Onboarding explainers that stay as current as your product

The stale-video problem

Onboarding explainers go out of date quietly. The sidebar moves, a step is renamed, pricing changes, and the welcome video still shows last year's product. Re-shooting or re-commissioning is expensive enough that most teams live with it, and new users learn from a video that no longer matches the screen in front of them.

Softer videos are built as code, not as a flattened file. The script, the voice, the scenes and the captions stay editable, so an update is a sentence: "the Projects tab is now called Workspaces", "remove the step about inviting by email". Softer re-renders and you replace the file.

What a good onboarding explainer covers

1. The promise (5–10s): what the user will be able to do once set up.
2. The first win (20–30s): the shortest path to value, shown as the actual steps.
3. The mental model (10–20s): the two or three objects the product is built around.
4. What's next (5–10s): where to go now, and where help lives.

That is 40 to 70 seconds, which fits Softer's 60-second default. Longer walkthroughs can run to 120 seconds, but for onboarding several short videos usually beat one long one.

One explainer per audience

Admins and end users need different first videos. So do customers in different countries. With Reuse you make the main explainer once, then branch it: "for admins, focus on permissions and SSO", "in Spanish", "for the mobile app, vertical". Each branch is its own video and the original stays intact.

Built from your material

Upload your help-center PDF, an onboarding deck or annotated screenshots, and Softer uses them as source material. The brand kit captured from your site at signup keeps the video in your colours, fonts and logo, so it sits naturally inside your product's welcome screen.