How to make an explainer video for your SaaS

What a SaaS explainer video is actually for

An explainer video has one job: take someone who has never seen your product and get them to understand what it does and why it is different, before they lose interest. That is it. It is not a feature tour, not a tutorial, and not a brand film.

This matters because it decides everything else. A tutorial can be eight minutes because the viewer already signed up. An explainer cannot, because the viewer has not decided they care yet. Most explainers fail by being made as short tutorials.

How long should a SaaS explainer video be?

Thirty to sixty seconds for a landing page or social post. That is enough to show roughly three real capabilities and short enough to keep completion rate high, which is the metric social platforms actually rank on.

Go longer only when the viewer has already opted in — an onboarding email, a sales follow-up, a docs page. Those audiences have committed something and will watch two or three minutes. A cold visitor on your homepage will not.

Write the script before you think about visuals

A 30–60 second video is about 90–130 words of narration. That constraint is useful: it forces you to pick three things and cut everything else.

Open on the outcome, not the introduction. "Close your books by Thursday, not next Friday" earns the next five seconds. "We are Acme, founded in 2021, and we build accounting software" spends them. Name the company once, near the end, next to the call to action.

Then write for the ear rather than the page. Short declarative sentences, contractions, no clauses stacked behind dashes. Read it out loud: anywhere you run out of breath or stumble is a line to cut. Hedging verbs — "can help you", "is designed to", "allows you to" — are the clearest sign a script was written to be read rather than heard.

Finish with one call to action. Two options is the same as none.

Show the real product

The single biggest quality difference between explainers is whether the viewer sees actual software. Recorded footage of your real interface — scrolling, opening, responding — tells a buyer more in three seconds than thirty seconds of narration.

Stock footage does the opposite. A clip of someone smiling at a laptop communicates that there was nothing worth filming. Mocked-up fake dashboards are worse, because buyers recognise them and it costs you trust at the exact moment you were asking for it.

If your product genuinely has no visual surface, show the input and the output — the spreadsheet before and the report after — rather than reaching for stock.

Caption everything

Assume the video plays silently. Autoplay is muted by default across every major feed, and a large share of views happen where sound is socially impossible. If your explainer only works with audio, most people will never receive it.

Burned-in captions, not uploaded caption files. Caption files are stripped when your video is re-uploaded, embedded, or shared into Slack.

Three ways to actually produce it

• Hire an agency. Typically $2,000–$8,000 and two to four weeks, plus a brief and revision rounds. Justified for a flagship brand film; hard to justify per release.
• Do it yourself. Screen-record the product, edit in Descript, Premiere or CapCut, buy a licensed music track, record or synthesise a voiceover. Realistically a week of someone senior enough to know what to say — which is the expensive part, not the software.
• Generate it from your landing page. Tools like FilmYourSite load your live URL in a real browser, record the tour, write narration from your existing copy and add voiceover, captions and music. Minutes rather than weeks, and the preview is free so you can judge the output before paying.

Common mistakes worth avoiding

• Opening with the company name and founding year instead of the viewer’s problem.
• Narrating the interface ("click here, then select a filter") instead of the outcome.
• Stock footage of laptops, handshakes or abstract data visualisations.
• No captions, or caption files that get stripped on re-upload.
• Three calls to action at the end. Pick one.
• Letting the video age. A demo of a UI you shipped two redesigns ago is worse than no demo.

How to make an explainer video for your SaaS: step by step

1. Pick three things to showA 30–60 second video holds about three capabilities. Choose the three that most often close deals, and cut everything else.
2. Write 90–130 words that lead with the outcomeOpen on what the viewer gets, not on who you are. Short declarative sentences, no hedging verbs, one call to action at the end.
3. Capture your real productScreen-record your live interface scrolling and responding, or generate the footage automatically from your landing page URL. Avoid stock footage and fake dashboards.
4. Cut to 30–60 secondsMatch each line of narration to what is on screen. Remove anything that does not show the product or advance the argument.
5. Add voiceover, burned-in captions and musicAssume the video plays muted: captions must be burned in, not uploaded as a separate file that gets stripped on re-upload.
6. Publish and keep it currentPut it above the fold on the landing page and in onboarding email. Regenerate it after significant UI changes so it never shows a product you no longer ship.

Frequently asked questions