I spent 6 months making videos for my SaaS. Most flopped. Here's the honest breakdown.

The validate-in-text-first principle is genuinely underrated — it's basically the same logic as building an MVP before going all-in on the full product, just applied to content. The 15-min screen recording vs. 4-hour cinematic piece example is painfully relatable. I'm curious whether you found the raw/unpolished style translated equally across platforms though. My intuition is that YouTube long-form might have a slightly higher quality bar, but Shorts, Reels, and TikTok are so forgiving of screen recordings that production almost doesn't matter. Did the repurposing workflow need to change per platform, or was it mostly just the format (aspect ratio, length)?

Same issue every where. Lower views, less impressions, etc. Content growing strategies are missing.

The repurpose-what-already-worked rule lands, but it quietly assumes you can get text traction in the first place, which for a small account is the actual bottleneck (fabijanbajo asked the same thing above).

I'm seven weeks into building in public and my own profile still sits at one follower, so "post it as a tweet first" returns basically zero signal no matter how good the idea is.

What's actually moved the needle for me isn't production or what-to-say, it's where the thing lands: a reply dropped into a thread where my ICP already hangs out gets more real conversation than anything I post on my own feed. So my version of your step one is to test the idea as a reply in a busy room first, and the ones that get a response back are the proven concepts worth the video.

Same validate-in-text logic, just borrowing someone else's audience until you've built your own.

Hey Jack congratulations on what you did .my question is how do you get customers if you are starting out in saas.because I keep posting in Instagram but the only thing I am getting is views but not that conversion the way a person expects

My biggest issue is finding the right hooks. One half of my product doesn't need any introduction.

People see "ADHD Habit Tracker/Builder" and think "ok, I know everything now!" and dismiss the rest. However the actual value it provides is the second half, where when you use it enough it creates a feedback-loop for the user to adjust routines to actually reach the goals that are meaningful to the user.

That's my struggle. My brain doesn't seem to be able to come up with good enough explanations.

That's a very interesting observation, but honestly, it almost makes me a little sad to learn that was the case.

I'd love to have read that novelty and creative flair were what were being rewarded, rather than a formulaic approach to content revision.

Still, valuable learnings nevertheless; thanks for sharing.

The repurposing part is what most people skip. A tweet thread or reply that already got traction has already done the hard part of proving the angle, so the video is mostly packaging. One thing that helped me with that was DictaFlow. I can hold a hotkey, talk through the hook, objections, and demo in one pass, then clean it up after, which is way faster than trying to script from a blank page. The 15 minute screen recording beating the polished video makes total sense. People usually respond to a sharp idea before they respond to production.

This is the same mistake many founders make with products.

They build the polished version first instead of validating demand.

Content, products, and startups all follow the same rule: test small, double down on what resonates. That's why Foundersbar starts with Market Validation before scaling execution: https://foundersbar.com/market-validation-for-startups

The "validate in text first, then adapt" insight is the sharp one, and your data proves it harder than any opinion could. But the real mechanism isn't repurposing, it's validation before investment. The from-scratch videos failed because you were testing the idea AND the format at once, two unknowns. Repurposing removed one. That generalizes: test hooks before filming, test the first line before writing the thread.

Honest flag on vidmachine: it automates steps 2-4, but the hard part you identified (writing text that actually resonates) is still on the user. Worth being clear about that in positioning, or people buy expecting it to solve "what to say" and churn when it doesn't.

What's converting better now, the video DMs or is text still your real top-of-funnel?

This matches my experience almost exactly. My best-performing clips are always a screen recording of a Reddit or X reply that already landed, never the scripted ones. The bottleneck for me was never production, it was confusing what I want to say with what already proved it resonates. Validating in text first basically kills that guessing. The raw 15-min clip beating the 4-hour edit is painfully real.

How does your tweet get traction in the first place? Do you already have a following or do you post in communities?

I spent 6 months making videos for my SaaS.Most flopped...

This matches what I see too. The bit I'd add is that the tweet-thread recording probably won because it carried a hook that was already tested, the first line of a thread that got engagement is proven, so reusing it verbatim beats writing a fresh cold open for camera every time.

When I repurpose now I lift the exact opening line from whatever text overperformed and use it as the first three seconds, then let the rest be a rough screen-record. The cinematic ones tend to flop because the polish itself reads as an ad and people brace against it, where a scrappy recording keeps them in reading mode. Worth testing on your winners too: most proven threads have two or three separate hooks in them, so you can usually cut a second video from a different sub-point of the same thread.

This is a great breakdown. The "validate in text first" point is the part most people skip.

This is a great breakdown of a pattern most people learn the hard way.

Content works best when it starts from validated signal, not production effort.

If it doesn’t resonate in text, better video execution rarely fixes it.

The shift from “create content” to “amplify what already works” is the real unlock.

The biggest takeaway for me is validating the idea before investing in the format. That principle seems to apply far beyond content.

This was the most valuable takeaway for me: validate the idea before the format. If a post can't get people to stop scrolling in text, making it into a polished video usually won't fix that. Repurposing proven ideas instead of guessing from scratch is a much more repeatable workflow.