How we built a better feature by removing it... for 2 YEARS
Today Tella launched a completely new version of our video trimming feature. It's full of small changes that make editing a screen recording faster and easier.
It also includes a big change that users have wanted for over a year.
✂️ SPLITTING ✂️
Splitting is when you cut a video clip into multiple parts. The duration of the parts can be adjusted, and parts can be removed completely. It's a handy tool for removing umms, ahhhs, mistakes, silences, and other stuff you don't want in your video.
But building splitting is hard. You have to deal with lots of video files, timecodes, rendering, re-rendering, browser memory, and a complicated UX. None of these challenges crossed our mind when we built the first version of Tella.
When we started Tella we shipped a lot of stuff, very quickly... by copying features from other video editing apps. Apps like Veed, Screenflow, Kapwing, Descript, and Clipchamp all had splitting. So splitting was right at the top of our backlog.
But ours sucked. 👎
It was slow, inaccurate, hard to use, and it made editing the rest of a video difficult. Our copy-cat split tool was a nightmare.
The longer it was live, the more problems appeared. Bug after bug, complaint after complaint. So we removed it. Completely.
With no way to remove parts of a video we asked ourselves if users would come back. Would we get new ones? Was this the end of Tella??? Was splitting the make or break feature????
The thing is, Tella isn't really video editor. In fact, it's much less video editor, and much more screen recorder. Our users told us we were like a souped-up version of Loom. They didn't want to make polished social ads, they wanted to make product demos.
Realising that our best users didn't care about advanced editing — and the technical nightmare off our shoulders — we got to spend time on more important things, that actually helped users, and helped us grow.
Fast forward a year or so. 🌀
Tella looks less like weekend hack and more like an actual product that makes money. Our users are creating more interesting videos, longer videos, videos for bigger audiences... and they want splitting.
As the splitting requests became more frequent we knew we had to give it another crack.
This time, instead of copying an unrelated video editing app, we built splitting the way users actually want. It also turns out that if you stick at something for a while you understand it better.
Our new version of splitting is more performant, accurate, and stable. Users like it too.
"this has been much awaited. All the features are spot-on"
"just tried the new trim/split tool and its even better than expected"
"keep these updates coming!!! so good. also awesome stuff with the waveform and marker updates"
Moral of the story? Copying stuff is a shortcut, so be prepared to find your own way if the shortcut gets you lost. Talking to your users will help you avoid taking shortcuts, and it'll helps when you're lost too.
