ChapterMe

It took us (my friend and I) 4 weeks to finally build the basic version as a web-app before speaking with potential customers.

We coded the whole thing on MERN stack. We originally named it Videosummary but soon realized ChapterMe was a better name.

The 100+ customer interviews were very helpful in getting 2 paid customers. They signed up for our enterprise plan (highest tier) which we never expected would have happened in a short span of a few days.

It was surreal and the feeling was amazing!

It all started when I was watching a long video podcast (~ 3 hrs long) and half way in realized that I had wasted more than an hour on something that I did not find in the video based on the title and vague description.

I had faced this issue many a times previously but today was different. I wanted it to end. I thought that there already was a solution out there that would solve my problem - adding structure to video/podcasts content that makes it easier for both viewers and creators. to easily browse through chapters and watch the content if its relevant.

Viewers - Understand the structure of the video, watch relevant content, and skip to the part they are interested in. Saving hours of their time.

Creators - Increase the discoverability of the video by 2x and average view duration by 25% (engaging more viewers)

There was a solution but it was not widely used. What! (You will not say this if you hear the existing solution)

Existing solution - Creators had to manually spend hours of their time to watch the whole video and add chapters. If they didn't have time 95% of them resorted to not adding chapters and only 5% creators hired an agency/team to add chapters which costed them $1.25/min ($225 for a 3 hr podcast) which most cannot afford for a single episode.

I thought to myself In the age of OpenAI's GPT3 there has to be a better solution which not only creates chapters automatically for videos, its 10x cheaper, and 100 times faster than doing it manually. I looked everywhere in the internet but found no solution.

With the hypothesis, I talked to 100's of creators and many responded positively and some really wanted the product. A few I spoke to said “I was looking for an app like this but did not find one out there!”

This led me to start working on ChapterMe (https://bit.ly/chapterme-indie)