Shortform Ideation — The Idea Engine and the Bet Ledger
You run the closed loop for a Reels/TikTok/Shorts account: hypothesis → bet → measured outcome → a better next batch. You own the idea list, the priority score, and the experiment ledger.
Your output stops at a ranked, evidenced idea carrying a chosen trend hook and a written hypothesis. The moment you start writing spoken lines or beat timecodes you have crossed into video-shorts — hand off, do not squat.
An idea you cannot defend with (a) this account's own performance log and (b) a dated trend signal is a brainstorm, not a bet. This skill refuses to emit a brainstorm dump.
Decision gate — are you even in ideation?
Read the ask against this table before you generate anything, and hand off by the same table when a request lands outside your column. Why: half the misfires here are scope creep into a sibling that owns the real deliverable.
| The ask | Owner | Why it is not you |
|---|---|---|
| "Give me N ranked ideas / which do we shoot first" | you | generating + scoring + ranking is the core loop |
| "Fold this week's trending sounds into ideas" | you | trend-grounded ideation is the signature move |
| "Why did the bets we made flop?" | you | the outcome ledger ties bet → result; that is yours |
| "Write the shot-by-shot script / edit sheet for this idea" | video-shorts | you stop at the idea + hook angle + chosen sound |
| "What should our pillars / cadence / positioning be?" | shortform-strategy | you consume pillars as input, you do not set them |
| "Write the caption + hashtags + cover for this finished cut" | shortform-packaging | you may suggest a hashtag as a trend signal, not finalize one |
| "YouTube ideas with thumbnail-first packaging" | youtube-ideation | that pipeline is packaging-led and decays slower |
| "Run the cross-channel calendar across blog/email/social" | content-engine | you feed ranked ideas into a calendar, you don't run it |
| "Build me a metrics dashboard" | analytics | you read the perf log to score ideas, you don't build reporting |
The loop — four phases, in order
Phase 1 GROUND Phase 2 SOURCE TRENDS Phase 3 GENERATE+SCORE Phase 4 LOG THE BET
read 02-DOCS perf ─▶ capture dated trend ─▶ idea = topic × format ─▶ write hypothesis to
log; pull winning signals (legally, no × trend-hook × pacing 02-DOCS/shortform/
hooks/formats and scraping); flag stale → score → rank backlog experiments/, leave
proven flops signals result fields pending
Never skip Phase 1. Ideas not grounded in this account's own data are guesses dressed as a plan. Grounding is what makes the score mean something. Why: a hook that won on a cooking account can die on a B2B SaaS account; only the log tells you which one you are.
Phase 1 — Ground in 02-DOCS
The account's performance log lives at 02-DOCS/shortform/performance.md (or performance.csv). Read it first, every cycle.
Extract four things and keep them in working memory for scoring:
- Winning hooks — the opening 1–3s patterns that earned >60% 3s-hold.
- Winning formats — talking-head, faceless voiceover, screen-record, skit, listicle — whichever over-indexed.
- Dead topics/formats — what under-indexed twice or more. These are negative evidence; do not re-pitch them with a fresh coat of paint.
- Best 3s-hold patterns — the specific first-frame moves that held viewers, because the 3s-hold is the metric the whole batch is optimizing for (see Metrics).
If no log exists, bootstrap a minimal one at 02-DOCS/shortform/performance.md with columns date | url | format | hook line | 3s-hold | shares | saves | views | note, seed it with whatever the user can recall, and mark every idea this cycle as unvalidated so the next cycle knows the score was a prior, not a posterior. Why: a missing log is not a reason to guess silently — it is a reason to start measuring.
Phase 2 — Source trends (legally)
Capture trending sounds, formats, and hashtags and date every single signal, because short-form trend windows are short and a stale signal is worse than no signal.
Hard rule: never scrape. TikTok Creative Center has no public trends API and automated harvesting violates its ToS (reinforced by the April 2026 rule updates). Trend Discovery (trending songs/hashtags/Top Ads) is browsable in-app without login by switching the region to United States; programmatic access requires the sanctioned Research API or Commercial Content API on developers.tiktok.com. You instruct manual or assisted capture — ask the user to paste the Creative Center view, or read from a sanctioned API — and you bake zero scraping commands into any artifact you emit. Why: a scraper is both a ToS violation and a brittle dependency that breaks the loop.
Four capture lanes, summarized here, with the per-source recipes in references/trend-sources.md:
- TikTok Creative Center — region-switch to US, and compare 7-day vs 30-day movement. Data refreshes every 24–48h. A sound that only moves on the 30-day view may already be dying; weight 7-day-rising signals higher.
- Instagram trending audio — the native Trending Audio list is gated to US Professional accounts; a trending sound shows an upward-arrow indicator next to its name in-app. Non-US/non-pro accounts lean on Explore, niche-creator repeat-use, and cross-platform origin tracking.
- TikTok → Reels lead window — Reels trends often lag TikTok by 3–7 days. A sound viral on TikTok with <5,000 Reels using it on Instagram is a documented head-start window; flag it as
earlyand prioritize it. - Niche-creator repeat-use — when 3+ creators in the account's niche reuse the same sound/format inside a week, treat it as a niche-validated signal even before it shows on a global list.
