From nothing to your
first posted video

Before you start

This is not a manual. A manual tells you which button to press. This is a course. It assumes you have never made a video and have no channel, and it explains what a thing is before it tells you to click it.

1.1What you will have by the end

• Esplainly installed on your computer and activated with your licence key.
• Accounts on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, set up properly, with a name, a picture and a bio that make sense together.
• A way of getting a script written, using whichever of three methods suits you.
• A narration voice chosen, set up and tested.
• A finished MP4 video, 1080 pixels wide by 1920 tall, which is the size every vertical feed wants.
• That video posted, with a caption, on all four platforms.
• A list of more than fifty other videos you could make next.

That is the whole job. Nothing is left as an exercise for the reader.

1.2What you need

• A Windows PC. Windows 10 or Windows 11. Any laptop bought in the last six or seven years is fine. Esplainly renders on your own machine, so a faster computer finishes sooner, but a slow one still finishes.
• A little free disk space. The download is about 75 MB and Esplainly uses around 200 MB once installed, because the video encoder and the twenty six music tracks come with it rather than being fetched later. Rendering barely touches the disk after that: the frames go straight to the encoder rather than being saved as thousands of images, so the only things written are the narration audio and the finished file. A finished video is a small file, comfortably inside a gigabyte of working room.
• An internet connection. You need it once to activate, and again if you use an online voice or ask the app to write a script. The rendering itself does not need it.
• An email address. You already used one to buy. That address is how you sign in, recover your key and get receipts.
• A phone. Not strictly required, but two of the four platforms are much easier to set up on a phone, and you will want to see your own video in a real feed.

Nothing else. No camera. No microphone. No editing software. No design skills. You do not appear on screen and your own voice is never recorded.

1.3How long each part takes

Honest numbers, for somebody doing it for the first time.

Channel setup is the long part and you only ever do it once. After the first week, a whole video from idea to posted takes about fifteen minutes.

1.4How to use this course

Read part 1 and part 2 now. Install the app. Then jump straight to part 7 and make something badly, using the free Windows voice and any two pictures. It will not be good. That is the point. Making one bad video teaches you more than reading three parts.

Then come back and do part 3 properly, because channel setup is the thing beginners skip and regret.

If you get stuck, part 11 is troubleshooting, and it is arranged by the symptom you are seeing rather than by the cause. If it does not cover what you are seeing, you can open a support ticket from your own account and a person answers it.

Install and activate Esplainly

2.1Download the installer

An installer is a small program whose only job is to put a bigger program onto your computer properly. You run it once and then you can delete it.

It does not come from a shop or a search result. It comes from your own account on this site, which is also where your licence key, your receipts and your support tickets live.

1. Open the email you received when you paid. It is from Esplainly and your licence key is in it.
2. Click Download the installer in that email. It takes you to Downloads in your own account.
3. If you cannot find the email, go to explainly.site/login, sign in with the address you paid with, and open Downloads from the menu. The newest installer is always there, so this link is the one to keep rather than the file.
4. The file is about 75 MB. It lands in your Downloads folder.
5. When it finishes, open that folder and double click the file.

2.2The blue "Windows protected your PC" screen

Windows may stop you with a blue box that says Windows protected your PC. At first glance it looks like it has only one button, Don't run, and a lot of people stop here and assume something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Here is how to get past it.

1. Click More info. It is the small underlined text inside the blue box, above the button.
2. The box expands and shows the publisher name and the file name.
3. Click Run anyway.

If your antivirus makes the file disappear instead of showing the blue screen, it has moved it to quarantine. Open your antivirus, find the quarantine or history list, restore or allow the file, then run it again.

2.3Finish the install

1. The installer opens. Read the licence agreement if you want to, then continue.
2. Leave every setting at its default. The defaults are correct.
3. Click Install.
4. Wait. It takes under a minute on most machines.
5. Leave Launch Esplainly ticked and click Finish.

2.4Activate with your licence key

A licence key is a long line of letters and numbers that proves you paid. It is in your purchase email.

1. Esplainly opens on the activation screen. There is one box on it.
2. Go back to your purchase email, select the whole key, and copy it with Ctrl and C held together.
3. Click into the box labelled Licence key.
4. Paste with Ctrl and V.
5. Check there is no extra space before or after the key. A stray space is the single most common reason activation fails.
6. Click Activate.
7. A green confirmation appears and the app opens.

Activation needs the internet once. After that you can work with no connection at all, apart from online voices and update checks.

2.5A short tour of the app

Before you touch anything, look at the layout so the rest of this course makes sense.

• Home is where the app opens. New video starts a fresh project, Open a project returns to one you left, and under those sits Showing up, which counts the days you have finished something. 2.6 covers that panel.
• The left panel inside a project is a list of seven steps: topic, script, pictures, voice, style, preview, render. You move down that list.
• The middle is whatever step you are on.
• The preview shows the video as it will look, in the tall shape a phone uses.
• Library sits in the bar at the top of the window and is there on every screen. It holds every video this computer has finished, and one click plays one. 7.6 covers it.
• Settings holds your keys, your channel handle and your defaults. You visit it rarely.
• Help holds the update check, About with the version number, the log folder, and a link that opens this course in your browser. You visit it when something goes wrong.

Two words appear everywhere in this app and you need them now. Left and right. Esplainly compares two things. The first thing is always the left one and the second is always the right one, and that never changes, in any video, so a viewer who watches three of your videos learns the rule without being told.

2.6Showing up: the streak, your goal and the badges

The Showing up panel is on Home, under the two buttons. It exists because the one thing that decides whether this works for you is how often you finish something, and a number you can see is a better reminder than a good intention.

Read that twice, because both halves matter.

• A finished video means a render that completed and left an MP4 on your disk. Opening the app does not count. Starting a project and abandoning it does not count. Two videos in one day count once towards the streak, and twice towards your total.
• One missed day is a rest day. It keeps the run alive and it does not add to the count, so the number on screen is always the number of days you actually showed up, never an inflated calendar span.
• Two missed days in a row ends the run. Nothing else does. When it ends, your best run and your badges stay exactly where they are, and the next video you finish starts a new run at one.

A goal, if you want one. You can set yourself a goal, and the shape of it is days out of days: five days out of seven is the one the app suggests first. It is your number, not ours. Nothing happens if you miss it and nothing is switched off. You can change it or remove it whenever you like.

Badges. There are twelve, for things like your first finished video, three days in a run, a week, thirty days, ten videos, fifty, a hundred, five different subjects, twenty different subjects, a goal you set and kept, and coming back after a fortnight away. They are permanent once earned.

The panel also shows your best run, your total videos, how many different subjects you have covered, and the last eight weeks as a small grid, so you can see the shape of your own habit at a glance.

Set up the channels you will post to

This is the part beginners skip. Do not skip it. A video posted to an empty profile with no name, no picture and no bio converts almost nobody into a follower, because a person who liked your video clicks your profile, sees nothing, and leaves.

Set this up once, properly, and it works for every video you ever post.

3.1Why four platforms and not one

Esplainly makes one file at 1080 by 1920. That exact file is what TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels all want. You are not making four videos. You are making one video and uploading it four times, which takes about six minutes once you have the habit.

The reason to do all four is that the audiences barely overlap.

• TikTok finds new people fastest. A video with no followers behind it can still reach thousands.
• YouTube Shorts is the slowest to start and the longest to last. A Short can still be picking up views nine months later, because YouTube is also a search engine.
• Instagram Reels has the audience most likely to follow you and stay.
• Facebook Reels has an older audience, less competition, and a monetisation route that surprises people.

Picking one platform means throwing away three quarters of the return on work you have already done.

3.2Choosing a channel name

Your channel name is what people read under your video. It should tell a stranger what they get if they follow.

Names that work for a comparison channel

• Two Things Daily
• The Difference Is
• Know The Difference
• Which One Is Which
• Two Words, One Difference
• Compare It Simply

Rules that actually matter

1. Use the same name on all four platforms. If your TikTok is one thing and your YouTube another, they never build on each other.
2. Keep it under about twenty characters. Long names get cut off with three dots on a phone.
3. Say the topic, not your own name. Nobody follows "Daniel's Videos". Plenty of people follow "Money Words Explained".
4. Check it is free before you commit. Open all four platforms and search the name. If it is taken on three of them, choose another.
5. Avoid numbers and underscores if you can. They are hard to say out loud and hard to type from memory.

