Everything here is free, and it is all of it.

1. What a hook is actually for

Short-form platforms decide distribution mainly from retention — how much of the video people watched before leaving. A viewer who leaves at second one contributes almost nothing to that signal, and nothing after second one can recover them, because they are gone.

That is the whole argument for caring about openings, and it is worth being precise about what it does not mean. It does not mean a good hook makes a bad video succeed. It means a bad hook stops a good video from ever being seen. The hook is not the product; it is the door.

2. The five components

Every score on this site comes from these, weighted and added. They are not secret numbers — knowing them is the point, because once you can see which one is low, the fix is usually obvious.

Specificity

Concrete referents: a real number, a named tool, a situation you could photograph. "Grow your business" has none. "The pricing email that got me a 40% raise" has three. This is the component most hooks fail on, and the cheapest to fix — you usually own the material already.

Clarity

Understood in one pass, at speaking speed, with no rewinding. Short is fine; rambling past about 26 words and using jargon is not. Note that clarity is not the same as simplicity of idea — only of sentence.

Tension

Something the viewer has to resolve. A contrast ("but", "instead"), a negation ("this isn't a talent problem"), a reversal. Without tension a hook is a statement, and statements are easy to scroll past.

Curiosity

An open loop: the line tells you an answer exists and withholds it. This is the component that most reliably produces watch-time, and the one most often faked badly — withholding that there's an answer, without ever giving one, is what makes people distrust a whole account.

Emotional charge

Words that carry feeling rather than information: cost, wasted, stopped, finally. High-arousal language travels; neutral language does not. It is weighted lowest of the five because it is the easiest to overdo — a hook made entirely of charge reads as an advert.

3. The ten archetypes

The archetypes are structures, not templates — each one exploits a different reason a person keeps watching. All ten, with worked examples and notes on when each fits, are on the hook library page. Read that alongside this one; they are the same method stated two ways.

4. A weekly loop that works

Tools are useless without a rhythm. This is the loop the site is designed around, and it takes about forty minutes a week:

• Generate. Put one real thing you know into the engine. Read all ten hooks even though the top three are ranked highest — the lower ones often fit your voice better, and the score cannot hear you say it.
• Rewrite two by hand. Pick two, change the wording to sound like you. This is the step people skip and it is the one that matters: unedited generated text is recognisable as generated text.
• Score them. Paste your rewrites into the checker. If a rewrite scores worse than the original, you usually removed the specificity by accident.
• Film one. One, not five. Follow the script scaffold, but cut any beat you cannot fill with something real — an empty Value 2 is worse than a three-beat video.
• Keep the score. Record what it scored before you posted. Over a few weeks you get your own data instead of anyone's advice, including mine.

5. What this does not do

Better to say this plainly than have you find out later:

• It does not guarantee reach. A high score means the opening is not what is holding you back. It says nothing about whether the platform shows it to anyone.
• It cannot supply your expertise. The engine arranges what you give it. If the input is generic, the output is generic — the score will tell you so rather than dress it up.
• It is a heuristic, not research. The five components are a defensible model of why openings hold, assembled from how short-form ranking behaves. They are not peer-reviewed, and the weights are a considered judgement, not a measured optimum.
• It will not make you a creator. Publishing consistently is the part no tool does. That is a decision, not a feature.

6. Why there is nothing to buy

This site is new and has no audience, so it has no business asking for money yet. If that changes, whatever gets added will be built on top of what is already here rather than put behind a wall — and the tools will stay free, because a free tool that works is the only honest way for a site with no reputation to earn one.