Instagram's Edits is a boutique, not a Costco

This isn’t your usual edition of Geekout.

I’ve been wanting to break Geekout out of the weekly cycle and get closer to the source…

…The people actually making decisions inside the platforms.

…And the social media talent behind some of your favourite brand accounts.

I also want to give you the chance to get your questions answered.

So I finally got my ass into gear last month…

I opened my social media VIP contacts list

Pinged a few people at Meta.

Asked to speak to the person behind Edits app.

Told them I wanted no PR fluff. No vague answers.

Just: 'let’s talk.'

In this pilot of ‘Geekout Interviews…’ I’m joined by Instagram’s director of product management for the Edits app, Matt Simari.
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If you think Edits is just Instagram’s CapCut clone… you’re probably underestimating what Meta’s really doing.

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1. This isn’t a CapCut clone — it’s a strategic bet on creators

Edits exists to help creators make better content, faster, inside Meta’s ecosystem. That’s why it’s now a standalone product team like Threads, not just an Instagram add-on.

2. Growth is already huge — and they’re shipping fast

Around 10% of all Reels views now come from content made in Edits. The team operates on a “ship every week” mindset, which is why updates feel constant (and meaningful).

3. AI is there to assist, not replace creators

Meta’s approach is clear: use AI to remove boring, repetitive tasks — not to generate full videos. The creator stays in control; AI just speeds things up.

4. “Boutique, not Costco” is the product philosophy

Edits isn’t trying to include every possible feature. It’s focused on doing the core workflows really well — simple, opinionated, and built for speed.

5. Free is core… but paid features are coming (likely via AI)

Meta wants to keep core tools free and accessible. But high-cost (possibly AI) features could sit behind a paywall in future — without taking away what creators already rely on.

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Below you can read a transcript of the interview, trimmed for length and lightly edited for clarity.

Watch the interview in full on YouTube:👇

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I’m joined by Instagram Edits’ Matt Simari. What's your official job title? Are you a product manager? Is that an unfair description of what you do?

I'm head of product for Instagram Edits. At Instagram recently we've rebranded the product management role for product staff. Everyone is a member of product staff, tied to a lot of the expectations evolving with how much more we can do with AI. So I’m a former product manager, now member of product staff.

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To give us an idea, in terms of the hierarchy of how Instagram works, you've got Adam Mosseri doing his role there. Where do you fit into that structure of how Instagram and Edits work together?

Adam runs all of Instagram, and then recently we broke out Edits as its own product group in. So you should think about it as there's the Edits app, Instagram, and Threads.

Connor [Hayes], who you may know, who's wonderful, he's running the Threads team. Adam obviously runs the Instagram team, and then Brett Westervelt is my manager. He used to be the head of design for Instagram and now he's fully focused on Edits. And so it's been fun. We're our own product group now focused on building a bunch of great things.

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Can you tell us a bit about what you did before Edits?

My entire career has been in zero-to-one new products that have been mostly consumer and taking a new technology to market. Originally, when I came to Meta in 2017, I was one of the first PMs on our Spark AR platform, if you're familiar with it.

So I was scaling up all of the face filters on Instagram and really making it a creation platform, which was a lot of fun. I worked on the AR glasses for a while. I was our first product manager on Orion back in the day. I pitched the Ray-Ban product and led Ray-Bans for our first version of that, which was really exciting to see how successful that was.

And then more recently I've come back to Instagram after taking a sojourn working in AI and AI labs to come lead the Edits team.

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Let's go back to the beginning with Edits. What drove Meta to create Edits in the first place, given the existing options on the market for content creation? Was it creative feedback? Was there internal data? Was it competitive pressure? Was it a combination?

What we saw over time is that creators needed to make really, really great content their audience loved. And so there was a desire for helping these more established or growing creators build amazing content on Instagram. And when we were looking at how to do that, building out a dedicated, really efficient, really easy to use, but deeply robust toolset.

