I Tried Guidde AI: Reviewing The Hottest How-To Video Maker

Hey there, AI enthusiasts! Today, I'm diving into Guidde, a tool that's been making waves in the SaaS documentation world. I first stumbled upon it while browsing Ben's Bites tutorials, and a week later, Packy McCormick featured it in Not Boring. 

I've been itching to revive this newsletter (can I use "revive" if it was only active for two months? 😅), so I decided to take Guidde for a spin.

Table of Contents

• What’s Guidde? 

• Setting Up

• How it works: 

• The Editing Process

• A few hiccups:

• What Guidde Does Well

• Umm… Why can’t I just Loom or Screen Record it? 

• See Guidde in Action!

• Verdict

What’s Guidde? 

Every SaaS company I've worked for has struggled with visual documentation. Creating how-to videos is typically a hassle – time-consuming and often requiring cross-functional coordination. Plus, as products evolve, parts of the documentation become obsolete, leading many to rely on personal training instead.

Enter Guidde: a tool that promises to let anyone create how-to videos in just minutes, without special video editing software or a voice-over artist. All you need is a product and a browser. 

Setting Up

Getting started with Guidde was a breeze. After adding their browser extension, I was immediately prompted to start recording a tutorial. With a simple click on "capture," I switched to the tab I wanted to record, and we were off to the races.

How it works: 

In essence, Guidde converts your entire video into frames and presents them in a PowerPoint-style format that you can edit, and Guidde will then stitch them together per your instructions. For this experiment, I created a how-to video for setting up a Cal.com account.

Once you've recorded, Guidde generates a first draft for you to review. You can then:

• Add, edit or omit a slide or step

• Number the steps

• Edit the video supers

• Modify the voice-over script

• Review the voice-over for each slide independently

My first draft was quite off, I had to edit nearly every slide. But since every step was covered and spread across slides, I managed to whip the video into shape in under an hour.

The Editing Process

1. Slide Editing: Saving each slide took a few seconds. After editing all slides, you need to save the entire video before reviewing.

2. Visual Edits: This felt like working in Canva – intuitive and user-friendly. You can play around with font colours and sizes to your heart’s desire.

3. Copy Improvements: I leaned heavily on Claude (another AI assistant) to edit the voice-over and video super copy. Took me a bit to find a standard prompt, but once I had one, it worked wonders for each step.

A few hiccups:

Overall, it was quite impressive to see what I could manage with my limited video editing skills. However, there’s room for improvement: 

• Some steps were recorded multiple times, requiring manual deletion.

• The initial copy voiceover and video supers copy was very robotic and often inaccurate. Claude did a much better job with the standard prompt, so I don’t see why they couldn’t have added a better wrapper.

• For this specific example, the last screen wasn't captured, probably as I had no action to perform. I had to manually upload and edit it. Thankfully, this was easy and quick. Took me less than 3 minutes to paste a screenshot and edit it. 

• Before I picked the cal.com example, I tried to create a video showing how to temporarily edit webpages using Inspect Element. But Guidde couldn’t capture the the code and it just looked like a video of someone magically editing the text. 🤣

What Guidde Does Well

• Easy setup and use

• Accurate screen and cursor click capture

• Intuitive customization

• Multiple voice-over options (You get the most natural sounding VOs in the most premium tier! I chose ‘Joseph’ for this video.)

Umm… Why can’t I just Loom or Screen Record it? 

Now, I can hear you asking this, and it's a fair question – I love Loom as much as the next person. But Guidde brings something unique to the table.

By presenting the entire video in a PowerPoint-style format, Guidde bridges the gap between raw product knowledge and the final how-to video. 

Guidde's format encourages a consistent structure across all your tutorials, creating a more professional and cohesive learning experience.

As your product evolves, you can update specific slides rather than recreating the entire tutorial.

See Guidde in Action!

🎥 My Guidde Creation: Here's the video I created using Guidde. It walks you through setting up a Cal.com account. Let me know what you think!

📚 Want More?: For a different take on Guidde, check out this awesome tutorial from Ben's Bites. It's where I first discovered this tool!

Verdict

I completed my first Guidde video in under two hours, including exploration time. With practice, I can see myself finishing videos in an hour or less – that's impressive for the quality you get!

It addresses a common pain point for product companies – maintaining up-to-date visual documentation and how-to guides. 

Guidde empowers your product marketing team to create high-quality tutorials without relying on designers, video editors, or voice-over artists. This autonomy is crucial when these teams are often swamped with other priorities.

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Have you tried Guidde or similar tools? I'd love to hear about your experiences in streamlining documentation processes. 

Drop a comment or hit me up on social media!

Until next time, 

Heer!