UpEmbed: Two-Week Anniversary 🚀

Hi, this is Muneeb Awan, I am one of the founders of UpEmbed. We are a video marketing tool, working for you, to transform your static video into a powerful lead-generating machine and take your business to the next level!

I have been a coder for the past six years now, and have recently switched to a product role to understand/learn things on a higher level. I have been fortunate enough to work on everything from watch OS apps to server K8 deployments and it has just been awesome!

Then there is my co-founder, Seerat Awan. A pure legend-level front-end developer who loves creating and contributing to open-source projects, the recent one being on Mantine.

We are two extremely ambitious individuals, trying to build our first SaaS product. And well today marks our two-week anniversary!! 😁

Why a video marketing tool and the kick-off …

What we are trying to do with UpEmbed, is to make the ultimate tool for all video marketers and offer perfection in the form of performance. We are not working on this to generate revenue, we just want to make the most bad-ass video marketing tool ever! That is our goal. ✌️

The two of us were sitting sipping tea while brainstorming ideas, then not sure why but this one stuck and both of us started getting excited about it! We started creating a list of features, jotting down everything we could think of for the product. Decided what to include in the MVP, and with the goal in sight, Seerat took the front end while I am working on the backend.

The first logo of UpEmbed, from Canva by Muneeb Awan.

We named it UpEmbed by just throwing words around and well this one struck a cord. Super excited I created our first logo on Canva and created social pages for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Seerat being the CTO defined our tech stack and created the projects on Git and well the coding spree began 😂

The more professional ones, from Adobe Illustrator by Seerat Awan. :D

Oh, also one thing I would like to mention. None of us have professional experience in marketing but we've seen how other companies operate, especially the ones getting built in public and we strategized accordingly for ourselves.

The social channels as of now have been a complete bust (for now hopefully), but then something changed when we joined Indie Hackers. A post of mine went viral, and Seerat and I both started getting attention, were getting invited to Slack channels, and started getting contacted by other founders to connect. Haha, I really loved the attention and it was fun to be in the spotlight like this, it felt like we had just been welcomed into a community of awesome individuals.

Oh, and we are on Reddit now, because someone said that it would help us reach out to a larger audience.

The gains!! 💪

Not sure if this is luck, or if we are doing something right but here is how far we have come …

We have got four signups for our product, keep in mind we are still building it and it is good to see that the people have faith in us.

The learning cycle …

Initially, we used an open-source component to build our app's core (the builder) but it was not working out so we scrapped it and now Seerat is working on building one for React from scratch. As I said, performance is our main goal and neither of us is willing to make a mediocre product :D. BTW, we have named the builder Enigma, because it will always be a mystery and will make everyone dumbstruck by how awesome it is!! 😎

I am working with FastAPI (Python) and PostgreSQL, honestly, I hadn't coded in Python for almost a year now and the last time I wrote a join query was back in my university for a class project. So I took some time to get the hang of things (almost a week :D ) and well now I am more confident and we are on track with that too.

Conclusion … for now 😉

Slowly, and gradually we are making progress. We are two people with extremely limited resources and no user base to rely on to launch our product but the response has been overwhelming. And we are trying our best to fulfill our dream of being the best video marketing tool in the market 😍

Please follow our journey on our UpEmbed product page on IndieHackers for daily updates and do follow our social channels as well (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit).

Thank you.

PS: A special shoutout to the IH community for enabling new founders with establishing their product. Thank you for the non-stop support and appreciation!

#buildinpublic #upembed