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Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

How To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire In Your 20s - Grace Beverley

👉 [Free live masterclass, Sat 21 Nov] Launch your online business by Christmas and land your first high-paying client by January →

Grace BeverleyguestAli Abdaalhost

Aug 18, 20222h 4mWatch on YouTube

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

Choir Years and Starting a Business at Oxford
Ali opens by asking about Grace's chorister background. Grace describes the heavy schedule at Salisbury, her music scholarships, her choral scholarship to Oxford, and how a bursar's suspension email pushed her to start her first business.
- •Grace links her obsession with being busy to the chorister workload, about 20 hours a week on top of schoolwork
- •She was a music scholar and attended the Royal Academy of Music alongside school
- •She gave up her Oxford choral scholarship after first year because she had started a business
- •She never missed a deadline so Oxford had no excuse to object
- •The bursar's email about unpaid fees is what prompted her to start earning
Should You Monetise What You Love?
Ali raises passion, purpose and music, and Grace explains why she kept music separate from her career. They discuss how adding money and obligation to something loved can make it feel like a chore, and why that is a privilege to even consider.
- •Grace keeps music as a passion rather than monetising it, which preserves her love of it
- •She says monetising what you love is a privilege, and obligation can make anything feel like a chore
- •She argues the idea that a monetised passion means you never hate it or burn out is mis-sold
- •Ali notes that almost everything he does is monetised too
Why Gen Z Wants Passion at Work
Ali notes that earlier generations treated work as a given, while younger people want fun and purpose. Grace ties the shift to housing costs and the promise of hard work paying off no longer holding.
- •Ali's mother tells him people have to grow up and work, as if work and fun were separate
- •Grace says working hard for years used to mean being able to buy a house, which is no longer true
- •If playing by the rules does not guarantee security, she says, people may as well try something they love
- •Online side hustles are being sold as the route to enough money
14:17 – 20:08
Are Side Hustles Toxic?
Ali describes reading The 4-Hour Workweek at 17 and asks how to square side hustles with the backlash against them. Grace says it is not black and white: side hustles are a great way to make money but are marketed toxically, and privilege has to be acknowledged.
- •Ali asked doctors what they'd do if they won the lottery, and that led him toward passive income
- •Grace says side hustles can be both effective and toxically tied to self-worth
- •She questions the idea that income is capped only by time, and values passive income streams
- •Online tools have lowered the barriers to starting a business
- •She contextualises her own success with her privilege and with being in the right place at the right time
The Rise of GracefitUK
Ali asks about the early days of Grace's influencer career. Grace walks through the timeline from a faceless Instagram diary to recipe PDFs and the £35 workout guide launched after the bursar's email, which made about £15k in a day.
- •Her Instagram started in February 2015 as a diary of a fitness journey, without showing her face
- •Her first product was a £5 recipe PDF sold on a Shopify store she built herself
- •After the bursar's email she wrote a workout guide overnight, and it made about £15k on launch day
- •She started YouTube because Instagram's 15-second videos were too short for workouts
- •For three years her content was her at her Oxford dorm room desk, which she sees as a blessing
Fear, Hate, and Gossip Forums
Ali asks how Grace got past the fear of posting. She talks about easing in through Instagram, early school reactions, body-shaming hate, and how checking gossip forums eventually hurt her as a people pleaser.
- •A year on Instagram eased her into YouTube
- •Early hate was mostly uninventive body shaming
- •She says people pleasing is incompatible with broadcasting to millions
- •She checked gossip forums to improve her content, but it dragged her down and changed nothing
- •She says she learned not to scratch itches that will hurt her
The Multiplier Effect of Making Money at Uni
Ali asks about the best and worst parts of suddenly making large sums while a student. Grace describes the freedom, but also how the multiplier effect pushed her to work harder and harder.
- •She says she sold roughly 300,000 to 350,000 of the PDFs in total
- •Best part: freedom and no money worries, though she still lived a similar student life
- •Worst part: working harder as more work meant more money
- •Ali describes doing ROI calculations on his own leisure time
- •Desire to earn more rises as the numbers go up
Building Long-Term Income Beyond Influencing
Grace explains that she saw influencing as a short-window career and invested her earnings into separate businesses. She and Ali compare it to being an athlete and discuss how creators try to build brands that don't depend on them showing up.
- •Grace saw influencing as a golden age with a golden product and planned for longevity within about a month
