Given that this is the first CreatorNotes email of the year, I wanted to kick things off with something that’s been on my mind as I’ve been thinking about my own approach to YouTube heading into 2026.
In the final quarter of last year, the team and I made a pretty significant change in that we dropped from trying to strive towards posting 2 videos per week down to just 1.
I know that might sound somewhat counterintuitive coming from someone who’s always banged on about consistency, but I’m leaning pretty hard into the whole financial freedom and lifestyle business content at the moment and I want to really double down on the quality and depth of those videos.
For those of you wondering, the big 3-year vision is that when someone searches “lifestyle business” or “financial freedom” on YouTube, my videos are hopefully the first to pop up. And if we’re going to achieve that goal, I need more time per video to come up with new frameworks and properly anchor each piece of content, rather than just churning stuff out to hit an arbitrary publishing schedule.
But – and this is a big but – while I’m reducing the number of uploads, if you haven’t yet started YouTube or you’re still in those early stages, this actually isn’t the advice I’d suggest following if you’re just starting out in January 2026.
Because when it comes to succeeding on the platform (and pretty much every other creative field), quantity matters way more than quality, especially in the beginning.
Whenever I teach this concept to our PTYA students or chat to aspiring YouTubers, I always come back to the Pottery Class Paradox.
You might’ve heard about it before but in brief, there’s this famous story about a ceramics teacher who basically split their class into 2 groups at the start of the semester. Group A had one job – create a single, perfect pot and they had the entire semester to make it as flawless as possible. Group B, on the other hand, just had to make as many pots as they could so quality didn’t matter at all.
Now here’s where it gets interesting because at the end of the semester when all the pots were judged, the highest quality pots all came from Group B – the quantity group.
While Group A spent weeks overthinking every tiny detail, Group B was actually doing the thing. They were making mistakes, learning from them, and gradually making progress over time.
And this is exactly the pattern I see with people who struggle to get started on YouTube. They’re stuck in Group A mode – trying to plan the perfect video, waiting until they’ve figured out their niche, researching the best camera setup, watching hundreds of tutorials on colour grading, stuff like that.
Meanwhile, the people who actually get their channel off the ground are hitting publish every week, learning from feedback, noticing what connects with their viewers, and getting better through repetition rather than preparation.
The reason I can afford to slow down now and focus more on quality is because I’ve already made hundreds of videos. I’ve confronted all the beginner fears, built the systems around my production pipeline, learned what works and what doesn’t through actually putting in the reps. I’m at a completely different stage in my YouTube journey.
But if you’re a beginner, or you’ve published fewer than say 50 videos, you need to prioritise quantity. And I don’t mean that in a “sacrifice all quality” kinda way – I mean that you learn quality through quantity, not before it.
This whole concept is actually baked into the core framework we teach within PTYA – what we call the Part-Time YouTuber Blueprint.
It’s a 3-level system that shows you how to actually make progress on YouTube, and level 1 is entirely about just getting started. Your only job at this stage is to publish at least 7 videos, without trying to figure out your perfect niche, buy the best gear, or learn advanced editing techniques. None of that matters yet.
Level 2, which we call Get Good, is where the quantity-over-quality principle really shines. You’ll naturally improve at titles, thumbnails, scripting, on-camera presence, editing – all the skills you actually need as a YouTuber – through consistency, not through planning or overthinking.
And if you focus on making small (and I mean genuinely small like 1%) incremental improvements each time you upload, then by video 10 you’ll be miles ahead of where you started. Not because you figured it all out theoretically but because you took action and learned through doing.
Finally, level 3 or Get Smart is when you start treating YouTube more strategically and like a proper business but only because you’ve already built the foundation through volume and consistency.
There’s a whole lot more detail within PTYA that guides you through this entire blueprint step-by-step, so if you’re someone who keeps putting off starting (or you’ve started but feel a bit stuck), this is the framework that’s helped thousands of our students actually make progress and build momentum. You can check out PTYA here if you’re interested.
Anyway, that’s my first bit of creator advice for 2026 and if this email gives you the push to finally publish your first video (or your 10th video, or your 50th).