Guide
Reel ideas are not invented. They are retrieved from work you already do
The reason a posting week goes empty is almost never a shortage of material. It is that nothing cues the material at nine on a Tuesday with the camera already propped up. The generator above deals five ideas written for your line of work, each with an opening line to say and three beats to talk through, and the rest of this page is where those ideas come from, so you can keep finding your own.
Reel idea generator
Runs in your browser · no account needed
Deal five reel ideas written for your job
Pick a profession — and a goal, if you have one — and get five idea cards, each with an opening line to say and a three-beat skeleton to talk through. The whole deck ships with this page; nothing you do here is uploaded anywhere.
What do you do?
What should the videos do? (optional)
- Hand-written ideas in the deck, twelve for each of six jobs
- 72
- Ideas dealt per hand, each with an opening line and three beats
- 5
- Goals to filter by: clients, trust, expertise, behind the scenes
- 4
Nothing to post is a retrieval problem
Ask a plumber why a boiler keeps losing pressure and they will talk for four minutes without pausing. Ask the same person what to post on Thursday and the answer is nothing.
The knowledge did not evaporate between those two questions. The prompt changed. One was specific and got a specific answer. The other was an open question at the end of a working day, which is the hardest thing you can hand a tired brain.
That is retrieval, not creativity. You are not short of material. You are short of a cue that reaches into the material and lifts one piece of it out.
The distinction matters because the two problems have different fixes. If it were creativity you would need inspiration, and inspiration does not turn up on a posting schedule. If it is retrieval you need a prompt, and a prompt can be written down once and used for a year.
That is all the tool above is. It does not ask what you want to make. It asks what you do, then hands back things somebody in your trade could film today.
The four wells every service business already owns
Every idea in the deck above was drawn from one of four places, and a service business of any size is sitting on each of them.
The first is the questions clients ask. Not the interesting ones. The boring one you answer twice a week in almost the same words, because it is the question everybody has before they hire anyone in your trade. If it is asked twice, it is a video.
The second is the mistakes you see. You watch people make the same error job after job. Naming it, showing it and giving the fix is a whole video, and it is useful to a stranger whether or not they ever call you.
The third is the work itself. An ordinary hour of doing your job is far more interesting to an outsider than it is to you, because they have never watched it happen. The step that takes longest is usually the one worth filming.
The fourth is the local angle. What a house costs on your street. What the season does to your bookings. What changed in your town this year. Nobody outside your patch can make that video, which is precisely why it works, and if you are not local to anywhere the same well is whatever is only true inside your niche.
These four keep producing because they are attached to work you were going to do anyway. A well runs dry when it is attached to a trend instead.
The four wells, and what each one becomes on camera
Nothing on the left is new work. It is already in the week; the right-hand column is what happens when you point a phone at it.
| What you already have | What it becomes | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions clients ask | The same question, twice a week, for years | One straight answer, said once, to camera |
| Mistakes you see | The error you quietly fix on most jobs | Name it, show it, hand over the fix |
| The work itself | An ordinary hour nobody outside has watched | Film the step that takes the longest |
| The local angle | What is true here and nowhere else | A number or a street only you can name |
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Turning an idea into a take you can film tonight
An idea is not a video until three things are settled: what it is about, how it opens, and where it goes after that. Most idea lists give you the first one and stop, which is why they sit unread in a note.
Each card above carries the three. The title fixes the subject. The opening line is a full sentence written to be said out loud, so the first second of the take is decided before you press record. The beats say what to cover, in order.
Beats are directions, not lines. Say this, then this, finish on that. The choice is deliberate. Reading a script to a phone sounds like reading a script, while talking through three points sounds like you.
Here is the honest limit. The deck is written by hand, twelve ideas for each of six jobs, so it is seventy-two ideas rather than an endless feed. If your exact trade is not listed, take the nearest one, because the shape of an idea travels further than a job title does.
And the card only decides what the video is about. Your numbers, the job you did last week and your own way of saying things are the parts that make it worth watching. No generator can supply those, and any tool claiming otherwise is selling you a stranger's voice.
From a dealt card to a filmable take
The card settles the first three steps. The last one is yours, and it is the only part that has to be.
Pick the job
the deck is written for it, not templated
Deal five
title, opening line, three beats each
Say the first line
the take opens itself
Talk the beats
directions, not a script to read
One take
up to three minutes, stumbles included
One idea is rarely one video
Four wells sounds small until you notice that a single idea splits, and keeps splitting.
Take one question clients ask. The straight answer is a video. The most common wrong answer is a second. What you would advise somebody doing it on a tight budget is a third. Each of those is a different search and a different viewer, and none of them repeats the others.
Length splits it again. The same subject covered in thirty seconds is not the ninety-second version trimmed. The short one drops the caveats and keeps the claim, which changes who it lands on.
The goal splits it a third time. That is what the filter above is for: the same subject aimed at building trust opens differently from the same subject aimed at getting the phone to ring, and the deck tags every idea with the jobs it honestly does.
So a hand of five cards is not five posts. Worked properly, most cards carry two or three, and that is the difference between posting when inspiration arrives and posting on a schedule you can actually keep.
From an idea card to a finished vertical video
An idea with an opening line and three beats is a take you can film now. Say it to a phone camera in one go of up to three minutes. Stumbles are fine, because they get cut.
Cutroom turns that one take into a finished 9:16 video. The transcript drives the cut, captions land word by word, and b-roll covers the phrases you highlight.
The beats keep working after filming, on the transcript. If the middle beat ran long, delete a line you do not want and the cut rebuilds around it. Change the pace and the machine re-cuts the whole thing, which is how one idea becomes a thirty-second version and a sixty-second version in the same sitting.
The pricing is one small sum. One batch is 100 credits and the export is 20 credits per output minute, so a 60-second finished video is about 120 credits.
Three finished videos are free inside your first seven days, no card, on the 600 credits granted at signup, and they export with a Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, which is about ten of those finished one-minute videos, and more when they run shorter. Dealing ideas on this page needs no account at all; turning the take into a finished video is the part that spends credits.
Questions people ask
- What do I post when I have no reel ideas?
- Stop trying to think of something and go looking instead. Four places always have something in them: the questions clients ask you, the mistakes you keep fixing, the work itself, and whatever is only true where you are. The generator above runs that search for you across six lines of work.
- How does this reel ideas generator work?
- Pick your profession, optionally pick what the videos should do, and it deals five ideas from a hand-written deck of seventy-two. Each card gives a title, a spoken opening line and three beats. Shuffle keeps dealing cards you have not seen until the deck runs out, says so, then starts from the top.
- Are the ideas different for each profession?
- Yes. Each of the six decks was written for its own trade, so a real estate agent gets cards about listings, comps and open houses while a recruiter gets cards about CVs, briefs and offer calls. There is no template underneath swapping nouns, which is why the deck holds seventy-two ideas rather than seven thousand.
- How many videos can one idea make?
- Usually more than one. The straight answer, the common wrong answer and the version for somebody on a tight budget are three videos out of a single client question. Changing the length or the goal splits it again. Treat a card as a subject, never as a script.
- Is anything I pick or copy sent anywhere?
- No. The whole deck ships with this page and the dealing happens in your browser, with no account needed. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is nothing to delete afterwards because nothing was kept.
Pick your job, deal five cards, keep the one you could film tonight. The idea was already yours; the card only went and found it.