- •She compares the roughly 10-year career window to that of athletes
- •Ali says creators move from little autonomy to being slaves to the algorithm and audience
- •Grace realised her fulfilment came from strategy and product work rather than being the face
- •Building a business needs more influence than brand deals, so pivoting late is harder
Pivoting Away From Being an Influencer
Ali asks why Grace wound down a hugely profitable influencer career. Grace explains that she was happier building brands in an office, that more money was not bringing more happiness, and that she cut herself off abruptly while starting TALA before her finals.
- •She says she was earning millions a year but marginal happiness wasn't there
- •She wanted income that did not depend on her posting
- •TALA launched the month before her finals, and she never really went back to content
- •Her motto is 'do less better'
- •The pivot meant a lot less money but more fulfilment
From PDFs to the Shreddy App and Licensing Partners
Ali asks about Shreddy's origin and why Grace moved beyond PDFs. She explains the shift to an app and physical products, why PDFs were a dying model, and how a licensing partner helped her build the business and team.
- •PDFs were easily shared and static, while an app subscription offers a service and an easier model
- •Shreddy's concept is that you shouldn't do workouts you hate to get results you love
- •A partner company offered customer service, manufacturing and a platform in exchange for a profit split
- •Turnkey influencer solutions exist because influencers shouldn't spend time on supplier calls
- •Grace offers to introduce Ali to such companies
The Faff of Starting an Activewear Brand
Ali asks what it takes to start an activewear brand. Grace describes upfront costs, her mistakes with T-shirts and sports bras, how fit models and fit sessions work, and why she pushed on with TALA as an investment in her future.
- •It takes real money for samples and stock
- •Early samples often came back wrong, such as a T-shirt with oversized sleeves and a sports bra that looked like a sock
- •Fit models are graded to sizes, and TALA now holds weekly fit sessions
- •TALA took a year to launch, starting from the end of her second year
- •She kept selling PDFs while building for her future self
Why Sustainable Activewear: TALA's Mission
Grace explains the reasoning behind TALA: after cutting fast fashion deals, she found no sustainable activewear at a competitive price. She describes calling sustainable fashion an oxymoron, her goal of helping people make better choices, and handling criticism.
- •She cut fast fashion contracts, then noticed activewear had been left out of that decision
- •Sustainable options she found were around double the price her student audience would pay
- •She calls sustainable fashion an oxymoron but believes it can be done more sustainably
- •TALA competes with non-sustainable brands, aiming to get people to make one better purchase
- •TALA uses descriptive language like 'sustainably made' rather than labelling things 'sustainable'
Working Hard, Hardly Working: Productivity and Self-Care
Ali asks about the book's central tension between productivity and self-care. Grace explains she wrote it amid the pandemic split between hustle culture and wellbeing culture, how sometimes productivity is self-care, and her idea of 'planned nothing' versus 'fuck it nothing'.
- •The book offers a blueprint between hustle culture and self-care culture
- •Sometimes self-care is meeting a deadline, not running a bath
- •She believes time management is stress management
- •Planned nothing means scheduling rest; fuck it nothing is deciding to do nothing when you are human and depleted
- •Ali's unproductive Saturday illustrates the guilt of not fully committing to doing nothing
Goal Setting and Work-Life Balance
Ali asks about Grace's goal-setting process. She describes layered SMART and 'floaty' goals, three daily non-negotiables, and how her goals change over time, then they discuss striving versus enjoying the present and why balance is individual.
- •Goal setting is like a steering wheel to keep you pointed in the right direction
- •She sets yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals, with daily goals taking about two minutes
- •Floaty goals describe how she wants to feel
- •Her goal of a fast fashion collaboration changed before the next year's goal setting
- •Grace says she needs to push herself to enjoy the moment, and that work-life balance is individual and privileged
Burnout and Grace's Favourite Books
Ali asks Grace about the signs of burnout. She distinguishes clinical from mini burnout, says working on a passion can hide burnout, and describes relying on boundaries and reading fiction to relax. The episode closes with fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
- •She separates clinical burnout from the mini burnout many people have in a constantly connected world
- •She says she has been slightly burnt out for a long time since slowing down social media
- •Passion work can mask burnout, and she says you're allowed to feel it
- •Understanding shifting boundaries and reading novels help her relax
- •Fiction picks include Educated, The Nightingale and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and nonfiction picks include Atomic Habits, Black Box Thinking and Trick Mirror

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