VEED.IO
Simple Online Video Editing
We just raised $35,000,000 from Sequoia!
But as a profitable boostrapped company doing +$6M ARR, you might ask yourself why?
Let's get into it!
- Opportunities like this are rare.
We are in a big market and from the very start, our users have pulled the product out of us. It has never felt like we have had to push VEED uphill, the company wants to grow fast and we think we should give it the fuel to do so.
- Technically, it's a hard product to build.
The resources we need to serve millions editing, rendering videos & sharing video is significant. As a bootstrapped company, we would make hires as our revenue grew. Now with funding, we can invest ahead of time.
- A group of kids.
At the start, the team was in their 20's. Now our team is a lot more diverse for the better. Then, payroll scaled into hundreds of thousands and the stakes got higher. Small fluctuations in revenue per month no longer phase us, allowing us to build long-term
- We raised later in the game.
If you can get to the position where you don't need to raise, any deal is "take it or leave it". For us, the most dilutive funding rounds were over. You can use your position to dictate the pace, secondary shares or special terms in the deal.
- The right partners to work with.
I spoke with many of VC's. Some want to buy a part of your company and others want to back you. Luciana at Sequoia felt very much that she wanted to back us. And Instead of offering to be helpful, they proactively did.
- Final Thoughts
Every founder, company & market is different. Should I raise or not? You have to pick the path that is best for you and your vision of the future. If you want to did deeper into our thinking, we wrote about it on our blog.
Hey all, after building our online video editor VEED for the last 2 years a lot of people have been asking us if they can use our API. Over the last few months, we have been working hard to make this a reality.
With the shift to working remote, there is a new wave of web apps all being powered by video and WebRTC. All helping people work and communicate online.
More and more developers have been asking us how to add editing to capabilities to their app as raw un editing videos are not always that useful.
Working with video editing is hard. You need a lot of technical domain expertise and also commit to ongoing maintenance
The goal is to let anyone add video editing capabilities to their app with just a few lines of code. In Jan we will launch our SDK, allowing anyone to spin up a fully-fledged video editor or add light editing tools to an existing app.
Today we are launching our API, there is still a lot of work to do (and in reality, we are still pushing code as we speak) anyway, check it out! https://www.veed.io/api
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As someone who has edited professionally for many years this is really exciting.
What kind of advanced editing capabilities will the api be capable of?
I understand its not intended to replicate a professional editing set up, but I'm curious to know how modular you intend it to be?-
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Hey Adam, thanks so much! So with the API you can send us a .JSON object and we will render it into a video. So the possibilities are kinda endless.
With our SDK, you will be able to drop in a full editor into your product if you wish. Alternately, you can offer light editing features. For example, Twitter does not allow videos that are longer than 2:20, they could let users trim their videos and we could process all of that for them (I wish) or just use it for transcoding and compression!
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Oh very interesting. I have multiple use cases for this. Now if only my developer wasn't so burried :(
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Hi Sabba,
Lets say I wnated to create an instagrma type app could i install your app and would it give user the abilty to edit their videos form my app?
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No reports
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very cool!
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Great stuff!
12 months ago we turned on our paywall and made our first ever SaaS $1!
For any entrepreneur, this is a moment that they will never forget. Tim and I could not control our excitement!
Exactly 12 months after our first payment, we have managed to cross the seemingly impossible task of hitting $83,333 MRR / $1M ARR!
The Indindie Hackers (and local Indie London / Indie Beers) communities have been a massive help to us over the last few years in so many ways, we would not be here without it!
As a small thank you, we have opened up our calendar next week. If you need any feedback, want to bounce around ideas, talk growth or just want to have a chat, you can book a call with me @sabba here
Finally, we have written a blog post on everything we learnt growing VEED from $0 to $1M ARR in 12 months with revenue numbers, traffic, product and growth strategies
I will be in the comments all day if you have any questions!
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Great read, can you share what is the profit from the MRR?
