@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!

@kevin_ramirez2 So great to hear that Lumen5 has made its way into your regular routine! It's always been a fascinating challenge to balance automation and creative control. Automation speeds up the process, but lacks the human touch. Creative control leads to a longer time to completion, but the end result is often better. This is a balance we're constantly playing with and I think Lumen5 is in a good place right now. The core user experience fully embraces automation and you can create videos in minutes (average is around 6 minutes), but over time, we've added a number of creative control tools that allows our users to spend as much time as they'd like perfecting the video. Both approaches are totally viable and the need differs depending on the purpose of the video! We'll keep up the hard work!

@kate_everett Thanks for the kind words! It's been an amazing journey working with an amazing team, and we're very proud to have developed an amazing product :)

@joshuafechter Thanks Josh! I always love getting updates from engineering because they always seem to come up with some new and crazy way to make Lumen5 even better!

@orishnal Haha, thank you!

@elaine_sihera Thank you so much for your support, Elaine! I've been living and breathing Lumen5 for a few years now... and sometimes I wonder what I used to do before we started working on Lumen5! It's truly been a fascinating journey and we're just getting started!

@michaelhsc Sounds like my project I've been working on for a while. Sending youth most amazing good fortune because you have an excellent, professional, yet very user friendly product, Michael. Streets ahead of the competition! Pleased to be associated with Lument5. The hard work shows. :o)

@uhproduction Criticisms—we absolutely love criticisms! We practice fearless feedback and radical candor as part of our work culture, and we definitely acknowledge that meaningful growth is never supposed to be comfortable! Keep the feedback coming, don't ever stop! It's the only way we get better :) Thank you so much for your support!

@michnavarro So happy to hear that Lumen5 has helped you with your work! A few years ago,, we saw some crazy stats around "80% of internet traffic is video content" and "videos get 1200% more reach than text/images", so we thought to ourselves... if the future is video, how are people going to make videos? That's how it all began! The goal was always to help our users make awesome videos in minutes, and it's fantastic to hear that we're accomplishing this goal!

@jill_d1 It's great that you haven't had any issues at all! There has definitely been issues, but whenever they arise, we tend to work frantically to resolve them before it affects any of our users. Sounds like we've done a good job at that if you've had no issues since 2017!

@new_user_19065c0dc9 They say that for a product to be successful, "you don't need everyone to like it—just need some people to love it!" Thank you so much for being our biggest fan! :)

@koka_sexton It's been a crazy journey! Thank you for sticking with us through both the good times and the bad :) There were major technical challenges we had to overcome to get the product to where it is now... so thank you so much for not giving up on us when Lumen5 used to take hours to render videos back in the day! We promise to keep working hard and make it even better :)