Your handle is the @ name, for example @knowthedifference. Handles must be unique, so this is usually the harder one to get. Get the handle first, then make the display name match it.

3.3Your profile picture

A profile picture is shown at about the size of a fingernail. Almost everything you would put in it is invisible at that size.

• One thing, filling the frame. A single bold letter, a simple shape, or a face cropped tight from the eyebrows to the chin.
• High contrast. A dark shape on a light background, or the reverse. Mid grey on mid brown vanishes.
• Two colours, maybe three. Not a photograph of a busy scene.
• Square, at least 400 by 400 pixels. All four platforms crop it to a circle, so keep anything important away from the corners.
• The same picture on all four platforms. This is how somebody recognises you when they meet you again somewhere else.

Avoid a photo of you standing far away, a picture with a sentence written across it, a stock photo of a lightbulb, or anything with fine detail.

3.4Writing your bio

The bio is the one or two lines under your name. Somebody reads it for about a second and a half. The shape that works: what the channel gives them, how often, and what to do next if there is anything.

Four you could use today

• No hashtags in a bio. They do nothing there.
• No email address unless you actually want email.
• No "DM for promo" until somebody has actually asked.
• Write it in the same voice as your videos. If your videos are plain and calm, do not write a bio full of exclamation marks.

3.5TikTok

TikTok is where a brand new account has the best chance of being seen, so it is worth setting up first.

Creating the account on Android

1. Open the Play Store.
2. Search for TikTok and tap Install.
3. Open TikTok. Tap Profile at the bottom right, or Sign up if it is offered.
4. Choose Use phone or email. Email is easier to keep hold of long term.
5. Enter your date of birth. Enter it correctly. TikTok uses it to decide which features you may use, and it is difficult to correct afterwards.
6. Enter your email address and choose a password.
7. TikTok emails you a six digit code. Type it in.
8. Choose your username, the @ name you decided in 3.2.
9. Skip the interests screen, or pick a few that match your topic.
10. Tap Profile, then Edit profile.
11. Set your profile photo, your name and your bio.
12. Tap Save.

Creating the account on iPhone

1. Open the App Store.
2. Search for TikTok and tap Get, then confirm with Face ID, Touch ID or your Apple Account password.
3. Open TikTok and tap Profile at the bottom right.
4. Tap Sign up. You can choose Continue with Apple to keep your real address private, or Use phone or email to sign up with an address you control directly. Your own email address is simpler to recover later.
5. Enter your date of birth correctly.
6. Confirm the code TikTok sends you.
7. Choose your username.
8. Tap Edit profile and set your photo, name and bio.
9. Tap Save.

About the country on your TikTok account

Every TikTok account carries a country or region. This matters more than people expect and it is set when you sign up, so it is worth thinking about before you tap.

What the country affects:

• Who sees you first. When you post, TikTok shows the video to a small test group before deciding whether to show it more widely. That first group is heavily weighted towards your own region.
• Which creator programmes you can join. Rewards and monetisation programmes are not open in every country and the rules differ between them.
• Which currency you would be paid in, if you ever reach the point of being paid.
• Which content and which sounds you see, and which trends surface for you.

How the country is actually decided. TikTok does not usually show you a dropdown list of countries at sign up. It reads the region from your phone: the system region in your phone settings, the SIM card and mobile network, and the network address you are connected through. So the account region generally follows where the phone is and how it is configured at the moment you create the account.

Signing up with the United Kingdom as the region. People ask about this because the United Kingdom is an English speaking market with high advertiser value, so views there are worth more in the programmes that pay per view. In practice an account picks up a United Kingdom region when it is created on a phone whose system region, SIM and network are all United Kingdom.

What this means in practice. If you live in the United Kingdom, sign up in the United Kingdom and this is a non issue. If you live somewhere else, an account matching where you actually live is the one that will still work when you reach the payout stage. Your reach is not capped by your country: strong videos travel far beyond their first test audience, and plenty of large accounts are based well outside the countries that pay most per view.

This is information about how the setting behaves. What you do with it is your decision, and the platform's terms are the platform's to enforce.

3.6YouTube and Shorts

YouTube takes the longest to set up and rewards you for the longest. A Short is simply a YouTube video that is vertical and under three minutes. There is no separate app to upload with and no separate account.

Step one: a Google account

You may already have one. If you use Gmail, you have one.

1. Go to accounts.google.com/signup.
2. Enter your first and last name. A channel name comes later, so this can just be you.
3. Choose a Gmail address, or click Use your existing email instead if you would rather keep the address you already have.
4. Choose a strong password and write it down somewhere safe.
5. Add a phone number for recovery. Do this. It is how you get back in if you are ever locked out.
6. Accept the terms.

Step two: create the channel

A Google account is not a channel. The channel is a separate thing you create inside it.

1. Go to youtube.com and sign in.
2. Click your profile picture at the top right.
3. Click Create a channel.
4. Enter the Name you chose in 3.2.
5. Enter the Handle, the @ name. Use the same one as everywhere else.
6. Click Create channel.

Step three: set it up properly for Shorts

1. Click your profile picture, then YouTube Studio. This is the control room. Everything below happens here.
2. In the left menu click Customisation.
3. Open the Branding tab. Under Picture, click Upload and choose your profile picture.
4. Still on Branding, under Banner image, upload a banner. The safe size is 2048 by 1152 pixels, and anything important must sit inside the middle 1235 by 338 pixels, because that is the only part visible on a phone. A plain coloured banner with your channel name in the centre is enough.
5. Open the Basic info tab and write your Description. Two or three sentences: what the channel is, how often you post, and the sort of topics you cover.
6. Add Keywords in the same tab: comparison, explained, difference between, and whatever your topics are.
7. Set your Country of residence. Answer honestly. This one matters for monetisation later.
8. Click Publish at the top right.

Step four: the settings that matter

1. In YouTube Studio, click Settings at the bottom of the left menu.
2. Open Channel, then Advanced settings.
3. Under Audience, set whether your channel is made for kids. For a general explainer channel the answer is almost always No, set this channel as not made for kids. Answer honestly, because getting this wrong has real consequences.
4. Open Upload defaults and set a default description and default tags, so you are not typing the same thing on every upload. Save yourself the daily work now.
5. Verify your account with a phone number if you are prompted. Verification unlocks longer uploads and custom thumbnails.

About Shorts specifically

• You do not tick a box to make a Short. Upload a video that is vertical, 1080 by 1920, and under three minutes, and YouTube treats it as a Short automatically. Esplainly's output already meets all of that.
• Shorts have titles, and unlike TikTok the title is a real search field. Write it as the question a person would actually type.
• Shorts appear on your channel in their own tab, and in the main Shorts feed, which is where the views come from.

3.7Instagram and Reels

A Reel is Instagram's vertical video format. It lives in its own feed and it is where almost all new reach on Instagram comes from.

Creating the account

1. Install Instagram from the Play Store or App Store.
2. Open it and tap Create new account.
3. Enter your email address or phone number. Email is easier to manage.
4. Confirm the code they send you.
5. Enter your date of birth correctly.
6. Choose your username, the same handle as everywhere else.
7. Choose a password.
8. Skip the "find friends" and "follow people" steps if you want a clean account.

Switching to a creator account

A personal account works, but a creator account is free and gives you the numbers you need to learn from.

1. Tap your profile picture at the bottom right.
2. Tap the three lines at the top right.
3. Tap Account type and tools.
4. Tap Switch to professional account.
5. Choose a category. Digital creator or Education both fit a comparison channel.
6. Choose Creator rather than Business unless you are a registered business.
7. Finish the steps. You can skip connecting a Facebook Page here and do it later in 3.8.

What this gives you is Insights: how many people saw each Reel, how long they watched and where they came from. That is the feedback loop that makes video ten better than video one.

Filling in the profile

1. On your profile, tap Edit profile.
2. Set Name to your channel name. This field is searchable, so words in it help people find you.
3. Set Username to your handle.
4. Write your Bio, using 3.4.
5. Tap the profile picture and upload the same image you used elsewhere.
6. Tap Done.

To upload a Reel, tap the + at the top right, then Reel. Your posted Reels appear in the Reels tab on your profile, which looks like a small play icon.

3.8Facebook, and why a Page

Do not post these videos from your personal Facebook profile. Create a Page.

