Open sourcing Incredible.dev and shutting down the company
I’m excited to announce that we’ve just open-sourced Incredible.dev 🎉
Here’s the link to OSS repository, do join our community channel in Discord and share your thoughts👇
🔗 https://github.com/IncredibleDevHQ/Incredible
But at the same time, with a heavy heart, we’re shutting down the operations of the company behind Incredible (Pixelbyte Studio)😪. I’ll dwell more on the reasons for this drastic decision later in the blog post.
Incredible set out to make a positive impact on developer education by simplifying the creation of developer video content, now it’ll make an attempt to realize its dream in open source with the help of the community.
I would like to start by thanking our existing investors Anshu Prasher(whiteboard capital), Roy (Sequoia India) for backing us.
Roy being the visionary he is, encouraged our decision to open source the product for the benefit of the broader developer ecosystem. I strongly urge the dev founders in the community to reach out to Roy if you’re building for the dev ecosystem. We had an Incredible time working with him, he’s been very supportive all along our journey.
Special thanks to our angel investors Atul Jha (taghash.io) and Cassidy Williams, who’ve been pillars of immense love and support in this journey.
In this blog, I delve into the story behind the genesis of Incredible, the tour of the product, and the reasons for shutting down the company.
The OSS release
The release contains the latest rewrite of Incredible using nextjs, prisma, and planet-scale (this also means that Incredible should work well with any MySQL-compatible DBS).
It could still be hard to get Incredible to run due to the proprietary components! For instance, we’re using Agora for video collaboration, Live blocks and hocus pocus for collab synchronization, and AWS for media transcoding and stitching. You need to create accounts on each of these platforms to get the full version of Incredible up and running on your own.
Our team is committed to the full OSS port of Incredible, without any proprietary services. We are also committing to maintaining the project and innovating to the best of our abilities no matter what our future endeavors are.
We probably have built the best dev video creator community. We will continue to add value and grow this community with meetups and conferences around dev video creation.
Do join our discord channel https://discord.com/invite/jJQWQs8Fh2 and don’t forget to say hi👋🏻
The OSS release is far from perfect! Please don’t expect this to be the best code you’ve ever seen, comments and docs are mostly missing along with the tests! Again, It’s far from being perfect!
Would love the community to jump into helping us make the software better. This is our commitment to making a positive difference in Developer education!
This version is hosted at https://oss.incredible.dev and is generally available to try. Please share your experience in our discord channel and report the bugs as issues on the Github repo.
The Product
👉For those who are new to Incredible, here’s the tour of the product.
🚀 https://www.loom.com/share/d5fd69a0d70f4dfd921bd4798bdb938c
👉To get a glimpse of what Incredible is capable of here’s a playlist of videos on Rust produced using Incredible.
👉Here’s an example with Replit integration where you can watch the video and even run the code snippet
👩🏻💻 https://incredible.dev/watch/enm-qyp-zks
👉For portrait fans, here’s a list of @YouTube shorts, and @instagram reels produced using @IncredibleDevHQ .
🎞 https://www.instagram.com/incredibledevhq/
The following video by Lee Robinson for the Next.js12.2 release is by far the most impactful video produced with the help of Incredible.
Top Features
Here are the top features of the product
- Markdown to a video preview
- Themes
- Transitions and lower-third animations
- Layouts and modes
- Code animations
- Collaboration
- Public share page with replit, codesandbox and stackblitz integration
The spark
In 2011 I was introduced to the founding members of the Free Software Movement in Bangalore. This organization instilled the culture of an open-source, community and content.
After an amazing stint as a systems developer at min.io, building an open-source alternative for Amazon S3, I decided to follow my passion for content and community full-time.
I joined Dgraph labs as their first Dev Advocate in early 2019. While at Dgraph, the challenges of being able to produce high-quality video content became very personal, and the spark for dev content eventually turned into a wildfire!
The mega problem of Developer Education
Video as a format is very impactful when it comes to taking education to the masses. While the mainstream format is Youtube-style landscape videos, they can manifest in other formats too!
When transformed into a quick-quirky short portrait video, you could reach far corners of the globe at an unprecedented scale! A lot of forward-thinking companies and creators are resorting to Tik-Tok, Instagram reels, and youtube shorts.
Streaming is another very interesting format for developer education, I never imagined what started as a revolution for gamers could go mainstream for developer content!
Both streaming and shorts are still in their infant stages, I’m really excited for the future of these formats when it comes to developer content!
The competition in the mid-market category SaaS/Devtool(Series A, B, C, D) companies is intensifying! You could spot a trend where these companies are now resorting to creating content in multiple formats.
I believe that in a world where building products are becoming easier than ever, creating content for different distribution channels in their native format will become strategically mission-critical.
Anyone who tried creating high-quality video content for developers would know that it’s hard! When I started creating videos, I only saw one word written all over them 👇
PAIN, PAIN and, and more PAIN
The problem
Here were the top reasons why the process of developer video content creation turned out to be extremely hard!
- Too many tools
The number of tools to be used to produce a series of videos end-to-end was endless! Notion for storyboarding, screen-flow for recording, Premier pro editing, and the list goes on!
- Lack of consensus on the workflow in the Devrel community
Just talk to 10 Devrels who produce videos, and learn their workflow, you’ll find that most of them are unique🥶
This emanates directly from the complexity of the problem. Every passionate developer educator ends up iterating forever and keeps improving their workflow. There’s no one answer!
