Blank prompt box or 4-step wizard — which do first-timers actually finish?
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Every AI tool I admire ships a blank prompt box. I shipped a wizard instead: product photo → copy → images → video + music → finished MP4. Four fixed steps.
The trade-off is real. Power users hate being walked through things, you lose the "type anything" magic, and every step is one more place to drop out.
I built it this way after making ads by hand for a friend's e-commerce store. The bottleneck was never the tools — it was that we didn't know what the ad should be until we'd already made three bad ones. A blank box doesn't help with that. A wizard at least makes the decisions in an order that works.
Still might be wrong about this.
When you open a new AI tool for the first time: does a blank box feel like freedom, or like homework?
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Following up on my own question now that it's built: I went with the 4-step wizard. Watching non-designer friends freeze in front of an empty prompt box was what decided it. The wizard finishes more often, even if power users lose a little control. It's live now if you want to see whether the hand-holding was the right call: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...