Kortland here, I'm trying something new where I occasionally feature bonus
episodes from other IndieHackers podcasts.
With the exception of this week, these will always be an addition to my normal
episodes instead of replacing them.
This one is called IndieBites, features short bite-sized conversations with
IndieHackers who are running profitable and bootstrapped businesses.
If you enjoy it, you should head over to the IndieBites podcast and subscribe.
When we got our first paid user, I was like, Oh my God, we might actually do this.
And then the next inflection point is like profitability.
And when I say profitability, I mean like, you know, all of us just pay
ourselves one, $2,000 a month.
That's really liberating time because it's like, hang on.
I don't need to go back to a job ever again.
Hello and welcome back to IndieBites, the podcast where I bring you stories
from IndieHackers in 15 minutes or less.
In this episode, we have Saba, who is the co-founder of VEED, an online
video editing platform.
Before we get into it, I'd like to thank Weekend Club for
continually supporting the podcast.
Weekend Club is a community I'm personally a part of.
And as I said before, it has made a huge impact on my progress as an IndieHacker.
If you've ever struggled meeting solo founders and staying accountable,
then Weekend Club is for you.
Every Saturday, we have deep working sessions to help you get your tasks done.
I've got limited promo code for you, 50% off your first
month, go to weekendclub.co and enter IndieBites as your code.
Let's get into this conversation with Saba, who is also a member of Weekend Club.
Saba is the co-founder of VEED.io, an online video editing platform
that has grown to over 1.7 million ARR.
When I first met Saba, VEED was just a small product that
wasn't generating any revenue.
Since then, Saba and his co-founder, Tim, have grown the platform rapidly, adding
new team members, thousands of new users, making a profitable bootstrap business.
Saba, how are you doing?
I'm good, man.
Thanks for having me.
It's absolutely mad because I think when I first met you and VEED was just this
thing you were building wasn't generating any revenue to a couple of months ago
when you came on the Marketing Mashup podcast and you were at a million in revenue.
And now you're at 1.7.
That's mad.
Oh, it's been so fast.
It's been crazy.
And how have you been dealing with the intense growth?
Has it been stressful on you, growing the team?
I think the main strain is going to be customer service and us wanting to move
faster and to get all the features in that all the users want.
The great thing about software is you can add more and more people and not as much
breaks.
It has been tough and we're still getting through it, but yeah, we're happy and we're
enjoying it.
Absolutely.
So tell me a little bit more about VEED.
What is it?
So VEED is a simple online video editing platform.
So it's like a Canva for video and people use it for video editing.
If to make content for social, they use it to edit webinars, make podcast videos,
basically any kind of content you want to make for social that's video based, you
can do it with us.
Amazing.
Where did the idea come from to start off with?
I was making content myself, YouTube and Instagram professionally and personally.
And I felt that the tools available at the time were just not up to scratch.
So I was editing 20 second clips in Premiere or After Effects and it just felt
very bloated.
Yeah, I was just really interested in the space and thought there was some
opportunities to do something interesting there really.
Yeah.
And in terms of the space, there are quite a few online video editing tools out
there, Wave, Headliner, Capwing, what makes be different from those?
There was obviously video editing products out there online.
I remember actually sitting in the local cafe with Tim.
We're looking at them and it just wasn't what we were looking for.
So that's why we decided to move forward.
Even now, I think it's a huge market and there's lots of really interesting
use cases, which each company focuses on.
The fact that there is so much competition now is a testament to the need
for this as a tool.
And I'm a user of Veed.
I think it's absolutely brilliant.
What market are you specifically going after?
Because there's some of these tools that specifically go over after
YouTubers, some that go after podcasters.
Subtitling is something that we focus on quite heavily.
Our users love it.
I think we've got a really good offering.
And so I think you hear it again and again with products, just focus on one
thing and do it really well.
And I think if you can nail that one thing, then everything else can spin out of it.
And how much do you charge for Veed at the moment?
How does that look in terms of margins for you?
There's two plans.
There is a $12 a month, a $25 a month plan when paid annually or 20% more than that.
If you pay monthly at the moment, we put away about 25% of that revenue into the
bank to save for a bit of a rainy day and make a bit of a buffer.
Because we are bootstraps, we don't have reserves in the bank.
So that's how we build our reserves.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we were saying just before you started, you've now got a team of about 20.
How has that been for you hiring people and managing them and seeing your team grow?
Have you had any growing pains with that?
Yeah, massively.
I think there's a personal growing pain where it's just to put in some
context, like 14 months ago, there was me and Tim, Mate Vilko, so just four of us.
