Start, Keep Going, Get Better
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Tintin's three-part method for creator growth, distilled from a year of weekly uploads and weekly office hours with paying students. The claim is that consistency is not just discipline — it is the forcing function that generates the answers. By continuing to publish while committed to improving, you are compelled to discover your unfair advantage, your niche, and how to make better videos, because the weekly deadline won't let you defer those questions. Ali extends the mechanism to quality: the way you get to a genuinely high-quality video is by making lots of videos and improving at the process, not by spending four weeks on one. The commitment to learning is load-bearing — repetition without it just entrenches the same mistakes.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Start before you have a niche
Publish without having resolved your topic. Tintin started with no clear niche beyond a vague interest in careers and life design, and it didn't prevent him from beginning.
Watch out Don't confuse this with never resolving it — the niche gap is what eventually stalled his first channel.
- 2
Fix a cadence you can hold and hold it
One video a week is the default. Tintin made a video every single week for an entire year, starting while still in his consulting job.
Watch out Set the cadence from your real capacity, not ambition. Ali still backs one a week over occasional prestige videos.
- 3
Pair the reps with an explicit commitment to improving
Consistency only works 'as long as you also have a commitment to improving and learning'. Each rep is an opportunity to fix one thing, not just to ship.
Watch out Volume without learning is the failure mode — it produces a year of identical mediocre videos.
- 4
Let the deadline force the unanswered questions
By keeping going you are forced to figure out your unfair advantage, your niche, and how to make better videos. The cadence surfaces the strategic questions you'd otherwise postpone.
Pro tip Track which question keeps recurring — Tintin's was consistently 'niche and unfair advantage', which told him what to fix.
- 5
Set a realistic timeline and extend your horizon
Expect it to take far longer than people assume. Tintin's most common observation in office hours is that 'some people think the timeline is way shorter than it is'; Ali's answer to the growth secret after seven years is 'a big part of the secret is just keep going'.
Pro tip Extend your time horizon for things being possible — over a long enough window you can learn everything you need to learn.
- 6
Protect enjoyment because it generates the energy
Ali's addition: a big part of the secret is finding a way to keep it enjoyable, which generates energy, plus having something deeper behind it than money.
Watch out Making videos purely for money erodes the energy that sustains the cadence in the first place.
In the wild
From October 2021, Tintin published one video a week — occasionally two — for a full year, spanning his final months in consulting and his stint as a freelance tutor. He describes the outcome honestly: it 'sort of got me somewhere', but he was still missing a niche and an unfair advantage. The consistency didn't hand him growth directly; it surfaced exactly which strategic gaps he had to close, and it built the production system and YouTube knowledge that later became the market-valuable skill people paid him for.
→ A year of reps produced a working production system and a precise diagnosis of what was missing, which later converted into paid consulting clients and a job running Ali's channel.
Students in Ali's sessions regularly ask whether it wouldn't be better to make one really high-quality video instead of a weekly one. His answer is that the way you get to making a really high-quality video is by making lots of videos and improving at the process over time — and that a video taking four weeks to edit is unlikely to lean into anyone's unfair advantage.
→ A decision rule that resolves the quality-versus-frequency debate in favour of frequency, unless the channel's explicit goal is documentary-style production.
Common mistakes
Reps without a learning commitment
Keeping going is only the number-one lever if paired with improving. Publishing the same video weekly for a year with no reflection produces volume, not progress.
Expecting a much shorter timeline
Tintin's most common office-hours observation. Channels can blow up fast, but only for people who already know how to make good videos and have an unfair advantage — beginners are learning a thousand skills at once.
Chasing the prestige video instead of the reps
A four-week edit rarely leans into your unfair advantage and starves you of the iterations that actually build skill. Reserve high-production formats for channels whose stated goal requires them.
From the transcript
“the number one thing you could do is keep going as as long as you also have a commitment to improving and learning because by…”
“kind of start keep going get better is like actually the the three-part method that like has the most truth behind it I think”
“the way you get to making a really high quality video is by making lots of videos and improving at the process over time”
From the episode
Conversations with my Team - Ep #1 - Tintin (YouTube Producer)
Tintin (YouTube Producer)