The HEAT strategy for Reels and TikToks

Our internal playbook for short-form video: Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Use it to plan a video before you film, check it before you post, and review it after.

The big idea: HEAT, then repeat. Hook them, Eliminate the lulls, Add a payoff, Tap relatability. Then turn whatever works into a format you can repeat.

H: Hook

Nothing good ever comes without a hook. In the feed, you're competing hard for attention against everything else people could be watching. No hook, no views.

A good hook creates curiosity. Same idea, three hooks:

The dead-phone test. If someone's phone died 5 seconds into your video, would they lose sleep over it? Would they scour the internet to find it again? That's the level of intrigue you're aiming for.

Ways to create curiosity:

1. Add stakes. Something has to be on the line, which is why "Who would win?" works. Meg & Glen's "This is what we do every time our daughter poops" is just the two of them drawing cards to decide who changes the diaper. Over 8 million views. Imagine that.
2. Open a knowledge gap. Give people a question they need answered. Max Klymenko's Career Ladder runs on exactly one: he gets two minutes to guess a stranger's job, and you NEED to know what on earth they do for a living. His TikTok has billions of views.
3. Promise a reaction. People want to see how other people react to things. If the thing is interesting enough, they'll be dying to see the reaction.
4. Use a great premise. Put a twist on something mundane, like "If Tesla ads were honest" from One Peak Creative or Selly's "Dacă Google ar fi om".

Intriguing is not the same as confusing. People need to understand what the video is about within the first 3-5 seconds. If nobody says the hook out loud, or the action starts too soon, put the context in on-screen text.

The anatomy of a hook. You have legs, hair (maybe), eyes and a mouth that we all know can't be shut. That's your anatomy. A hook has one too:

How to write one. Start from the payoff: what's worth sticking around for? Write 5 versions of the hook, keep the best and cut every word it doesn't need. Then check it for the three C's: clarity (what will I get out of this?), context (who is this, and what's going on?) and curiosity (what do I now need to know?).

E: Eliminate the lulls

A lull is any moment the story doesn't need. The hook buys you some patience (the more curious people are, the more they'll sit through), but never count on it.

Assume a goldfish attention span. One or two seconds of boredom is enough to lose people. If a second doesn't move toward the payoff, it goes.

How to cut them. Trim pauses, filler words and anything said twice. Use jump cuts. Add captions, so nobody misses a word and people watching with the sound off can follow along. Cover slow stretches with b-roll, close-ups or on-screen graphics. Sound effects and music changes keep the energy up without anyone noticing them.

A: Add a payoff

Every video needs a peak: the moment, the reveal, the answer. All the curiosity from the hook should point at it, so the viewer has one clear question in their head, like "I'm watching this to see if the robot makes it up the ramp."

Put it at the end. The payoff belongs in the last few seconds. Give it away 15 seconds in and people leave, average watch time tanks, and the video stalls at a few tens of thousands of views. (For where we are right now, that would honestly be a great result, but it's far from what a well-built video can do.)

Once the payoff lands, end the video. People leave the moment they get what they came for. You have a couple of seconds, tops.

Educational videos need a payoff too. In educational content, the payoff is teaching the viewer something that improves their life. The hook still has to be built around something interesting that happened, though. Meg & Glen didn't open with "Come with me on a trip to Vancouver Island". They opened with "My daughter has a phobia I'd never heard of, and it ruined our vacation", and now you need to know: what phobia? How did it ruin the trip? How did it all end?

Longer explainers need re-hooks. When the teaching runs through the whole video, keep the main question open until the end and drop small re-hooks along the way ("but this is where it gets weird") so people stay for the answer.

Rule of thumb: whatever you promise in the first 5 seconds, you resolve in the last 5.

T: Tap relatability

Relatable videos get people talking in the comments, sharing, reposting and saving them for later. Every niche has its relatable topics, and finding ours is how we find material for our content.

Relatable gets comments, shareable gets reach. For every video, ask: who would send this to whom, and why? On Instagram, sends (people DMing a video to a friend) are one of the strongest signals for reaching people who don't follow us yet.

Then repeat

Once something works, turn it into a format. Repeatable formats save a lot of time and make production predictable: with 3-4 formats that work, nobody has to think hard, we just reflavor them every time. They mostly keep working, though we'll need new ones from time to time. Career Ladder is the perfect example: one format, endless episodes.

Before you post

• The hook lands in the first 3-5 seconds, with no intro
• It passes the dead-phone test
• If someone says the hook, their face is in frame
• On-screen text gives context or hints at the payoff
• The caption hints at the payoff too
• The audio is crisp and the music isn't fighting the voice
• Every second moves toward the payoff
• The payoff lands in the last 5 seconds, and the video ends right after
• Someone will see themselves in it
• You can name who would send it to whom
• It fits a format we can repeat (or could start one)

After you post

• Check the numbers about 2 days after posting.
• Open the video's retention graph. If more than half of viewers are still watching at the 5-second mark, the hook is doing its job.
• On Instagram, also look at average watch time and sends per reach.
• If it did well, figure out how to repeat it with a similar hook.
• If it flopped, rewrite the hook anyway. It's the fastest way to get better at writing them.
• Want to compare two hooks on the same footage? Post both as Trial Reels. Instagram shows trials to non-followers first, so you can compare them without spamming our followers, then share the winner with everyone.

Open questions for the team

1. What is Alacrity's niche? Do we even need one?
2. Can we afford to make videos built to go viral? Will they actually serve our goals?
3. If yes: what's our niche, what are 10 hooks we can think of right away, and which 2 formats could we reuse?

Ideas so far: "Guess which amplifier we're using, blindfolded." Might work, untested.

Where this comes from. Justin's notes on One Peak Creative's short-form video material: The Viral TikTok + Reels Checklist, The Ultimate Hook Writing Guide and The Hook Writing Cheat Sheet.

Hooks that worked

Nine of these come from science and engineering creators, to prove our kind of content can hook as hard as anyone's, plus one MrBeast for pure stakes. They're YouTube titles, but the move behind each one works just as well as the first line of a Reel.

The pattern: a concrete thing plus an impossible claim. A hammer nobody else can lift. Gloves you can drink. A hoop you can't miss. Nobody can picture "electronics", but everyone can picture a hammer. Don't copy the titles, copy the move.

Lesson Assignments:

1. Go through any content you've created and see how it performs on this checklist. If you haven't created enough content yet, scroll through social media and see if you can predict which videos will do well just by watching them and thinking about this framework.
2. Take one of your existing video concepts and rework the hook three different ways - from basic to curiosity-inducing to viral potentia

Hooks that worked (short format)

Ten short-form hits. Half come from science teachers and science channels, to prove our kind of content works in under a minute. The other half are some of the most-watched and most-liked short videos ever posted, to show the same moves at full strength. A few are YouTube Shorts, which is the same vertical format as Reels and TikToks. Quotes are what's said or written; italics describe what's on screen.

The pattern: in short-form, the first frame is the hook. An egg that's not supposed to fly, a spoon going into water, a guy flying a broomstick. Each one shows the thing in the first second, makes one clear promise about it, and ends right after the promise is kept.

Notice who's on this list. A university physics department, a chemistry teacher and an elementary school science teacher sit right next to MrBeast. Science works on short-form, and one person with energy and a cheap demo is enough.

Documents from creators:
the_hook_writing_guide_compressed.pdf
viraltiktokreelschecklist_download__compressed.pdf
50_hook_examples_compressed.pdf