Content Research

Ask Cook which short-form videos are working in your niche and it comes back with a Word document you can shoot from: one page per reel, with twelve frames from the video itself, the real play counts, the opening line word for word, and the beats in order.

It does not describe reels from memory. It finds them, downloads them, and watches them.

How to ask

In any chat, in your own words. Say who the content is for, not what file you want:

use the explore page in instagram and find me reels that would work for my use case. download and transcribe all of them so you actually know what you’re looking at. we want content that targets people trying AI tools and business owners who want to scale with AI. i need contact sheets and transcripts for each reference.

You do not have to say “Word document”, “contact sheet” or name a format. Saying who you are trying to reach is the part that matters.

What comes back

A document with a cover listing every reference grouped into the repeatable formats they belong to — “numbered click-through tutorial”, “silent screenshot checklist” — and then one page per reel:

• A contact sheet. Twelve frames sampled evenly across the video, so you can see the whole thing without watching it.
• The numbers. Play count, likes, comments and duration as they stood on the day it was pulled.
• A fit score out of ten — how directly you could shoot the same format with your own product on screen. Most reels score under six, and those get dropped.
• The opening line, word for word: what was said, or the first card on screen if nobody speaks.
• The beats, in order, so you can see the shape rather than read a wall of transcript.
• Your version — the same structure rewritten for your business.
• The caption the creator actually wrote.

Where it lands

On your drive, under research / reels, alongside the raw research it was built from. Open it in Word, Google Docs or Pages, and hand it to whoever is shooting.

Building a list of creators to watch

Cook scores every recent reel against that creator’s own median, so a 100,000-view reel from an account that normally gets 10,000 counts as a hit and the same number from an account that normally gets a million does not. That comparison needs a list of accounts.

Name a few handles in your message and it uses those. To stop repeating yourself, keep a file called CREATORS.md in research / reels on your drive with one handle per line — Cook reads it whenever you do not name anyone, and sweeps the whole list.

How long it takes

Longer than an ordinary answer. It is downloading and transcribing real videos, so a full pack of around thirty references runs for several minutes and Cook may tell you it is still working. If it says it is part-way through, ask it to carry on and it picks up where it stopped rather than starting again.

Good to know

• It reads silent reels too. Plenty of short-form video has no speech at all. Those get read frame by frame instead, and the document carries the on-screen text in order rather than a transcript.
• The links expire. The video files it pulls are only reachable for about an hour, which is why it downloads everything before it starts writing.
• Ask for more. If the pack feels thin, say so — “push it to around thirty reels and make every breakdown properly detailed” — and it extends the same document rather than making a new one.