Growing Veed.io from $0 to $5 million ARR in 2 years with Sabba Keynejad

0:00the journey of veed started just two years ago so two years ago i was not standing on stages i wasn't talking about my company um i was completely broke i had no money uh my company wasn't working so two years later to be standing here presenting with a title five million ar in two years is quite like i don't know not emotional but you know what i mean um so first of all i'd like to start with a warning um i've been incredibly fortunate to be in this position i'm not smarter than anyone else in this room i'm a terrible developer pretty bad designer too um and i think i don't think i could

0:36replicate the success again um to this level anyway so um yeah just a bit of caution there and then also the second thing is this is not an overnight success this is an overnight success ten years in the making so it took a while to kind of get to this stage where we've been at so to to tell you the story i'm gonna go all the way back to when i left university i got my first job and it was in a design studio in london and you went to celebrate your first job and i was really happy when i got it because it was like apparently really hard to

1:04get break into the design industry um and so i was really happy but then quite quickly i got this allergic reaction to actually working full-time i was like i was like looking around the room and i couldn't believe that people sat at desks from nine to five every single day it was very very strange um i also looked around the room and i wasn't like i don't know i used to have this like super super power like creative energy i used to be able to work until like midnight every night and i was so into the projects that i was doing however at this job it just kind of disappeared i

1:35had no energy and i found it really really sad and i thought i had so much more to give the other thing that i did was when i was there is i was kind of looking around the room saying who do i want to be um i suppose when i grow up and you know what i did was i looked at the creative directors in these creative agencies and that's like you know the top the head honcho of where i could get in in my career and they were making about a hundred thousand pounds a year so over ten years and you have to get to

2:02that level right so over ten years on a hundred thousand salary you'd be making a million which sounds great right but then once you factor in taxes living expenses you're not actually left with that much money at the end of the day um and if you live somewhere like i do in london property is incredibly expensive you can't you literally can't do anything with that kind of cash right of course you can get a deposit but i i didn't i didn't i didn't it didn't make sense to me um but starting feed wasn't about actually the money it was about creative freedom and having that energy that i was kind

2:32of missing when i had this job um i had some early successes as an entrepreneur um of varying degrees the first thing that i did when i was about 16 um was start this little business selling red cups and the company's called worldwide cups and what happened was i um had a 16th birthday party coming up i saw it in this american film and i was like it'd be really cool to have these red cups at my birthday party however i couldn't find them um in the uk so i ended up getting on the phone 16 year old sabha contacting solo europe the guys who make the cups and

3:04they shipped me a box um which is really nice to them i took out 20 cups i did my birthday party and then i had about 400 cups left over so then i took them out and i started selling on ebay and that was going quite nicely i was making a bit of cash so then i put up a website called realredcaps.com uk and people started buying crates from me and i didn't even know what drop shipping was um and i was technically drop shipping so you know 16 17 18 i was making 5 600 pounds a month and i was pretty happy with that it fizzled out

3:31when i got to university though the next kind of business that i started was a breaking bad halloween costume business i love breaking bad um and i there was so much hype around like the final episode what was going to happen to jesse pinkman and walter white and me and my flatmate had this you know we thought like wouldn't it be cool to dress up um in hazmat suits for halloween that year and then we thought hang on why don't we actually just start selling them online so we found yo hazmat suits from like a chemical grade dealer we found these blue gloves and these gas masks and the

4:06smart thing that we did was we found all of this stuff on next day delivery and we sold them on five day lead times so we never actually had any stock we literally just got the order got stock put it in a bag sent it off we even started making our own crystal meth out of sugar as well to start you know beating the competition and add some value we made 14 grand in a week um that was pretty cool and i was at university and then the final kind of thing that i did was i was making mobile games towards the end of university when i got my first job

4:37and i read that candy crush made a million pounds a day and i was like my brain couldn't comprehend that the size of that business so i was like i can make mobile games so i did and you know some of them did quite well some of them completely flopped um and you know at its height it was making about a thousand pounds a month um so i thought if i can take everything that i've previously done and you know actually went full time on doing something maybe i could you know start a little company and you know be pretty cool um so i thought you know what let's go

5:08work at some startups gain some experience learn a bit more and also build some side projects at the same time however what ended up happening was i became incredibly unfocused i was doing making vr projects for some reason um out doing arduino stuff as well and blowing up pretty much every motor that i got um expensive hobby music i was creating music doing side projects dev work design installation creating youtube videos it was like i was literally all over the place and nothing ever really got done that well and i wasn't getting any closer to my goal of having my own little company startup whatever so on the train back to see my mum for

5:48christmas in 2016 i cracked over my laptop i opened my notepad and i wrote this message myself which i'm actually kind of proud of um and i'll read it to you now so this is end of 2016. 2017 how can i combine creativity and entrepreneurship what can i do really well and what do i want to spend my time doing how can i spend more of my time doing what i love making music videos dev design and film got a lot of passions so plan um work less charge more that's quite a good plan uh put more effort into less projects focus more on fewer projects and make

6:27them the best they can be and i don't know if it's you guys have ever felt like this but i think a lot of people kind of fall into this trap just kind of doing a lot of different stuff maybe got two or three projects going and none of them can ever really develop significantly around that time one of my hobbies was creating youtube videos and um and i found i mean i went to an art school i was kind of working commercially in the creative field i was editing videos and my own youtube videos i'm a relatively technical person however that confuses me quite a lot

7:00right um and and then you know but you know i can get it done however um i was then working a contract job at a marketing agency doing video editing and um i was asked to add text to a video all day long literally video after video and i was like this is a waste of my time this is boring i was getting paid well for it though and um and the the guys that kind of hired me were more than creatively able to do it however didn't have the skills didn't have the right mark et cetera et cetera so i thought and this wasn't a penny drop

7:31moment by the way this was like something interesting there and i think that's something that i could you know enjoy so what we did next was i designed this this is the first ever design of these um and it looks pretty bad i should have went to the design workshop a couple of years ago but anyway and the functionality was super simple right it was i got a laser i think oh yeah um so we have a storyboard so you can combine videos together you can add text and images and that was simply it um really really basic stuff so what happened next was i put all the

8:07money that i had so when friends of mine were you know buying the first house i put all the money that i had together so did my co-founder tim and we started and also bitcoin in 2017 before the boom but whatever um [ __ ] um and we started building right and like you know i don't know it felt kind of cool you know i got a little startup kind of thing going um and and yeah and then like not long after that we hired a couple of junior devs who just left university i started doing pitch competitions and we were winning and things felt like it was kind of

8:42going well until it didn't and basically we ran out of money um the office that we were in was kind of given to us for free by a vc and they kicked us out funds were so so low so i thought i would maybe try and raise some cash from investors because they back phenomenal entrepreneurs right so i got rejection after rejection after rejection and it like it's quite hard to articulate how [ __ ] it felt right i was so so upset and i remember and i remember leaning against this wall i think i kicked like this for a bit and i hit my head against or something weird

9:26like that just to remember how painful this experience was um and that kind of sticks with me a bit and so what happened now was my co-founder tim um he got a contract job because we literally had zero and he started giving me half of his salary every month so kudos to tim for being such an incredible co-founder at that that point and he's turning up mornings working evenings and weekends i'm doing the full day and you know over the next month we pretty much get to the point where we've got an mvp out and you can see how basic videos there look like eddie which is

9:58probably nothing trim we were literally adding buttons that did nothing just to make it look more like a product crop rotate render like very very very basic and launch it on product time and spam the link around a few places and traffic starts coming in which is kind of cool but i was like i was pretty exhausted tim was exhausted like it really really strained relationships that i had um i wasn't able to go to friend's birthday party like it was bad anyway so i got a contract job too and it was quite nice to get paid again and what we then so what we started doing um

10:36was we started taking our salaries we hired two devs um again juniors so they would be working on the product for us me tim are doing mornings evenings and weekends still and over the space of um about eight months at this job this started happening we're like ah sick uh traffic starts going up that's a really good sign um but it still it's not clear that we've actually got something here at all right it's just like well that's quite a good sign and so we quit our jobs again we apply for um the very prestigious y combinator and um to our maze we get a final

11:12interview so me and tim jump on a flight we go to san francisco we lay next to the sign and um and and then so we're going to the y company's interview um and in this interview we're like you know we're riding the questions for 10 minutes and afterwards were like yeah you know kind of did it right you know like i think room for a good shot here you know like video editing is a cool big market and you know and so the way that it works with yc um is if you get in you get a phone call if you don't get in you get

11:41an email so we're sitting there we're waiting refreshing the emails checking the phones friend calls council friend calls accounts you know that sort of vibe and it finally came in boom we have been rejected and it was like such a gut punch it was like oh [ __ ] things you know um and and like we were pretty upset go to bed next day wake up having breakfast and we're like you know what let's look at this one more time at the in the end we didn't understand why you waited so long to start charging for the product well that's an easy fix so what me and tim for on the friday

12:16when you know when we're kind of waking up was like if we can get some paid users and revenue by the monday we can write why see an email and they'll reconsider and obviously take us in because like that's a pretty cool story right so that's exactly what we do we're like open the laptops off we go get payments in get accounts in it was like proper choppy um and to our amazement we go live stripes obviously in test mode still but finally um five dollars comes in yes um but that was pretty cool and over that weekend we actually managed to get 20 paid users admittedly two or three might

12:53have been friends but there was some real ones in there um but that was awesome like we had our first paid user like they're obviously going to take us in doubt like how can they not like this is incredible and then obviously you know we can't change our mind at this time this is such a boring automated response i thought they would be like oh cool guys like you've done well but like i'm sorry anyway so you know i just want to recap the amount of sand that we've ate over the last year and a half to this point okay burnt through all our savings not once

13:23twice um sold all our crit okay not saved a bit um failed to raise capital uh highest devs they both quit on the same day that was pretty pretty bad spent eight months contracting and like you know putting that revenue back and putting that money back into the company and then also getting rejected by yc you know we had a paid use at this point um and you know we started making a bit and money we started growing and things looked like it was going to go right and like we thought okay we need to get some ramen profitability at that point you can't kill us no more

13:57contracting no more years waiting we've got a bit of cash coming in with chill and our expectation at the time was like you know what if we could get to like two grand a month each we'd be so so happy and then this happened we're like whoa hang on a minute five thousand mrr in like what four months or something like that like this is crazy and i was looking at josh pigford's blog post on bear metrics about arr milestones and i was like pretty quick this is awesome users really started enjoying the product and when we started charging they then started being a lot more

14:27articulate about what they wanted in the product and what we needed to build so we were like okay this is cool so then we started building more of the features that the users were looking for and then i don't know like nine ten months in this happened was like wow that's pretty cool this is beyond my wildest expectations by the way like this was never this was not the plan but it was pretty cool obviously um and yeah and then like it was very clear like you know we're on the way to a million at this point that's that's awesome um and so i at the point of that yc

14:59rejection did nothing apart from growth nothing i didn't build any features i did no more design work the only thing what that i did was grow the product how did i grow the product i answered 160 questions on quora i created 30 youtube videos did 10 blog posts 20 landing pages joined every single facebook group there was i did 15 product launches on product hunt which you can no longer do because we probably messed that up for everyone else i'm sorry and i built a bunch of tools as well um okay i did bit of code and and that's how that's how we grew the products like that's that was the

15:34kickstart that's the thing that you know and then obviously 12 lamps it will not obviously 12 bumps in we hit a millionaire wow that was just so ridiculous uh at this time we had a team of 10. and what was interesting is again like do check out that bear metrics blog post on revenue milestones it's really really good the first million took four months sorry 12 months the second million took only four months later right so the team grows we're now a team of i don't know 50 60 something like that it's pretty exciting we know what levers to push and it just starts snowballing we're just

16:09doubling down exactly on what was working and it's just started taking off so we get to two million four months after that i think what three months after that it was three million it was absolutely ridiculous obviously the investors then decided to come back because we're such a great team as i said before um and you know we've been inundated with investors at this point um and and then so i i did a presentation to the company at 2 million error and i was like guys i know how to get to 10 and it was really simple double down like what we're doing is working and it's working

16:38phenomenally well we just need to get better at what we're doing we found an acquisition channel that works incredibly incredibly well we we were able to build the products that we wanted and deliver it to the user in a meaningful way we had the right team it felt like all the stars were aligning so i took this screenshot um just before i had to do the submission for the the the slides i think we're maybe tonight or tomorrow morning across half a million a month through current revenue which is ridiculous which is obviously six million aorr and there's also like no sign of it slowing down which is

17:10super super cool but i suppose you guys want to know exactly how you can build a company to five million are in two years and that's quite hard you know there's you know there's a lot of involvement there's a lot of luck there's a lot of hard work there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff so what i want to do is give you six really really actionable tips and observations i have from my own personal experience about how we managed to grow these to five minute arr in two years number one start niche but in a big market this is so so important if you are in a

17:42niche and when i say niche a niche that's not in a big market you're never going to be able to really really scale and start addressing the larger market that's there a really good example of this is adobe being valued at 2 sorry 300 billion huge huge company with a massive creative suite marketing automation loads loads of tools right but in there is video that's a good start vimeo is being worth valued at five billion which has a bunch of video tools veed at one million error could trim a one and one thousand mrr was just able to trim a video but it's quite easy to

18:17see how you can go from trim and start going up up up getting closer to vimeo and hopefully adobe one day i don't know um and and the number one that i just to drive this point home that i think is super interesting at the moment is like um in the meditation space there are a bunch of unicorn companies who have millions and millions in revenue right and then if you put that into a tool like ahrefs you can see there's a lot of people actually selling from morning searching for morning meditation so big market the meditation space the niche in it maybe it's morning meditation and

18:44then you scale when you go you know to the next niche which might be like sleep meditation etc etc number two every product has an acquisition channel and i think this is something we realized very very early on and being able to identify the acquisition channel for your company and the category of company that you are in is incredibly powerful because from day one you know where to go at the top here you see veed and this is our breakdown of how we get traffic this is public data you can see on a website like similar web below me is competitor a below that is competitor b they look

19:17very very similar don't they it's because the majority of search on all of these platforms um search is the is the main acquisition on all these platforms if you have a different product you might see that social is a really big driver um and you might also see that maybe direct mail or something like that so understand the acquisition channel for each product is great because then you can start replicating that yourself number three is my favorite but first

19:49number three is make something people search for y combinator famously coined the term make something people want but obvi that's kind of obvious right this is i feel like a lot more actionable if you make something people search for a few things happen one you identify that there's demand for the product and you can see exactly how many people are looking for that product the other thing is you've now identified a product that people want and you've also identified the way that you're going to get that product into the hands of the users search and here's a bunch of examples um that i decided to prepare for you guys

20:23so um you can see for example um chart maker right a hundred thousand people are looking to create charts every single month the cpc is four dollars which means that's what a competitor or whatever is is willing to pay to be the number one spot on google if you combine the traffic and the cpc you kind of get just a number but it's kind of nice to have another number next you can see how hard it is to rank for that this being 48 means you know i'm pretty sure you could do it in a couple of years um the next is the long tail so what's

20:56the long tail opportunity i think it's quite high for chart maker it's gantt chart maker bar chart maker graph chart maker again all of these search terms and and i've kind of scored how hard i think it would be to dev this another one which i think is incredible opportunity is sign pdf um there are multiple companies who are public or being acquired by dropbox that are just for signing pdfs docusign for one um there are a hundred thousand people also searching for that but you see the cpc is much higher so it's an incredibly profitable keyword to actually be ranking for and i say it's relatively

21:29easy to rank for it and the long tail is great sign pdf sign pdf max sign pdf online like it goes on and on um number four is don't be a dev um as i said i stopped all products like hands-on product development work myself a top part for product management at the point of that yc rejection because i wanted to grow the company as quickly as i physically could so i'm bringing this slide back what did i do i did 160 posts on quora 30 youtube videos there was like there was nothing that i was doing that didn't grow the product so if you're you know sitting there

22:07thinking i would like to grow my product and i want to get into the hands of more users and you're building another feature that user asks for you are doing it wrong you need to do this um and i know it's hard if you're a solo founder and it's quite nice to fall back just into that engineering mode and building that next feature but it doesn't grow your product as i said trim crop you could draw a video and add text that was it we grew to 30 40 thousand a month for users with just that and it was clunky number five it takes much much longer than you think

22:39if and that's cool by the way that's it's normal but like if you are if you've got enough runway to last you a year don't be upset if you get to the end of that year and you throw you know i'm done it's probably going to take two years so if you look at our kind of this is not unfortunately in scale because um that'd be way too hard but you know it took us a year from the mvp being live to get our first dollar and before this it was um about another year so two years to actually make a dollar right that's a long long time to wait and push

23:12for that and finally number six something that i think incredibly important and a reason why i'm standing here today and the reason why we've been successful is um i care quite a lot about the products i've built and i've done it with an incredible co-founder who as i said paid me half of his salary for a few months no questions asked when times are really really tough and that takes a certain type of co-founder um and also the the point about care what you work on me and tim previously made this made this product and it was in like the real estate market and like we literally built it we

23:46shipped it and i was like i have i do not care about real estate um and another another example is like say you're building like a legal tech platform like you also you're going to be associating yourselves and hanging out with people who are lawyers no offense to lawyers you know but i i personally don't find it interesting so build a product in a category that you actually like um sorry is that a lawyer over there no okay good um and as i yeah and just to drive that point home incredible co-founder tim has been incredibly supportive to me and i think we're a really really good team

24:16so that is all my size that's how we grew veg from zero to five million it's actually six million now uh arr in just over two years um and thank you so much to um the whole team here for putting on this amazing event and yeah it's been absolute pleasure thank you hey that that was amazing very inspiring i'm curious because you know this seems uh like anyway uh like you followed your intuition right and then you kind of grew your business of course with a lot of hard work and then one of the lessons that you shared is to like do this research and then figure out what people

24:55are searching for uh did you at some point can i like switch to that and like start making pivots to your landing pages yeah yeah i had no idea about any of this stuff it was only from being incredibly i was just like stalking like i was listening to every podcast that the head of growth of canva or this or that has ever been on i was looking at every marketing analytical tool i was listening to every single podcast that melanie from canberra was on and all the other competitors and i started seeing a bit of a trend and then as i saw seo was working for us i just went super super

25:27deep and i'd love to know how you got into yc hey sabah thanks for your talk and your amazing journey i think uh i the first time i read about you was when you were spamming hacker news with all your posts it was amazing to read along the way um i was wondering uh especially in the beginning as a bootstrapped company and two booster head founders you were doing a product which required quite some resources with all the video processing etc and especially in the beginning everything was free did you had any challenges funding that part and how did you plan on that so running veed from a technical standpoint

26:11as of today costs about thirty to forty thousand dollars a month back then we had a hundred thousand dollars in google credits and in fact no it was actually like two thousand and then we literally went to google's office and demanded to speak to someone who could up it and that actually worked he's a really nice guy actually um really nice guy the the part like we like our technical this was the edge of our technical experience um and expertise at the time so that was probably the hardest thing and that's why we had to bring people in quite early but because like honestly i think if

26:44you're a developer you could build that early version of veed in a in a couple of weeks if you if you really wanted to dave hey savage how's it going oh sorry a bit loud um just checked out your pricing it's really reasonable it's like sort of 18 and sort of 25 pounds and it maybe goes against the grain of some of the sort of raise your pricing type stuff also i'm guessing it's aimed at prosumers rather than b2b can you talk a little bit about that because you know what you're doing is working so okay so there are about 250 million searches for video creation editing

27:16related searches annually in the english language there's a lot of people there's multiple apps on the app store with over 100 billion downloads and they they can't quote any higher than that so the market is huge um we have about 1.5 million people coming to the site every single month at the moment and um so with that volume we can charge that price and it is quite i mean you know i think we could up the price but we don't you know we're kind of chill um yeah i mean everyone who stopped that price don't they let's be honest and also um dave has just launched his pr uh

27:51his his products today haven't you dave so dave's taking pre-sign ups today please find dave at the bar and uh he's he's got an email list and i've iphone will be signing up you're going to look great dave any yeah at what point did you go from like just more marketing and investing in seo to like the product needs to do more so like from trim and crop and yeah to like expanding towards adobe and the product was always being developed um the features took quite a long time because it was such an intensive product to build um but like my i was just grow grow grow

28:31i was like pretty aggressive on growth i would wake up and think about growth i'd go to bed and think about growth like you know obviously the products need to basically when you're making enough money to not worry so much about growth you can do product you know like it's that kind of relationship but so often i see founders and friends of mine who think that the next feature is going to be the one and a good example of this is a friend of mine was building his product like a year and a half and i was like oh what you can do about growth it was like oh don't you worry about

29:02that i've got this like viral mechanic in there and like it's gonna explode it's gonna be the next drop box and i was like really i wouldn't say that i was like oh cool dude um and um and of course it didn't work right and then there was no there was no backup though which was really upsetting um and the product struggled to get traction because again they're still really making those buttons pretty nice and the you know glossier blur is pretty good i've got to say it's a lovely looking product but it's not growing so have you done 160 core post 20 30 blog posts 30 youtube videos ask yourself

29:34that question uh part of the reason you saw the opportunity for veed was the complexity of the existing video tools is there anything you're doing to make sure that v doesn't itself become too complex or is that okay as you start to grow and move up market yeah i think that i just recently heard a really good podcast on this this very topic um so you know we're always in we're always trying okay so one thing that i did was super helpful in the early days is i any user that signed up for veed or paid feed could book call with me and instead of being like i'd love to learn about

30:06how you're using the product i was like if you want to book an onboarding call i'm more than happy to show you how the product works and i had a lot of face time with our users and they are not youtubers they're not young they're not hip those guys are using the you know the decent edit software like they're they're working in a marketing agency in their you know 40 in their 40s right and so i've got this image of the user in my head and i know that they're going to look at the product and what they need to see needs to just make sense you know

30:35so a lot of so we've ignored a lot of the sort of like generic design um principles that you might normally associate with video editing so that we can bend the rules a little bit to what we think is a more intuitive and native experience um and yeah i mean it just comes down to having great designers that we have on our team and great pms that are able to kind of like do that filtering for us now but early days it's quite hard to build a really featureful product in this space thanks for joining us i hope you got as much value out of that talk

31:02as i did and as a reminder that talk was from our 2021 microconf europe event tickets to our 2022 event have gone on sale and that is in malta in november and you can get all the details and buy your ticket at microconf.com europe i hope to see you there

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