How would Iman Gadzhi do it?

Iman Gadzhi grew up in London and was making money online as a teenager, buying and flipping Instagram accounts. In 2017 he left school and started a social media marketing agency, IAG Media.

An agency is the simplest business there is: you do the work, the client pays for it. Every euro comes from his own hours and his team's. If he stops, the money stops.

He did one thing most agency owners don't. He filmed all of it, and posted it. That footage turned out to be worth more than the agency.

The people watching his videos didn't want to hire his agency. They wanted to have one. So he taught them.

The education business that became Educate started in 2018, teaching people how to start and scale their own agencies. Now his income no longer depended on his own client work. It came from other people learning to do it. Educate says it has served "hundreds of thousands" of students (his claim).

Most course sellers rent their audience: they pay for ads, and the price goes up every year. He built his own.

From around April 2022 he ran content as its own department, with a clipping team that grew to 65 in-house editors in about three months. At their peak his accounts reached 200 to 300 million views a month (his claim), and his main YouTube channel had about 5.6 million subscribers by mid-2025.

This is the one layer that still runs on him every day. Everything else is fed by it.

His students sell their own courses and communities once they finish his. Most of them sell on Whop. So in spring 2025 he bought a stake in Whop. How big was never made public, but it made him a co-owner, next to investors like Peter Thiel and Insight Partners. Then he moved his own products onto it.

When one of his students makes a sale, a slice of it flows through a platform he partly owns. When someone who has never heard of him makes a sale on Whop, the same thing happens. He earns even when people don't buy from him.

Building a famous education brand takes years, so he bought one. In 2025 he bought Consulting.com, the brand Sam Ovens built in business education, from its second owner, Rian Doris. The price was not disclosed.

He says he prefers brands with lasting intellectual property over one product launch after another. Like Educate, it is run by other people; he is the face.

His audience needs two things to run the businesses he teaches: customers and content. He bought into both.

ListKit finds customers: it is an AI cold-email platform, valued at €45m before its 2025 round. He took a stake, then built it into Consulting.com, so his students use a tool he partly owns. Higgsfield makes content: it is an AI video company from Almaty, Kazakhstan. He invested in 2026 and advises it weekly. In August 2026 it raised $400m at a $5.4bn valuation.

The last layer is people. His in-person events seat 60 to 70 hand-picked operators. He books the whole venue so everyone there is staff or a member, and brings in speakers from outside the attendees' world: a founder who sold at a $1bn valuation, an operator who bootstrapped to nine figures, an M&A adviser.

The room is the product. It is also where the next deals start.

The agency is closed: it paid for hours, and hours don't grow. Educate and Consulting.com have teams and other instructors; he is their face and their owner. Whop, ListKit and Higgsfield are run by their founders.

What he still does himself is the part that feeds everything: the content, the brand and the room. He gave up running the businesses and kept the attention, and a slice of every layer the attention flows through.