The hardest part of running a faceless channel isn’t editing — it’s sourcing. You need a steady supply of clips that are already proven to travel: the ones racking up views right now, in your niche. Hunting for them by hand across three apps is a time sink.
Discover does the hunting. Type a niche or keyword — “discipline mindset”, “gym motivation”, “cooking hacks” — and Shortmaker searches the most-viral short-form videos across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels, ranked by views.
How it works
Discover is on-demand. There’s no crawler quietly hoarding videos and no stale, pre-baked feed — you search, we fan out to each platform, merge the results, sort by view count, and show them in one grid. Filter by platform, or flip the sort to “most recent” when you want what’s breaking rather than what’s already huge.
Crucially, Discover is an index, not a re-host. We store links and metadata only. Nothing is downloaded until you pick a video — at which point it flows through the same resolve pipeline you’d use for a pasted link. Same posture as copying a URL by hand, just far faster to find the URL.
From “found it” to “made it”
Every result is a starting point, not a dead end. Select the clips you like and:
- Create post cards — each becomes its own branded social-post short, headed with your channel avatar, name and caption.
- Or grab the link and drop it into a ranked compilation or the editor.
That’s the whole loop, in one place: search a niche → pick the winners → export finished shorts. What used to be three browser tabs and a download manager is now a search box.
A note on sources
YouTube results come from YouTube’s official API. TikTok and Reels come through a managed data provider — so you’re not running a scraper, and there’s nothing to maintain. Each source lights up when its provider is configured; if a platform is dark, it just isn’t wired up yet on your instance.
Use it well
Discover is a research tool, not an autopilot. The most viral clip in a niche isn’t automatically the right one for your channel — check the fit, respect the source, and add your own framing. The point is to spend your time choosing and shaping, not scrolling.
Search a niche and see what’s working right now.