I Made a $500 Video for Free. While My Kids Were on a Trampoline.

Welcome to The Real Work, weekly insights for high-performers and entrepreneurs who've outgrown their current success and are ready to rebuild from their authentic foundation.

Let's talk about explainer videos.

You know those short videos that walk someone through what your product or service does? The ones that show up on landing pages and course pages and make people go "oh, I get it now"?

They work. Really well.

Landing pages with explainer videos convert 86% higher than pages without them. 85% of people say they're more likely to buy after watching one. And 73% of marketers say it's the type of video they create the most.

The problem? Getting one made usually costs $500 minimum. And that's the low end. You're also spending days going back and forth with an editor, getting one thing right while three other things break, and by the time it's done you've already moved on to something else.

If you're testing an idea, launching a course, or pitching a new service, $500 and two weeks of revisions is a lot to bet on something that might not work yet.

So I made my own. Using AI. For free.

Here's How That Went

I built a course called Build With Them where parents learn to build apps with their kids using AI. (More on that in a second.) I needed a video that explained what the course was, who it was for, and why it mattered.

I used Google's NotebookLM. It's free. You upload information about your offer, your audience, and yourself, and it generates an audio-based explainer video that walks through everything.

The first few versions looked like those videos I used to watch in elementary school about how not to run with scissors or why you should say please. Stiff. Weirdly formal. Possibly narrated by someone who had never spoken to a child before.

But I kept going. I tweaked the inputs, adjusted what information I gave it, and built a set of prompts that walked through every step with predictable results.

I did this whole thing in a few hours. My kids were jumping on a trampoline in the next room. That's the kind of production budget we're talking about.

​Watch the explainer video I made for Build With Them.​

What I Actually Did (Step by Step)

Here's the process:

1. I created a document with everything about my offer. What the course teaches, who it's for, what they get, the price, and the outcome.
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2. I wrote up who my audience is. What they care about. What they're worried about. How they talk about the problem.
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3. I added information about myself so the video positions me as someone worth listening to. Not a bio. More like the version of me that makes a potential customer think "ok, this person gets it."
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4. I fed all of that into NotebookLM and prompted it to create the explainer.
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5. I revised it. Multiple times. The more specific the inputs, the better the output.
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The result? A video that made it way easier for people to understand the course. I have testimonials now and I'm updating the page, but having that video alone got people to a "yes" faster than any landing page copy I wrote.

Why This Matters for You

I'm not an expert in video production. I started playing with this stuff over Christmas break while my kids were home. But here's what I've figured out: curiosity and persistence are a dangerous combo when you're working with AI. You keep hammering away until you've built something you're confident will be useful.

In the age of AI, your intellectual curiosity will be more valuable than your intellectual capacity. What you're willing to figure out matters more than what you already know.

NotebookLM is free, it runs through Google, and the results are surprisingly good once you learn how to feed it the right information.

Two Things Worth Checking Out

I made explainer videos for two different offers. The first is for my course Build With Them, a $19 course where parents learn to build apps with their kids using AI. (10% of every sale goes to PUSH to End Preventable Stillbirth in honor of our son TJ.)

The second is for my corporate AI workshop, where I work with companies like Google, Estée Lauder, and Walmart to get their teams actually building with AI instead of sitting through another slide deck.

Both videos were made the same way. Zero production budget. Just good inputs and a willingness to keep tweaking until it worked.

Your Turn

I'd love to hear what you'd create an explainer video for. Maybe you're pitching a partnership and need a quick way to show what you bring to the table. Maybe you've got a service that's hard to explain in a paragraph. Maybe you want to tell your own story in a way that people actually watch.

Try NotebookLM. Upload what you know. See what happens.

And if you make something, reply to this email and tell me about it. I'll feature the best ones in a future issue.

Keep building,

Terry

Real Quick: The Build With Them course page is getting an update with testimonials soon. If you grabbed it already, thank you. If you haven't, $19 and one hour is all it takes.

One More: If your company is ready to stop watching AI demos and start building, here's how the workshop works. My 10-year-old daughter builds apps this way. Your team can too.

Last One: That corporate training website? I vibe coded the whole thing myself before paying a team to produce it. It's not perfect. I'll update it. But I'm already booking sales calls from it. That used to be the bottleneck for most people. Not the idea. Not the offer. Just getting what's in your head out into the world. That problem doesn't exist anymore. And that's exactly what I'm teaching now.