In today’s highly competitive tech landscape, capturing the attention of your target audience has become more challenging than ever. This is especially true for enterprises that find it difficult to effectively communicate the value proposition of their products to stand out.
Consequently, many companies have increased their reliance on explainer videos to make a direct impact on their target audience, ensuring that their users quickly understand the value and benefits of their offerings.
However, despite being a powerful tool, deploying explainer videos is a complex process. This is because making high-quality videos requires extensive scriptwriting, animation, voiceover and editing skills, and, sometimes, may even cost smaller startups an arm and a leg.
This is where the Bengaluru-based GenAI startup Clueso steals the show. Founded in 2023 by three IIT Madras alumni, Akash Anand, Prajwal Prakash and Neel Balar, Clueso helps companies create documentation and videos from anything to everything — be it the explainer video of a SaaS tool or the video of a training module for new staffers.
The startup’s AI-powered tech stack converts ordinary screen recordings into highly engaging videos and step-by-step articles with screenshots and GIFs. However, despite its potential to serve multiple industries, segments and functions, the company primarily focusses on B2B SaaS companies.
In April, the startup raised $1.4 Mn (about INR 11.6 Cr) in its seed funding round led by f7 ventures. The round also saw participation from existing backer Y Combinator.
From No Clue To Clueso
The journey of the Clueso founders started with Desklamp, a tool to help students and academic researchers make and share notes on PDF documents. The trio had been working on the tool for over a year before making their way into the Y Combinator (YC) 2023 batch.
Even though it was Desklamp that helped them get into YC, the group partners did not approve of their product. They, however, appreciated the entrepreneurs’ product-building skills.
The founders still were too stubborn to prove the viability of their product. For this, they ventured to find paying users for their tool, which already had more than 25K users and was decently popular among university students.
However, the cofounders were exiled from their la-la land when their college hesitated to subscribe to their product, whose viability they were hell-bent on proving.
In one of his blogs on the Clueso website, Anand (cofounder and CEO) highlights that they even tried to shoehorn their product into industries such as legal and publication but to no avail. In the absence of any paying user, the trio knew it was time to pivot.
Stuck in the pivotal hell, as Anand describes in his blog, when the cofounders were at each other’s necks, Michael Seibel, group partner at YC advised them to solve one of the biggest problems they faced at Desklamp.
It was then that they realised that making an explainer video of their product, Desklamp, was a big challenge as it was both a time-consuming and labour-intensive process.
“We thought what if we automate the process of creating explainer videos with AI,” the cofounders told Inc42.
This realisation led to the genesis of Clueso, a tool to quickly create and update documentation and videos.
What’s In The Clueso Tech Stack
Clueso transforms ordinary screen recordings of any software process into step-by-step documentation and high-quality video tutorials. It does this by integrating multiple advanced models to transform rough screen recordings into polished, professional videos. The process begins with an input video containing a rough voiceover, which is transcribed into text using Deepgram. This text is then refined into a perfect script with open language models.
Next, the speech-to-voice AI platform, Eleven Labs, generates a new voiceover from this script, offering various accent options. Finally, Clueso’s in-house video processing pipeline synchronises the new voiceover with the video, adding company branding and special effects to enhance engagement. With these efforts, customers receive studio-quality videos.
Anand explained that Clueso’s offerings go beyond client-targeted videos. For example, one of Clueso’s customers, Aspire, a Singapore-based finance OS for SaaS companies, uses Clueso for two main purposes — customer support and onboarding.
Aspire, which provides an all-in-one tool for managing finances and expenditures, leverages the Indian startup’s platform to create documentation and videos explaining various features of its banking platform. The company also develops training materials covering internal procedures, banking processes, and theoretical concepts, ensuring employees are well-trained to support customers and operate efficiently.
Another Clueso customer uses the tool to create developer documentation for onboarding new developers. Clueso also helps the company generate internal training materials for various teams, including operations, customer success, developers, and sales.
According to Anand, Clueso stands out from basic documentation and explainer tools by offering features designed to enhance video content, making it more polished and professional. One key feature is the automatic addition of company branding to videos, transforming rough screen shares into branded, professional presentations.
Another feature is the editable transcript. After recording, users can easily fix any mistakes directly within the transcript. Additionally, Clueso’s AI can generate scripts based on the initial recording, refining users’ input into a concise and effective script. This is particularly useful as many users tend to stray off-topic.
Moreover, Clueso provides a range of voiceover options, allowing customers to choose from various accents, including American, British, Australian, and Indian.
This feature has proven useful for Clueso as it enjoys a diverse customer base. While 40% of its customers hail from India, the remaining 40% are scattered across the US, Europe and East Asia.
Clueso’s Competitive Advantage & The Road Ahead
Clueso primarily serves B2B SaaS companies, which are often keen on educating their customers on how to use their products. However, it also has clients that use its tech to provide internal training to employees. The startup also caters to edtechs and hardware companies, which need explainer videos for their customers and employees.
“Our focus is primarily on B2B SaaS because we believe that it is the largest and fastest growing market for creating documentation and videos. It is also the space where Clueso is best positioned to add the most value,” CEO and cofounder of Clueso Anand told Inc42.
Interestingly, most of Clueso’s clients have customers based outside of India, primarily in the US and Europe. To cater to this segment, Clueso offers a feature that can transform videos with Indian accents into professional American accents, Anand said.
Moreover, Clueso supports the creation of content in multiple languages, including vernacular languages like Hindi and Tamil. This feature is particularly beneficial for companies targeting customers in specific linguistic regions.
Beyond Indian languages, Clueso also offers translation into over 25 different languages, allowing Indian customers to create documentation in Spanish, German, and other languages for their international clientele.
According to Anand, Clueso has onboarded over 150 companies as customers in the last 10 months. “Our goal for the next year is to significantly expand our reach, aiming to increase this number by five to six times, targeting 600 to 700 companies within the next 12 months.”
On the product side, Clueso aims to automate processes further using AI to streamline and expedite video creation. The aim is to empower companies to produce longer and higher-quality videos without the need for editors or writers.
Finally, Clueso seeks to significantly reduce the high costs associated with explainer videos. The goal, as per Anand, is to slash the expense from $4K to $5K to a mere fraction, reducing it by 1,000X.
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