The argument in one line.
Carousels convert far better than reels on Instagram, and the entire production process — copy, hook image, slide layout, and quality check — can be handed to an AI coding assistant working from a reusable brand and skill folder.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You post on Instagram and want a repeatable, higher-engagement alternative to reels.
- You're comfortable installing a code editor and want to see exactly how an AI coding tool can be pointed at a design task, not just a programming one.
- You already have a lead magnet or offer and want a content format built to collect comments and emails, not just views.
- You want a concrete slide-by-slide structure to copy for any listicle-style social post.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for native Instagram-app editing tips — this entire workflow happens outside Instagram, in a code editor.
- You have no interest in AI-assisted production and just want manual design software tips.
The full version, fast.
Carousels reportedly out-perform reels by wide margins in views, comments, and saves, and a well-placed lead magnet turns that engagement into emails. Every carousel follows the same nine-slide skeleton: hook, stakes, five value slides, receipts, and a one-word CTA. The video demonstrates building one end-to-end using a custom Claude Code skill that first locks the copy, then designs a hook image (the highest-leverage slide, worth roughly 80% of the result), builds the remaining slides, and self-checks them for layout errors before export. Once one carousel is dialed in, the same skeleton can be refilled with new topics for fast weekly production, and free tools like Canva's Magic Layers cover any manual layout tweaks the code-based workflow can't handle well.
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00:00 – 01:07
01 · Cold open: 5,000 comments from 5 carousels
Results tease — views, comments, and emails collected from the first five carousels, all AI-generated.
01:07 – 01:50
02 · Viral Carousels 101 (the engagement stats)
First-five-carousels results shown as a dashboard: views, comments, magnet visits, emails collected.
01:50 – 02:18
03 · The lead magnet that turns 10 comments into 2,000
Why the gap between a flop carousel and a viral one is an irresistible lead magnet tied to a one-word comment.
02:18 – 03:16
04 · The 5-part viral carousel formula
The nine-slide skeleton: hook, stakes, value (slides 3-7), receipts, CTA.
03:16 – 03:33
05 · Instagram's new 3:4 carousel size
Feed crop moved to 3:4 (1080x1440); square posts reportedly get buried.
03:33 – 04:26
06 · The 5 rules of viral carousels
Recap rules: 3:4 dimensions, hook slide as 80% of result, irresistible value, keyword CTA, data beats design.
04:26 – 05:13
07 · How the data feedback loop works
An analytics dashboard tracks views, click-throughs, and emails across posts to inform which carousels to make next.
05:13 – 07:25
08 · Building a carousel in Claude Code (setup)
Orientation to VS Code and the Claude Code extension; opening a pre-built 'carousel studio' folder containing the carousel-generator skill.
07:25 – 08:21
09 · Pulling brand colors from a website
Claude is pointed at a website URL and asked to extract brand colors, fonts, and style into a reusable design bundle.
08:21 – 10:11
10 · Gathering assets and reference hooks
Building a folder of reference carousels and image assets (including a mascot graphic) to feed into the hook slide.
10:11 – 12:46
11 · Slide-by-slide copy with the carousel skill
Invoking the carousel-generator skill; it drafts the copy for all 9 slides before any HTML or images are generated.
12:46 – 15:18
12 · The hook slide: 3 levels, plus an image tool
Three levels of hook slide complexity (plain text, composited image, fully animated); using an external image tool and re-prompting after a bad first attempt.
15:18 – 15:32
13 · Locking the hook, building all 8 remaining slides
Once the hook is approved, Claude is told to build out the rest of the deck from the locked copy.
15:32 – 16:12
14 · Claude QAs every slide automatically
The skill reviews every generated slide for layout issues (overlapping text, dead space) before calling the deck done.
16:12 – 17:26
15 · Grid preview and export to Instagram-ready PNGs
A local preview simulates the Instagram grid and post view; finished slides are exported as PNGs ready to upload.
17:26 – 19:46
16 · Claude design vs. Canva Magic Layers
Comparing an HTML-based AI design tool (fast for text edits, poor for dragging elements) against Canva's free Magic Layers tool for manual slide tweaks.
19:46 – 21:18
17 · Mass production and anti-AI niches
Once one carousel wins, the same skeleton is reused for new topics; the finished post shows no trace of the AI production process.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A typical carousel post can draw roughly 7x the views, 42x the comments, and 18x the saves of a typical reel on the same account.
