Here is a morning most support leads at small software companies know well.
Version 4.2 ships. The release note goes out by email at 9. It is accurate and complete: four numbered steps, plus a note about when the feature runs. By 9:15 the first ticket arrives: "How do I turn this on?" By lunch there are a dozen more, and every one gets a hand-typed reply that repeats the release note.
Text release notes are written for the people who built the feature. Customers want to see where to click. A 60-second how-to video and a matching help article would close most of those tickets, but nobody on a three-person support team has an afternoon to script, record, voice and edit one on launch day.
I built a lesson around exactly this job in Clueso, using a made-up 15-person scheduling-software company called Bookline and its new Waitlist auto-fill feature. The steps and numbers below come from that run in the real app.
The business case
Do the math on one feature launch:
- Each "how do I turn this on?" ticket takes a support agent 5 to 10 minutes to answer well.
- Twenty of those in launch week is two to three hours of repeated work.
- Every customer who gives up instead of asking just never uses the feature you built.
A short video plus a step-by-step article, linked from the release email and dropped into your ticket macro, turns those replies into one link. Clueso's pitch is that you get both from one screen recording. The useful part of the lesson is learning where it gets things right and where you still have to check it.
Step 1: Record once, clicks only
You record the setting once: open Settings, open the Waitlist tab, flip the toggle. For Bookline that was 22 seconds, no talking.
On Clueso's start screen, click Upload screen recording. The Upload videos dialog takes .mp4, .mov, .wav or .webm and promises "a studio-quality video and a step-by-step article". Pick the file. Clueso reads it (240 KB, 21 sec, 720p, screen recording). Click Create.
Step 2: Read what it wrote from your clicks alone
About thirty seconds later the editor opens. Clueso named the project Find Waitlist Auto-Fill in Bookline Settings and wrote a voiceover script from what it saw.
Read it before you do anything else. It ended at "Right now, it's switched off." It saw Settings and the Waitlist tab, but it never got to the toggle, the Offer window or Save changes, because the recording did not show those clearly.
This is the most important lesson in the whole exercise: an AI tool that only watches your clicks will describe your clicks, not your feature. The release note is what knows the full procedure. So you give it the release note.
Step 3: Write the real brief
On the right, Clueso AI asks what you want to do with the video. Tick Answer support questions ("short clips for help articles") and click the arrow.
Then in the Ask anything box, write a brief with five parts:
- What to make: a 60-second customer how-to.
- Who it is for: clinic owners and front-desk leads.
- The order: follow the release note, show each click with a zoom, end on what they see after saving.
- The voice: friendly, plain English, no jargon.
- The brand: keep Bookline branding, blue on white.
Then paste the full release note under it, so the steps come from the note and not from a guess. Click the arrow. Clueso says Watched your video and starts writing.
Step 4: Skip the upsell
About a minute in, Clueso offers four more videos: a support training clip, a house-style version, a launch film and a feature spotlight. Two were pre-ticked at about 355 credits. You asked for one how-to. Click Skip.
Worth noticing on any credit-based tool: the defaults are not always set to "what you asked for".
Step 5: Read the plan as a customer would, then fix one thing
Two minutes later Clueso shows its plan and script: "Approve it and I'll build it." Writing the plan used 69 credits.
The steps followed the release note, and the end card carried the "offers go out between 7 am and 8 pm" note. Good. But the labels said Steps 1–2 · Settings → Waitlist tab, then Step 2 · Auto-fill toggle. The numbering had drifted from the release note. A customer reading the email and watching the video would see two different step 2s.
Do not approve it yet. Under How would you like to proceed?, pick Something else and say exactly what to change, and nothing else:
One fix to the script: Settings plus the Waitlist tab is Step 1, not Steps 1-2, so the four steps match the release note. Keep everything else as planned.
Keep corrections that narrow. A vague "make it better" invites the tool to rewrite parts that were already right.
In my run, two of Clueso's own next steps showed Couldn't finish this step before it carried on and built anyway. That happens. Watch the output, not the progress messages.
Step 6: Let it build, and read its report to the end
This is the slow part. Clueso rebuilt the video as three scenes (Intro, How it works, Turn on auto-fill), generated the voiceover, added zooms on each click and a Step 1 of 4 to Step 4 of 4 label. The panel said Working for about 28 minutes.
The result: a 51-second video with a "How auto-fill works" animation it drew itself. The build used 444 credits.
Then read its report all the way down, because it caught something in my recording: after the offer window was changed to 20 minutes, the message template still said "Reply YES within 30 minutes". That is a real mismatch a customer would notice, and it was in the source, not the AI's output. Fix the recording before you share anything.
Step 7: Check the article separately
Click Article at the top. Here is the trap: the article was still the first version, written from the clicks before you gave it the release note. "Step 1: Open the Bookline calendar", and it stopped at the toggle. The video was rebuilt; the article was not.
In Ask AI to improve your article, give it the four steps from the release note and the 7 am to 8 pm note. About a minute later you get a new title, a plain-words intro, Step 1 through Step 4 with screenshots pulled from your recording, and the "Keep in mind" line. That used 126 credits.
Step 8: Share, but not yet
Share offers Export video (MP4, GIF, PPTX, PDF, MP3), Export article, a View-only link and Embed code. On the free plan, local export is off and video export runs in the cloud.
In the lesson we stop here and publish nothing. For real: fix the flagged recording, re-export, then put the link in the release email and your ticket macro.
What to take from this
Total for one launch: roughly 640 credits and about 35 minutes, most of it waiting. Your part is three checks that no tool does for you:
- Did the script cover the full procedure, or only what it saw?
- Do the step numbers match the release note your customers already have?
- Did the article get updated when the video did?
Clueso is a Stepthrough partner, and this is their tracked referral link: Clueso.
Practice it step by step, free: https://learn.ynteractive.com/content/clueso-release-notes-how-to-video
Top comments (0)