We asked five creators to walk us through their daily Shortly routines. Their answers surprised us — not because the tool is used in complex ways, but because the simplest workflows produce the most output.
1. Léna — TikTok, 2.3M followers
Léna posts 3 times a day, every day. Her niche is ASMR-style animal clips, and each video is 15 seconds across three shots.
“I open Shortly at 7am with coffee, write three prompts, click render. Go do my day. Come back at noon, all three are done. Post them staggered through afternoon.”— Léna, @soft.mornings
Time per video: 4 minutes of her attention. Total daily effort: 15 minutes. Monthly output: 90 videos.
2. Marcus — YouTube Shorts, 800K subscribers
Marcus does faceless commentary on tech news. He writes the script manually in a Google Doc, then uses Shortly only for the visuals.
His trick: a 6-scene template he reuses every video. Opening shot, three illustrative shots per point, closing shot. Copy-paste the template, edit the nouns, render.
“I used to spend 3 hours editing stock footage. Now my templates and Shortly get me to a polished cut in 25 minutes, voiceover included.”— Marcus, @TechBiteSize
3. Priya — Instagram Reels, 450K followers
Priya runs a fashion-forward styling account. She renders 4 mood-board style videos per week to accompany outfit posts. Her process is the opposite of Léna — she iterates aggressively.
For each concept, she renders 4 variations with slightly different moods, picks the best one, discards the others. That is 16 renders per week, 4 publishes.
4. Abdul — Brand content, agency owner
Abdul runs a small content agency. Six clients. Each gets 8–12 videos per month. Before Shortly, his team of three editors was a bottleneck. Now the editors focus on thumbnails and captions, while Shortly handles the video generation.
Cost drop per client: about 60%. Margin up: about 80%. He is hiring more accounts, not more editors.
5. Sofia — Creator coach
Sofia teaches course creators how to produce short-form content. She uses Shortly live in her coaching sessions to demo workflows. Her students see a finished video being made in 4 minutes.
“The 'aha' moment is watching a student write a single sentence and seeing a 15-second cinematic Reel pop out. You can see the switch flip in their heads — they stop thinking of content as expensive.”— Sofia, @creatorcoach.so
The common thread
Nobody uses Shortly as their sole creative tool. Everybody combines it with writing, thumbnails, voiceovers, and editing. But for the "visuals" step specifically — the most expensive step in the traditional pipeline — it collapses hours into minutes.
That is the actual ROI: not replacing creativity, but removing friction from one specific step so the rest can breathe.