Case study

Easy integration allowed Tella to build their product in 1.5 months

Tella is a collaborative online video editor for screen and camera recordings. Although there are many video products emerging, Tella sets itself apart with its specific use case. If other video platforms are like creating a Slack message–quick with low production–Tella is the video equivalent of a slide deck or blog post–an artifact that requires more editing, thought, and more permanent.

When co-founders Grant Shaddick and Michiel Westerbeek first started Tella in May 2020, they looked to build a video pipeline themselves. Michiel investigated AWS but realized there were some details he didn’t know, i.e. what devices to target. Michiel found Mux, and even though he was still in the mindset of wanting to build a solution himself, implemented Mux and saw how easy it was to use.

“Why spend a lot of time maintaining all this stuff on our own if we can just do it with Mux? Also, Mux is pay per minute stored and streamed so I didn’t have a huge upfront cost to convert files,” said Michiel.

Mux doesn’t just offer ease, but also focus

Besides being easy, the team had other product requirements they needed. One was fast video playback. Tella has multiple video elements that play on the page at the same time so it looks like one video playing. They needed video playback to be fast, otherwise, if one video takes a long time loading, it'd impact the whole experience. Mux, with its just-in-time encoding, is able to help Tella achieve the video experience they’re looking for.

Because of Mux, the Tella team was able to build the first version of their product in just 1.5 months. “If at the start, I had to do all this myself before we could even stream any video, we’d be in a bad spot. We’re where we are now due to how easy Mux was to use,” said Michiel.

“It’s also about focus. We’re becoming more knowledgeable about video now but coming into this we weren’t video experts. We decided we wanted to solve this problem for people. So not to have to worry about this massive, complex black box, just means we can focus on what we are good at, which is building the experience for our users,” said Grant.

Launch and beyond

When Tella publicly launched in July, they were enthusiastically received reaching #4 on ProductHunt and top 10 for the week.

“Our long-term vision is that we want to build a new kind of presentation tool that’s based around the screen and camera as the main source of video. Video editing can be prohibitive and we want to make it as intuitive as possible so people who have content and expertise, but aren’t video editors, can get their content out there,” said Grant.