Lumen5

@judy_orr Thank you so much for your support! As makers, there's really no better feeling than to hear that the products we make are delivering real value! The idea for Lumen5 sprung from the observation that most existing video editing tools were built for the film industry. As mobile devices became more common, data plans got cheaper, videos became a core part of the way we convey and consume information. We saw a new breed of video in the form of social videos, and they tend to be much simpler than your average blockbuster film. As a result, we felt there was a need for a simpler video creator, built specifically to help brands and businesses create engaging social videos! I'm a strong believer that good design, and especially good A.I. should be invisible to the user. Our hope is to deliver the feeling that "it just works" and nobody knows why! Of course, behind the scenes, lots of stuff are happening: We use Natural Language Processing algorithms to automatically summarize content and highlight important keywords. Our A.I. automatically matches each scene with relevant media files through constantly improved searching and matching algorithms. Scene lengths are all automatically calculated based on the amount of content on display so there's no need for a timeline. Components are automatically re-positioned and adjusted when dynamically switching between wide, square, and tall aspect ratios. The list goes on, and on, and on! Simplicity is truly the ultimate sophistication!

@nerdybff Welcome aboard! The blog to video feature is quite neat. I see that you have 58 pages of blog posts you've written over the years! Since videos tend to be a bit shorter than blog posts content-wise, I often recommend creating 3 or 4 videos out of a single blog post. You have about 12 blog posts on a page, and 58 pages of posts, and if you create 3 videos per post, that's over 2000 videos! Re-purposing content into video has been a game-changer for a lot of users we work with. It's a really low cost way to get tons of engagement and expose your content to new platforms like Instagram and definitely Instagram Stories!

@lily_martin That's awesome! We hear about the time & money savings a lot. I've often heard stories of people spending thousands of dollars hiring professional video editors, then waiting weeks for completion, but by the time you get the video and post the video, it gets drowned out and swept away by the rapid streams of social media! Consistency has never been more important when it comes to creating video content. With formats like Instagram Stories, video creation has become an important daily practice. Every design decision we make is all around how to make it as easy as possible to create the best and most eye-catching video with a user experience that's simple enough to have you making new videos every single day, and maybe multiple videos per day! We're always working on new themes and styles to make our videos even more eye-catching :)

@josh_kilen So great to hear that you're creating videos for your clients! This is actually one of my favorite use cases. I often hear about how users are rapidly producing high-quality videos for clients with quick turnaround times. Speed is really key when it comes to client work and it sure sounds like Lumen5 has been helping professionals like you achieve this speed without sacrificing quality. Great that you brought up ads as well! This is an emerging use case that I've been hearing more and more about. There's a great quote where it says that "the best ads will last for 7 days" meaning that even the most exciting creative will drop in performance once people have seen it before. Long story short, advertisers really need to create new ad creatives on a weekly basis to stay fresh and top-of-mind. Traditionally you hire a video editor for thousands of dollars and wait weeks for completion, so it's impossible to run new video ads every week, and the new approach with Lumen5 is changing this dynamic! I've seen users A/B test 20 different video ads with different media and copy, and ad strategies like these are made possible with the great A.I. work that our engineers build on everyday!

@anna_konovodova Amazing! Thank you so much for being there with us from the start! I still remember the old days when rendering took hours. Along the way, we figured out so many cool and innovative ways to drastically reduce render time and now videos only take a minute or so to produce. The product is where it is today thanks to the feedback from early users like yourselves! Please keep them coming and we promise to keep making Lumen5 better and better!

@souite_home I love that you used the word evolving and I wouldn't describe it any other way! I have the pleasure of working with the most brilliant and customer-focused team, and we're talking to our active (and inactive) users everyday to learn about how we can evolve the product in the right direction. It's been an extremely fun challenge evolving a product in a rapidly evolving space. When we first launched our initial MVP, I don't think Instagram Stories were even a thing! Over time we've had to shape the product towards new social trends and new trending platforms, and this rapidly shifting landscape has really forced us to stay on our toes and never get complacent with where our product is. The challenge and difficulty of this task attracted the most diligent talent and I'm continuously impressed with every new member we bring onto the team! It was a little overwhelming at first when it was just Chris, Nigel, and I... but I think we've managed to surround ourselves with a truly impressive team and I have no doubt we can push the product much further!