AS such Saas Takes allot of server power .... and storage-
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Yeah, also it's a video editing app. So I guess it'll be lots of server power and storage backing that. Numbers $$ are just going upwards in my mind.
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That's awesome @sabba well played!
I booked a call from your link to get to know you and ask some advice on customer development. Really appreciate the office hours, keep it up! Even if I don't have any successful product yet I have lots of product design knowledge and I do free UX consultation sessions every week to fellow indiehackers just to keep up with the community and stay more connected. It's really awesome so far.
Could I ask how the indielondon and indiebeers meetups helped you exactly? I just had a call with one of their founders because I am interested in doing the same thing in the Netherlands. Your feedback as a member would be really valuable in this case 😅
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Hey Sabba! Congratulations 😀
I took a quick look at your website and my first impression is that search is playing a big role in driving top of the funnel traffic, am I right?
Would like to know more about that part of the story. I rarely see founders execute an SEO strategy so well.
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Good write up here: https://saashacker.co/saas-seo-strategy/
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Hi! the link to calendly isn't working
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Good on you mate. Great read. please share your story more often here.
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Brilliant work!! @sabba what's your next target? and when are you hoping to achieve it?
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Congratulations! Thanks for sharing your journey. Very inspiring.
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Congrats!
Is it intended that your blog link on the logo send me to heroku subdomain "https://veed-blog-3.herokuapp.com/blog/" 🏃♂️ -
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This was a happy post to read :) Congrats fellas
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Amazing work!
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Thanks for sharing the story. The growth looks solid. Will keep the trendline.
All the best. -
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Inspiring and informative. Thank you!
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Insane! Congrats!
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@sabba - great work, great traction, and great milestone.
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Very nice!
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Congrats ! Are you working with the mbp 16inch ?
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Woohoo!
Congratulations!! -
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Congrats!! just played a bit with it and loved it! video editing like it should be! Looking forward to it growing and getting better :)
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What an incredible rise. Been tracking you guys since your "rejected from YC" story, knew it was a matter of time.
Enjoy the success!
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Congrats guys!!!!! Super proud!
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BOOM! Congrats guys! Loving following your journey and blog posts. Keem 'em coming!
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Congrats Sabba!
Thanks for the article, great to learn from your experience! -
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This is awesome. Blogs a great read as well. Congrats big man. Love the second photo. Controversial of choice of beer from Tim!
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Congrats!
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Congrats fellas. Massive kudos for your success so far, and also your generosity helping the rest of the London community 🔥
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That's insane. Congrats! Years of effort, now finally worth it :)
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Thanks so much Hugo! An overnight success, 10 years in the making!
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Interesting click bait. I hoped to find anything useful in the marketing section, but the most you could tell is to read a book on Traction? Hahaha. Really funny.
Is this all you know? What about funnels? Which marketing venues you have used besides posting on IndieHackers and HackerNews? Are there tricks to organic SEO, paid ads, LinkedIn Pods, FB groups, email lists, cold email, cold calls? There are so many things you haven't explained.
How did you get to 30,000 MAU in the first place? So many questions. So little answers.-
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Hey Alex, we have done many really in-depth blog posts on this I just did not want to repeat ourselves. Here is a comprehensive breakdown on everything you asked above - https://www.veed.io/blog/startup-growth-no-budget/ If you have any questions let me know, or feel free book a call :)
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Seems legit. Thanks for sharing.
Now I try to figure out how to find good competitor keywords using SEMRush. Can you point me in the right direction?
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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.
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.
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.
(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
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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 🎉
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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
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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.
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many congratulations sabba. this is awesome. loved watching this grow
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Thanks so much Harry! Right back at you, always super inspired by your work over at marketingexamples.com
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This is awesome, well done @sabba!
I really like your brand and website design, it's beautiful.
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Wow that's an awesome story, and an awesome idea. Congrats!
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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 !
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Congrats Sabba!
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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!
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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?
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This is amazing. Severe inspiration for me to keep building. Thank you for sharing.
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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! :)
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Good stuff guys. Keep pushing!
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wow! congrats!
