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2000 active paid user in 9 months (40K MRR)

2000 paid users in 9 months!

We really can't believe quickly VEED.IO has grown. To say that we have imposter syndrome is an understatement.

We first started working on VEED as a side project back in late 2017. Back then we wanted to make a video editor that was simple and easy to use.

Below is an early design of what we originally planned to build.

VEED.IO

We went full time on VEED about 12 months ago and started charging for the product in early June last year. Since then the product has evolved a lot into what Is now, a fully-fledged video editor (almost) yet this is not as simple a taking IMovie and putting it online, there are a lot of small details and tooling build for our users use cases and needs.

VEED.IO

Our product development has been guided by speaking to lots of our users ever day. We do this through a combination of optional onboarding calls, customers service and also being available at any time of the day to hop on a hangouts call and help solve a users problem.

Talking to users

(Tim talking to Roland from Germany)

I imagine for the outside observer it looks like we did everything right and that it was a smooth journey. But I just want to let you know it was f***ing hard with many MANY mistakes along the way.

Finally, there is no way would we have been able to achieve this without such a talented and dedicated team that we have to built over the last year 🙏

We are approaching another big milestone soon and we will be publishing a proper breakdown of what we did and how we got here in the following few days on our blog

  1. 5

    Congratulations! I remember finding VEED after I started to build a graphics editor with some motion features, and when I saw that I was like "damn, they've made something so difficult look easy" and I promptly scrapped my project, so it's super interesting to read this with a glimpse of the other side. Well done 🎉

    1. 3

      Hey @anthify thanks so much.

      One of the hardest things is making the product simple and easy to use. This will get harder every day as we add more features 🤪

      There is also a lot of technical work that goes into building a product like VEED. We support videos up to 2 hours long and have no upload limit. We allow this to happen thought a proxy system that transcodes smaller files for the users to work on, then render on the master.

      We are launching our video editing API and SDK soon so if you have any cool ideas you want to build on top of VEED you can! This will let you pretty much spin up a fully customizable white label version of the product if your interested sign up here :) https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/video-editing-api

      1. 1

        That's awesome, I've just subscribed. If you spot an email address from atostudios just delete it as that was an old one, I'm now subscribed on my normal email.

  2. 2

    many congratulations sabba. this is awesome. loved watching this grow

    1. 1

      Thanks so much Harry! Right back at you, always super inspired by your work over at marketingexamples.com

  3. 1

    This is awesome, well done @sabba!

    I really like your brand and website design, it's beautiful.

  4. 1

    Wow that's an awesome story, and an awesome idea. Congrats!

  5. 1

    I remember reading your posts and when I saw this I was like WOAH ! This thing went fast ! You worked hard on it and you you deserve it, looking forward to see you reaching 500k MRR bar !

  6. 1

    Huge! Crazy to see this in my inbox. During hard times this year I’ve managed to pay my rent a few times selling social media marketing services using veed to create the assets I was delivering. Goes to show how much your work can change the lives of others. Am happy to see this!

  7. 1

    Congrats Sabba, this is awesome! Looking forward to reading the coming blog post.

    Has the pandemic caused any noticeable slowdown in growth for you guys?

  8. 1

    This is amazing. Severe inspiration for me to keep building. Thank you for sharing.

  9. 1

    Congratulations, guys! Well deserved success and this is just the beginning.

    I've been following your blog and articles and I like it how you have been smart on what to invest your time in and what not (ehem. unit tests when not critical) and things such as experimenting from multiple angles and capitalize on the ones that users find to be the most important (ie. subtitles).

    Inspiring! :)

  10. 1

    This is a really inspiring story guys, well done. I use to do a lot of video editing for fun but I stopped because I found Adobe Premier so clunky.

    I found a couple of typos on your about page:

    we realised that for many editing tasks the current solution where overkill (should be were)

    and

    we did contact work in-between (should be contract)

    I am only raising this in case it's helpful for you :-)

    Quick question, in your text editor do you use a colour picker and font picker plugin? I am working on a band website builder and I'm looking for decent colour/font picker like yours.

    1. 1

      Thank you will, I will try and get them sorted today! I am just blind to spelling mistakes.

      The colour picker is a custom build, the react colour picker was too heavy but good to get started.

      1. 1

        I am the same, I am only good at spotting other people's spelling mistakes.

        Thanks for info. I am using Vue so I'll try and come up with something custom.

  11. 1

    Good stuff guys. Keep pushing!

  12. 1

    Love it! My first thought was canva for videos

  13. 1

    I saw the revenue graph, and it looks like an exponential growth :)
    What do you think effected this growth the most?
    and any tips for indie hackers starting out?

  14. 1

    Awesome! Congrats on the huge milestone.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much @Malaydude really kind of you to say so!

    1. 1

      Thank you @kacper if you have any good Growth Marketing ideas send them my way :)

      1. 1

        I have a lot of them ;) hmu if you need anything specific

  15. 1

    Many congratulations Sabba. Couple of questions.

    1. Were you bootstrapped all along?
    2. If you have raised funds then at what stages?
    1. 1

      Hey, bootstrapped the whole way. We ran out of money once and had to go back to work for 4 months to save up again. We also did win money from pitch competitions but this was one of our biggest mistakes. This was because we where building to impress competition judges, not our users. To make it even worse, we were forced to burn the money quick and it all went down the drain. So yea, bootstrapped & self-funded.

  16. 1

    Hey Sabba congratulations! I tried VEED a few weeks ago and it’s really good.

    1. 1

      Thanks @andreboso how did you get on with finding a video tool making twitter thread videos? Drop me another email if you want any more help with it, more than happy help.

  17. 1

    GREAT SUCCESS!!! CONGRATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    1. 1

      YES ANDREY! And also well done on your amazing progress with Sheer2Site, 10K MRR for a one-man team is CRAZY good!

  18. 1

    Congrats! Well deserved!

    1. 1

      Thanks so much @rikschennink super kind of you to drop a comment :)

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