• A profile is for people you know. A Page is a public thing that strangers can follow without being your friend. Reach on a personal profile is mostly limited to your friends list.
• A Page gets analytics. You can see what worked. A personal profile gives you almost nothing.
• A Page is the only route to being paid. Facebook's monetisation programmes run on Pages, not personal profiles.
• A Page can be scheduled and managed from Meta Business Suite, which also posts to Instagram at the same time. That saves you a step every day.
• A Page keeps your two lives apart. Your family does not have to see forty comparison videos, and your viewers do not see your holiday photos.

1. You need a personal Facebook account first, because Pages are created from one. Your personal profile is not shown to your Page's followers.
2. Go to facebook.com/pages/create on a computer, or in the app tap the menu, then Pages, then Create.
3. Enter the Page name. Same channel name as everywhere else.
4. Choose a Category. Start typing "Education" or "Video creator" and pick from the list.
5. Write the Bio, using 3.4.
6. Click Create Page.
7. Add your profile picture and a cover photo. The cover can be the same design as your YouTube banner.
8. On your Page, open Settings, then Linked accounts, and link your Instagram account. Once linked you can upload once in Meta Business Suite and publish to both.

3.9The setup checklist

Before you post anything, check every one of these.

• Same channel name on all four platforms.
• Same handle on all four, or as close as you could get.
• Same profile picture everywhere, square, readable at fingernail size.
• A bio on all four that says what somebody gets by following.
• YouTube: banner uploaded, description written, audience setting answered.
• Instagram: switched to a creator account.
• Facebook: a Page exists, not just a personal profile.
• Facebook Page linked to Instagram.
• Every password written down somewhere you will still have in a year.
• A recovery phone number or email set on each account.

Getting your script

The script is the words the narrator says. In Esplainly a script is a list of short lines, and each line is marked as being about the left thing, the right thing, or both.

You have three ways to get one. All three are fine. Use whichever you like and switch whenever you want.

4.1What a good script looks like

A 30 second video is about seven lines and about 75 to 90 words in total. That is much less than people expect. Speech runs at roughly 150 words a minute, and you want a little air.

Worked example: Saving vs Investing

1. BOTHMost people use these two words to mean the same thing. They are not the same thing.
2. LEFTSaving is putting money somewhere safe so it is still there later.
3. LEFTThe amount barely grows, but it also barely moves.
4. RIGHTInvesting is putting money into something that can grow.
5. RIGHTIt can go up. It can also go down, and that is the deal.
6. BOTHSaving protects the money you have. Investing risks it to get more.
7. BOTHWhich one are you actually doing right now?

Read that out loud. It takes about thirty seconds. That is the whole craft.

The rules underneath it

• One idea per line. If a line has an "and" in the middle, it is two lines.
• Under fifteen words per line. Long lines wrap onto three rows in the caption chip and stop being readable.
• No jargon in line one. If a viewer has to know a word to understand your hook, they scroll.
• Concrete beats abstract. "It can go down" beats "there is downside volatility".
• The difference must be sayable in one sentence. If you cannot do that, the comparison is too big. Pick a smaller one.
• End with a question. Comments push these videos further than likes do, and a question is the cheapest way to get comments.

4.2Route one: inside Esplainly with your own AI key

Esplainly can write the script for you, inside the app, if you give it a key from an AI company. You choose which company. There are three, and you pick one: Google Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic Claude.

You get your own key, paste it in once, and it is yours. Esplainly does not resell any of them, does not mark anything up, and never sees what you are charged. The key is stored in the Windows Credential Manager on your own computer, not in a project file and not in a log, and it is never sent to us.

Which of the three to choose

You only need one. The honest differences, as they stand:

• Google Gemini is the only one of the three that offers a free tier at all. If you would rather not put a card anywhere, start here.
• OpenAI publishes no free allowance for text models, so the account needs credit on it before the key does anything.
• Anthropic has no free tier either. New accounts are given a small one off amount of free credit to try the API, and after that the account needs credit on it.

Either way the amounts are tiny for this job. You are asking for eight or nine short lines, which is one of the smallest things you can ask a model to do. The app shows you a price for each model in the form of what a hundred scripts would cost, so you can see the size of it before you commit.

Switching later costs nothing. The keys for the other two stay saved, so going back is a click and not another trip to find a key.

Getting a key and putting it in

1. Go to the site for the one you chose: aistudio.google.com for Gemini, platform.openai.com for OpenAI, or console.anthropic.com for Anthropic.
2. Sign in or create an account. For Google, the account you made for YouTube in 3.6 is fine.
3. Find the API keys page and create a key. All three call it much the same thing.
4. The key appears on screen. Copy it, and paste it somewhere safe immediately. Some of these pages will not show you the full key again.
5. In Esplainly, open Settings, then Keys. The panel is called Who writes your script.
6. Choose your company on the Script writer switch at the top of that panel.
7. Paste the key into API key.
8. Click Test key. You should get an answer within a couple of seconds.
9. Click Save.

There is an Open button beside each one that takes you straight to the right page in your browser, so you do not have to type any of those addresses.

Choosing a model

Underneath the key is a list of models. This is worth understanding, because it is not a fixed list written into the app.

The list comes from your own key. Once your key is saved, Esplainly asks the company which models your account can actually call, and shows you that. This matters, because what an account is allowed to use is not the same for everybody and it changes without notice: Google has stopped handing its 2.5 family to new accounts, for example, so a list printed in a course would be wrong for some readers on the day they read it. That is why this section describes the picker rather than naming models.

What you will see against the entries:

• SUGGESTED marks the one Esplainly recommends. It is always a cheap, quick model, because writing eight short lines needs no more thinking than that. Take it unless you have a reason not to.
• FREE TIER appears on a model that has one.
• ON YOUR KEY means your account offers a model Esplainly has no price or note for. It is still selectable.
• NOT ON YOUR KEY greys a model out. Your account cannot call it, so the app will not let you choose it and then fail at the moment you press the button.
• A price like "about $0.02 for 100 scripts", or price not confirmed where the app could not verify a figure. It never guesses one.

The prices carry the date they were checked, and there is a Check them yourself link to each company's own pricing page beside them. Prices move. Believe the company, not us.

If Esplainly cannot ask. With no key saved yet, or with no internet, or if the request is refused, the app says so plainly and falls back to the list built into it, with a Check again button. You can still pick something. It just means the list is Esplainly's rather than your account's, so one of them may be refused when you write a script.

If your saved model stops being allowed, Esplainly tells you before you use it, and offers you a working one to switch to in a single click.

Rate limits, in plain words

A rate limit is a cap on how often you may ask. It exists so one person cannot use up a shared service. It is measured three ways.

• RPM, requests per minute. How many times you can ask in any sixty seconds.
• RPD, requests per day. How many times you can ask in a day, which resets at midnight Pacific time.
• TPM, tokens per minute. How much text you can push through in a minute. A token is roughly three quarters of a word.

All three companies set limits of this kind, they differ between them, and they move. Do not learn a number. Learn the shape.

What that means for you. Writing one script is one request. Even on the tightest free allowance any of them offers, you could write a script every few seconds for as long as you had ideas. You will never touch a rate limit making videos. The only way to hit one is to sit clicking Write my script repeatedly, and if you do, wait sixty seconds and it clears.

Check your own position rather than assuming. Each company publishes its current prices and limits, and Esplainly links to the right page beside the prices on the Keys screen. For a Gemini key, your own live limits are at aistudio.google.com/rate-limit.

Using it

1. In Esplainly, click New video.
2. Type your two things into the left and right boxes, and choose a length.
3. Click Write my script.
4. Wait a few seconds. The lines appear, already split and already marked LEFT, RIGHT or BOTH, and with a tile suggested for each side.
5. Read every line and fix what is wrong. 4.5 covers this.

If the script does not come back, Esplainly says so and offers you a button that opens your key settings at the right panel. It never leaves you guessing which of the two things went wrong.

4.3Route two: ChatGPT or any chatbot

You do not need a key at all. You can get a script from any chatbot in a browser and paste it into Esplainly. ChatGPT, Gemini in a browser, Claude, Copilot, any of them.

1. Open the chatbot in your browser.
2. Copy the prompt below.
3. Replace the two things on lines two and three with your own.
4. Paste it into the chat and send it.
5. Copy the reply.
6. In Esplainly, click New video, type your two things, then click Paste a script.
7. Paste it in and click Use this script.
8. Esplainly splits it into lines and reads the side markers.
9. Check every line before you carry on.

