Lighthouse creates walkthroughs 10x faster in 11 languages with Supademo
How Lighthouse's customer engagement team produced ten walkthroughs in two days, and now publishes in eleven languages without re-recording each version.
To produce one localized walkthrough, down from two to three days
Ten walkthroughs in the two days that used to yield one video
Per translation across 11 languages. Translating video cost $2 a minute, and every re-record meant paying it again
Company size
500+ employees
Use Cases
Customer onboarding, help center documentation, localization
Challenges
Video scripting and re-recording, per-minute translation costs, translations invalidated by every re-record, reliance on native-speaking colleagues
Outcomes
One hour per walkthrough, ten built in two days, eleven languages without re-recording
About Lighthouse
Lighthouse builds software for the hospitality industry, spanning revenue management, distribution and guest engagement across a suite of products including BenchDirect, The Hotels Network and Channel Manager.
Hanne Alliet sits on the customer engagement team, working on what Lighthouse calls the indie vertical. Not chains, not groups.
"I'm part of the indie vertical, which means that we focus mostly on our smaller customers. It could be your neighbor that has like three extra rooms that she wants to rent out and turns into a B&B, or small boutique hotels."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
Lighthouse's customer base of independent hoteliers and B&B owners are hospitality professionals first. Their time goes into running their property and is not spent learning new software.
"We have to make sure onboarding is as light and self-explanatory as possible."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
What challenges did Lighthouse face before Supademo?
Onboarding was entirely one-to-one, and slow. Every new customer got a kickoff call, then sent through their setup for Lighthouse to configure, then a training call covering every feature of the tool, then a go-live call to activate connections to external channels, then a follow-up a week or two later.
For a responsive customer with a straightforward setup, that took two to three weeks. For anyone with an external property management system to integrate, or more of Lighthouse's products to configure, it could stretch to two or three months. By that point the customer most likely had not been back in the tool since their training call, and the process effectively started again.
Customers kept coming back for more help.
"We had a lot of retraining requests, and we really wanted to minimize those, because the onboarding process was such a lengthy manual process."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
So the team started making video content. The point was to reduce how much one-to-one time each customer needed, and to give people something to consult instead of booking another call. They began with a video hosting tool the marketing team already used.
Then producing the videos became the bottleneck. Every video needed a full script, a clean recording, and a re-record whenever anything went wrong. In a fast-moving product, videos went out of date and had to be rebuilt.
"You needed two, three days for one video. And that's not even counting all the different languages that we had to record."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
Localization multiplied all of it. Lighthouse's customers want to learn in their own language. Early on that meant recording every video three or four times with a colleague who spoke each language, while knowing they needed more languages than they could cover.
Once AI translation became viable it carried its own costs, and every re-record wiped the work out.
"Each translation costs us, I think, $2 per minute."
"If you re-record a video, you have to do all the translations again."
Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
The result was a team that had built a solution to its onboarding problem and then could not afford to run it.
"Nobody wanted to do the videos with the previous tool, because it took so long."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
Why did Lighthouse choose Supademo?
The team started evaluating alternatives and quickly ruled out an entire category.
"A lot of the big video tools like Loom, you have Vimeo as well, they're all based on the same thing: you record something and then we share it. But that's where for us it was very difficult to scale our videos in that way."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
What they wanted instead was click-based. Capture the steps in the product and generate the walkthrough from those, so a change could be made once and pushed through every language rather than re-recorded in each.
Supademo was not in their original shortlist. They found it because of an integration requirement.
"We were very close to going with a different tool, but then we discovered that the other tool did not have the integration with Intercom, the embed integration. Intercom is our help center. It's super important for us that our videos are also able to live there. So we checked all the possible tools that were able to embed with Intercom. And that's actually how we found Supademo."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
Two other factors closed it: the team preferred Supademo's output quality to the alternative they had been considering, and pricing that did not charge separately for every translation. See the full list of Supademo integrations for where interactive demos can be embedded.
The voice quality mattered more than the team expected. Lighthouse clones its own specialists' voices for several languages.
"We can translate our own voice, clone our own voice as well, which we've done for a few languages."
"It sounds super natural. Our customers have the idea that they're listening to their customer engagement specialist while watching the video."
Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
What results has Lighthouse achieved with Supademo?
- 1
Production time collapsed.
"Now I can create a video in one hour, whereas before it would take me, like I said, two to three days sometimes to create it."
In one recent two-day stretch Hanne produced ten of them, which was Lighthouse's entire website manager series. The work also stopped needing a committee.
"And now we actually don't need anyone else apart from me, because it goes so quickly and so smooth."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
- 2
Localization stopped being a separate project.
Content ships in eleven languages without recording any of them individually, and without a translation bill that scales per minute.
- 3
The format suits how their customers actually work.
Where a video has to be watched, a walkthrough can be worked through.
"They can click through them. They can skip a step if they already know it. They can really do it on their own rhythm. Whereas with somebody just talking in a video, you have to listen. You can put it on one and a half, but then maybe you miss something."Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
And then it compounded
Hanne connected Claude to Supademo through the MCP connector and built a skill that edits her demos directly. It writes hotspot copy in Lighthouse's tone of voice, generates the English voiceover for sign-off, then translates it into every other language. She hands it a demo ID and it runs.
"All I have to do right now is open my skill, put in the demo ID and say, okay, do your magic. It knows which languages it needs, how the hotspots should look."
"I only have to spend maximum of an hour, and most of the time is also just spent waiting on Claude to implement something. That's because of the skill."
Hanne Alliet, Onboarding Specialist
That workflow is fundamentally easier with editable, step-based content than with a flat video file. Moving from video to steps did not just make production faster, it made it automatable.
| With video | With Supademo |
|---|---|
| Two to three days for one video | One hour for one walkthrough |
| Scripting, rehearsal, and re-recording | Capture the steps once, edit them after |
| $2 per minute per translation | Eleven languages, no per-translation charge |
| A re-record invalidates every translation | Change a step, push it through every language |
| Borrow a native-speaking colleague to record | Cloned specialist voices in several languages |
| Nobody wanted to take video work on | One person produces the whole library |
| No way to automate an MP4 | An AI agent edits, voices and localizes it |
What's next?
Lighthouse is still migrating its library across from its previous tool. After that the walkthroughs will be embedded in the Intercom help center and in the checklists customers work through before their live session.
And while Hanne currently owns this for the indie vertical, the workflow is being built so that other Lighthouse teams can adopt it too.
