How to build an online video maker









Interview with the founder of VEED

How to build an online video maker

Hey Sabba, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you are working on?

Hi, I am Sabba. Technically, I am a designer, but my never-ending appetite for learning new things means I also like to code (pretty bad) marketing products (even worse) and also make youtube videos (Despicable)

Anyway, I'm the co-founder of VEED, an online video maker. We let users do a bunch of cool video stuff online, like make Instagram video templates, add glitch filter and VHS video filters to video and we are most well known for our automated subtitle generation.

You are working on Veed.io - How did your get your first users for them?

Our first users were pretty easy, we launched on product hunt super early. Our build at the time was pretty much bad and only allowed you do some basic features such as trimming videos, cropping videos, adding images. That was pretty much it!

After that, we hit Reddit and answered about 100 questions on quora about video editing. After we did all this, we were pretty much buoyant and would see users to VEED every day, not many, but enough to see some basics working.

What tools/services are you using and would you recommend to other indie makers?

Nothing fancy - Drift, google analytics, Mix panel, webmasters tools

What “social media strategies” are you doing for your projects?

We are not that big on social media as most of our traffic comes from SEO right now.

We do like to launch products on Twitter, Reddit, hacker news and on product hunt, but don't have a social media strategy (YET)

My advice for any other indie hacker is if social media is an important acquisition channel for your industry, you should work on it. But it's not necessary for everyone.

What SEO strategies have worked for you?

Landing pages!

Every time someone searched something like a term like “add image to video” we show up in the top few results. When you land one of our landing pages, there is just one button above the fold that takes you to our video editor. This method has proven really effective for us and we have managed to acquire the best part of 30,000 users a month with it. We actually wrote a blog post about how we got 50,000 MAU with no marketing budget. If you're looking for more technical detail, check that out.

What content marketing are you doing for your projects?

I am the first to hold my hand up and say we were REALLY bad at content marketing in the early days, mainly due to being really bad at writing, but we got better at it over time.

We now have a few blogs, we write about how to grow your audience with social media on VEED GROW and we also write about our own startup on our blog.

Our blog content is really hit or miss. When it comes to results, one blog post we wrote, about how we got rejected from YC, brought in about 40,000 users overnight, with around 500 concurrent users at any point in time, It was crazy.

And other articles about the future of silent film just get a few views, but is our most backlinks blog post.

Let’s talk a bit about pricing strategy - what did work for you and what didn’t work out?

We are pretty new to pricing and have only been charging for 4 Months. 4 months ago we had to start charging as we only had 3 months runway in the bank. We started off charging $5 as we thought no one would pay. After acquiring 20 users over one weekend, we then put the price up to $10. Charging $10 was good as we learned what our users found valuable and how we could improve it for them. Once we made significant product improvements, we put the price up to $20. I do recommend checking out Van Westendorp price sensitivity model for a more strategic way of doing this.

What advice would you give someone to get his first 100 customers?

Get your first 10, then do whatever you did that first time, but 10X more! For example, 10 PH launched, 10X quora, 10X Reddit, 10X blog posts, 10X landing pages. You get the idea.