A standalone app made the most sense. And as we introduced that to creators and it really started taking off as people loved it, we're able to build really great things. We just have invested more and more and it has started achieving exit velocity where we broke it out as its own product group and now have a lot of people with a dedicated focus on it.

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How is Edits doing now in terms of usage, compare to how you hoped it to would? What can you give us any sense of scale of what it was like when it first started and where it's got to and how people are using it now?

It's grown immensely. I think we shared this in our earnings call in February, but we're now about 10% of all Reels viewed on Instagram are created with Edits, which is enormous when you think about like the volume of content both produced and viewed every single day.

One of the things that we found is when we launched the product almost a year ago – we're about to hit our birthday – it was very much a basic, simple, well-crafted editor, but there is a lot of what I would say are core workflows that weren't totally there.

Our commitment has been with our audience and really what our focus has been is just relentlessly shipping. So we have an update every week with new, improved tools.

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I’ve noticed that with Edits compared to any other Meta product, I don't think I've ever seen such an iteration of new features added. It's not just like one or two little extra things. It's quite substantial and quite frequent.

Is that an unusual thing? Is it intentional? How do you manage to do that?

It's very intentional. So I would say it's like part of the culture of the team. We have cultural principles we share with everyone and talk about at every team meeting. ‘Ship every week’ is one of the core cultural principles.

In terms of how we're able to do it, this is where being a standalone app is actually excellent. By being a standalone app, you have a lot less dependencies to navigate and with the code base, it's a lot less likely that we're going to change something that accidentally breaks someone else.

With an app like Instagram or Facebook, for example, there are a lot of things that are connected in ways that may not even be intuitive to a user. So the beauty of having the standalone app is the iteration speed is a lot more flexible.

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How do you, as someone who is working on the product and within the team feel it stacks up against competitors?

I guess most people would compare you to CapCut, possibly Adobe's tools as well. How much time are you spending benchmarking against the features that they have, the way the platform operates? Do you feel that Edits has a USP that makes it stand out in a crowd that's got quite a few strong competitors who've been doing it longer than Edits has?

It's incredibly dense space. There are so many apps with so many different purposes. For us [our focus is] core tools that work. So what are the things that you as a creator rely on and how do we deliver them to you at the absolute highest quality possible?

On those things, we feel very confident about Edits in the market in comparison to other options in the market. I think when you look at creative tools, there's an incredibly long tail of every possible thing that you could go build.

One way that we describe this internally is we are building a boutique, not a Costco. So our idea is this is a very specific app that is very good and opinionated and has taste on these core flows for you to deliver great content.

If every editing feature you could ever dream of exists in Edits, at some point you have a tipping point where it almost becomes too overwhelming for a creator, or complicated to navigate.

I was talking to a creator last week and the way that they described it to me is it almost feels like a sigh of relief when they land in Edits, because it just like it has the things they need and they're able just to navigate it. And that's the dream. That's the product achieving its mission when we have someone describe it in that way.

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How do you pick what you're going to build, then? Because obviously you must have regular ideation sessions and feedback from users, a million and one things as you've described you could potentially add.

The most important thing is chatting with creators. You'll find that creators are incredibly consistent with the things that they're frustrated about and the things that they need. Things like key frames, captions, language translations for different markets, text capabilities… all of these things are just very core.

When you talk to creators, no-one that has a greater sense of what they need than themselves.

But especially right now with so many AI tools coming about, there's a couple areas where you can kind of just have a hypothesis and a bet on, we actually think ‘this is going to make someone's life a lot easier in this specific aspect, so let's go take a swing at that’. And that comes from intuition, spending a bunch of time with creators, but also an understanding of where the technology is evolving and where we can have the highest impact.

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If you were to look at CapCut or Adobe or maybe something else that I haven't mentioned, what would you say you recognise, if you're self-reflective, that Edits isn't quite there yet with, they're better at that than us?

