I stopped keyframing overlays and built a tool instead

So here's the thing. I've spent 15 years in building automation — KNX systems, smart home controllers, industrial interfaces. Sales, product quality, bridging customers with engineering teams. Not exactly the "I learned to code at 12" founder story.

About 6 months ago I started recording tutorials for the building automation market. Screen recordings in DaVinci Resolve — how to configure controllers, set up interfaces, that kind of stuff. The recording part was fine. The editing part nearly broke me.

I kept needing one stupid thing: a pulsing rectangle around a UI button. Or an arrow pointing at a menu item. Or a spotlight on a wiring diagram. Basic visual cues that every tutorial needs.

And every single time, Google told me the same thing: "Use After Effects."

After Effects. $23/month. For a pulsing rectangle.

I tried the alternatives. CapCut has effects, but they're made for TikTok trends — hearts and sparkles, not clean technical highlights. Premiere has basically nothing built-in for this. You either keyframe it yourself (20 minutes for a 3-second animation) or buy Envato templates and spend another 20 minutes customizing them.

At some point I just thought — okay, nobody is solving this properly. I'll do it myself.

What I actually built

ShapeLoop is stupidly simple on purpose. You pick a shape (circle, rectangle, arrow, spotlight), choose a color, select an animation effect, and export a transparent video file. Drag it into your editor's timeline. That's the entire product.

No AI. No timeline. No keyframes. You get an animated overlay file and you put it in your video. Done.

The part that turned out to be genuinely hard: transparent video formats are a mess. Different editors support different things:

• MOV ProRes 4444 — works in Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci. Files are huge tho.
• WebM VP9 with alpha — smaller files, but only a few editors support it (Filmora, Blender, OBS, a couple others).
• Green Screen MP4 — the fallback for mobile editors like CapCut Mobile that don't do alpha channels at all.

So I built this thing where you click your editor's logo and the format auto-selects. Tested across 17 editors. Sounds boring, but honestly thats probably the feature people appreciate most. No more googling "why does my overlay have a black background in Filmora."

Where I'm at right now (honest numbers)

I'll be straight with you — my only paying customer so far is myself, testing whether checkout actually works. So technically not zero revenue, but I wouldn't put that in a pitch deck.

What I do have:

• Working product with 18 animation effects
• Free overlay pack thats getting downloads (9 files — green screen MP4s + static PNGs)
• A TikTok account where I post my actual editing workflow. ~300 views per video on a fresh account. Not viral, not dead.
• My first Reddit post got auto-removed by spam filters because new account + link = instant kill. Classic.
• SEO is basically broken right now. Google "shapeloop" and you'll find an RNA research tool and an Italian 3D printing company before you find me. Working on it.

So yeah. It's early. Really early.

What I've learned building this

The export format thing taught me something. Creators don't care about codecs. They care about their editor. "Pick your editor, we handle the format" — that one line communicates more value than any feature list I could write.

Defaults matter more than options. Every preset in ShapeLoop is export-ready. A beginner's first download should look professional without touching a single setting. If someone has to configure something to not look bad — thats a design failure.

And honestly — building in public means showing the ugly parts. My TikTok has 300 views. My Reddit post got removed. I have zero revenue. I'm writing about it anyway because every founder I actually respect was honest about day 1.

What ShapeLoop is NOT

I think this matters more than what it is:

• Not a video editor. You still need CapCut or Premiere or whatever you use.
• Not a motion graphics suite. No timelines, no layers, no keyframes.
• Not an After Effects replacement for complex work. If you need particle systems and 3D tracking, this isn't it.

It does one thing — animated overlay files — and it does that one thing fast. Thats the whole pitch.

What's next

Discord community for early users. More shape categories (callouts, lower thirds, pointers). Pre-made packs — YouTube Kit, Tutorial Kit, Streaming Kit. But I won't launch any pack with fewer than 5-6 solid elements because a half-empty pack looks worse than no pack.

And fixing SEO. Because if Google can't find you, nothing else matters.

→ shapeloop.io

One question for you: what overlay or visual element takes you the longest to create in your current editing workflow? I'm genuinely building the next features based on what people tell me.