Tanmay Bhat Content Creation Strategy: Hacking YouTube Algorithm

Tanmay Bhat's content creation strategy isn't built on luck. It's a system engineered through a decade of writing, mastering retention psychology, and understanding how platforms manipulate creator behavior.

Most creators chase views. Tanmay engineers systems that make views inevitable.

Writing: The Universal Advantage Nobody Talks About

Tanmay Bhat’s strategy has one non-negotiable: writing volume. Not talent. Volume.

"I've written for television, film, radio... hoardings, print ads, jingles, songs, YouTube videos, corporate shows."

The output is over 1,000 pages a year. Maybe 100 are usable. But you must write the full thousand to develop judgment.

His background proves this: 300 AIB sketches, daily sitcoms for Disney, scripts for reality TV shows. Years of output compressed his feedback loops.

"Your ability to exercise judgment only gets stronger if your feedback loops are shorter and faster."

Can you create without writing? Yes. But you’ll need a thousand hours of content to gain the intuition a writer builds in a fraction of that time.

The craft isn’t optional. You have to chew the craft.

The Anatomy of Retention: Engineering the "Oven Moment"

Retention is the single most important metric. Can you keep the viewer until the end? The "Oven Moment" is how you guarantee it.

Every successful video makes a psychological contract with the viewer in the first three seconds. It makes a promise. The entire video is spent building toward that specific payoff.

BuzzFeed Tasty perfected this. A pizza goes into the oven. You wait. It emerges, perfectly golden. Promise made, promise kept.

Tanmay applied this to his show Overpowered. Early episodes discussed abstract AI theory. Views were low. He restructured each episode to promise a dramatic transformation using a specific AI tool.

The format is always the same: setup the tool, process the input, reveal the impressive output. This isn't an editing technique. It's a psychological formula for retention.

This pattern is universal. Every trend, from Instagram videos to movie character filters, follows the same rule: anticipation built, anticipation delivered.

Your content must have that baked in payoff, the Oven Moment, that fulfills the initial promise.

Platform Evolution: Why YouTube Changed Everything in 2023

Tanmay's strategy shifted when YouTube redesigned its architecture. Channels were once unidimensional. Now, tabs for Videos, Shorts, and Podcasts separate feeds under one brand.

"Now when I subscribe to a channel, I've subscribed to this brand of content."

This unlocked his current approach: long-form for depth, shorts for reach. Subscriber count matters less than engagement. His 300k subs yield views from 50k to 200k. The algorithm pushes content to users whose behavior suggests they'll watch.

It mirrors the TikTok model: 10 followers can get 8 million views.

This is why he now advises beginners to start with short-form. Confidence drives success more than talent.

"If you make 5 short-form videos a day... and take 50 shots, one of them is going to hit."

But long-form remains the holy grail. Short-form is a scrolling habit. Long-form is an intentional choice. A 30-minute time investment creates loyalty.

The strategy: start short for traction, pivot to long-form for community.

The Variable Rewards Loop: Why Creators Keep Creating

Platforms are designed to keep you creating, and they do it through a powerful psychological mechanism called variable rewards.

A Stanford experiment put rats in water. They were rescued once. When put back, they paddled for 5 days, believing rescue was possible again. This is the psychological engine of every content platform.

"Variable rewards is what makes the rat continue running on the treadmill."

When one Overpowered Reel hit 12 million views, it created the belief that the next one could too. One video gets 500 views, the next 50,000. The unpredictability is the feature, not the bug. Platforms engineer this to keep you producing. Your job isn't to succeed every time; it's to generate more lottery tickets.

If success were linear and predictable, creators would optimize once and coast. Variable rewards ensure you keep producing volume, taking more shots, and increasing the platform's inventory. You are not failing when a video flops. You are buying another lottery ticket. This is why Tanmay describes content creation as increasing your "surface area of luck."

You cannot control who sees your content, but you can control how much you put out there. The variable rewards loop is what ensures you will keep buying tickets, hoping for the next jackpot.

Tanmay Bhat's strategy boils down to 3 systems:

1. Write Relentlessly. A 1000 pages a year. The volume builds judgment. You earn pattern recognition through repetition.

2. Engineer Retention. Every video needs an "Oven Moment." Promise, build anticipation, deliver the payoff.

3. Understand the Game. Platforms manipulate you with variable rewards. Knowing this helps you stay sane when videos flop.

These aren't secrets. They're systems. Tanmay spent a decade earning these instincts.

The pattern: write more, test retention, and ride the variable rewards loop without letting it break you. Most creators fail because they skip the writing and quit when the algorithm doesn't reward them.

Tanmay's advantage isn't talent. It's volume multiplied by time.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

ProductHunt (PH) is good if your audience fits the niche that PH serves. Other than that, it is gold for backlinks since it has 91+ Domain Rating.

2/

Pro-tip: Use F5Bot to get notified of Reddit Comments in real-time.

3/

Interesting insight.

Rabbit Holes

1. 145,000 leads. 1 instagram post. Here’s how

2. Being the Best in the World

3. Using Claude to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

What’d ya think of today’s newsletter? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know.

Do me a favor and share it in your company's Slack #marketing channel.

First time? Subscribe.

Follow me on X.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. How South Korean Government Uses Incentives Like Cash and Apps to Solve Its Aging and Health Crisis (LINK)

2. The Psychology of Packaging: How Visuals Drive Revenue (LINK)

3. Perspective Funnels' Marketing Playbook: Turn €250K/Month Ads Into Profit in 7 Days with Mobile-First, AI-Funnels (LINK)

4. How Kapwing Hacks Meme Virality using Trends (LINK)

5. Social Media's Unspoken Rule (LINK)