Setup Guide · The Boss
HeyGen is what turns your words into video of you talking — without you filming anything. You set it up once. Work down this list and tick each box as you go; your place is saved if you close the page.
Five minutes. Don't buy a plan yet — Stage 4 tells you which one you actually need.
Use an email address you'll keep for years. If you change brokerages, you don't want to lose your avatar and have to start over.
The free plan lets you create one avatar, which is all you need to get through the next two stages. You'll decide about paying in Stage 4, once you know what you're actually paying for.
This is the only time you'll ever be on camera. Everything after this is generated from it.
Stand or sit so there's space behind you — a room that continues, a window, furniture at different distances. Do not stand right in front of a blank wall.
This matters more than anything else you'll do today. Every look you generate later inherits the feel of this room. A flat wall makes every future video look flat and cheap, and no setting fixes it afterwards.
Light on your face, not behind your head. If there's a window in the room, look toward it.
HeyGen walks you through this and tells you what to say. Speak normally, the way you'd talk to a client across a desk. Don't perform.
Usually 10 to 15 minutes. Go do something else. You'll get an email when it's ready.
The stage people skip. Skipping it is why videos come out with white bars and unreadable captions.
A "look" is a version of you — same face, same voice, different outfit and setting. You generate them from the one video you just recorded.
Your videos come in two different shapes. Your daily short videos are tall — the shape of a phone held upright. Your longer YouTube city videos are wide — the shape of a TV.
Put a wide look into a tall video and it doesn't stretch to fit. It gets squeezed into a band across the middle with big empty white bars above and below, and your captions get pushed down into that empty space where nobody can read them. That's not a small cosmetic thing — it's the difference between looking professional and looking like a mistake.
HeyGen needs to learn your face from more than one angle. More photos gives better results.
Include: recent photos that look like you do now, only you in the frame, a mix of close-ups and full-body shots, different angles and expressions, a variety of outfits, well lit and high resolution.
Leave out: group photos, hats, sunglasses, pets in frame, heavy filters, screenshots, blurry photos, and anything more than a couple of years old.
You type a short description of what you want. The word "avatar" has to be in it — that's how HeyGen knows who you mean.
Copy these, changing the outfit each time:
change avatar outfit to a navy blazer, standing, full body, vertical 9:16 framing, plain office backgroundchange avatar clothing to a casual polo, standing, full body, vertical 9:16 framing, warm living room backgroundavatar standing outdoors on a residential street, business casual, full body, vertical 9:16 framingchange avatar outfit to a dress shirt, standing, full body, vertical 9:16 framing, bright modern officeWhy four and not one? Your short videos publish twice a day — around 60 a month. If every one shows you in the same shirt in the same room, people notice, and it starts to look automated. Four outfits reads like a real person.
"Taller than it is wide" is not enough. It has to be phone-shaped.
Hold your phone up next to the picture in your Avatars list. If the look is noticeably wider and stubbier than your phone screen, it won't work — generate it again and be more insistent about vertical framing.
The Boss checks this automatically. If none of your looks are the right shape, your videos will stop rather than publish looking broken, and you'll see a message telling you why.
avatar seated at a desk in a bright office, wide shot, professional
You publish those far less often, so one is plenty.
These names show up in The Boss when you pick one. Name them plainly: Tall - Navy Blazer, Tall - Casual Polo, Tall - Outdoors, Wide - Desk.
Don't use looks with moving backgrounds. They're capped at 15 seconds and your videos are longer than that. Stick to still backgrounds.
HeyGen charges you in two separate places. Almost everyone gets this wrong.
There are two separate pots of money, and money in one does not pay for the other.
| Your API balance | Your monthly plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Pays for | Videos The Boss makes for you | Videos you make yourself on heygen.com |
| In practice | Your two daily short videos | Your "Living In [City]" videos |
| How it works | Prepaid dollars, topped up like a gift card | Monthly credits included with your plan |
| If it runs out | Your daily videos stop | You can't make videos on the website |
Your two daily short videos always come from The Boss, so the API balance is not optional. Stage 5 sets it up. The monthly plan is the part you get to choose.
