I think we built a billion-dollar project this weekend (by accident)

Recently, I set out to make a simple demo video for one of my side projects.

I thought, “How hard can After Effects be?”
Turns out: very hard.

I spent a whole week on it, and the result was so bad it’s still floating around on Product Hunt if you want a laugh. That week taught me two things:

Content creation is a massive time sink for founders.
The friction of making good video content for or about your product kills momentum.

The Accidental Breakthrough

When I started working on V2, I asked my friend (an AI engineer) if AI could make this easier.

He told me to give him a little time. Two days later, he came back with a CLI tool that generated motion video from simple inputs.

I tried it. My jaw hit the floor.

It wasn’t Hollywood-level, but it was better than what took me a week in After Effects. Without thinking twice, I hacked together a simple front-end, hooked up the CLI backend, and just like that, it was generating motion videos from single prompts.

Sample output: Watch the video

Why I Think This Could Be Huge

After Effects is the industry standard for motion design, but it’s incredibly hard to learn and time-consuming to use.

What we stumbled into feels like it could completely replace After Effects for 80% of use cases.

If that’s true… It might really be a billion-dollar idea. I am planning to leave my side project, already generating thousands of dollars, to work on this.

What do you think?

Where We Go From Here

Now we’re asking ourselves: should we make this open-source so the community can build on top of it? Or should we double down on turning it into a polished product?

Do we bootstrap? Do we try to find investors?

Maybe you could help us with some of these questions.

Lessons for Indie Hackers

Solve your own pain first. GoMotion only exists because I was frustrated enough to ask for help.
Don’t overcomplicate. The first working version was and still is literally a CLI and a barebones UI. That was enough to validate demand.

Takeaway: Sometimes the project you think will take you a week will flop.
And sometimes the one you stumble into by accident could be the next billion-dollar product (I hope).

💡 Side note: The product is GoMotion.io, if you’re curious, you can try it yourself.