Kapwing
How Modern Creators Make Visual Content
Over the last several months we have had the opportunity to work with the Google Chrome team to optimize our frontend performance. Their team helped us refine our implementation of various web APIs and introduce webcodecs into our application.
Below is a blog article we wrote that was initially published on Google's Web Dev blog. It gives an overview of the key web APIs that power our app and provides useful boilerplate snippets for getting started with indexedDB, the web audio API, and webcodecs. To learn more you can also look at the presentation we gave at the 2021 Chrome Dev Summit.
Full post on the Kapwing blog https://www.kapwing.com/blog/working-with-google-chrome/
Kapwing is a website that helps modern creators make and edit videos, images, and GIFs. Organic Google Search and YouTube are our largest acquisition channels, due to how we write and create trending content.
This week, for example, we published a video on our YouTube channel that has gotten about 1000 views an hour since it was posted two days ago.
Read full post on the Kapwing blog
In celebration of hitting 8000 subscribers on our YouTube channel, I published a blog post this week about how we got to our first 1000 subscribers. It has tips for other entrepreneurs looking to grow their business through YouTube.
Full post on the Kapwing blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog/how-to-grow-a-saas-startup-on-youtube/
Eric, our CTO, explaining how we renamed our master branch to main. Posting this article for other Indie Hackers who want to do this low risk migration away from problematic language.
Read full post on the Kapwing Blog
This month, we made the decision to offer free Kapwing Pro Workspaces to any educator at a school or university affected by covid-19 closures. We think that Kapwing is an excellent resource for remote learning and can enable teachers to share video lessons and make study materials for students from home. Kapwing is thankfully relatively unaffected by the current economic slowdown, so we want to give back to our communities and help teachers engage their students with creative projects.
Please share with the teachers in your life!
https://www.kapwing.com/resources/free-kapwing-pro-accounts-for-educators-affected-by-covid-19/
What happened when we asked 200 companies to send us free swag? This study reports the full results for other entrepreneurs trying to figure out if they should give away free gifts to users.
Read on the Kapwing Blog
We started Kapwing (an online image and video editor) almost two years ago and grew the company from 2 co-founders to 12 full-time employees in the last 12 months. Our team is based full-time in San Francisco, where the unemployment rate is astonishingly low. I wanted to write up a brief article on our learnings around hiring for other first-time entrepreneurs trying to hire engineers.
Like marketing and sales, hiring requires hustle. There’s no silver bullet and no easy way. We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments.
In this article, I summarize the channels and tactics that worked and didn't work for us. This list is not exhausted, but it does give you a place to start if you're trying to source talent in SF.
Read more on the Kapwing blog
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I wonder if you really need so many people :)))
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Right, you always hear about how many people are on the team, but never about WHY so many people are even needed.
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We're not VC funded but at similar revenue numbers. We have 13 people including myself, but not all full time. Here's the breakdown...
3 - Marketing
2 - Sales
3- Customer Success / Support
3 - Product Development (dev, qa, tech lead)
1 - manager of sales and customer success
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They are VC funded. Exponential growth is a must!
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Yeah, it just answers the question "How are they paying?" but not the question "Why do they need so many people?" :)))))
Exponential growth of customers - right
Exponential growth of sales - right
Exponential growth of employees - hmmmm....
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About $4k, which is a lot. But it has saved us time and given us a code-free way to update job openings.
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Congrats!
How are you acquiring users right now?
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Mostly SEO. The product also has some built-in virality because of the watermark and because people share their video URLs with each other.
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Hello world! My name’s Grace. I’m a rising senior studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, and I love creating videos, adventuring, laughing at memes, and telling stories. That’s how I ended up interning as a Growth Marketing intern at Kapwing, a San Francisco-based startup.
