Consistency is Not King

The most important factor to growing online

One of the things I hear a lot via podcasts/Twitter is “consistency is the most important factor to growing online.”

Let’s pressure test that.

The most important levers to content creation are idea quality, level of execution, and level of consistency.

Here’s a chart to help us think about it (apologies in advance to those color blind readers at home).

I’ve mapped Execution and Idea Quality across a 3×3 grid. Think of consistency as a switch you could turn on and off for every box.

Consider the scenario of someone with low quality ideas, low quality execution, and high consistency (the red box) vs someone with high quality ideas, high quality execution with low consistency (the green box).

A practical example of this would be someone that makes bad daily YouTube videos (red) vs Quentin Tarantino (green). Clearly Tarantino is the “more successful” case here, despite much lower consistency.

So consistency in a vacuum is not the most important thing.

Let’s take another more nuanced case…high idea, medium execution, low consistency vs medium idea, high execution, low consistency. A battle of the blues.

A practical example would be someone like Marko Terzo (completely original, high ideas, pretty good execution but not flawless, publishes every 10 days) vs someone like MKBHD (not every video is a super original idea, amazing execution, publishes around the same frequency).

I’ll admit, it’s tough to compare apples to apples here and it really depends what you’re optimizing for.

Marko has 6.1M subs in 5 years across 249 videos. MKBHD has 17.7M subscribers in 14 years across 1.6K videos.

I’d say if you had them creating content for the same period, Marko would have the bigger channel, with broader influence, and a higher slugging percentage on videos that went nuclear.

MKBHD would probably have the deeper fan base that would convert higher on purchasing his products.

Why is this?

My hunch is idea originality is the most flammable substance on the internet. Said another way, if you want to start a forest fire of attention, you want to have the most original ideas possible executed “well enough.”

If one were consistent and the other wasn’t, I do think consistency would become the most important factor.

Holding consistency constant, idea originality is much more important than execution.

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