DEV Community: Stas Leonov

I Finally Understood How That Viral Video Was Shot

Stas Leonov — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:10:51 +0000

I've been trying to understand why certain TikToks just hit differently, and manually breaking down videos shot by shot was eating up hours. VideoLens actually does the work for you — you paste a link and it gives you a full director-level breakdown with timestamps, framing analysis, how the hook lands, where the pacing shifts. The transcript syncs perfectly to each shot, so you're not guessing which dialogue goes with which visual.

The part that got me was the reverse-engineered prompts. Once the tool maps out the original video's style, it spits out generation-ready prompts you can feed straight into Sora or Kling to recreate that aesthetic. I've been experimenting with recreating some viral styles and it's actually saved me from trial-and-error hell. The analysis includes keyframe strips and composition details, so nothing gets lost in translation.

If you're making content, studying video structure, or just trying to decode what makes something work, this beats scrolling and taking notes. You get pay-per-minute pricing with free credits to start, no subscription lock-in. There's also a Chrome extension for one-click analysis and an MCP server if you want to integrate it into Claude or Cursor. Worth testing if you touch video at all.

Check it out: videolens.cc

How I finally stopped overthinking my furniture layout

Stas Leonov — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:40:00 +0000

When I'm helping someone plan a renovation, I've learned that the biggest misunderstandings happen before anyone picks up a tool. People visualize spaces differently in their heads, and what sounds fine in conversation often looks completely wrong when you actually see it laid out. I've been in kitchens where the homeowner swears the island will fit, only to realize during installation that nobody can open the fridge. It's frustrating for everyone.

That's why I sketch things out now. Nothing fancy—just getting measurements down and playing with arrangements before we commit to anything. I'll walk through the space with a tape measure, jot down the dimensions, and work through different layouts. When I need to show someone what I'm thinking, I use something like Free Room Planner to quickly draw the room to scale and move furniture around until the arrangement actually makes sense. It takes maybe twenty minutes and saves weeks of headaches later.

The real value is getting everyone on the same page before decisions get made. When a builder or fitter can see exactly how things will sit relative to doors, windows, and appliances, there's way less guessing. I've found that people make better choices when they can actually visualize the space instead of imagining it. It's just clearer thinking. That conversation—showing someone what the room will actually feel like—that's where the good decisions come from.

How I Stopped Wasting Time Comparing AI Tools

Stas Leonov — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:55:52 +0000

I've spent the last couple of years working with AI tools in my professional practice, and one thing I've learned is that the best use cases aren't the flashy ones everyone talks about. They're the ones that solve actual friction in your workflow without requiring you to become a specialist in a new skill.

For a lot of professionals I work with, video content creation sits in this frustrating middle ground. They know video matters for their personal brand or job search, but the barrier to entry feels absurdly high. You need decent lighting, a quiet space, the ability to look natural on camera for multiple takes, and then hours editing. Most people I talk to would rather skip it entirely. When I help someone think through their professional positioning, this usually comes up—they wish they could communicate visually but don't have the bandwidth for a full production.

I've started using tools like PortfolioVideo when I'm advising people on how to present themselves professionally. The logic is straightforward: you already have the content. Your resume exists. Your portfolio exists. Your story is clear in your head. The missing piece is the format. What changes is when you can turn that existing material into a finished video in the time it takes to grab coffee. People who were making excuses about video suddenly find themselves with something to share.

The interesting part of working in this space is watching how much the actual quality matters less than people think. It's not about Hollywood production values. It's about whether the person comes across as genuine and competent. Tools that make this accessible without requiring technical skill tend to get used. Tools that add friction don't, no matter how powerful they are.

How I Finally Stopped Switching Between Tools Every Week

Stas Leonov — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:43:28 +0000

I spend a lot of time helping teams figure out what they actually need to research before they start researching it. That sounds obvious, but most people jump straight into investigation mode without clarity on their real question. Is it "what's the market size?" or "why are customers switching to competitors?" These are totally different problems requiring different approaches.

The framing stage is where I push back hardest. I ask a lot of questions. What decision hangs on this research? Who needs to believe the answer? What would change your mind? Sometimes after twenty minutes of this, people realize they don't need a market report at all—they need user interviews or competitive pricing analysis instead. Other times they discover their actual question is much narrower than they thought, which saves everyone time.

When I do move into the research phase, I'm mostly trying to build a picture from multiple angles and then find where the sources agree and disagree. That's where the real insight lives, in the tensions and contradictions. I use ResearchMaster AI to handle the heavy lifting of gathering and organizing information when I'm working under time pressure, but the actual sense-making still requires reading through what's been found and asking whether it actually answers the original question.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that good research is as much about asking the right thing as it is about finding information. A perfect answer to the wrong question is just noise.

