Why TubeSmarts Exists

The 45-minute gamble

Here's how it used to work. I'd see a title that looked interesting — "The LinkedIn Strategy That Got Me 100K Followers" or whatever — and I'd click. Forwards, backwards, looking at the "most replayed" section. Ten minutes in, I'd realize it's mostly fluff, sponsorships add, and exhultations to subscribe. The actual strategy is a single tip I already knew, buried at the 32-minute mark behind two sponsor reads and a story about the creator's morning routine.

And this is why I like text. You can skim text. You can jump about. And that's really hard to do with video. Not in a meaningful, useful way, anyway.

Multiply that by 50 videos a week and the maths gets ugly fast.

Most of those videos had nothing I needed. A few had one or two ideas worth grabbing. And maybe, just maybe, four or five were genuinely worth watching start to finish.

As I said, the problem is figuring out which 5.

Titles lie. Thumbnails lie. Comments don't help.

You'd think you could filter by title and thumbnail alone. You can't. Every creator has learned the same clickbait playbook. "I Tried X for 30 Days" could be a rigorous experiment or a 40-minute ramble with no data. "The ONLY Strategy You Need" could be legitimately useful or completely recycled.

Maybe the title is "<something> is insane!" or "<something else> is now dead". I ignore those videos, but what if, underneath the hyperbole, there's actually something useful?

Comments are worse. The top comments are always "This changed my life" or "Watching this at 3am." Neither tells you whether the video has anything new in it.

Even the timestamps in descriptions — when they exist — only tell you the topics covered, not whether those topics contain anything you haven't heard before.

So you're left guessing. Click, watch a few minutes, decide, repeat. It's a terrible way to filter 50 videos down to 5.

And that, dear reader, is why the only time I have ever really watched Youtube is to watch how a plumber fixes a problem I've got at home, or how to get the light bulb out of my car when there seems to be no room. Or when I'm looking for distraction and watch the best space battles from The Expanse or the best fight scenes from the Jason Bourne movies.

Watching it for learning? Not a chance.

What I actually needed was a readable, scannable preview

What I needed was a way to see what was in the video before deciding whether to watch it. Like reading the back cover of a book, and the contents, before committing to 300 pages.

Specifically, I wanted to know:

• What are the actual key points? Not "this video covers marketing strategies" — what specific strategies?
• Are there real numbers, frameworks, or examples? Or is it all vibes?
• Does it cover something I've already heard from three other creators this month?
• Is there one section worth watching even if the rest is filler?

And I wanted to know that without having to skip around the video itself.

And that's how TubeSmarts began, or at least an early version of it.

The inbox triage method

Here's what my workflow looks like now. Every morning, I open my email and there's a batch of summaries from the channels I follow. Each one is a structured breakdown — key insights, specific strategies mentioned, tools referenced, action items.

I scan them over coffee, taking maybe 30 seconds per summary.

Most of them, I can tell immediately: nothing new for me. A creator I follow did another video on email subject lines, but the summary shows the same three tips I've seen before. Skip. Someone posted a "day in the life" video. The summary confirms there's no tactical content. Skip.

But then I'll hit one where the summary shows a specific framework I haven't seen, or real revenue numbers from a strategy I'm considering, or a tool recommendation with actual results. That one goes on my watch list.

Every week, I typically flag 4-6 videos as worth watching. And when I do watch them, I know exactly what I'm looking for. I can skip to the relevant section, absorb the material, and move on.

The "never watch a video because I can't be bothered dealing with all that overhead" problem disappeared, replace with maybe 30 minutes a week reading summaries plus 1-2 hours watching the videos that actually matter.

What makes a summary useful for triage

But not all summaries are equal. A one-paragraph overview is almost useless for deciding whether to watch. "This video covers growth strategies for SaaS businesses" tells me nothing I didn't get from the title.

What works for triage is structure. I need to see:

The specific claims. Not "discusses pricing strategy" but "recommends starting at $49/month and raising prices 15% quarterly, based on results from 3 B2B SaaS products." Now I can tell whether that's relevant to me.

The numbers. If a creator mentions they grew from 0 to 10K subscribers using a specific method, I want to see that number in the summary. Numbers are the fastest signal for whether a video has substance or is just opinion.

The tools and resources. If someone mentions specific tools, APIs, or platforms, I want those listed out. Sometimes the only thing worth knowing from a 40-minute video is that a particular tool exists.

The action items. What is the video actually telling me to do? If the answer is vague ("be consistent," "provide value"), I can skip it. If it's specific ("post LinkedIn carousels on Tuesday at 8am using this hook format"), that's worth my attention.

This is the difference between a useless summary and a good one.

My current

The irony is I'm actually getting more from YouTube now than I was before. I'm watching more videos. The creators are getting more views (well, the good ones are), and the benefits from that.

I'm catching insights from channels or videos I would have ignored because I didn't have time to check them. I'm noticing when three different creators cover the same trend in one week, which is a signal I would have missed watching one video at a time. I'm subscribing to creators newsletters when they consistently offer valuable content, which I had no way of knowing without wasting time watching lots of videos before.

This is what TubeSmarts does

So this is the exact workflow that TubeSmarts was built for.

You subscribe to the YouTube channels you follow. Every time a new video is published, TubeSmarts automatically transcribes it, generates a structured AI summary, and sends it to your inbox. The summary breaks the video into key insights, strategies, specific numbers, tools mentioned, and action items.

You read the summaries. You decide what's worth watching. You skip the rest.

That's it. There's no learning curve, no additional app to check, no habit to build. The summaries show up in your email. You scan them the same way you'd scan headlines in a newsletter. And if the summary is good, you click the link in the email taking you to the video on youtube. Or you click the link to bring you to Tubesmarts and you bookmark it for later.

If you follow 10 channels or 50, the workflow is the same. The summaries do the triage. You do the watching — but only when it's worth it.

Try it free — no credit card required. Subscribe to a few channels and see what shows up in your inbox over the next few days.