How I'd use Sora 2, Claude, and Perplexity to generate 1M+ views

On this episode I share a comprehensive framework for creating viral videos using Sora 2, Perplexity, and Claude. The process involves researching viral formats with Perplexity, using Claude to generate and evaluate video concepts based on audience psychology, and finally implementing those concepts with Sora 2. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:32 -Why Sora 2 gives you an unfair advantage 03:02 - Using Perplexity as a research agent 06:07 - Generating concepts with Claude 09:15 - Evaluating concepts for viral potential 14:51 - Implementing prompts in Sora 2 18:10 - Final thoughts and demonstration Key Points: • A three-step workflow using Perplexity for research, Claude for prompt creation, and Sora 2 for video generation • Creating viral content gives startups an "unfair advantage" in distribution and attention • Evaluating video concepts against engagement criteria (hook strength, emotional triggers, algorithm fit) • Testing multiple AI-generated concepts to find what resonates with your target audience The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  In this episode, I go through how you can actually come up with Sora 2 concepts that are going to resonate with people. Because you want to create an internet audience, you know that Sora 2, the AI video piece of it, is a key part of that, but you don't know how. So today, I'm going to walk you through my entire workflow for using Perplexity, using Claude, and how you can actually write prompts that give you Hollywood-level output that have the highest likelihood of success. And this is for anyone who wants to go viral, wants to build an audience, but doesn't know how. Here's a tutorial that, you know, within five minutes, you'll be able to get 10 incredible concepts for whatever it is you're working on.

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  This is the sort of thing that is going to help you go viral. This episode is all about that. Enjoy the episode, and I'll see you in there.

• 1:02Greg Isenberg?

  Today, we're going to talk about how do you use Sora 2 to actually come up with viral videos? And why does it matter? Because if you're able to create viral videos using Sora 2, then you're going to be able to own a lot of attention. If you have a lot of attention, you'll be able to create startup ideas that sell to that attention: consumer mobile apps, SaaS products, micro SaaS, and it'll make your life a lot easier. It actually is an unfair advantage, right? Everyone says it: "Distribution is the new moat." And today, we're going to talk about how to use Perplexity, how to use Claude, how to use Sora 2 to actually come up with ideas that are going to rip. And I think that, you know, if you stay to the end,

• 1:46Greg Isenberg?

  you will have an unfair advantage around how to actually surgically come up with prompts for Sora 2.

• 1:54Greg Isenberg?

  That have a higher likelihood of success and that's the sauce, right? If you understand how to do that, your startup will more likely work. People who understood how to use YouTube in 2006 to 2012, you know, did better than people who didn't. People who understood how to use Instagram from 2012 to 2019, you know, did better than people who didn't know how. People who understood how to use Twitter in 2019 to 2023, you know, created massive, massive media empire. So today's episode, I'm going to share everything with you, how I would do it, my entire workflow. I'm going to go through an example of how I created

• 2:39Greg Isenberg?

  an ad for my startup idea browser.com. And yeah, by the end of it, you'll be able to copy this and start, you know, I wouldn't say going viral because it, this is a framework for going viral. Obviously, not every one of these are going to go viral, but it's going to give you the muscle for how to create videos that have a higher likelihood of success. So let's get into it. The first thing is you're going to want to go to perplexity. So for perplexity, we basically want to use perplexity as a research agent. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, I run a startup. In my case, you know, this is what it does.

• 3:22Greg Isenberg?

  Gives validated startup ideas, trends, et cetera. It's called idea browser.com. I need to create short form video that will go viral. To do that, I need scroll stopping concepts for my audience of entrepreneurs building mostly software. The ones who long for the idea of owning a SaaS that spits out cash. What kind of short form will get this engagement for this audience? Show examples and give frameworks. By the way, in this entire episode, if you go to the show notes, I'll include notes so you can download these notes. So you don't have to have the prompts for you and you can just replace idea browser with whatever it is you're doing, right? And you know, the other important thing about this prompt is it says the.

• 4:08Greg Isenberg?

  It says like what the audience actually wants, right? Like, what is the main goal of the audience? Like, the people who sign up to Idea Browser, one of the things that, you know, we learned is that the people, you know, they want to build software products, they want to build mobile apps, they want to build SaaS, they don't know how, or they're looking for ideas to get their creative juices flowing. So whatever it is for you, like, what is the main motivation for why people are signing up to your product? So you use Perplexity as this research agent, and it spits out, by the way, deep research, I should mention that.

• 4:49Greg Isenberg?

  So if you don't know, the deep research button is over here at the bottom. You don't necessarily need to use Perplexity, you can use ChatGPT deep research, you can use Grok deep research. I just find that, you know, this one, Perplexity deep research is a little better for this specific use case. So now that you've got, it says like your core psychology behind viral entrepreneur content, high arousal emotions, validation-seeking, FOMO, pattern recognition, it starts giving these scroll-stopping video frameworks. So it says, "The contradiction hook. This leverages the brain's attraction to unresolved tension. I'm broke, but I'll show you my 50K MRR SaaS.

