What do you do when there are no reference videos in your category?

A brand sells a small spray bottle that keeps swim goggles from fogging up. Somebody spent an afternoon in the app typing every word they could think of for it — the product, the problem, the sport — and the doc they came back with has three links in it.

One is a shop explaining what anti-fog spray is. One is a coach talking to camera about a meet. One is somebody's goggles, filmed close, with a caption about the pool being cold. None of them looks like either of the others, and nobody on the call can say what the campaign would copy from any of them.

So the meeting arrives at the obvious conclusion: there's nothing in this category. That conclusion is doing more work than the search supports.

What were you looking for in there?

Not a video about goggles. A structure you could build a version of.

Our guide to picking a reference out of a thread of saved links runs a reading that answers exactly this, and it never asks whether the subject is yours: "When unrelated accounts have each chosen to build videos this way, what you're looking at is more than one account's taste. When the whole thing lives on one account, what you've found is one account."

Run that over your three links. The shop's explainer, the coach, the close-up of cold goggles — each one is the only one of its kind in the doc. Three results, three accounts, and nothing in the doc repeats.

What did your search words cover?

Start with the words you typed, because they named your subject.

You searched for the product and the problem it solves, which is the natural thing to do. Our guide to finding creators on TikTok describes what that gives you: "Type words into the search bar and what comes back is videos, playing, one after another." That guide is choosing search words for a different job, finding the person who has already made your video, and it still treats the words as the variable you control: "Different phrasings surface different corners of the same problem".

One competitor's creator training on how to research content says the thin case out loud. For a relatively unpopular niche, the training says the chances are you "won't find many or any validated content formats or hooks", and that when that happens "it is entirely up to you to brainstorm new hooks and scripts from scratch." Note what that training is doing there: it isn't reporting a measurement of which categories are thin, and neither did your afternoon. It's naming a case that comes up, and sorting it into a different kind of work.

None of that proves your category is full of structures you missed. Your search narrows what your result covers: the subject you named, and nothing else. So before you accept that your category is the thin case, there's one more search to run, and it isn't the same search with more words.

What is missing from a one-off video, and from a structure found outside?

Each is missing a different half, and only one of the two gaps is yours to fill.

The one-off video has your subject in it, and you can read a structure off it. What you can't tell is whether that structure is why anyone watched or whether it is this one account's habit, because there is nothing to compare it against. The thread guide files a link like that on a watch list instead of in a brief, and it is clear about which layer you would be taking either way: "What you can take from somebody else's video is the structure, not the execution".

The structure from another category is missing the other half. It turns up on account after account, so you can see that more than one person builds videos this way, and it has nothing to do with goggles. The goggles are the half you can supply yourself.

What do you search for instead of your product?

The moment your product is for.

Your product does something for somebody at a particular second — in this case, the second in a locker room when somebody realizes they can see. Written as words you could type, that's a moment rather than a category: the two-second fix nobody mentions, or the tip people pass around for something they had all quietly put up with.

Words like that don't name a category, so a skincare account, a cycling account and a dog-grooming account can all post the same moment. The thread guide's criterion for what you need is exactly that nothing forces them together: "unrelated subjects, no shared sound or hashtag forcing them into the same result." Your own category words are the ones least likely to give you that, because the accounts they reach are the accounts your category already connects.

Part of this move is documented. The same creator training adds the near case as a bonus: "you absolutely can reference videos from adjacent niches to find ways to recreate or repurpose adjacent content formats for your specific niche." Its worked example is a creator making videos in the AI study-tool niche, pulling formats from the personal finance or productivity niches — niches next door, picked because they already make the same kind of video. Dropping the adjacency, and going out to accounts with nothing in common with yours, is ours rather than theirs.

That training is talking to a creator who is filling an account, and the instruction it gives them is to pull formats and refine them. You are not filling an account. You are commissioning one video against a brief, and you'll be the one to say what the creator should keep. So take the search from it and leave the recipe.

In the goggle search: the moment words turn up a structure that shows up on a face-cream account, a car-detailing account and a fishing account. Nothing connects them. Each video spends its first half on a small thing the person had stopped mentioning, and its second half on the thing that ended it, held up to camera and used once.

What comes back with the structure, and what stays behind?

The parts that make it recognizable come back. The subject doesn't.

Our guide to joining a TikTok trend is where that separation is worked out: "Strictly, you don't join a trend. You join the meme format underneath it." It also gives you the way to write the parts down: "Write down the parts that, if you changed them, would stop people from recognizing it." Run that on the structure in front of you. The face cream, the car and the fish sit in the parts that vary — and of the things that vary, that guide says one carries what the structure pays off in. That one is what it calls the open place.

