Atharv Ketkar

Content has to be primal

I don’t know how did I miss it till now but content has to be primal just the way in software will look for recurring problems. In content also we have to go for recurring human nature. Software goes for recurring problems content goes for recurring nature.

Like this is a total deja vu moment because two years ago I remember writing. About to be a software giant, you need to be primal. And my point there was that the biggest companies serve the seven sins that humans have. I think content is supposed to be the same.

Recurring human behaviors are need for humor, need for money, need for status. Sins like sloth, pride, gluttony. And you will see content formats associated with it. For gluttony you see mugbang, for status you see All these alpha male and woman content for humor. You see a lot of standup comedians or skit pages. So market is definitely divided as per the primality and seven sins.

pride, greed (avarice), lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth

Human beings are flawed creatures and we keep falling into loops and habits. We develop good habits and bad habits like doom scrolling, bed roting, or Exercise or yoga or looking for humor, beauty, seeking status or money. So these are recurring behaviors and these behaviors also make us seek media and content related. To it, and thus these are huge markets.

Your videos have to find a product market fit, just the same way software has to do. You deal in the attention economy, and if you are using your content to sell a product, and selling a product requires multiple touchpoint, then you by default have to make videos. That makes them wanna come back again. Something that creates a recurring demand, and instead of creating it from scratch, it is better to tap into this recurring base nature of humans.

The thing that makes people save or follow is they wanting to consume something like this again. They are looking for something similar. Even if I am consuming eight hours worth of Instagram Reels every day, I’m watching like same two three kind of invariant where it’s like funny, beautiful or cool, just a variation of these three things.

So your content has to tap into the primality or the seven sins, and your content has to be such that it will have recurring demand that people will ask for more. The north star here is tapping into recurring human behavior. As well as being something people will ask for more. Imagine you shoot a video, it’s ready to upload. Think about it. If someone watches this video, will they ask for more?

Also, like people do get addicted. I think technicalities or the seven sins always get people addicted. For example, if a kid is having bad confidence, then he will get addicted to confidence sigma videos, or if someone has bad self-image, or if they have a lot of pride, they will watch facial analysis related content. Because I think content in itself has to be primal.

when you make it think if people will beg for more, This has happened only once with me when I was making those AI explainer videos. No one has sent me a dm saying please keep making this when I talk about my opinions

Recurring human loops: status, lust, envy, greed, humor, belonging, competence, fear, outrage, curiosity, comfort, aspiration, laziness, self-improvement.

All right, let’s get into flow state and spit out some things that I think are really recurring.

  • Watching stories of how other humans are living
  • traveling
  • things getting built
  • fights
  • arguments
  • esotericism
  • Sexy things
  • Music
  • Beautifully designed things
  • Politics
  • Fashion
  • Looks
  • exercise
  • culture wars
  • icons of success
  • Advice
  • motivation
  • something encouraging you to go all out
  • imaginary scenarios between people
  • Movie clips
  • How to get rich
  • how to get successful
  • how to get status
  • How to save money
  • Partying
  • Nostalgia
  • Something that boosts tribalism or talks highly of your native thing
  • Food.
  • Something that makes you feel smart.
  • History
  • Family or colleague drama.
  • Something related to love, unrequited love, or heartbreaks or current crush.
  • Things that remind you of your childhood.
  • Things that address your melancholy. Maybe someone is longing for rest, someone is longing for silence, someone is longing for company. So according to that, there might be different pieces of media.
  • Things that put you deeper into misery when you are sad.
  • Hypnotic things that push time faster.
  • Watching someone win.
  • Watching someone fail or almost fail. Revenge.
  • Justice being served.
  • Cheating, betrayal, exposure.
  • Secrets being revealed.
  • Before/after transformation.
  • Makeovers. Glow-ups. People becoming more attractive.
  • People becoming more powerful or losing power.
  • Rich people behaving strangely.
  • Poor people becoming rich.
  • Seeing luxury up close.
  • Seeing extreme poverty up close.
  • Forbidden or Dangerous places.
  • Hidden rooms. Underground scenes.
  • Cults. Scams. Conspiracies.
  • Criminal psychology.
  • Disasters.
  • Survival. “How did they survive this?” Near-death stories. Extreme weather.
  • Huge machines or Tiny machines.
  • Things operating at absurd scale.
  • Destruction. Restoration. Cleaning. Organizing. Repairing.
  • Watching competence. Watching craftsmanship.
  • Watching someone do something insanely fast.
  • Watching someone do something insanely precisely.
  • “I could do that.” or “I could never do that.”
  • Skill envy.
  • Mastery.
  • Optimization. Hacks. Shortcuts or Getting an unfair advantage.
    more at bottom

Content PMF: recurring human drive → recurring appetite → repeated viewing.

