The truth can be very misleading.
In an interview with Neil Patel, in regards to producing content that spreads, the interviewer says, “It’s quality that matters, not quantity.”
This is true and is likely the right advice, but it’s not very good advice.
The issue is that you often only can start to get quality from creating quantity – this has been proven a lot.
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, says “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Look at the first YouTube videos of Ray William Johnson, the top subscribed channel in the early 2000s – his videos were terrible.
The first video for Oney Cartoons was god awful compared to him now.
Southpark & Simpsons were a bit ‘off’ in their first season few episodes.
TV show Friends had a pretty boring pilot episode.
Rhett and Link, with over 10 million YouTube subscribers, have some hilariously low production value videos when they started.
Too Short, successful rapper that pioneered West Coast rap, used beats from a simple drum machine when he started.
Almost everyone starts off awful, but only some keep producing that product and learn from each iteration, try harder for the next one, and also know when to give up and pivot to something else as discussed in Seth Godin’s book, The Dip.
Knowing that quality matters and is the goal is true, but quantity is the way to get there.