How does the 20cuts method work?

You paste your product's URL, and within 24 hours you get twenty short watermarked videos of your actual product — different hooks, styles, and angles — free, no card, no call. You pick the one that's right, and we produce the finished version of exactly that direction.

That's the whole mechanic. This page explains why it's built that way, what each of the six stages does, and what happens after the pick — including the parts that matter if you never buy anything.

Why choosing beats describing

Nobody can describe a video they haven't seen. A founder who would struggle for an hour to write "what our video should feel like" can watch twenty real candidates and know the right one in about ninety seconds. Recognition is fast and accurate; description is slow and lossy. The design world learned this years ago with logo contests: show a client one designer's interpretation of their brief and you get three rounds of "not quite"; show them thirty real options and they point.

The traditional agency process runs on description anyway. Discovery call, creative brief, script document, storyboard — four artifacts, each a written guess at what you meant, each a meeting to correct the guess. The most expensive failure in video production is discovering at the end that the direction was wrong, and a brief-driven process can't surface that until most of the money is spent.

So we moved the direction decision to the front, where it's cheap. A 15–30 second cut is enough to judge a direction completely — the hook, the style, the angle, whether it feels like your product. Judging twenty of them costs you minutes and us a watermark. Getting the same certainty from an agency costs a storyboard round and several weeks. Same principle we apply inside production too: put the decision at the cheapest artifact that exposes it.

The six stages

1. Send us anything

Intake is four fields and under 90 seconds: your product's URL, what the video is for, who it's for, your email. You can add a repo, brand files, or screenshots if you have them. We don't ask how long the video should be (the purpose decides that — a launch wants 60–90 seconds, a course intro wants more) and we don't ask your budget (prices are public).

2. We match your look

Before any video exists, we pull your design language from what you sent: colors, type, spacing, your real screens. Every candidate is built from that, which is why the board doesn't look like a template with your logo on it — it looks like you made it. This is also our hardest rule carried over from production: every frame shows the real product, because invented UI is the fastest way to lose a viewer's trust.

3. We start from what you want a viewer to do

Each video is planned backwards from its goal — sign up, book, buy. The goal sits at the end and the scenes are derived from it: what does the viewer need to see, in what order, for that action to make sense? Then we backtest the chain, and scenes that don't move the viewer toward the goal get replaced. A video planned forward from "what should we show" becomes a feature tour; planned backward from the goal it becomes an argument.

4. Every video has to earn its spot

Most viewers decide in the first five seconds whether to keep watching, so that's the bar every candidate is held to. Hooks and styles are paired and scored for attention — a bold claim opening in a cinematic UI style, a question opening in a diagrammatic style, and so on across the grid. Pairings that don't grab in five seconds don't make your twenty.

5. We loop until it clears the bar

Make, score, prune — and the bar rises each pass. Weak candidates drop, stronger ones replace them, and the loop runs until exactly twenty survive. Those twenty are your board, 24 hours after your URL, free. The point of the loop is that your board is a set of survivors, twenty different directions that each cleared the same bar — never the first twenty things made.

6. You pick one, and we refine it until you love it

Your pick is the spec. You can attach one note ("this one, but calmer music"), choose a tier, and pay — for that one video, nothing before it. Then the finished version gets produced at full length and quality, and revision rounds land your notes on narration, pacing, and color. First version in 5 business days; 72 hours on Flagship.

What the twenty videos are — and aren't

They are: real videos, 15–30 seconds each, built from your actual product with your actual design language. Each is a genuinely different direction — a different hook, style, or angle — because twenty variations of one idea would give you nothing to choose between. They're watermarked, and the board stays live for about three weeks.

They aren't: finished videos. A cut is a direction you can judge, at the length a direction needs — the finished video is longer, fully produced, revised with you, and delivered clean. The board is a spec sheet you can watch, and treating it that way is what keeps it free.

If you never pick one, nothing happens. No calls, no pressure — at most a couple of emails, then silence. The board cost you ninety seconds, and watching twenty directions for your own product tends to be clarifying even if you make the video somewhere else entirely.

What happens after the pick

1. Your pick and note are restated back to you on the order page, so you can see we heard the actual request.
2. First version arrives on the clock — 5 business days, or 72 hours on Flagship.
3. You review by pointing at moments, not writing essays: click a timestamp, leave the note. "0:23 — hold this frame longer" is a complete, actionable review.
4. Revision rounds are counted and visible — 1, 2, or 3 depending on tier, and you always know which round you're in. Wording, pacing, color, and asset swaps are included; new scenes or a new thesis are a change order, quoted before any work happens. The scope is printed on the pricing card, which is the whole contract.
5. Delivery is everything: 4K and 1080p, captions, thumbnail on every tier; vertical and square cutdowns on Pro; the full editable project on Flagship. Full prices and tiers are on the cost page.

The guarantees

• 100% money-back, no questions. If you don't love the finished video, you get your money back. We can afford this because you watched twenty real cuts before paying — the usual reason video projects disappoint, a direction mismatch discovered late, is filtered out before money moves.
• Full commercial rights, every tier. The finished video is yours, everywhere, forever.
• Fixed public prices. $1,500 to $3,500, stated on the site. No quote requests, no calls to book.
• A free re-roll. If none of the twenty is right, tell us what was missing and we'll run the loop again at no charge.

Using the method without us

The method is portable, and it's useful even if you never send us a URL:

• Spec by selection, whatever you buy. Ask a freelancer for three rough style frames before commissioning the video. Ask an agency to show directions before a full storyboard. Any vendor can move a decision to a cheaper artifact if you ask.
• Plan backwards from the viewer's action. Write the action first, then ask what the viewer must see for it to make sense. It reliably kills the feature-tour instinct — more in what makes a good explainer video.
• Judge by the first five seconds. Watch any draft cold and ask whether second five earns second six. It's the same bar your viewers apply.

FAQ

Is the board really free? Yes. No card, no call, no obligation. The cuts are watermarked and the board expires after about three weeks — expired boards can be revived on request for 30 days.

Why are the cuts 15–30 seconds instead of full length? Because that's what judging a direction takes. The hook, the style, and the feel are all visible in 15 seconds, and viewers decide whether to keep watching in five. Full-length candidates would add nothing to your decision.

What if none of the twenty is right? Say what was missing and we re-roll free. Or walk away — you've spent zero dollars and about ninety seconds.

Can the finished video differ from the cut I picked? The pick sets the direction — hook, style, angle — and your note plus revision rounds shape the rest. It grows to full length and full production quality; it doesn't change into a different video.

When you're ready to see the method run on your own product, paste your URL — the board takes ninety seconds to request.