How we built buyer-filtered Reel inspiration (not blank-prompt AI)
Most AI video tools start the same way: an empty prompt box. For a brand marketing team, that's the hardest part of short-form — not editing, but deciding what to post today.
While building beREEL, we flipped the order: inspiration first, generation second. Here's the shape of the approach.
1. Start from the website, not a prompt
A brand's site already encodes most of what a prompt would ask for. We extract a small, structured "Brand DNA" from it:
- Audience — who the buyer is
- Offer type — product vs. service
- Personas / archetypes — the brand's voice and roles
- Benefits — what the buyer actually gets
- Tone — how it should sound
We deliberately kept this to a few fields. A short, editable profile that the user locks once is reused on every reel, instead of re-describing the brand in each prompt.
2. Filter a template feed instead of generating from scratch
Rather than asking a model to invent a concept, we keep a library of 600+ Reel templates and filter them against Brand DNA, then present them as a scrollable, For You–style feed. The user's job becomes picking, which is much faster than imagining.
Design lessons:
- Filtering beats ranking alone. Hiding clearly off-buyer formats matters more than perfect ordering.
- Keep/skip is signal. Saved and skipped styles help steer what shows up next.
- The feed must feel familiar. A vertical feed matches how people already browse Reels.
3. Remix onto real products
Once a template is picked, it's remixed onto the brand's own products or services — stills or clips — with captions kept inside the safe area, and an editor for pace, crop and cut. Scheduling to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Facebook and Snapchat exists, but we treat it as secondary: the core problem is choosing a winner.
What we'd tell other builders
If your users stall at the blank state, consider whether you can derive context from something they already have (a website, a repo, a doc) and turn creation into selection.
I'm building beREEL — you can try it free (170 credits, no card) at https://bereel.pro. Happy to answer questions about the approach in the comments.