSupply - https://linxsupply.com/ 🔗 CONNECT WITH ALI 🎥 YouTube Channel - https://youtube.com/aliabdaal 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/aliabdaal 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/aliabdaal 💻 Website - https://aliabdaal.com 👥 Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ali-abdaal/ 00:00 Intro 01:19 Making $600,000 from Tumblr Themes 04:06 Early Life & Turning a Hobby into a Business 13:34 Finding Enjoyment Despite Struggles 17:33 Building a team 19:56 Growing Online 27:28 Getting into Dropshipping 43:34 What's Oliur's Empire like? 45:22 Testicular Cancer Diagnosis 51:38 Dealing With Chemotherapy 54:43 Life lessons From Cancer 01:04:04 Making Your Own Luck 01:11:31 Do you have any gratitude practices? 01:12:40 Advice for Finding Your Path 01:16:39 Would your life change if you had millions in the bank? 01:19:37 Final Thoughts 📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED Alibaba.com 🎙 ABOUT THE PODCAST Deep Dive is the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people to uncover their journey's towards finding joy and fulfilment at work and in life. In each episode our host Ali Abdaal talks to his guests about their philosophies, strategies and tools that have helped them along their personal path to living a life of happiness and meaning. There's no manual for living a happy life, but we hope that from these shared experiences you'll leave each episode with practical advice you can use to help you along the way. Want to start your own podcast? We use Transistor! https://go.aliabdaal.com/transistor 🎬 Subscribe to Deep Dive Clips for bitesized podcast clips https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmh... 🎧 Listen for free on your favourite Podcast platform - search "Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal" on your podcast app, or click these links: Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/id1587142091 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7gZkflCpck1rTixj8M7yHt RSS - https://feeds.transistor.fm/deep-dive 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on iTunes / Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/id1587142091 🧠 SPONSORED BY BRILLIANT This episode is kindly supported by Brilliant, the best way to learn maths, science and computer science online. Brilliant focuses on helping you learn through interactive courses that work to develop your intuition and first principles knowledge, rather than just memorising methods and facts. Sign up at https://brilliant.org/deepdive - the first 200 people will receive 20% off the annual premium subscription. 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also Tweet @DeepDivePodcast with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learnt from the episodes and we can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 https://twitter.com/DeepDivePodcast PS: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links that I get a kickback from 😜