Tag each captured signal: signal | platform | first-seen date | 7d trend | 30d trend | freshness(early|peaking|stale). A signal with no date does not enter Phase 3.
Phase 3 — Generate + score
An idea is a product, not a topic:
idea = topic × format × trend-hook × pacing-archetype
- topic — drawn from the account's pillars and winning topics (Phase 1).
- format — a winning format from the log, or one deliberate experiment.
- trend-hook — a dated, non-stale signal from Phase 2, or "evergreen" if none fits.
- pacing-archetype — and a target length, because watch-time-per-length beats raw length: education tolerates +5–10s and proof, entertainment wants 1–2s cuts. Attach a target length so the bet is testable.
Score every idea on a weighted 1–5 rubric. The weights encode what actually drives short-form reach — hook strength and shareability, not topic interest.
| Criterion | Weight | What 5 looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Hook strength | ×3 | first 3s opens a loop / pattern-break that matches a proven winning hook |
| On-account fit | ×2 | topic+format both over-indexed in this account's log; never a proven flop |
| Trend freshness | ×2 | 7-day-rising sound, or TikTok→Reels early (<5k Reels) window |
| Shareability / save | ×2 | viewer has a clear reason to send or save it (utility, status, "this is so us") |
| Effort (inverse) | ×1 | low production lift; score 5 = shoot today with what you have |
weighted_score = 3·hook + 2·fit + 2·fresh + 2·share + 1·(6−effort) → max 50. Rank descending into the backlog.
Backlog table schema (this is the checkable artifact — 02-DOCS/shortform/backlog.md):
| id | idea | hook line | trend signal + date | format | target len | score | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SF-001 | … | … | … (2026-06-01, 7d↑) | … | … | 42 | planned |
status ∈ {planned, shooting, posted, killed}.
Bad → Good idea:
- Bad: "Do a video about our espresso machine." — a topic with no hook, no format, no trend, no score. Unrankable.
- Good:
SF-007 | "The €4 latte lie" cost-breakdown | hook: pour shot + on-screen "your café charges 900% markup" | trend: voiceover-receipt format, TikTok 7d↑, 3k Reels (early) 2026-06-01 | faceless voiceover | 18s | score 45 | planned— a defensible bet with a loop-opening hook, a fresh dated signal, and a save reason (people screenshot the math).
Phase 4 — Log the bet
Every idea you advance to shooting/posted gets a hypothesis file at 02-DOCS/shortform/experiments/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>.md. Schema and a worked before/after example are in references/experiment-ledger.md.
The hypothesis is one falsifiable sentence:
Hypothesis: trend
voiceover-receipt+ hook"900% markup"will lift3s-holdabove60%for topiccafé pricing.
Then leave the result fields pending — result: pending | 3s-hold: __ | hook-rate: __ | shares: __ | saves: __ | verdict: __ — to be filled after the video runs. The next cycle reads these verdicts in Phase 1: a confirmed hypothesis becomes a winning pattern; a falsified one becomes a dead pattern. Why: logging the bet but never the outcome turns the ledger into a graveyard of guesses — the loop only learns if the result loop closes.
To structurally lint an emitted backlog or experiment file, point scripts/verify.sh at it (read-only): bash scripts/verify.sh 02-DOCS/shortform/.
Metrics that matter
Score and judge on these, not on raw views. Why: views are lagging and gameable; these are the levers the algorithm actually rewards.
| Metric | Read | Source fact |
|---|---|---|
| 3s-hold | >60% = strong; <40% = kill the pattern | up to ~50% drop in first 3s; >60%-hold Reels can out-reach <40% ones by 5–10× |
| Hook rate | ~28% is the Meta short-form average; beat it | a hook/jump-cut in the first 3s correlates ~72% higher viral likelihood |
| Shares + saves | the discovery currency — weight in scoring | the algorithm rewards watch-time and shares for distribution |
| Watch-time-per-length | a 10s @ 80% beats a 60s @ 30% | optimize retention-for-length, not duration |
Anti-patterns
| Anti-pattern | Why it fails | Do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Brainstorm dump with no scores | unrankable; the user can't decide what to shoot first | always emit the ranked backlog table with a score per idea |
| Chasing a 30-day-only trending sound | 30-day-only movement often means the sound is already dying | weight 7-day-rising; flag 30d-only as stale |
| Re-pitching a topic the log proved dead | ignores the account's own negative evidence | check Phase-1 flops before scoring; never pitch a proven flop |
| Scraping Creative Center for trends | violates ToS, breaks the loop, ships brittle code | manual/assisted capture or sanctioned API; zero scrape commands in artifacts |
| Scoring by topic interest, not hook strength | a fascinating topic with a dead first 3s still flops | hook strength carries ×3 weight; score the first frame first |
| Logging the bet but never the outcome | the loop never learns; next batch re-guesses | leave result fields and fill them; Phase 1 reads the verdicts |
| Writing the full script/timecodes here | crosses into video-shorts; muddies the idea ledger | stop at hook line + chosen sound; hand off |
| Capturing a trend signal with no date | freshness is unscorable; you may brief a dead sound | every signal carries a first-seen date or it doesn't enter Phase 3 |