The Daily Thread Engine
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The Cultural Tutor started with zero followers and no name, and reached roughly 100,000 in six weeks by running a simple publishing engine: one thread every day, plus manual distribution done entirely by hand. The engine has two halves. The first is volume with a deadline — he committed to a daily thread for a 90-day trial, on the logic that each post is another ticket in the draw. The second is the unglamorous outbound grind: asking friends to follow, searching his own topic and engaging with everyone writing about it, DMing larger accounts for advice, and personally messaging every person who had ever liked a post, every time he published, until the platform blocked him for looking like a bot. Most threads flopped. The point was to still be publishing when one didn't.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Commit to one post a day for a fixed trial window
Pick a single format you can produce daily and set an end date rather than an open-ended promise. His original plan was one thread every day for 90 days, purely to see what happened, with the explicit fallback that if it failed he would try something else.
Pro tip A fixed window turns an intimidating career bet into a test you can actually finish.
- 2
Seed the first few followers manually
Ask friends to follow. Then search the platform for other people writing about your subject — for him, Roman history — follow them, and follow the people who liked, commented on and retweeted their posts, hoping some follow back. This got him to twenty or thirty followers.
Pro tip Search your own topic, not the trending page — you want readers who already care about the subject.
- 3
Ask bigger accounts for advice, not favours
He messaged accounts from 2,000 to 100,000 followers introducing himself, saying what he wrote about, and asking how they grew. Many replied with detailed advice and some retweeted him, each retweet adding twenty or thirty followers.
Pro tip Lead with a specific question about their growth; it is easier to answer than a vague request for support.
- 4
Message every past liker each time you publish
He built the habit of personally messaging everyone who had ever liked anything he posted, every time he uploaded something new — roughly 150 people a night, one or two hours at a stretch, sometimes far longer, until the platform rate-limited him for looking like a bot.
Pro tip Send until the platform stops you; that is your natural daily ceiling.
Watch out This is hours of unglamorous manual work with no leverage. It only makes sense while you are below critical mass.
- 5
Keep the cadence through the flops
His first hit got 900 likes after two weeks; the next thread got about twenty. He treated the daily post as an odds machine — the more you publish, the more chances something breaks out — rather than judging the project by any single result.
Watch out The dangerous moment is the drop after a hit, when the ego deflates and quitting feels rational.
- 6
Ride the breakout to critical mass, then keep the cadence
One thread went to half a million likes and added around 80,000 followers in a day. At roughly 100,000 followers he had enough of a base not to depend on algorithmic favour. He then carried on with one thread a day regardless.
Pro tip Start the adjacent asset early — he started a newsletter in the same period without agonising over its name or format.
In the wild
Six weeks in, engagement had been dropping for three or four days and he assumed the account was finished at about 15,000 followers. Annoyed rather than resigned, he opened his laptop and wrote a thread about the danger of minimalist design and the death of detail, arguing that everything from brand logos to architecture has been simplified. He shut the laptop and went to bed. A friend messaged that it was doing well; a few hours later it had 30,000 likes, and by the end of the day half a million.
→ Around 80,000 new followers in a day, taking him to nearly 100,000 and past reliance on the algorithm.
Two weeks into the daily cadence he analysed and broke down a speech given by Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. It got 900 likes and he was convinced he had made it and was famous online. The very next thread got roughly twenty likes and burst the ego immediately. He kept publishing daily, picked up retweets from bigger accounts, and reached about 3,000 followers by week four.
→ Demonstrated that the engine works on averages across many posts, not on any single result.
Common mistakes
Waiting to be discovered
He spent years emailing newspapers and literary agents, collecting two to three hundred rejections, and assumed someone would eventually knock on his door with a book deal. Nothing arrives if you do not build the audience yourself.
Skipping the manual outreach
The daily post alone does nothing at zero followers. The unscalable part — following, replying, DMing, messaging every liker — is what produced the first thousand followers that made the algorithm possible.
Judging the account on one post
A hit inflates the ego and a flop deflates it, and both distort the decision. The only meaningful unit is whether you are still publishing daily weeks later.
From the transcript
“and then I got got into this habit of every time anybody had liked anything I'd ever posted I would then message them personally every…”
“so I usually send messages until I wasn't allowed to send them anymore by the platform and I ground out those first um those first…”
“by runting a thread every day you're just increasing the odds of something doing well”
From the episode
How To Build A 1.5 Million Following As An Online Writer - The Cultural Tutor
The Cultural Tutor