Freedom and skills

Building creative tools is about balancing skills and freedom. To let your users bring a big vision to live, you need to give them enough creative freedom in your tool. Bit that freedom comes at a cost: a steep learning curve. Most users don’t want to learn that much. They want a good enough result, fast, so they can go on with their business. These users don’t want freedom, they want guidance. If we map creative tools along two axis: skill and freedom, it looks something like this:

High skill, high freedom

What do high-skill users want? They want full control so they can create the exact end-result they want. It’s okay if that takes some time and effort. Because these users have a vision of where they are going, and the skill and motivation to get there. Tools like Blender and Final Cut sit on this side of the spectrum.

Low skill, low freedom

What do low-skill users want? A good looking result without having to do too much work. They don’t have such a clear vision of the final result in mind, and they don’t care about perfection. These people want you to take them by the hand. Guiding users like that comes at the expense of the creative freedom in your tool. Canva and Wix are great examples of this. They rely on templates and guardrails to help many people make something that’s good fast.

The middle

Then we have the middle, where there’s some freedom to play, but there are still guardrails that keep you from crashing too hard. I’d put the current VEED here.

So you’re saying there’s nothing in the top left and bottom right?

That’s right: if I have the skills, but can’t get the end-result I want (top left), I will get frustrated. And if I don’t have the skill, but do get loads of freedom (bottom right), my results will likely be quite bad and I will churn too. So we product builders want to stay out of those two zones.

I’m seeing the same thing play out in AI tools: Some coding agents focus on low skill users, and help them by abstracting away lots of the architecture and code (think Lovable), while others cater to a more professional audience (think Cursor). There are no tools focused on giving lots of freedom to noobs, or putting up lots of guardrails for great engineers.

There’s no “right” side of this line to be on, as long as the freedom your product gives maps to the skills of your users. At VEED, we noticed that 80+% of our users does not change their default subtitle style. This shows us we’re more like Canva than Final Cut. Because of this we decided to double down on templates and guided flows, where we edit the video for the user. This means we’re trading away some control, but we believe its the right thing to do for most of our users.

The hard part is accurately diagnosing where your users sit on this spectrum. Look at your usage: What percentage customize vs. use defaults? How long do users spend in your tool before publishing? What end results do they produce? I have a hunch most builders will discover their users are less skilled than they assumed. Once you know where your users really are, the product decisions become obvious.