The prompt to copy

Write a 30 second narration script for a short vertical video comparing
LEFT = Saving
RIGHT = Investing

Rules:
- Exactly 7 lines.
- Each line on its own row, starting with LEFT:, RIGHT: or BOTH:
- Line 1 is BOTH and is a hook: name the mistake people make, in under 15 words.
- Lines 2 and 3 are LEFT and explain the first thing in plain words.
- Lines 4 and 5 are RIGHT and explain the second thing in plain words.
- Line 6 is BOTH and states the single difference in one sentence.
- Line 7 is BOTH and asks the viewer a question they can answer in a comment.
- Under 15 words per line. Around 85 words in total.
- Everyday language. No jargon. No introductions. No sign off.
- Do not use dashes. Use commas and full stops.
- Output only the 7 lines and nothing else.

Change the two names for every new video. Change 30 second and 7 lines if you want a different length: a 15 second video is about 4 lines, a 45 second video about 10, a 60 second video about 13.

If the reply is wrong, say so plainly in the chat. "Too long, cut every line to under twelve words." "Line 6 is not a difference, rewrite it." "Line 1 is boring, make it a mistake people make." Chatbots take correction well and you are allowed to ask twice.

4.4Route three: writing it yourself

This is the route that produces the best videos, once you have made ten or so. You know things a model does not, and it shows.

1. Open a blank note.
2. Write the difference in one sentence, before anything else. If you cannot, stop and pick a smaller comparison.
3. That sentence becomes line 6.
4. Write line 1 as the mistake people make. Not "today we compare X and Y". Something like "You have been using these two words to mean the same thing."
5. Write two short lines about the left thing: what it is, then one concrete detail.
6. Write two short lines about the right thing, in the same order.
7. Write a question for line 7.
8. Read the whole thing out loud with a timer running. If it is over 32 seconds for a 30 second video, cut words. Cut adjectives first.
9. In Esplainly, click Paste a script, paste it in, and mark the sides. If you would rather type straight into the app, click Write it myself instead and you get three empty lines. No account and no key is needed for that button, or for anything after it.

What makes these scripts work

• Start with the mistake, not the topic. People stop for being told they are wrong. They scroll past being told what a video is about.
• Use words a twelve year old would use. If you need a technical word, define it in the same breath or drop it.
• One concrete example beats three abstract ones. "A savings account paying two percent" beats "a low yield instrument".
• Do not be complete. You are settling one confusion, not teaching a course. Everything you leave out is a future video.
• Do not hedge. "It depends" is true and it is also the reason nobody finished your video.
• Finish with a question a person can answer from their own life. "Which one are you doing?" beats "What do you think?"

4.5Editing a script, whichever route you took

Whatever wrote it, read it before you render it. This is the step people skip and then wonder why the video is flat.

1. Read it out loud. Actually out loud. Anything you stumble over, a narrator will stumble over.
2. Check line 1 is a hook. If it says "Today we are comparing", rewrite it.
3. Check every line is on the right side. A line about the second thing marked LEFT makes the presenter point at the wrong picture. This is the single most common reason a finished video feels confusing.
4. Cut any line over fifteen words. Either shorten it or split it into two.
5. Check the difference is actually stated. Some scripts describe both things beautifully and never say what separates them.
6. Check it is true. You are the publisher. A model can be confidently wrong, and the comments will tell you so in public.
7. Click into any line to edit it. You can rewrite it completely, and you can drag lines to reorder them.
8. Click the side marker on a line to cycle it between LEFT, RIGHT and BOTH.

4.6Name your two things early

Whichever route you took, one thing about the opening is worth knowing, because it is the difference between a video that starts and a video that stalls.

So when you write or edit line 1, prefer an opening that names at least one of your two things. "Saving is not investing, and the difference costs people money" does the hook and the naming in one breath. When Esplainly writes the script for you, it asks for an opening built exactly that way.

If you want a pure hook first, that is a real choice and sometimes the right one. Just make it knowingly, and keep it to one line.

Choosing a voice

Esplainly narrates your script for you. You never record anything. There are four ways to get that narration and they differ in quality, in setup effort and in cost.

5.1The four options side by side

Scroll the table sideways

There is a fourth option and it is a real one. Under the three cards is a quiet link, skip the voiceover. Take it and you get captions and music over a silent track, with each line staying on screen long enough to read. Plenty of accounts post exactly that, and it is the right choice if you plan to record yourself over the top afterwards.

Esplainly never charges you for narration and never sees your keys. They are stored on your own computer. If you use Google or ElevenLabs, you have an account with them and you pay them directly, if you pay at all.

5.2The built in Windows voice

This is already selected. There is nothing to set up, no account and no card.

1. In Esplainly, go to the Voice step of the wizard.
2. Choose Windows voice.
3. Pick one of the voices in the list.
4. Click Test voice and listen. If you have already written your script, this reads the first line of your own words back to you rather than a canned sentence, which tells you far more.
5. Click Save.

Being honest about the quality. It sounds like a computer reading a sentence. The rhythm is flat and it puts emphasis in slightly the wrong places. It is not going to fool anyone.

Why that is genuinely fine to start with. Most people watch short video with the sound off, reading the captions. Esplainly burns captions into the video, so your message lands either way. Plenty of accounts post with a synthetic voice and do perfectly well. More importantly, using it costs nothing and lets you learn the whole workflow before you spend a penny or set up an account anywhere.

You can usually install a few more voices. Open the Windows Settings app, go to Time & language, then Language & region, then add a language or open the options for a language you already have and install its speech pack. Any new voices show up in Esplainly after you restart it. Whether extra voices are available at all depends on your edition of Windows, so treat this as worth a try rather than a guarantee.

5.3Google Cloud Text to Speech

This is the biggest jump in quality for the least money, and it is where most people who post regularly end up.

For scale. A 30 second script is roughly 400 to 600 characters. The free monthly allowance is counted separately for the standard voices and for the higher quality neural voices, and the allowances are different sizes. Google publishes the current numbers on the Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing page. Read it before you start, because the numbers change and this course does not update itself.

Setting it up

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com and sign in with a Google account.
2. Accept the terms if you are asked to.
3. Create a project. Click the project selector in the top bar, click New project, name it something like "Esplainly voice", then click Create.
4. Use a different project from the one holding your Gemini key. Attaching billing to a project removes the Gemini free allowance for that project, as explained in 4.2. Two separate projects keeps the free thing free.
5. Wait for the project to be created, then check the project selector at the top shows your new project. This is the step that trips people up. Everything you do next applies to whichever project is selected.
6. Link a billing account. In the left menu open Billing, then Link a billing account. If you have never used Google Cloud, click Create billing account and add a card. The service will not work without this.
7. Enable the service. Type Cloud Text-to-Speech API into the search bar at the top, open the result, and click Enable. Wait until the page says it is enabled.
8. Create a key. In the left menu open APIs & Services, then Credentials. Click Create credentials and choose API key. Click Copy.
9. Restrict the key immediately. Click Edit API key. Under API restrictions choose Restrict key, tick Cloud Text-to-Speech API, and click Save. Now if the key ever leaks it can only be used for speech, and only on your project. Never skip this.
10. In Esplainly, open Settings, then Keys, and find Google text to speech. Then go to the Voice step and choose Google Cloud.
11. Paste the key into API key.
12. Click Test voice. You should hear it within a couple of seconds.
13. Click Save.

Picking a voice, and the tier that decides the price

Google has hundreds of voices and they are not all priced the same. They come in tiers, and the tiers differ in price by more than forty times, so this is the one choice on the screen with real money attached to it.

• Above the list is a Quality tier switch. It shows only the tiers your own key can actually reach, with how many voices are in each, so you are choosing from your account rather than from a brochure.
• Standard is the cheapest tier and has the largest free allowance. It is clearly synthetic, and closest to the Windows voice.
• The middle tiers are the usual choice for narration: natural, and far below the top tier in price.
• The broadcast quality tiers are the expensive ones. Hear one before you build a whole channel on it.
• Selecting a voice shows you the tier it belongs to, with a note and a price where Google publishes one. Where the app could not verify a figure it says price not confirmed rather than inventing one, and links you to Google's own price list.

There is a search box as well, so you can type an accent or a name instead of scrolling. Below the list are Speed and Pitch sliders. Leave them alone at first: a voice at its natural speed is nearly always better than the same voice hurried.

Listen to several. Whichever you choose becomes part of how your channel sounds, so choose one you are happy to hear on every video you make for the next year.

Watching what you spend

Do these two things once, and a surprise bill stops being possible.

