Kaify Saad

Talent gets you hired. Reliability gets you kept. When asked what matters more, reliability or skill, almost all of my clients answered "Reliability" Quick replies. Accurate deadlines. Feedback taken without ego. Only then comes the edit. Quick word from @tobylejeune on his experience.

Long before I ran an editing company, I was carving wood. DIY projects, wood carving, anything that let me make something with my hands. Turns out it was the same skill. With wood, you don't add the shape. You take away everything that isn't it. Editing works the same way. The video is already in the footage, you just remove what's hiding it. Every timeline is a block of wood.

Even worse feeling for a creative Making an absolute banger and it being rejected

Things I believe about running an editing team that most agencies won't say out loud: 1) Free test edits are a bad filter. They show who has spare time, not who'll show up every week. 2) Most creators don't leave an editor over skill. They leave over silence. 3) A steady editor who never misses a deadline beats a brilliant one you have to chase. 4) An editor who pushes back on your idea is worth more than one who says yes to everything. 5) More revision rounds don't mean more care. Usually the brief was never clear. 6) A turnaround promise means nothing if one sick day breaks it. 7) The best editors ask more questions before the edit than after it.

You need to be unbothered to run a creative business. You can do 100 things right and still lose. You can make 10 things that flop. Then have one that gets you 10 clients. Build the resilience. You'll win eventually.

Being friendly gets you a nice call. Being professional gets you the client. Clients hire the person who sounds like they'll deliver, not the one who's most fun to talk to.

YouTube is testing AI answers at the top of search, built from clips of relevant videos. From the edit side, that changes one thing for education videos. A viewer can now meet your video in the middle. One explanation, pulled out on its own, with no intro and no context around it. So every section has to stand up by itself: The point gets stated inside the section, not only in the intro. No "like I said earlier" doing the heavy lifting. Visuals that explain the idea without needing the last five minutes. Videos edited like one long run-on sentence don't survive being pulled apart. Videos edited in clean, complete chapters do.

People said MrBeast was down 50%. He answered that his giant numbers come from videos that are years old and still pull 5-10M views a month. While most creators judge a video in 48 hours. The best judge it in years.

The comments

AI tools are insanely good now, so startups should stop paying for launch videos, right? The NYT reported an SF AI startup paying $80k for one shoot to announce a funding round, and Cluely's viral video cost about $140k. When AI makes the product cheap to build, the product stops proving anything. Claude didn't kill the launch video. It turned it into the trust signal.

Saw a post saying people can't sit through a 30 min video anymore had almost a million impressions. Meanwhile YouTube podcasts have 1B monthly viewers.

We edit and animate for three very different worlds. Business creators. Startup launches. Streamers. Different audiences, different budgets, different egos. But after enough projects across all three, the same rules decide whether people keep watching: 1. The story is found in the edit, not just the script. 2. The first 5 seconds are a promise. The rest of the edit is keeping it. 3. People don't remember videos. They remember moments. Build the edit around one. 4. Pacing beats polish. Every time. 5. Every animation needs a job. If it doesn't explain or emphasize, it's noise. 6. Sound is half the edit. Most people treat it like an afterthought. 7. A launch animation, a finance explainer and a stream highlight are the same job. Take attention, hold it, hand it to the next beat. 8. The best edits are invisible. The viewer should feel it, not see it. 9. Great editors are storytellers with a timeline, not button pushers. 10. If you'd skip it while editing, they'll skip it while watching. Most people try to fix a video with more effects. The best editors fix it with less.

How this startup got 4 million views!!!!! Chill out buddy, an agency charged $14k for it. $2k went into making the actual video $1.4k went into paid retweets to impress investors The rest is history. I swear X is becoming the next linkdin.

YouTube hit 15.8% of all US TV watch time in August. Netflix was at 7.7%. MrBeast says his videos doubled to around 25 min. Most of you still edit like the viewer is a 19 year old watching a dude perfect video on their phone. A growing chunk of the audience is a 55 year old on a couch with a remote.

AI made our editors and animators faster. It didn't make them better. Here's the split we see right now: Fast now: - Transcripts and rough assembly - Captions - Finding the best moments in a long stream - First-pass cleanup and masking - Versioning one video for every format Still human: - Pacing - Knowing when to hold a shot one beat longer - Timing an animation to the voice - The joke landing - Finding the story in the footage The editors winning right now hand AI the first list so they can spend all day on the second.

Everything Grok Bot did for me this week. I run 3 creative companies & my content runs on a team of AI agents (built on Grok Bot). Here's what they handle: Content brain: holds my story, clients, results and voice. Every post starts there, so nothing sounds generic. Weekly writer: every Tuesday it writes next week's posts and schedules them. Reply bot: any post that passes 20 likes gets a reply with the right link. It answers commenters too. Reference learner: I send it posts and reels I like. It tells me what fits my brand and saves the lessons. Quote post writer: I paste a post plus my side of the story and it writes my take. Graphics: builds every visual in my own style (this one included). Fact checker: strips any claim I can't back with real numbers. Chief of staff: shares my rules across every bot, so one fix applies everywhere. Learning coach: turns the YouTube channels I learn from into a searchable brain. Outreach heads: one per company, finding clients while I make content. I bring the story (they ship it). How are you using AI for your content?