Have you kind of identified some of the things where Edits has still got work to do?

For sure. There is a lot that we could do to continue to improve the base offering of the product. I think one of the things that I am really interested in when I look at some of those competitor apps is I think a lot of them are playing with AI in really interesting ways.

I use all these tools and use them frequently. I think one of the things that's been interesting is a lot of those tools where they've been compelling, the use cases they've been really good at are things like montages or ‘take a bunch of clips and smash them together’ and you get like a pretty well done, beautifully artifact-like video at the end.

I think where we differ right now is our approach to AI has been eliminate the creatively exhausting work, but maintain the creatively rewarding work. And so while I think a lot of those tools are really compelling and I'm excited about where they're going, we're focused more on ‘how do we help the creator in their own workflow with AI so the thing at the end is theirs and that they own it and feel like it was their creative process to go get it?’

Generally in all of these video editors is I see a lot of people taking swings in a variety of ways. I think the products that generate a fully complete artifact at the end are interesting. I think we're zagging in a different direction that's more about the tool side.

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You mentioned AI there and inevitably it's a huge topic with lots of questions all around it. So it's probably worth diving into some of that because Meta, like most of the big tech companies, but probably more so than the many, has really heavily invested in its AI products and its teams and the capabilities it offers.

From your point of view as someone working within the company and also working on one of the core products, how much should creators lean on AI when creating content in the times that we're in now?

How do you tell what the right balance is between human and AI automation and generation? Is that something that you either as a person, or as a team, have considered and have a view on?

Our view overall is that human storytelling and human voice is the thing that matters.

I view AI as a tool that is a massive accelerant. I don't view AI as an output in a way. One of the ways I think about this for myself is I use AI for things I don't want to do, don't have time to do, or don't know how to do. That's my basic framework. With the idea being is it makes it more likely that I'm going to get to something more quickly for something I'm building.

And I think about this a lot with creators. Where they're using AI is on this creatively exhausting work. So if you were to go chat with a bunch of creators, a lot of them are using AI for ideation of new ideas. They think ‘I have an idea, what if I did this with it?’ And they're using chatbots and different things to brainstorm. They're using AI tools for different forms of editing.

Where I don't see them using AI is like 'hey, give me a fully finished, perfect video for this thing,‘ at least in the cohort of creators that we care about, which is people that do this every day and are aspiring to have a living on this or this be their main thing.

If you're a creator, you have a unique point of view. How can we give you tools that help you make and land that point of view more easily? And AI just happens to be a very good tool for some of these things, but maybe actually not that good of a tool for others.

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Do you as a team worry have concerns that the more AI tools or generative AI features that come in products like Edits the more content from creators could end up being much more formulaic, more bland, soulless?

We think about it all the time. An analogy I give our team is who is in the driver's seat of the car?

The creator is always in the driver's seat of the car with all of these tools. Could AI be a passenger riding shotgun that could say ‘hey, there's an opportunity to turn right up ahead and you should take it? ‘I think things like that are valuable, but at the end of the day, it's the creator's expression and their decision and their taste, discernment, and judgment on making those calls.

When you think about it through a tool lens, it's just like yet another thing a creator can use to make a video their audience is more likely to love, and that's really the thing we're anchored on.

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READER QUESTION:

I teach AI workshops for professionals who struggle with the friction between ideas and actual editing. Does the Edits app roadmap include 'agentic' features like the ability to generate a rough-cut or sync B-roll based on a text prompt or script?

- Chris Snider

We are definitely thinking about all of those things. A perfect example of this is we have an AI feature in the app right now that cuts silences from talking head videos or voiceovers. It trims out ums, ahs, blank spaces, whatever.

When you think about that repeatable exhausting work a creator does, it's like ‘have to trim this video, I have to cut it, I have to get rid of these hiccups’. Automating that is not changing their creative vision, the story they're telling, the artifact they're trying to create. It's just like taking a highly repetitive task that was annoying and like making it easier for them.