- Poor collaboration and broken workflow
The direct result of pondering with too many tools leads to poor workflow and broken collaboration. One needs to add all the collaborators to multiple tools in your workflow. The collaboration in one tool doesn’t easily flow into the next one, and some of the tools may not be even designed for strong collaboration!
- Non-linear time and effort to translate storyboarding to multiple formats
What if you want to produce shorts, a presentation, or semi-structured (planned content + live improvisation) streams from your storyboarding?
There is no unified approach for starting from one storyboarding to rule most of the popular formats. This means you need to invest significant time and effort just to translate the content from one to another consumable format!
- Cost
Video editing softwares are expensive, now add the plethora of tools in the workflow into the mix, and you’ll be easily shelling out over $100 a month just to procure these tools. Also, if you don’t need the complexity of a generic video tool to produce developer content, then why pay in full just to use 10–20% capabilities?
- Processing
Video has immense processing requirements. This is a massive bottleneck for democratizing the creation process.
- Integration
All the video tools in the market lack critical integration like Github to create custom workflows for developer videos.
The bottom line is developer video content creation is not accessible to most people in the world!! What a shame! It’s a super power vested in the hands of a few individuals, and this is not great for the dev ecosystem.
The state of developer education
Given how hard it is to produce video content, I was even more worried about the state of developer education around the globe🤒
Developer education has made a significant difference in my life, and many others. The easier creation of video content could further amplify the positive outcomes of developer education.
Imagine the sheer volume of developer video content we could have had in this world if this process was easier. Imagine the number of self-serving developer communities that could create content in their own spoken languages to uplift themselves.
The solution: The genesis of Incredible.dev
We thought wouldn’t it be Incredible to live in a world where creating developer video content is not a superpower!
Here are some of the early high-level design decisions we took while arriving at the solution.
- Storyboarding to a video is made simple. A very easy way to go from storyboarding -> composition -> recording -> Producing the final video.
- Need not have complex and fancy video output, need just enough graphics capabilities to make good videos. This way a good proportion of video processing could happen on the browser, and the bare minimal media processing could be moved to the cloud.
- The easiest video editor to use is an editor without any editing required! This way we could reduce the computing requirements and slim down the experience. We decided to break down the creation into multiple smaller blocks so that you retake them instead of editing them. We eventually decided to add the trim function as the only editing feature.
- Unified workflow to go from storyboarding to multiple formats(landscape video, portrait video, live-stream)
The challenges and the solution
Well, at a high level might sound easy, but we soon realized the practical challenges.
Engineering challenge
Amazing graphics and animations are computationally expensive to produce. We also needed the videos to be made in real-time so that there is instantaneous feedback. This was the most complex engineering problem we had to solve. In the early days, we did build a version using ffmpeg to construct videos on the server side, but this was too computationally too expensive.
We underestimated the power of HTML5 Canvas
We decided to give HTML5 canvas a shot to explore how powerful it is! Turns out like most people we too underestimated its capabilities.
Our graphics coding wizard made what we thought was impossible to infinite possibilities, Suvij’s contribution to pushing the limits to HTML5 Canvas is one of the most amazing front-end feats I’ve seen in my experience of working with startups around the globe.
Take a look at the transitions, animations, and graphics in this series of videos here.
Design Challenge
In due course, we were able to solve the problem of producing amazing videos on the browser, while building a unified experience to produce multiple formats of content.
Last year around this time around August 2021, I reach out to my long-time friend Jerric with the design challenge in hand. He was running his design as a service platform Newwwton at the time. Jerric came on board as the creative director and co-founder, with two of his Incredible designers, Priyanka and Nirmal.
Jerric laid foundations for what today is the core experience of Incredible. The game-changing UX where the video/presentation/stream preview right next to the text layout was born!
Community love
The best part of this journey has been the thousands of interactions we’ve had with amazing people from the Devrel community.
Some of the best love us and they hang out in our discord channel. Come join us if you’re passionate about dev content creation :)
We’ve aggregated some of the testimonials from some of the best in the business here https://incredible.dev/testimonials .
Why are we shutting down
Long story short, we couldn’t find a venture scale market for a tool that simplifies the creation of developer video content!
Also, my startup journey took a financial and emotional toll on my family. I had turned blind to how my startup hustle is affecting them. I had left too much of responsibilities on my wife’s shoulders and had taken her support for granted.
Roadmap
Here are the top features in our roadmap
- 100% OSS version with any third-party proprietary series
- Edit like presentations on the preview
- Github and notion integration
- Support for presentations
- More complex video compositions and animations
Thank you
I take this opportunity to thank some of the amazing people who loved us, encouraged us, and cheered for us!
- Firstly I would like to thank my wife, Vaishnavi, for standing next to me through this grueling startup journey!
- Cassidy Williams, Head of DX at Remote(she saw something special in the product before anyone did and angel invested in us)
- Atul Jha, Founder at Taghash.io (My mentor and brother from another mother! Who’s been always there for me)
- Shawn (swyx), and Alex (codercatdev) for cheering us along the journey.
- Matt Mclure (Co-founder at Mux), Jiten Vaidya (co-founder of Planetscale) for their kind support in this journey.
- Nathan Iyer, Co-founder of Adorilabs for being a constant pillar of support.
- Balaji, popularly known as Poonai for turning up in person and bearing me over endless calls during the highs and lows. I found a new younger brother on the journey!
- Jai and Sanketh, co-founders of Deepsource for being there in the last month or so when the crisis had hit me real hard!
- Bri Kimmel for her enthusiasm and support of what we’ve built.