1. See what you have used. In the Google Cloud console open Billing, then Reports, and filter by the Cloud Text-to-Speech service. That figure is exactly what your narration has cost this month, and it should read zero for a long time.
2. Set a budget alert. In Billing, open Budgets & alerts and click Create budget. Set the amount to something small, such as 5 in your currency, with email alerts at 50 percent and 100 percent. Google will email you long before anything meaningful is charged.

Raw call counts, if you want them, are under APIs & Services, then Dashboard. Your key is stored on your own computer inside Esplainly's settings. It is never sent to us and we never see your usage or your bill.

5.4ElevenLabs

The most natural voices available anywhere. Real breathing, real emphasis, real pauses. If the voice is the point of your channel, this is the one.

1. Go to elevenlabs.io and click Sign up. A free account is enough to test with.
2. Confirm your email address.
3. Open your account menu. It sits at the bottom left of their dashboard.
4. Choose Profile or API Keys, depending on which version of their site you see.
5. Create or reveal your API key and copy it. Treat it like a password.
6. In Esplainly, open Settings, then Keys, and find ElevenLabs. Then go to the Voice step and choose ElevenLabs.
7. Paste the key into API key.
8. Click Test voice, then Save.

The voice, and the model behind it

There are two things to choose here, not one, and they are different.

• The voice is who is speaking. Esplainly fetches the list from your own account, so you see your own voices, including any you have made or added there. A search box and a Kind switch narrow it down. Unlike Google there are no speed or pitch sliders, because ElevenLabs does not offer them, so the app does not show sliders that would do nothing.
• The model is the engine reading the words, and it changes both the sound and the price. Esplainly offers three, each with its price per thousand characters and a note about what it is for: the lifelike one Esplainly has always used, a quicker one at half the price, and their most expressive one. The first is tagged IN YOUR CACHE, because every clip you have already made was made with it.

If narration suddenly stops working part way through a month, you have most likely used your quota. Check the usage figure on your ElevenLabs dashboard. You can switch back to the Windows voice in one click while you decide whether to upgrade, and your other keys stay saved so switching back later is another click.

5.5Pick one and keep it

Whichever you choose, stay with it. A viewer who has seen four of your videos recognises the voice before they read the name. Changing it every week throws that away for no gain.

A reasonable path: start on the Windows voice while you learn. Move to Google Cloud once posting has become a habit and you know you will keep going. Consider ElevenLabs only if you have decided the voice is a real part of what makes your channel yours.

Pictures

Every video has two tiles, one for the left thing and one for the right. What goes in them is up to you: the subject name set large as a text card, an emoji, a line icon drawn in the presenter's own style, or a photograph. Text cards are the default, so if you skip this section entirely you still get a finished video. The rest of this section is about photographs, because they are the option with rules attached.

6.1Where to get pictures you are allowed to use

• Your own photos. The safest option by a wide margin, and the least generic. Photograph the thing. Two coffees, two tools, two receipts, two plants. Your phone camera is fine, and original photos stand out because everybody else is using the same stock images.
• Screenshots of your own work. Your spreadsheet, your dashboard, your handwriting. Yours, and specific to you.
• Free stock sites. Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay have large libraries that are free to use commercially. Read the licence on the site itself, not somebody's summary of it. Licences change.
• Creative Commons search. Openverse indexes Creative Commons images. Many require you to credit the creator by name. Check the licence on each individual image and give credit where it is asked for.
• AI generated images. The platforms allow them today. What you may do with them commercially is decided by the terms of whichever tool you generated with, so read those terms.
• Public domain collections. Museum and library collections often release images with no restrictions at all. Excellent for history, art and science topics.

Two things to watch even on free stock. Pictures containing recognisable people can require a model release for some uses. Pictures containing logos, product packaging or artwork carry somebody else's rights inside them, even when the photograph itself is free.

6.2Where not to get pictures

• Image search results. A search engine finds pictures, it does not license them.
• Film and television stills.
• Other creators' videos or thumbnails.
• Brand logos and product packaging.
• Album artwork.
• Photographs of celebrities.
• Anything you found on a social feed and saved.

These get videos muted, restricted, taken down or geoblocked, and they get accounts struck. It is not worth it for a picture you could have replaced in thirty seconds.

6.3You are responsible for the rights

6.4Picking two pictures that read at phone size

Remember what actually happens to your picture. It becomes a square tile roughly a third of the screen wide, sitting next to the other one, watched on a phone at arm's length by somebody who is also doing something else. It has about half a second to land, and it is small.

That means the usual advice about beautiful photography does not apply. What you need is a picture that survives being shrunk.

1. One subject, close, filling the frame. This is the whole game. A single object photographed close up reads instantly. A wide scene with your subject somewhere in it becomes a smudge.
2. Crop it square before you import it. The tile is square, so anything long and thin comes out looking wrong. Crop it yourself in Windows Photos or any free tool and you keep control of what stays in the picture.
3. Around 800 to 1200 pixels square is plenty. The tile is about 400 pixels, so anything above that is fine and anything much below it looks soft.
4. Make the two pictures obviously different from each other. This is the one most people get wrong, and it matters more here than anywhere, because both tiles are on screen at the same time and the viewer is comparing them directly. Different colour, different shape, different subject.
5. Avoid white or very pale backgrounds. The whole frame is white. A picture with a white background has no edges and the tile looks empty. A plain coloured or dark background makes the tile pop.
6. Avoid pictures with words in them. Text at that size is unreadable, and your caption is already the text on screen.
7. Avoid fine detail. A dense chart, a page of writing or a crowd scene all turn to noise at tile size.

Worked example, Saving vs Investing. Left, a close photograph of a jar of coins against a dark table, cropped square. Right, a close photograph of a green line chart climbing, cropped square. Different colour, different shape, both readable at a glance, neither containing any text.

Making the video, step by step

Everything so far was preparation. This is the part you will repeat for every video, and it settles down to about four minutes.

7.1What the finished video actually looks like

Before you build one, here is what comes out, from the top of the frame to the bottom. Knowing this makes every choice in the app obvious.

• The background is white and the type is black. This is deliberate. It is bright in a feed, it is readable in sunlight, and it does not look like everybody else's dark video.
• Each side arrives the first time your script talks about it, and then stays. Nothing swaps out. If your opening line is about the pair together, both come up at once. What changes after that is which one is emphasised.
• The active side is highlighted and the other is faded back. When a line is about the left thing, the left name and the left tile stay full strength and lift slightly, and the right side dims. That is how the viewer knows which thing is being talked about, without being told.
• The captions come in short groups, four words at a time to start with, timed to the narration clip for that line. The word being spoken lights up as it is said. You can change the group size on the Style step, or set it to nought if you would rather a whole line appeared at once.
• The presenter points. Left, right, or neither. That comes from the side marker on the script line, and from the words in the line itself, which is why 7.3 matters so much. You can pin a different pose on any line from the script step if you disagree with the choice.

7.2The worked example: Saving vs Investing

1. Open Esplainly and click New video. You land on the topic screen.
2. Type your two things. Put Saving in the left box and Investing in the right box. The order follows through the whole video, so the left thing is always on the left.
3. Choose a length. Your options are 15, 30, 45 and 60 seconds. Choose 30. It is long enough to say something real and short enough that people watch to the end. Watch time decides how far these videos travel, so a 30 second video people finish beats a 60 second video they abandon.
4. Get your script. Click Write my script if you set up an AI key in 4.2, Paste a script if you wrote it elsewhere, or Write it myself for three empty lines. Either of the last two needs no key and no account. The lines appear in a list.
5. Read every line and fix it. Read them out loud. Change anything that is wrong, vague, too long or dull. Click into a line to edit the words. This is the step that separates a good video from a video that technically exists.
6. Check the side marker on every line. Each line shows LEFT, RIGHT or BOTH. Click the marker to cycle it. Section 7.3 explains why this matters more than anything else on the screen.
7. Fill the two tiles. Each side offers a text card, an emoji, an icon or a photograph. Text cards are already chosen for you, so you can walk straight past this step and still get a finished video. For a photograph, click Add picture and choose a file, or drag an image out of a folder and drop it onto the box. If you have copied an image from a web page, clicking the box and pressing Ctrl and V often works too, though copying a file in File Explorer and pasting it is less reliable. When in doubt, use Add picture.
8. Pick a voice and hear it. Open the Voice step, choose your voice and click Test voice, which reads the first line of your own script back to you. If you have not set anything up, the Windows voice is already selected and works immediately. You are not forced to listen before moving on, but two seconds now beats finding out after a render.
9. Add or switch off music. The Music panel is further down that same Voice step. Choose one of the twenty six included tracks and set the volume low, so the narration stays clearly on top. You can hear it under the voice here rather than finding out in the render. If you would rather have no music, switch it off.
10. Choose the presenter. Move on to the Style step. This is the figure at the bottom of the frame who points at each side as the narration moves. Pick one of the five looks, or open Customise this look and change it. Choose one and keep it, because it becomes your channel's face.
11. Check the captions. The Captions panel is on the same Style step. Captions are on by default and burned into the video, which is what you want, because most people watch with the sound off. They appear a few words at a time in a cyan chip below the pictures, timed to the narration.
12. Preview. Click Preview and watch the whole thing. Listen for lines that run long, look for a moment where the presenter points at the wrong picture, and check both tiles are still recognisable at that size. Fix anything you find and preview again.
13. Render. Click Render. A 30 second video takes about 28 seconds on an ordinary eight core laptop with no graphics card, and proportionally longer for a longer video or a slower machine. Leave it alone while it works.
14. Find your file. Click Open folder when it finishes. Your MP4 is sitting there, 1080 by 1920, ready to upload with no further editing.

