Examples
The best explainer videos, and the specific thing each one gets right
Not a gallery. Fifteen videos, and for each one the single structural decision that made it work — the part you can copy without the budget, the warehouse, or the comedian.
Published 13 September 2026 · 8 min read · no conversion statistics, for the reason given at the end
The short version
- Every good one passes the same test. Pause at fifteen seconds. If you cannot yet say what the product does, the video is already failing regardless of how it looks.
- The money went into the script. The famous examples are mostly cheap. What they bought was a writer, not an animator.
- Humour is not the lesson. Two of the most-copied examples are comedies, which is why the category is full of companies doing a voice that is not theirs.
- Show, do not assert. The through-line in all fifteen is that the claim and the picture of the claim arrive together.
What makes an explainer video good, specifically
“Good” in this category is unusually measurable, because the video has one job: a person who did not understand the product understands it ninety seconds later. Three things separate the ones that do that from the ones that merely look expensive.
- One idea. Not three features and a mission statement. The videos below each explain a single thing and trust the rest of the page to do the rest.
- The idea arrives early. Almost all of them state what the product is inside the first fifteen seconds, before any story or joke has had time to develop.
- The picture carries the claim. When the voice says the thing, the screen shows the thing. This is the part most budgets skip and the part that does the work.
The classics, and what each one actually did
These five built the category and are still the most-imitated videos in it — usually for the wrong reasons.
| Video | Style | The decision worth copying |
|---|---|---|
| Dropbox (2009) | Screencast | It shows the product working, on a real screen, within seconds. No metaphor, no story. The category’s founding video is also its plainest. |
| Dollar Shave Club | Live action | The first line is the entire proposition. Everything after it is entertainment built on a pitch that has already landed. Widely reported to have cost about $4,500. |
| Crazy Egg | Motion graphics | It draws the abstraction. Heat-mapping is hard to describe and trivial to show, and the video simply shows it. |
| Mint | Motion graphics | It explains a category, not a product. When the thing you sell is unfamiliar, the first job is teaching the problem. |
| PooPourri | Live action | It makes an unmentionable product mentionable. Tone as a strategy rather than as decoration. |
The thing these five share is that none of them is expensive-looking except by accident. Dropbox’s is a screen recording. Dollar Shave Club’s was shot in their own warehouse in a day. What they spent on was the writing.
SaaS and B2B
The harder half of the category, because the product has no physical form and the buyer is sceptical by default.
| Video | Style | The decision worth copying |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Mixed | It sells the change in how a team feels, not the feature list. The product appears as a consequence. |
| Stripe | Motion graphics | It shows code and money moving. For a developer audience the interface is the emotional content. |
| Notion | Screencast | It accepts that the product is hard to summarise and demonstrates one workflow end to end instead. |
| Figma | Screencast | Multiplayer is shown by showing two cursors. One picture replaces a paragraph of explanation. |
| Monday.com | Motion graphics | Colour and motion carry the structure of the tool, so the video teaches the interface before you open it. |
Four of those five are motion graphics or screencast, which is not a coincidence: software is a system, and systems are drawable. That argument, extended to which video belongs on which page, is the SaaS explainer video playbook.
Product and consumer
| Video | Style | The decision worth copying |
|---|---|---|
| Headspace | 2D character | The animation style is the product promise: calm, simple, unthreatening. Form matching argument. |
| Spotify | Motion graphics | It explains the offer in one sentence and spends the rest of the runtime on the catalogue. |
| Duolingo | 2D character | The mascot does the explaining, so the brand asset and the teaching device are the same thing. |
| Grammarly | Screencast | It shows the product fixing real text in real time. The demo is the argument. |
| Google “Dear Sophie” | Screencast | An entire emotional story told inside a browser UI. Proof that a screencast can be moving. |
Styles here split roughly down the middle, and the split is predictable: the character-animated ones are selling a feeling and the screencasts are selling a capability. Which style suits which subject is the whole of the explainer video styles guide.
The opening five seconds
The single most transferable thing in all fifteen. Every one of them front-loads, and it is worth reading the openings as a set:
- State the product. Dropbox opens by showing a file appearing on a second computer. Nothing is withheld.
- State the proposition. Dollar Shave Club’s first line is the offer. The comedy is decoration on a pitch already made.
- State the problem, once. Mint spends its opening on why the category exists, because nobody knew.
What none of them does is open on a slow logo, a sunrise, or forty seconds of a cartoon person looking frustrated at a laptop. That last one is the default opening of the modern template explainer and it is where most of the runtime goes.