- A lead magnet turns a carousel from a 10-comment post into one that can generate over 2,000 comments and hundreds of email signups.
- Every high-performing carousel in this format follows the same nine-slide skeleton: hook, stakes, five value slides, receipts, then a single-word CTA.
- Instagram's carousel feed crop moved to a 3:4 aspect ratio (1080x1440); posting in the older 1:1 square format reportedly gets buried by the algorithm.
- The hook slide is treated as roughly 80% of a carousel's performance — most of the production time goes into that one image, not the other eight slides.
- Telling an AI image tool explicitly what NOT to draw, not just what to include, is what got a usable hook image on a later attempt after an earlier version blindly overlaid an unrelated graphic on a photo.
- A one-word comment-to-DM funnel (comment a keyword to receive a link or file) is used as the primary mechanism for converting carousel engagement into email captures.
- Once one carousel format is dialed in, it becomes a reusable template — the same skeleton can be refilled with a new topic and a new hook image for a new post in minutes.
- A free design tool (Canva's Magic Layers) can outperform an HTML-based AI design tool for manual layout tweaks, because HTML-based tools struggle to let a user freely drag elements around.
- In a niche skeptical of AI-generated content, the finished carousel shows no trace of the production process — viewers only see a clean, on-brand post with data and value, not the prompting behind it.
Carousels win on structure, not on design polish.
WHAT TO LEARN
A carousel's performance comes down to a repeatable nine-slide skeleton and one high-effort hook slide, and both can be handed to an AI assistant working from a saved brand and workflow reference.
02Viral Carousels 101 (the engagement stats)
- Carousels can dramatically out-perform reels on views, comments, and saves on the same account, because the swipe format encourages lingering and studying, not just passive watching.
03The lead magnet that turns 10 comments into 2,000
- A lead magnet tied to a single-word comment is what converts ordinary engagement into an email list, turning a 10-comment post into one with thousands.
04The 5-part viral carousel formula
- The stakes slide exists purely to answer 'why should I keep reading' before any value is delivered — skipping it costs swipe-through rate.
- Every value slide should carry exactly one idea; cramming two ideas onto one slide is treated as a design failure, not a shortcut.
- The receipts slide (proof, not claims) is what separates a carousel people believe from one they scroll past.
05Instagram's new 3:4 carousel size
- Feed dimensions are a live constraint, not a fixed one — a format that worked last quarter (square posts) can start getting suppressed, and it's worth testing before assuming your specs are still correct.
06The 5 rules of viral carousels
- A single-word CTA outperforms multi-step asks because it removes friction between interest and action.
- Treating the hook slide as worth roughly 80% of a post's outcome justifies spending most of the production budget there and shipping the rest on a single pass.
08Building a carousel in Claude Code (setup)
- Writing all the copy before any visual design work starts prevents a common failure mode: polishing a slide's layout before the words on it are actually finished.
09Pulling brand colors from a website
- A saved 'design bundle' (brand colors, fonts, and style pulled once from an existing site) keeps every future asset visually consistent without re-deriving the brand each time.
10Gathering assets and reference hooks
- Gathering reference examples and assets into one folder before generating anything gives an AI assistant (or a designer) concrete targets instead of vague instructions.
12The hook slide: 3 levels, plus an image tool
- Telling an image generation tool explicitly what NOT to include is often more decisive than describing what you want — a vague first pass produced an unwanted, blindly-composited result.
14Claude QAs every slide automatically
- Automated quality review (checking for overlapping text, dead space, inconsistent styling) catches the kind of small layout errors a rushed manual pass would ship.
15Grid preview and export to Instagram-ready PNGs
- A local preview that mimics the actual platform's grid and post view is what catches problems a raw slide export would hide.
16Claude design vs. Canva Magic Layers
- HTML-based design tools are fast for text edits but weak at free-form repositioning of images and graphics — pick the tool that matches the edit you're actually making.
17Mass production and anti-AI niches
- Once a single format proves itself, the fastest path to volume is refilling the same skeleton with a new topic and a new hook, not redesigning from scratch each time.
- In a niche resistant to AI-made content, the finished product carries no visible trace of the process — only the output has to hold up, not the method.
Terms worth knowing.