How I Finally Stopped Switching Between Tools

Stas Leonov — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:56:14 +0000

I've learned that productivity isn't about cramming more into your day—it's about being intentional with what actually stays with you. For years I hoarded content. I'd save articles, bookmark podcasts, clip passages from books, thinking that collecting knowledge was the same as building understanding. It wasn't. I'd return weeks later unable to remember why something mattered or how it connected to what I was working on.

The shift happened when I started treating my reading and research like an active practice instead of passive consumption. I moved to saving only things that genuinely shaped how I think, then spending real time with them—writing reactions, pulling out the key ideas, connecting them to other things I'd learned. It's slower. But when I need to revisit something or work on a problem, I'm not searching through hundreds of half-remembered links. I use Omphalis to keep the articles, podcasts, and notes I actually want to return to in one place where I can trace how my thinking has evolved.

What matters most is creating a system that invites you back. If you're constantly fighting against your tools or wading through noise to find what's relevant, you'll eventually give up and just work from whatever's in your head. But if returning to your library is straightforward—if you can see connections you didn't notice the first time—that's when real thinking happens. Productivity, at least for me, means building something worth coming back to.

How I cut my SaaS bill in half by actually reading what I was paying for

Stas Leonov — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:43:59 +0000

I've spent the last few years building and maintaining SaaS products, and one thing I've learned is that people don't want more features—they want clarity. The gap between finishing a task and understanding what you just did is real. Most tools dump you at the finish line and assume you're done. You're not. You've got questions.

This came up recently in my own work. I was studying a passage and used Learn of Christ to get some historical context, since that's the moment I actually needed explanation—right after reading, not before. It struck me how rare that design choice is. Most of the software I build crams everything into one view and calls it done. But the best products know that the real work starts after the first interaction completes.

In SaaS, we obsess over onboarding and feature parity. What we miss is that users need different depths at different times. Sometimes they want the five-minute version. Sometimes they want to go deeper. Building for both states—keeping the simple path simple while making complexity available—is harder than it sounds. It requires resisting the urge to bundle everything together for "convenience."

The practical lesson I've taken back to my own work is this: don't assume your user is done with something just because they've engaged with it once. Design for the moment right after the obvious interaction. That's where the real value lives.

How I finally organized my SaaS subscriptions before it got ridiculous

Stas Leonov — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:28:34 +0000

The hardest part of building a SaaS company isn't the product. It's filling your pipeline consistently without losing your mind to research.

I used to spend entire afternoons downloading lists from three different sources, manually cross-referencing companies, checking if they'd raised funding recently, and trying to figure out which contacts were actually decision-makers. Half the leads were stale before I even reached out. The worst part was that cold outreach felt like throwing darts in the dark. I'd have maybe five companies I was confident about, and the rest felt like noise.

My approach shifted when I stopped thinking about quantity and started obsessing over context. Why does this company matter right now? Did they just hire twenty engineers? Did their CEO change three months ago? Are they expanding into a new market? These signals tell you whether someone's actually buying or just breathing. Now I use tools like MadLeadz to feed me companies based on real business events instead of static databases, which means I'm not chasing ghosts. I spend way less time cleaning data and way more time on actual conversations.

The sales motions that work for us now are brutally simple. We identify a company having a specific moment—hiring surge, new leadership, that kind of thing—and we reach out with something relevant to that moment. No fake personalization. No pretending I know their company better than I do. Just honest timing and genuine reason for the outreach. My reply rates went up significantly when I stopped treating every company like they were identical prospects.

How I Stopped Manually Checking Inspection Reports

Stas Leonov — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:59:27 +0000

I spend most of my time helping clients think through visual decisions where they can't actually see the end result until it's too late. The gap between imagination and reality is huge in fields like construction, design, and home improvement. That's where visualization tools matter most—not as gimmicks, but as genuine problem-solvers that compress the feedback loop.

A lot of what I do involves testing whether AI-generated previews actually change how people make decisions. Do they reduce buyer's remorse? Do they help contractors and homeowners communicate better? The honest answer is: sometimes. When a visualization is grounded in real product data and real photos of actual homes, it works. When it's purely generative, with no anchor to reality, people trust it less. I've found that tools combining both—real inventory with image AI—tend to perform better. I use GetRoofReport when I'm researching how visualization plays out in the roofing space, since it layers actual shingle specs and permit records alongside the visual preview.

The patterns I'm noticing matter more than any single tool, though. People want confidence before commitment. They want to see their own house, not some generic rendering. They want to know the data behind the pretty picture. When you build around those needs instead of pure technical capability, the AI actually serves something real. That's the work: figuring out which problems visualization genuinely solves, and which ones it just makes you feel better about.