That genre of things, which I think agentic tasks are going to be great at, becomes really, really interesting across a variety of use cases. And so they're definitely things we're looking at in the future.

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Taking that one step further, how far away are we from ‘describe the video you want and Edits will edit it for you?’

Will editing eventually become less about the technical skill and more about the storytelling prompts and the original creative ideas to feed into it? And is that something that you would want Edits to be able to do in terms of literally put a prompt and it does all the edits, transitions, everything for you?

Video editing is kind of like the final boss of computational tasks and tools.

It's so complicated, data intensive, with so many variables like temporal consistency, timing, visual consistency, all of those things. The ability to do what you described at a really, really high quality is going to take time, research, and continued evolution of models.

But I think decomposing it into some of the component parts, there's a lot of the underlying use cases of just like, 'here is a repetitive frustrating task that I can automate and eliminate', I think things like that are going to come online a lot sooner.

I think the other thing, and this is a really important nuance, is generation versus editing, right. There's like content generation, which is more in line with what [OpenAI’s social AI video app] Sora was doing. And then there is I have content that I've captured or a story I'm already telling and I just want to make it easier for me to complete the vision and telling that.

I would say like our focus generally is much more on editing and helping creators with their footage, their vision, to create a video that their audience loves versus net new generation.

I think there are interesting spaces in generation, but just for the cohort of people that we're working with and want to help solve things for, it's really that core editing flow is our focus.

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Were you surprised that Sora didn't take off and have stickiness in the way that maybe we all thought it might do? Was it a surprise that it not only didn't have that stickiness, but also has been abandoned? What's your take on why people haven't really got excited by it or found a use case for it?

A bunch of people are taking swings at different ideas. I think more people trying swings at different ideas that allow more people to be creative is a great thing. There are a bunch of startups and competitor companies doing cool things, and that's awesome.

On that specific case, it's hard because there are so many dynamics in terms of compute cost, all sorts of things that go into these video models that drive business decisions.

I wouldn't be able to speak to why they made that call, but I do think generally if you just take a step back and look at the industry through a framework of ‘tools and toys’, it's an interesting way of analysing things because toys are a great way of demonstrating the value of something.

It is a great way of going to consumers and being like, 'here's a fundamentally new concept that you never knew could exist before. Play with this thing to learn it.' But they typically have shorter shelf lives, unless you have a toy factory that's constantly coming up with new ones.

Tools are harder to drive engagement on, but are more evergreen if you're meaningfully solving a problem for someone.

I think tools, which is the thing that we really care about, are going to be a longer journey just because of the accuracy and different things required.

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Let's dig into the features of Edits. One of the things we talked about at the top was the fact that the team's rolling out regularly new features, new updates, and they all seem fairly meaningful rather than just an additional set of transitions or effects and things.

What are some of the things you’re working on?

One of the things we're really excited about is we're getting ready to roll out text customisations.

This ties back to creators being highly specific and having a vision of exactly the thing they want to communicate to their audience

I was naive to not realise how important kerning and thickness and all these things may matter in text. For a lot of these creators with such a specific aesthetic and taste, those things really matter.

I think that what we're doing with text customisation is the very tip of the spear of a vision I think we have around broadly like Edits feeling like your creative studio. You can customise a bunch of things that are very specific to you.

In the long, long term, we want it to turn not only into your creative studio, but also a place where you can build on and have community with other creators and their ideas. This focus on customisation, and customisation that ideally over time can be shared, is something really, really powerful that we're excited about.

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Can you tell us a bit more about this new text customisation feature? Is it like AI font creation in Instagram?

It's more steerable. The AI fonts that we have in Stories are really fun, but those are kind of like a little bit more like a slot machine. You put in the prompt and then you get a font out.

It's fun, because you can like try a bunch of different ideas, whereas the features that we're rolling out in Edits, again, more tool focused is really fine-tuned customisation on any font that you can have specific to you or your brand. Spacing, outlines, thickness, all things on sliders.

If you think about a creator as their own independent small business, they have their own branding, they have their own logos, they have their own way they talk to their audience. And so customising a font very specific to their brand and aesthetic actually really matters because that's like their business aesthetic.

These tools where we're allowing them to fine tune to be really hyper specific to them and their brand, I think are going to matter because it just continues to reinforce their relationship with their audience.

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You must have features that creators are screaming out for or DMs or people that stop you and say ‘you need to add this, you need to add that’. What are some of those features that get shouted out about?

We've burned down quite a few of them, to be honest. So like we recently put out freeze frame, improved speed curves, audio ducking, a lot of these things.

It's fun when we do these weekly announces, because I get a reply to a bunch of creators and be like ‘we listened to you! I told you we were listening, we were listening!’

And then the other thing is Edits is a global product with a really diverse audience. And so there are different things that matter in different locales. For example, captions, which is something we care really deeply about and it's something we're really focused on continuing to improve.

In markets like India, you can't just have one language for captions. You need to have multiple languages. And oftentimes, if you look at creators in India, they may actually navigate between multiple languages in a given video or some hybrid between languages.

And so there are things like that where it's about continuing to refine core capabilities. Those are the things we care a lot about and are going to continue to focus on.

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READER QUESTION:

With CapCut recently hiking the price of their Pro plan, and a lot of creators looking around for alternatives, is Edits being 'free' a genuine long-term commitment to creators, or will we get to the stage where people have built their entire editing workflow around an app that will eventually quietly move the majority of features behind a paywall?

- Bryan Larkin

We definitely thought about it and it's been really clear that creators really value the free and low-cost Edits option that has high quality core features that they care about.

Will there be any paid features in the future? I can't promise that there won't be. But what I would say is, if we were to consider anything that would be paid, it wouldn't be necessarily walking back things we have now. It would be more like if there was something new we wanted to introduce where the only financially viable way of introducing it is to have it behind some sort of paid tier, then that is something we would consider.

So I think you're seeing this a lot right now with really high powered AI tools that take up a bunch of GPUs where it's just financially irresponsible or impossible to offer it without a paid tier. I think things like that, would be something that we would look at. But in terms of the core high quality, reliable tools that we're delivering right now, our goal is to continue to make these as low cost, easy to use, and efficient as possible.

Everything comes back to goals. My goal is more creators creating more and better content for Instagram. That's the dream. That's what we achieve. Additional ARR, for example, is not one of those goals.

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What does the typical Edits user look like? I would assume it’s mostly independent creators or creator collectives, but what about how many brands, in-house teams and agencies are using Edits as their go-to tool?

Is that something you think about when you're building the product?

Definitely there are creators that have teams. One of the most popular features we shipped last year was shareable insights. Creators were like, ‘thank you, thank you’, because they have brand campaigns or other things and they wanted to be able to export insights to share with their teams or partners to share how something performed.

So there are things like that where we want to empower a creator with their overall ecosystem of partners.

But really I think our sweet spot is creators that are making videos themselves, for themselves, and sharing them on Instagram.

When you get to a certain stratosphere, if you will, there's a certain tier of creators that have full teams of editors that are using very professional tools that are editing all these videos on their behalf. That group of people probably isn't the perfect fit for editing a video on your phone, because you're creating videos for all sorts of platforms and all different resolutions and all different sizes.

But if you're a creator that is up and coming, or established and growing, and you're editing your videos for yourself on your phone, that is really our sweet spot for Edits and who we're focused on.

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Has Meta seen a boost in engagement in reels that feature the “Made in Edits” tag on them? OR does Meta boost those videos in the algorithm?

– Mark Dalmacio, Communications Manager, Bezos Family Foundation

I think Adam talked about this when we launched Edits. We had a small boost, fairly negligible, just to get some data on the product itself.