• 5:33Greg Isenberg?

  Zero coding seals, but built 100K SaaS in six months." So it gives you all these different frameworks that, you know, if you're listening to this, probably resonates with you in some way, or you know, you've seen it at least before. And it basically breaks down, okay, here's what's most likely to go viral. Micro tutorials, set up a SaaS analytics in 60 seconds, real numbers reveals, so, you know, Stripe MRR growth charts. So the point is, it breaks down all these different frameworks. It gives you ideas in different content formats. And then what you're gonna do is you're literally gonna copy this. And you're gonna ingest it into Claude.

• 6:18Greg Isenberg?

  I actually call it Claude because that's the French way of saying it. But for, just so the comment section doesn't yell at me for this, for this video, I'm gonna call it. I'll call it Claude. You win, you win comment section on this one. So you're basically wanna copy and paste all that deep research to start generating concepts with Claude. And we're actually gonna use Claude. Damn, I said Claude. We're actually gonna use Claude to write the Sora prompts. So basically, that's, that's our, that's how we're gonna do this. We're gonna use perplexity for the research agent. We're gonna use Claude to write the Sora prompts. And then we're gonna use Sora to actually, obviously, produce the content.

• 7:00Greg Isenberg?

  And then you can always go back to perplexity and Claude to refine your prompts over time. So let's go ahead and into Claude. I literally copy and pasted the perplexity deep research spit it out, what it spit out. And I, and I put it in here. You can do that with, with Claude, so don't worry if it's super long. And then it literally just throws out 10 scroll-stopping video concepts. Because basically what I said was, I said, "You are a skilled social media content strategist and short-form video expert. I will provide you with some research insights about my target audience and platform.

• 7:45Greg Isenberg?

  Using these insights, brainstorm 10 creative short-form video concepts for your industry or brand." I put the goals, the requirements, the psychological triggers.

• 7:57Greg Isenberg?

  So I basically, yeah, I just copied and pasted this. And I just said, "Hey Claude, act as a social media content strategist." And you can see, these are all, this is all the data from Claude. You get some actually killer ideas for videos. Now, these videos could be used for ads, or they could be used if you're building an organic audience. If you need stuff, short form for LinkedIn or X, Instagram, you can go ahead and use that. So, you know, I'll just read one. Refresh Stripe 47 times today, got this and said, "Screen recording starts on a Stripe dashboard, refreshing repeatedly, cuts to a specific tactic and tool that actually drove

• 8:40Greg Isenberg?

  the sales, quick transitions between dashboard, tool, and interface, and result numbers, and with the exact MRR number appearing on screen." So it's got these really clear, clean ideas. "My 80K SaaS mistake in 23 seconds." Like, these are things that would go viral. POV, you just got your first dollar on Stripe. Cloned $100 million SaaS in four days using these three tools, it's legal. Your SaaS onboarding has a 14-second problem. So, these are all, so now you have 10 ideas that have a good chance of resonating. But, this is the mistake that people make, is they just kind of stop there and then they, they put it into Sora.

• 9:23Greg Isenberg?

  But what you actually want Claude to do is to evaluate it. So what I usually do is I say, "evaluate each of these 10 concepts against our key engagement criteria. Specifically, for each idea, rate 1 to 10, and briefly comment on hook strength." So the first three seconds, how attention grabbing is the proposed hook? Pattern interrupts in pacing? Emotional curiosity trigger, does it invoke an emotional response? Algorithm fit? How likely is this concept to lead to high completion rate or shares? I use a trend friendly, engaging enough for TikTok and Reels? This is so, so important, because this is the stuff that we talked about in the beginning, which is, it's going to help you increase your odds of success.

• 10:07Greg Isenberg?

  So then what it spits out is the evaluations. We're using it as basically an evaluation agent. So it tells us, you know, what is the best, the, the, yeah, the highest rated, or lowest rated, of these concepts? And you can see, there's a lot of eights and nines, there's lots of, you know, there's here some tens. And what I like to do is, now that we have this list, that's all rated...

• 10:36Greg Isenberg?

  Is I basically ask it to give me a recommendation. So the top three concepts overall, it gives it to me. So everyone says build an MVP. I did the opposite and hit 25 K MRR. You can see that the average score is 9.75. It tells you why it wins. And I always read this. It's important to read it. Perfect storm of controversy, social proof and trending format. Leverages in existing popular content remix strategy. Drives massive comment debate algorithm gold. You should read this to make sure that you agree with it. Right? If you get one of these concepts and it's rated high, but you're like, mm, this is kind of cringe for whatever reason, or, you know,

• 11:19Greg Isenberg?

  I don't feel comfortable sharing this for whatever reason. Change it, change it, but maybe you want to keep the format and just sort of change some of the content. So it gives you a recommendation. So start with concept three as your first video. It has the highest viral ceiling. Follow up with quickly with concept seven clone tutorial for practical value that converts. And now you basically have a few videos that you can start testing. You're not sitting in a blank page and being like, what should I use Sora 2 for? No, you've got something that's validated that you can actually use. So then, then you have to actually prompt it to get the prompt. Right?