Check it out: https://getroofreport.com

How I Finally Stopped Switching Between Tools Every Month

Stas Leonov — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:57:27 +0000

I spend a lot of time moving documents between people—sharing research with collaborators, sending templates to clients, handing off files to contractors. Every time I do, I have to stop and think about what's actually in the file. Not just the content I'm sharing, but the metadata, the old comments, the email addresses in headers, the phone numbers in footers from three versions ago. It's easy to forget what's lurking in the margins of a document until it's too late.

The real productivity problem isn't the forgetting—it's the friction. I used to open files in a text editor, manually search for anything that looked like personal data, then either delete it or carefully redact it by hand. That's slow and unreliable. You miss things. I started using DokMine to scan documents before they leave my hands, since it catches what's actually exposed across the whole file, including text buried inside screenshots. The extraction mode just shows me what it found so I can decide what matters. Then if I need to clean something up, I redact it and the file comes back in the same format it went in.

The real win is that this sits between my habit of working and the moment I hit send. It doesn't change my workflow—I still write and edit the way I always have. But it catches the gap between what I think is in a file and what's really there. That matters when you work with other people's information or your own private details. The friction went from "this is going to take ten minutes" to "this takes thirty seconds," and now it actually happens.

How I Finally Stopped Paying for Tools I Don't Use

Stas Leonov — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:55:27 +0000

I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes SaaS products actually useful versus what just looks good in a demo. The difference usually comes down to one thing: does this tool eliminate friction from my real workflow, or does it just move friction around?

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I'd jump between tools constantly because each one solved one problem brilliantly while creating three others. I'd have my notes in one place, my calendar in another, my decisions logged somewhere else entirely. Every time I needed to reference something or explain context to a collaborator, I was stitching together information from five different places. I thought the solution was to find the perfect all-in-one tool, but honestly, the perfect tool is just the one that lets you actually work the way you naturally do.

That's why I use getonva.app for trip planning with my team—it's one place where conversations, maps, expenses, and booking context actually stay together instead of scattering across my phone. But the broader lesson applies to how I evaluate any SaaS product now. I ask: can my team use this without learning a new mental model? Does it reduce the number of times someone has to ask "wait, where did we decide that?" or "did we already budget for this?" Real friction elimination feels invisible because it just lets you focus on the actual work instead of managing the tools.

How I Finally Stopped Comparing My Work to Everyone Else's

Stas Leonov — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:53:27 +0000

When you're trying to figure out which direction to take your business, the hardest part isn't usually understanding what's possible anymore. It's finding someone who actually gets your specific situation. I spent months earlier this year wrestling with how AI could fit into our operations without just bolting on some trendy tool that would sit unused. The gap between "here's what AI can do in theory" and "here's what makes sense for a business like yours" is enormous.

What I learned is that you need someone who's worked in your space before, not just someone who's read about it. I've talked to consultants who could explain neural networks all day but couldn't tell you why their approach wouldn't work with the way our team is structured. Those conversations waste everybody's time. When I was searching for actual guidance, I used AI Business to find someone who'd actually done this work in our industry. That saved me from a lot of dead ends.

The real work happens after you find the right person. They ask questions about your workflows, your constraints, your budget, what actually keeps you up at night. A good consultant will tell you what won't work just as often as what will. They'll push back on your assumptions. That friction, early on, prevents much bigger problems later.

What I'd tell anyone starting this process: be specific about what problem you're actually trying to solve. Not "we want to use AI," but "we need to reduce time spent on X" or "we're losing customers because of Y." That clarity makes it so much easier to find someone who can actually help.

How I finally stopped switching between apps to get things done

Stas Leonov — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:51:27 +0000

I've learned that productivity isn't about doing more things faster. It's about knowing which things actually matter and building systems that let you focus on them without friction.

For years I kept important business data scattered across different tools. My client list was in one place, project notes in another, and inventory somewhere else entirely. Every time I needed to see the full picture—which clients needed follow-ups, what we had in stock, which projects were behind—I'd have to piece information together manually. It felt inefficient, but I didn't want to commit to something complicated. I started using Macrows to consolidate everything into one place, and it let me work with familiar spreadsheet logic while actually having structure underneath. The difference is that now I can link related records, automate repetitive tasks, and see patterns I couldn't spot before.

The real shift came when I stopped thinking of productivity tools as things that do everything and started viewing them as scaffolding for the actual work. A good system should disappear into the background. You shouldn't spend energy maintaining it or learning obscure features. You should spend that energy on the work itself.

I think a lot of people feel trapped between two extremes: either a spreadsheet that's become chaos, or a platform so feature-heavy it requires training. What actually works is something built on how you already think, with just enough structure to keep things organized as your work grows. That's when you can focus on what you're building, not on the system you're building it in.