Issue #33
Hey! I’m Alyssa X, a serial entrepreneur building 12+ products by myself. This email is part of my maker journey, which you’re subscribed to. Feel free to forward it to others if you find it interesting! You can support me through GitHub Sponsors, I’d really appreciate it! ❤️
Hey all,
Like I mentioned in my last issue, I’ve been working on a new version of Screenity. I figured it might be nice to share my thinking behind it, as well as some of the progress, as I go along.
Incompatibility
When I first set out to rebuild Screenity, I imagined it would be a pretty quick and straightforward process. After all, I had created it all from scratch myself just a few years ago, and I have learnt so much more since then, so surely it would be a simple undertaking.
Unfortunately that couldn’t be further from the truth. While the development part of the equation has indeed been fairly easy, I had largely underestimated the research and planning involved for it, if I wanted it to be successful. Sure, I could just mindlessly give the extension a facelift, play it by intuition, but it feels unnecessarily risky, especially when the user base is so big.
My first step, then, was understanding the current predicament of the product. I gathered that my audience was made up of a variety of demographics (teachers, students, designers, developers, marketers, founders…), brought together by three things: the feature offering, the open source and privacy-friendly nature of the tool, and its cost, or rather the lack of.
For this new version, given it would be paid (I would still keep a completely free version alongside it), I could only really capitalize on the first two aspects. The problem though is that being free was really the main selling point of it, which made users switch from products like Loom or Screencastify, as I could provide them with the same or better features without any limitations or paywalls.
This made me realize that the paid version would likely need to have a different audience, the kind that would be willing to pay for the product. And who would that be?
Analysis paralysis
Needless to say, this shook things up quite a bit for me. I went from, hey, let’s just add a lot of awesome new functionality on top of this and ship it, to hmm, maybe take a step back, and really think it through.
You see, this opened up a path of possibilities. I was no longer bound to what I built a few years ago. The paid version could take on any shape imaginable, catered to any kind of user, maybe even a specific niche, as long as I kept the free one consistent. The trick would then be to use the existing version as a way to generate trust and social proof for the paid one, so it could convert better. Also, if I kept it generalized enough, a subset of users could still be interested in upgrading, even if only a minority.
I came up with all sorts of ideas. What if I targeted designers, with a Screenity integration for Figma, with templates for design critiques, helping create a design system knowledge base, documenting everything to onboard new members to the design team or better hand over to the developers… Or how about for entrepreneurs, or founders, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to record product demos, stylish teasers for Product Hunt and social media, or helping with marketing and sales with recorded video messages?
I must have spent weeks daydreaming about what Screenity could eventually become. But in that present, it was more like a nightmare for me. I had an abundance of choice, and I had to figure out how to make a decision, quickly.
Keep it simple, stupid
In order to move forward, I used a variety of methods. With the process of elimination, I removed any far-fetched or flawed ideas. I also considered the risk and reward; while for instance I could tap into the education sector, it is currently dominated largely by Screencastify, and it is generally not a very profitable market. Since I wanted to move relatively fast, I also discarded any ideas that would take too long, as well as any that would be too costly to implement. Or in some cases, I considered the impact on things like the branding itself, as it all would still fall under the same umbrella, so I should make sure it remained compatible for both, without diluting or “tainting” the brand.
Ultimately, I decided to discard them all for the time being, and I looked at things from a different angle. Maybe the solution had been staring at me, all this time. It’s true that by making the new version paid I would put off a subset of my existing users, but that doesn’t mean I should pivot into a niche. I could still keep it generalized, and attract external users through the features and open source component. That would also give me the choice, in the future, to focus more on a specific market. And on top of that, it still leaves open the possibility for users to upgrade, if they so choose. Much simpler to implement, and faster, too.
I just had to come up with unique features to set the paid version apart from others, and think of a better hook for the open source / privacy model. For the former, I already have a lot of creative and useful functionality in mind, that no other screen recorder currently has (so I will probably keep quiet about it for now 😅). And for the latter, I came up with the idea of allowing companies to self-host Screenity in their own servers, so they would be fully in control of their own videos, and I’d just provide the software. It could even be modular, or customizable to their needs.
Closing notes
Well, this ended up being longer than expected. I wanted to share with you some of the visuals of the product and interactions, but I think I will keep it for next time (or I might tweet something out, who knows…). I’d also love to share my thinking on the design side of things, since I really took a rather unorthodox approach which I am pretty excited about.
That’s all for now though, thanks for reading (would love to hear your thoughts too!).
See you,
Alyssa X