What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
I'm here with Saba Kainajad, the founder of Veed, which is one of the fastest-growing
companies that I've ever featured on the show.
So what's your revenue, Saba, today versus what it was last year, the beginning of 2020?
So today, we're at 3.3 million ARR.
December last year, it was about 150K ARR.
This is the concept of boiling the frog.
You put a frog in a pot, and you turn up the water, and he's just going to sit there and
let you boil him alive.
And the whole idea is, we don't really notice when things are changing slowly, but your
revenue has changed incredibly quickly.
That's one year from like, hey, we're kind of ramen profitable, maybe we can quit our
jobs to like, oh shit, we're rich, we can do whatever we want, we can hire whoever we
want, we can build whatever we want, we're on top of the world.
What's the biggest thing that's changed in your life, having gone from such a small company
to such a large and growing company in that short of time span?
Everything has really changed my life personally, day to day, I actually think I'd probably
work a bit less than I did maybe a year ago, so we've got more great people helping us.
It has in hindsight grown incredibly quickly, but day to day, it doesn't feel like that
much changes.
Instead, it kind of feels a bit more like every three months I have to kind of like fire
myself for my old job and kind of get more people to help and take up different responsibilities.
And that's been quite hard to get used to, but it's been a fun journey though.
An old interview with Elon Musk that I watched the other day where he had just sold his first
company and made like $100 million or something crazy and he bought a McLaren F1 and he was
just sitting in front of his house with his girlfriend like, I got one of the rarest cars
in the world and I'm going to drive it around and go super fast and I'm the shit, I'm rich
now.
He just cared so much about having this car and obviously today, if you look at that guy,
he's trying to put people on Mars and he's trying to change everybody to driving electric
cars and he's like only focused on like weirdly ambitious, like world changing things.
I think that's one thing I've seen pretty consistently with everybody I know who's like
gone from starting small to like making it big, it's like your ambitions kind of ramp
up.
And so I wonder if that's the case with you because if Elon didn't start off with these
world changing ambitions, I'm sure almost no one does.
Did you think a year ago that Veed was going to become this huge thing and also like if
your ambitions change, have your goals changed since back then?
Completely.
There's also an interesting, I heard an interesting conversation with Elon Musk and going straight
to like making spaceships or whatever is like super, super challenging and pretty much unattainable
for anyone unless you've had a few successes before.
And I think one of the examples that he used was like, oh, just make a nice photo sharing
app.
Funny analogy.
But no, my ambitions have completely changed me and my co-founder, early days, the idea
was it wouldn't be really great if we didn't have to work for anyone else and you know,
about consultancy.
So that was like step one.
And then like once we got there, it was like, oh, wouldn't it be really cool if we got to
like 1 million ARR, like, wouldn't that just be like insane, like we'd be able to like
take home quite a lot of cash and just like maybe we could sell the company and would
be like fine.
And then after we kind of got there, we're just like, no, no, no, like that ambition's
gone now.
Like, you know, what's the next thing?
And so now we're at this stage where we've got this, you know, really fast growing company
and we're working with such amazing people.
They're just like, you know, helping me create a really nice environment for all of us to,
you know, do really good work and all have good work life balance and, you know, be able
to travel, see loved ones and stuff like that.
So our ambitions have changed and they probably will change again in the next, you know, six
to twelve months.
And then maybe start with what VD is because we haven't even gotten into that yet.
That's a really good idea.
So VD is like a simple online video editing platform.
So the problem that we're solving is, you know, video editing software like iMovie and
Premiere is all browser, not browser based, sorry, desktop based and normally really hard
to use.
So we just make it super easy to edit videos in the browser.
And our tooling is like more optimized for making content for like social media or editing
webinars or making podcast videos and stuff like that.
Okay.
So not like YouTubers aren't using it?
They do, but not, you know, your high production YouTube content, if that makes any sense.
So very casual kind of users, or it could be like a recording that we've made here and
we want to sometimes put a frame on it, add an indie hackers logo to the top, you know,
that kind of stuff, you know, light editing in the browser.
We'd like to make it and we will be making it way more powerful as we go.
But I think, you know, due to the resource constraints that we have, you know, we're
not going to sit in beta for four years building this thing.
We just had to get it out.
And early days, it was just add text to a video or like, you know, trim the video.
And over time, it's, you know, got a lot more powerful.
And how did you come up with the idea for this is I'm friends with a mutual friend of
yours, his name's James, he's part of the Weekend Club.
I love James.
And he's also part of the Indie Hackers Podcast Network.
And it's funny because we were talking about V the other day and he's like, yeah, I remember
sitting down with Saba and he told me he wanted to make like a browser based video editing
company.
I'm just laughed at him like it's a cool story, bro, but like people just edit in editing
software.
Like, why did you think this idea was ever going to work?
I think I remember that conversation.
So I have, so I went to an art school and I studied graphic, a set of graphic design.
I worked in like branding and advertising for a few years in London.
You know, I was just really interested in what was happening on YouTube, basically,
and how creators were building really, really big audiences.
You know, I got inspired.
So I've started making my own videos and the bottleneck that I found was just the complexity
to get into the software as someone who's very technical.
Even for me, it was tough.
So I thought it must be really hard for people who haven't maybe got an arts degree and worked
in advertising.
So that was kind of the initial idea.
And I really liked Giphy's GIF editor, like you could just create a GIF in the browser
really, really light and super simple.
And I was like, okay, can we do that but for video?
And so yeah, that was kind of like the initial genesis of the idea.
It was you and a co-founder.
What are some of the first things you did and how did you end up growing it to what
it is today?
It probably goes back three years, actually.
So my co-founder Tim had his final major project at university and he was like, oh, what should
I do for it?
I was like, oh, I've got this great video idea.
Why don't you do that?
And then after you finish doing that for university, we can start the company.
It was like, great idea.
So that's kind of how it started, really.
So then we kind of had like an MVP.
We went through our, his university accelerator then got really off track, went way off course
and started kind of optimizing the idea of the company for winning competitions to get
basically free money.
A massive lesson there was like, you know, don't build a company to win a competition,
build it to make a user happy.
And so that kind of put us a good eight months off course.
I did the exact same thing at a college.
I built a startup with a couple of grad students and we won like MIT's 50K business plan competition.
