Vento Screen Recorder

As always, it started with a problem that I myself encountered - I'm not the most eloquent speaker, so I'll often trip up while pitching a design, demoing a product, etc.

I'd spend an hour recording a 5-minute screen recording, and I'd hit the restart button again and again because I'd trip up 4 minutes and 55 seconds into the recording.

I'm a product designer by trade - so I followed the common design framework of "take what people are already doing and remove steps"! I thought maybe if I could just quickly trim the last few seconds and record over it I wouldn't have to keep restarting.

Enter https://vento.so/ - it reached #3 on Hacker News and got 4k upvotes on Reddit!

Please let me know if you resonate with the problem, or if you have any feedback after trying it out!

The key is to find influencers that actively post about new products to their audience. Many influencers built their followings by doing these kinds of posts, so it's sort of a win-win. Here was how I did it and I'm sure it's repeatable for many of you too.

Another important takeaway is that this channel is REPEATABLE. It's not a one-off reddit post, you can keep finding influencers on all the different social channels and engage them.

1. Searched 'tech tips' on Facebook and looked for folks who had decent followings.
2. Found how to contact him (you can google their handle or dm them on the social network, sometimes I'll use hunter.io to find their emails and set up a drip campaign to engage them.
3. I contacted him via his website contact form (https://mattymctech.com/contact-me/)
4. He posted and the post got 227k views, and brought a lot of new users to my site. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1554042221744347/?s=fb_shorts_tab&stack_idx=0

Hope this helps some of you!

Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/10kfp50/i_made_a_screen_recorder_that_lets_you_pause/

I'm a regular Loom user, and recently had an idea that would fix the constant restarting I'd have to do while screen recording. I built an MVP, and puzzled about how to get people to try it out and provide feedback, which I knew was likely the best next step to validate.

I'm also on a Boostrapped budget, so I needed a channel that would get me a lot of people, fast! So I turned to reddit - but unlike other who try and spam their message across, I took a lot of time to deliberate my message & approach. Here are my tips for you to replicate the success!

1. Find a subreddit that contains the kinds of people you're interested in testing with. In my case, my audience is pretty broad but anyone who uses desktop computers and communicates with other digital natives.

2. Study the subreddit - I mean really study it. Figure out what types of posts resonate well, and in particular, figure out what types of posts DON'T resonate well. For example, I noticed on r/InternetIsBeautiful the posts that started with "I made a X that does Y" seemed to garner a lot of attention.

3. Also, the community wasn't receptive to paid products, or products that simply looked too 'refined' or corporate. This was a subreddit for small qwerky web tools, nothing too formal. If I posted on ProductHunt for example I may have gotten a different result, since my MVP was quite raw and unpolished still.

4. Once I posted, I immediately got around 4-5 family & friends to upvote my post. This helped get it off the ground as I saw a lot of posts with 0 upvotes which ended up going nowhere. Once the algo started to pick up that this wasn't just another dead post, it took off from there.

5. I was really, really diligent about replying pretty much everyone, even those who were slamming me for one reason or another. Here's an example https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/10kfp50/comment/j5qs80k/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

That's really it! Manufactured virality :) I got more written feedback than I knew what to do with, and in particular seem to have found that my product DOES resonate with a lot of people.

Onwards and upwards :)