How Video Editor SDK Helped a Social Network Save 50% of Dev Time

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Key takeaways

• Weat is a social network for food enthusiasts
• It used Video Editor SDK instead of building content creation functionalities from scratch
• As a result, it launched 50% faster than estimated if they had to build everything on their own.

Client

Weat is a US-based food-centric, video-native social commerce platform. Its founders had an idea to make a TikTok-like app for foodies, something that would help them connect and exchange their favorite recipes. 

Given that food reviews and cooking videos gain billions of views on social media, the idea was sound. Both professional chefs and casual cooks could use it.

Even an MVP of a TikTok-like app is difficult and expensive to build from scratch. However, the founders needed to deliver a product that would attract, engage, and keep users, and deliver it fast.

So, they turned to Banuba to get their video editing functionality.

Weat Results | Video Editing SDK

Product

The app in question is a video-based social network that is built around food and drink. At first glance, it has a feed similar to the one in TikTok with the relevant auxiliary features: comments, likes, subscription, personal cabinet, etc.

Weat Case | Video Editor SDK

Where Weat differs is in the “recipe” functionality. Each video comes with a list of ingredients and the order of operations to turn them into something delicious. A user can see how a dish or a cocktail looks and follow the steps to recreate it. 

The cooking process is assisted by an AI called “Jarvis.” It can recognize human speech and help walk the person through the cooking process. Jarvis can even recommend replacement ingredients (in case of allergy, personal distaste, or absence of the required component in the pantry).

Naturally, an app like this requires an inbuilt video editor to help users share their favorite recipes. Weat boasts a powerful one, provided by Banuba. It can trim, overlay pictures and text, provide color filters (LUTs), and do many other things that creative people find helpful. 

Why Banuba Video Editor

There are many solid video editing SDKs on the market. However, in this case, Banuba was the best fit. Here’s why:

• Easy to get started with. Compared to competing products, Banuba Video Editor SDK was the quickest to integrate.
• Feature-rich. Banuba’s SDK had all the functionality needed to make an MVP of a TikTok-like app: trimming, sound editing, captions, AR filters, etc.
• Well-supported. The product had detailed documentation, and the managers were quick to answer customer questions.

With Banuba Video Editor SDK we can cut our development effort in half so we can focus more on core business functionality.

Ash Zarif, CTO, Weat.

Banuba Video Editor SDK was able to cover the core features of Weat out of the box:

• Video trimming
• Video recording (including hands-free mode)
• Audio editing
• Video captions
• Picture and GIF overlays
• AR face filters
• LUTs (“Instagram filters)
• Drafts
• Picture-in-picture.

Results

Weat launched in November 2021 on iOS, having saved 50% of its product development time with Banuba Video Editor SDK.

Even with little marketing, it has already racked up about 5 thousand downloads and was met with universal praise from the users. The developers, emboldened by this success, now intend to expand their video app to Android.