Get Going, Get Good, Get Smart: Starting a Channel
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
When Sahil Bloom asks how someone with a large written audience and zero videos should start on YouTube, Ali Abdaal gives a three-level progression with an explicit decision gate between each level. Level one is get going: make five videos without overthinking. Then decide whether you want a casual or a serious relationship with the platform. Level two is get good: work on titles, thumbnails, hooks and production until you no longer cringe at your own videos. Then decide whether this is a hobby or a business. Level three is get smart: market research, competitor analysis, niche definition, target audience and analytics. The core diagnosis is that most people fail by doing level three thinking, agonising over niche and audience, while still at level zero with nothing published.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Level one, make five videos
Publish five videos and see what happens. Use whatever setup you already have, a microphone and a camera, and talk through content you already own, such as a written post you have published before.
Pro tip Ask the Tim Ferriss question: what would this look like if it were easy?
- 2
Decide casual or serious
After five videos, choose. Casual means clips get posted whenever you happen to record something. Serious means committing to consistent publishing. Both are legitimate, but pretending casual is serious wastes years.
- 3
Level two, get good at the craft
If serious, work the levers of a good video: title, thumbnail, hook, and production value. A light in the background, a plant, a considered set. Learn what actually makes a video work rather than just shipping more of the same.
- 4
Ship until you stop cringing
The threshold for level two being complete is that your videos are sufficiently good that you no longer cringe at them, and you start seeing some traction. That is a felt standard, not a metric.
Pro tip If you already have an audience elsewhere, you can transition some of it across, which accelerates early traction.
- 5
Decide hobby or business
Once the videos are good enough, the remaining gains come from strategy, so you have to place yourself on the hobby-to-business spectrum before investing that effort.
- 6
Level three, get smart
Do what a startup would do: market research, competitor analysis, niche and target audience definition, analytics and trend review, and study viral videos in your niche to see whether you can replicate their performance in your own way.
Watch out Doing this at level zero is the classic mistake. Overthinking niche and audience before publishing anything stops people from ever starting.
- 7
Outsource editing, never the writing
High production value can be bought in from day one. The writing cannot. Ali says he has tried hard to outsource his own video writing and found it basically impossible for a personality-led channel, and the work of writing is where the value is.
Pro tip The exception is a non-personality, research-script channel in the mould of a large explainer publisher.
In the wild
Bloom asks the question from a real position: roughly twenty-one subscribers, no videos, and a large library of written content he believes would convert well into video. He finds the prospect daunting despite having a huge Twitter audience. Ali's answer sidesteps the daunting part entirely by shrinking the first commitment to five videos recorded on the podcast setup already in the room, narrating existing tweets. The audience transfer from Twitter is treated as an accelerant at level two, not a prerequisite, and the diagnosis is that his real question is simply whether he enjoys making videos.
→ A daunting platform launch reduced to a five-video experiment with a decision gate at the end of it.
Ali describes the common failure directly: people agonise over what their niche should be, who their target audience is, and which topics they should refuse to cover, all of which are level three questions. Meanwhile they have published nothing. Because they never make the first five videos, they never generate the information that would answer those questions, and the strategy work is performed on imaginary data. The prescription is to invert the order and let five published videos reveal what the strategy should be.
→ Strategy paralysis replaced with published work that generates the data strategy needs.
Common mistakes
Level three thinking at level zero
Overthinking niche, target audience and topic boundaries before publishing anything. These questions can only be answered with real videos and real data, so doing them first guarantees paralysis.
Outsourcing the writing
You can buy slick editing but not your own voice. Ali says he tried hard and found it basically impossible, and every creator he has spoken to struggles with it on a personality-led channel.
Never picking casual or serious
Drifting between occasional clip posting and real commitment gives you the costs of both and the compounding of neither. The decision gate after five videos exists precisely to force the call.
From the transcript
“there's three levels level one level two level three level one is get going level two is get good and level three is get smart”
“just make five videos and see what happens just like don't overthink it what would this look like if it were easy”
“the mistake people make is they overthink their niche they overthink like what what's my target audience what's my niche”
From the episode
How I Grew from 0 to 500k Followers In Under 2 Years - Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom