LeoStudio: What We Do, Who We Do It For, and Why We Do It

This page isn't going to sell you anything.

I've written enough sales pages to know how they go. The problem you have. The solution we offer. The proof we have. The call to action you should take. It's a formula, and it works, and I'm tired of it.

So this is a different kind of page. It's the page I'd want to read if I were a founder trying to figure out whether this studio was worth talking to. It's honest. It's specific. And if it turns out we're not a fit, it will tell you that too.

What We Actually Do

LeoStudio makes onboarding videos for SaaS products.

That's the whole thing. Not brand films. Not launch videos. Not social content. Onboarding videos—the specific kind of video that meets a new user at the moment they're stuck and shows them the one thing to do next.

The videos are usually 60 to 90 seconds long. They're built around a single action. They open with the user's problem, not with our client's brand. They're designed to work on mute and on a phone. They end with permission to ignore everything else in the product.

Most of them live inside the product, in the empty dashboard state or an in-app modal. Some live in the welcome email. Some live on a landing page. The placement matters as much as the video, and we work on both.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, the case studies are on leostudiohq.com. They're not about animation styles. They're about the moment the video was built for and what happened after it launched.

Who We Do It For

We work with SaaS founders and product leads.

Not all of them. We're picky in a way that occasionally costs us money. The founders we work well with have three things in common.

They have a real product with real users. We're not building videos for concepts or pre-launch ideas. The video only works if there's something for the user to actually do. If the product isn't built yet, the video can wait.

They have a problem they can name. Maybe it's churn in the first two weeks. Maybe it's an activation rate that's stuck. Maybe it's a support queue that's drowning in the same three questions. If the founder can point to a number and say "this is the problem," we can work with that. If the problem is vague—"people don't get it"—we'll spend our first conversation finding out what that actually means.

They're willing to be told something they don't want to hear. This is the one that matters most. Every project has a moment where we say, "This feature shouldn't be in the video," or "This isn't the moment the user is stuck," or "The video isn't the answer here—the product is." The founders who trust us through those moments get better work. The founders who insist on their original brief get a video that looks like what they asked for and doesn't move the number they cared about.

We're not the right studio for everyone. If you want a video that shows every feature, we're not it. If you want something cinematic and brand-forward, we're not it. If you want a video next week, we're probably not it either. But if you're trying to solve a specific onboarding problem and you're open to being told what's actually causing it, we can probably help.

Who We Don't Do It For

I want to be specific about who we turn down, because the refusals are as defining as the acceptances.

Companies that want a video for the wrong reason. Sometimes a founder asks for an onboarding video when the real problem is that the product requires a week of setup before it does anything. A video can't fix that. No video can. The honest answer is "simplify the product first," and we'd rather say it than take the project and produce something that doesn't work.

Companies with no way to measure the result. If there's no metric—no time-to-value, no activation rate, no churn number—then we can't tell whether the video worked. And if we can't tell, we're just making content. We'd rather help define the metric first, even if that takes a few weeks before any production begins.

Companies that want volume over clarity. Some clients want a hundred videos a month—feature announcements, social clips, product updates. That's a legitimate need, but it's a different kind of studio. We do fewer videos, more deliberately, and we measure each one. If volume is what you need, we'll happily point you somewhere better suited to it.

Companies where the video isn't the bottleneck. Sometimes the churn problem is pricing. Sometimes it's fit. Sometimes it's the sales process. Sometimes it's the product itself. When we diagnose a project and find that the video isn't the lever, we say so. We've turned down work because of it. It's the right thing to do, and it's also better for us—a video that doesn't move the number isn't a case study, it's a wasted project.

How We Work

We're a small, remote team. That shapes everything about how we operate.

Small on purpose. Our core production team is smaller than you'd expect. A scriptwriter. A motion designer. An animator. A project lead. Not a chain of seven people where each one adds a layer of polish and removes a layer of meaning. Small means we can't hide behind process. Everything we make has to be right the first time, because there's no one downstream to fix it.

Remote by default. Everyone on the team works from wherever they are—kitchen tables, coffee shops, the couch that's too comfortable to be productive. We talk about that openly. Remote work has real distractions and real habits that make it possible anyway. The Pomodoro technique. The focus bubble. The one task written down the night before. Pretending those don't exist doesn't help anyone.

Deliberately slow at the start. Every project begins with a conversation, not a brief. We ask three questions before we touch a script: what's the one message the viewer must remember, tell us about your most satisfied client's "aha" moment, and what's the hardest thing to explain about your offer. Those answers become the video. The production is fast. The understanding is slow. That's the right order.

Fast once the work begins. A typical onboarding video takes three to five weeks from kickoff to delivery. The fastest we've done took nineteen days. The slowest took eleven weeks, and the difference was never the production—it was the decisions. Fewer decision points, faster approvals, parallel workstreams. The production itself is not the bottleneck.

Measured at the end. Every project includes the analytics setup—the events, the cohort tracking, the dashboard that links the video to retention. We don't just deliver a video. We deliver a way to know whether it worked. If it didn't, we want to know that too.

What We Believe

There are three beliefs that run through everything we make. They're not marketing slogans. They're the things we've learned by getting it wrong first.

A video is not content. It's an intervention. Content is something you publish and hope people find. An intervention is something you place at a specific moment to change a specific behavior. The difference is everything. An intervention has a trigger, a message, and a metric. If any of those is missing, the video is just a file.

The product is the actor. We don't need actors on camera. We don't need a studio. A real cursor moving on a real screen, with a calm voice explaining the next click, is more persuasive than any performance. The user wants to see their own product, not a stranger pretending to use it.

The user's moment is the brief. Not the client's product roadmap. Not the features they're proudest of. Not the brand story. The moment the user is stuck. Everything in the video either serves that moment or gets cut.

You can see these beliefs in every case study on leostudiohq.com—not because we wrote them there, but because the work is the expression of them. The videos are short. They open with the user. They show one action. They end with permission.

The People Behind It

I'm not going to list the team like a corporate org chart. That's not how we think about it.

There's a founder who started the studio because he kept watching good products explain themselves badly. There's a scriptwriter who cuts every script to half its length, and is right every time. There's a motion designer who knows how to make a cursor move like a person instead of a robot. There's a project lead who protects the timeline from everyone, including me.

We're not a big team. We're not trying to be. We're trying to get better at one specific thing, on every project, for every client, over a long period of time. That's the whole ambition.

What We're Building Next

We're going deeper, not broader.

More measurement infrastructure in every project—the analytics, the cohort tracking, the dashboards. More work with complex B2B products, the ones with multiple roles and layered onboarding needs, because that's where the problem is hardest and the impact is largest. And more writing like this—the thinking behind the work, published openly, so other studios and founders can learn from what we've already paid for.

If any of it is useful to you, it's there on leostudiohq.com. Take it. Use it. You don't have to hire us to benefit from it.

What to Do If This Sounds Like You

If you read this page and recognized your own product in it—the stuck user, the churn number, the onboarding problem you can't quite name—then the next step is a conversation. Not a pitch. A conversation about what's actually happening and whether a video is even the right answer.

If it turns out we're not the right studio, we'll tell you. If it turns out the problem isn't a video problem, we'll tell you that too. And if it turns out we are the right fit, we'll start with the three questions, not a proposal.

That's the whole thing. Not a sales page. Just an honest description of what we do, who we do it for, and why we keep doing it.

If you want to see the work before you decide, it's all on leostudiohq.com. If you want to talk, the contact page is there. Either way, thank you for reading this far—it means more than you know.