- Carousel (Instagram)
- A multi-image Instagram post that viewers swipe through slide by slide, as opposed to a single photo or a short video (reel).
- Hook slide
- The first slide of a carousel, shown before any swipe — its only job is to stop someone from scrolling past and make them swipe to slide two.
- Lead magnet
- A piece of free, high-value content or a resource offered in exchange for an action (commonly a comment or an email address) that a business can use to start a relationship with a potential customer.
- Claude Code
- An AI coding assistant that runs inside a code editor and can read, write, and execute files based on plain-language instructions, rather than requiring the user to write code directly.
- Skill (in an AI coding tool)
- A saved, reusable set of instructions that tells the AI assistant a specific multi-step process to follow, so the same workflow can be repeated consistently across different projects or topics.
- Design bundle
- A reference file an AI assistant generates by extracting a brand's colors, fonts, and visual style from an existing website or image set, so future designs stay consistent with that brand.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:08
“My typical carousel gets seven times the views and 42 times the comments of my typical reel.”
06:40
“The hook and the copywriting is 80% of the hard work and the design is just like a nice layer on top.”
20:45
“If you're in an anti-AI niche, nobody sees the way that you created your carousel slides... all they see is a clean three-four post with your data and your value.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphorstory
5,000 comments and over 1,000 emails collected from my first five carousels. But what's wild is that every single slide was made entirely by Claude. My typical carousel gets seven times the views and 42 times the comments of my typical reel.
And more importantly, this engagement leads to more click throughs, more emails, and more revenue for my business. Carousels are because creating them can largely be automated with Claude code, and these are the results you can expect when you add this cheat code to your organic content strategy.
By the end of this video, you will know exactly how to write and structure viral carousel slides, how to get Claude to generate the entire carousel and preview it inside a real Instagram post, and whether Claude design is good for editing carousel slides, or if there's a free alternative that's actually faster and easier to use.
Stick around because I'm also giving you my exact Claude skill that has generated an average of 650 comments per carousel completely for free. And for the 84% of you that are watching that haven't subscribed yet, if you want a growth hack faster than the competitors in your niche, make sure to hit that big red subscribe button below before they do.
Before I show you how to build viral carousels from scratch step by step, let's jump into viral carousels one zero one to speed run your success. So my first five carousels led to a 100,000 views, over 5,000 comments, and eventually I collected over a thousand emails from these carousels.
The reason carousels are overpowered is because compared to a typical reel, the engagement rate is insane. If you look here, on average, seven x the views, 42 x the comments, 18 x the saves.
People are spending more time lingering on your carousels and they're actually studying the information that you're giving them and they're much more likely to engage with it. Here's another view, engagement per 100 views. You can see that carousels are .
But the one thing that separates a carousel from one that gets 10 comments to one that gets over 2,000 comments and hundreds of emails is an irresistible piece of value in a lead magnet. Every carousel I post gives away something people would happily pay for and they only have to comment one word to get it. Lead magnets have collected me over 10,000 emails in the last couple of months.
So if you want a full video on how I build lead magnets that actually convert, comment magnet down below as this informs my next upload, and I read every comment. This is exactly why I'm releasing this video on carousels. I saw all of your comments asking for a carousels video on the trial reels one, so here it is.
So carousels in combination with a lead magnet is the real cheat code here. The formula for a viral carousel follows five different sections. Slide one is the hook and this is the most important aspect because it's what stops people from doom scrolling.
People are in a , so the first hook has to capture their attention and it does this by creating curiosity, demonstrating authority that you actually know what you're talking about so that they want to actually scroll the slides to get value from you. So slide one should be a bold claim plus a real number.
Slide two is the stakes. Why does this matter to them? Why should they continue reading?
Slides three to seven is the value. This is where you pack in a bunch of information that's gonna be valuable to your reader so that they keep scrolling through and they go, wow, this is actually useful for me. Slide eight is receipts.
You want to show some proof that you practice what you preach and you're actually generating results and then the last slide should always be a CTA. You want to tell them to comment something or engage in some way so that you're driving engagement up and that you're sending them further into your funnel. Before you post anything, dimensions have changed in the last couple of weeks on Instagram and it's 34.
34 is what you should be aiming for and I tested this. I posted a square carousel and it flopped because I think square posts are getting shadowbanned now. I took one for the team to test that out.
