From Spending $20,000 to $0

How we make videos quickly, easily, and — most importantly — cheaply.

At a previous job, our marketing team set budgeted $20,000 for the production cost of a few explainer videos at a video agency. With Next Release, I think we got the same impact spending exactly $0.

How? We used Loom.

Loom lets you record a video of your screen (and optionally of your webcam) .

Granted, this title is a little link bait-y, because professional motion designers, voice talent, and editors are probably 10x better than me and my MacBook Pro (with broken keys) and I actually use the pro version ($8/mo), but hey, who is counting?

Here are some of the way’s we use loom:

1. Record personalized welcome videos for our initial customers (which had mixed results and I no longer do these)

2. Record detail explainer how-to features. I find this easier than writing help documentation and they are easier to change when we add new features (although at the cost of more SEO)

3. I created a <LoomPlayer /> component that takes an id of a video and uses a thumbnail of the video as a button to open the embedded player in a modal