And I was developing, designing, doing marketing, and everyone was
doing a bit of everything.
Now 14 months later, I do none of that.
And it's more like management.
So that's been a hard transition for me because all the designing is what I
really love doing in terms of hiring the team, that's been challenging,
delegating has been challenging.
It's just new skills that I've never exercised before that I've had to learn.
How did you choose who to hire at the start when you started generating more
revenue and you got to that point to hire?
Because a lot of people, do they hire a new dev person to build out the product?
Do they hire sales?
Do they hire marketing?
How did you make that decision?
I think it depends on every company, I think individually what they're lacking.
And I remember at the start, we had really good traffic.
So we weren't worried about growing marketing hugely, but we're like,
actually the product needs work.
And there's a lot of complexity when building a video editing platform,
especially when it comes down to the video file formats and like making
sure they work in the browser, saving projects and making the collaboration
work and all this stuff.
So development was our main focus.
And then all of a sudden marketing looks really small.
So then we start hiring people into marketing.
Was there a turning point for you where you started making enough revenue
from V to go, okay, this works out.
Was there ever a point where you thought, I'm not too sure how long
we're going to be able to keep this up?
So when we got our first paid user, I was like, Oh my God, we might actually do this.
And even at that point, you just don't know if you're going to make it work out.
And then the next inflection point is like profitability.
And when I say profitability, I mean, like, you know, all of us just
pay ourselves one, $2,000 a month.
That's really liberating time because it's like, hang on.
I don't need to go back to a job ever again.
Well, not ever again, but like, you know, there's no immediate rush
for anything to change here.
The hardest, but also the most fun times are the pre-products when
you're just first building it out when it is super risky, but that's also
the time where it's just, am I doing the right thing?
Could it like, maybe it will fail?
I don't know.
You know?
Yeah.
And a lot of indie hackers are working on their projects or their side
hustles alongside a full-time job.
Were you working a full-time job?
When you started Veed, and at what point did you leave?
So we had two phases.
We had the initial phase where me and Tim worked on Veed full-time for eight
months, once we got the first basic, really bad version of Veed live, we
ran out of money and had to go back to work for eight months, but during
those eight months, we were working evenings and weekends, and then we
used the salaries that we were getting to hire two part-time developers
to help us out.
So we kept it moving forwards, which was really important.
I think we, we are by nature, both of us are very high risk and very all in.
Yeah.
We've mentioned Tim a few times as your co-founder, a lot of indie
hackers are building their products so late that they won't have a co-founder.
Do you think it's worth the solo founders going out to find a co-founder?
First of all, I think co-founders are great.
And I actually think free people is a perfect number, especially in those
early days, doing it on your own so hard, because you might just spend all
your time just developing and not speaking to users and marketing.
And so, yeah, I would encourage people to find co-founders, but I wouldn't
necessarily seek a co-founder, I would just put yourself in an environment
where you might meet other people that are super interesting or that have
similar ideas and you might just have some great synergy with someone.
And that's a perfect co-founder.
But in general, we're part of weekend club together.
And there's a lot of people that we chat to and we meet up with externally
in real life, have some drinks, put yourself in the environment, basically
where you are exposed to other interesting people and see what happens.
Going back to the sort of the start of the, your bootstraps, you've done
really well to grow to the point you are now.
For those people that are at the start of their journey, trying to build users,
what did you do to get your first sort of hundred users?
So one product launch can get you a hundred pretty easily.
Like one Reddit launch will get you a hundred relatively easy.
It's not that hard.
You've just got to keep plugging away and keep sharing and keep telling
the world about what you're building in whatever way, shape or form you can do.
Maybe it's a, if it's a B2B, maybe you need to go to talks or write blog posts
or go to conferences or if it's like a more B2C, it's hosting a product hunt
or Reddit, Quora, it doesn't really matter.
And I think there's different opportunities always at different times.
So like when we just started, Quora was really great and we were able to
post hundreds and hundreds of dances on Quora, now we can't do it.
Also, just back to what we were saying about co-founders, it's really hard
to have your finger on the pulse if you're just in a development
environment all day coding.
So if someone's actively spending all their time on marketing, that's great.
And I guess getting your first sort of hundred or first thousand users
might be easier when you're free and you started out as a free product, right?
We were free for the eight months.
And then how did you start converting people to paid and what
point did you induce that paid plan to start generating some revenue?
So we grew from zero to about 30,000 monthly users because it was a free product,
because it was very low barrier to entry, you just come on, no account.
We decided to start charging our products because someone said that
they didn't think we'd convert anyone and we were like, yeah, we will.
We basically just dropped our paywall and just converted about 10 people
on that first day, which is incredible.