After consuming this, does the viewer still want another instance of the same underlying experience? Like you can make a really banger affiliate video or a really good piece of information or a one-off event that you document. The attention for it is scarce in nature. So people won’t want to visit it again. That piece of media itself might get popular. But it won’t help you sell as it won’t have recurring demand, nor will it grow your audience.

Like for example, I made a video explaining hyper log log, and sure it might be a good video, but no one is going to say hey give me another piece of this after watching it. It’s not going to create a recurring hunger in anyone. On the other hand, when I made the video related to KV cache, since AI is currently really hot. And a lot of workplaces are demanding people go through the courses and stuff, and it’s really aspirational to know about AI right now. There is going to be recurring hunger for those type of videos, like both are technical explainers, but one will have recurring hunger and another won’t.

it about getting sense of low-demand content vs recurring-demand content.

Audience growth = attention × probability they want another instance

The best thing you can do for yourself financially is to own pieces of media that garner a lot of recurring attention. If you gain a sense for how to do that, you will be golden. Because in this world to earn more. You gotta take on more responsibilities. Earning happens from a position of responsibility, while ownership, let’s see, move beyond that. Ownership lets you crystallize the amount of efforts you are put in, and the value of those efforts can grow exponentially. It decouples the effort, responsibility, and the reward. The best asset is the one that can recurrently attract human attention.

You crystallize some amount of thought, taste, research, storytelling, or technical work into an object. Once the object exists, it can travel independently of you. Ten people can consume it while you sleep. Then ten thousand. Then ten million. Your responsibility for producing it does not scale linearly with the number of people it reaches.
Make a portfolio of interconnected media that recurringly attracts attention, and that portfolio can help you commercialize objects, and then you can also have sales emerging out of nowhere.

create media → connect media → accumulate recurring attention → attach objects to the attention graph → let transactions emerge across the graph

Yep, it’s like why do you think reaction channels gain so much traction? Because the underlying asset that they’re reacting to is so good that even if they react to it, they will get attention and then they can react to that reaction. So it’s like something has to satisfy the base nature of humans and. Then you can recursively create content on it. So it’s like, it’s not like it’s demanding too much. Even at such diluted levels of reaction to a reaction to a reaction, it still works. We are not making a one in a billion type thing here. Once you have something good, you exploit the hell out of it.

Bad, low entropy and yearners basically mean that if you are making AI-related videos, then you are basically targeting people who know they need to know AI, but they are pretty sure they are fucking bad at it and they are yearning to get to a state where they understand it. Then you have to have proper affordances for the platform and for those users. You have to make something that they will ask for more, that maybe the explanation isn’t intuitive or something. And basically, the soul has to be recurring, that the ICP I mentioned at the start, or the yearner I mentioned at the start, is someone who knows they don’t know and they want to know. So seeking knowledge is the soul here. But it’s not very strong because the knowledge-seeking side of humans is very wishy-washy. We want to seek the esoteric, we want to seek something that is not supposed to be known, something magical, something that will change everything. The seeking side of us for mundane things is not that strong. So I don’t know.

In that case, I guess you have to tie it to aspirational identity or fear mongering. Basically saying, if you want to be the top tier person in your industry, then you gotta watch this. Or you can say if you wanna be left behind, don’t watch this. Something like that. The knowledge seeking side of them. Which is the soul in this case is not strong enough so we have to tap into the identity side of things as well.

