Intro Maker

Previously, customers could only buy videos for $5 (720p) or $10 (1080p). I offered a "bulk" coupon in lieu of a subscription plan (30 renders for $100), but I don't think most people understood what it was.

Today, I launched 4k60 videos at $25 for individual renders.

Instead of the clunky bulk render pack, users can now buy an individual subscription ($19-49/mo) or a team subscription ($99-249/mo) that allows them to share renders with teammates.

I'm close to being able to run ads profitably with just the lower-priced videos, so hopefully these new higher price points will push me over the edge and allow me to diversify a bit off of just organic traffic.

This happened awhile back, but back in June I finished the massive render pipeline update that I designed in the first few months after acquiring the site.

Besides rebuilding every single video template, I dramatically streamlined the content creation process and it's now muuuuch easier to add new content to the site and update older content.

Whether an actual blocker or not, I always perceived the old render architecture as the thing holding me back from offering 4k videos and subscription plans (which could possibly lead to too much render volume).

https://introcave.com/blog/rebuild-all-the-things-15-video-templates-for-june-2021

I don't want to repost the whole blog post over here, but I do want to pull out a few interesting stats for 2020:

• Over 10 million page views
• Over 1 million unique visitors
• Rendered 750,000 preview videos (> 2,000 hours of video)
• I sent 880,000 emails in 2020, with an average open rate of 18% and CTR of ~5%.
• Crossed $50k in SDE (up about 50% from when I acquired the site in 2018)
• On pace to finish recouping the original purchase with a similar 2021
• Not making any goals for 2021 until the kids are back in school

You can read the whole thing here!
https://introcave.com/blog/2020-roundup-stats-and-themes

Revenue was just over $6k in October and November, which brings my total for the year to just a hair over $50k with one month to go! Last year was ~$26k, so (unless something disastrous happens) the business will have doubled in 2020.

Net income is already past the doubling mark--a nice hedge in case the top-line number doesn't beat the asterisk. That is partly due to WAY lower interest expenses this year (lower rates AND lower principle).

Traffic/sales have shot up in January in both 2018 and 2019. I still owe ~$55k on the line of credit I used to buy the business, so if I can run things lean and grow ~20-30% in 2021 there's a decent shot I clear the debt entirely. That would be a bit ahead of schedule (I was forecasting ~4-5 years with the interest drag).

After that, things start to get... interesting. I could use the cashflow to hire some dev help on Intro Maker. I could buy another business in the $100-$200k range and pay it down twice as fast. I could use the cashflow to just accelerate payments on our other debts (mostly investment real estate).

I've been running IntroCave for 28 months now, and I feel like I've made a ton of improvements. I see that in the top-line revenue and traffic/engagement stats, but I've consistently felt like I was failing. The average ARPU (measured simply as daily revenue / GA users) has consistently declined over time from around $0.07/user to around $0.04/user.

It's not a super actionable stat, but it's easy to throw in my spreadsheets because I already track daily/monthly users and revenue.

I would periodically scan back through my monthly data and see if I could spot big drops, then go through the git logs for that month and see what changed. I considered reverting the site back to its 2018 state to see if the ARPU came back up.

I don't know why this popped into my head, but I went back over the historical data and pulled out just the data for my Big 4 countries (US/UK/Canada/Australia). The data is not rock solid (I don't really track users that way, so going off of GA conversion reports and AdSense breakdowns), but there's a pretty clear trend.

The Big 4 consistently make up around 70% of my revenue, but only 15-25% of my traffic (and declining as a percent over time). Estimated ARPU in just that group has steadily ticked up from ~$0.10 to ~$0.20 since 2018.

While the global traffic has SURGED (~1,300/day to ~4,500/day), traffic for the Big 4 is only up ~20%. I'm doing a lot more revenue with about the same number of users, it turns out.

It's a huge relief, but it's also a dilemma. Do I focus on growing the 30% of revenue that comes from global traffic (thinking about adding a separate UPI/RuPay processor since Stripe doesn't support it AFAICT) or double down on just the Big 4? Is there anything I can even do to just focus on the Big 4?

One more thing I'm considering as a result of this: tagging user signups with a reverse-IP estimate of their country. I would need to do this to present different payment options, but it would also open up the possibility of segmenting my emails further. Is it even worth keeping the global traffic on my newsletter? Sending emails to 20k users is logistically a lot easier than 80k users.

Gross profit was ~$6,700 (up ~50% from April!). SDE came in around $4,600 (almost double!), but some of that was payments that got pushed from April into May. I'm pretty pleased with that! June (so far) looks like it's coming down from that as people start going back to work, but if I can settle in around $3-4k profit each month I'm meeting my expectations.

The first half of the month, I got a ton of work done on the proof-of-concept for Intro Maker. I had around 20 things I wanted to test and knocked off all but a couple of them. I have a pretty clear path forward, regardless of whether I use it as my cloud-based render tech or decide to take a go at desktop downloadable software.

In the back half of the month, I switched gears into content production and added 7 new intro video templates to IntroCave.

All that May productivity has led to a bit of a hangover in June so far. Once I get into a better content rhythm it might be worth it to bang out 3-4 months worth of content in one go so that I can buy myself some heads down time to tinker (or figure out how to outsource that bit).

Gross profit was ~$4,471. SDE was up to $2,438. It's taking a bit of time to get one of the new ad partners set up for payments, so I expect to see a bigger SDE spike in May.

I ran three A/B tests in April, but nothing amazing to report. Two were duds and the third (Stripe.js vs Stripe Elements vs Stripe Checkout) needs a bit more data to be conclusive.

For most of April, I wasn't super motivated to do much. I took a week off for spring break, got the garden in order, figured out how to use the bread machine, made a few fabric masks. In the last week or so, though, I've started coming out of my shelter-in-place funk a bit.

I added a new render server to keep up with the demand spike. I built a new intro video template, added variants of a couple, and rebuilt another intro to be more customizable. I mentioned "maintenance mode" in my March post, but that's maybe not the way to think about it. I think all the big optimizations have been made and the site is really in "playbook mode" or "operations mode." I need to add 4-6 templates per month, do a blog post, and do a newsletter. If I can keep doing that (and keep an eye on SEO), the site should continue to grow.

That frees me up to work on Intro Maker.

Finally.

I bought https://intromaker.com just about the same time I purchased IntroCave, but I've been too busy with IntroCave to execute on that plan. I go back and forth in my head about what I want it to be, but the central thesis is that realtime rendering is getting really good, AfterEffects is really slow, and there's money to be made there.

Idea #1: I hate managing render servers. Build a standalone client so people can run on their own hardware. Sell it for $50. (Or $50 for 1-year of updates model. Or new templates as paid add-ons).

Idea #2: Built a web front-end for creating/customizing projects from scratch that hands off to a backend renderer. This would not be "pick a template and add your logo," but more like "here's a blank canvas -- add text/images/effects from scratch." The idea here is that IntroCave would stay "pick a cool template" and IntroMaker would be "or make your own."

The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but they do compete with each other. Idea #2 is probably more B2B friendly (installed/managed software is a pain in the ass compared to having everything live on a website), but I think the YouTube creator audience has more in common with B2C than B2B even if individual channels could be considered a "business."

Whichever of these paths I end up taking (or something completely different), there are a handful of technical hurdles I need to solve first. I started putting that big-ass list together last night and started putting a proof-of-concept together. I knocked off the first big technical hurdle and have maybe 10-15 more items on my "I think this is doable, but let's make sure" list before I need to decide on a business model.

Signups are not something I track that closely, but just had a customer support request come in and noticed that their user ID was over 100k in the database. I'm averaging around 350-400 signups per day right now.

Only around 6,700 of those users have purchased an intro video, so the next "good" milestone will probably be 10k paying customers.

There are a lot of bored people stuck at home right now, which is good for me from a purely business point of view. Traffic yesterday (3/31) was my 2nd highest all time and preview creation volume was my highest all time. My traffic is currently about 2x what it was doing at the beginning of the month.

Gross profit was ~$2960. SDE was pretty much flat at around $1900, but that tends to lag about a month behind on big traffic changes.

I tried a few new ads in March -- Carbon and a hand-placed sponsorship. Carbon didn't perform well (too much international traffic), but I find them very appealing from a usability point of view. If I can grow sales/traffic to the point where the ad revenue is not as meaningful I could see going back to those instead of dropping ads entirely.

The sponsorship performed well, but had some knock-on effects (pageviews and intros created were down ~15-20%). Overall revenue was up, but shifted the mix of revenue to be more like 60/40 sales/ads instead of the usual 80/20. I'm glad I took the time to set up an A/B test (25% of my traffic stayed on a control) to analyze this.

I'm mostly running the site in maintenance-mode during the pandemic. All of my "tinker time" is going towards building some completely unrelated stuff that my kids can use until school starts back up.

I didn't post my January stats, but they were up quite a bit from December. Traffic and traffic quality are both improving.

February continued the trend

I made around $1950 in SDE. Gross profit (Stripe/Adsense less fees) was ~$2260, which was up from January's $2094 (on fewer days!). Ads just about cover hosting costs, so the little chart of Stripe revenue is pretty close to net income (not counting debt service).

Someone at a recent meetup asked me what multiple I paid for the site, and I realized I didn't really know. I had a sort of broad idea that it was in the 30-40x monthly range, but with earnouts and purchasing a few related domains I hadn't really sat down and calculated it. I tend to use 36x in my spreadsheets, but in reality it was a bit lower than that.

Ultimately it doesn't matter too much -- I'm enjoying running it right now and have big plans for the future.

I negotiated and purchased the domain https://lowerthirds.com right at the end of January. There's way less search demand for that compared to intro makers, but the tech is similar to what I have planned for https://intromaker.com with less moving parts.

Up and to the right!