Lottie animation editor for non-After-Effects users

A motion designer finishes a Lottie file in After Effects, hands it to a marketer or developer, and that person immediately hits a dead end. They can't change timing, swap colors, adjust easing, or crop — because 'it's impossible to add filters to the finished video, change the tilt level, crop, or add animation or a GIF to the finished project.' Their only option is to go back to the original designer or learn After Effects themselves. Neither is acceptable on a Tuesday afternoon.

This gap persists because Adobe has no incentive to make After Effects outputs editable by non-Adobe users — that would reduce seat count. Lottie-adjacent editors exist but they operate on raw JSON and assume familiarity with animation concepts like keyframes, which is exactly the wall users are already complaining about.

What's missing is a visual editor that treats a finished Lottie file the way Canva treats a design: you open it, you see the animation playing, and you can change the obvious things — colors, timing, text, loop behavior — without touching JSON or learning what an easing curve is. The complaints about 'not having use of keyframes' and 'not able to edit the animations in After Effects' point to users who don't want full control, they want enough control to finish their job.

This is a recurring business because every team that uses Lottie animations — product teams shipping onboarding flows, marketers running campaigns, app developers integrating brand animations — hits this wall every single time a new animation needs a tweak. The designer is never available at the exact moment you need the change. That delay has a concrete cost: blocked launches, revision cycles measured in days, and designers pulled off higher-value work to change a hex color.

What to build

Build a browser-based Lottie editor that imports any .json Lottie file, renders it visually, and exposes color, timing, text, and loop settings as direct controls — no JSON editing, no After Effects required — then exports a valid Lottie file or an embeddable snippet.

Where to start

Start with teams already using Lottie for onboarding flows in SaaS products, where the same animation gets tweaked per customer or per A/B test — the edit frequency is high enough that the pain is acute and the buyer (product team) has budget authority.

The hard part

Lottie files have wildly inconsistent internal structures depending on which After Effects version and which Bodymovin plugin version exported them — handling edge cases without breaking the animation on import will consume most of the early engineering time.

How it makes money

Per-seat subscription billed monthly, with a free tier capped at three saved projects to drive organic adoption inside teams.