On my first day of work at Kapwing, my coworker Peter and I were challenged to put up 400 posters around the Bay Area in one day. The company we’re working for has a history of non-traditional marketing, and our CEO wanted us to get an experience with scrappy tactics as our first project. We were given a budget of $500 and told to go do.
Read more on the Kapwing blog!
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Hi @jjejje,
I saw that you're very active on Quora. Would love to hear about that too.
In the world of subscription payments, service providers face ethical dilemmas on how to charge customers and set policies for their business. A large company might have the financial freedom to take the high road, but startups face a constant existential threat that can force them to make revenue-first decisions.
After leaving the company with the tagline “Don’t be evil,” I founded a subscription-based startup with every intention of building a consumer-first subscription model without the “gotchyas” that I hated. But as we’ve developed our growth funnel, I’ve realized that those tactics represent huge business opportunities, and as the company’s CEO I’ve struggled to find the right balance of loyalty to my bottom line (that is, my employees and investors) and loyalty to straight-forward subscription practices. In this article, I describe five of the business questions we’ve faced when setting up subscription policies and open a dialogue about expectations for subscription-based businesses. How does a startup make a decision on these issues? What’s acceptable and what’s a best practice?
More on the Kapwing Blog
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My take, running a SaaS hosting platform for a variety of subscription businesses.
1/ Ease of Cancelation: Making it harder to cancel does not reduce churn. It just increases your cost in customer support, because now someone has to pick up the phone.
2/ “Forgot to Cancel” Refund: Always give refunds. It is a lot better than having to deal with chargebacks.
3/ Shared passwords: This indicates a shortcoming in the product. We implemented Service Access Policies with multiple users connected through various roles to an account.
4/ Notice of recurring payment: Every e-mail you send is a a way to put your product top of mind for the customer. Nothing prevents you to include a "Thank you for your payment. By the way we added these new features last month you should try out."
5/ Default Plan: Yes. -
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Thanks Julia, very insightful and thought-provoking article.
Sounds like you are taking pains to treat your customers as ethically as possible. Personal belief is that this will pay dividends in the long term, as you will continue to refine your customer base to folks who really need/love/use the product
Two months ago, I tweeted “TIL that cofounder conflict is best resolved over tacos.” A lot of founders appreciated the tweet (IndieHackers RTed), but my investors did not. A few hours later, one of my investors messaged me “Are you and Eric okay?” Then, that Friday, a potential investor told me that I could never show cracks in my cofounder relationship, that it was a very dangerous red flag to investors for a company looking to raise money soon. I’m not sure if the warning was related to the tweet, but they were certainly solemn words.
This article is a confessional to break the mold. Eric (my cofounder and CTO) and I are doing great and have an excellent working relationship. Our startup - an online image and video editor called Kapwing - is thriving, and we’re growing a team and user base together. But we definitely argue. Conflict is a natural and important part of building a healthy company culture with diverse perspectives. Any founder, advisor, or investor who says otherwise probably either hasn’t built a thriving startup or has built one riddled with group-think.
In this article, I want to address the unspeakable: cofounder conflict. It’s not uncommon, and it doesn’t mean that your company is falling apart. If you’re having problems with your cofounder, you should proactively address and fix them, just like you would any other problem with your business, rather hiding from the issue.
Read more on the Kapwing Blog
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Excellent article Julia! Honest and fun to read. Thanks for the tips, it really helped me to understand about the deep relationship between cofounders and how to make it work.
All the best for both of you!!!
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It is perfectly fine to argue and disagree with co-workers, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to deliver.
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If cofounder philosophy about running the business is drastically different it's better to part ways asap.
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Hi Julia! HUGE fan of your blog posts - they're super interesting and super useful to me as a founder. When I launch I'm planning on adding a blog and modeling it mainly off of your advice.
It has always seemed, to me, that the incentives are in all the wrong places for honest communication between founders and investors. I hope investors don't actually believe that startups can be a conflict-free environment. Do you think there is anything that can be done to open up communication channels in a more truthful way?
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