When someone shares a behind the scenes look at how they created something, most people scroll straight past it. And I get it. If you have no intention of ever making a film, watching a director explain how they composited a green screen shot is about as useful as reading the manual for a car you will never drive.
But behind the scenes content creation is having a moment online, and for a very specific reason that most content advice misses entirely.
The real question is not whether behind the scenes content is interesting. The question is: interesting to whom, and why does that matter for your business?
I was reminded of this recently when I thought about a reading experience I had years ago. I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath at the same time as his journal from the same period, a document where he wrote frankly to a friend about the daily grind of producing that novel. The finished book is a masterpiece. The journal is something else entirely. It is raw, uncertain, and surprisingly moving. But here is the thing: I only found the journal fascinating because I also write. If I had been purely a reader, with no interest in the process, the journal would have meant nothing to me.
That is the principle behind the scenes content creation is built on, and it is the principle most online creators get completely wrong.
Behind the scenes content works when the audience is made up of people who do the same thing, or who want to. It falls flat when it is aimed at people who only care about the result.
So before you film yourself at your desk explaining how you built your latest PDF or planned your content calendar, ask yourself who is watching. If your audience is other creators, other online business builders, people who are trying to figure out how to do what you do, then showing your process is genuinely useful to them. Because it closes the gap between where they are and where they want to be. That gap is exactly what good behind the scenes content addresses.
If your audience is buyers who just want the outcome, then skip the making-of and give them the finished product with a strong reason to act.
Here is where it gets more complicated, though.
John Cleese gave a lecture recently where he cited research suggesting that only 10 to 15 percent of people are genuinely competent at their jobs. He also made the point that competence and confidence tend to run in opposite directions. The people who seem most certain they can help you are often the least qualified to do so. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect dressed up in a business shirt, and it is everywhere in online education.
The practical problem this creates for behind the scenes content creation is real. When someone shares how they do something, there is no simple way to know if what they are showing you actually works, or if it just worked once, or if they are confidently teaching a method they do not fully understand themselves.
This is not a reason to avoid learning from behind the scenes content. It is a reason to be selective about whose process you choose to follow, and to test what you learn against your own results.
One way I have found to filter out the noise is by using AI tools that are trained on my specific situation. When I describe my audience, my products, my goals, and my constraints to a well-structured AI, it can search and sort through a far larger pool of information than I could ever cover manually. The AI is not competent in the human sense, but it does not have an ego investment in being right either. It gives me options and I evaluate them.
That is what I had in mind when I built my Prompt Guide for Claude. Rather than giving people generic prompts that produce generic results, this guide starts by asking you questions about your own business. Your answers then shape the prompts it produces for you. Targeted prompts give you targeted output, because the input reflects your actual circumstances rather than a hypothetical average business owner.
Behind the scenes content creation, done well, works exactly the same way. It starts with context. It respects what the audience already knows. And it gives people something they can actually apply to their own situation, rather than a polished performance that looks impressive but teaches nothing.
If you are building an online business and want to get more useful output from AI without wading through a hundred generic prompt lists, take a look at what I put together:
