What to Show in the First Seconds
A launch demo video has one job: show a stranger what your product does, fast enough that they keep watching. In a feed or on a launch board, people often decide within seconds whether to keep going, so those seconds should show the product, not your logo.
Open on the moment the product does its main job. For an invoicing tool, that's the reminder going out and the invoice turning to "paid". For a writing app, it's the rough draft becoming the clean one. The setup (signing in, creating a project, changing settings) can come later, or not at all.
What wastes the opening:
- A logo animation or title card. Put your name and URL at the end, where the people who watched want them.
- You on camera saying hello. A face can help later in the video; the first frames belong to the product.
- An empty state. A blank dashboard says nothing. Use realistic sample data, never real customer data.
- A slow tour of the menu. Nobody needs to see every tab to understand what the product is for.
A quick test: mute the video, play only the first five seconds to someone, and ask what the product does. If they can't say, change the opening, not the voiceover.
How Long to Make It, by Channel
There's no single right length. It depends on where the video plays and how much the viewer already knows. These are our suggestions; where a platform sets a hard limit, it's covered in the export section below.
| Where it plays | Suggested length | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A post on X or LinkedIn | 20 to 45 seconds | It plays in a feed between other posts, so show one job, once |
| A launch board listing | 45 to 90 seconds | Viewers clicked to learn more, so there's room for one extra detail |
| YouTube | 1 to 3 minutes | People search there for walkthroughs, so a fuller tour fits |
| App Store app preview | 15 to 30 seconds | Apple's own limit for previews |
| Your landing page | 10 to 30 seconds, looping | It plays beside your headline, usually muted |
If you only make one, make the 45 to 90 second version, then cut a shorter one for feeds from the same footage. Shortening a good video is easy; stretching a short one isn't.
A Script You Can Fill In
Write the script before you record. Without one, you click around, narrate what you're doing instead of why, and end up with four minutes to cut down. With one, you know exactly which screens to record and in what order.
A structure that fits most products, for a video of about 60 to 90 seconds:
"0:00 Show the main result on screen. Caption: Product does what for who.
0:05 The problem: one sentence your users have said themselves.
0:15 The main job: the 3 to 5 steps to that result, at normal speed.
0:45 One detail that makes it different: the thing users notice first.
1:05 Where it stands and how to try it: free plan, beta or price at your URL."
For a feed post or a 30-second App Store preview, keep just the opening and the main job. Write the narration in the words your users use, then read it aloud; anything you stumble over, shorten. Each line should match what's on screen at that moment. If you say "it exports to CSV", the export should be happening as you say it.
Keep the script once you're done. It becomes your captions, your YouTube description and the first draft of your launch post. It follows the same order as a good listing, which our guide to writing a launch listing covers: what it is, who it's for, and proof that it's real.
Recording the Screen
You don't need paid software for a launch demo. These well-known options are built into your system or free to download:
- Mac: press Shift-Command-5 to open the Screenshot app, then record the entire screen or a selected portion, as Apple's Mac guide shows.
- Windows 11: Snipping Tool records a selected area of the screen. Press Windows logo key + Shift + R, per Microsoft's Snipping Tool help.
- iPhone: the Record button in Control Center, with the microphone optional; see Apple's guide to recording the iPhone screen.
- Any desktop: OBS Studio, free and open source, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and is worth learning if you'll record demos often.
For editing, DaVinci Resolve has a free version. For a short demo recorded in takes, you may only need to trim and join the clips.
Before you press record:
- Clean the screen. Close other apps, hide the bookmarks bar and personal tabs, and turn on Do Not Disturb so nothing pops up mid-take.
- Set up demo data. A fresh account with realistic sample content and nothing private.
- Make the text big enough. Record a smaller window or zoom the app in, so the important text is still readable when the video plays on a phone.
- Record in short takes, one per line of the script. A mistake costs you one take, not the whole video.
- Record the voiceover separately, after the screen. Reading a script while clicking rarely sounds natural. A headset mic close to your mouth in a quiet room usually sounds better than a laptop's built-in one.
Move the cursor slowly and pause for a beat after each click, so viewers see what changed. Cut loading spinners in the edit rather than waiting through them, but don't speed up the product itself: a demo that makes the product look faster than it is sets up a disappointing first visit.
Captions for Viewers Without Sound
Many people watch with the sound off: at work, on a train, or because the video started muted. On the App Store it's the default. Apple's app preview guidance says previews play with the sound muted by default, and suggests adding text to give your footage context.
So make the video work silently first. Three kinds of text help:
- Burned-in captions: the narration as on-screen text, added in your editor. They show wherever the video plays, including players that ignore caption files.
- Short labels: three to six words naming what's happening, such as "Reminder sent automatically". In App Store previews, Apple allows narration and text overlays, as long as the footage is screen captures of the app itself (App Review Guideline 2.3.4).
- Captions on YouTube: YouTube can make automatic captions with speech recognition, but says their quality may vary and you should review them. Since you have a script, you can instead paste it as a transcript, and YouTube syncs the text to your video.
Keep each caption on screen long enough to read twice, place it where it doesn't cover the part of the interface you're showing, and use strong contrast: white text on a dark band reads on almost any background. Apple's guidance makes the same point: text should be legible and stay on screen long enough to read.
GIF or Video?
GIFs are handy where video doesn't play well: a README, an email, a docs page, a chat message. They play and loop on their own, have no sound to worry about and need no player. The trade-offs:
- File size: a GIF is usually much larger than the same clip saved as MP4, which slows down the page it sits on.
- Quality: a GIF color table holds at most 256 colors (see the GIF89a specification), so gradients and soft shadows band and blur.
- Length: keep a GIF to one action of a few seconds. Anything longer belongs in a video.
On your own landing page, a short MP4 in <video autoplay muted loop playsinline poster="..."> behaves like a GIF without the weight. The muted attribute matters: Chrome's autoplay policy says muted autoplay is always allowed, while videos with sound are often blocked from autoplaying. The poster image shows while the video loads.
To turn a clip into a GIF, FFmpeg, the open-source command-line tool, does it in one line, for example ffmpeg -i demo.mp4 -vf "fps=12,scale=800:-1" demo.gif. Lower the frame rate and width until the file is small enough for where it's going.
Exporting for Each Place
Export one high-quality master first: an MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, at the frame rate you recorded in. That matches YouTube's recommended upload settings (MP4, H.264, AAC-LC, and the same frame rate it was recorded at), and it's accepted almost everywhere else. Then make each version from that master:
- X: X's developer docs on media recommend H.264 High Profile video with AAC LC audio, at 30 or 60 FPS, in 16:9 or square. A demo of under two minutes is well within the length and size caps they list for accounts without Premium. Our guide to announcing your launch on X covers the post around it.
- YouTube: upload the 16:9 master, which YouTube calls the standard aspect ratio on a computer. By default you can upload videos up to 15 minutes long, and longer ones need a verified account, per YouTube's upload help. Paste your script into the description, with your link near the top.
- App Store app previews: Apple's app preview specifications call for 15 to 30 seconds, at most 500 MB, as .mov, .m4v or .mp4 (H.264, or ProRes 422 HQ in .mov), at no more than 30 frames per second. Export at the accepted resolution for each device group, not the device's own screen size: for example 886 x 1920 portrait for iPhones with Face ID or Dynamic Island, and 1200 x 1600 portrait for the 11-inch and 13-inch iPads. You can upload up to three previews per device size and language. Our guide to launching an iOS app covers the rest of the listing.
- Launch boards: most take a link rather than a file, so upload the 45 to 90 second version to YouTube once and reuse the link. Product Hunt's listing takes an optional video, Hauntboard launch pages take a demo video link from YouTube, Loom or Vimeo, and Uneed's guide suggests having a short video or GIF ready before launch day.
- Your landing page: a 10 to 30 second muted loop, compressed hard, with a poster image cut from a strong frame. The launch asset resizer helps you crop that frame for social previews too.
Before you post anything, watch every version on a phone, muted, all the way through. Then put the video to work: our 30-day launch plan shows where it fits in the month before launch, and the launch checklist covers everything else. When it's ready, add it to your Hauntboard launch; free launches go live once approved.