One limit comes over with it. That same guide says the list you can write from outside is incomplete, because "some of what holds it together isn't visible from outside", and its answer is to ask somebody who posts in the structure. So the list you leave with is the outside view of the structure, not the whole of what holds it together.

When do you run the check on a structure from outside?

The moment the parts are written down, before you brief anyone. Every found structure arrives with somebody else's product already sitting in the open place. What's different about one from outside your category is that a mismatch doesn't show on sight: in your own category the other product is at least the same kind of thing you sell.

That judgment belongs to our guide to joining a TikTok trend, and the inputs it names are small: "what the open place is for, and a plain sentence about what you sell. No numbers, no budget, and nothing you'd have had to commission." The first of those two is the step it says gets skipped, so do it before you look at your product at all.

In the goggle search: read the originals and the open place is the second half, the thing that ended the annoyance. What that structure pays off in is the viewer recognizing the fix: something that was there all along and they had never gone and gotten. So the job of that place is to hold a fix they would believe was available to them. A bottle you spray on goggles before a swim does that job, so the check clears and the brief has a structure to start from.

Searching by your own moment stacks the odds that this passes, because you went looking where your product already fits. It doesn't settle it: the place can turn out to be for something only their product could be.

What if nothing carries?

Then you've learned the thing the afternoon was for.

The same creator training splits the work in two. What it sends a creator out to find is a concept that "has already gone viral before", and when there is none to work from it sends them to build from scratch instead. That split is drawn for somebody filling an account, and it survives the move to your side for a reason that isn't theirs: you are commissioning one video, so there is no room to test variations around a structure you don't have. If your moment words came back as thin as your product words, that is the job in front of you. A third pass might still turn something up; what it won't do is change what you write next.

The brief doesn't wait for either one. Our guide to sending a creator a reference video already found the thing that carries an ask — "A video doesn't say which part of it you meant. Write that part down and you'll find out whether you still need the video." — and it says what happens to the link once that sentence exists: "The sentence is what you'll hold the draft to; the video is context. The link may stop looking necessary at that point, and letting it go is not a loss."

So the campaign that starts without a reference starts the same way the one with a reference does. You write the sentence. What you lose is the evidence that somebody has made this structure before — not the ability to brief anyone. That one is worth being honest about on the call.

Read one competitor's brief template on this point and you find two places, not one. Its inspiration section says a mood board "can be helpful" and points at what the brand already has: "You can include images and references from past collaborations that were successful or your key visuals, including color palettes." A brand running its first campaign has no past collaborations to point at. Where that same template talks about the content itself, it offers the other option: "Provide a few examples or suggestions", or leave the type of content to the creator's judgment. One asks for inspiration from what the brand already has; the other leaves the type of content open. Neither requires a reference video you don't have.

What can you say on the call, and what can't you?

You can say you have a structure, name the unrelated accounts you found it repeating on, and say your product has a place in it. What you can't say is that any of it has been measured. Nobody has compared campaigns built from a structure found outside the category against campaigns built from one found inside it, and this page isn't that comparison. The reading also leans on which videos your words returned, so write the words you searched next to the structure you kept, along with the date: a different set of words is a different search, and the one you ran is the only one your conclusion covers.

Frequently asked questions

Our category isn't empty — it's three competitor accounts posting the same thing. Is that a structure?

Not from what you've got, because those three aren't unrelated.

Three accounts selling one kind of product to one kind of buyer have every reason to land in the same search result, so a structure all three use can be three competitors converging. The reading needs accounts with nothing forcing them together, and the quickest way to get them is to search the moment instead of the product. If the structure turns up on an account that has nothing to do with your category, you have the unrelated account the reading needs. If it never does, what you found is what your three competitors are doing, and not yet something that repeats beyond them.

The structure came from another category. Should we hire a creator from that category?

Those are two decisions, and only the first one has been made.

What you carried over is the structure. Who films it is settled by choosing creators, and the accounts you found the structure on have one thing going for them. Our guide to finding creators says it about a video that is already about your own product — "if that video exists, its maker has already done the thing you're about to ask for." — and here it reaches only as far as the structure: someone who has built this structure has built it once. That earns them a place on the list, and the rest of that decision runs as the choosing guide sets it out.

See what this looks like for your brand

Instead of scrolling feeds and competitor pages for days, ask Popow Studio and start from TikTok references with observed views and engagement.

Or email us: business@popow.ai