• 12:01Greg Isenberg?

  So instead of you coming up with the prompt, you want to come up with, you want to prompt Claude to come up with the prompt. So it's optimized. So you say, I want you to make sure this is Sora 2 optimized. Basically, how can I use Sora 2 to its advantage to make this scroll stopping? Maybe it's a cameo by Sam Altman or someone else. Look into Sora to make sure you are optimizing. And then give me the prompts for Sora for your two best ones. So it researches Sora 2's capabilities and it optimizes it based on that. That and in pretty much instantaneously, you get.

• 12:40Greg Isenberg?

  You get, you know, well, actually not instantaneously. So here you can see it researching why, you know, how to optimize Sora 2 for SaaS content. So it's gone ahead and done that. And then what I did is I said, you know, make it 15 seconds long. I think Sora maxes out at 15 seconds on web and on mobile. I think it maxed out on 10. Obviously, they're going to increase that over time. So you want to get good at it now because yeah, the truth is, you know, 10 and 15 seconds, you don't have enough time. It's really not enough time to do tons of high-quality content. But, you know, obviously, it'll increase over time.

• 13:23Greg Isenberg?

  So that's why now is a good time to get used to it and get good at it. And there are people who are getting millions of views on their 10-second pieces of content. Reminder, Vine was six seconds back in the day, right? And early days in TikTok was just 15 seconds. So what I said was, I gave it, I wanted, I wanted it to be 15 seconds instead of 10 seconds. So I put, "Make it 15 seconds. Use quotes for the exact line I want spoken." So Sora 2 is capable of generating synchronized speech, so the character in the video might actually say that line out loud. Describe the key visual elements. Person at a desk, timer.

• 14:05Greg Isenberg?

  Put a spoken dialogue label just to be safe, to indicate that line should be spoken. This might not, may or may not be necessary. And mention on-screen text explicitly for the ending. Sora can render some text in the scene it prompted, although quality may vary. So sometimes, you know, the prompt includes some of this stuff. Sometimes it just completely ignores it. But having this in there does, overall, when you're creating a bunch of content, help. So you, you put that in there and then you get the Sora 2 prompts for your top two concepts. And it's pretty long. I know what you're thinking. I generally, you know, use Sora 2 on, on the web.

• 14:51Greg Isenberg?

  And a lot of people think of Sora 2 as a mobile app. You can use Sora 2 on the web. It's just, you do need to be a Pro member, I believe. So just double check it there. I like it on the web is you can, you can just, you know, it's just easier to copy and paste. You can, you can do these really long, really long, you know, sorry, you can do these really long prompts here. And you can see at the bottom here, you can actually change the duration. Oh, see, it's not letting me do it right now. I guess, you know, they're probably overloaded with traffic.

• 15:33Greg Isenberg?

  But this is a little hack that you can sometimes change the duration from 10 to 15 seconds on the web here. So I ended up, the, the prompt over here, and ended up creating a 10 second video. So I actually think it's a pretty good ad because it generates curiosity. And when you generate curiosity with an ad, your, your click through rate goes up. And sometimes the platforms are willing to basically have a lower cost per click if you do that. So this isn't, you know, I think it does this.

• 16:18Greg Isenberg?

  It basically shows Notion. And then it's like, I clone this. Do you want to clone this? And then it basically says like, there's these tools, how to do it. Go to my link in bio. It's not perfect, right? You can see like this is like Bubble I O up here and like the, you know, the, the writing's a bit like sketchy. But I think overall, like, I wouldn't be surprised if this ad worked. And you would have to pay someone hundreds, thousands of dollars to actually like conceptualize this, build this. And now you can do this, you know, pretty simply. This was one of my prompts. And this was, this is a second video that had the most likelihood of success. I think it's interesting.

• 17:03Greg Isenberg?

  It's completely different.

• 17:06Greg Isenberg?

  I have a feeling that this Notion one will perform better, but that's just based on my gut. But that's the beauty about Sora, right? You try it out and you see if it works. And that's kinda it, right? Like, this is hopefully giving you a workflow for how to research ideas, how to come up with concepts, how to score concepts, how to iterate with them, and how you can, yeah, how you can basically use Sora to your advantage. You're basically just wanna keep going back and forth and iterating and seeing what it prompts out.

• 17:48Greg Isenberg?

  And you may say like, hey, this Notion video is like, it's pretty good, but what if you change the visual style? What if you made it more cinematic? Ask Claude to give you advice on how to prompt it. And good things will happen if you continue iterating, continue posting. I think that this is just a massive opportunity to get started today. Because I think the people who are gonna write incredible Sora prompts

• 18:23Greg Isenberg?

  will have the power of Hollywood in their hands. And how valuable is that? So I hope this episode has been interesting. I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day, friends. And if this has been even remotely interesting to you, please like and comment so I know to keep creating episodes like this. Thank you for listening to the Startup Ideas Podcast. And for more startup ideas and trends, go to ideabrowser.com and sign up for free.