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Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#103

Post by destraynor »

pando11 wrote: post #48

Hi everyone! I'm the CEO of Arcade (who a few people have already mentioned...thanks!). +1 to that being ScreenStudio. Sometimes people import ScreenStudio videos into Arcade to add branching, annotations, and get analytics about who is engaging with the tool. We're about to announce a big release on May 17th which will be very relevant - we're going to show how you can capture beyond the browser and get even more po…

Thanks for featuring Intercom in your site :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#105

Post by tomgs »

peteforde wrote: post #67

Arcade looks genuinely great, so thanks for posting this question. Several folks have already mentioned that the real value of screen capture tools is to create assets that can be used by a person whose job it is to explain abstract concepts to an audience. I would go so far as to say that if you're a founder, hiring someone who is really good at product videos is something you should 100% outsource even if you're ta…

I actually do that as a service for companies:

https://syntaxcinema.dev

I think that product tutorials are somewhat of a black art. On the one hand you have:

1. Keeping the flow moving and the video fast-paced and interesting

2. Adding aftereffects and other visual niceties

3. Pointing out the relevant bits with zooms, highlights, etc...

But on a deeper level, you also have questions of:

1. Am I using the right sample app to demonstrate my use case?

2. Is the feature I'm using bulletproof? Do I need to change something in the DOM of the application since that feature is not 100%? Do I need to not show a piece since it's irrelevant? Do I need to speed through or flip over from things while they're running / fetching / compiling / generating etc...?

3. And, maybe most importantly, what is the message I intended to deliver? Is that a product overview? A documentation-oriented video? A demo for a conference or a customer? Who's my audience? Am I speaking to them?

I've been doing videos for a while, and I found that the second part of the problem is actually not as easy as one would assume.

I applaud great YouTubers for that - they cracked how to do walkthroughs of products that are not only technically interesting, but also visually pleasing.

I'm a bit of a video nerd, I guess. I started out way back when doing these little nuggets of absolute terribleness (oh my god the thumbnail) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM7w0mARnn4ytxM6s-0b...

And happy to say I improved a little bit from then :)

(that website's pretty new, comments more than welcome)

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#109

Post by magundu »

devops000 wrote: post #107

the biggest pain for product demo is to have fake user data to populate the UI.

This is the main problem we are facing right now.

We are looking for tools that can generate fake data(may be based on our small set of data) for live demo setup.

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#110

Post by uncertainrhymes »

No specifically for video, but I've always had a soft spot for this site:

https://tiffzhang.com/startup/

It semi-randomly creates the site of a recently-launched startup. It is nine years old now, and completely nailed the overused style of the time.

The company names are also excellent. I wonder how many accidentally became real.

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