Hey, it's Cindy 🌱 You commented ENGINE, so here is the whole stack. Every execution tool in it is free.
btw the waitlist for AI System Club is now open! If you're keen on using AI to automate your content, video editing, job search, business or build AI agents, feel free to sign up (only if you want to hehe). Ps. the waitlist gets first dibs:)
the shape
Six stages, one brain
1. Ideas Pull what is already rising instead of guessing. Three free research surfaces, no subscriptions.
2. Script Claude turns a trend into hooks and a filmable script in your voice, not generic AI copy.
3. Voice Your own voice is free and unlimited. When you need a synthetic one, there is exactly one that is free for commercial use.
4. Edit and captions Cut it and burn in captions, because most of your audience watches on mute.
5. Visuals Covers, diagrams and on-screen graphics without a design subscription.
6. Repurpose One reel becomes five posts. This is the stage that changes your output the most and costs nothing.
Build stage one and stage two first and post from those alone for two weeks. Half the people who try to stand up a whole engine in one weekend never post. The engine is worth nothing until something is going out.
stage one
Ideas: find what is already rising
📈 Google Trends. Free, no account needed. Type your topic, set the window to the past 90 days, and look at the shape of the line rather than the height. A small topic climbing beats a big topic flattening. Related queries at the bottom of the page are where the actual video ideas are. Open it
🔍 TikTok Creator Search Insights. Free inside the TikTok app: Profile, then the menu, then Creator tools, then Creator Search Insights. It shows what people are searching for and flags topics where demand outstrips the content that exists. That gap list is the most useful free research surface on the internet right now. How it works
💡 YouTube Studio Inspiration tab. Free on desktop at studio.youtube.com, in the left menu. It suggests video ideas tied to your own audience and channel rather than the internet in general, which makes it the sharpest of the three once you have a bit of history. Details
🧠 Feed all three to Claude. Screenshot or copy what you found, paste it in, and run the prompt below. You are not asking Claude to invent ideas out of nothing, you are asking it to turn real demand signals into angles that fit your specific audience.
🔎 turn trends into a week of hooks
Here is what I found in my research this week: [paste the rising Google Trends terms, the TikTok search topics with low content supply, and the YouTube Inspiration suggestions]. My niche is [niche], my audience is [who they are and what they are trying to achieve], and the thing I eventually sell or point people toward is [offer, or "nothing yet, I am building an audience"].
Turn this into five short-form video ideas for the coming week. For each one give me: the specific demand signal it is riding and why you picked it, three hook options written as the first spoken line of the video, the single idea the video teaches, and the reason someone would send it to a friend. Vary the formats across the five so I am not filming the same shape five times: mix a how-to, a myth I can correct, a mistake I can name, a comparison, and something built or shown on screen.
Be specific rather than broad. "AI tools for marketers" is not an idea, "the free voice tool that is actually licensed for commercial use" is. Reject any angle where the hook could belong to any account in any niche, and tell me which of the five you would film first and why.
stage two
Script: the stage everyone skips
This is where the free stack either works or falls over. A 60 second reel is roughly 150 to 170 spoken words, and every one of them has to earn the next. Give Claude the constraints out loud and it writes to them.
👩💻 write the reel script
Write me a 60 second short-form video script for this idea: [paste the chosen idea and the hook you liked]. Target 150 to 170 spoken words, because that is what fits 60 seconds at a natural speaking pace.
Structure it as four beats. Beat one is the hook, one spoken line, and it must be concrete rather than a promise: name the specific thing, not "here is how to change your life". Beat two takes the pressure off the viewer by naming why this is genuinely hard or counterintuitive, without blaming them. Beat three is the actual teaching, and it has to contain something a viewer could go and do within ten minutes, with real names of tools, real numbers and real steps rather than categories. Beat four is one line that tells them what to do next.