Don't make the same mistake. Keep your carousels in three four. Here's the five rules of viral carousels.
Always make them in three four, so they should be ten eighty by fourteen forty dimensions. The hook slide is 80% of the result. The hook needs to stop their scroll in their tracks.
So make sure you're creating some curiosity and demonstrating some authority so they want to actually scroll through your slides to get value. Provide irresistible value for your audience. This is where you need to deeply understand what your audience wants and how you can help them.
So having a clearly defined target audience, clearly defined pain points that your audience struggles with is important here. Then put a one word comment CTA at the top of your caption so that they can very easily engage to get that value from you. And then finally, data beats design every time.
You should be leaning on reference carousels that have proven to perform well statistically, and you should be feeding your data from your own Instagram to see which carousels are actually performing well to feed back into your Claude code knowledge base.
So a quick note on how I created that data feedback loop. This is AllGrowth AI, my automated content system for organic growth and it tracks every single thing from all of the views across all my posts through to click through and email capture and engagement from leads that are engaging with my business.
It also studies all of the different creators in my niche and pulls their transcripts so that I can learn from what is going viral within my niche and then data is being tracked left, right, and center across YouTube, across Instagram, and my email newsletter. So everything is all connected and feeding my knowledge base that actually drives the next carousels that I'm going to be making.
If you want to put your organic growth on steroids, go and follow allgrowth.ai on Instagram right now where we are sharing exactly how to do just that with an automated content system. Now let's jump into Claude Code and build a viral carousel from scratch step by step.
So a quick orientation for you guys that have never seen this before. This is Versus Code and it's called an IDE. It basically just lets you interact with code.
It's like a video editing software but for code. And what we're gonna do is add the Claude extension which lets you talk to the code like a human. So don't worry, you don't have to touch any lines of code.
What I'm gonna do in here is open the folder. If you guys wanna follow along, head to my Instagram right now and I will have posted the carousel that I'm making in this video. And if you comment viral on that carousel, I will literally send you this exact folder that I'm gonna be starting with which has the Claude skill in there which is called carousel generator.
So we're gonna be using the carousel generator skill to create carousels. It's gonna guide you through everything step by step just like what I'm doing in this video. So if you want to follow along, head to my Instagram, comment viral, I'll send it straight to you.
So I'm gonna start by opening that up. So I'm gonna come in here and go open folder. And what I really like about Versus Code is you can see all of the files on the left hand side here.
There's a read me here which will open up very quickly. This is for you guys to understand what's going on. You can read through this and you can actually just paste this into your Claude code so that it can understand exactly what we're trying to achieve here and then it will know how to use that carousel generator skill which is listed over here in the skill dot m d file.
So everything that we ran through in that viral carousels one zero one is listed in this readme, and it's just gonna give Claude context and you context if you wanna read it and dive into it for exactly how we're gonna approach creating viral carousels. What I'm gonna do is come over to this little Claude icon. If you guys wanna get this for yourselves, come up to here, type in extensions, and you wanna search Claude code for Versus Code.
Come in here. I've already got it installed, but you'll basically come over to here, click install, and you'll see this little Claude icon that is now available in the top right.
And you just wanna click that. So I'll click it in here because this is what you guys are gonna see. Boom.
Now we've got a Claude agent that's spun up, and we're gonna start prompt ing this Claude agent to create viral carousels for us. And I'm gonna guide you through every step of the way.
So let me just close everything else here to make it super simple for you guys. So the first thing I'm gonna do is give Claude a reference for what my carousel design should look like.
So I'm gonna come here to my website. I'm gonna copy and paste the link. And then I'm gonna paste it into Claude and say, look at my website, pull my brand colors, fonts, overall visual style, and build a carousel design bundle from it in a new folder called d s dash bundle dash orgrowth, which is my brand.
You guys just paste in your website. You can paste in just an image example. You can paste in a reference Instagram carousel set from Instagram and tell it to pull the brand colors and the style.
And I'm gonna be using the model Opus here because I know some of you guys won't have access to Fable five. I'm gonna show you that you can still make incredible carousels with Opus. You don't need Fable five for this.
The skill will do most of the heavy lifting. So I'm gonna click into here. I'm gonna let this run.
