The Challenge: Support content that goes stale—and takes forever to redo
5StarStudents is a subscription SaaS platform used by K–12 schools to track campus activity and student movement—things like virtual hall passes and event check-ins. With a web-based product that constantly changes, traditional support videos quickly became a liability.
Chance described the old workflow as slow and fragile: record a 5-minute screen video to explain one small thing, then six months later the UI shifts and the content is already wrong. And re-recording meant dealing with voice takes, mistakes, and editing—over and over.
“It was really tedious to make these five minute long videos… and then six months to a year later it’s going to look a little bit different and that video is already out of date.”
On top of that, the support team needed to handle sensitive, school-specific scenarios—often involving private student-related contexts—so content couldn’t always be “generic” or publicly shareable.
The Shift: Turn every support moment into an editable, reusable walkthrough
iorad gave Chance a faster, more flexible way to deliver answers.
Instead of re-recording videos, he could capture workflows as step-by-step tutorials and update individual steps later when the interface changed—without rebuilding everything.
And because iorad captures in steps, he could also edit for clarity by simply deleting unnecessary actions (like typing into multiple fields) to keep the learner focused on what matters.
“Sometimes I have to fill out like five spots… they don’t really need to see that… so I just delete four of the steps.”
That ability to “cut to the meat” mattered for educators—especially those who only touch the software occasionally and want the fastest path to the answer.
“They just want to get an answer.”
How 5StarStudents operationalized it: Zendesk + a hidden tutorials hub
Chance’s primary use case is support: troubleshooting and quickly responding to tickets.
They use Zendesk, plus a lot of direct email outreach coming from relationships built during live onboarding. Most tutorials are reusable, general guides—but they also maintain a smaller set of highly specific walkthroughs for individual schools.
A key scaling move was building a tutorials page inside their product (behind login). That keeps tutorials accessible to customers while making them less discoverable to competitors.
“We built a tutorials page within our website… you can’t access it like our competitors can.”
From there, the support flow is simple:
- send the customer to the tutorial hub, or
- email a direct tutorial link back in response to a ticket.
Privacy-first support: school-specific walkthroughs that stay private
Because they work with schools, privacy and access control matter. Chance called out a repeated scenario: a school needs help investigating a specific student’s activity (e.g., too many hall passes), or troubleshooting something that’s tied to the school’s exact configuration.
iorad made it easy to create targeted walkthroughs that stay private between the support rep and the school contact.
“I can’t share this… it has to be private between me and whoever I’m sending the link to.”
That let him demonstrate the exact “click path” using the customer’s real context while still keeping control over who can view it.
The Outcome: Faster creation, easier updates, and better support responses
Chance summarized the biggest win as time savings—both in creation speed and in avoiding the constant rebuild cycle that comes with video.
“I mess up talking, I got to go back and do it again… next thing you know it takes me 30 minutes. With iorad it takes me five.”
He also described a meaningful maintenance benefit: when the product changes, he can add or adjust steps instead of recreating the tutorial.
“We can go back and add… and I don’t even need to recreate the whole thing.”
In terms of measurable impact, he estimated roughly 15 minutes saved per tutorial—which adds up fast across a library of 200+.
Looking ahead: mobile tutorials and reducing “auto highlight” friction
Chance surfaced two forward-looking product needs:
Mobile app tutorial creation
5StarStudents has two mobile apps, and capturing tutorials there is still clunky. Like other customers, they rely on screen mirroring today—functional, but not great.
“We’ve been doing [screen mirroring]. It’s clunky. It’s not ideal.”
Disable or control default highlighting
Chance noted frustration with iorad’s automatic highlighting/pink emphasis on text or UI elements—often choosing the wrong thing and forcing manual cleanup.
“It loves to highlight our website… and I’m like… I’d rather get rid of this.”