Funnel teardown: Tella (Video for SaaS sales)
Founder(s): Tella team

Tella turned async sales video into a product category. The funnel runs on the output.

TL;DR: Tella's funnel relies on the fact that Tella-produced sales videos look different from Loom-produced ones, so every shared Tella video on the public web is implicit advertising. The lesson: pick the visible-output category and design the output to be recognizable.

What they sell: A browser-based screen and webcam recording tool optimized for polished marketing videos, async sales pitches, and product demos.
Who it's for: SaaS founders, sales teams, and creators who need video that looks intentional rather than utilitarian.
Pricing: Free tier with watermark. Paid tiers per editor for branded video, advanced editing, and team features (verified 2026-05-17).

Hook pattern: Aesthetic-differentiated output
Tella videos have a recognizable visual signature (clean backgrounds, layered camera and screen, branded color overlays). A reader who watches a Tella video on someone else's site recognizes the tool by the aesthetic alone, which is the strongest free distribution channel that exists.

Story pattern: Founder-demos-the-product as story
The story is told through founder-recorded demos embedded on the marketing site, which are themselves Tella videos. The recursion makes the demo unfakeable.

Offer pattern: Free-with-watermark plus brand-removal paid trigger
Same structural move as Senja and Tally: free tier with attribution feeds the visible-output flywheel; paid tier removes attribution when the founder is ready to publish to their marketing site without the third-party brand.

What's working:
Distinctive output aesthetic makes Tella videos recognizable, turning every shared video into an ad.|Founder-recorded marketing videos are also product demos, so the proof is in the marketing.|Free tier with watermark seeds visible-output presence on social and in shared videos.|Built-in templates produce on-brand output even for non-designer users, raising the floor of what the average customer ships.|Async sales positioning targets a high-willingness-to-pay buyer (sales teams) without abandoning the indie creator market.

What to adapt:
If your product produces a visible output, design the output so a third party can identify the tool. Subtle, but discoverable.|Record your own marketing videos with your own product. Eating dog food is a category-truth check.|Raise the floor of what an average user ships. Power-user output is a niche; average-user output is the public face.

What to avoid:
Do not over-brand the output to the point where customers fight to remove it. The attribution should be a soft signal, not a billboard.|Do not assume the visible-output flywheel works for non-shareable categories. Internal SaaS produces no public artifacts and the flywheel stalls.

Brunson lens:
Hook: Vehicle change (better video output for sales) plus identity positioning ('this is what a serious async pitch looks like').
Story: Founder demos itself; the marketing video IS the product capability statement.
Offer: Free-with-watermark plus brand-removal upsell — same Brunson structural move as the Tally / Senja pattern.
Value ladder tier: Front-end lead funnel (free with watermark) plus per-editor subscription core.