I Discovered The Perfect Claude Prompt Formula For YouTube Shorts

I've actually started doing a lot more shorts on my channel. I'm trying to experiment with doing more shorts as opposed to only doing long form videos because I want to try to get in front of different audiences. And shorts tend to get in front of different audiences than the long form videos. I've also got sponsors coming to me saying, hey, I would love to pay for a short on your channel. So I'm like, okay, well, maybe I should start doing shorts then. So I've actually started playing around with more shorts. And so I created this custom project in Claude, and if you're not familiar with custom projects, but you are familiar with like custom GPT, it's basically Claude's version of a custom GPT, right? So I created this one called Shorts Writer. And what I did with it was, you could see I uploaded a whole bunch of transcripts from shorts that I thought were really, really good shorts. So I came across shorts that had a lot of views that were in sort of technical niches that talked about, you know, AI or talked about like emerging tech or things like that. And I downloaded each of the videos and then I pulled them into descript to get the transcript from the video. And then I uploaded all of the scripts from all of these videos that I found. And then basically what I told this custom Claude prompt to do is to read the scripts that I uploaded and try to find the sort of consistent formula that seems to make all of these work well. And for anything I put into the prompt box, give me a similar script. So that's essentially the way I did it. And so now if there's like a new piece of news, so if I go over to like a news website, I know you can't actually see this because I'm just sharing the one tab, but if I go to like a news website, there's some news out today about how the humane. Pluck for humane. But if I was to go and copy the entire article and come over to Claude, you can see I can paste in the entire article and it makes this little like pasted box here. So I just posted in the entire article from the Verge about how Humane's performance is underperforming right now. I don't have to put anything into the prompt box because it already knows what I'm looking for. And if I just hit enter on this, it's going to read this news article and then write me a script based on this news article that I put in here.

That's crazy. You could do that with like a faceless YouTube channel too, couldn't you?

You could, yeah. It knows that I want my script to be under 60 seconds. I'm trying to model. Cleo Abrams is like, one of my favorite YouTubers as far as, like, shorts go. She does a really good job with them. So it's kind of trying to model a similar formula to what Cleo's videos are. And you can see it wrote like a 60th second script about that news article that I just put in. Humane just launched their AI pin wearable device meant to replace your smartphone. But things aren't going as planned. Imagine you create a revolutionary new gadget. You spend years developing it, raise over 200 million from big tech names, and finally release it to the world. But then more people return it than keep it, right? And it just wrote this whole script for me. That's actually a pretty, like, compelling, interesting script.

It sounds. Yeah, it sounds like a good short. That's crazy.

So, yeah, you take this script I it into my teleprompter here, I read it, I overlay it with B roll, and I can crank out shorts in 45 minutes. You know.

Wait a minute. Is that what you're doing? Are you changing anything?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times it's not specifically worded the way I would word it. Right. Sometimes it'll use like, delve or, you know, the common words that, like, make it obvious that it's AI. So I will, you know, tweak some words to make it sound a little bit more like me. But for the most part, the scripts come out pretty good out of the box.

That's why.

Let me, let me see if I can show you my system prompt here. So create video scripts that will be one minute or less in the style of Cleo Abram. Use the transcripts in the project knowledge to determine the consistent formula behind the video scripts. Then use the details about the video idea inside of the prompt to create a video about the details in the prompt in the style of the Cleo Abrams videos, following a very similar formula. So it's. I uploaded the transcripts and it's following a very similar formula because I really liked her flow. She always starts with like, imagine this and then give some more details. And then like, it's got a very formulaic flow to it. And I was like, I really like that flow. Let's see if I can make a little formula that creates shorts for me that follow a very similar flow. So now I can plug in any news article, any sales page if I need to make A video about like the rabbit R1, like just describing what it is. I can go to the Rabbit R1 homepage, copy the all of the details from that page. Right. Copy all of the bullets and the selling points of the product, paste them in and it will write a short for me that will ideally make people interested in the Rabbit. Right. So that little like flow for me has made making short form content really, really easy for me.

That's crazy. I was imagining like, do you combine that with like 11 labs and like generating a voice, reading all of it out and then you start using some of the new AI video tools that are out there. I think there was a new open source one released today or it's going to be released soon. You know, generate some B roll or something like that. Like most of the video just like done like automatically.

That's not really a future I'm looking forward to.

Yeah, yeah, I know exactly. I'm like, somebody's gonna do that. It's gonna be either great or horrible or somewhere. Yeah.

The lower that we bury the entry, the lower we bring this barrier to entry to create content, like, yeah. The more we're just going to get flooded with junk. So I'm like, I'm always sort of hesitant to share this kind of stuff because I'm like, this works really well for me. But I also know like, if something doesn't come out quality, I'm not going to upload it. A lot of other people aren't going to have those filters. Right. A lot of other people are going to go, oh, I can make a workflow where I can crank out a video every 10 minutes and just see what works. Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to that future, but I found a workflow that works for me and I know, you know, a lot of others might find it valuable if there's like a, a content creator that you're like, oh, they have a decent formula, a decent flow that they, they follow when they make their videos. You can actually use a tool like this to reverse engineer the flow of the video and then use that reverse engineering to then make videos for you based on the topics that you input. And to me that's really powerful. But also the lowering of the barrier for effort, like, also makes it sort of scary. And so I hope nobody goes and takes this idea and runs with it.

Tons of people will, dammit. But I think long term, yeah, people want to see people's faces and actually know who the, who's the person behind it. And, and like you said, even, even if you have Cloud help you make that, you're still curating, you're still coming up with the idea to do the video in the first place. You're reviewing the content, making sure it's the kind of stuff you would say and that kind of customizing it to your voice. So at least there's still curation and, you know, aspect. There's Sam.