Who is Ali Abdaal?
5 million YouTube subscribers. Former doctor. Startup founder. The guy who turned productivity content into an actual career before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon.
Ali started making YouTube videos in 2017 while working as a junior doctor at Cambridge. By 2022, he'd quit medicine completely to focus on content creation and building Voicepal, his AI note-taking startup. That transition from MD to full-time creator is actually kind of wild when you think about how much he walked away from.
What makes Ali different from other productivity YouTubers is he's building actual companies while creating content about productivity. Voicepal launched in late 2024, and he's been documenting the entire startup journey on his channel. Most productivity experts just talk about systems. Ali's testing them in real businesses.
His courses on productivity have generated millions in revenue. The Part-Time YouTuber Academy helps people start their own channels. Everything he teaches comes from stuff he's actually doing at scale, not theoretical frameworks pulled from books.
Everything below comes from his YouTube videos, podcasts, and social posts where he's shared the Ali Abdaal tools he uses. Fair warning: his stack has changed a bit over the years as he's scaled from solo creator to running actual teams.
How Ali Runs His Team
When you're running a YouTube channel, building a startup, and managing multiple courses, team communication gets complicated fast. Slack is where everything happens for Ali's team.
Separate workspaces for the YouTube team and Voicepal keep things organized. Within YouTube, channels break down by function: #video-scripts, #thumbnail-review, #sponsor-deals. It prevents the chaos of having 15 people all pinging each other randomly.
His favorite Slack trick? Using saved messages as a personal task inbox. Quick things that need doing get saved, then cleared once done. It's basically a lightweight task manager without switching apps.
Loom replaced most meetings. Instead of scheduling calls to review video edits or explain new processes, he just records a quick walkthrough. The team watches on their own time and asks questions async in Slack.
In a Deep Dive podcast episode from 2024, Ali mentioned Loom cut his weekly meeting time from about 10 hours to 3. That's 7 hours back for actual work instead of sitting on Zoom calls explaining the same thing to different people.
Design Tools for Content Creation
YouTube thumbnails make or break videos. Ali's team churns out multiple thumbnail variations per video, testing different designs to maximize clicks. Canva handles the heavy lifting here.
They've built a library of Canva templates matching his brand style. New thumbnails get created in minutes instead of hours. The collaboration features mean designers can share drafts with the team for feedback without exporting and re-uploading constantly.
For course graphics, social media posts, and presentation decks, Canva just works. Yeah, designers might scoff at it compared to Adobe tools, but speed matters more than pixel-perfect perfection when you're shipping content daily.
Figma is the serious design tool for Voicepal. Product design, app wireframes, marketing site mockups - all live in Figma. The Voicepal team uses it for everything from early sketches to final handoff for developers.
Real-time collaboration is clutch when designers and developers need to stay aligned. Comments and version history mean no one's working off outdated designs or confused about what changed. It's like Google Docs but for product design.
Website and Email Marketing
Webflow powers aliabdaal.com and all his landing pages. He switched from WordPress around 2023, mostly because the no-code approach let his team ship changes faster without waiting on developers.
The blog, resources section, and course pages all run on Webflow's CMS. It's more expensive than WordPress, but the time saved on maintenance and updates makes it worth it. No more plugin conflicts breaking the site at 2am.
For email, Kit (formerly ConvertKit) handles his massive newsletter list. Sunday Snippets goes out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers weekly. Course launches, product announcements, and automated welcome sequences all run through Kit.
The creator-focused features work way better than MailChimp for his needs. Product recommendations, subscriber tagging, and visual automation builders make complex sequences manageable. When you're selling courses and digital products, those tools matter.
Ali's mentioned Kit's deliverability is solid too. When you're sending to six-figure subscriber lists, getting emails into inboxes instead of spam folders becomes stupidly important.
Personal Productivity Stack
Notion is Ali's second brain. Video ideas, course outlines, company wiki for Voicepal, project documentation - everything lives in Notion. He's made multiple videos showing his Notion setup, which thousands of people have copied.
Databases are his favorite feature. Content calendars with linked databases let him see everything from idea to published video. Project trackers for Voicepal development keep the whole team aligned on what's shipping when.
But for daily tasks, he uses Todoist. Not Notion's database system. Just good old Todoist with projects and priorities. Sometimes simple beats powerful, especially when you just need to capture 'call accountant' or 'review script' without building a whole database.
Google Calendar runs his time blocking system. Deep work sessions for writing and filming get blocked in 4-hour chunks. Meetings cluster on specific days to preserve focus time. Color coding separates YouTube work, Voicepal meetings, and personal stuff.
Superhuman handles his inbox. Switched from regular Gmail in 2022 and hasn't looked back. Keyboard shortcuts, scheduled send, and the split inbox for newsletters versus important emails save him about an hour daily on email processing.
Yeah, it's $30/month. But when you're managing sponsor deals, partnership opportunities, and team coordination through email, that hour saved every single day adds up fast. The ROI is obvious.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ali Abdaal's Stack
What productivity apps does Ali Abdaal use?
Ali's core stack includes Notion for knowledge management, Todoist for daily tasks, Google Calendar for time blocking, and Superhuman for email. He switched to Superhuman in 2022 and credits it with saving an hour daily. The productivity YouTuber actually walks the talk with these tools - everything shows up in his videos and gets tested in real workflows.
What tools does Ali Abdaal use for YouTube?
Slack handles team coordination, Loom replaces most meetings with async video, and Canva churns out thumbnail variations. His team uses Canva templates for brand consistency across all graphics. From what he's shown in behind-the-scenes videos, the YouTube operation runs pretty lean with these three doing most of the heavy lifting for collaboration.
Does Ali Abdaal use Notion or Todoist?
Both, actually. Notion is his second brain for everything - video ideas, course outlines, Voicepal documentation. But daily tasks live in Todoist because it's just faster for quick capture. He's mentioned multiple times that Notion's database overkill for simple task lists. Sometimes you just need to write 'call accountant' without building a whole system around it.
What email app does Ali Abdaal recommend?
Superhuman, hands down. Switched from Gmail in 2022 and says it saves him about an hour daily on email processing. The keyboard shortcuts and split inbox for newsletters versus important stuff make inbox zero actually achievable. Yeah, it's $30/month, but when you're managing hundreds of emails daily, that's a no-brainer investment.
How does Ali Abdaal manage his startup?
Voicepal runs on Figma for product design, Slack for team communication, and Notion for company documentation. Pretty standard startup stack, honestly. What's different is how he uses Loom to cut meeting time - went from 10 hours weekly to about 3 by replacing most Zoom calls with async video walkthroughs.
What makes Ali Abdaal's tech stack different?
The Ali Abdaal tech stack is built for scale but stays surprisingly simple. He's not chasing every new productivity app that launches. Slack, Notion, Todoist, Superhuman - these are boring choices that just work when you're managing a YouTube channel with 5M subscribers and building a startup. The focus is shipping content and product, not optimizing which task app has the prettiest interface.