Yeah.
Why did you start for free?
Because that'll probably be scary for a lot of indie hackers who want to
start charging for their products right away because they need to generate revenue.
If they're ever going to leave their jobs, why is it you started for free?
The product, when it first went live, you couldn't charge for, and then
increasingly it gets better and better and you get more and more people.
If you think to yourself that it goes live with the paywall, you might be
making your life way too hard, right?
That you need, you need to get your product out there as quickly as possible.
And you get people using it and get their feedback as much as possible.
And if you make the Barret entry high with a paywall and you make it hard for
yourself to produce this piece of software, it's just going to slow you down.
So we got the basic version out, kept improving in hindsight.
We probably should have started charging for it about three months earlier than
we did, but first time, proper founder, should we say, so yeah, I'm still learning.
Yeah.
So I guess it was almost a beta where the product wasn't quite ready for people to
pay, so you were focusing on growth while you could, and then you
could, and then seeing how many you can convert when you did start charging for it.
Do you have a free plan now?
Is it a trial?
How do you get signups?
You can use the product for free, I think without even signing up still.
And you get a watermarks video.
You can have an account, which is also free to save all your projects.
And then if you want to remove that watermark, it's the paid plans.
For your marketing strategy, you said you started off doing the core answers.
How is that developed over time?
And what are you doing now for growth?
At the start, you can be relatively scrappy and you can just try and get
a few users from LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, and, but now we, we, I think we
think a lot more long-term about our growth.
So eight months ago, we hired someone to do YouTube videos for us.
The YouTube channel gets about 8,000 views every day, which is amazing, and
converts a good portion of users to the platform as free and paid users.
The other thing that we've been doing is like engineering as growth as well.
So like we've just built a screen recorder, a webcam recorder, and thinking
there is people that maybe want to record their screens and want to record
their webcams also want to edit their videos.
So that's just a really nice flow into the products and we can make
those products free, just as a way to drive them into the main app.
Absolutely.
So you've been doing this for a while now.
You've been learning along the way with a fast growing business.
What advice would you give for founders based on maybe some of the mistakes
you've made or those going through a similar growth path?
I would say just get stuff out there.
Don't wait for it to be perfect.
As an easy hacker, you need to make money to support the
business that keeps developing on it.
So build a product that you can charge for.
And normally a good litmus test of that is, are there other products in the
market that people are willing to pay for?
And people going through like the growth stage and just they've got a bit of
revenue, I would say push really hard, really fast, because I am a big
believer in my trajectory.
We are still benefiting from the trajectory of that hard push we did in
the first six months and that business is wrong at that speed.
So if you want your business to move quicker, just put so much effort in.
And I think you can get it to take off.
Absolutely.
All right.
Sabah, you've been a great guest as always.
I'll end on a few quick fire questions for you.
What do you think is the best book for indie hackers to read?
I've got two.
So one is the book Traction.
It's a growth marketing book.
And if you've got something going on, you've got a bit of revenue.
There's a book called Seven Powers, which is great for business strategy.
Favorite podcast listen to, and it can't be acquired.
I like how I built this.
I'm sorry.
It's good.
I enjoy it.
Who's an indie hacker you admire or who should people follow?
I really like Josh Pigford.
His Twitter's really, I don't know.
He's just got some really good content.
He tweets some good stuff.
But yeah, I just got a lot of respect for him.
He's a cool guy.
Yeah.
Big fan of Josh.
And finally, what are you most excited about for the future,
either in business or personal, Sabah?
I'm most excited for Coronavirus.
Just going away and we can all go and have fun again.
No, I'm looking forward to keep growing the team.
I've got 10 million ARR as our next huge target that we're going
to try and hit next year.
Just keep laser focus on the goal and just get on with it.
I'm having fun, man.
I'm having fun.
Amazing.
Thanks for joining me, mate.
Thanks so much, dude.
Take care.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Indie Bites with Sabah.
Sabah has been on such an amazing journey building V and I think
they're going to go really, really far.
If you like this episode, I'd love it if you shared it with another
Indie Hacker to help the podcast grow, or if you're on Apple Podcast
to leave a review, it really, really does help.
I've got a ton of really cool episodes coming up, including Corey Haines,
who has recently left his role as head of Grocer's Bear Metrics
to be a full-time Indie Hacker.
I've got Rosie Sherry, who runs the community at Indie Hackers,
a Mubs, who is just a prolific maker.
If you want to hear any of those episodes, head over to IndieBites.co
and subscribe, and I'll make sure that every episode is in your inbox
when it gets released.
You can find everything discussed in this episode in the show notes.
Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.