Kapwing

Recently, a founder asked to chat with me about SEO. During our call, the founder - whose startup is backed by a top-tier VC - said to me “I assume that you acquired your first users through paid marketing.” Really? Is this an assumption nowadays?

Since we’ve raised money, I’ve advised several founders who are fundraising for the first time. Many of them have told me that they need capital to pay for ads before they’ve even launched their product. When I ask about existing traction, they tell me they can’t get attention from early adopters without ad money.

This article is a bit of tough love for those entrepreneurs. I think spending money to acquire your first customers is an unhealthy approach to product validation and, frankly, a waste of capital. In this post, I’ll make the case for acquiring users organically rather than through paid acquisition.

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/dont-pay-to-acquire-your-first-users/

In December, we co-published a survey with Wistia on how startups think about and make video for business purposes.

• 85% of founders have made videos for their startup.
• 51% have created a product demo video
• 87% of startups who make video do so in-house

Read more details and insights on the Kapwing Blog https://www.kapwing.com/blog/video-usage-at-startups-report/

Last July, I left my dream job at Google to work on a startup full-time. Since then, many of my entrepreneurial friends have asked me about the decision to leave a good corporate job for the risky unknown. In this article, I’ll give my advice to first-time founders who are torn between their startup dreams and their comfortable day job.

Read your the full article on the Kapwing blog

Create a branded design and maintain visual consistency by making an Instagram Story template and sharing it with your team. In this blog post, I describe how to use Kapwing's new layout designer to make and share re-usable templates for 9:16 Instagram Story posts. Kapwing supports photo and video, plus text, GIFs, shapes, and other visual media.

https://www.kapwing.com/resources/how-to-create-a-reusable-instagram-story-template/

Before the "Creator", Kapwing was a suite of 15 distinct video editing tools. The Creator was our first effort to unify these tools into one layout and design suite for video makers. Check it out at https://www.kapwing.com/create

It was a risky endeavor that we were not sure would work. After all, how would people find or know about the Creator? Would they explore it and find the features it had to offer, or would they get lost in the more powerful toolbox? Nonetheless, we knew that we had to experiment with a more powerful product so that social media creators could transition to Kapwing from iMovie or Adobe.

It worked. In October, we grew 40% in revenue and 25% in usage. Time spent, videos created per user, and bounce rate metrics improved substantially. We rolled out the creator to Add Text, the Collage Maker, and our Meme Generator. I've realized that investing in high retention products is more important that top-of-funnel growth now that we have some money in the bank.