When it comes to video editing, there is a plenty of software out there. Right from Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Apple’s Final Cut Pro to online video editing services such as Wave.video and Veed. However, all of them require you to edit the video frame by frame. What if there was a simpler way to edit videos? Or what if what you need to edit isn’t a video with multiple different frames, but an interview? Wouldn’t it be cool if you can edit it by looking at the interview responses, and removing extra pauses, redundancies, and more? Enter Type Studio – which as the name suggests – is a text-based video editor. What makes Type Studio even more powerful is that it can work via your browser itself. We got a chance to interact with Michael Sieb, who leads growth at the startup to understand how they got the idea for it, its journey till now, and more.
PS: the interview has been edited for the sake of brevity.
Table of Contents
1) Before we talk about Type Studio itself, could you share your journey into the world of SaaS?
I have always been interested in the startup scene and SaaS tools. And my interest is specifically towards B2C SaaS products, unlike the enterprise-focused offerings. During my studies as a medical engineer, I pursued different ideas from time to time. It became really concrete when I started my master’s in Computer Science. During that time, I worked as a working student in a German tech accelerator in my hometown.
I started working on an idea with friends at that time. It was a microlearning app. We wanted to summarize educational content just like Blinkist does for books. It was already a SaaS business. However, we pivoted after a few months because we discovered a huge problem. The solution for that turned resulted in Type Studio.
2) What gaps did you see in the market for launching Type Studio?
When we validated our initial idea and talked to a lot of online course creators, we realized that while they were experts in their field, they had no experience with video editing. Additionally, we created content ourselves for our micro-learning app and realized how painful it is to create content-focused videos.
Hence, we started Type Studio because we got frustrated with the way video editing is today. A typical video editing experience is counterintuitive when compared to everything within the modern conventions of UI design and functionality. There are so many buttons, dials, knobs, settings, and keyboard shortcuts to remember, that learning how it all works becomes, in and of itself, an exercise in patience and resolve. For content-focused video editing, you don’t need most of the features offered by most editing software, and the barrier to entry is very steep. With our text-based approach, we achieve exactly this simplicity of use, so that anyone can create outstanding videos without having any video editing skills.
3) Could you tell us about Type Studio’s evolution since its inception last year?
We launched Type Studio in March 2020. Just like we learned in the Accelerator back then to validate the idea first, we just talked to a lot of content creators first to understand how they create videos and where the problems are. After some time, we worked on building our very first MVP. This was really lean and could only transcribe the language from the video and display that text. You could then delete sentences or words and click the export button, which then rendered the video in the background. We quickly realized that this way was too abstract, and people wanted a video preview to see how the cuts would affect the video. So, we went on to further develop our MVP. We launched our first public beta version on Product Hunt on 07/07/2020.
Since then, Type Studio has continued to evolve. And even today, not all the basic video editing features have been created. There is still a long way to go to get our product to the state where we see it. At the same time, Type Studio is already at a point where it brings a lot of value to our users.
4) Could you share how many customers do you have now? What’s the split between users and businesses using Type Studio?
We currently stand at over 13k users. Most of our users are from the marketing sector and produce videos for social media. Though, we have people from a wide variety of industries. Simply put, wherever content-focused videos are created, Type Studio helps for the easiest and fastest way to edit videos without having any video editing experience.
As we get more requests from companies, we are currently rolling out our enterprise plan. This means that in the future, more B2B plans will be sold in addition to our current B2C approach.
5) Video editing space is quite competitive – with both established players as well as new-age companies in the fray. What makes Type Studio stand out?
Type Studio makes text-based video editing in the browser unique. It is a completely new approach to video editing. We don’t see ourselves as a direct competitor to established players like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut, who develop professional software for experts. Type Studio is much more made for people who have never edited videos before and want to get started easily. For content-focused videos, it makes more sense to edit the video based on the content rather than skipping through a timeline and putting different layers on top of each other. In a way, Type Studio is a no-code video editor. We lower the entry barrier for people to create beautiful videos. Our goal is to democratize video editing.
Type Studio can be considered as a no-code video editor
6) Could you shed a light on your marketing strategy?
Through our many Product Hunt launches, we have received a lot of initial attention. Meanwhile, some of our landing pages rank organically. Another big driver is word of mouth, as people like to talk and report about new technologies. In addition, we invest a lot of time and effort in creating YouTube videos to cover every problem people are looking for and to have a suitable tutorial.
7) What’s next for Type Studio? Any new features that you are working on?
As I mentioned earlier, we are currently working on the enterprise plan and the associated functions. This includes things like collaborative working or role management. Our roadmap of features is long. We always validate and prioritize them based on feedback from our users, with whom we try to be as close as possible. For example, an integrated web and screen recorder is coming.
8) What has been your experience in launching and building a product amidst the pandemic?
I think pandemic has pushed the whole area of video creation and editing faster. You can see that in the overall growth of the industry. At the same time, like probably everyone, we had an incredibly difficult time when it comes to the fundamental way you work. A couple of times we were in the home office during lockdowns and realized that this was not helping our way of working. The daily conversations that were so natural for coordination and collaboration before because we were all sitting together at the same table no longer took place. On the other hand, working with our remote team works super well.
9) What are your favorite SaaS software out there?
Microsoft Clarity is an underrated gem that helps you understand your website visitors by exploring their heatmaps.
I think there are a few. Since I spend a lot of time on Product Hunt, I discover new SaaS solutions practically every day. Some of them that are part of my everyday life are Notion to organize my tasks, Slack to communicate with the team. For my work, I use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs for SEO. For tracking and capturing data from the app, we use Amplitude. A secret tip that I guess fewer people know yet is Clarity from Microsoft. It’s a free tool that records your website visitors. With it, you can observe the user behavior super well under real conditions and make optimizations for the user experience. I guess there is no such an underestimated tool like Clarity.