Basically the recurring soul has to be something that pulls no matter what. So you have to go up the chain in case you were surface level one cannot do their job. For example if you are making videos about AI that are educational then education leads to not you zeroing on knowledge seeking. But knowledge seeking is not Very strong for something that is not viscerally engaging, such as conspiracy theories or esotericism or knowing what you are not supposed to know or something that will just change everything in an instant. So in that case you have to go up the chain and realize that the strong knowledge seeking. Was happening for the change everything in an instant kind of stuff, and that is associated with like really top performance. So we can sell that that you can be the top performer or another adversarial angle can be that. If you don’t watch, you will be left behind. So we have to keep going up the chain. Maybe people would be apathetic to watching this video because they don’t care about being the top performer or being left behind in this industry. Then maybe the fear factor here can be how can it be relevant for them? For example, how can you make AI relevant to someone who is not working? In that industry, maybe it’s about how it is going to affect their job. That if you don’t know this thing about AI, even you in the accounting industry are not safe. Maybe now it is tapping into something that pulls them no matter what because it is tied to their livelihood and survival.

Knowing something before other people. Insider information. Hidden rules. Unspoken rules. Social etiquette. Office politics. Dating politics. Class signals. Wealth signals. Taste signals. Status symbols. “What does this say about you?” Ranking people. Ranking products. Ranking cities. Tier lists. Best/worst. Who is stronger? Who is smarter? Who is richer? Who is more attractive? Comparison itself. Prediction. “What happens next?” Future technology. Future society. Collapse scenarios. Utopias. Dystopias. Alternate history. Counterfactuals. “What if?” Imaginary conversations. Fantasy lives. Daydream fuel. Escapism into another social class. Escapism into another country. Escapism into another era. Escapism into a cleaner, calmer life. Escapism into chaos. Cozy content. Rain. Night drives. Empty cities. Airports. Hotels. Cafés. Solitude. People being alone beautifully. People being together beautifully. Friendship. Male friendship. Female friendship. Brotherhood. Rivalry. Mentor–student relationships. Father–son dynamics. Mother–daughter dynamics. Family pride. Family shame. Generational conflict. Parenting. Babies. Pets. Cute things. Protective instincts. Rescue stories. Animals behaving like humans. Humans behaving like animals. Embarrassment. Cringe. Secondhand embarrassment. Awkwardness. Social rejection. Acceptance. Validation. “Someone finally understands me.” “I thought I was the only one.” Identity confirmation. Identity threat. Tribal victory. Tribal humiliation. Seeing your group praised. Seeing the outgroup mocked. Redemption. Forgiveness. Regret. Missed opportunities. “I should have done this earlier.” Midlife panic. Youth anxiety. Fear of wasting life. Fear of being ordinary. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of being unattractive. Fear of being poor. Fear of being irrelevant. Fear of being alone. Fear of being weak. Reassurance. Permission. Someone telling you it is okay. Someone telling you to stop caring. Someone telling you to go harder. Discipline porn. Productivity porn. Anti-productivity content. Romanticizing work. Romanticizing laziness. Romanticizing suffering. Romanticizing freedom. Burnout identification. Recovery fantasies. Vacation fantasies. Retirement fantasies. “Fuck everything, I’m leaving.” Reinvention. Starting over. Moving cities. Quitting jobs. Going off-grid. Becoming anonymous. Becoming famous. Getting recognition. Being underestimated. Proving people wrong. Revenge success. Comeback stories. Underdogs. Dominance. Submission to expertise. Being led. Leadership. Charisma. Voice. Presence. Masculinity. Femininity. Sexual polarity. Seduction. Romantic tension. Jealousy. Possessiveness. Breakups. Reconciliation. Unrequited attraction. “Do they like me?” Reading signals. Body language. Facial analysis. Personality typing. Astrology-like categorization. Archetypes. “What type of person are you?” Self-diagnosis. Self-explanation. Finding a label for yourself. Finding a tribe for that label. Memory. Childhood. Old technology. Old games. Old music. Lost places. Dead malls. Old internet. “Things used to be better.” “You had to be there.” Generational superiority. Lost futures. Forgotten history. Hidden history. Weird history. Historical irony. Rise and fall. Empires. Wars. Leaders. Assassinations. Betrayals. Great inventions. Catastrophic mistakes. “How did nobody notice?” Mysteries. Unsolved mysteries. Puzzles. Pattern recognition. Easter eggs. Lore. Canon. Fan theories. Esoteric systems. Symbolism. Occult aesthetics. Secret societies. Ancient knowledge. “Forbidden knowledge.” Deep expertise. Things that make you feel initiated. Things that make you feel smarter than the average person. Things that make the world feel deeper than it did five minutes ago.