Type Studio, a text-based video editor developed by 4 German students, can help you make content more easily
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Podcast.
Michael Seib is one of the four German students who developed Type Studio. They help business owners get noticed by building an application that gives people easy access to video editing.
Image from LinkedIn
How Type Studio Works
Today’s advanced video editing software lacks functionality. Michael and his co-founders started the project because they themselves have struggled to create video content. With their app, they lower the entry barrier so that everyone can create great, outstanding content.
Though they’re still university students, they’re mostly concentrated on building and enhancing Type Studio, which now has 20,000 users.
Type Studio supports both video and audio files. To use it, you have to sign up, make an account, and drag-and-drop your file into their editor. The file gets automatically uploaded and transcribed, which then makes the text editable. It uses Google’s speech-to-text transcription application programming interface (API) to help them transcribe spoken words into text.
If you have bloopers and mistakes in your recordings, you can simply highlight the text and click on the delete button. The deleted words in the text will be automatically removed from your audio or video file. You can also add subtitles or translate your transcript into different languages.
Image from Type Studio’s website
Currently, Type Studio is only capable of editing recordings with one person speaking. However, Michael shared that they have a huge roadmap and they intend to implement new features soon. One of these is allowing users to edit files with two speakers. They consider this feature valuable because the direction now is that podcasts and many other recordings have more than one speaker.
Simple Tweaks Matter
Type Studio caters to content creators from all kinds of industries. It’s a horizontal business model rather than targeting a specific niche.
In general, what their users have in common is that they’re creating content-focused videos and audio podcasts. Mostly, they have people from the marketing space, such as influencers, publishing their content on different social media channels like YouTube.
Image from Type Studio’s website
According to Michael, simple tweaks can significantly leverage the quality of your output. For instance, when you add subtitles to your video, it can perform much better because most people on social media watch content without turning on the audio. If you add a nice frame and a proper headline, it can get attention from the people who are scrolling through their newsfeed.
Type Studio allows users to do that. It’s not just about cutting text and cropping video files. You can also put images and headlines and any other element that you’d want on the canvas. You can also change the background colour. Their video editor enables you to really interact with and design your video.
Creating Multiple Content
Another feature that Type Studio offers is to help users easily repurpose a single video. You can create more content from a video and use it for different social media channels that have different requirements (e.g., aspect ratio).
With their application, you can upload one video, duplicate it, and create multiple versions out of it. You can create snippets that you want to post and change their aspect ratios accordingly.
While they’re still working on users being able to share Type Studio’s output directly to social media after editing, they have already implemented some integration features. For instance, if you want to upload a video for editing, you can simply drop a YouTube, Dropbox, or Google Drive link.
After rendering your output, you also get access to a sharing page, which lets you embed the video to your website or your blog. It also features an interactive transcript below the media file. With that, you can simply share links — nobody has to actually download the file.
Apart from the social media-sharing feature, they’re also planning to launch a feature that enables you to schedule your videos for posting on your channels.
What Michael and company want is to build the whole process and make everything doable online. This prevents you from having to deal with downloading and uploading files.
Image from Unsplash
Trends and Observations
In 12 months, Type Studio has gone from zero to 20,000 users. Most of their subscribers are influencers and subject matter experts in their fields who are publishing content.
During the pandemic, Michael observed how the whole education sector has switched into the digital world. This required teachers to do online quizzes and create more online video content. These users are happy to have a lean and easy-to-use video editor that gives them the power to create the content that they need.
Most of Type Studio’s users come from Europe. In the beginning, it can only support the English language. This has expanded to almost 30 different languages. Now, there are people around the world with all kinds of languages that use Type Studio. However, their main target group would be those in the United States.
As for trends on content created on Type Studio, Michael observed that many are creating talking-head videos wherein you have a certain personality. Now, many brands are starting to have people in their companies create this type of content — as opposed to simply using stock images, footage, or animated things. They want to have that personal feel.
To get noticed, Michael shared that there’s a need to post content more frequently. And Type Studio, as mentioned, can help with that because you can easily create multiple snippets or different kinds of content from one video. You don’t have to hire a big agency to create all that content for you.
Type Studio can also be used for internal presentations. For instance, it could be used to trim Zoom recordings of your team and share them with the whole company. Rather than sending PowerPoint presentations, an edited video of you presenting that — alongside a document — can be more remarkably successful.
Democratising Content Creation
Image from Unsplash
Type Studio uses a subscription model. It starts with a free plan where you can upload up to 10 minutes of audio or video per month. It has all the major functionalities except the translation feature.
They also offer a basic plan, priced at $12 per month; a pro plan at $28 per month. Discounts are available if you’re subscribing for an entire year.
They have also already released an enterprise plan at $45 per month. It targets companies who want to use the application with their entire team.
Two weeks after they rolled out the enterprise plan, some companies have already reached out to them. Michael considers it a big help, especially when they’re able to onboard a company with 20 licensees. With less work required, it can bring the same amount of money as getting 20 single creators.
However, Michael still emphasised how they built Type Studio for business-to-consumer (B2C) users. They’re focusing on the end-consumer level because it allows them to get user feedback directly. With that, they can implement features that people want to see on their app. This is why they plan to stick with that kind of customer: They like to interact with their users rather than simply developing a video editor.
With this technology, Michael and his co-founders are helping entrepreneurs become content creators themselves. And it’s delightful to see how technology can democratise content creation. To learn more about them, visit www.typestudio.co. You can also find Michael on LinkedIn or email him at michael@typestudio.co.
This article is based on a transcript from my Podcast The UnNoticed, you can listen here.
Cover image from Mia Baker on Unsplash.
