What made you build your product in the first place?

ClickClips didn't start with a business plan, a market analysis, or some brilliant idea about disrupting video editing. It started much more simply: I was streaming a lot, mostly Call of Duty: Warzone, and at some point I realized that I had neither the time nor the energy to do anything useful with all the video I was producing.

A normal session for me could easily last three or four hours. When you play the same game regularly, those recordings accumulate surprisingly fast. At first, you think you'll remember where the good moments were. Maybe there was a great fight in the third match, something funny happened an hour later, or you had one of those rare games where everything somehow worked.

A few days later, though, all those matches start blending together. I honestly couldn't remember whether a particular moment happened yesterday, two streams ago, or somewhere in the middle of another four-hour recording. So if I wanted to post something on YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram, I basically had to watch my own stream again just to find the parts worth clipping.

Streaming for four hours is one thing. Watching yourself play the same game for another four hours afterwards is a completely different kind of entertainment.

And finding the moment was only half the job.

Once I had found something worth keeping, I still had to turn a horizontal gaming video into something that worked vertically. I used tools like CapCut, which obviously can do the job, but the process was repetitive. I needed the gameplay in one area, the webcam in another, everything cropped and positioned correctly, and then I had to repeat more or less the same process with the next stream.

The minimap was another thing I didn't want to lose. In a game like Warzone, it can actually be part of the story. Sometimes you make a decision because of something you see there. You rotate in a certain direction, notice another team, decide to push or back away. If you crop the gameplay badly and remove the minimap, part of the context disappears with it.

After doing this enough times, I stopped thinking, "How can I edit this faster?" and started thinking, "Why am I doing all of this manually in the first place?"

The first version was just a Python script

My original idea was much smaller than the application eventually became. I wasn't trying to build some large AI video product. I just wanted a lightweight Windows tool that could take a horizontal recording, turn it into a usable vertical layout and help me break a long stream into smaller pieces that were easier to review.

The first thing I tried was audio.

With Warzone, a lot of interesting moments leave a pretty obvious trace in the audio. Gunfire gets louder, explosions happen, people start talking over each other, reactions become stronger. If you look at the waveform of a long gaming session, many of those moments stand out naturally.

So I wrote a simple Python script around that idea.

There was no interface. No buttons. No installer. I would put the path to a video file into the code, run it, and the script would look for audio peaks and cut sections around them. That was basically the whole product.

It wasn't elegant, but it solved part of the problem. And once that worked, the next problems became obvious.

Could the webcam be detected automatically instead of selecting it every time? Could the gameplay area be detected? What about the minimap? Could speech help find moments where something important was said? Could some kind of AI analysis do a better job than just looking at audio? What happens when you have not one long recording, but five or ten of them waiting to be processed?

That is more or less how the application grew. Not because I had a roadmap with twenty features from day one, but because every time I removed one repetitive step, I noticed the next repetitive step sitting behind it.

The interesting part for me isn't really the feature list

Looking back, what I find more interesting than the application itself is how the whole thing started.

The original problem was very ordinary: I had more video than I had time to process.

I wasn't sitting there thinking about market size or trying to invent a SaaS idea. I just didn't want to spend another evening rewatching yesterday's stream to find the good two minutes hidden somewhere inside four hours of footage.

The first solution wasn't impressive either. It was a Python script that only I could realistically use.

But it solved something annoying enough that I kept working on it.

And I suspect a lot of products probably start this way. Not with a grand product vision, but with someone getting tired of doing the same stupid thing over and over again.

That's actually what I'm curious about

This is the part I'd be more interested in hearing from other makers about.

How did you arrive at your product?

Did you notice a problem in your own work and eventually decide to solve it? Did a customer keep asking for something that didn't exist? Did you see another product and think you could make a better version? Or did you simply notice a market opportunity and build around that?

I'm especially interested in products that started from a personal problem, because in that case you already know what the annoying parts are before you write the first line of code. You know which steps waste time. You know what sounds useful in theory but isn't particularly useful when you're actually doing the work.

For me, ClickClips started because I was tired of going through hours of my own gaming footage.

The first version was just a script looking for audio peaks.

Everything else came afterwards.

So if you're building something now, what was the original problem that pushed you to start? And what did the very first, probably ugly, version of your solution look like?

I'd genuinely like to read those stories.

By Sergiy Rudomotov