stop watching youtube videos start to finish. i built an extension that shows you exactly where the good parts are.
As a founder i watch a ton of youtube for learning. lectures, startup talks, coding tutorials, deep dives. the kind of stuff that's 45 minutes to 2 hours long but has maybe 10-15 minutes of actual insight buried somewhere inside.
Whats worst, some of these really good videos dont have timestamps, and if on top of that you add clickbait videos, it can become a bit of a nightmare to find actionable and valualable information in videos without having to watch them entirely!
for the longest time my workflow was embarrassing:
- find a video worth watching
- copy the youtube link
- paste it into NotebookLM or a transcript tool
- wait for it to generate a transcript and ask an AI for a summary
- ask it questions
- take that transcript and feed it into a ChatGPT project to cross-reference with my own notes
every single video. multiple times a day. five tabs, constant copy-pasting, losing momentum every time.
while it worked, it gets annoying after sometime and none of the extensions create summaries, timestamps or AI Chats the way i wanted them, so i built my own version of it and called it meetclaras.com
and i know i'm not alone. i've seen people in other subs talking about watching at 2x speed and still missing the important parts, manually copying transcripts from youtube's subtitle panel into AI tools, or just sitting through entire lectures hoping they catch the 10 minutes that actually matter (and dealing with clickbaits).
so i built a chrome extension that replaces all of that with a single side panel next to the video.
what it does and who this is for!
- detailed table of contents with timestamps. not youtube's basic chapters. actual section breakdowns with descriptions so you can read what each part is about and jump straight to what you care about. no more scrubbing through a timeline guessing where the good stuff is.
- full summary. know what the entire video covers in a few minutes. decide if it's worth your time before committing to the whole thing.
- downloadable transcript. grab it and drop it into chatgpt, claude, notebooklm, whatever you use. no more copying subtitles by hand.
- chat with the video. ask AI questions about the content right in the side panel. the AI has the full context of the video so you get actual answers, not hallucinated ones.
it basically killed my entire NotebookLM-to-ChatGPT pipeline and put everything in one place.
i've been using it for about three weeks now and it's already saving me hours. especially for those videos where you know there's gold in there but you have no idea where it is until you've sat through the whole thing.
launched it on product hunt last week. ranked #13 on launch day with 112 upvotes, and already filled the first 50 spots on the waitlist. so clearly i wasn't the only one frustrated with this.
if you use youtube for actual learning and not just entertainment, this might save you a lot of time. happy to answer any questions about how it works or the tech behind it.