And what it's gonna do is create a design spec that Claude is gonna use for all of the carousels that we generate from this folder from now on. So while that's still spinning up, what I would encourage you guys do is go and make a bookmarked folder full of great carousels that you like, and then save some assets that you wanna use for your carousel.
So for example, I had a carousel that did really well that had this Claude icon in the back. So I wanna put him into this carousel that I'm about to make about viral carousels. I want this image to be the hook slide and I wanna put like a Claude character in there and then I'm gonna use this deck.
If you guys watched my trial reels video, I gave you prompt that would create an audit of all of your Instagram. It creates a graph and a bunch of great insights about your Instagram analytics so that you can learn from those and actually drive your content strategy better and in a more informed way. And so when I open this, it's got a bunch of great stuff about how I can use carousels.
So I'm gonna use that to make these slides. So you wanna go and gather some assets and put them into your carousel studio. And the asset can be as simple as, you know, going you could even go to my page like if you like this hook which is a hook that I like, what I'm gonna do here is screenshot this and put that into my assets folder just like this.
And then when Claude's ready and it knows what my design style is, I'm gonna give it that and say, hey, wanna do a text on the screen in the same font as this similar to this, but I'm gonna put it on this guy.
So once it's done, you'll see me do exactly that. I'll show you. I'll guide you step by step.
So Claude is done doing its magic building a design bundle for us. It said it pulled the brand straight from All Growth AI's own CSS, and it's got all of the palette things laid out here, all of the hex codes, and the fonts as well, which is perfect.
That's exactly what we need. What the Claude code skill is gonna do for you guys, the carousel generator skill, is it's gonna prompt you to actually write out the copywriting and the script of the slides first before any HTML and any images get generated.
As we said, the hook and the copywriting is 80% of the hard work and the design is just like a nice layer on top.
We want to make the design look great but before any of the design, you need to actually have a great narrative which follows those five steps that we talked about in Viral Carousels one zero one. So the way to invoke the carousel generator skill that's included in this carousel studio folder is to literally just tell Claude, use carousel the generator skill.
And then after this, you wanna just explain to it exactly what you want the carousel to look like. Now you can go crazy with however you wanna explain it, but what the skill does is it guides you through the copy first before actually generating any HTML, which is what creates the slides and before generating any images.
Normally, like my hook slides to have a picture of me because I'm trying to build a personal brand. You guys could just have it be strictly your website design style with those fonts and colors. You don't have to have a picture of a human on there, but I like to use Higgs field MCP, which is connected to Claude code to generate images for that hook slide.
I'll normally generate three different ones, and then I'll pick my favorite and use that to guide the rest of the carousels. Something you should be aware of is since we're using code, need to copy any file as a path name when you're pasting it in here. So I'm just gonna paste this here, and I'm gonna let it run.
This is something I would encourage you guys to do with your automated content system is to lean on content you've already created to recycle it and then use it for other assets. So if you have a YouTube video, turn that into an email newsletter.
If you have an email newsletter, turn that into a carousel and then drive them to your YouTube video. So everything's like an organic growth flywheel that feeds itself. So this is where the carousel generator skill comes in clutch.
It's gonna talk about the direction it wants to take for this carousel, and then it's gonna give me the slide by slide copy based on its understanding of what's already made a bunch of carousels go viral. I'm just gonna talk to it because this is the beauty of Claude is it lets you speak to the code like a human.
So I'm gonna say, give me the slide by slide copy again, and we wanna make sure we are including the graphs from that HTML presentation I already made on Viral Carousels one zero one. So now it's gonna spin away and redo the copy based on my changes. Typically, I'll do one or two re prompts here.
I mainly wanna fast forward to actually seeing the slides, and that all starts with generating the hook slide. So guys, the hook slide is the most important thing, and there's three levels to this.
Level one is just a simple HTML Claude generated slide with some text on there.
Right? And maybe some icons. Level two would be something like this where you've used an image that you've fed to Claude.
And for this one, I use Higgs Field MCP to add this little Claude icon over my shoulder. And then level three would be like a fully animated picture slide and these have been performing really well on my page.
I've done two of these and they averaged about 2,000 comments. So if you guys wanna learn how to do viral video carousels, it's a whole another ballgame but I can do a video on that. So comment below if you want to see how to do video carousels.
But for now, we're just going to do one like this where we're using Higgs field MCP. Copy that as a path name, and I'm going to paste that in.