These come off your API balance. Nothing to decide here — but there is one lever, and it's entirely yours.
| Your daily short videos | Cost |
|---|---|
| One video, 30 seconds | $2.00 |
| Two a day | $4.00 a day |
| Two a day, for a month | $120 |
| One a day — reject the other | $60 |
When you reject a video, it's rejected before it's made — so it costs you nothing. If $120 a month is more than you want to spend, approve one a day instead of two and you've halved it. That's why the reject button is there.
These are the long ones on YouTube — 15 to 25 minutes about a town or neighborhood. The Boss writes the script and the shot list either way. The only question is whether your avatar reads it or you do.
The money is the same. Pick on preference, not price.
| Your city videos | Use your avatar | Be on camera |
|---|---|---|
| You build it in | HeyGen Studio | Riverside |
| Monthly cost | $29 | $29 |
| Where b-roll comes from | You film it — free | Riverside generates it — 4 to 6 clips included |
| Your time | An hour or two | Filming, plus editing |
You may want more b-roll than your plan includes. On Riverside, four to six generated clips come with the $29. A long city video might want more, and that's an extra cost — but you decide, and you'll see it before you spend it.
A trick worth knowing: most people making these put up one background — a map of the area, or a skyline shot — and leave it on screen for a minute or two while they talk. You need far fewer clips than you'd think, and four to six usually covers a whole video.
And you don't have to edit it yourself. An editor runs about $75 to $100 per video. If your time is worth more than that, hire it out — plenty of agents do.
600 credits a month — about 30 minutes of avatar video, comfortably one city video, since only the parts where your avatar is talking cost credits.
Skip this if you're going on camera. You'd be paying HeyGen for credits you never spend — Riverside is your tool instead.
If you're building videos in HeyGen yourself, the free plan stamps a watermark across everything you export and caps you at three videos a month. You need Creator.
Three settings. Get them wrong and your videos stop with no warning.
This is a different page from your monthly plan. If you are looking at plans and prices, you are in the wrong place — you want the one showing a dollar balance and an Add funds button.
Both numbers have to be comfortably bigger than one video. Don't set the threshold to $1 or $5.
Auto-reload adds money when your balance drops below your threshold. But a video that costs more than your remaining balance gets rejected instead of made — so it doesn't spend anything, so your balance never drops, so auto-reload never fires.
You end up stuck: a few dollars sitting there forever, videos silently failing every day, and an auto-reload that looks switched on and does nothing. Setting both numbers well above the cost of one video is what prevents it.
If it hasn't moved at all, something isn't working. Say so and we'll look.
The last step. Nothing runs until this is done.
Where it lives in HeyGen: your account settings. Paste it somewhere safe the moment you copy it. HeyGen shows it once.
If you paste the key into a notes app first, check that it still starts with a lowercase letter. Some apps helpfully capitalise the first letter, which breaks the key — and the only error you'll see is a meaningless "unauthorized."
Log in at app.homebossai.com, click Connections in the left menu, find the HeyGen card, and paste the key.
If it refuses the key, it's almost always the capitalisation above. Copy it fresh from HeyGen and try again.
New looks you make in HeyGen do not reach The Boss on their own. Every time you generate looks — today and any time in the future — come back here and click Refresh my looks.
Skip it and The Boss won't know your new looks exist. Your videos will stop, and it'll look like the setup failed when actually it just hasn't been told.
From here on, The Boss writes the script, you read it and approve the words, and the video makes itself. You'll never be on camera again.
Two things to remember months from now: if you ever make new looks in HeyGen, come back and click Refresh my looks, and keep an eye on your API balance. Those are the only two things that stop working if left alone.