Welcome to a new episode of Tellavision. Tella's monthly video version of the newsletter that we haven't done in a while. I did these a bunch last year and then kind of dropped off, so now I'm reviving it. If you're a longtime Tella user and Tellavision watcher, I doubt you've actually been eagerly waiting for another episode, but here it is.

If you're new to Tellavision, basically it's a chance for you to learn a little bit more about Tella behind the scenes, what goes on here, what's happening with the company, what product stuff we're working on, and some of the stuff we've shipped. So let's get into it.

The first thing that I wanted to share with you is our new newsletter style.

It looks like a newspaper.

A few months ago I started thinking about fun ways to make our newsletter more interesting and kind of stand out and tried a bunch of different graphic styles in there and then the other day I was like, well, what if it was just like a newspaper? It's a newsletter. It's a newspaper. We put the news in it.

So I took a look at some old newspaper designs and tried to try to find something cool that we could do. And I like the aesthetic. You can put kind of like these weird tabloid adverts at the top. You have the little letterhead. It's lots of fun.

The buttons are meant to kind of mimic the "turn to page 36" that you see at the end of the sections in a newsletter. So this is what is in your inbox and probably going to stick with this for a little while and when a name like The Tellagraph comes to you, you would be silly not to act on it.

So this is The Tellagraph and you're watching Tellavision.

Open Marketing Lead Role

So Tella is a small team. We are only four people and that works for us. But we're growing and we need someone to come on and help us keep up that growth and find new growth. So we're hiring for marketing. We're looking for a marketing lead who will basically run and lead our marketing and growth efforts.

So if you know someone who could be that person, or maybe you are that person, please reply to the newsletter or send me a DM or an email to get in touch and we'll take it from there.

There are two key things we're looking for in this role. The first is a lot of experience with marketing B2C software. So we'd love to see someone who's basically taken a consumer product or been part of a team working on a consumer product and help reach a lot of users and grow a business like that.

Before I get into the second reason, the reason that we're interested in B2C as opposed to B2B, because I'm sure some of you are watching this thinking, wait, I'm a business and I'm a customer of Tella why B2C? Because we kind of market like that.

We try and focus our product on the end user experience a lot at the moment and we try and reach our customers like that so we want someone who's got some experience doing that as opposed to the more kind of like traditional playbookie type B2B sales stuff.

Also, consumer marketing feels like kind of a dark art, like it's mysterious, at least to me and so I'd love someone who can kind of come on and help us demystify that.

The second thing that we're really looking for is someone who's worked at an early-stage company, a small startup, and has been there from the beginning and gone with them through a lot of growth. That's really important to us because that's kind of what we're trying to do and we want this person to be able to help us get to that next level.

Let me know if you know someone or if you're interested and we can take it from there.

Latest Updates

Last month, March 2023, we shipped a ton of stuff. We also sent you three newsletters. I'm sorry about bugging you so much, but we appreciate all the support. It really helped us grow a lot last month and this month has been really good for growth as well.

On the product side, this month has been a little bit quieter. So last month we had the Mac app and we had zooms and a bunch of other things. This month, we've had to get back to some kind of less sexy stuff, making improvements to the stability and consistency of our video renderer. If you've noticed any issues there, hang in there. We're working on it. It's just kind of a grind to work with video, so these things take a little bit of time.

We're also working on some stability improvements to our recorder as well, and a few other things. But we have had the chance, and we have been able to squeeze in some nice, more user-facing, more interesting updates that you can already use. So let me show you those.

Burned-in Subtitles

So I think the coolest update this month is that you can now burn in your subtitles into your video.

Go to Download.

Then you can just flick this switch, start the Export, and then you'll get the subtitles in your video.

The way that they look is basically like this:

It'll be positioned slightly differently. It'll be a little bit lower as if there's no playbar. But run an export and you'll see what I mean. You'll basically get the subtitles just like this in your export, and all you have to do is flick that switch and hit Export.

So that makes things much easier for publishing your videos to external places like YouTube or Twitter, and you don't have to worry about a separate subtitle file or anything like that. We give you them right inside of your video the moment you export.

Copy Subtitles to Clipboard

Now another fun one, less critical but keen to hear what you think is if you go to your Edit subtitles option and then go to the Settings. We've got this one here called Copy to Clipboard.

You can now copy all of the subtitle text, all of the words in the subtitles to your clipboard, and then you can paste that somewhere.

This only took us a couple of minutes to do last week, and the idea for this was that I'm working on a new project for revamping our knowledge base and I wanted to use the subtitles to kind of help with the SEO on the pages.

So instead of having to write out content for the pages that we're going to be putting up for the knowledge base, I just thought let's just get the subtitle content and use that kind of as either the basis for some of the content on there or just straight copy and paste it and put it under a section called a transcript. That makes things much easier rather than having to download the file and copy the text out of the file.

The other cool thing is that there are tons of ways that you can use text these days with all the LLMs and AI stuff. So if you wanted to go and generate a summary or get the meaning of one of your videos or whatever, just copy it, paste it into Chat GPT, and who knows what you're going to get out of that? So have fun! Let me know what kind of cool ideas you come up with this.

Obviously, we should build in some neat AI stuff into Tella in the future. We will, but in the meantime, you can hack around with this and the subtitles if anything comes to mind.

Improved Window Selection

Next, we've made it easier for you to see which screen you are recording with the Mac app.

When you're recording in the Mac app, you can select a specific window and when you select the specific window, you'll see a bright green border around that window.

It will bring it to the front so you can see exactly which window you're capturing, making it a lot clearer.

A bunch of people asked us for this when we shipped the Mac app last month, and so this seemed like a good improvement so that you have a bit more confidence about what you're recording and when.

And that's it for the first Tellavision episode of 2023, the Tellavision revival. Thanks for tuning in. Please let me know what you think. You can comment on the video or send me a message or reply to the newsletter or whatever. Help us make this better and we'll see you in the next episode.