That is a finished video. It is a real one, and you can post it.

7.3LEFT, RIGHT and BOTH

Every line in your script carries a side marker. It is not decoration. It decides two things at once: which side of the frame is emphasised while that line is spoken, and which way the presenter points.

This is the single most common thing to get wrong. If your finished video feels confusing and you cannot say why, it is almost always this. A line is talking about investing while the presenter points at the jar of coins. Watch the preview once with the sound off and just watch the pointing. If a hand points at the wrong thing, click that line's marker and fix it.

7.4A second run: CPU vs GPU

Do the whole thing again with a different topic, so the shape becomes yours.

1. Click New video.
2. Left: CPU. Right: GPU.
3. Length: 30.
4. Script, written or generated, something like the seven lines below.
5. Pictures: left, a close photograph of a processor chip, cropped square. Right, a close photograph of a graphics card, cropped square. Two obviously different shapes, neither on a white background.
6. Same voice, same presenter, same captions, same music as last time. This is the point. Consistency is what turns a pile of uploads into a channel.
7. Preview, then Render.

1. BOTHYour computer has two chips that do maths, and people mix them up constantly.
2. LEFTThe CPU is the general one. It can do anything, one job after another.
3. LEFTIt is fast at hard problems that have to be solved in order.
4. RIGHTThe GPU does thousands of simple sums at the same time.
5. RIGHTThat is why it draws games and trains AI models.
6. BOTHThe CPU is a few brilliant workers. The GPU is a thousand ordinary ones.
7. BOTHWhich one do you think matters more for gaming?

Notice how much faster the second one was. That is the real speed of this: not the twenty eight seconds of rendering, but the four minutes of deciding.

7.5Where the file goes

• Click Open folder after a render and Windows opens the folder with the file selected.
• By default Esplainly saves to a folder inside your Videos folder. You can change this in Settings, then Output.
• The file is named after your two things and the date, so a folder of them is still readable in six months.
• The format is MP4. Every platform accepts it directly.
• Do not re-export it. Do not open it in another editor, do not resize it, do not compress it. It is already exactly the size and format the platforms want, and every extra pass costs quality.

7.6Your Library

You do not have to go looking through folders to find something you made last week. Library is a button in the bar at the top of the window, and it is there on every screen: on Home, on any of the seven steps, and in the middle of a render.

What it holds. Every video this computer has finished. A video turns up there the moment its render completes, without you doing anything, and it stays there even if you later delete the project it came from.

You can look at them as Grid, which shows the stills side by side, or as List, which shows dates, lengths and sizes. Right click any video, or use the button on its tile, for:

• Play, and Play full screen.
• Show the folder in Explorer, which is the same thing Open folder does after a render.
• Copy the file, so you can paste it into a cloud drive folder or an upload box.
• Delete the video file, and you can tick several and delete them together.

Deleting a video deletes the MP4 and nothing else. The project behind it, with its script, its pictures and its voice, is untouched, so you can render it again from the project whenever you like. The app says so on the confirmation, and it also says that deleting the file cannot be undone. Both are true.

If you moved or renamed a file yourself, Esplainly does not pretend it is still there. The tile shows the still marked file moved and offers you Forget this video, nothing is deleted, or Copy the path it should be at so you can go and look. It never quietly drops a video off the list, because a list that edits itself is a list you cannot trust.

Making it yours

Your first few videos should look like the defaults, because the defaults work. Once you have posted a handful, these are the things worth changing.

8.1Your handle on every video

Esplainly puts your channel handle at the top of every video, above the two subject names. Set it once.

1. Open Settings, then Branding.
2. Type your handle into Channel handle, including the @, for example @knowthedifference.
3. Click Save.

8.2Presenters

The presenter is the drawn figure at the bottom of the frame who points at each side. It is not a photograph and not a video of a person. It is a line drawing generated by the app, which is why it is instant and why nothing has to be downloaded.

Open the Presenter panel on the Style step. Start by picking a look. There are five ready-made presenters, and each card draws itself in your own colours so you choose by looking rather than by imagining:

• Tech. Glasses and a laptop.
• Teacher. A tie and a jacket. This is the one a new project starts with.
• Casual. Curly hair, no accessories, a lighter frame.
• Scholar. Glasses and a hat.
• Creator. Long hair, headphones and a hoodie. The one that looks least like the rest.

They are deliberately unalike. At the size these videos are watched, five arrangements of the same head with different props is one figure in five costumes, so the things that change the outline come first: the hair, the shape of the outfit, the build.

If none of them is quite you, click Customise this look and change any of this:

• Glasses, Hat, Tie and Laptop, each on or off.
• Torso, the shape of what the figure is wearing.
• Hair.
• Line colour and outfit colour.
• Text on the front, up to twelve characters. Your channel name goes here if it is short. Longer than that and the torso clips it.
• Size, from 80 to 120 percent.

How the presenter decides what to do

It changes pose by itself as the script runs, across twenty three poses: pointing left or right, leaning, presenting, thinking, waving, shrugging, thumbs up or down, warning, counting, measuring, surprised, and so on. Two things drive the choice, and it is worth knowing both.

• The words in the line. A line ending in a question mark gets a thinking pose. A line that says "do not", "never" or "mistake" gets a warning. A line that says "best" or "faster" gets a thumbs up. "Three ways" gets a counting pose with three fingers. A line starting "but" or "actually" gets a surprised one. The opening line gets a wave and the closing line gets something livelier.
• The side marker, which decides everything else and also decides which way the gesture faces. A warning on a LEFT line is a warning aimed left. Two lines in a row about the same side never get the identical pose twice, so the figure moves rather than freezing.

You can pin a pose on any line. On the Script step each line has a pose menu, set to auto by default and showing you which pose auto has chosen. Change it there if you disagree.

Choose one combination and stay with it. Your presenter is your channel's face. Somebody scrolling recognises a shape before they read a word. Changing it every video throws away the recognition you are trying to build.

8.3Captions

Captions are burned into the video, which means they appear everywhere, including in feeds that ignore uploaded subtitle files.

How they behave. Your script arrives in short groups of words, in a bright cyan chip with dark text, sitting below the two tiles. A group appears when its part of the narration starts and goes when the next one arrives. Everything is timed against the length of the real narration clip, so the caption and the voice always agree.

1. Open the Captions panel on the Style step.
2. Check Show captions is on. It is on by default.
3. Set Words on screen at once if four is not to your taste. Anything from one to eight, or nought for a whole line at a time.
4. Light up the word being said is the highlight. It only does anything when the words are grouped, so it does nothing at nought.
5. Position, Text colour and Block colour are there if you want them. Change them once and leave them alone.
6. Look at the preview and read a long line. If a line wraps onto three rows in the chip, it is too long. Go back to the script and cut words. This is the real caption control: your writing.
7. To turn captions off entirely, switch Show captions off. Think hard before you do. Most people watch with the sound off, and the captions are the only reason those people understand anything.

8.4Colours

The frame is white, the type is black and the caption chip is cyan. That combination is deliberate: it is bright in a dark feed, it is readable outdoors on a phone, and it does not look like everybody else.

Where the app lets you set a colour, two rules:

• Change it once, at the start, then leave it alone. Colours only tell a returning viewer anything if they are the same every time.
• Keep whatever you choose strongly different from your pictures. A colour that disappears against your usual tiles is worse than the default.

