I've spent the last five years making WordPress videos.
For a long time, the formula was fairly simple. Build something useful, make a good tutorial, publish it, and people would watch.
I don't think that's true anymore.
The problem isn't that people have stopped caring about websites. The problem is that attention has become much harder to earn. There are endless feature announcements, tutorials, launch videos, and product demos. Most of them look and feel the same.
Making another good product video isn't enough.
If we want people to stop scrolling, we need to give them a reason to care before we show them the product.
The product isn't the whole story
This is the biggest shift I've been thinking about.
Companies often treat the product as the story.
"We launched a new feature."
"We redesigned the editor."
"We added AI."
Those aren't stories. They're updates.
Stories have movement. They have tension. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The product is simply what moves the story forward.
Think like a filmmaker
One of the reasons Casey Neistat's videos work so well is that they were rarely about the thing in the title.
A camera review became an adventure.
A drone became a challenge.
A snowboard became a journey.
The object wasn't the story.
The object enabled the story.
I think software companies could learn a lot from that.
Build a narrative, not a content calendar
Instead of asking:
What should we make a video about this week?
Maybe we should be asking:
What story are we telling this year?
Once that becomes clear, every launch has context.
Every product update becomes another chapter.
Every customer story reinforces the same narrative.
The content stops feeling random.
Tone matters
I think people are becoming increasingly good at spotting marketing.
I'd rather hear:
"We tried this. It didn't work."
than:
"We're excited to announce…"
I'd rather see the messy whiteboard than the polished keynote.
I'd rather understand why a decision was made than simply be shown the finished feature.
Curiosity is more engaging than certainty.
Honesty is more engaging than polish.
Build in public
One of the biggest opportunities for software companies is to share more of the journey.
Not everything.
But more of the interesting bits.
The debates.
The trade-offs.
The customer feedback.
The experiments.
The dead ends.
People don't just enjoy watching products evolve.
They enjoy watching people solve problems.
Every launch should move the story forward
This is the idea I keep coming back to.
The best product launches don't feel isolated.
They feel inevitable.
They move a bigger story forward.
That's the challenge I'd love to solve at Automattic over the next few years.
Not just how to make better product videos.
How to make products part of a story that people genuinely want to follow.
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