does anyone have an actual repeatable way to decide what to make next, or is everyone just guessing?

genuine question, not a rhetorical setup.

i burned out on my last channel and it wasn't the filming or the editing. it was opening a blank doc every week and having no idea what to put in it. the making part i liked. the deciding part is what killed it.

things i tried, and where each one fell apart for me:

keyword tools. they tell you a topic gets searched. they don't tell you whether the five videos already covering it left anyone unsatisfied. so you can pick a "good" keyword and just be the sixth result nobody needed.

"make more of what worked." sounds obvious but i kept copying the wrong layer. i'd repeat the format or the topic when the thing people actually responded to was one specific idea inside it. same topic, different idea, flopped.

trends. by the time i noticed one and finished a video, it was over. and it pulled people who wanted the trend, not me.

gut feel. honestly not worse than the others, which is kind of the problem.

what bugs me is that every tool i've used grades a video that already exists. title score, thumbnail score, retention graph. all of it is feedback on a decision i already made. i've never found anything that helps with the decision itself.

so: do you have a process you actually repeat, or is it gut feel with extra steps? and if you do have one, what makes you confident enough to commit a week of work to a topic before you've made it?

asking because i suspect most people are quietly in the same spot and just don't post about it.