Steal a proven channel’s playbook.
Three prompts, run in order. Reverse-engineer why a proven channel’s videos win, turn that into fifteen ideas with live demand, then brief your team to beat its best video — all from one channel URL.
What you put in.
You paste two things. The prompts tell Claude Code to pull everything else itself — the catalog, the view counts, the research. Type below and the prompts fill in as you go.
Two things you provide.
Prompt 2 needs nothing from you — it reads the files Prompt 1 wrote and does its own research.
The prompts.
Run them in order, in the same folder. Copy each one clean — your inputs from above are already filled in and highlighted.
Get the environment right.
Do this once, before your first run. After that it’s just paste, run, repeat.
Prompt 1 runs yt-dlp and Prompt 2 does live web research. A plain chat window can only describe that.
Everything lands in ./channel_analysis/. Run all three prompts from the same folder so each can read what the last one wrote.
Prompt 1 pulls the channel’s 40 most recent long-form videos itself. It installs yt-dlp if it is missing.
Prompt 2 reads REPORT.md and the CSVs; Prompt 3 reads them too. They reopen the files on disk — chat history isn’t enough.
One view of the whole run.
What each prompt takes, what it produces, and the one thing that’s yours to check.
| Step | You paste | Produces | Your job |
|---|---|---|---|
| PROMPT 1Reverse-engineer the channel | The reference channel’s /videos URL | REPORT.md, videos_enriched.csv, clusters.csv, title_templates.md | It confirms the video count, median, and outlier threshold first — check those, then let it finish. |
| PROMPT 2Find 15 ideas | Nothing — reads the channel_analysis files | new_ideas.md — 15 ranked ideas, each with a cluster, a proven template, and a dated hook | Spot-check that the “happening now” hooks are current. It cites a date and a source for each. |
| PROMPT 3Brief the video | The title you’re making | A script brief and an editor brief, each ready to hand to a freelancer | Run once per video, after you pick a title from Prompt 2. |
Want it run on your channel?
On a free strategy call we’ll pick the channel worth modelling, read its teardown together, and brief your first video against a real benchmark — so you leave with ideas that cite a pattern and a demand signal, and a brief your team can execute this week.