And I'm going to say, use the attached slide as a reference.
Then I'm gonna come back here and give them this image. Use the right hand side of this image. Let that run.
I am using a local host to preview these slides and I wanna keep this as raw as possible and what you'll see here is that these slides are kind of close to what we wanted but they're not clean at all.
Like it's taken the Claude icon from over my shoulder and just like blindly put it on top of me. I wanted to show you exactly what can go wrong so that you know how to prompt Claude in the right way to generate a hook slide that actually looks good. So the one thing that makes it land first try is to tell it what not to draw and I'm gonna say exactly what I want and exactly what I don't want to give it the best chance of actually working and I didn't tell it which model I wanted so I'm gonna tell it to use GPT image two.
Guys this is where you can have some fun with it and actually speak to Claude like a human about exactly what you want to drive the best results. So now I've just spoken to it like a human to re prompt it and it's gonna go away and actually generate from scratch what I've just suggested and give me three new versions that I can look at.
And this is the hardest part guys, like 80 of the time goes into making this hook slide. That's because the hook slide is the most important aspect that's gonna stop the scroll.
So we wanna make sure that this hook slide is really strong. It's gonna be a scroll stopper.
So they wanna scroll through the rest of those slides. Okay. So Claude has made two new versions of the hook.
Let's lock in gen one. Okay. It's taken a bit of re prompting, but we've got our final version of the hook slide.
So now I'm gonna tell Claude the hook is locked, build the remaining slides from the slide by slide copy, copy, then spin up the localhost Instagram preview window that shows me what this would look like on my Instagram grid. Just to weigh in here guys with this Claude skill you can see that it quality controls them so you can see it's saying let me QA them.
It's gonna review all of the body slides and check that everything looks like a human would want it to look. So you can see that the Claude skill has already found two issues. It said slide two's footnote overlaps the panel captions and slide three has dead space below the card.
Let me see the rest before fixing. Slides four and five look strong. Checking the comments engine rules and CTA.
So it's gonna check all the slides automatically for you and it's gonna fix things. So you can go and brew a coffee. You can go and do whatever it is that you're building with your business whilst Claude quality assures all of your slides for you.
And there might still need to be some re prompting which we'll see in a sec, but this is gonna do most of the heavy lifting for you on autopilot. Alright. So all eight slides are done, and we're gonna be able to preview these based on exactly how people would see it on your grid.
And I'm just using my arrow keys to click through these. Wow. Okay.
This looks really good so far. 85% of my time was spent just reprompting the hook slide a couple of times to get it exactly how I want it to look because that's the most important piece. It's one shot prompted the rest of the slides.
Once you've got one great carousel like this in your carousel studio, you can prompt again and again and again, paste in reference carousels from Instagram, paste in YouTube videos and use y t dash d l p to rip the transcripts from your own YouTube videos.
Or you can just talk to this carousel studio like a human and the carousel generator is going to guide you through the slide by slide copy. It's gonna create three different hook slides for you. You can hone in the exact hook slide that you want.
That's gonna be a scroll stopper. And then it's gonna generate all of the slides for you so that you can just scroll through them at a breeze. You can re prompt anything if you need to, but this is gonna do all the heavy lifting for you on autopilot.
So now you can see Claude has exported all of these eight slides into PNG images that I can go and airdrop to my phone and just upload straight to Instagram. So it's super useful. Now at the start of the video, I said I was gonna show you if Claude design is useful for creating carousels or if there's a free alternative that's faster and easier to use to actually run your slides home and edit the text, edit the designs, so you don't have to re prompt a code prompt box in Versus Code Code or in Claude Code.
So jumping into a previous carousel that I generated which was about scaling faster without the ad spend. You can see that Claude design is a great way to view all of your slides together and what I like about it is you can jump in here and click edit and you can actually come in and you know, if I wanted to say 200 times engagement rate instead of comments, you can very easily edit the components of your slides without having to re prompt Claude code and wait two minutes for it to change one piece of text.
But what sucks about Claude design is that you cannot really drag things around easily. If I wanted to move this image down here for example up to the top right corner, see how it's kind of glitching around? It's because this is still HTML and it's a really fiddly way to edit images and logos and anything that's not text, Claw Design sucks at.
