The long climb of an obsession on quality

I’ve mentioned the excellent “Acquired” podcast on here a few times (including learning as leverage and average advice), as it’s a fantastic show. I’m relatively new to it, but over the last year or so there are a lot of people that are new to it. Case in point, here is their growth over the past nine years:

There are a few things to take away from this, the biggest being that slow climb. Looking at 2016-2019, four years worth of shows, the climb was very minimal. They put a ton of work into every episode, and the results took a long time to arrive.

Cal Newport recently wrote a great article unpacking their show and had a few fascinating statements. The first is related to the challenges of an audience as large as theirs is now:

The show now serves more than 200,000 downloads per episode and they now face the problem of their audience becoming too large for their advertisers to afford paying the full fair market price for their spots.

He also explains why the growth has been so impressive the last few years:

What does explain the success of Acquired? The answer is almost disappointingly simple: it’s really good. Gilbert and Rosenthal don’t just look into the histories of the companies they profile, they master them — tracking down obscure books, reading every relevant article, pouring through investor filings, interviewing people who were involved. Fast Company reported that for their episode on Nike, Rosenthal prepared a 39-page script and Gilbert created a 4,000-word document listing insights to mention during the taping.

I see the same story with other creators.

• David Senra published to a small audience for years before Founders took off.
• MrBeast has 246 million subscribers on YouTube, but it took him more than two years and 113 videos to reach his first 1,000. 1,000 subscribers on YouTube is nothing, yet he kept pushing and improving and now every video of his reaches hundreds of millions of viewers.
• Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) is another YouTuber with a similar trend. His videos get millions of views now, but he’s been doing this for over 15 years and many of those were with a very small audience.

In all three cases, perseverance and quality were the keys. They all improved their quality as time went on, and kept publishing, learning, testing, and publishing some more.

There are certainly some shows and creators that blow up quickly, but most have a long consistent push in their past that has taken them to where they are today.