How long the good ones actually are
Most of the videos above land between about sixty and a hundred and ten seconds, and the longer ones buy their length with entertainment rather than information. That gives a usable rule.
| Where it sits | Runtime | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage hero | 30–60s | The page can finish the argument |
| Feature page | 20–45s | One feature, one idea |
| Paid social | 15–30s | Nobody chose to watch it |
| Sales follow-up | 60–120s | They asked; you have permission |
| Onboarding | Up to 5 min | Already a customer, already committed |
What you can copy without the budget
None of the three things that make these videos work costs money.
Copy this
- The first sentence. Write the video’s opening line as though it were the only line. If it does not say what the product is, rewrite it.
- One idea per video. If you have five things to say, that is five short videos, and a library of five beats one video that says all five badly.
- Show the claim. Every time the script asserts something, ask what the screen is doing at that moment. “Nothing in particular” is the most common and most expensive answer in the category.
Do not copy this
- The tone. Borrowed irreverence is the most visible failure mode in explainer video, and it reads instantly.
- The production tier. A $50,000 live-action shoot is not what made Dropbox’s video work, and Dropbox’s video did not have one.
- The length. The long famous ones are long because they are funny. Yours probably is not, and that is fine.
Where ExplainVids fits
Most of what makes the videos above good is decided before anything is animated: one idea, stated early, shown rather than asserted. That is a writing problem, and it stays your job.
What we remove is the part that stops people making the video at all. You type what it should explain — or paste a URL and we read the page — and about two minutes later there is a narrated film with motion graphics, a real voice, captions lit word by word, vertical or widescreen, for €3. The claim and the picture of the claim arrive together because the animation is cut to the narration rather than guessed against it, which is the third rule on this page made automatic.
The honest limit: we make motion graphics. Two of the fifteen videos above are live-action comedies and three are character animation, and if that is what your idea needs, it is not what we do. If your idea is a product, a process or a set of numbers — which is eleven of the fifteen — it is.
The cheapest way to find out whether your first sentence is any good is to hear it read aloud over the picture it is supposed to earn. Three euros, about two minutes.
Make one and seeQuestions
What makes an explainer video good?
One idea, stated early, shown rather than described. The videos that hold up all pass the same test: pause at fifteen seconds and you can already say what the product does. Everything else — animation quality, music, humour — is amplification. A beautifully made video that takes forty seconds to reach the point performs worse than a plain one that opens with it, which is why production value is the least useful thing to copy from a showreel.
How long should an explainer video be?
Sixty to ninety seconds for a homepage, and thirty is often better. The famous examples are mostly between 60 and 110 seconds, and the ones at the upper end earn it with entertainment rather than information. The practical rule: a viewer on a landing page is deciding every few seconds whether to keep watching, so length has to be justified continuously rather than budgeted in advance.
What was the first famous explainer video?
Dropbox’s 2009 screencast is the one usually credited with creating the category. It is not animated, not scripted cleverly and not expensive — a plain screen recording with a friendly voiceover explaining a product that people found hard to grasp in text. It is worth watching precisely because it is unimpressive to look at: it shows that the format’s power was always clarity rather than production.
Do explainer videos still work in 2026?
The format does; the 2013 execution of it does not. What has changed is the baseline: a generic animated explainer with stock characters and an upbeat ukulele track now reads as a template, because it is one. What still works is specificity — a video about your actual product, showing your actual workflow and your actual numbers. That is harder to fake than production value and is the thing the good examples all have.
How much did the famous explainer videos cost?
Less than people assume, and the reported figures are mostly from the makers rather than independently audited. Dollar Shave Club’s launch video is widely reported to have cost around $4,500 and was shot in a day in their own warehouse. Dropbox’s was a screen recording. The pattern in the well-known examples is that the money went into the script and the idea rather than the animation, which is the reverse of how most explainer budgets are actually spent.
Should I copy a famous explainer video's style?
Copy the structure, not the tone. The opening-line discipline, the one-idea rule and the early demonstration all transfer to any product. The humour usually does not: Dollar Shave Club and PooPourri work because the voice matches a genuinely irreverent brand, and the same script from an enterprise security vendor would read as a company trying on a personality. Borrowed tone is the most visible mistake in the category.
Related: explainer video styles for picking the form, what an explainer video costs for what these would be quoted at today, corporate explainer videos if this is for an internal audience, and the explainer video generator to try your own opening line.