Finding your formats

Our guide to video formats: what a format is, the three categories we use, and how they fit our content pillars. It picks up where the HEAT strategy ends: once a video works, this is how we make more like it.

The big idea: pillars decide what we post about, formats decide how we package it. Find a few formats that work, and every pillar can fill them week after week.

Short-form lives or dies on four things, so every format we keep has to pass all four:

What a video format is

A format is a blueprint you know works. It's a repeatable framework you follow every time you make a video, and it predictably and consistently gets views.

• Selly's "Dacă Google ar fi om" and One Peak Creative's "If brand ads were honest".
• "Listening to country until they say word", where the word is a country cliché like truck, shotgun or beer. One Peak's example: a student of theirs posted polished videos of his music and how he made it, and nothing took off until he switched to this format.

Every format has a blank. A fixed frame plus one slot you refill each time: the brand, the word, the situation. Once you have the frame, the next ten videos are just new things in the slot.

Three format categories

1. Everyday life

Videos about what we'd be doing anyway, like a vlog or an Instagram Story. It's one of the most common formats out there.

Its weak spot is "who are you?" New viewers don't know who you are or what you do, so they have no reason to care about your day.

The question to ask: is there any part of everyday life (for us, something ordinary we do all the time in the lab or at the NGO) that we can dramatize? Two examples:

• Outside: "Get ready with me" storytimes. Doing your makeup is as ordinary as it gets. The story told over it ("GRWM while I tell you about the worst date of my life") is the hook, and the routine is just the backdrop.
• Ours: a lab session, from the door. "In ten minutes, this room fills up with teenagers who've never held a soldering iron. By the end of the day, every one of them will have built something that works." The hook says who we are, which fixes the weak spot, and the payoff is the last project switching on.

The hook does all the work. The action itself usually isn't that interesting, so the intrigue has to come from a well-crafted hook. That's a little like tricking people, so we use this format sparingly: when we really want to popularize something we do often, when it teaches people something, or when it could save other NGOs time.

Dramatize, don't invent. Turn up the tension that's really there. The clock, the stakes and the numbers in the hook have to be true.

2. Challenges

One of the oldest tricks in the book, and it works in both long and short form. Challenges have done well since the first video platforms, and before that, TV had shows like Jackass built on the same idea.

Add stakes and gamify the niche. The art is putting something on the line, so people have to watch until the end to find out how it went.

They scale. A simple challenge fits in a single short. A harder one turns into a whole series that feeds both long and short form.

We can invent our own. No need to hop on a trend. A challenge has to be relatable enough, and unique enough to get people excited (easier said than done). Get that right and it can take us pretty far.

The stakes are what has to be relatable, not the action. "I told my wife that if I make this shot, I'll take her to dinner wherever she wants." You might know nothing about golf, but you stay to find out whether she gets her dinner.

And the stakes have to be win-lose. Either it happens or it doesn't.

The action can be niche. The stakes can't.

Examples:

• Alec Steele's "My Dream Power Hammer Restoration!" The blacksmith is bringing back a 1958 Massie power hammer that spent 20 years outside in a bush. One episode's title says it all: "I've Dreamt of Owning This Hammer Since I Was 11". Every part runs on the same stakes (will his childhood dream ever hammer again?), he's cut it into both long and short videos, and as of October 2026 it had outperformed most of his other videos for two months straight.
• JerryRigEverything's durability tests. Zack Nelson turned phone reviews, normally a list of specs, into a survival test: scratch it, burn it, and save the bend test for the very end. Plenty of phones pass it; the Nexus 6P failed it twice. Either way, every video comes down to one question anyone with a phone cares about: will it break?
• Ours: the rover bet. "I told my students: if the rover drives itself out of the lab before the session ends, pizza is on me. If it doesn't, they're on cleanup duty for a month." Hardly anyone watching knows how a robot finds its way around a room, but everyone understands pizza versus a month of cleaning. The verdict lands at the door, in the last five seconds. Spread it over a few sessions and it becomes a series like Alec Steele's: one reel per session, with the drive out the door as the finale.

3. Educational

Videos that inspire, inform or teach.

The hook is a knowledge gap: something the viewer doesn't know (or has only half heard about) and is curious to find out. One Peak's example: "Archeologists just discovered something that might explain how the pyramids were built."

Look for the gaps in our niche. Take electronics: which parts of it are people undereducated about, or curious to learn more about? This works with faceless content too.

"Learn with me" works great too. Following someone's journey as they learn something.

Balance context and curiosity in the first 5 seconds. Enough context that people know what this is, and enough curiosity to leave them with a question that HAS to be answered.

For us, this is the Explainers pillar. Our strongest version is already on the intro page: "this is what that formula from school is actually for." And "learn with me" is the People pillar's student journey: never touched a soldering iron -> first joint -> first working PCB.

Bonus: educational videos are the most likely to get saved. People come back to what they save, and every rewatch adds watch time.

Content pillars

Pillars are the 3-5 themes people can count on seeing from us. They're the foundation of the account, and they decide which formats we reach for. A fitness creator's could be quick home workouts, eating well on a budget and gear reviews.

Ours are on the intro page: builds (about half of what we post), explainers, people, and the occasional local story.

From pillar to video, through hooks. For each pillar, list the specific value we can give, and write every idea as a hook. Write down as many as you can, then film the ones that excite you most. Pillars and formats mix freely: One Peak's own list for a workout pillar includes a lunge-off with your partner, loser on laundry duty for a month. Same pillar, challenge format.

Picking or sharpening pillars takes real thought, since everything we post grows out of them. Two ways in:

1. Start from goals and audience. What do we want social media to do for us? What can we give our audience that makes their day better? Do we want to teach, entertain, or both? List the subjects that come out of the answers, then narrow down.
2. Look up what people search for. Search niche keywords on Instagram and TikTok and check the tags (hashtags) tab: it shows what people care about and what they struggle with. For us, search in Romanian, the way our audience types: robotică, electronică, arduino, fizică. Note anything that stands out.

Why pillars are worth it:

• Focus. Instead of posting a bit of everything, we put our energy into a few things and become the account people go to for them.
• Planning ahead. We never sit there wondering what to post this week. Collect ideas pillar by pillar and slot them into a calendar weeks ahead. With two posting days a week, one slot can always be a build and the other can rotate through explainers, people and local stories. That keeps builds at about half.

Which formats fit which pillar:

Lesson assignment

1. Think of a video you could create in each of the format categories we covered. Create the hook and a little bit of a script for each one and see what excites you the most!

Write the hooks in Romanian, exactly as you'd say them on camera, and run each one through the HEAT quick tests before you pick a favorite.