Video is everywhere.

With the push towards video content on every social media platform and the move towards remote work, video has become the most consumed form of media worldwide. We watched 12 billion minutes of video content in 2021 🤯  . 85% of companies rank short-from video as the most effective type of social media content, and Forbes goes so far as to declare that “video is where we need to be,” for both content creators and brands.

Video serves more purpose than just entertainment. People make videos for all types of communication, from marketing products to training colleagues and aligning with teammates.

But creating videos is time-consuming.

Traditional editors – like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro – are slow, unintuitive and not optimized for creating modern video formats quickly. That’s why for the past five years at Kapwing, we’ve worked to make video creation easier for everyone.

Kapwing started in 2018 as a video meme making platform. The early team continued expanding our editing tools one by one so that we now have a full video, image, and GIF editing studio that over three million people use to create content every month. Regardless of where you live, what device you have access to, or how much video editing experience you have, you can use Kapwing to make videos.

Our founders and product designers benefited from the feedback and encouragement from millions of creators along the way. We also grew a content creation team in-house, producing videos on the latest format and trends while growing an audience on TikTok and YouTube. Along the way, as our editing platform and expertise grew, we noticed something...

Most videos are not created alone.

While we often think of video creation as one or two “video editors” combining clips in an editing software, there’s often a whole team of people with varying skill sets and responsibilities who contribute. Some of these people never actually touch the raw video clips, but give feedback or oversee tasks.

We also noticed collaboration on our own content creation team while dogfooding our own product. For our YouTube channel, multiple people worked together to brainstorm ideas, then share assets like logos, video intro clips, and footage with one another. After creating a first draft, a variety of people (our manager, the CEO) would give feedback and sign off. We'd make more edits, review the final version, then download the latest to post. Sometimes these creation and feedback loops happened multiple times for one video.

Our team’s creative process was inefficient, scattered, and frustrating.

Each stage of the process touched a different platform, including Kapwing, Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Dropbox, Figma, and more. We were constantly downloading and uploading files between all these platforms, hitting file upload limits, and forgetting who had which asset.

Meanwhile, our three-person content team was racing to 100,000 YouTube subscribers. We had weeks of publishing a video every day, which is a huge volume of content to produce, edit, and post. With constraints on both time and quality, we often cut short valuable feedback cycles and collaboration because it took too long with existing tools. It was hard to keep people on the same page, and, at the end of the day, we knew weren’t reaching as many customers as we could with our content.

It’s time to make creative collaboration easier.

We aspire to reach more people with our content by creating as a team faster, and we want to make it possible for other teams to do the same. That’s why we’re building a better Kapwing experience for teams of editors and non-editors alike.

Driven by our own experience and interviews with hundreds of marketers, influencers, and media entrepreneurs, we've designed features that will make it easier to create videos together. Like Google Docs for video editing, Kapwing helps you get more ideas and contributions from non-editing team members, so your whole team can move faster to create. Here’s what what teams will achieve when using these upcoming features in Kapwing:

Keep everyone on the same page

You’ll always stay up-to-date with your team’s progress because everyone’s work is created and stored in one space. The team workspace includes a set of shared folders so your team can organize content and anyone can jump into projects.

Give and receive feedback

It’ll be easier to give and act on feedback with project comments. Whether it’s a high level idea shared early on in the drafting process or the final touches before posting a video, comments are an important part of bringing more voices into the creative process and ensuring that content fits the team’s vision.

Guarantee brand consistency

Keeping your brand consistent across every piece of content is critical, but this gets harder with more people involved. That’s why we’re building Brand Kit. Upload brand colors, fonts, and media for the whole team to use in their projects. Everyone will be using the same assets every time.

Edit together in real time

Sometimes it’s easier for everyone’s creative vision to come to life when you edit simultaneously. Changes made to projects are seen by everyone, so there’s no need to constantly share updated copies. It’s like Google Docs, but for video.

It’s also time to breathe new energy into our brand.

While Kapwing has evolved over the years as a product and editing platform, we’ve made few changes to our visual brand. As we embark on making it easier to create together, we felt this was a prime moment for a new look to emphasize our values of creativity and boldness while welcoming in the next chapter of our work to help creators.

We are delighted to introduce Kapwing’s new branding: our colors, logo, and kitten characters Kit & Bob who star in our illustrations. Read more about these visual changes and how we developed our new look at the blog post below:

So what’s next?

In late September, we did hit the 100k subscriber mark on our YouTube channel, and our community has continued to thrive. Recently, we've started investing in our TikTok channel again and plan to syndicate across Reels, YouTube Shorts, and other platforms.

To power a larger team, we're piloting our new Teams products internally, using comments to give feedback, a shared digital workspace for visibility, and folders to organize projects. As creators ourselves, we're excited to introduce these features to creative teams everywhere and hope that they'll speed up your re-purposing workflows.

Teams features like comments and brand kit are now in Kapwing, try them out at the link below! We’re excited to work with you to shape what a world with collaborative video editing looks like 😸