How it works
- In Claude Code, run /format-finder:find-formats followed by your app brief.
- It writes search phrases at three distances: your app’s niche, nearby niches, and unrelated niches whose structures could carry over. It finds competitor apps through Apple’s free App Store search.
- It searches each platform for recent videos, reads each account’s recent posts, and works out the account’s normal views and each video’s multiple of them.
- It downloads the strongest videos, cuts frames and gets captions or a local transcript, so Claude can describe how each video is built.
- It groups the videos into formats, drops one-person hits, flags fading formats, and writes ten formats, each with its evidence videos, their multiples and how many accounts use it.
What it does
An outlier is a video with far more views than its own account normally gets.
- Three platforms. YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels, each with two free routes, and it moves to the next route on its own when it needs to.
- Each video against its own account. A video’s multiple compares its views with its account’s normal, the median views of the account’s recent posts.
- Noise left out. It flags big accounts’ ordinary videos, ads and paid partnerships the platform marks, suspected boosts (views far out of line with likes), videos under a view floor, and accounts with too few posts to judge.
- Formats, not one-off hits. A format has to work on several accounts (5 by default), so one creator’s hit isn’t taken for a format.
- Your thresholds. The numbers are rules of thumb you can change, such as how recent a video must be (60 days by default) and how big an outlier must be (5 times its account’s normal).
- Every run saved. Each run writes its files to a dated folder, ending in formats.md with the ten formats.
No paid APIs. Everything runs on your machine.
What you need
Claude Code, with Python 3.11 or newer, Node.js 22 or newer and git, and about 600 MB of disk. For TikTok and Instagram it uses Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave or Microsoft Edge, and with none of them, setup downloads Chrome for Testing (about 380 MB more).
FAQ
Is it free?
Yes. Format Finder is free and open source (MIT). It uses no paid APIs and runs on your own machine.
Do I need a login?
YouTube Shorts and TikTok work without one. For Instagram, you sign in yourself once, in the tool’s own browser window.
How does it find competitors?
Through Apple’s free App Store search, plus the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts each developer’s own website links to.
What do I get at the end?
Ten formats worth testing, each with its evidence videos, their multiples and how many accounts use it, saved as formats.md with the rest of the run.
Related
How to Find Viral Video Formats for Your App on TikTok, Reels and Shorts
How to find viral video formats for your app on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts: where to search, how to spot outliers, and how to adapt them.
ReadToolTrialpilot
Test a video before everyone sees it: Trialpilot turns one video into a few edited versions and posts each one as an Instagram trial reel, from Claude Desktop.
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