The one thing worth checking on every video is your two picture tiles. Because the frame behind them is white, a picture with a white or very pale background has no visible edge and the tile looks empty. Choose pictures with some colour in them and this never comes up.

8.5Background music

Music sits under the narration at a low volume. It is a small change with a real effect on how long people watch.

Twenty six tracks come with the app. They are on your disk already, which is part of why the install is around 200 MB. Each one is described by what it is for rather than by its name, because you choose by niche: calm with no drums, something safe under any voice, something with a beat for a faster topic.

1. Open the Music panel, on the Voice step.
2. Choose An included track and pick one, or My own file, or Off.
3. Set the volume low. The slider stops at half for that reason. The narration must stay clearly on top.
4. Leave Duck under the voice on, so the music drops while a line is spoken and comes back between lines.
5. Click Hear it under the voice. Listen properly. If you have to concentrate to hear the words, the music is too loud. Cut it in half.

8.6What to leave alone for now

Until you have posted at least ten videos, do not touch these. They are the things people fiddle with instead of posting.

• The video length. Stay on 30 seconds. Learn one length properly before you have opinions about the others.
• Custom colours. The defaults are tuned. Change them when you have a reason, not on day one.
• Custom music. The included tracks are cleared and they work.
• Trying a different presenter every video. You are undoing your own recognition.
• Rewriting your bio every week. Write it once and leave it for a month.
• Buying anything else. You do not need another tool. You need ten more videos.

The single biggest predictor of whether this works for you is how many videos you post in your first month. Everything in this part is optimisation, and optimisation before volume is just an interesting way to avoid posting.

Posting it

9.1Finding the file and getting it to your phone

Your file is in the folder that opened when you clicked Open folder, or in your Videos folder if you closed it.

You often do not need it on your phone at all. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook all accept uploads from a desktop browser, and typing a caption on a keyboard is faster than typing it on glass.

1. Put the file in Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive on your computer.
2. Open the same app on your phone.
3. Download the file to your phone's photo library.

9.2The caption that works everywhere

The same skeleton works on all four platforms. Write it once, paste it four times.

1. Restate the question or the mistake. "Most people use these two words to mean the same thing."
2. Do not answer it. The answer is in the video. That is the entire point of the caption.
3. Ask for a reply. "Which one are you actually doing?" Comments are the strongest signal you can generate, and a direct question is the cheapest way to get them.
4. Add three to five hashtags. Not thirty. 9.7 explains why.

9.3Posting to TikTok

1. Go to tiktok.com/upload in a browser on your computer, or open the app and tap the + button.
2. Drag your MP4 in, or click Select video.
3. Wait for the upload to finish and the preview to appear.
4. Write your caption and your hashtags.
5. Choose a cover. Pick a frame with the question text visible on it, not a blank moment.
6. Leave the privacy setting on Everyone.
7. Click Post.

TikTok judges the first two seconds harder than anywhere else. If your opening line is not a question or a claim that somebody is wrong about something, rewrite it before you post.

9.4Posting to Instagram Reels

1. In the app, tap the + at the top right, then Reel. On a computer, go to instagram.com and click Create.
2. Choose your MP4.
3. Choose a cover frame. Instagram leans on the cover more than the others do, so pick a frame with legible text.
4. Write your caption and hashtags.
5. Leave Also share to feed on, so it appears on your profile grid as well as in the Reels feed.
6. Tap Share.

9.5Posting to YouTube Shorts

1. Go to studio.youtube.com and sign in.
2. Click Create at the top right, then Upload videos.
3. Choose your MP4. Anything vertical and under three minutes is treated as a Short automatically.
4. Write the title as the exact question somebody would type into a search box. "What is the difference between saving and investing?" Titles matter more here than anywhere else, because YouTube is a search engine and Shorts get found through search for months.
5. Write a sentence or two in the description and add #Shorts at the end.
6. Set Made for kids correctly. Answer honestly.
7. Click Next through the remaining screens.
8. Set visibility to Public and click Publish.

Shorts keep working for a long time. A video that does nothing on TikTok on day one can find its audience on YouTube in week six. Do not judge a Short in its first week.

9.6Posting to Facebook Reels

1. Go to business.facebook.com, which is Meta Business Suite, and sign in.
2. Make sure your Page is selected at the top left, not your personal profile.
3. Click Create reel.
4. Upload your MP4.
5. Write the same caption. Facebook audiences skew a little older, so plain wording beats slang.
6. If your Instagram account is linked, tick Instagram here and publish to both at once. That saves you the whole of 9.4 every day.
7. Click Publish.

9.7Hashtags, honestly

Hashtags are the most over-thought part of posting. Here is the honest position.

What actually helps

• Three to five tags that genuinely describe the content. They help the platform work out what your video is about and who to test it on. That is their real job.
• One broad tag and two or three specific ones. #money is broad. #savingmoney and #personalfinance are specific.
• Consistent tags across your videos in the same topic. It helps the system build a picture of what your account is about.
• On YouTube, #Shorts in the description. That one is a real signal.
• Words in your caption and your title. These carry far more weight than the hashtags do, on every platform, and especially on YouTube and Instagram where search is real.

What is superstition

• Thirty hashtags. It does not increase reach. It makes the caption unreadable and it looks like spam to a human, which costs you the follow.
• #fyp, #foryou, #viral, #explore. Millions of videos use these every day. They tell the system nothing about your video, so they cannot help it find your audience.
• Lists of "banned hashtags". These circulate constantly and are almost entirely made up.
• Copying a block of tags from a big account. Their tags describe their videos and their audience, not yours.
• Hashtags in your bio. They do nothing there.
• A comment full of hashtags under your own video. This was a real tactic years ago on one platform. It is not one now.
• Deleting and reposting a video that flopped. You reset its history and lose the slow re-testing these platforms do for weeks afterwards.

The short version: pick four honest tags, keep them consistent, and spend the time you saved on writing a better first line.

9.8When to post and how often

• Once a day for the first month. If daily is not realistic, five a week on the same five days. Consistency beats volume, and both beat perfection.
• Roughly the same time each day. Pick a time your audience is awake. It matters less than people say, but a habit helps you more than it helps the algorithm.
• Batch the work. Make five videos in one sitting and post them across the week. Esplainly renders a 30 second video in about half a minute, so making the video is never the slow part. Deciding what to make is.
• Post the same video to all four platforms. Stagger by a day if you like. The audiences barely overlap.
• Never delete a video that is doing nothing. These platforms re-test old videos for weeks and sometimes months. Deleting it ends that chance permanently, and it teaches you nothing.
• Give it thirty videos before you judge the channel. The first ten are you learning the craft. The second ten are you learning the audience. The third ten are the first ones that are actually representative.

9.9What to do with your first ten videos

Your first ten videos have one job and it is not going viral. It is to teach you what you cannot learn by reading.

1. Post all ten within two weeks. Speed of iteration is the entire point.
2. Change one thing at a time. If you change the hook, the topic and the pictures all at once, you learn nothing from the result.
3. Check the retention graph on each one, in TikTok analytics or YouTube Studio. It shows where people stopped watching. This is the most useful number you have access to.
4. If people leave in the first two seconds, your first line is the problem. Not your topic, not your voice, not your pictures. Rewrite the hook and try the same topic again in a fortnight.
5. If people leave halfway, your middle is too slow or your lines are too long. Cut words.
6. If people watch to the end and do not comment, your last line was not a real question. Ask something a person can answer from their own life.
7. Read every comment and reply to every comment, for at least the first month. Replies count as engagement, and the questions people ask are your next twenty video ideas, written for you by your audience.
8. Keep a note of which topics got the most comments. Not the most views. Comments tell you what people actually care about. Views tell you what the algorithm happened to test that day.
9. Remake your best one. Take the video with the best retention, write a sharper script for the same topic, and post it again in a month. Nobody will notice, and it will do better.
10. Do not read anything else about growth until you have posted ten. Everything in this part makes sense only once you have your own numbers to compare it to.

Ideas that work

Fifty pairs, ready to use. Each of these is a real confusion that real people have, which is the only thing that matters when picking a topic.

10.1How to find your own

The list above will run out. This is how you refill it, forever.

