Telle video recorder

It’s been a long time since I participated in a company hackathon. Hackathons give me this good vibe of simple pre AI times where having at least half a brain guaranteed you to have a good live in IT.
Jobs looked for people, hiring could be wrapped up in 2 meetings and salary raises were guaranteed. No one even heard of an LLM except for AI nerds (sic!)

So when our stakeholders announced that we’ll have a company hackathon I had to take a part in it.

So what was the idea?

Rather simple - companies pay shit load of money for software, and we’ve been paying a whole bunch:
25k 💵 annually for an app to record videos of you and your screen to be shared with others.

Can you believe that?

Ever considered a Chinese car? Great tech, shiny on the outside, but when you take a closer look some finer details don't always add up.

We needed an app supporting:

• Screen recording

• Video recording

• Automatic upload

• Flexbile sharing

• Video comments & notifications

I submitted my idea and wanted to build a simple automation that would work somehow like this:

• User records video

• User triggers upload interaction

• Video gets uploaded to Google drive

• User decides who they want to share it with

What did we do?

I was surprised to see that one of our developers picked up this project and signed up for it. I was even more surprised when he's told me that he's planning to make an app out of it, not a simple automation. I thought - cool man! Good luck with that - hackathon takes only 3 days.

In fact he spend couple weekends and evenings working on backend, infrastracture and all that stuff, vibecoding some parts of it.

Who was it for?

Sales to use as a tool communicating with potential & exisiting clients.
Product - internally to gather feedback, pitch ideas, exchange notes & research.

How did we do it?

Developer spent couple evenings and weekends to build a mac desktop app (can be ported to windows if we ever need to) using Electron with a NextJS web app to handle video playback, comments and anything that will be shared with potential audience of users' videos.

Then we met during hackathon, saw ourselves first time live (yay, good old remote, good times, right?)
Created a plan. He keeps doing the heavy lifting and I do my part.

But what was my part exactly?

I am not technical, well, maybe for a Product Designer I am. I understand constraints of modern frontend, how databases & basic programming concepts work, how an LLM works, yea, that would be about it. If someone forced me I would write some frontend code, possible make a functional layout but who does that nowadays anyway, right?

I spent couple evenings looking at solution we've been paying for, its competitors and surrounding video recording apps.
I looked for solutions to meet our constraints.

I got carried away and created a logo and more sexy visuals than I get to make everyday. I felt like a uni again!

App design:

Execution

I downloaded cursor, set Figma MCP and began vibecoding UI of desktop app over the placeholder UI that we already had. I spent two full working days perfecting UI accordingly with my vision
(I ripped off most of the UX existing brands in the field, like a good LLM, without asking)

I delivered roughly 90% of my ideas, last 10% was a pain not worth doing, even coding with AI.

Leftover time we had I used for creating a simple landing page that I used during presentations when showing off our projects.
We won one of the prizes, yay 🙌

So, what's next?

Through testing by couple other users recording more than 2-3 videos we learnt that what we built isn't stable enough to use at scale and would probably require additional month or two of engineering to make it work well. Bugs started to come up.

If that time were spent combining time we already spent building it we would have to use the app for a year as a company to break even.

(Our time wasn't free to the company, even though nobody issued an invoice to be paid for overtimes! This was voluntary)