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Love it! My first thought was canva for videos
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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? -
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Awesome! Congrats on the huge milestone.
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Thank you so much @Malaydude really kind of you to say so!
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impressive!
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Many congratulations Sabba. Couple of questions.
- Were you bootstrapped all along?
- If you have raised funds then at what stages?
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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.
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Hey Sabba congratulations! I tried VEED a few weeks ago and it’s really good.
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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.
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GREAT SUCCESS!!! CONGRATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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YES ANDREY! And also well done on your amazing progress with Sheer2Site, 10K MRR for a one-man team is CRAZY good!
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Congrats! Well deserved!
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Thanks so much @rikschennink super kind of you to drop a comment :)
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In just 4 months and 14 days since we have started charging for our product and about 13 months since our online video editor went live, we have hit an important milestone...
WE HAVE HIT RAMEN PROFITABILITY !!!! WOOP
As of mid October 2019 passed $5000 in monthly recurring revenue, VEED now pays for two full-time founders (myself and Tim) and two part-time developers (Mate and Veljko... Love you guys)
We have hustled pretty f****** hard to get here and learned a LOT along the way. There were a couple of moments where we thought it was all over, like the time we ran out of money and had to get contract work, or the time when we were kicked out of our office.
Oh and time our first two developers quit working for us on the same day. But through all these drastic highs and lows, we have continued to move forward and grow.
Ramen profitability is a huge milestone and also marks the start of the next big phase of our startup journey. As we are moving towards finding product-market fit and starting to scale our product to thousands of monthly paid users.
I have created a complete breakdown of the journey in a blog post titled "The journey to ramen profitability" If you are an early-stage founder, this might be worth checking out.
Thanks Yall, Sabba
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I like this idea a lot, and your approach.
Who are your competitors?
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Some notes on the landing page (maybe you have tried some of these? Would be interested to hear about what you've tried so far):
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- Move your example videos above the fold
"Show don't tell": showing your user the end product is always more valuable than a simple screenshot.
You already have a great video lower on your page .. I would emphasize this by moving it above the fold.
- Instead of "Subtitle videos, edit great content and grow your audience online."
"Making engaging videos that grow your audience.
in minutes, not hours"I would talk to your users (great for getting testimonials) and see what the key benefits are, and stress those.
I would guess that learning a new software is a big negative for them.
I would guess that time is a big issue for them.Use words specific to your benefits, i.e. "engaging videos"
"Engaging videos that get more clicks" might be a good one to test.
- Use "TRY IT FREE" instead of "more upload options"
Again, focus on the main drivers for getting someone to click your CTA.
- Move the container with the social proof above the fold
Social proof above the fold will create more interest
Outcome: https://imgur.com/a/3PkXy0T
(I would format the video so that it's larger, but not so large that it crowds the page)--
"Simple, Yet Powerful Tools
Instead focus on the positive:
"Simple AND Powerful"
"Perfect for simple video editing tasks online.
You dont need an arts degree to use VEED."Instead, simplify your text and focus on outcomes. As a user I don't want to "use veed" I want to make amazing videos.
"Edit your videos online.
You don't need an arts degree or hours to make amazing videos"---
- Add user testimonials -- creatives will be most swayed by emotional appeals
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- The feature list is overwhelming for most users. Would cut it down to 8-10 and the "see all of our features" button for users who are looking for specific features
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- Instead of "join mailing list" (why would I join?) add another "upload now" or "add it to your calendar for later" type CTA.
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Wow, lots of great points here. Your approach really reminds me of the "Jobs to be done" framework. I just finished the lean startup and really keep to apply the testing framework with your idea. Thanks again! Sabba
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Yup, I love jobs to be done. Super effective when used correctly, but sometimes people (including me :P) can go overboard with it.
If you're ever looking for some outside help on product (think you've done a good job so far though, and seems like you really understand the user need), feel free to hit me up.
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great feedback - sending you my positive energy
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Wow @sobbuh. A lot of value provided here for all those who need a landing page that converts 🙂.
