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🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
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Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: turn one good video into a week of content.
A good video is too much work to publish once and forget. With the right workflow, its best moments can become short clips, posts, notes, and follow-ups – without starting from scratch every time. Today, I’m sharing three tools to help you edit, repurpose and publish faster.
Plus: BeFreed for bite-sized learning, browser agents for repetitive web work, and WeWork’s $47B plot twist.
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Editing a video used to mean staring at a timeline and nudging tiny clips around for hours. Descript takes a far more sensible route: edit the transcript (the video words), and the video changes with it.
It transcribes recordings, removes filler words, tidies audio with Studio Sound, and helps create clips, captions, and other AI-assisted video assets – not perfect, but a great starting point. One caveat: all plans include monthly AI credits, and those can disappear faster than expected if you lean heavily on generation tools – a bit annoying, to be honest.
I use it for Tooltester videos because making a rough cut from text is much less fiddly than working entirely on a traditional timeline. I think it saves me a few hours of work per video; I am pretty happy with it.
🛠️ Alternative to: Adobe Premiere Pro, Synthesia, CapCut
👉 Visit: descript.com
💰 From $16/month | Free plan available
Castmagic
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Making the video is a big task, but the work doesn’t end there. Next comes the slightly soul-destroying job of turning it into posts, notes, and emails. Castmagic helps you with that part.
Upload a file or paste a link, and it produces speaker-labelled, timestamped transcripts, summaries, show notes, highlights, social posts, newsletter drafts, and captioned clips. You can also add custom prompts. Still, give every output a proper human pass; in fact, you should always review & edit any AI output.
Think of it less as an editor and more as a repurposing engine. One useful conversation becomes starting material for several formats, instead of a blank page every time.
Best for podcasters, marketing teams, and creators regularly publishing interviews, videos, or webinars. Hobby starts at $19/month when billed annually, including 30 transcribed hours.
🛠️ Alternative to: Descript, CapCut, Podsqueeze
👉 Visit: castmagic.io
💰 From $19/month | No free plan available
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Klap
A one-hour interview can easily contain ten useful short videos. Finding them is the tedious bit. Klap turns podcasts, webinars, interviews, and YouTube uploads into vertical clips for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts – sometimes works better than others.
It picks potential highlights, reframes speakers, and adds captions. Its virality score is useful for deciding what to inspect first – but don’t mistake it for editorial judgment. AI still misses context, punchlines, and the moment where a clip should actually begin, so review every export before posting.
The Basic plan starts at $14/month when billed yearly, and you can make one video free before committing – no free plan, I am afraid.
🛠️ Alternative to: OpusClip, Vizard, Captions
👉 Visit: klap.app
💰From $14/month | No free plan available
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✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant
My reading list grows much faster than my free time, I guess yours the same. BeFreed helps by turning books, podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, and PDFs into short lessons you can read or listen to. You can choose the length, voice, and learning style depending on whether you have five minutes or a longer commute.
The practical uses are easy to see: turn a long report into an audio briefing before a meeting, understand a book someone recommended without buying it immediately, or get the main ideas from a YouTube interview while walking your dog. You can also interrupt a lesson with questions such as “How could I use this in a small business?” and save useful answers as notes.
BeFreed looks most useful for exploring a subject, refreshing your memory, or deciding what deserves more of your time. Remember that AI summaries can miss context or get details wrong, so check the source before relying on anything important.
🛠️ Alternative to: Blinkist, Headway
👉 Visit: befreed.ai
💰 From $7.49/month | Free plan available
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⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
Your browser is where tiny jobs go to multiply. Upload one YouTube video, and suddenly you’re copying titles, filling fields, hunting for files, and opening 27 tabs before the useful work even starts.
Claude Code and Codex can take on those repetitive browser jobs: clicking through pages, filling forms, uploading files, and pulling information into a draft. Robert told me how he used one for keyword research in Ahrefs – he asked Claude to click around using his browser and perform the research.
I thought that was a great tip for everyone else.
Start small:
1. Ask it to pull specific dashboard figures into a draft.
2. Let it fill a low-risk repeated form or check a batch of listings.
3. Have it prepare a video upload (I do this and it works wonders) – then you take over before publishing.
Think of it as a very fast assistant with access to your browser. Review every important action, don’t leave it unattended in sensitive accounts, and keep approval steps for sending, publishing, or payments. And of course assess the risk – e.g. maybe don’t give it access to your online bank just yet.
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🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
I stumbled across WeCrashed this week, the Apple TV+ drama about WeWork, and it’s a brilliant watch. The most absurd part? This desk-rental company was briefly valued at $47B.
WeWork sold a vision of community, big ideas, and belonging. But beneath the incense was a tricky bit of maths: it signed long leases on buildings, then sold shorter memberships. When demand slowed, the mismatch hurt badly – and helped send the company into Chapter 11, as The Verge reported.
The unexpected epilogue: WeWork emerged from bankruptcy as a private company, having exited about 170 unprofitable locations. It also began moving more toward management and revenue-share deals, sharing more risk with building owners. TIME reports it returned to profitability in 2025 with nearly $2.3B in revenue – I did not expect this after watching the TV show a few years ago.
The lesson… everyone deserves a second chance?
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. Next time, practical ways to turn happy customers into a steady growth channel.
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Hey, I’m Josep Garcia. I’ve been testing digital tools for over a decade, and we put a lot of ❤️ into this newsletter at Tooltester.
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