How to Make a Business Video That Shows the Product Instead of Talking About It

When a small software company decides it needs a business video, it nearly always makes one of three things. The first is a founder talking to camera about why they started the company. The second is a tour of the office and the team, and the third is a montage of the product with music and a voice listing benefits.

All three cost a lot for a small budget and answer questions nobody asked. The person who found you has a specific problem and wants to know whether your software solves it.

What to make instead

Record someone using your product to finish the job your customers ask about most often. It costs an afternoon and needs no camera, studio or presenter, and six months from now it will be the only video from this list still doing any good.

If you have a support inbox, the subject line that comes up most is your first video. If you do not have one yet, pick whatever you find yourself explaining on every sales call.

The afternoon, step by step

• Write the task as one sentence with a finish line. "Send a client their first invoice" works, while "show the billing features" does not, because nothing finishes.
• Set up a clean account with realistic but fake data. Avoid your real customers, and avoid an empty demo account with nothing in it.
• Start a screen recording before you begin, and keep it running when something goes wrong.
• Do the task, and say what you are clicking and why as you go.
• At the end, show the proof, such as the invoice arriving in the other inbox. The confirmation screen alone is not enough.
• Cut the dead air, correct the auto-generated captions and publish.

The result runs two to four minutes. If the task takes longer, the video can too, as long as you neither pad it nor rush it.

Keep the part where it went wrong

Keeping it will feel wrong the first time, and it is the most valuable minute you will record.

A take where everything worked shows that someone who already knew how can use your product. A take where something went wrong shows that someone who did not know can use it as well.

Add a line at the end saying what went wrong first and what fixed it. A customer will search for exactly that at eleven at night, and if your site does not have it, a forum using your product's name will.

Why not the founder video

A founder video has its moment, usually a funding announcement or a real change of direction, and when that moment comes it is worth making well. As a small company's first video it is a poor choice, for a practical reason: you cannot reuse it.

A product task video can be linked from a support reply, embedded in a help article, attached to a sales email, cut into a thirty-second clip for social and re-recorded when the product changes. A founder monologue gets watched once by people who were already interested.

What it costs

The first video takes an afternoon, mostly spent setting up the clean account and getting used to recording yourself. The second takes about ninety minutes, and by the fifth you are down to an hour.

Free tools are enough: your operating system's screen recorder, DaVinci Resolve for editing and YouTube for hosting. The full list is in video marketing tools for software companies, and how to make a marketing video for a software product describes the process in more detail.

Make one video, then decide

Make one video and link it the next three times somebody asks that question. If linking it saved you from writing the answer three times, that settles the question and gives you the business case for the next one.

It is a better test than any amount of planning, and it takes a week.