VEED.IO

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!

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

https://www.veed.io/blog/raising-series-a/

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

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!

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

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