Onboarding audit and UX consulting for video software vendors

A product manager at a mid-size video editing software company watches churn numbers and sees that users who don't complete a core action in the first session never come back. They know the interface is overwhelming new users. They don't know exactly where people freeze, which features are invisible to beginners, or what sequence of exposure actually leads to a second session.

This gap persists because most UX research firms do general usability work and don't have deep expertise in video editing workflows specifically. The video editing domain has its own vocabulary — timelines, sequences, nested clips, audio tracks — and a generalist UX consultant misses the nuance of why 'unnesting sequences' is a power-user concept that shouldn't appear in a beginner's first week, while 'basic cut' should be front and center. The complaints here are domain-specific: 'can't unnest sequences natively', 'too many tools no one knows about at first', 'overwhelming due to variety of tools'.

What vendors currently do is run generic NPS surveys, read app store reviews, and occasionally commission broad usability studies. None of that produces a ranked, actionable list of which specific interface elements are causing new user drop-off and what progressive disclosure changes would fix them. The buyer is a product or growth team at the vendor; the user is their churning customer. That disconnect means the vendor is always one step behind.

This is a business because the need recurs with every major product update — new features re-introduce the overwhelm problem, and each release cycle creates a new onboarding gap to audit. Vendors with monthly active user targets can't afford to run this themselves continuously.

What to build

Offer a fixed-scope video editing onboarding audit: recruit 20 beginner users, run moderated sessions inside the client's actual product, map every moment of freeze or confusion to a specific UI element, and deliver a ranked list of onboarding changes with before/after mockups — repeatable on a per-release-cycle basis.

Where to start

Start with a single vendor in the prosumer video space — not the largest players — where the PM team is small enough that they genuinely don't have in-house video UX expertise and the new-user drop-off problem is visibly hurting their trial-to-paid conversion.

The hard part

The hardest part of the first sale is convincing a PM that a domain-specialist audit will produce findings their own user research team missed — which requires either a published case study or a low-risk pilot engagement, neither of which exists until you've done the first one.

How it makes money

Fixed project fee per audit engagement, with a retainer option for teams who want a quarterly re-audit tied to their release calendar.