| I’m an indie dev, and every time I launch or ship anything, there’s this familiar mini-hell: “now I need to record a decent demo…” You probably know the drill: - install yet another screen recorder
- mess with audio input / system audio
- accidentally capture your messy tabs or notifications
- re-record because you forgot to hide something sensitive
- open a separate editor just to crop, zoom, or add a simple arrow After doing this a few too many times, I realized I was spending way more time fighting tools than making the actual demo. And most of my needs were pretty simple: short product walkthroughs, tutorial clips, or something clean enough to share on socials. So I ended up doing what devs probably shouldn’t do when they’re busy: I built my own thing. It’s called Screentell, and the idea is: A low-friction, in-browser screen recorder + editor that covers ~90% of “I just need a decent demo” use cases. No install, no desktop app, just browser. What it does (and why I built it this way) Recording I wanted to hit “record” and not think too much: record screen + camera at the same time
capture both system audio and mic (so you can narrate while playing app sounds / videos) Editing (directly in the browser) Most of my edits are very “presentation-like”, not full video production. So I focused on: - Cropping the video area – hide browser tabs, taskbar, or any sensitive stuff, and just keep the content region that matters.
- Smooth zoom / focus – simple “zoom into this part” so viewers know exactly where to look. Stickers & callouts I always end up wanting arrows and little annotations, so I added: Hand-drawn style（just like excalidraw style）stickers – arrows, underlines, speech bubbles, shapes, text, images, etc.
The goal is to quickly highlight “click here”, “this changed”, or “this is the important part” without opening a full-blown editor. Layout / presentation I also care about how the final frame looks (especially for posting on social media): - choose a background (solid color, gradient, or wallpaper)
- put the screen recording in a kind of “card” with padding + shadow
- treat the face camera layer as a movable/resizable element: show/hide it, change size/shape/position Basically: make the final video look like something you’d be okay dropping into a landing page, tweet, or product update — without touching Premiere / Final Cut. Who it’s for (roughly)
If you’re: - recording product demos
- making short tutorials / onboarding clips
- creating quick social content around your app or workflow …and you don’t want to install heavy software or learn a complex timeline editor, this might be useful. There’s no software to download, everything is done in the browser (record → edit → export). Most people should be able to figure it out in a few minutes of clicking around. Right now it’s very much built from my own pain points as a solo dev who constantly needs “yet another demo,” so I’m sure my blind spots are showing. If you do screen recordings often, I’d love to know: What’s the most annoying part of your current workflow?
What’s the one thing your current tool still doesn’t do well? |