“Just publish more” is some of the most expensive advice a devtools team can follow. It is how you end up with a blog full of thin, forgettable posts that pulled a content calendar together and moved nothing, while convincing yourselves you have a content program because the publish count went up. For a technical audience especially, more is rarely the answer, and chasing volume often does active harm. The better question is not how do we produce more. It is how few pieces can we publish that are each genuinely worth a skeptical engineer’s time.
I have watched teams on both sides of this. The ones winning with content almost never have the biggest blogs. They have the posts people bookmark and cite, produced at a pace they can sustain, and nothing that embarrasses them. Here is how to think about the right amount.
Why volume backfires with engineers
Your audience ignores filler and can spot it instantly, so every shallow post you publish does two bad things. It fails to land, and it chips at the trust your good content built, because a reader who hits one thin piece reads it as a signal about the rest. Publishing more low-value content to hit a number is paying to make your blog slightly worse.
Search has moved the same direction. Thin content produced at scale can drag on how search judges your whole site, and the updates of the last few years have rewarded demonstrated expertise and discounted bulk low-value pages. So the volume play that used to sort of work now carries real downside, which is why the standard in content engineers respect is depth and specificity rather than output.
What actually drives results
The content that works is the content good enough to earn attention from a reader who defaults to skeptical. One post that genuinely answers a hard question, with real specifics and an honest opinion, does more than five that skim the surface, and it keeps working for years while the shallow ones sink without a trace.
This does not mean publish rarely. It means every piece clears the bar, and you reach the bar by doing fewer things well rather than more things adequately. A year of one strong post a week is a serious library. A year of five mediocre posts a week is a liability you will eventually have to prune.
Where consistency comes in
The one place quantity matters is consistency, which is a different thing from volume. Showing up reliably, week after week, is what builds an audience and the compounding search authority I describe in how long content takes to work. A blog that posts once and goes quiet for three months fails regardless of how good that one post was.
So the target is not high volume. It is a steady cadence of genuinely good pieces, set at a level you can hold without dropping the quality. For most early devtools teams that is around one strong post a week. Fewer than that and you struggle to build momentum. More than that, and quality usually slips unless you have real resources behind it, at which point you are back to publishing filler.
Resist the volume pressure
The pressure to produce more comes from counting the wrong thing. Output is easy to measure and feels like progress, so a founder watching a publish count wants it higher. The number that actually matters is whether the content is earning attention and moving the right people, which the measurement in measuring the PLG funnel shows and a raw post count never will.
Pick a cadence you can hold while keeping every piece good, protect the quality over the count, and let the library compound. The teams that win are almost always doing less than the ones that lose, just far better and more consistently. If you want help producing the right amount of genuinely good content instead of chasing a volume number, that is the work I do, and you can tell me what your current cadence costs you.
