How SaaStr publishes 3-4 videos every day with Descript
SaaStr is the world’s largest SaaS community. It puts on networking events and creates content (a lot of it) to help founders scale. Amelia Ibarra, SVP and GM at SaaStr, uses video both to attract founders and to keep them in the community. Doing both means creating a lot of video—Amelia’s team publishes multiple new videos every day—and making sure the videos not only contain valuable content, but also look and sound really good. How do they do it? With Descript.
Descript’s text-based editing, AI tools, and native collaboration enable the SaaStr team to produce video at the volume and quality they’re aiming for.
Video
It’s hard to remember a time before Descript. We to try and put it out of our minds of how slow it used to be.
Amelia Ibarra
SVP, GM SaaStr
Increased content production by 100%
Publishing 3-4 videos per day
Nearing 100,000 YouTube subscribers
So much content, so little time
SaaStr produces content at a rate that would make most video editors weep. From event-specific videos for their marquee conference to speaker teasers, investor pitch reels, and original educational content, they publish three to four videos a day, 365 days a year across multiple channels and formats.
On top of this, SaaStr has a lot of eyes to feed: their blog receives 750,000 monthly views and their YouTube channel gets another 850,000 views. Rightfully, Amelia Ibarra and her team uphold a high bar—ensuring all of their content is useful and insightful, and all their video looks and sounds good. But relying on third-party vendors was slowing them down. And achieving the polish they wanted, at the speed they needed, wasn’t really possible for the internal team.
How Descript speeds up video creation without sacrificing quality
More self-sufficient, more video, faster
Without Descript
Relying on third party vendors and waiting weeks for final cuts
With Descript
Creating, editing, and publishing videos fast—often in real time
Instead of working with multiple vendors and waiting weeks to land on the final video, SaaStr now edits raw files the moment they receive them and uses Descript’s cloud collaboration to get feedback and approvals from partners.
Whether they’re working on a keynote recording, a podcast episode, or an original piece of educational content, the SaaStr team now handles much of this editing in house—something they couldn’t do at scale before Descript. And not only are they more self-sufficient with Descript’s intuitive text-based editing, but they can also stand up videos quickly, sometimes releasing event-specific content while the event is still happening. The pace keeps their engagement high, and enables them to turn out 100% more content than they used to—which gave them a 214% year-over-year increase in organic reach.
Using AI to police their polish
Without Descript
High quality meant more time and money spent on editing
With Descript
High-quality content at a fraction of the cost
For SaaStr’s Annual Conference alone, they count on two- to-three minute promo videos, session teasers, and TED-esque videos of their top presenters to drive nearly 37% of their ticket sales. And because they’re often working with guest speakers or other partner brands and companies, there’s a lot of scrutiny on each video. On top of event content, they’re also churning out podcasts, interviews, and investor pitch reels. All of it has to be top-notch.
Using Descript’s AI assistant, Underlord, SaaStr is able to keep quality consistent across all content formats. Features like Studio sound and filler word removal ensure all content is up to SaaStr standards. They’ve even gone back to old content from the cutting room floor and salvaged it using Descript’s powerful AI tools, and are experimenting with personalized AI-generated video recaps for attendees.
Turning one video into ten—in hours, not days
Without Descript
Creating clips from long videos added days to video production
With Descript
Easy clip creation is baked into the editing process
Back in the day, SaaStr had a person on contract whose one job was to watch entire videos and note timestamps for which clips they thought would resonate on different channels—long form, short form, social, email, etc. This whole process took hours just to earmark the clips, let alone create them.
Using Descript, SaaStr has been able to repurpose 78% of their content across multiple channels, resulting in a 214% increase in year over year organic traffic. Now, as they’re editing the video, they’re also highlighting quotes they think will make for good clips directly in the transcript. All they need to do is export, add the captions, and suddenly that one video has 10 new legs.
Our video production timeline went from weeks to ‘I can release this the next day.'
Amelia Ibarra, SVP, GM SaaStr
Doubling your content production and slashing your cost? Possible with Descript.
Before Descript, paying for outside editors, visual designers, sound engineers was adding up fast for SaaStr—and wasn’t allowing the team to produce content at the speed and scale they needed. Not only that, but much of their content was ineffective, because the video quality was poor, or the audio was distractingly bad.
With text-based editing, AI tools to instantly polish audio and visuals, and easy collaboration on Descript, SaaStr can not only produce high-quality video at scale, but also reinvest all the time and money saved back into their events and their community. On top of that, their content is delivering better engagement and higher growth.
Giving your full org access to Descript's AI-powered video editing can unlock 2.5x more video output. And you'll get enterprise-grade security, brand controls, and collaboration—all in one scalable solution.