Write it the way I talk, in second person, short sentences, no lists read aloud, no corporate words, and no phrases like "in today's digital landscape". Read it back to yourself for rhythm and cut any line that only exists to link two other lines. Then give me the same script marked up with where to change shot or show something on screen, and tell me honestly which line is the weakest.
Ask for the weakest line every time. It is the single highest-value habit in this whole guide, because a script with one flat line in the middle is what makes a reel lose people at eleven seconds.
stage three
Voice: your own is free, and one synthetic one is genuinely free
🎙️ Your own voice, on camera or over b-roll. Free, unlimited, licensed to you, and it outperforms synthetic voice on connection. Record it on your phone in a soft room. This should be your default, and the synthetic options below are for the segments where you are not on camera.
🔊 TTSMaker, the one with no catch. Free, no account required, and its licence grants a worldwide perpetual right to use the generated audio for personal and commercial purposes with no additional fee, including in ads and videos. One thing to know: it deletes your audio file and download link after 30 minutes, so download it the moment it finishes. Open it · licence terms
⚠️ ElevenLabs, best sounding, not free for commercial use. The free tier is 10,000 credits a month, and the commercial licence starts at the paid Starter plan. So it is the right tool for testing what a voice sounds like and the wrong tool for the audio on a monetised post. Pricing and licence tiers
🧠 Reformat the script before you paste it. Text-to-speech reads punctuation, not intention. Run the prompt below and the same script comes out sounding markedly less robotic.
🔊 make the script speakable
Reformat this script for a text-to-speech tool so it sounds like a person rather than a reader: [paste the script].
Break long sentences into shorter ones, because TTS engines run out of breath in a way people do not. Spell out anything that gets mangled when read aloud: turn numerals into words where a natural speaker would say them that way, expand abbreviations, and write out URLs as spoken words. Add full stops and commas where I would actually pause, and split the script into short paragraphs so I can generate it in chunks and re-do a single line without regenerating everything.
Do not change my wording, my meaning or the order of anything. This is a formatting pass only. At the end, flag any word or name the engine is likely to mispronounce, and suggest a phonetic spelling I can paste instead.
stage four
Edit and captions: the honest free tiers
📱 CapCut for the cut and the captions. The free plan covers timeline editing, transitions, auto captions and 1080p export, and standard edits export without a watermark. What it does not cover: some Pro templates, premium effects packs and certain AI features add a watermark or are metered on free. So build your look out of the standard tools and you stay clean. Open it
📝 Descript for cutting by transcript. You delete words in the transcript and the video cuts to match, which is the fastest way to strip filler out of a talking-head take. Be clear-eyed about the free tier though: it is 1 hour of media a month, exports cap at 720p, and watermark-free video export starts on the paid plans. Great as a free structural editor, not a free finisher. Current plan limits
👩💻 The workflow that gets the best of both. Do the structural cut in Descript, export the timeline or the trimmed file, then finish, caption and export in CapCut. You get transcript-speed editing plus a clean 1080p export, and you pay nothing.
💡 Always fix the auto captions. Auto captions get names, brands and numbers wrong, and those are exactly the words carrying your credibility. Two minutes of correction per video, every time.
Free tiers move faster than any guide can. Before you build a paid client workflow on any of these, open the pricing page and read the current limits yourself. The two that change most often are watermark rules on AI features and whether a commercial licence is included.
stage five
Visuals without a design subscription
🧠 Claude for anything explanatory. Ask Claude to build a diagram, a comparison table or a simple animated explainer as an artifact, then screen record it. This is free on every plan and it is genuinely the best free source of on-screen graphics that are specific to your point rather than generic stock.
🖼️ Canva free for covers and text-on-image. Free tier covers templates, brand colours, text and export at usable quality. It is the pragmatic default for reel covers and carousel slides. Open it
🌱 Reve when you want a stronger image model. This is a paid tool rather than part of the free stack, and it is the one I reach for when a generated image actually has to hold up at full size with legible text in it. Worth knowing about, not required to run the engine. Take a look
💡 Reuse your own footage. The most underrated free visual library is the one on your camera roll. Ten seconds of your actual desk, screen or notebook beats a stock clip every single time, and the algorithm agrees with me on that.
stage six
Repurpose: where one reel becomes five posts
Same idea, genuinely rewritten per platform. Not the same caption pasted five times, which is what most people mean by repurposing and why it does not work for them.
