When I was a kid making my first videos, I thought you had to make enough high-quality pieces to eventually reach enough people.
Basically: quality over quantity.
But around mid-2023, I started noticing that some cool videos I saw were outperforming mine with a fraction of the effort I was putting in. I also realized I wasn’t following Nikita Bier’s rule: a team with more shots at bat will win against a team with an audacious vision.
And although that idea was originally about apps, I think it’s essentially true for content too:
I had to kill my mindset that a creative had to be good enough, in the same sense that it would be a audacious vision, and with that move to have more shots of growth opportunity ⬆️.
Because unless TikTok or Instagram decides you’re doing something wrong and stops distributing your videos entirely, it’s never over. You can try again, and again, and again.
Some of my first pieces back in 2022 were good, but they were incredibly hard to produce. They took a lot of effort. Spending a week on a one-minute vertical video is a lot, especially when today the same thing might take me no more than 20 minutes.
What happens with a new product?
By 2023, I had learned how to make good content for my audience and for brands that reached out to me. But then I had to learn something different: how to make good content that actually converts my new users.
Whenever you start a new product, you don’t really know where to begin or which direction to take. When you build a product and start creating content around it, you have to approach it from different angles and formats until you find what works.
At the beginning, what you have is a space: a spectrum of ideas that can move in different directions and be mixed together to create many different kinds of videos.
You have to put them out there.
Eventually, what you end up doing is eliminating the things that don’t work. That’s the information you get. You learn what doesn’t work and what does.
So I stayed focused on gathering information: producing creatives quickly, testing different ideas, and making sure the message was clear enough to know whether it worked.
Once I find something that works, that’s when I go all in on quality. I improve it. I duplicate it. I make another better version.
This applies to content, but I think it applies to almost any digital product too. And maybe to more things than that. Maybe even life?
You do a lot of things, and most of them go nowhere, but every attempt gives you a little more information about what you like and what might actually be worth doing.
I’m doing that right now, even as I write these articles.
You get information through volume. You learn from it.
Then, finally, you exploit it through quality.