Why We Built xform

Hoot Originals has been building products for the web for almost ten years now. We started out as a web agency, taking on websites and web apps for customers, before slowly moving toward our own SaaS products.

When we started work on PixelPaper, our website builder, we knew we'd need solid image transformation and optimisation, and video streaming on top of that. Images and video are at the heart of what a modern website looks like, and we wanted PixelPaper to handle both of them properly... resizing, format conversion, compression, fast delivery, the lot.

Video brought its own set of needs. Hosting, streaming, sensible playback. Not just a <video> tag pointed at a file in a bucket.

The Obvious Move

The obvious move was to roll all of it into PixelPaper itself. We started down that path, then paused.

A few things gave us pause.

The first was that every other product we wanted to ship next would have the same problem. Pixelmatic, our screen recorder and screenshot editor for remote teams and SaaS businesses, would need it. Other SaaS products we had in mind would need it. Internal tools would need it. Building it once into PixelPaper meant building it again, and again, and again, every time we started something new.

The second was that we already knew, from our years running an agency, how much this kind of thing actually gets used in the wild. Building sites for customers over the years, we'd reached for services like this many times. Image CDNs, transformation APIs, video hosting platforms. So we knew it wasn't just us. Plenty of other companies and websites need a tool like this, and they need it done well.

It started to feel less like a feature inside PixelPaper and more like a product in its own right.

Pulling It Out

So we pulled it out. We called it xform (short for "transform") and gave it room to grow on its own.

xform handles image transformation and optimisation, with video streaming as a first-class feature. It's the engine that sits underneath PixelPaper and Pixelmatic today, and it's available to anyone else who'd find it useful.

I think there's something to be said for building tools the way you'd want to use them yourself. We needed this. We didn't want to bolt it on. So we built it properly, separately, with care.

There's also a quiet benefit to having it separate. xform can move at its own pace. Pixelmatic can move at its own pace. When we improve xform, everything that uses it gets better, including Pixelmatic and anything we build next.

What's Next

We'll be writing more about xform soon, including some of the specifics around what it does and where it fits compared to the alternatives. For now, this is the short version of why it exists.

If you'd like to see xform in use, we've written about how Pixelmatic leans on it for screen recording, image optimisation, and video delivery in our Why We Built Pixelmatic post.

If you'd like to take a look, you can find it at xform.media. And if you've been wrestling with images or video in your own SaaS, we'd love to hear from you.

Until next time!