Outlier
Outlier finds the Reels overperforming in your niche, scores each one against that account's own average so real breakouts surface instead of big pages, has AI watch the actual video, and hands you back ready-to-film scripts with the hook, the retention beats and the visual direction written out. Craft instead of guesswork.
Setup guide
You will not write any code. You will paste a few lines into a terminal and fill in three keys. If you can follow a recipe you can do this.
Download it from code.visualstudio.com. It picks the right build for your machine on its own. Run the installer and open it once to check it launches.
You are installing it for the built-in terminal as much as the editor, so every command below has an obvious place to go.
Then use it. Nothing here depends on VS Code. You only need somewhere to edit a text file and a terminal to type into.
Open the terminal in VS Code with Terminal, then New Terminal, and run this.
node --version
If it prints anything below v20.9, or says command not found, install the LTS build
from nodejs.org and run it again. Next.js 16 will not start on
anything older.
Node is what runs JavaScript outside a browser. Outlier is a small web app
that runs on your own machine rather than on a server somewhere, and Node is what serves it to
localhost. You install it once and forget it exists.
The repository link sits in the Shopwright classroom, in the module called Get Outlier. Joining is free and takes about ten seconds. Once you have the link, clone it from the terminal.
git clone <the repo link> outlier
If you would rather not touch git, open the link, click the green Code button, choose Download ZIP, unzip it, then open the folder in VS Code with File, then Open Folder.
Script writing can run through the Claude Code CLI on your existing
subscription, which costs nothing extra, or through the metered API, which bills per call. The
app tries the CLI first and falls back to the API. To use the CLI, run which claude
and put that path in CLAUDE_CLI_PATH. Get it wrong and the app quietly bills your
API account instead, which is the most common surprise on this page.
In the project folder, make your own copy of the example file.
cp .env.example .env
Open the new .env in your editor and paste each key after its equals sign.
APIFY_API_TOKEN=your_apify_token GEMINI_API_KEY=your_gemini_key ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_anthropic_key CLAUDE_CLI_PATH=
Save it. It belongs in the top level folder, not inside app. Leave
CLAUDE_CLI_PATH empty unless you are using the subscription path from step four.
The app cannot see your .env. Almost always one of three
things: the file is inside app instead of the top level folder, you edited it while
the server was running and need to restart, or your editor silently saved it as
.env.txt.
cd app npm install npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000. An empty dashboard is correct, there is no data yet.
From there the workflow is four screens.
Start small. Watching video is the expensive step, because the real file gets uploaded rather than a transcript. Ten creators keeping the top three each is thirty analyses. Three creators and a top two is six, and inside ten minutes it tells you whether your prompt is good enough to scale up.
The prompt is the whole game. The second prompt is where your brand lives: what you sell and to whom, the angle you own, the angles you refuse, the formats you can shoot, the things you will never say. "Adapt this for my brand" gets you exactly the slop you would expect. If the scripts come back generic, fix this before you change anything else.