February is a very important month for me because it’s when HOVE takes its first step into existence. I’ve been working on it in my spare time for a few years and this month we launched its beta version.

What is HOVE?

HOVE is a video editor focused on mobile devices. Its aim is to be an easy and simple editor to use and its target audience is people who have no previous experience with video editing and who perhaps find the editors on the market too complicated and/or don’t use all the features they have to offer.

Our differentials lie not only in a simplified experience but also in the possibility of working with videos using an internet link.

For example, if you have a big YouTube video on your channel and want to post an excerpt of your video in Instagram, you can edit it on HOVE without having to download its entirety to your phone, saving memory and time.

And when you’ve finished editing, you can request to download the video and we’ll send you an email when the processing is finished. This is especially useful in the case of longer videos, as most editors do the processing on your own phone, making it unusable for a good few minutes until the process is finished.

Once completed, an email like this one will arrive in your inbox:

Next steps

Today HOVE’s focus is on doing a lot of testing with real users and understanding whether the design we’re proposing is really coherent and whether there’s a good experience in it.

Over time we also want to understand if what it offers makes sense and what kind of features it should contain to get out of Beta.

I’d appreciate it if you could go to our main page, create an account and edit something basic in a video, such as removing the first 5 seconds of it. How was your experience?

You can send feedback directly there or feel free to email me at luiz@cieslak.dev.

The journey

Developing a product from scratch is no joke. When I started, I was just a dev who was focused only on the front-end but was keen to learn other areas within software engineering. Today, although the main challenge at HOVE is in fact the front-end, I feel comfortable working on other parts of the back-end, database and infrastructure.

In my dream world, having good code would mean having a good product. However, in real life things are different. I’ve learned and still have to learn a lot about product, SEO and so on so that HOVE will one day have a lot of active users.

I confess that during this journey I haven’t given much importance to these aspects and if I had done things differently we would have been able to launch an MVP sooner. The fact is, we can only change things from now on and I’m very proud of the work I’ve done so far.

The Blog

This article launches my personal website. One of my goals is to write more (as I’m doing here right now) and so I want to share more details and technical experiences that I’m learning inside and outside HOVE.

Probably not everything is worthy of a blog post, so you’ll probably see me talking about these things on my Twitter.

🤗