So the better option than Claw Design which is completely free is Canva. It has a tool called Magic Layers Layers and if you upload your slides into it, you can drag everything around, can edit the text and it's just as good as Claw Design except it doesn't have that glitchy HTML aspect to it. So once you're in Canva, you can add in all your slides and then if you click on one of the slides and you click edit, come over here and click magic layers and it's gonna scan your slide and you can then move around every element of that slide.
You can adjust the text. You can move around images. You can move around graphics and this is a way better option than Claw Design because Claw has been built from HTML and so it's a bit stuck in its ways.
So as you can see here, I can very easily type in like my typical real format or whatever.
I can edit the text and this is a way better way to do it than Claude Design if you guys wanna very quickly edit your slides in bulk. So this was me starting a fresh Carousel Studio session from scratch to show you how to start cooking these up. Claude is an LLM and it's gonna iteratively learn as you prompt more and more carousels to get quicker at generating the results that you want.
And in my own folder that I use, my carousel generator skill can print carousels way faster because it's learned from the 10 plus carousels that I've already made. For mass production, once you've prompted one winning carousel, that becomes your template. You can ask Claude to refill the same skeleton with a new topic, with a different hook slide, and then you have the next week's posts in minutes.
That's how you create high quality carousels at scale, and you can follow the five step narrative formula that is proven to perform, and use the five rules of viral carousels from the carousel one zero one slides at the start of this video. And if you're in an anti AI niche, something like real estate, nobody sees the way that you created your carousel slides, nobody sees you prompting Claude code, all they see is a clean three four post with your data and your value that you can offer to your audience on them.
To get the exact carousel studio and carousel generator skill that you just watched me build from with this folder in this exact video, head to my Instagram and find the carousel that you watched me make in this video and comment viral and I'll DM it straight to you. If you learned something new from this video, make sure to hit the like button and the big fat subscribe button below.
I post a new automated content system breakdown every single week on this channel. And if you haven't seen how I use trial reels to get my brand in front of thousands of non followers before it ever touches my grid every single day, video is gonna be right here. Get your notepad out.
Make sure to dive into that one. I will catch you guys in next week's video. Peace.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The video opens on a stat, not a face: five carousels, five thousand comments, a thousand emails — and a claim that every slide of every one of them was generated by an AI coding assistant, not a designer.
Named ideas worth stealing.
02:18list
The 9-Slide Viral Carousel Skeleton
- Slide 1: The hook (a bold claim plus a real number)
- Slide 2: The stakes (why this matters right now)
- Slides 3-7: The value (one idea per slide)
- Slide 8: The receipts (proof it works)
- Slide 9: The CTA (one keyword to comment)
Every carousel is built on the same nine-slide narrative order, from cold-open claim to a single-word comment ask.
Steal forany slide-based or listicle social post, not just Instagram
03:33list
The 5 Rules of Viral Carousels
- 3:4 or nothing; build at 1080x1440
- The hook slide is 80% of the result
- Provide irresistible value for your audience
- Put a keyword CTA in the first line of the caption
- Data beats design every time
A condensed checklist to run before posting any carousel.
Steal fora pre-publish checklist for any swipeable social format
12:46model
Three Levels of Hook Slide
- Level 1: plain text slide, AI-generated HTML, maybe an icon
- Level 2: text over a composited reference image
- Level 3: a fully animated picture slide
The three levels of visual complexity for a hook slide, with level 3 reportedly averaging around 2,000 comments across two posts.
Steal fordeciding how much production effort a cold-open visual deserves before shipping
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
20:30link
“comment "VIRAL" on my latest Instagram carousel and I will DM you the whole folder”
A recurring comment-to-DM funnel used throughout the video (also "comment magnet", "comment viral"), driving Instagram engagement into a DM-delivered lead magnet and, per the description, a 1:1 consultation link.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
- comment "VIRAL" on my latest Instagram carousel and I will DM you the whole folder ↗
- Want to chat content strategy one on one? ↗
- VS Code (free editor) ↗
- Claude Code (the AI, runs inside VS Code) ↗
- Claude Code extension for VS Code ↗
- Higgsfield (image tool for the hook slide) ↗
- Canva (free, for Magic Layers slide edits) ↗
- yt-dlp (rip transcripts from your own videos) ↗
- Orgrowth AI (my content system) ↗
Visual structure at a glance.