Are you a UX designer)?-
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Thanks :)
No, I'm a product manager so I do a little bit of everything.
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Thanks!
I'm intrigued by flookup.
How is your marketing going? Who are your main users / what kind of users are subscribing to the paid plan?
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For a starting point I would try to make your homepage more similar to the gsuite marketplace -- those screenshots are much more beneficial for users to see vs the current text imo.
Who would need this product and know that they need it, and be willing to pay for it? Seems like you have a huge user base on gsuite marketplace?
How do people find you on google?
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I'm not Veed.io user as I don't really do video editing stuff but I'm a huge fan of you guys. Definitely one of the most genuine group of founders/entrepreneurs I've ever read about.
Really loving your blog posts by the way. Keep it up, Sabba!
Edit: Oh, and congratulations on reaching this milestone!
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Hey Qabil, Thank is super kind of you to say.
I think entrepreneurship can be presented in a glossy light, yet the reality is that it is a hard slog. We try to present a mix of both. Also, just checked out One Profile, looks super cool! Let me know if I can help in any way.
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Not at all, you guys are truly inspirational. The story where you guys made money over the weekend after the YC interview email rejection was amazing (the part where you accidentally used Stripe test key in production was really funny too 🤣)
Yes, I completely agree. I'm at my very early stage at the moment with One Profile and getting users is the most difficult part right now. Reading your stories motivates me and the tips you shared were really useful when implemented.
Thank you for checking out One Profile! And thank you for offering to help. A shoutout would be great but only if you really like it. If you don't, a feedback would be equally rad. Otherwise, I'm completely fine with nothing. Hoping we could meet up one day!
Rooting for you guys, always!
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HI @sabba - I like this story and I think it's definitely should be republished at Hackernoon. I'm an editor there and can help you - tell me if you are interested.
And good luck with your project! Go Go Go! -
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Well done, Sabba! 😊 And bravo momci! (Mate & Veljko) 🚀💪
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Awesome work you guys!
Keep hustling and building the momentum.
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I would love to see an update from you! Seems like you have had some awesome growth!
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Just posted on for you now Tyler :)
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Congratulations and thank you for the great post
I'm launching passportlist.co version one this week. WIll be very grateful for your quick feedback on how to improve it and grow.
Tnx -
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Good job guys and thank you for the insights into your journey. Keep it going!
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Hello Sabba & Tim -
I read through the linked blog post, and was humbled & inspired by your journey. Congrats on the milestone, and best wishes for the future.
Can you talk about how you went from 0 to 20K (free) users. Many here would love to learn about your growth tactics.
Best!
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Hey these two blog posts I made should help https://veed.io/blog/startup-growth-no-budget/ https://veed.io/blog/how-to-get-first-paid-users-saas/
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This is absolutely incredible and I love the article cover photo! Thank you for sharing the whole journey, including all of the downs and lessons learned to get where you are :)
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Hi Danielle, thank you for your kind words. I recently listed to the IH podcast about your product Leave Me Alone. You guys have a really cool story and its super impressive to see how much it has grown in the last month! Since hearing your story, I am super tempted to try nomad life myself too.
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That's awesome! Thank you so much for listening ^_^ - it really has grown a tonne in the last month or so, I hope it keeps growing so we can reach ramen profitability too!
Nomad life isn't for everyone and doesn't come without it's own challenges, but for me I love it. I have found the perfect balance between work and travel that lets me see the world and still build products I love. I wrote about our journey to remote work and the realities/challenges of nomad life on our Squarecat blog if you're interested in reading more - it's a 3 part series :)
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Congrats @sabba & Tim!
Would love to reconnect with you guys -- it's been awhile since we last talked 😀
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Do people know they need your service? Who are your competitors?
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Used by Social media marketers and SME's. I think there is a lot of people saying VIDEO in the marketing space, so they are eager to lean. Lots of competitors from adobe to apple and also well funded startups too.
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Your site looks super sleek!
What template do you use?