• Listen for "wait, what is the difference between". Whenever anybody says that out loud near you, write it down. That is a video with proven demand.
• Read your own comments. Every "but what about X" is a video.
• Search your topic followed by "vs" on any platform and read what people are asking.
• Look at the questions people answer badly. Anything with a thousand slightly wrong answers on a forum is a good topic.
• Take one of your own videos and go one level deeper. If Saving vs Investing worked, Shares vs Bonds is next.
• Pick a topic you actually know. Your job, your hobby, your degree, your faith, your sport. You will be right, you will be specific, and it will show.

Troubleshooting

Arranged by what you are seeing, not by what is causing it.

11.1Windows says "Windows protected your PC"

What it is. SmartScreen has not seen this file often enough to have built a reputation for it. It is a comment on how new the file is, not on whether it is safe.

1. Click More info inside the blue box.
2. Click Run anyway.

If the file vanishes instead, your antivirus quarantined it. Open your antivirus, find the quarantine or history list, restore or allow the file, then run it again. If it was deleted outright, sign in at explainly.site/login and download it again from Downloads.

11.2A render fails or stops part way

Work through these in order. It is usually the second one.

1. Check you have some free disk space. Rendering does not need much, because the frames go straight to the encoder rather than being written out, but the finished MP4 still has to land somewhere. If your drive is completely full, empty something.
2. Check your pictures are still there. If you moved, renamed or deleted an image after adding it, the render cannot find it. Re-add both pictures.
3. Try a different picture. Some image files carry unusual colour profiles, for example CMYK files exported from print software. Open the picture in Windows Photos, save a copy as a normal JPG or PNG, and use the copy.
4. Close heavy apps. Games, video editors, virtual machines and browsers with forty tabs all compete for the same memory.
5. Try a shorter length. If a 60 second video fails and a 15 second one renders, the problem is resources, not the app.
6. Restart Esplainly, then restart Windows if it is still failing.
7. Send us the log. Open Help, then Open log folder, and email the newest file to support@explainly.site with a line about what you were making. The log usually names the exact problem.

11.3No sound in the finished video

1. Play it in a different player. VLC, Windows Media Player, or drag it into a browser tab. Some preview panes and phone thumbnails are muted by default.
2. Test the narration on its own. Open Settings, then Voice, and click Test voice. If you hear nothing there, the problem is the voice, not the render.
3. Check the music volume. If music is your only audio and it is set to zero, you get silence.
4. Check the Windows output device. Windows sometimes sends audio to a device that is not connected, for example headphones you unplugged. Click the speaker icon in the taskbar and check which device is selected.
5. If only the narration is missing and you use Google or ElevenLabs, the request probably failed during the render. Switch to the built in Windows voice, render again, and confirm you get sound. If you do, your key is the problem. See the next item.

11.4A voice key or a script key is not working

Take these in order. It is usually the first one.

1. Spaces. Pasting a key often brings a space or a line break with it. Clear the field completely and paste again carefully, with nothing before or after it.
2. Google: the service is not enabled. Go back to the Cloud console, search for Cloud Text-to-Speech API, and confirm it says Enabled for the project the key belongs to.
3. Google: billing is not linked. Open Billing in the console. Without a linked billing account the service refuses every request, even inside the free allowance.
4. Google: the key is restricted to the wrong thing. Open APIs & Services, then Credentials, click your key, and check that Cloud Text-to-Speech API is ticked under API restrictions.
5. Google: the key is from the wrong project. Easy to do if you have more than one, and you should have more than one. The key must be created inside the project where you enabled the service.
6. Your account cannot call the model you picked. Esplainly greys out the models your key cannot use and warns you if the one you had saved stops being allowed, with a button that switches you to a working one. If you see that warning, take the suggestion. This happens more than people expect: what an account may use changes without notice, and Google in particular has stopped handing some older models to new accounts. 4.2 covers the picker.
7. A quota or rate limit message. Wait sixty seconds and try again. It clears by itself.
8. No credit on the account. OpenAI and Anthropic have no free tier for this. If the key is right and the model is right and it still refuses, check the account has credit on it.
9. ElevenLabs: quota used up. Open your ElevenLabs dashboard and check your character usage for the month. When the quota runs out, requests fail until it resets or you upgrade.
10. Test it. Whatever you changed, click Test voice or Test key before rendering again. That button tells you in two seconds what a render tells you in thirty.

11.5"Your licence is in use on another computer"

Your licence runs on one computer at a time, so this means the previous activation is still being held.

1. Go to explainly.site/login and sign in with the email you paid with.
2. Open My devices.
3. Find the old computer in the list and click Release.
4. Go back to Esplainly on the new computer and click Activate again.

• You reinstalled Windows or replaced a drive. The machine now looks like a different computer, so the old entry is still sitting there holding the slot. Release it and activate again.
• You cannot sign in. Use /recover to get your key by email, and /forgot to reset your password.

11.6The video looks wrong on my phone

• Black bars down the sides. You uploaded a file that was not 1080 by 1920. Check you uploaded the file Esplainly made, not one that went through another editor or a chat app. Do not re-export.
• My channel handle is hidden behind the platform buttons. Every platform puts its own overlays near the very top and bottom of the frame. The handle sits below the top edge for exactly this reason, but a platform can change its layout. Check on a real phone, not just on your laptop.
• The pictures are blurry. Your source images were too small. Around 800 to 1200 pixels square is comfortable.
• The picture is missing its edges. Esplainly crops a photo to a square rather than stretching it, so nothing is ever squashed, but the left and right of a wide photo are cut off. Crop it yourself first to choose what stays.
• I cannot tell what the pictures are. They are small on purpose, so they need to be close, simple and colourful. The postage stamp test in 6.4 will tell you in two seconds.
• It looks fine on the computer and bad on the phone. Check you did not send it to yourself through a messaging app. Those re-compress video heavily.
• Colours look different on the phone. Phone screens are more saturated than laptop screens. This is normal and not something to fix.

11.7Getting an answer from a person

If nothing above matches what you are seeing, ask us. There is a proper ticket system and it is part of what you paid for.

1. Go to explainly.site/login and sign in with the email you paid with.
2. Open Support in the menu.
3. Click Open a ticket.
4. Fill in the two boxes: What is this about?, which is a one line summary, and What happened?, which is the story in your own words.
5. Click Send it.

Tickets are for licence holders. That is how one person can answer every one of them properly. If your licence is not active, for any reason, the page gives you support@explainly.site instead, and a person still reads it and answers within the same working day. Nobody is left with no door.

What to put in the message. The more of this you include, the more likely the first reply is a fix rather than a question.

• what you were doing when it went wrong,
• the exact wording of any error message, typed out rather than described,
• what you expected to happen instead,
• if it is a render problem, the newest file from Help, then Open log folder. Email that one to support@explainly.site, because the ticket form takes words rather than files.

11.8If you cannot get it running at all

That is the one case with a promise attached to it, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

It is a promise about getting it running, not a trial period and not a change of mind policy, and it is not a time limit on a product that turns out to be faulty. The whole thing is written out on the refund policy page, and that page is the one that counts.

Moving to a new computer

Your licence is yours forever and it runs on one computer at a time. You can move it as often as you like. You just have to release the old one first.

12.1If you still have the old computer

1. Open Esplainly on the old computer.
2. Open Settings, then Licence.
3. Click Deactivate this computer.
4. On the new computer, install Esplainly following part 2.
5. Enter the same licence key and click Activate.

12.2If the old computer is gone, sold, wiped or broken

1. Go to explainly.site/login and sign in with the email you paid with.
2. Open My devices in the left menu, at /app/devices.
3. Find the old computer in the list. It is named after the machine, so it is usually obvious which is which.
4. Click Release.
5. On the new computer, install Esplainly following part 2.
6. Enter the same licence key and click Activate.

12.3If you have lost your licence key

1. Go to explainly.site/recover.
2. Enter the email address you paid with.
3. Click Send my key.
4. Check your inbox, and check your spam folder.

It has to be the address you paid with. If you are not sure which one that was, try each address you might have used at checkout.

What moves with you and what does not

12.4Updates

Esplainly keeps itself up to date. There is nothing to buy again and nothing to reinstall.

• It checks when it starts, downloads new versions quietly, and applies them the next time you open the app.
• Check whenever you like under Help, then Check for updates.
• Improvements arrive free as part of normal updates. You paid once and that covers them.
• Your licence key never changes and you never need to reactivate after an update.
• If an automatic update ever fails, sign in, open Downloads, and run the latest installer over the top of your existing install. Your settings and your keys stay exactly where they are.
• You may see the blue SmartScreen warning again after a new version is published, for the reason described in 2.2.