We like tied for first, so we got like 25K.
And it's actually the worst thing that could happen because it just meant that I spent
a year living off 25K and wasting my time on something that nobody really cared about.
But like we did want a competition and that felt good.
It feels like validation in a way.
And you're always kind of like looking for some sort of validation that you're doing
the right thing.
And if you've got a few judges that are just like, yes, you guys are really onto something,
you're like, you know what, you know what I mean, like, yeah, that that put us massively
off course.
And once we kind of like the good news is we won a few of the competitions, we got some
money and then we basically burnt through it really quickly.
Kind of when we had like a couple of months left, we were like, okay, let's bring this
back to where we started, which was that simple online video editing platform.
So the, so the initial product went up with, it was like ad text, trim crop.
And I think we had some basic color correction and that was it.
And that product went live.
When we got it live, we put it on products hunt, Tim, my co-founder got a job offer and
he was like, well, you know, we've run out of money.
Why don't I get a job and you I'll give you half my salary and you keep working.
I was like, okay, that's great.
And you know, testament to Tim, like that was they were really hard times, you know,
because we felt like absolute failures.
And there's probably a million people out there at the time who also had online video
editors that could do color correction and trimming videos.
Like what you released, like how unique was it at the time?
No, it wasn't super unique, but all right.
So Tim gets a job because you need money to survive and eat.
What about you?
How are you paying your bills?
So Tim's basically given me half his salary every month so I can keep building the product.
Yeah.
So I mean, that's like massive commitment.
And that's one of the times where I think in hindsight we did like the right thing,
obviously, but yeah, a really hard decision to make.
And like, we are actually going to keep doing this.
Like are we going to really try and keep this alive?
And then not long after that, I got a random call, I remember I was on London South Bank,
I was eating a hot dog and I got a call from a recruiter saying like, Hey, are you looking
for a contract job?
And I was like, Yeah, I think I am.
And then yeah, so I went contract as well.
And then but the good news was the product was live.
People were using it, very small traffic, but we're like, Okay, we've got money coming
in, let's save up some more runway so we can go again.
The early days of your growth, it wasn't exactly obvious that you're going to be a rocket ship.
And I think a lot of people struggle with this because it's like, well, do I keep doing
this thing?
That's like not working that well?
What was going through your head?
Yeah, I think about that quite a lot, especially when I'm chatting with friends who are in
similar situations than maybe where we were.
It wasn't obvious at all.
However, we did see stable growth kind of month for month, nothing crazy, but people
were using it.
I remember at that time we were like trying to reach out to users, like ask them what
they liked, like absolutely nothing came back.
And we were just like, do people really care about this?
The thought at the time was like, okay, maybe we need to raise money.
So I remember speaking to investors and they were just like, yeah, cool, yeah, like maybe
check back in a few months.
And I was like, okay, well, that's not going to work.
Oh, maybe YC, they give free money, right?
So like we applied to YC, like got on that application.
And then the other thing we were just like, okay, well, you know, we're based in London.
We're getting good contract day rates.
And so we're like, well, why don't we hire a couple of developers to help build the products
part-time while we're bringing in money and we're doing evenings and weekends.
So you know, the next eight months we brought Maté and Vilko on who are still with us today.
And we would just do evenings and weekends and we just kept pushing.
And the feeling at the time was just like, we've kind of got to make this work.
I don't know, I've never been in that situation before where I'm just like, this is going
to work.
It's going to happen.
This time it's going to happen.
You know?
So that was kind of the attitude.
We were just very brute force about it.
I mentioned it earlier, part of this, this group called The Weekend Club.
It's kind of badass.
It operates out of London.
It's run by this guy, Charlie Ward, and pre-COVID times we used to have indie hackers meetups
all over the world.
He was like one of the guys, he was like a meetup founder, he was always hosting events.
I flew out to London to go to one of them.
I just like these groups of people who are all friends with each other and close with
each other who just decide like, we're going to come together and we're just going to run
shit.
We're going to hold each other accountable.
We're going to pump each other up.
And in your case, it's like, we're all going to be indie founders and we're going to build
great businesses together.
And there's a lot of these, maybe like the most famous one is probably like the PayPal
Mafia.
Everybody knows like, okay, Peter Thiel came out of that and David Sacks, who founded Yammer,
worked at PayPal.
He sold that for like a billion dollars.
Both the founders of Yelp came out of the PayPal Mafia.
All three YouTube co-founders were at PayPal.
Big investors like Kiefer Boyd, Dave McClure, Reed Hoffman, the founder of Lee.
I can keep going.
Elon Musk, obviously.
I don't know what they were doing there.
They're putting something in the water or just hiring the best people, but like they
all came together and they incubated an incredible group of people who basically just run tech
today.
And then part of like a small group of, it's funny, it's called the 100K Club.
It's just a group of people who are in an iMessage group who all just want to get their
Twitter accounts to 100,000 followers.
Not for any particular reason.
They just want to.
And like, I don't know how I even got into this group because I don't, I couldn't care
less.
Like I'm going to be the only person in the group who doesn't get there, but it's kind
of fun to like see what they're talking about and kind of feed off their energy and a lot
of them are doing it.
This is you too.
I mean, you're part of the weekend club.
You're part of this group of people in London who are all working together and pushing each
other forward.
How did that play into your sort of early struggles and successes?
Yeah, I mean the London indie hackers community is absolutely amazing.
Indie beers, that was it.
So it would be like, I think it was like a Wednesday of like the first Wednesday of every
month would go for beers.
That's how I met Charlie and James.
And also Harry's kind of part of the mafia from weekend club and like front end mentor.
Like there's a lot of people hustling and William as well from simple poll, you know,
going to these sort of like meetups and events was just like, I'm not the only one doing
this.
I mean, I remember when I first met William from simple poll and he told me what his revenue
was.
I was like, Oh my God.
Like that's ridiculous.
Like, so yeah, it kind of made it feel a bit more obtainable and a bit more achievable,
but also a nice way to kind of unwind, have a few beers and kind of just like complain
about stuff, you know.
So at some point things turned around for you, like there is a before and an after.
Is that true?
Would you describe it like that?
So true.
Yeah.
So what was that point?
Give me the skinny.
I mean, where it turned around was when we went full time on the product again.
So yeah, we're working the contract jobs and you know, user numbers are going up.
We get to about 30,000 monthly users, which is pretty, you know, we were really happy
with it.
Pretty decent.
Everyone was free on the app and yeah, we got a YC interview and said, we go to YC,
do the interview and we got rejected and they were like, yeah, you kind of got rejected
because you're not making any revenue.
And that was like a massive bummer because we were just like, this is, this is it.
This is the future.
Like we kind of, you know, bedded the house on it sort of thing where just like, you know,
we go into YC and when we both quit our jobs again for that interview.
And then, yeah, when that, when that happened, we were just like really down for about 12
hours.
We woke up the next day.
We're just like, I've got a great idea.
Like, why don't we try and get revenue this weekend, message them on Monday?
And then they'll definitely let us in.
Like, of course they will.
You know, it shows hustle, shows grind, grit and all that.
And we did it and they're just like, yeah, no, sorry, can't again, really down.
But the thing that changed was like, we got 10 users, right?
Paid users over that weekend.
And we were like, oh, hang on a minute, something's going on here.
And those original investors that were really, you know, not standoffish, but they were just
like, yeah, it's not the right time.
We're just like, yeah, no, I think it's, you know, we'd like to, you know, you to meet
the partners and they'd love to meet you.
I was like, I'm really sorry, but I just need to see this out a bit longer because the trajectory
kind of looks all right.
So that's when it turned around, we went full time on the product, me and Tim and Mattie
Vilko as well came full time as well, and we just started grinding really, really hard
using numbers.
We're looking good.
We kind of worked out how to grow the product.
We kind of worked out how to, you know, build a lot of the product and scale it.
And that's when things kind of clicked.
It takes a certain type of personality to deal with rejection that way.
Like a lot of people when they get rejected, they're like, well, that sucked.
I'm not doing this anymore.
Like, that's a good sign that I should quit.
You know, these people are maybe more successful and smarter than me.
If they don't think I have a chance, I don't think I have a chance, whereas like your response
was the exact opposite.
Like, these people don't want us like, screw them, we're going to go make money on our
own.
And like you actually argued, it was like the best thing that ever happened to you that
they rejected you because it seemed like it lit a fire under your ass to like, go do the
things you probably should have already been doing.
Yeah, I remember at the time thinking like I was like planning out how we were going
to monetize.
And in hindsight, if I actually executed that plan, maybe we've never executed it, right?
Or we could have executed it six months later.
Like the time was right.
So yeah, massive favor.
It's super interesting just thinking about the different personality traits of the people
I have on the show, because a lot of people just have like these weird, quirky things
that like make them different.
So like I interviewed Danielle Baskin, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, and
she's got like this crazy creative personality where she just always inventing these like
weird, quirky things.
And as a result, she's just, she's got like 20, 30 different inventions and like 20, 30
different projects and companies she's running at the same time.
But because she does that, she's just like one of the most fascinating people ever to
talk to.
Everyone wants to get to know her.
And she's got like some cool stuff that's really taken off.
You've got people like Daniel Vassallo, this guy who was like making 500 grand a year at
Amazon.
And then he quit to become an indie hacker, which seems incredibly risky.
But if you actually talk to him, and like you see what he's tweeting and saying, like,
he's like one of the most risk averse people ever.
Like everything he does is 100% to add redundancy to his life to make sure that he's like disconnected
from any sort of system where he's like putting all his eggs on one basket.
That's kind of what motivates him to do everything.
So he also has like a bunch of different projects that all could like independently succeed
even if the others fail.
Maybe the most common trait is contrarianism.
So people like Peter levels are to be his friend, Snyder, Sahel from Gumroad, like these
are all contrarians.
Well, they'll just do things just because no one else is doing it.
That's kind of how they're oriented.
Like they just get really upset when people are doing the same thing.
So they just do something else.
Like Sahel was in a clubhouse chat with my brother the other day and he's like, we're
moving Gumroad to build in public and we're going to always, you know, our zoom meetings
moving him over to clubhouse.
So there'll be, they'll be in public.
And then my brother was kind of talking to him about like the different trade-offs and
so I was like, well, I never really even considered that point.
That's a really good point.
Like I'm just doing it because no one else is doing it and he's just motivated to do
things.
So like no one else is doing, which is, which can kind of work because it ends up uncovering
these opportunities.
You know, I'm guessing like yours is from what I know about you is like this sort of
relentlessness.
You're very polite and kind and mild-mannered on podcasts, but like, you know, I've heard
some behind the scenes stories of you trying every single thing under the sun, like work
in super late, like staring at your strike dashboard.
Like I need to make this MRR go up, like whatever it takes, you know, an investor is sort of
rejecting you saying like, screw them, we're going to do it without them.
And now I know you could probably raise a ton of money if you wanted to, but like you
still haven't, which kind of seems like a fuck you to the man, like we're doing it on
our own.
I mean, that's, that's, I, yeah.
So maybe I do come across quite well-matted on a podcast, but I, yeah, I definitely have
a bit of fire and kind of when I'm on a mission, I need to get something done.
The initial like, oh, we've run out of money, we need to go back to contract jobs.
That was an argument I had with myself and I was like, like Sabra, are you really going
to like, are you really not going to do this thing that you wanted to do your 28 or whatever
at the time, 27, like, when else are you going to do it?
Now's the time, get on with it.
That was like what I was saying to myself.
And then with the YC thing and the investors, it was just a bit like, you know what?
Fuck you.
Like I'm doing this, like I'm just going to get on with it.
And I, and I don't know, I kind of like believed in, you know, myself and my co-founder Tim
as well.
I was like, yeah, no, we are doing this and we, yeah, we're very, very high risk.
I mean, we all like both times we just put all our money into it and we're just like,
okay, let's just get on with it.
Cause you know, what's the worst that's going to happen?
Well, I mean, I say that like, you know, you're not going to die, you know, you're not going
to die.
And I was like, I can fall back on a contract job if I really need to.
Hopefully the market is all right for it, you know, but yeah, we were just all in, always
all in.
In hindsight, do you think the investors were right to reject you?
Like, do you think YC made a mistake and Veed could be like a billion dollar company or
do you think that their judgment was accurate?
This is obviously my opinion and it's, you know, there's, there's not an opinion that's
going to, you know, be against mine and so I'm just going to steal the line right here.
Yes, I think they made a massive mistake.
I do think it could be a really big company.
One of the reservations I remember from the, from the interview was we were kind of not
pushed, but they were like, it needs to be more like YouTube or Instagram.
Like that's, you know, those companies make a lot of money that like tool companies don't.
And I was like, I don't know, like, you know, Adobe's got like, you know, 20, 200 billion
market cap.
They're like, no, no, no.
The big ones are like Instagram.
I made the next Instagram.
No, no, no, no, no.
And I mean, in terms of like the private investors that we're speaking to at the time, you know,
they're in the business of like de-risking themselves so they can make better bets, right?
And so sometimes if you're in the, you know, if you're running lower money, they want to
see as much as they can before they're willing to really commit.
So I don't blame them at all.
Like I'd probably do the same as a strategic decision really on the, on the company.
Yeah.
I do have a bit of a chip on my shoulder from the whole experience though.
And yeah, I probably always have a bit.
Yeah.
I mean, you should, it sounds, it does sound kind of dumb.
I mean, there's a, there's a tweet ironically from Sam Altman who he runs open AI nowadays,
but it used to be probably when you apply to YC, he was running Y Combinator and his
tweet is bad investors ask about market size.
Good investors ask about market growth rates and great investors believe new markets will
get created.
And he's talking about like, you know, investors in Silicon Valley, like high growth startups,
like how do you make the money?
You know, you make the money by investing and people create new markets and do new things.
And so the idea that you have to look exactly like an Instagram or a Snapchat or something
in order to be successful is pretty silly.
You sort of had some good counter examples there were like, there are really massive
tool companies like Adobe that are just crushing it, you know, and they started small, but
they were like, listen, they executed well.
And like, it turns out like people like people like tools and people pay a lot of money for
tools.
I mean, it's kind of silly that like people would think that there's no way you could
possibly make it unless you completely pivot to be a social media application.
Right.
That they're asking is like about defensibility, just like, you know, what stops someone else
just building this?
And I think, you know, all of these are kind of like really valid questions and it's really
good to challenge to be challenged on that sort of stuff.
But you know, I think that's what it really resonated the whole like, you know, what does
it like?
Or like, does it really matter?
Wouldn't it be really great if we could just work full time on it?
Like that's when that sort of like first initial, like, you know, that would make me really
happy feeling came.
I don't want to raise a load of money.
I don't need this to be really big.
Like if we can just work on this full time, that'd be awesome.
You know, like that was, that was the idea.
Cool.
So I asked on Twitter what I should ask you.
I told everybody how fast you were growing what I should ask you.
One guy had the funniest, funniest question.
He said, asked Saba about his biggest failures and his dumbest mistakes.
And the reason I think it's funny is because he didn't ask because he wants to know and
learn from that.
He just said, just, I want to, I want to feel better about myself.
I'm not making $3 million a year, so I want to hear him say something bad.
So I'm going to ask you about that.
But first, let's talk about the good stuff.
Let's talk about how it is that you are able to sort of actually grow so quickly, you know,
once things turned around.
I've got my theories.
I obviously want to like hear yours as well, but like you and I both know a lot of impressive
people.
You know, a lot of great founders in the weekend club and outside of it, you know, a lot of
people with good ideas who are their hustlers and they try lots of stuff and they might
even have like good markets and they haven't grown nearly as fast as you.
What do you think you're doing that they're not doing?
One thing is this like high, I mean, again, it's not for everyone being really high risk.
Like I was, it was all guns blazing from the start.
It wasn't like, oh, let's just do this on the side of my job because I mean, there's
loads of people who have done that incredibly successfully, but that would take us two years
to get to the point where we could quit our jobs.
So I think that was one thing that really helped.
It just kind of really, yeah, that that pushed us quite a lot.
I was really unintentional when I started this.
I wasn't like video editing is huge market.
Adobe has a $200 billion market cap, right?
I would like I had no idea about any of that stuff.
I was like, I really like video editing and I really like that space.
So that's kind of where I want to put my time.
Honestly, I have no idea, no, I do have an idea of why we grew fast, but it wasn't intentional.
We didn't set ourselves up to grow this fast.
One analogy that I do like to think about a lot, the way that we've grown is I kind
of feel like it's, you know, you're like putting a rocket into orbit and to get into orbit,
you need to get, you know, through the atmosphere.
And that's the bit that's really, really tough and you have to burn really hard to get through.
The size is the thing that's really hard to ignore here from research that I've done.
I can see that.
I mean, like there's a there's an app in the Play Store called InShot and it's had a hundred
million downloads and that tops out on the cap of what the Play Store will actually track.
So it's, you know, it's really big.
And when you have a lot of people looking for stuff, then there's a lot of market to
go around.
Right.
So you, I don't think you can grow super, super fast if you're going to cap out at the
few thousand users.
I'm checking it out right now, by the way.
InShot video editor and video maker, nine million ratings, five star rating, four point
star rating.
Absolutely huge.
Right.
When you look at this, do you think like, damn, we should be doing this?
Mmm.
I mean, we will.
I mean, one day we will move, move to apps, but you know, the web was like super underserved.
I mean, the other thing is if you crack open app store on your, on your Mac, the most downloaded
software on, on Mac is iMovie as well.
Right.
So the super, super clear signs that there's a lot of people using and searching for this
stuff.
And that's, you know, really encouraging.
But as I said, this is in hindsight, I was so unintentioned when I started this, I was
like, I like video.
We're going to build a video editor.
I mean, now with all the stuff that I've learned, I would approach idea generation incredibly
differently and kind of do some of this stuff that we're talking about, like look at what
apps people are downloading regularly.
Like how well served are they?
What are the power laws with like usage of within these applications, you know, stuff
like that.
So I got another one for you that is sort of a common trope.
It's just this statement that goes around, which is that ideas don't matter.
Execution does, you know, you could, you could have a great idea, but you execute like shit
and your companies were $0.
I got my own opinions on this.
What do you think having, you know, obviously come up with an idea that wasn't super well
considered in the beginning, but also executed like mad and found success?
I was thinking about this the other day, like my mum used to let out a holiday, a holiday
cottage, right?
And she used to put it in a magazine called country cottages for you and it would turn
up and you know, in there you could see all the places that you could stay.
Right?
And then, you know, like 10 years later, there's this new innovative company called Airbnb
who are letting out holiday houses online, right?
And it's just like, it's technically the same idea.
It's 10% different.
They've modernized it.
They've branded it really nicely.
They've told a really, really good story, but that's just execution incredibly well.
Right?
It's interesting.
And it's almost the trick to the question is like, what even counts as the idea?
Is it only the product or the service you're making this the idea?
Or like, if you have a special plan for how you're going to brand it and who you're going
to distribute it to like, does that count as part of your business idea?
Because if that does count as part of your idea, then your idea is clearly extremely
important.
And it's the difference between being, you know, a footnote in a magazine and being the
next Airbnb.
But if you're only talking about the product, then you know, there's a lot of other parts
of your business that matter a lot.
The way that I would define a business idea is that it's all inclusive, it's all of these
things.
And it makes it slightly different than just a product idea.
So I do think if you're talking about a product idea, like that doesn't matter that much.
Because there's so many other things to worry about.
But I think if you're talking about a business idea, which is like, all this research that
you didn't do upfront, but like in hindsight, you know, you kind of wish you did and in
the future you will, I think that matters an incredible amount.
If you do the research to figure out what market you're targeting, how fast that market
is growing, how you can you reach these people, like, will they switch?
How much will they pay, etc?
Like, if that's all part of your idea, then I think that is honestly the difference between
starting, you know, like a mom and pop pizza chop, where it doesn't matter how well you
execute, like, you're just never gonna grow that big, you know, and starting out on something
like V where you're in a year, you go from ramen profitable to 3 million in revenue.
You don't have to have all the cards in your hand at the start there, you can kind of like
pick them up on the way.
Because I remember learning about acquisition channels like marketing something that I never
did before.
And I remember just like crash coursing it, like massive, like just reading as much as
I could consume as much as I could try on as many ideas as I could.
And okay, we've got that, we've got that under our belt.
What's the next thing that we would need to learn, right?
So that's the execution, they're like the relentless, you started, you had your idea,
but now you got to execute.
And that might mean changing directions, learning new things, and like, obviously, it's a huge
part of like why V has been successful.
So let's get into that.
I want to actually spend a decent amount of this episode just like going through some
of these channels you've succeeded on.
Are you familiar with the term called the Lollapalooza effect?
You ever heard of that?
So it comes from Charlie Munger, I've talked about him on the show a few times before he's
Warren Buffett's business partner, one of the most inspiring people in my life since
I was about 20, he just kind of attribute this guy with like teaching me how to be a
systems thinker.
And he's like 97 years old, he's still investing, he was on a podcast a couple months ago, like
that guy's just gonna keep going till he dies.
But I think one of his biggest contributions is really nothing to do with his investing,
it's just to do with like how he thinks through things.
These ideas called mental models, one of them is called the Lollapalooza effect.
So the idea is that we're all like simplifying machines, like we want to take the complex
world and make it as simple as possible because otherwise it's really hard to understand.
And so we like when we see something happen, we just kind of want to find like one explanation
like oh here's why Saba was successful, like he just got lucky and then you know we walk
away satisfied that we understand it or you know here's why this thing works.
But the Lollapalooza effect is basically like no, generally things have multiple causes
and whenever you see something that is like an outlier, whenever you see something extreme,
it almost certainly got that way because there's multiple forces that are all pushing in the
same direction and adding together.
And so if you want to analyze extreme results, you should try to figure out what forces are
pushing together.
So a good example would be, I think he talks a lot about like auctions, you know, you got
a guy on stage on out prices selling goods that end up going for people who buy a piece
of art for like $100 million, you know, and it's like, why did you spend that much on
this art?
And it's like when you got like three or four factors pushing in the same direction, you've
got social proof where you're surrounded by other people who are also buying at the same
time as you and it makes you kind of feel like accepted and like this is the right thing
to do and you've got like this commitment principle where like, you know, if you say
a number, you kind of verbally committed to everybody that you want to buy this thing
and then like if someone bids higher than you, you kind of want to stick with the image
you put out that like you want this thing.
You got loss aversion where like people tend to care more about not losing kind of FOMO
like missing out on things and then winning things actually and so like someone outbid
you like you don't want to lose and so you bid back and you got like this and a bunch
of other factors pushing in the same direction and like next thing you know, you've spent
like 50 million dollars on like a painting and VEDA is the same way like your total outlier
you have gone from 100k a year to 3 million a year and you know, the last 12 months or
something and it's probably not just one reason for that, it's probably more than one reason
for that and so I'm going to guess that like you have a lot of different marketing channels
that are working really well for you and it's not just all coming from word of mouth.
It's not just all coming from SEO like there might be one or two that stand out but like
probably a lot of them are pushing in the same direction.
So what's your take?
Do you think that's that's accurate?
That's extremely accurate, yeah 100%.
There's so many things.
I mean, the global pandemic as well has definitely contributed towards growth.
I mean, not loads but like it's another little thing that's pushed us, right?
I mean, I remember speaking with one user who was a personal trainer from Ireland telling
me that now he can't, you know, work out in the gym and work with his clients, he would
just make videos, right?
And obviously there's loads of people doing that using our platform.
Yeah, YouTube has been a really big channel for us.
We make Alec has been making a YouTube video every single day since he started about nine
months ago.
And I mean, I think our videos get like 40,000 views every 48 hours.
So you know, that's a lot of people, that's a lot of articles on video and it's growing
incredibly well as well.
So okay, so let's talk about these like one at a time.
So YouTube, Alec, I presume that's someone that you hired nine months ago.
Yeah, yeah.
And what were your what was your thought?
Like, how did you how did you decide we should hire someone to do YouTube for us?
Like, what was your thinking about how that was going to work and what this person would
do that search search in general was just a really good channel for us.
And YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.
And the great thing about YouTube as well being the second biggest search and it's not
just like, oh, you click a link and you go to the product.
It's like you the video is like a vehicle for you to explain how to use the product
as well as market the product.
So it's like education as well as marketing, which is incredibly powerful.
We were so, so lucky to find Alec.
The story goes he was looking for a job in social media and he googled social media job
London and we were the first link on Google jobs.
He clicks it.
He clicks apply and he's already got a YouTube channel talking about social media, which
was incredibly impressive.
And I remember interviewing him and like this is early days like non-professional interview.
I was like, so if you want a job, just like, you know, let me know.
Like it was like super casual and he was like, yeah, I'm actually looking for a job.
And he was like, all right, should we work together?
And he was like, yeah, yeah, okay.
That was pretty much it.
And then he came in one day and made a video and then made another one.
And that's pretty much how it went.
And what was your strategy?
Like, Hey, you do whatever you want.
We trust you.
Or were you like, here's the playbook we think is going to work on YouTube and also ultimately
like what has ended up working because I'm checking out YouTube right now.
You're at 13,000 subscribers.
You've got a ridiculous number of videos.
What's going on here?
It's similar to how investors work, right, you put 10 bets in on 10 companies and one
of them is going to work really well.
So it's the same with YouTube videos.
We think we don't know.
And what we try and do is answer the internet's questions, basically.
So when I was working in video editing, if I wanted to do something, like if I wanted
to make an audio wave on in After Effects, I'd put After Effects audio wave generation
and I'd watch the video, right?
And maybe there'd be a plugin that I'd have to get or something like that.
So it was just from past experience.
And so I was like, Alex, turn, you know, take, take some of the things that you can do, Aveda,
you know, write them out as questions and show people how to do them.
He was like, all right, sweet.
Yeah, let's get on with it.
And then, you know, the varying degrees of success on each of the videos, like we're
kind of working out what works for the algorithms.
We're trying to work out what works for the users.
We worked out that if we, we say like, oh, how to subtype to the video and iMovie, right?
And then we show them how to do an iMovie.
But at the start of the video, Alex, like there's the quick way or the fast way.
Let me show you the iMovie slow way first, and then we'll show you the fast way with
Aveda.
So, yeah, so we've worked out how to like lean on other, you know, other tools.
And like we had a lot of people like asking about Zoom videos.
I think the Zoom, you know, user doesn't really know that much about video editing.
So we'd get a lot of questions like, can, can I, can I edit a Zoom video with you guys
or is it just social media videos, but like, no, no, no, all videos.
So Alex made a video like how to subtitle or how to edit a Zoom video.
And then that, you know, in the first six months got 100,000 views because it's really
topical.
Right.
Google Analytics around Christmas.
I saw a massive spike in how to make Christmas videos right on our website.
So also taking current topics, things that people are talking about and like, you know,
addressing that is really helpful to catch, you know, catch waves and ride them.
Okay.
So that's YouTube.
One part of your growth.
Let's talk about hiring.
How many people work at V today?
I'm not too sure.
The reason I'm not too sure is because there's a few friends in the Slack as well.
So I think we've got about this.
Yeah.
So, and like, we don't, if people leave, they stay in the Slack as well.
So we can still chat to them because we like them.
But I think there's about 35 of us, uh, about 25 people are on like product marketing, development
design sort of stuff.
I would imagine you do not have 35 people a year ago.
So obviously you're hiring a lot.
How does that contribute to your growth and what's your strategy for hiring?
I mean, like I hire like founders, basically that's, that was the original strategy.
So Diana, for example, who does our social, she was a freelancer working in social media
and had her own agency.
So I knew hiring her would be great because she could do everything.
And so, you know, the first few hires like Alec, Diana, and they were very able to handle
everything which meant there was no management needed.
They, they could just get on with it and I trust that they do a really, really good
job and both of them have done exceptionally well.
This kind of comes back to like us not expecting to get to where we were, right?
We weren't like, Oh, we need organizational structure and all of this stuff, you know?
But the problem that we have now hit a problem, you know, when it comes to like engineering,
especially, it was just like, let's add one more engineer to help us.
And then like, we get to the point where we've got 10 engineers, which is like, this doesn't
work anymore.
Like we need to kind of structure that and maybe get a product manager in.
So I'm trying to learn actually Cottland how to do this myself.
And I don't know any of the answers.
It's one of those like double edged swords where like, obviously, if you have more people
on the door, like you can do more things.
It's a reason why the biggest companies in the world have like 100,000 employees.
But at the same time, it's kind of chaos, right?
If you don't hire carefully, you've hired the wrong people can be a huge distraction.
It's not particularly fun for someone like you who like code and design and do some hands
on stuff.
What are some of like the hidden costs of growing so quickly?
You know, are there are there risks to hiring that you've in downsides that you've sort
of encountered?
Yeah, I mean, massively, I don't do anything that I originally did.
There's no coding for me.
There's no design for me.
Yes, I have like, you know, conversations, I'm very much part of that world in the company,
which is great, but massive cost.
It's I mean, like right now, we're probably going through, I'd like to think like the
hardest part of my hiring journey in the company, which kind of is going to initiate a lot of
the key people in the organization.
That's what I'm doing right now.
And hopefully, after that, they will be responsible for hiring the next people.
But it just takes a long time, basically, to hire good people is expensive.
And it's retiring.
And it's not something that I particularly enjoy.
Have you made any mistakes?
And what do you think about the advice to, you know, hire slow, fire fast?
Yeah, I mean, we in the in the early days, we I mean, we found Vilko, who was like our
second engineer on a Discord chat, and he joined like two days later.
And it was like, you know, super, super lucky.
So we made a lot of like, we were basically we got super lucky in the early days.
To find Mattie and Vilko.
And yet now we take a lot longer to hire and we do fire relatively fast as well if it doesn't
work out.
But we also don't like firing people.
So it means we're super diligent on that initial process.
Hiring people is literally the hot like the worst thing in the world.
And all it is is exactly it's basically just demonstrating that you're doing your job wrong.
So if I'm if I'm firing someone a week after they started, it means that I just haven't
done the due diligence I have, I've like persuaded myself that they're a great fit when that
actually they're probably not or you know what I mean?
So like, yeah, yeah, I hold myself accountable for that.
What do you think is the best thing like, let's say someone hasn't gone through this
year of hiring and learning these lessons hard, like, what would you tell a new founder
who really doesn't want to have to fire anyone and doesn't want to have to put themselves
in the position?
Like, how do they prevent that and actually hire well?
Okay, so two things.
One is I've learned a lot about this stuff recently.
So one is like, do the due diligence, right?
So like, if it's an engineer, there's like multiple interviews with coding tests and
stuff like that.
If it's a product manager, there might be a take home.
If there's a design, we do like an interactive thing with Miro.
The other thing that I've learned is job boards don't work that well at all.
You know, I think job boards are really good for jobs that lots of people apply for.
But when you're looking for a very specific talent, especially at the early stages of
a company growing, then it's probably better to find them yourself, working at another
company and be like, you work at that company, you do this kind of stuff, like maybe there's
something we could do here, you know, and the biggest time save that I've, I've was
a bit against recruiters at the start, I was like, no, I want to find them myself, I want
to save the money.
But now it's just like, oh my God, I speak to a recruiter, they put 10 TVs in front of
me, and they're all really good.
And they're all ready to go.
Right?
So like, that has literally saved weeks.
And that's for us now, it's just so worth worth paying for that.
Right?
So let's talk about side project marketing.
You familiar with this term?
I think it was created by Ali Meese.
It's funny, because it's like, I don't the term never really caught on.
I remember he wrote a blog post about it on indie hackers, like two or three years ago,
where you get people to your your app, by basically building little side projects that
build them in.
And like the term never took off, but like, looking at some of the things that you've
done to grow Veed, it seems like one of your primary acquisition channels, you build all
sorts of cool apps that like aren't Veed, they're not your video editor.
But it looks like they're bringing a lot of people into your video editor.
So so walk us through some of the things you've done there and why they work.
Okay, so we tried everything, literally everything, side projects, tooling, blogging, YouTube,
like we were throwing spaghetti at the wall massively.
Side project marketing in the early days was like, there's a few things that we do.
Like one is like, is this just a static site that can easily be thrown up?
And it's kind of interesting, we can get it on product hunt, and there's a bit more buzz,
a few more backlinks.
And then the way that we kind of think about it now, which is a bit more smart, it's just
like, what's a complimentary product that we can make for free that plugs into our application
that is like super nice.
So a good example is a screen recorder tool that we have, that gets between like three
to 5000 people using it every day.
And like, you know, what, what portion of those people recording that, you know, the
screen are going to want to now edit that video, you know, hopefully 10 20%.
So that's, you know, a good portion of people into the application.
It's super smart.
You're thinking like one level up the stack, all right, we have a video editor, what do
people do right before they need to edit a video?
Oh, one of them is they make screen recordings.
So let's make a screen recorder and then put like an edit button in there when they click
that edit button.
It'll take them to be it after they record their video, not enough people think this
way, but I think it's like a super creative and interesting and kind of fun way to get
people to your app because then you get to like, you know, if you're the sort of developer
type who always wants to build stuff, you get to justify building like a whole new really
simple app.
And you know, using that to grow rather than doing like pure marketing, you know, we're
just going to write blog posts, etc.
Yeah, it is way more fun.
The cool thing is there can be like certain amount of like virality or like network effects
baked into that.
So, you know, something we're asking ourselves now is like, okay, people record their screen.
And that, you know, we've got 2,000 to 5,000 people doing that a day.
What if we had like a share button and they could share it with someone else and that
person could then come, you know, and then, okay, so 10% of those people share it and
10% of those users become video users as well.
So, you know, we're trying to think a lot about that.
The other side project marketing that's been quite interesting is, oh, that's a video compressor.
So we emailed another video compressor site and said, why do people use this?
And they said, oh, they're just getting compressing their videos to using video editing software.
And we're like, okay, so we were just like, okay, video compressor, let's get that up.
And then, yeah, once your videos compress, just click edit and you're in the editor,
you know.
So, yeah, we think a lot about that.
So let's go.
Let's go rapid fire through some of these because I got like a long list of things.
We've talked about YouTube, we've talked about hiring, we've talked about side project marketing.
What about Quora?
I've heard that you've done, you did some work on Quora in the early days.
It's a big Q&A site.
Is that true?
And how did that help you grow?
Yeah, exactly.
So Quora, what, I mean, again, I say was because I'm not sure if these things are still true.
Again, like, you know, we would like search for things that we wanted to come up for,
right?
So like, how do I add text to video, right?
And then I'd put like Quora and then I'd get the first link on Quora and then I'd just
write a really good response to it.
And when we were doing this like three years ago, Quora was pretty chill.
So you could just basically spam Quora and just like write 20, 30, 40 answers a day.
And now it's just the numbers game, right?
It's just like, okay, well, those 10 answers generate 20 clicks.
Let's just do this every day.
And all of a sudden, you know, 10 days that you've got 200 clicks a day coming from Quora.
And in the early days, it is like you just want to stack one click on top of another
click on top of another click every day.
And you just want to make that marginal improvement of getting more people to your site.
So that, that was pretty much what we're doing.
And when I get banned from Quora or told to chill out for 48 hours, I go to Reddit, right?
And just start doing it there instead.
So yeah, we were just relentless, absolutely relentless.
Did you use Reddit?
Yeah, of course we use Reddit.
I'm banned from like most of the subreddits on there.
Because like, you know, too much self promotion.
Yeah.
Was it worth it?
Do you think it like, oh yeah, a hundred percent worth it.
Yeah.
So we try and find different ways to share content as well with, it's not that exciting
posting a link, which is just like how to add text to a video.
Like very few people are going to click on it.
So like, what interesting content can we make that people will click on that, you know,
gets that initial flow of traffic.
I feel a little bit like Google is a bit like a stream, right?
And you know, you want to start just getting things flowing down the stream.
And then after a while, like a bit more of the bank breaks off and then the river starts
coming through really, really fast, you know.
So just whatever you can to just get something going, people, eyeballs on the page, you know.
Yeah.
SEO is kind of the elephant in the room because I would guess this is where the majority of
your traffic comes from.
I'm not sure if that's true, but also even some of the things you're doing, like your
side projects, like probably benefit a lot from SEO.
Somebody's like, Oh, how do I record, you know, a video with my webcam and they get
your webcam recorder?
Like that is side project marketing.
Yeah.
But it's also through search and optimization.
So how much of a role does SEO play and feeds growth and how have you kind of thought about
it over time?
You know, the way that a company like Buzzfeed will grow is to going to be completely different
to how we grow.
And maybe a social media app is going to grow through referrals and invites like clubhouses
right now, but it's not going to grow through SEO.
So I think understanding what the primary acquisition channels that work in the industry
that you're in is like super, super important.
So you can go to a website like SimilarWeb and put in, you know, a tool like Canva and
you can see that probably about 60% of their traffic's coming from SEO.
So that's a really good indicator to us that that's where we should be putting our, putting
our time and energy.
So that's the way, and again, like, you know, I might sound like I've got my shit together,
but at the start, I didn't know any of this, right?
So you know, we were plodding through trying to work it out, but yeah, SEO super, yeah,
super powerful for us.
And because it, you know, when it starts, when something starts working, you pull more
resource into it and see if you can continue to scale it, right?
SEO I think is one of the hardest things for people to get into because number one, it's
extremely competitive.
You might try getting into it and just like give up because nothing's working at first.
And then number two, even if you're doing it right, like you're, you know, you're building
all these pages, you're getting, you know, you're targeting the right keywords, it might
take like three, six, 12 months to like see results.
So the feedback loop is super slow and like, to some degree, you kind of have to have faith
that it's working and keep going, whereas, you know, like if you put a link on Hacker
News, you get the traffic immediately, it kind of feels good.
How did you sort of decide to stick with SEO for so long?
How long did it take it to start working for you?
And what were some of the first things you tried?
The way that I like to think about like idea generation in general is not make something
people want.
It's like make something people search for, right?
And I think that's massively key, right?
And you know, you talk about competition, SEO being really tough.
And like, yes, if you're like trying to market a marketing product or an SEO course, then
that might be quite tough to go after.
But you can also go for long tail keywords and what I mean by that is like SEO courses
for butchers.
I mean, that's completely random, but yeah, and you know, just even from like recent exploration
that I've done, it's like, you know, 33,000 people a month for searching for video hosting
and that's a lot of people looking for video hosting and we know that video hosting is
a proven market and people are willing to pay for it.
Yet the domain difficulty for ranking for that is actually relatively low.
It's like 33.
So that's an obtainable search term to go after, I would say, right?
Even for an indie hacker.
That's the first part, which is make something people search for.
The second part, when it comes to, you know, how long it takes, you said, you know, ranking
can take three, six, 12 months.
The good news is that's probably how long it takes you to build your product to a point
that people want to use it, right?
So if I was to start again, you know, the SEO stuff goes up at the same time that the
product goes up and give it time.
I think it took us a good eight months for SEO to start kicking in and we didn't see
the full fruits of it for probably a year, maybe longer.
And a good friend of mine, he makes a really cool tool called Tiny Host.
I remember having a chat with him about eight, nine months ago and I was like, dude, just
make like five landing pages and like, here, grab my Ahrefs account and just try and find
some keywords.
So eight months later, he's now like adding four paid users to his platform every single
day.
And he's just, it's taken eight months, but he's just like, I get it now.
I get it.
And I'm like, yeah, you do.
Yeah, you do.
So what am I not asking you about?
We've been through a few channels.
I got like 10 more here.
We don't have time to go through all of them.
What would somebody, you know, who's on the outside looking in, doesn't really understand
what you've been through, you know, not even know to ask about what's been crucial for
your success and finding more people for Veed.
I've dodged the question about the most, the big fuck up that I've had.
But I might just leave that one there.
The things that you've missed is luck being at the right place at the right time.
This is not hard work.
This I mean, there's a massive portion of hard work in here, but it's not all hard work
at all.
And as you said, like with the theory, it's just, it's not one thing, right?
It's not like, oh, we made this like referral code.
And then every side, everyone just started sharing it and they'd get like free Dropbox
credits and stuff like that.
It wasn't that it's just like multiple things all pushing us in the right direction.
So yeah, I completely resonate with that.
So I'm not going to let you get out of this, this Twitter guys question for all the people
out there who are feeling bad that you're making so much money so quickly, even though
it's not easy.
What is like the most embarrassing thing, the dumbest mistakes, the dumbest mistakes
that you've made in the process of running Veed?
God, I don't know if I'm going to say this, but I might say it.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going to say it.
So, uh, so if you, so we, oh no, I can't say it and I can't say it, no, I can't say
it.
It's like a dumbest thing.
The reason why, yeah.
The reason why I won't say it is because there might be legal implications.
So I don't want to get you arrested or fined.
Yeah.
I mean, the other thing is like, we ran out of money.
That's like a pretty big deal and like, I might've brushed over it, but that was like
really pretty hard on us and pretty depressing as well.
Like we were so close to giving up at that point.
So that was super hard, but there's the one big one.
Okay.
So maybe, maybe if you want to know the one big one, someone could like message me like,
what was that really big one?
I need to feel better about myself.
Like, you know, it'd be funny if you said it, I'll bleep it out in the podcast episode.
So no one will hear it.
It'll just make for some funny audio.
I think.
Should I say it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll bleep it out.
Okay.
So we had one point.
Yeah.
Oh no.
Yeah.
That's it sucks.
Yeah.
Really.
That was like super early.
It was like before we even charged products as well.
Like it was like before there was even signup balls or anything like, yeah.
Were you mortified?
I literally thought the world was going to be over like, I was like, I was like, they're
going to come.
The police are just going to come take me away.
I remember calling up a lawyer of, I'm going to stop talking.
All right.
If someone wants to know, to know about this, I can message you Sava.
You've been a great guest.
Thanks a ton for coming on the podcast.
I got to ask you the traditional ending and the hacker question here.
And then a positive note, you've been through a lot, obviously you've had this rocket ship
growth.
You've been at rock bottom.
You've run out of money.
You've been rejected by investors.
What are one takeaway that you think other founders out there, whether they're just getting
started or whether they're very experienced should take away from, from what you've learned.
Invest in SEO, probably if you're a tools company and don't give up, keep pushing and
make something people search for.
All right.
Make something people search for.
Can you tell people, and where can people go to find out more about like what's going
on at V behind the scenes?
You could, I'm on Twitter, S A B eight a, our site is V.io.
Yeah.
You can email me at S at V.io as well.
And if you're, if you want to join the team at Veid, feel free to reach out and we'd love
to have a chat for you.
All right.
Thanks again, Saba.
Cheers.
All right, thanks again, Saba, thanks again, Saba, thanks again, Saba, thanks again, Saba.