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Custom, altho the blog was made by @johnonolan product Ghost. Really incredible platform, we are huge fans.
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First, get your ramen. Next, get your bread! Congrats
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This space is so hot, whoever can create just the right balance of simplicity and useful features is going to make a ton'a chedda' . I dream of automations that create images and video perfect for the platfrom I am uploading to with ease and a professional feel to the media quality.
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Simplicity + Power is something I am always really considered about and something Canva did extremely well.
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Congrats again Sabba, really inspirational stuff, this sort of insight into your journey really does so much to motivate. Best of luck continuing to grow!!
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Thank you so much Simon
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What does Ramen Profitability mean?
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Congratulations guys! I read your article a few days ago about being rejected by Ycombinator.
Keep the hustle going, these numbers are growing pretty fast :)
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I hope we can keep the growth up. I am spending as much time as I can talking to users and working on growth. We really need to try on growth product too.
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There 's a typo in the following sentence from the Features page "Want to sugest a tool?". It should be "suggest". Congrats on the milestone.
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Massive achievement, well done guys!
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Huge! I remember us first meeting on the very first week you guys started charging back in June. Genuinely awesome to see how far you've come. Great stuff.
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Thanks Harry, great to see marketing example fly too!
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What a cool article Sabba!
Congrats for this amazing journey, can't wait to read about your next milestone.-
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Really pleased you like it, we will keep the updates coming!
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Hi Sabba,
Many congrats on your achievement.
May I know the tool that you use for the sales projection. I want to know from which tool the screenshot that you have used on your post was taken from. -
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Hey Sabba,
Congrats on the new milestones for VEED.
I'm wondering how much does it cost to hire a partime developer as I'm looking to get one.
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Thank you! Interns of hiring developers, it is hard to say. The price of developers changes depending on their experience, experiences what country they are in.
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Great story !
mind what your tech stack and cloud setup? -
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Congrats!!!
What's your plan to scale your product to thousands of users?
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Content marketing is working well for us at the moment. But we are also experimenting with other channels too. For example, we now have a high lifetime value per user, allowing us to experiment with advertising, something we would not consider if we had no MRR. We don't know if it is going to work until we try. I will let you know when we find out :)
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We have a Trello, we all assign tasks and have catch up calls every other week.
We have a lot of trust in our team, so we don't look over the shoulders, we just let them get on with it and we don't count hours.
We don't push deadlines or point fingers, we are all in this together. This has worked well for us and we have an amazing culture that I am really proud of. I might do a blog post on this...
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Hey, thank you. Yea, it is strange and totally unexpected. I think making the product more stable over time make a big impact on this too.
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We all want to grow our product to reach millions of users to improve the lives of many, but a very common problem that a lot of startup founders have is that they don't have enough experience growing a startup.
When Tim and I started VEED like many others, we felt competent at building and designing a product, but had no experience of growing a product and no budget to do so.
Now we have thousands of monthly users, growing 40% month over month and almost reached profitability, the holy grail of a self-funded startup. We often get asked for advice on growth and we like helping others so we normally say yes, but after many hour-long calls we decided to put this post together. In this post, I am going to show you how we grew to 50,000 MAU in just 6 months without spending a single penny.
Read more on the VEED BLOG
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That looks like the real deal.Congrats mate! Getting so fast to 50k just with SEO practices is quite admirable. I'm also trying to get my Blogspot ranked higher, but with all the competition and the same ontent you find on each one of them it seems frustratingly hard. Not to the point that even the content gets copied nowadays. You'll find the same thing written about soccer moms on ten different sites ad most of them will not be readable by search engines. I think most of these guys should look for contentwise.pro and see how you can be unique.
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Awesome, thanks for sharing.
3 Comments
Congrats, I remember when you were just starting to get traction.
It's been a great journey to watch (so far)
Congratulations! Did they call you, or did you call them?
I hadn't read your blog before, but just did for the first time. You have some really solid, thoughtful writing! Thanks for sharing. 🙏
Congrats on everything accomplished so far and much luck in the ongoing journey!