Why We Built Pixelmatic

Pixelmatic started the way most of our products start. With a problem we kept hitting ourselves.

We record a lot of video at work. Product walkthroughs, feature explainers, support videos, async updates inside the team, quick recordings to send to a customer when an email won't quite do. Working largely remotely, screen recording is part of our daily rhythm.

And we'd grown tired of the tools we'd been using. Some were too heavy. Some were too simple. Pricing on others climbed fast the moment you wanted anything beyond the basics. None of them felt like they'd been built with remote teams and SaaS businesses in mind.

So we set out to build the tool we wanted to use.

Pixelmatic is, at its heart, a screen recorder for remote teams and SaaS businesses. There's also a free screenshot editor in there alongside it, for the times when a recording is more than the moment calls for.

We've written about that journey in more detail in the "Welcome to Pixelmatic" post on the Pixelmatic blog. If you'd like the full story of what we built and what we believe about it, that's the place to start. There are a few specific features in there that matter a lot to us, and it's easier to read about them in context than to repeat them here.

This post is about a slightly different thing. It's about why we chose to use xform underneath.

Why We Needed xform

Building a screen recorder means dealing with a lot of video. Every recording a customer makes needs to be uploaded, processed, stored, and streamed back to whoever they share it with. That's not a small piece of infrastructure.

On top of customer recordings, we also lean on video heavily for our own marketing and support. Product walkthroughs, feature explainers, support videos for people who get stuck. Words only get you so far when the thing you're describing is, well, visual.

We could have reached for one of the existing video hosting services. There are some good ones out there. But we'd already built xform for our own image transformation and optimisation work (originally while building PixelPaper, our website builder), and xform handles video streaming as a first-class feature. It made no sense to pay another vendor for something we'd already built.

If you want the longer version of how xform came to be, we wrote about that in a separate post.

Where xform Shows Up Inside Pixelmatic

Pixelmatic leans on xform for a few different things.

Customer screen recordings are the big one. When someone hits record in Pixelmatic, the resulting video gets stored and streamed via xform. That's the core of the product right there, and it's where xform is doing the most work.

Image optimisation across the marketing site and inside the product. Everything you see on a Pixelmatic page that involves an image is being served, sized, and compressed by xform. It keeps things fast, which matters more than people give it credit for.

Video streaming for our own library of product and support videos too. When you watch a walkthrough on the Pixelmatic site, or click into a support video, that's xform doing the work in the background.

The Nice Side Effect

The nice side effect of all this is that any improvement we make to xform flows straight back into Pixelmatic. Better compression, faster delivery, new features. We're not waiting on a vendor and we're not stuck with someone else's roadmap.

It also means we're using our own tool. There's a sort of accountability in that. If something about xform isn't quite right, we're the first to feel it. We can't really hide from it.

That's something I genuinely value about how we build. We try not to ship things to customers that we wouldn't happily live with ourselves.

In Closing

If you'd like to read more about Pixelmatic itself, the "Welcome to Pixelmatic" post is the place. And if you'd like to know more about xform, we'll be writing more about it soon.

Until next time!