I wrote previously about my intention of creating and launching 10 micro-SaaS products in 100 days, while building Apocode (a UK-based startup helping entrepreneurs create SaaS products without writing code).

Ten days ago, I completed the fifth micro-SaaS. This article brings you the sixth.

The problem

When researching a new topic, I like to take notes in order to summarise important concepts and make them easier to remember. I use the following process:

1. Find a topic of interest and create a new note.
2. Search for web pages and Youtube videos that look relevant.
3. Skim through them to assess their usefulness.
4. Close the uninteresting ones.
5. Read/watch the remaining content more carefully and take notes.

Well-written web pages stand out as they tend to contain certain features: images, headings, tables of contents, that make their structure easy to grasp. So gauging the relevance of a web page can be achieved very quickly by simply scrolling through it and/or searching for keywords.

Finding interesting content in a YouTube video, however, is much more difficult. Very few Youtubers use chapters, or include a summary in their video descriptions.

Because of this, pin-pointing the relevant few moments of a video can be time-consuming, and means I can't simply take notes as I watch and augment them later with screenshots. Instead, I am forced to capture everything in the hope that something will be relevant. Pausing to take these screenshots every few seconds is tedious and, more importantly, diverts my attention away from learning.

The solution

To solve this problem I have created Video Slide Extractor to extract slides from YouTube videos automatically.

To use it, you just need to copy the URL of a YouTube video and paste into the form:

After clicking "Extract slides", Video Slide Extractor will download the video in the background and take screenshots of up to 200 still frames.

There are only a few similar tools available online. And, compared to them, Video Slide Extractor detects more slides and produces fewer duplicates. By default, extracted slides are kept on the server for 7 days. Registered users get priority processing and longer data retention.

Feedback

If you would like to provide feedback, create similar SaaS products, or follow the journey, you can join Apocode's product waitlist, subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter, or email me at nicolas@apocode.com