🔁 rewrite for every platform
Take this reel script and turn it into a post for each platform, rewritten properly rather than reformatted: [paste the script].
Give me: an Instagram caption that opens on a thought rather than repeating the hook out loud, a text-only version for a short-form text feed that works with no video attached, a carousel outline of six to eight slides with the actual slide copy written out, a YouTube Shorts title written for how people search rather than how they scroll, and a LinkedIn version that keeps the same insight but assumes a professional context and a slower read.
Each one has to stand alone for someone who never saw the video. Match the length and rhythm real posts have on that platform, do not use hashtags as filler, and do not use em dashes anywhere. At the end, tell me which platform this particular idea is strongest on and which one it is weakest on, with your reasoning.
the actual unlock
Make Claude the brain, permanently
Everything above still has you re-explaining your niche, your audience and your voice at the start of every session. Fixing that is what turns a pile of prompts into an engine.
📁 Build a content Project. In Claude, open Projects and create one called "content engine". Projects work on every plan including Free, where you can hold up to five (source).
📄 Load it with your actual context. Upload your ten best-performing captions or scripts, a short document describing your audience and offer, and your brand rules. Claude then writes from your evidence rather than from an average of the internet.
💡 Write the project instructions. Use the prompt below and paste the output into the project's custom instructions box.
👩💻 Turn the weekly run into a skill. Once you have run the whole flow twice by hand, package it. Ask Claude to build a skill that runs your research digest, hooks, script, TTS formatting and platform rewrites in one command, then add it in the app under Customize, then Skills, then Add, then Upload a skill. Skills are available from Free through Enterprise (how to create custom skills).
🧠 project instructions for my content engine
You are the brain of my content engine. My niche is [niche], my audience is [who they are, what they want, what they already know], my brand voice is [describe it in three or four adjectives plus one line on what you never sound like], and what I point people toward is [offer, or "nothing yet"].
The files in this project are my real posts and my brand rules. Before you write anything for me, read them and match the sentence length, the level of directness and the vocabulary you find there. When I ask for content, always assume my audience already has the basics of my topic and teach one level above beginner, because talking down to them is the fastest way to lose them.
Never use em dashes. Never use "delve", "landscape", "unlock" or "in today's world". Never write a hook that would work for any account in any niche. When you are not sure whether a claim is true, say so and tell me what to verify rather than writing it confidently. Default to short output and only go long when I ask.
👩💻 package the weekly run as a skill
Turn my weekly content process into a reusable skill. The process is: I paste in my trend research, you give me five video ideas with hooks, I pick one, you write a 150 to 170 word four-beat script, you reformat it for text-to-speech, then you write the platform rewrites.
Write the SKILL.md for this. Give it a short lowercase hyphenated name that does not contain "claude" or "anthropic", and a description line that says exactly what it does and when to trigger it, because that description is what makes you reach for it automatically. Put my voice rules and the four-beat structure inside the instructions so I never have to restate them.
First ask me the three or four things you need to know about my format and constraints, then write it. When it is done, tell me how to save it as a zipped folder so I can upload it in the app.
the honest bit
What actually costs money here
Three things are worth being straight about. A commercially licensed synthetic voice with the best quality is paid. A watermark-free 1080p export out of Descript is paid. And Claude's free tier has usage limits, so a heavy week of scripting will hit them. Everything else on this page genuinely runs at zero, and the one thing I would put money on first is the brain, not the hands.
🌱 Starting out Run stages one, two and six only. Film on your phone, edit in CapCut, and post. That is a complete engine and it costs nothing.
🧠 Further along Add the Project, package the weekly run as a skill, and the whole week becomes one command with you making the taste calls.