I can't confidently say if that's in place anymore. I don't believe it is. But in any case, even if there was, it would be very, very small.

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Can you publicly commit that Reels edited in other apps will NOT face an algorithmic disadvantage compared to Reels edited in Edits?

– Francisco Vayas

It does not matter where you make your content. All that matters is your content is something that your audience loves.

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How does the Edits app plan to turn 'editing elements' into direct SEO signals? In the future, will the algorithm prioritise videos where native text, stickers, and transitions confirm the content's niche, rather than relying solely on the external caption?

– Marciel Muniz, Jornalista, Mercadólogo e Estrategista Digital, Marketing 3 Comunicação

Our relevance and ranking system is its own miraculous thing. Me trying to describe how it works would not do it justice.

It takes in a bunch of implicit signals, and I mean it not in an almost coy or dismissive way, it's actually the truth. Content that we believe your audience is going to love or people are going to enjoy, typically it gets ranked higher and that's the number one driver of it, because that's our mission.

We want to connect viewers with content that they're going to really enjoy. And so focusing on concept, ideation, making the content great matters a lot more than just whatever creative assets you happen to use in a video.

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Creators and social media managers handle multiple brand accounts and concurrently switch between up to 10 accounts on Instagram.

Are there plans for Edits to introduce an account switching feature so agencies, freelancers can use it seamlessly for clients and access features like link across accounts?

– Rowena Fernando

Definitely something we want to look at.

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When will we get a feature to work on a project together as a team from different devices logged in into the same instagram account? (like shared drafts and collaborative editing in CapCut).

– Daniel Zoll

Again, something we're looking at but a shockingly complex thing to go build. It's a really interesting one, but similar to the multi accounts, it's one we hear all the time and we're exploring.

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While Edits is great, it doesn’t sync up with all Meta products. I love being able to add multiple tracks and sounds effects to my videos but it's not supported on Facebook.

I'm so annoyed that every Meta product is separate but linked, but not everything is harmonious across the platforms. Make the Edits app features work for all Meta platforms!

- Michaela Jaskowiak

Part of the reason to break Edits out as its own product group is intentionally for us to be able to think about how to make Edits awesome for creators everywhere, even beyond Instagram.

Obviously Meta products is a great one to start with, but even thinking about third-party ecosystems as well, we want Edits to be your end-to-end creative studio, regardless of where you end up posting the content.

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Will Instagram roll out a desktop version of Edits?

- Chelsea Knoren, Senior Marketing + Communications Manager, Outward Bound California

I think desktop is super interesting. I think it's a different cohort, a very specific cohort of creators that are using desktop. And so I can't make any firm commitments, but it is a very interesting idea.

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What is a feature in Instagram that people maybe don’t know enough about and should definitely try?

I will give you three, actually. Cutouts is awesome. I love it. It's a great way of adding depth to a video so you can cut out yourself and put content behind you, text, stickers, whatever it may be. I think it adds a level of depth.

The other two is, and these have taken off quite a bit, profile links. So say you're making a video and you want to reference another creator. Say I were to make a video about interviewing you. I can actually just link your profile directly on the video and it's clickable and the viewer can go to your profile. I think it's a great way for creators to build on top of each other's content and collaborate.

And similar to that one is snippets. You can take any snippet from any Reel in Edits and bring it into your video to remix, comment on, build on top of. And again, it's attributable to the original creator. It can be clicked on. And so I think that gets really exciting when you think about people building on top of each other's ideas and creating a whole ecosystem.

Before I go… A big thanks to Matt for taking the time to chat all things Edits — properly insightful stuff.

And a shoutout to the Meta comms team for making it happen behind the scenes 👏

This was a pilot of Geekout Interviews…

But here’s the deal 👇

If I open my black book of social media VIP contacts for another deep dive…

…who would you want me to interview next?

Hit reply and give me some names to add to my hit list!

Goodbye, geeks 👋

P.S. This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant