It sucks to be rejected from anything, especially YC, but as a catalyst to push you forwards and move from 'interesting tech project' to 'actual business making money' it sounds like your interview was exactly what you needed. Well done.
The Veed founders are in London, and while about $2500/month each after tax isn't great money for a London dev it is definitely "low end junior dev" level wages.
I can’t understand some of the YC invested companies. They don’t seem to be billion dollar companies to me. For example, why is a form builder a billion dollar company?
Of course you are, "and then they all lived happily ever after, and by all I mean 7 billion people, and by happily I mean paying $10/month or clicking ads"
I don't believe that YC made that assumption when they accepted the form builder. There are many things that's in-browser video editing app can evolve to.
A "form builder" that obviates the need for lots of expensive web development would be huge for intranet and small business applications. It would blow away Sharepoint, for example.
Don't get me wrong it's a great company for the founder and maybe a small team, but there's no intent to grow it massively. The founder has even said so.
I remember reading the article when it got first published in June 2019, this is the same article but with an update at the end. YC W20 batch just got all their letters.
Good luck, I hope you guys succeed and keep grinding!
We think of it more as getting into NBA or Olympic Games or becoming a Navy Seal. It is tough to get in, tough throughout and will only harden you if you don't break along the way. Being part of community and other perks also are a nice-to-have.
Honestly it sounds a bit like one of those false-validation goals that makes a founder feel good about their company when other, more objective metrics aren't looking as nice.
Like writing a blog post vs. adding a desired feature.
Agreed. $150K is basically enough for you to move to the Bay Area (or pay rent) for 3 months + salaries + expenses, possibly hire some folks, while you're going through the program. The way I read it, it's bridge financing until Demo Day.
> even though we have a great growing company, it is possible YC does not think we will be a billion dollar company.
This is a very positive take away: Y combinator is not for the vast majority of startups (and that's ok). They are not destined to become billion dollar companies, yet they will still go on to provide huge value to a large number of people and turn a big profit - they should still exist, and may even be vital for many.
> “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
This is a fantastic story! A couple of takeaways here. The team took rejection VERY well. This is not as easy as you may think. This to me shows the founders believe in what they are doing and have a deeper goal than just making money. The ability to take the feedback and double down in just a few days is motivational.
Second, The power of positive response to negative situations. Lord knows how long it would have taken them to work on MRR if not for the rejection and they could easily have wasted time fiddling with copy and graphics, but the pressure for YC to re-evaluate them made them release ASAP and now they are already making revenue. At the end of the day, YC rejection allowed them to start generating proper revenue before they would have initially, to me that's a win, and they still get to keep the shares YC would have taken and now they have a higher valuation for whomever they apply to next for funding.
This is a great framing of a story that could easily be a sob story blog post. Keep it up, guys. You are bound for success.
Just wanted to echo this post. The start of the OP felt a little like the prospective founders were focused more on image than results, but by the end I was convinced.
My 2 cents would be to forget about YC as a source of seed capital and either get a loan or private angel investment to build a solid, revenue generating success.
Ya, if you already have good revenue and revenue growth, why do you need YC? I think YC may be overvaluing their contribution a bit.
If I take on all the risk, blood, sweat, and tears to get a product built and out the door and making money, I don't need your $150k. At least right now in this climate, you can raise much more than that from VCs that carry cachet similar to YC and will be good advisors as well.
> The ability to take the feedback and double down in just a few days is motivational.
Maybe. I took it slightly differently. They received negative feedback after a 10 minute pitch, and immediately dropped everything to change their product & strategy to appease a potential investor.
Was monetizing in this manner at this moment the right strategy for them? That's a pivotal decision to make and not one I'd throw together at 2 am to try impress a party with no skin in the game.
I think considering they've grown the MRR to $5000 from nothing since then, it looks like it was a pretty good strategy even if you don't like how it was concocted.
It is very rare that I upvote two comments that seem to be in opposition to each other. In this case, I think it's warranted because you're both likely correct.
In your favour, the strategy was successful and they grew to $5k MRR in four months with estimates suggesting they'll hit $100k in recurring annual revenue by the end of the year. It worked so it's hard to criticize it.
But, what if it hadn't, or what if the founders were in a different situation where they had a bigger team? Last minute "we have to do this now" decisions are often wrong. When they're not, they often result in some really ugly code that will be tough to maintain. Further, they can be hard on morale.
Chances are that the founders had this type of conversation and talked about the risks while they were brainstorming. It almost sounds like they had debated this in the past. Those kinds of debates are very valuable and I think that founders need to talk about how a new feature can go bad.
It can be pretty stressful working for people who pivot too easily.
Some investors may be attracted to this kind of behavior, and I fear they are also the least pleasant to work with. Things can get a little exploitative sometimes.
Their willingness to make the change may reflect the fact that deep down, they had been thinking that they should monetize, and having YC tell them to do it may just have been the kick in the ass they needed.
It's not like YC told them "put on a chicken suit and dance in front of our headquarters and we might consider you".
Monetizing and finding out whether there's anyone willing to actually pay for the product is a straightforward move. They weren't building a social network or something with a massive network effect. Putting off the terrifying discovery ("hey, will anyone pay for this?") in their case may just have been procrastination - and YC's rejection may have been a useful trigger to end it.
I started a company about 10 years ago. We are making money, but not lots. But that was never the point of the enterprise.
Me, and my co-founders, created the company for us to be able to work with great colleagues and to limit the work hours. Our employees, including ourselves, are not allowed to work more than 40h/week. We have parties and trips where we invite all of our friends and family etc. We make sure our employees have 80% of full salary for at least 9 months for parental leave. Work-life balance is core to our values.
Our employee turn-over is basically zero. And if someone leaves we go out to dinner to thank them, keep in touch and they are always welcome back to our events and parties (also to come back to work for us of course).
I understand the idea of going big with a start-up, make tons of money. But there are other goals one can pursue with a start-up that, at least to some, is just as fulfilling.
Great job! You still have control and ownership and might be better off in the long run.
This is such a breath of fresh air in the tech world. I dream of working for a people over profits org, where value is placed on your compassion and custodianship as a means of getting things done (and enjoying the journey there).
Then go work for a non-profit. There's a lot of e.g. human rights NGOs needing IT people and having a hard time finding them.
I was at a NGO for a while where we interviewed North Korean refugees about execution and burial sites and collected the information in a PostGIS db with QGIS as a frontend and working towards a custom UI plugin for the interview process, and it was very rewarding. Their operations also had a lot of unique security challenges to deal with.
I'm not sure if working for an NGO is necessarily better in terms of culture. It seems to me you can have good or bad culture and management either way, regardless whether the purpose of the organization is making profits or not.
From my interaction with people from NGOs, mostly from foreign aid organizations, there seemed to be as many people genuinely trying to make a difference as the ones that are only interested in their own agenda. I would like to think the smaller an organization the easer it is to maintain certain standards and not the other way around.
Getting talked into working late because your boss is persuasive and his bonus is on the line happens all the time here.
Working late because people are dying is a much better justification, but you will burn out just as fast. People who are too earnest about a cause have difficulty pacing themselves. Every org has people who burn the candle at both ends.
I think the values and work/life balance are really great, but it still has to come with a decent paycheck to be great, which NGO’s often seem to lack.
I have friends who have had awful experiences working for NGOs, and eventually ended up burning out.
It can be all the stress of working for a tech company, with 1/3 of the pay. The dynamic that often shows up is that higher-ups try to use employees' intrinsic motivation to guilt them into working longer hours and accepting low pay, "for the greater good".
There are good and bad NGO workplaces, just as there are good and bad private workplaces. But NGOs as a whole are no safe haven.
There's no magic bullet solution to finding a great life by just applying for a job in the right sector. Non profits are not necessarily healthier places to work.
The world as a whole is still trying to work out how to be productive enough to provide for everyone, fairly or reasonably divide up the pie and achieve the vaunted work-life balance.
That's a relatively new concept. In the past, a lot of people were literally slaves or metaphorically "wage slaves." A standard expectation was that the man of the house was the primary breadwinner and he had a wife handling all the quality of life work -- cooking, cleaning, shopping -- so he could put most of his time and energy into the job. In exchange, he got enough income and benefits to support a family.
We are gradually transitioning to a two income couple model in part because people are living longer and having fewer kids. It no longer makes sense to sequester female labor and limit it to women's work. It doesn't make sense for her life, for her marriage or for society.
I've seen plenty of toxic non-profits that will happily burn you out while paying far below market rate. Bonus: total disillusionment with the mission that excited you in the first place.
Not saying there aren't great NGO roles, but the company being an NGO isn't a good signal that it is a great role.
These responses are common on here, and in my opinion, unhelpful. A conventional Vc funded businesses is supposed to either get big or fail. That is the model. Everyone working on them and everyone investing in them gets that. Advocating for someone to do something completely different by starting a low-growth business is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation.
I’m not so sure. I sometimes meet startups, at meet-ups or conferences. Many that I have spoken to seem to just run their startup according to some kind of start-up template. There is an expected trajectory, just as you said. Maybe that doesn’t apply as much here at HN as many have read stories like this plenty before, like you said.
But, I bet many don’t even consider that there are completely different goals one can pursue with a startup.
Don't understand why you got downvoted, because what you're saying is indeed the conventional wisdom : you can't get big without getting big fast , with a lot of VC infused money, and work insane hours.
I think the next (current ?) generation is going to question that : values like "durability" and "long term vision" starts to get fashionable again.
The old industries were based on "family businesses" where you would take extreme care before letting someone new have shares of the company, where growing was measured in terms of generations, based on reputation and quality of work, and sustainability. And that gave giants, which lasted for generations.
I think it's getting clearer and clearer that there are alternatives to "pump and IPO" models, and that they may even be preferable for everybody (founders, employees and customers) except VCs who needs quick cash rotation.
Note: maybe what you meant is just "we're talking about VC funded companies, not other types". Still, i think VC will need to take new aspirations into account when looking for next gen companies to fund.
> Still, i think VC will need to take new aspirations into account when looking for next gen companies to fund.
they don’t. it’s not their model. get big or fail is inherent to their model and is what their fund investors want. for long term steady value or other (valid) models the VC customers (LPs) can just invest in index funds.
The entire point of the VC is risk/reward. remove the reward and why would you take on the risk?
I actually think it's important to share that there are other ways.
We tend to follow patterns and being reminded that there is value in alternatives is precious.
I'm sure many founders think the vc funded startup is the only way to create a cool company as their parents thought that a steady office job was the only way to live a comfortable life.
As it turns out the juicy parts of life are where it's less crowded.
I'm convinced it's possible to create a company that looks and feels like yours and still makes it big. The idea that you can only grow quickly when everybody's being pushed into a burnout feels hopelessly outdated to me.
(and I'm putting my money where my mouth is: here at TalkJS.com we're VC funded and on a steep growth curve, and we also have sane working hours and good benefits etc etc)
Sure, if you have plenty of money flowing in (whether it’s VC funds or paying customers) it’s relatively easy to provide good working conditions and benefits. Is it sustainable though? Investors will push for an exit, and once you get bought it’s out of your control. If the buyer is a publicly traded company, its shareholders will mostly care about short-term profits rather than the conditions you provide for your workers.
The shenanigans and culture drift happen once you need a layer of “middle management”. Their goals are often focused on their own careers rather than the success of the company as a whole.
I agree, but I would expect to that growing fast usually means bringing in lots of people over a short amount of time. I’ve never done something like that, but I imagine keeping the culture of the company might be challenging.
Its very, very, VERY hard to keep such a company culture when you grow company big time.
You would effectively have to have people dedicated simply to this task, with massive managerial powers checking all management decisions and keep reminding all folks to stick to them (I can't imagine any other way). Its not only about things on paper like benefits and working hours, but overall company culture, agility to change and corner cases. If you manage that, kudos to you, but you are rather an exception.
I've seen it first hand - an amazing, startup-like company, growing super fast, and culture suffered.
I’ve worked at a few places where we pushed an agenda of always getting better at our jobs, so that doing things like we’ve done before gets cheaper, and things we couldn’t do before become feasible.
It’s great for some things, but it also gives the devs more time (and moral authority) to think about the flaws in other parts of the organization. It seemed like there was just as much complaining and stressing about things, it was just different things.
I suspect this is why the “good enough” culture of thick-skinned, slightly masochistic people who put up with the same busy work is the de facto standard.
Part of what drew me to software was that you “figure out” how something works, you write a bit of software to manage that task, and move on to the next problem. I amazes me how many people who are capable of automating simple tasks are content to simply repeat them instead.
This is what I aspire to. Thanks for showing this is possible!
It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially after reading "A company of one". That it's possible to make a good living with friends and not be the next X or Y hypergrowth company.
For some context, I am currently working for one of the hottest startups in the world (not hyperbole, we have the metrics to back it up), and I have been here long enough to remember when we could all fit in a small room.
The first 2 years were a dream, this last year has been pretty terrible, and coincidently, is when we started our crazy rapid growth.
It went from a place where you felt like you were working with your friends, and could have great conversations/humour and learn, to politics, arguments, poorly defined scopes on projects, process for the sake of process, or no process at all, but not knowing whom to ask, and not being empowered enough to sort it out yourself.
I realized, and I think I kind of knew this previously, that my happiest work was when I was working with a small team of smart people who could relate to each other. Basically, going to work with my friends.
I think after the IPO, it will be time to leave and find/start something similar to what you are doing.
The thing about success is that it's addictive. Particularly with the mindset that you seem to have currently. I'm not judging, and I don't know you, so this is just the feeling I get from your post. You seem to be ambitious and on the trajectory for massive success.
It's easy to justify putting in extra hard work now if you tell yourself that the struggle is only temporary. That once this success materializes, you can relax, take it easy and just "work for fun". Some people pull that off.
Ultimately though, we are all human, and one thing humans do is get addicted to the adrenaline. Particularly if we come out having accomplished something after the struggle. Particularly those of us who have this innate drive to push the envelope. You might relax for a little while afterwards and savor the fruits of your labor, but soon you'll get restless. You'll yearn for the feeling of acute focus, that rush of adrenaline and that state of being on top of the world when things come together and you pull off something big.
This is what drives many already accomplished people to continue. It is a self fulfilling prophecy as well, because it takes this sort of drive to get there in the first place, and it's the same drive that prevents your from ever stopping. Take Musk for example. He has generational wealth. He could sit back, put his money in some safe assets and neither him nor the following 10 generations would have to ever work in their life again. Bezos could have long ago retired and just enjoyed his wealth. The thing is, once you have FU$, it all becomes a game. You no longer need the money, but you still want the feeling of success and prove to yourself that you can do well.
You should take care of that drive. Don't let it consume you. It should be a tool, a means to an end, not the thing that defines you wholly.
You are correct, but this is not the whole picture I feel. Yes, people with power still desire more power. But it's the same drive that fueled all the great pioneers and explorers of the world. Very few if any stopped after the first breakthrough and said: "Alright, I can stop now".
I consider this one of the great distinguishing features of the human race. For some people, enough is never enough. Yes, obsession has it's dark side, but without these people, we'd not be where we are today. The human race needed this trait to push the envelope. We needed (and for a while we'll still need) boneheaded bastards who won't take no for an answer.
Sometimes this obsession gets us dictators who ruin the lives of millions, sometimes it gets us breakthroughs that improve the lives of billions.
>A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
My company has always been under 20 people. We’ve developed some unique tech and are the industry leader in our sector. We’re 18 1/2 years old, yet everyone still calls us a start up. WE’RE NOT A START UP! We’re a small tech business.
That's the definition that PG uses but I don't think it's common to the world at large.
Usually the difference is between a first stage company and a self sustaining operation. Once revenue is enough to cover costs and the company can essentially run without outside funding it pretty much stops being a startup.
I see that your company managed to become the kind of unicorn we all would actually care about. In a system where growth takes precedence over taking care of people and building employee loyalty, something seems desperately wrong
If you can afford to give your employees these benefits your profit margins are vastly larger than most software companies.
Are you the sole founder of this software company? If there are/were other founders, do they also carry the title 'Senior Consultant and Partner'? I've yet to see executive or founder leadership at a software company carry a similar title. Not that titles matter, but I'm just a bit confused on your claim of founding the company vs. what I've seen in the industry with respect to titles.
My eyebrows are practically in orbit. If you believe that, you're being fooled. There is plenty of money to give employees these kinds of benefits, especially in a high-margin business like software. We don't see it very often because VC funding invariably comes with certain expectations about fiscal discipline when it comes to rewarding the rank and file, and because owners of successful bootstrapped startups prioritize taking profits over investing back into their people. But the money is there.
Yes! I like your attitude and I think that many companies could use it. I was inspired into thinking along these lines after reading "Let my People Go Surfing" and if I ever start a proper company then I'd love to hold similar values to yours.
Right now I'm working as a consultant, early on I decided that I'm going to donate 1% of my revenue to 1% For The Planet. One other value that I chose to follow was that health > work and having this attitude I visit the gym 3 times a week, no matter how things are at my consultancy.
I hope that I can keep these values as I move to setting up a proper company out of my activity.
This is something corporations like banking don't fully get (yet) - there is only so much you can achieve with money as reward for work done. Yes if you underpay severely most brilliant people will go elsewhere because mortgages or whatnot. But there is so much more to life than work, and if we spend most of our waking time there, the better and more supportive the environment is, the better for all involved.
Things like parental leave support, work from home in reasonable cases/amount (not fan of 100% remote from receiving side in general but there might be exceptions), more informal approach, management that reasonably listens to its employees and so on. Suddenly, motivation to join and work hard is much better.
what i've found working in tech in financial institutions are just more up front and "ruthless" with the reality that you aren't going to have a cushy 10-year type "career" where your output ebbs and flows between, say, 0-20% (new kid, divorce) or 80-100% (new title, new project). obviously one has to be OK with that coming in, but it was made abundantly clear to me that it's not a lifestyle gig.
getting laid off in a finance job typically comes with severance and an understanding that it's not your fault, necessarily, just that the project didn't meet expectations, or the bank had a bad quarter, or whatever else. it was made clear up front that in exchange, you get to work on very interesting stuff, have long (9hour M-F) but reasonable and well-planned days (no on-call stuff typically), and an understanding that you share in the profits of the institution (typically via bonuses instead of equity a la google at one point), so have incentive to keep working hard.
when compared to startup model that i read about on here a lot (work hella hard then get shafted by equity games), it's honestly refreshing to just get the bottom line up front vs. game playing, loyalty/honor manipulation to work uncompensated, etc.
when compared to what i consider a "normal" office job, where you probably work about 4 solidly productive hours per day over the life of your career, it's just more honest about the value of your labor and that it's sort of ridiculous that we have this charade that knowledge workers are consistently doing 8 hours of deep knowledge work every day they are in front of their computer.
I would imagine your zero employee turn-over is more about employee selection. Your company won't get the "I'm going to change the world" hustlers, it will get lifestyle employees. The latter can be good of course, but you won't get access to the really relentless innovators who could totally transform your startup/ create value you didn't think was there.
I definitely think that most people who describe themselves that way probably subscribe to the idea that unhealthy working hours are the only way to be innovative.
But this isn't so much evidence that your claim about the OPs employees is true as an attempted definition of "relentless innovators and world changers".
We could equally baselessly argue relentless innovators who are trying to find the next big thing would prefer a sane working environment so that they can have enough of a life to actually pursue their passion.
When reading such comment, I'm glad I decided to stay in Europe. Here you don't need to do anything special to have 40 h work weeks, paid parental leave and other benefits mentioned by the poster.
The fact that it's not normal, but something to praise is very unfortunate description of many peoples reality.
I agree but it's actually a Swedish company so the comment is a bit misleading. Parental leave with 80% salary is paid for by the government up to 1.5 years.
That’s not the complete picture though. The government pay you in parental leave up to a limit. The most anyone can get is more or less about 2900USD/month for full parental leave. All of our employees make more than that limit, most a lot more. We pay them the difference between what they can get from the government insurance policy up to 80% of their normal salary.
We also keep paying for their pension. There we also pay about 80% of what we would otherwise.
Starting something from nothing and running it yourself, this agency, is a reason in itself to start something. I think it shouldn't be understated that many of us start things because we want to, not because we want to become billionaires of have convenient lifestyles.
I think there is a lot of confirmation bias on these sorts of discussions on places like HN.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the number of companies started as lifestyle businesses, freelancing, etc. far outweigh what we think of as "startups" here. Many of them are very explicitly targeting number of hours - I know a bunch of people who went freelance mostly because they can target 30h/wk that way a lot more easily than in traditional employment.
Freelancing is one thing but a comparing it to owning a company with employees is very different.
I have no numbers but what I've seen from people owning businesses with employees (or even alone) in various fields none are stopping at 40 hours a week. That is in Sweden.
EDIT: Just for fun I googled some and found an article where they had made a poll in a magazine about small business owners. The distribution was:
Less than 30h 7,5%
31-35h 2,3%
36-40h 6,5%
41-45h 10,5%
46-50h 14,9%
51-55h 13,9%
56-60h 15,8%
61-65h 8,0%
66-70h 7,1%
71-75h 3,4%
76-80h 3,9%
More than 80h 6,2%
> Freelancing is one thing but a comparing it to owning a company with employees is very different.
Yes of course, but I did not mean to do that. I don't know what the relative distribution is, but think HN readership plausibly has a particular view of "starting a company" which is not very reflective of that distribution...
Sounds to me that being reject was super valuable to you guys anyway and instead of being "accelerated" you'll be able to go in your own speed the way you want with your product, not as YC, VC's or anyone else wants, which can easily "accelerate" you into the void and add extra level of stress to the one already, because imo investors are more like all-or-nothing types, when for you building "normal" sustainable business, that can later be sold for some X-XX million amount, is viable option as well.
But why? YC takes up a lot of risky ventures but I really don't see video editor in browser taking off beyond a fun little toy so I definitely get why they refused.
Could you elaborate more who's your clientele? I'm very curious.
Well I’m referring to actual, professional editors (which probably aren’t your target customer anyway.) When you’re working with terabytes of video, it’s not practical to rely on an internet connection to get work done.
I think it depends on what you're editing. With internet speeds continuing to increase and be widely available, people getting increasingly used to recording themselves/creating their own content, and the influencer marketing wave educating/inspiring them that they too can create, the demand for video will only continue to go up.
I think people also underestimate the collaborative nature/ease of use that comes with creating video, editing it, commenting w/ colleagues, and sharing it seamlessly via a url or uploading to your intended social network. I don't think people will be making full-fledged movies anytime soon, but there's likely a lot of use cases beyond the hardcore power user that absolutely needs a native tool.
I had a browser based video editor startup (we failed). Video editing on the desktop sucks if you are not a pro. For causal users it's like rocket science. Enabling video editing in the browser is a godsend since it takes out so much from the equation which makes it hard.
There are now successful startups in this space with serious investments.
I didn’t know the rendering was done server-side, but if that saves time then that’s a plus of course.
I don’t agree about installation at all, with mac app store (and probably on the PC as well) installation is a one-click affair.
As to tutorials, I don’t see how the choice of platform would make it any easier to use, how do you mean?
Oh, and my point was that These points don’t really seem to be arguments for a browser app.
I would think that this makes most sense for casual video editing. If you can be bothered paying for a subscription you might as well get adobe or some other established, native app. Installation is trivial.
Video Editing in particular is graphically and resource heavy process. Veed doesn't even work on my browser (qutebrowser via webengine).
In general web based apps are just inferior to native ones in every aspect except for "don't need to install" aspect and I don't think that many people who edit videos mind that. If you're spending hours on this might as well spend 10 minutes to install proper software, right?
Most people who are editing video online are uploading it to some social media sites, and most of those are uploading to YouTube.
And there are free editing apps for every platform, and every digital camera probably comes with one.
Also a search for "online video editor" returned plenty of results. I don't know about the quality of capability of those sites, but it doesn't seem like "video editing for amateurs" or "video editing in the browser" were unsolved problems until veed.io came along.
Modern chrome/ium has ever improving GPU acceleration.
And this isn't for people who spend hours, it's for those who want some editing power better than adding a star wipe and filter, but don't need full blown color grading and multichannel layering.
Webengine _is_ chromium. I'm just trying to illustrate that the main advantage of "being crossplatform" is a bunch of bs if you can only run it on _some_ versions of chrome or firefox, _sometimes_ with _some_ addons. Such complex apps fail too often - there's no "crossplatform" benefit here.
This strikes me as the main difficult proposition of this business, at least for the VC model—people aren’t going to pay much for this if they perceive it as being only for ‘casual’ use. That can be ok if you can get tons (millions) of users, but otherwise it’s a really hard road.
While it’s a huge achievement for an entrepreneur, investors aren’t interested in a 10k MRR business except for the potential it demonstrates to be 1000x bigger. This seems like the part of the story that the OP is missing.
>people aren’t going to pay much for this if they perceive it as being only for ‘casual’ use.
You don't need people paying much for this to be monetarily successful. You just need many people paying a little bit.
I honestly believe that if GarageBand was multiplatform, browser-based, and priced at something around $10-15/mo (as opposed to being free, but native and limited to apple devices only), it would make a lot of money, despite not being a full replacement for software targeted at people who are professionally making music (like Bitwig, Ableton, Logic Pro, etc.). A simplified video editing service would make way more than that, because the number of casual users who need to make simple changes to a video is way larger than the number of casual users who want to mix or edit a simple track.
"Many people paying a little bit" certainly works but it's really hard to pull off without funding, an extremely compelling product, or some kind of brilliant viral growth strategy because you have very little room to spend on user acquisition. That's why investors in a product like this want to see early growth metrics that are on fire. They are looking for something that can rocket up into millions of users, so if your growth slows down too much as you reach 100k users or whatever, investors will start questioning whether the market is big enough or whether the product is appealing enough to go the distance.
If you make something people will pay more for, it's just a very different calculation because you then have the potential to sustainably convert capital into growth. It allows you to grow more under your own power through sales and marketing rather than relying so much on virality.
For this reason, the GarageBand comparison isn't really helpful. Sure Apple could make a lot of money with that strategy because they could easily market it to millions of people. A new unfunded startup doesn't have that ability.
That is such a silly gimmick. Video editing is a pretty time intensive activity - if I'm spending hours on something might as well spend 5 minutes installing the app locally, right?
That is if you can install the app. Some people aren't tech savvy but quite internet savvy. That wouldn't be us :P But some older aunts and uncles that I know, definitely.
It's not a gimmick, it's just better user experience. Look at it through the lens of an average user rather than a power user ("power user" in the context of someone who is fluent with technical aspects of computers, not the domain).
I'm not arguing that the app itself has better video editing UX -- it may very well be that local apps win there. But for onboarding, no installation wins.
Eh, it's a bit of a stretch to attribute success to "runs in browser". Students in my college use Canva all the time but not because it runs in the browser - because it gives you a bunch of easy templates and you put things together fast even on their questionably performing software.
I would honestly probably pay if they gave better controls on gif conversion. There's a ton of gif websites but they don't do longer gifs / multiple scene text editing very well.
It's a bit off topic, but I wonder why everyone is so focussed on MRR (monthly recurring revenue). Why are you focussing only on people who want to pay you every month?
Especially for a tool that targets beginners. I mean, if someone uses your app enough to keep paying 20€ for it every month, I would assume that they'll soon want to upgrade to "real" video editing software. Adobe Premiere isn't that much more expensive.
Of course, the non-power users can just use the free version with watermarks. But who wants a watermark on their videos?
I always wonder why these SaaS companies do not offer something for casual users?
If I want to edit just a single video from a special event, why do I need to get a monthly subscription? Why can't I just pay $5 or whatever to remove a watermark from a single video?
I understand that targeting casual users may seem less profitable than targeting power users. But there's probably also lot less competition in that space, and it may help with word of mouth advertising if you don't focus exclusively on the most frequent users of your software.
Subscriptions are cool right now. It's an easy way, especially when you're a new company, to show that people like your product and need your product enough to use it on a recurring basis.
One off purchases are great for consumables. You wouldn't expect a shoe company to have recurring revenue (at least not monthly, should hopefully take a bit longer than that for shoes to wear out). But for software, the current emphasis is on making products people use, and pay for, regularly.
> Subscriptions are cool right now
> But for software, the current emphasis is [...]
Yes, SaaS is hot now, but this doesn't explain why.
> an easy way [...] to show that people like your product and need your product
This attempts to explain an advantage of Saas, but totally neglects the viewpoint of the customer. And that's the problem I have with it: SaaS is an advantage in the relation between the company and their investors (look, recurring revenue!), but for the customer it's often not a good thing.
The reason most companies have turned to SAAS is that it provides a more reliable revenue stream at the low end of the spectrum given that individuals are usually bad about paying attention to recurring billing, and much cheaper to support at the enterprise level. You don't have to support 20 versions of the same product, you just roll out one or two and support those.
I remember someone mentioning that one of the dark secrets of the SaaS world is reliance on people procrastinating on cancelling the subscription, forgetting to cancel it, etc.
I think if I had a SaaS company, I'd try to avoid doing that, and encourage people who are clearly not using the product to unsubscribe.
Most SaaS is enterprise facing, not consumer, so I don't know how much procrastination fits into it as the momentum behind decision making in a business.
The other part though is that if you want your data from a SAAS platform to migrate to another one, it's a giant pain in the ass because most SAAS platforms don't have "export data for use with competitors" at the top of their TODO lists. You need to get the data, get the new system configured, and then train your employees on that system.
You can can't you. You can license
Premiere Pro for 1 month for $31 or at least it appears you can. When I go here https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html and click Premiere Pro it gives me 3 options
1. Annual plan billed monthly $21 a month
2. Annual plan billed yearly $240 (So $12 cheaper)
3. Monthly plan $31 a month
$31 seems like an incredibly good deal to me since the software is amazing (IMO) and I probably only need it once every 2 years at the moment.
Good point. That is pretty affordable if you only need it for a short project.
But then again, I never even considered buying access to Adobe apps for just a month -- I'm wary of subscriptions, it's all too easy to forget cancelling them in time, and then you end up paying for software you don't need.
It's true that it's harder to sell people on a monthly subscription, but once you do, the revenue is much more predictable.
From the entrepreneurs perspective, SaaS is a much more appealing business model, though of course customers would prefer to pay once instead of every month.
Also, I'm not a technical person so I might be wrong, but I'd also imagine that an online video editing tool requires a lot of money to maintain, so random one-off $5 payments might not be enough keep the lights on.
> the revenue [on a monthly subscription] is much more predictable
That's a common fallacy here on HN. But it's just not true that one-off payments aren't predictable.
If you have a large enough number of potential customers, and some small fraction of them buys your product every month, you'll end up with very predictable revenue, even if each single customer only pays once.
As the number of sales per month increases, the variance goes down, and you end up with remarkable constant revenue. I don't know enough about statistics to explain why that is the case, but I know from experience that it does work like this.
Note that I'm not saying that pay-once is more or less profitable than subscriptions. I have no clue, and I suspect this strongly depends on the target audience. All I'm saying is that subscriptions are not "more predictable".
Customer acquisition is expensive, and if you have a subscription-based model you only have to get a customer once. If you're relying on one-off payments, every transaction comes with acquisition costs.
Customer acquisition can be expensive, but that's not a given. If your product is good enough that people tell others about it, you might not have any customer acquisition costs at all. (I know that because I sell software and spend almost no money on marketing)
Another complaint about MRR is that it doesn't take into account how much time/money was spent to earn that revenue. Is there a good alternative metric that factors in margins or profitability or something? MRR is great if you're venture-backed and don't have to worry about your marketing budget. But if you're bootstrapped (like these guys are), MRR is less useful than something that at least accounts for costs associated with the revenue.
I think you were rejected this go around for your own good.
You don't necessarily need YC. You're growing at a growing rate. You're not at any kind of impasse, you're not making a transition. You'd be giving up 7% for a lesson you already got for free.
The most important take for me was that YC gave great free advice even in the rejection email.
When I was working at Google I was not allowed to give detailed feedback to the person whom I was interviewing and I hated that, because I think people deserve to know why they weren't hired.
Yo its Tim (co-founder @ VEED). It's not really about money for us, but more about the hustle. We think of it more as getting into NBA or Olympic Games or becoming a Navy Seal. It is tough to get in, tough throughout and will only harden you if you don't break along the way. Just my 2c
Appreciate the post and kudos on the product - looks great.
Just to counter your argument though - getting into the NBA is the only way to be a successful pro basketball player. Getting into Navy Seals is the only way to be an elite special forces soldier (well, that and a bunch of other elite forces).
But getting into YC isn't the only way to build a successful company.
I understand the appeal - getting into an elite institution can open plenty of doors. But do consider whether that is worth whatever % of your company YC will take.
Ok, I get the desire, but personally I believe it's a bit fluffy.
I'd love to be in your guys position and I have a hard time just understanding why you would want to give away control which is basically freedom, be essentially be cool or be part of an "elite" group?
You guys already are cool, you don't need someone else to be it.
But are you giving away control by giving YC 7%? YC isn't a traditional investor. You don't need to raise money on demo day and are free to go back to being a small business that puts profit before growth. YC isn't going to send you an angry email or frankly even remember you if you don't stay in touch and continue to do office hours.
Perhaps not. Maybe the contacts you will recieve and the amount of money is enough to help you bootstrap stuff faster.
I have never actually started a company myself, so I wouldn't know. I just think I would be extremely satisfied if I could sustain myself without any investor money.
Seems like a better way to grow in my mind, if you're not aiming to be a billion dollar company anytime soon.
150k it's not a lot of money for Silicon Valley, that's just enough to keep the light on for a few months. But they outgrew that, I mean in course of only a few months they hit 100k and still growing. And I agree, they really don't those money unless they somehow think investing those in something, let's call it "magic dust" that in next month will allow them to hit the threshold of millions. Otherwise they should just forget about YC and just rack in the dough.
Y Combinator isn't just money. If you have a growing company with a vision, you can definitely find some investor interest. However, that should rarely be your goal, unless you flat-out just can't move your business forward otherwise. Y Combinator is what some would call _smart_ money: money that comes with a network of advisors, constant input and a nagging push to improve what you're doing. All of that combined can be worth more than the actual money.
I have seen people say this on HN over and over again. But it's not like most people who start businesses lacks vision. If you got a vision and start to earn enough money to sustain yourself you are free to hunt whatever vision you want.
> constant input and a nagging push to improve what you're doing
I get why this can be good, but honestly it sounds terrible when you lay it out like that. If I want to be nagged on, I would just get married.
Tech startups and the Angel/VC ecosystem feels like a Ponzi scheme sometimes. The goal doesn’t seem to be to create a profitable business, but to make a good exit with the next investor’s money (or the public’s in the case of an IPO).
I’m not sure it is very common that the next round investors buy shares from the first round, seems to defeat the purpose of raising money. IPOs are a different story though, cf We, Uber.
Wonderful story Thanks for sharing it with details and updates.
A little question is funding the current bottleneck for your growth? If you receive $X Million how would you spend it to increase the growth?
We are growing fast. But if we take $X Million yeah we will grow SUPER fast. So yeah. But whether you should do it is up to you, there are horror/success stories on either side.
Moral of the story is: there's more than one way to found a company and the current startup model ( place hundreds of bets, hope a few win big) doesn't work for all of them.
This story and others ( like the one of Gumroad: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...) that show that success can be achieved even when others consider you a failure are refreshing and should taken as an inspiration from those who wish to become an enterpreneur (and possibly by everyone to be applied to life in general).
Hello there! I was rejected today for 7th time I believe.
We started selling our product in January, We just signed a contract with Accenture, we are on track to have 1 million websites using our technology and we are about $20k MRR (which we know will be a much more thanks to some partnerships we are about to sign.
YC is an amazing opportunity, but it's just one of the many tools we have as entrepreneurs. Keep working, be better and more important than anything, be permissionless.
Just the act of applying is a healthy exercise, and chances are that the people who got accepted are just better than our company. We keep moving, keep making progress and keep applying.
I don't see what is disrespectful about that. I would love to learn more if you care in elaborating.
Honestly you might be past the point where you need YC, but I agree that there's no harm in applying -- if your experience is anything like this one, even applying to YC apparently gives some value to the companies doing it.
True. Also if you have been rejected once too many, the chances of you getting accepted goes down.
Unless you knew why you were rejected and you improve on that.
Ultimately you are wasting time applying and then waiting for results. Every rejection is a step down the morale ladder so be judicious in your applications
Most YC founders were rejected multiple times before they got in. In my batch around 50% of the founders were previously rejected, which I believe is standard for most batches.
Let's be honest. Even solely from money and evaluation point, being accepted to YC increases your evaluation for your startup significantly.
I'm not advocating that this is why you need to apply, but FOMO on YC companies is real among VC's. On demo day same companies who are pre-seed or just started get new rounds on $15Mil+ evaluation.
From what I have heard and seen the biggest value is advice, but getting so much hype to raise big money is not bad for founders.
I've heard from a VC recently that YC is usually associated with teams of very young entrepreneurs and some VCs avoid this team profile. Not sure if this is a widespread stereotype.
> So even though we have a great growing company, it is possible YC does not think we will be a billion dollar company.
And that's perfectly fine. Not every company needs to be a billion dollar unicorn. Not every founder needs to strive for that.
Continue to grow the company organically. You have clearly already found a path to success without YC. YC is great, but is not essential to your startup. Not getting in is not the end of the world.
I would not sweat it. I was an early employee in a startup that got rejected twice from YC (because it was from Mexico) and nowadays is one of the fastest growing FinTech companies in LatAm and just raised their series B.
How did office hours between the two batches go? That was left out of the blog post.
Similar to when you're in the lunch round during a job interview are told "oh don't worry, lunch is not an interview, just relax", I imagine attending office hours after you got rejected last time is in the same boat - it's another hidden interview. It's possible that there were indicators during that time period that indicated how the next batch might go for you guys :/.
Great story and lots of positive messages here so let me take a different view and get downvoted here. Obviously you want to be as big as airbnb and box otherwise you will not be applying to YC year over year. Point here is that don’t settle for these small wins of 100k revenue..and no it is not ok to NOT be hugely successful company if you really want that go be that. Now there are many other VC companies out there who have helped many others companies do the same so Yc rejection is a blow but there are other options too. Don't stop until you get into one.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadThat's the thing. Who are you trying to impress? Investors? Or your customers?
and also saying a form builder can become an app builder, is like saying a plain paper can be used to print money ...
we all know that the delta between them is huge. We are not selling fairy tales to VCs, or are we?
Silicon Valley should have its own version of the Hollywood sign that reads "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute."
It could be that investors believe the company can grow into something large and profitable.
It could be that investors believe they will be able to sell their shares to someone else for more.
There is no law that says these beliefs have to be rational.
Don't get me wrong it's a great company for the founder and maybe a small team, but there's no intent to grow it massively. The founder has even said so.
Not sure why YC makes those exceptions sometimes.
Good luck, I hope you guys succeed and keep grinding!
Like writing a blog post vs. adding a desired feature.
This is a very positive take away: Y combinator is not for the vast majority of startups (and that's ok). They are not destined to become billion dollar companies, yet they will still go on to provide huge value to a large number of people and turn a big profit - they should still exist, and may even be vital for many.
> “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
Second, The power of positive response to negative situations. Lord knows how long it would have taken them to work on MRR if not for the rejection and they could easily have wasted time fiddling with copy and graphics, but the pressure for YC to re-evaluate them made them release ASAP and now they are already making revenue. At the end of the day, YC rejection allowed them to start generating proper revenue before they would have initially, to me that's a win, and they still get to keep the shares YC would have taken and now they have a higher valuation for whomever they apply to next for funding.
This is a great framing of a story that could easily be a sob story blog post. Keep it up, guys. You are bound for success.
My 2 cents would be to forget about YC as a source of seed capital and either get a loan or private angel investment to build a solid, revenue generating success.
If I take on all the risk, blood, sweat, and tears to get a product built and out the door and making money, I don't need your $150k. At least right now in this climate, you can raise much more than that from VCs that carry cachet similar to YC and will be good advisors as well.
Maybe. I took it slightly differently. They received negative feedback after a 10 minute pitch, and immediately dropped everything to change their product & strategy to appease a potential investor.
Was monetizing in this manner at this moment the right strategy for them? That's a pivotal decision to make and not one I'd throw together at 2 am to try impress a party with no skin in the game.
In your favour, the strategy was successful and they grew to $5k MRR in four months with estimates suggesting they'll hit $100k in recurring annual revenue by the end of the year. It worked so it's hard to criticize it.
But, what if it hadn't, or what if the founders were in a different situation where they had a bigger team? Last minute "we have to do this now" decisions are often wrong. When they're not, they often result in some really ugly code that will be tough to maintain. Further, they can be hard on morale.
Chances are that the founders had this type of conversation and talked about the risks while they were brainstorming. It almost sounds like they had debated this in the past. Those kinds of debates are very valuable and I think that founders need to talk about how a new feature can go bad.
Some investors may be attracted to this kind of behavior, and I fear they are also the least pleasant to work with. Things can get a little exploitative sometimes.
It's not like YC told them "put on a chicken suit and dance in front of our headquarters and we might consider you".
Monetizing and finding out whether there's anyone willing to actually pay for the product is a straightforward move. They weren't building a social network or something with a massive network effect. Putting off the terrifying discovery ("hey, will anyone pay for this?") in their case may just have been procrastination - and YC's rejection may have been a useful trigger to end it.
Me, and my co-founders, created the company for us to be able to work with great colleagues and to limit the work hours. Our employees, including ourselves, are not allowed to work more than 40h/week. We have parties and trips where we invite all of our friends and family etc. We make sure our employees have 80% of full salary for at least 9 months for parental leave. Work-life balance is core to our values.
Our employee turn-over is basically zero. And if someone leaves we go out to dinner to thank them, keep in touch and they are always welcome back to our events and parties (also to come back to work for us of course).
I understand the idea of going big with a start-up, make tons of money. But there are other goals one can pursue with a start-up that, at least to some, is just as fulfilling.
Great job! You still have control and ownership and might be better off in the long run.
I was at a NGO for a while where we interviewed North Korean refugees about execution and burial sites and collected the information in a PostGIS db with QGIS as a frontend and working towards a custom UI plugin for the interview process, and it was very rewarding. Their operations also had a lot of unique security challenges to deal with.
Working late because people are dying is a much better justification, but you will burn out just as fast. People who are too earnest about a cause have difficulty pacing themselves. Every org has people who burn the candle at both ends.
It can be all the stress of working for a tech company, with 1/3 of the pay. The dynamic that often shows up is that higher-ups try to use employees' intrinsic motivation to guilt them into working longer hours and accepting low pay, "for the greater good".
There are good and bad NGO workplaces, just as there are good and bad private workplaces. But NGOs as a whole are no safe haven.
The world as a whole is still trying to work out how to be productive enough to provide for everyone, fairly or reasonably divide up the pie and achieve the vaunted work-life balance.
That's a relatively new concept. In the past, a lot of people were literally slaves or metaphorically "wage slaves." A standard expectation was that the man of the house was the primary breadwinner and he had a wife handling all the quality of life work -- cooking, cleaning, shopping -- so he could put most of his time and energy into the job. In exchange, he got enough income and benefits to support a family.
We are gradually transitioning to a two income couple model in part because people are living longer and having fewer kids. It no longer makes sense to sequester female labor and limit it to women's work. It doesn't make sense for her life, for her marriage or for society.
The transition is proving bumpy.
Not saying there aren't great NGO roles, but the company being an NGO isn't a good signal that it is a great role.
dhh is David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of Basecamp. they basically run their company just like you, i'd recommend reading their posts.
I think the next (current ?) generation is going to question that : values like "durability" and "long term vision" starts to get fashionable again.
The old industries were based on "family businesses" where you would take extreme care before letting someone new have shares of the company, where growing was measured in terms of generations, based on reputation and quality of work, and sustainability. And that gave giants, which lasted for generations.
I think it's getting clearer and clearer that there are alternatives to "pump and IPO" models, and that they may even be preferable for everybody (founders, employees and customers) except VCs who needs quick cash rotation.
Note: maybe what you meant is just "we're talking about VC funded companies, not other types". Still, i think VC will need to take new aspirations into account when looking for next gen companies to fund.
they don’t. it’s not their model. get big or fail is inherent to their model and is what their fund investors want. for long term steady value or other (valid) models the VC customers (LPs) can just invest in index funds.
The entire point of the VC is risk/reward. remove the reward and why would you take on the risk?
We tend to follow patterns and being reminded that there is value in alternatives is precious.
I'm sure many founders think the vc funded startup is the only way to create a cool company as their parents thought that a steady office job was the only way to live a comfortable life.
As it turns out the juicy parts of life are where it's less crowded.
I agree with everything you've said but this. I don't think everyone really fully groks this and hence why comments like the above are helpful.
Young impressionable people don't know there are alternatives when all they hear is "startup, startup, startup" being echo'd out of SV.
PS - it's also frowned upon on HN to say what comments are beneficial/relevant. Just use the arrows next time.
(and I'm putting my money where my mouth is: here at TalkJS.com we're VC funded and on a steep growth curve, and we also have sane working hours and good benefits etc etc)
You would effectively have to have people dedicated simply to this task, with massive managerial powers checking all management decisions and keep reminding all folks to stick to them (I can't imagine any other way). Its not only about things on paper like benefits and working hours, but overall company culture, agility to change and corner cases. If you manage that, kudos to you, but you are rather an exception.
I've seen it first hand - an amazing, startup-like company, growing super fast, and culture suffered.
It’s great for some things, but it also gives the devs more time (and moral authority) to think about the flaws in other parts of the organization. It seemed like there was just as much complaining and stressing about things, it was just different things.
I suspect this is why the “good enough” culture of thick-skinned, slightly masochistic people who put up with the same busy work is the de facto standard.
Part of what drew me to software was that you “figure out” how something works, you write a bit of software to manage that task, and move on to the next problem. I amazes me how many people who are capable of automating simple tasks are content to simply repeat them instead.
It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially after reading "A company of one". That it's possible to make a good living with friends and not be the next X or Y hypergrowth company.
For some context, I am currently working for one of the hottest startups in the world (not hyperbole, we have the metrics to back it up), and I have been here long enough to remember when we could all fit in a small room.
The first 2 years were a dream, this last year has been pretty terrible, and coincidently, is when we started our crazy rapid growth.
It went from a place where you felt like you were working with your friends, and could have great conversations/humour and learn, to politics, arguments, poorly defined scopes on projects, process for the sake of process, or no process at all, but not knowing whom to ask, and not being empowered enough to sort it out yourself.
I realized, and I think I kind of knew this previously, that my happiest work was when I was working with a small team of smart people who could relate to each other. Basically, going to work with my friends.
I think after the IPO, it will be time to leave and find/start something similar to what you are doing.
It's easy to justify putting in extra hard work now if you tell yourself that the struggle is only temporary. That once this success materializes, you can relax, take it easy and just "work for fun". Some people pull that off.
Ultimately though, we are all human, and one thing humans do is get addicted to the adrenaline. Particularly if we come out having accomplished something after the struggle. Particularly those of us who have this innate drive to push the envelope. You might relax for a little while afterwards and savor the fruits of your labor, but soon you'll get restless. You'll yearn for the feeling of acute focus, that rush of adrenaline and that state of being on top of the world when things come together and you pull off something big.
This is what drives many already accomplished people to continue. It is a self fulfilling prophecy as well, because it takes this sort of drive to get there in the first place, and it's the same drive that prevents your from ever stopping. Take Musk for example. He has generational wealth. He could sit back, put his money in some safe assets and neither him nor the following 10 generations would have to ever work in their life again. Bezos could have long ago retired and just enjoyed his wealth. The thing is, once you have FU$, it all becomes a game. You no longer need the money, but you still want the feeling of success and prove to yourself that you can do well.
You should take care of that drive. Don't let it consume you. It should be a tool, a means to an end, not the thing that defines you wholly.
I consider this one of the great distinguishing features of the human race. For some people, enough is never enough. Yes, obsession has it's dark side, but without these people, we'd not be where we are today. The human race needed this trait to push the envelope. We needed (and for a while we'll still need) boneheaded bastards who won't take no for an answer.
Sometimes this obsession gets us dictators who ruin the lives of millions, sometimes it gets us breakthroughs that improve the lives of billions.
http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
>A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
Usually the difference is between a first stage company and a self sustaining operation. Once revenue is enough to cover costs and the company can essentially run without outside funding it pretty much stops being a startup.
Definition on Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/startup.asp
Are you the sole founder of this software company? If there are/were other founders, do they also carry the title 'Senior Consultant and Partner'? I've yet to see executive or founder leadership at a software company carry a similar title. Not that titles matter, but I'm just a bit confused on your claim of founding the company vs. what I've seen in the industry with respect to titles.
the 40h/week, paid leave, etc. are minimums set by law in my home country, so I really doubt that.
Right now I'm working as a consultant, early on I decided that I'm going to donate 1% of my revenue to 1% For The Planet. One other value that I chose to follow was that health > work and having this attitude I visit the gym 3 times a week, no matter how things are at my consultancy.
I hope that I can keep these values as I move to setting up a proper company out of my activity.
Things like parental leave support, work from home in reasonable cases/amount (not fan of 100% remote from receiving side in general but there might be exceptions), more informal approach, management that reasonably listens to its employees and so on. Suddenly, motivation to join and work hard is much better.
It might be that people who do best in these kinds of occupations are cutthroat sociopaths obsessed with money and power.
This means that if you want to attract and retain them, you need to offer them money and power.
getting laid off in a finance job typically comes with severance and an understanding that it's not your fault, necessarily, just that the project didn't meet expectations, or the bank had a bad quarter, or whatever else. it was made clear up front that in exchange, you get to work on very interesting stuff, have long (9hour M-F) but reasonable and well-planned days (no on-call stuff typically), and an understanding that you share in the profits of the institution (typically via bonuses instead of equity a la google at one point), so have incentive to keep working hard.
when compared to startup model that i read about on here a lot (work hella hard then get shafted by equity games), it's honestly refreshing to just get the bottom line up front vs. game playing, loyalty/honor manipulation to work uncompensated, etc.
when compared to what i consider a "normal" office job, where you probably work about 4 solidly productive hours per day over the life of your career, it's just more honest about the value of your labor and that it's sort of ridiculous that we have this charade that knowledge workers are consistently doing 8 hours of deep knowledge work every day they are in front of their computer.
But this isn't so much evidence that your claim about the OPs employees is true as an attempted definition of "relentless innovators and world changers".
We could equally baselessly argue relentless innovators who are trying to find the next big thing would prefer a sane working environment so that they can have enough of a life to actually pursue their passion.
https://indiehackers.com https://www.starterstory.com/
The fact that it's not normal, but something to praise is very unfortunate description of many peoples reality.
We also keep paying for their pension. There we also pay about 80% of what we would otherwise.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the number of companies started as lifestyle businesses, freelancing, etc. far outweigh what we think of as "startups" here. Many of them are very explicitly targeting number of hours - I know a bunch of people who went freelance mostly because they can target 30h/wk that way a lot more easily than in traditional employment.
I have no numbers but what I've seen from people owning businesses with employees (or even alone) in various fields none are stopping at 40 hours a week. That is in Sweden.
EDIT: Just for fun I googled some and found an article where they had made a poll in a magazine about small business owners. The distribution was:
Less than 30h 7,5% 31-35h 2,3% 36-40h 6,5% 41-45h 10,5% 46-50h 14,9% 51-55h 13,9% 56-60h 15,8% 61-65h 8,0% 66-70h 7,1% 71-75h 3,4% 76-80h 3,9% More than 80h 6,2%
https://www.foretagande.se/nyheter/sa-manga-timmar-jobbar-eg...
Yes of course, but I did not mean to do that. I don't know what the relative distribution is, but think HN readership plausibly has a particular view of "starting a company" which is not very reflective of that distribution...
Good luck and keep building! :)
But why? YC takes up a lot of risky ventures but I really don't see video editor in browser taking off beyond a fun little toy so I definitely get why they refused. Could you elaborate more who's your clientele? I'm very curious.
Nevertheless it was a fun read!
I could see this being useful for youtubers without access to decent hardware.
I think people also underestimate the collaborative nature/ease of use that comes with creating video, editing it, commenting w/ colleagues, and sharing it seamlessly via a url or uploading to your intended social network. I don't think people will be making full-fledged movies anytime soon, but there's likely a lot of use cases beyond the hardcore power user that absolutely needs a native tool.
There are now successful startups in this space with serious investments.
- installing codecs
- video conversion to the right format the editor can handle
- video export to the right format, size, frame rate that works on the web
- navigating a complex UI with usually the most common features hidden in context menus and shortcuts
The last one seems completely unrelated to the choice between browser and desktop. If anything it is harder to make nice UI in the browser.
By moving rendering server side, a lot of problems are solved.
Casual users shouldn't install complex solutions and watch tutorials to do simple things.
I don’t agree about installation at all, with mac app store (and probably on the PC as well) installation is a one-click affair.
As to tutorials, I don’t see how the choice of platform would make it any easier to use, how do you mean?
Oh, and my point was that These points don’t really seem to be arguments for a browser app.
I would think that this makes most sense for casual video editing. If you can be bothered paying for a subscription you might as well get adobe or some other established, native app. Installation is trivial.
Google docs, Invision, canva, all browser based.
And then, if you really want to make a desktop version, you take a shortcut and put in in electron. Which is just a browser.
Video Editing in particular is graphically and resource heavy process. Veed doesn't even work on my browser (qutebrowser via webengine).
In general web based apps are just inferior to native ones in every aspect except for "don't need to install" aspect and I don't think that many people who edit videos mind that. If you're spending hours on this might as well spend 10 minutes to install proper software, right?
And there are free editing apps for every platform, and every digital camera probably comes with one.
Also a search for "online video editor" returned plenty of results. I don't know about the quality of capability of those sites, but it doesn't seem like "video editing for amateurs" or "video editing in the browser" were unsolved problems until veed.io came along.
Clearly there are people who are willing to pay for what Veed is offering.
A revolutionary, industry disrupting, potential billion-dollar concept? Something worth injecting VC money into? I don't think so.
> Less serious people should just use email.
Almost the exact same response. No concept of the prosumer / intermediate user.
So you're an edge case?
Modern chrome/ium has ever improving GPU acceleration.
And this isn't for people who spend hours, it's for those who want some editing power better than adding a star wipe and filter, but don't need full blown color grading and multichannel layering.
Just guessing here. I haven't used the service nor do I have any use for it.
While it’s a huge achievement for an entrepreneur, investors aren’t interested in a 10k MRR business except for the potential it demonstrates to be 1000x bigger. This seems like the part of the story that the OP is missing.
You don't need people paying much for this to be monetarily successful. You just need many people paying a little bit.
I honestly believe that if GarageBand was multiplatform, browser-based, and priced at something around $10-15/mo (as opposed to being free, but native and limited to apple devices only), it would make a lot of money, despite not being a full replacement for software targeted at people who are professionally making music (like Bitwig, Ableton, Logic Pro, etc.). A simplified video editing service would make way more than that, because the number of casual users who need to make simple changes to a video is way larger than the number of casual users who want to mix or edit a simple track.
If you make something people will pay more for, it's just a very different calculation because you then have the potential to sustainably convert capital into growth. It allows you to grow more under your own power through sales and marketing rather than relying so much on virality.
For this reason, the GarageBand comparison isn't really helpful. Sure Apple could make a lot of money with that strategy because they could easily market it to millions of people. A new unfunded startup doesn't have that ability.
FWIW it seems to work fine for me in qutebrowser.
I remember this being quite a good thing for the Harvard course CS50. You don't need to download an IDE, you can just open one up in the cloud.
Video editing falls in the same space, depending on one's tech savviness.
That is such a silly gimmick. Video editing is a pretty time intensive activity - if I'm spending hours on something might as well spend 5 minutes installing the app locally, right?
I'm not in the target market for this, but I can absolutely see a class of people for whom this style works completely.
I'm not arguing that the app itself has better video editing UX -- it may very well be that local apps win there. But for onboarding, no installation wins.
Even more specifically for video editor in the browser: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/kapwing/
Especially for a tool that targets beginners. I mean, if someone uses your app enough to keep paying 20€ for it every month, I would assume that they'll soon want to upgrade to "real" video editing software. Adobe Premiere isn't that much more expensive.
Of course, the non-power users can just use the free version with watermarks. But who wants a watermark on their videos?
I always wonder why these SaaS companies do not offer something for casual users?
If I want to edit just a single video from a special event, why do I need to get a monthly subscription? Why can't I just pay $5 or whatever to remove a watermark from a single video?
I understand that targeting casual users may seem less profitable than targeting power users. But there's probably also lot less competition in that space, and it may help with word of mouth advertising if you don't focus exclusively on the most frequent users of your software.
One off purchases are great for consumables. You wouldn't expect a shoe company to have recurring revenue (at least not monthly, should hopefully take a bit longer than that for shoes to wear out). But for software, the current emphasis is on making products people use, and pay for, regularly.
Yes, SaaS is hot now, but this doesn't explain why.
> an easy way [...] to show that people like your product and need your product
This attempts to explain an advantage of Saas, but totally neglects the viewpoint of the customer. And that's the problem I have with it: SaaS is an advantage in the relation between the company and their investors (look, recurring revenue!), but for the customer it's often not a good thing.
- Updates happen automatically without disruption to users
- The product, at least in theory, improves and adds new features over time
- Can access from any device
- Better integrations through APIs, Zapier, etc.
All of those things are pretty non-trivial.
I think if I had a SaaS company, I'd try to avoid doing that, and encourage people who are clearly not using the product to unsubscribe.
1. Annual plan billed monthly $21 a month
2. Annual plan billed yearly $240 (So $12 cheaper)
3. Monthly plan $31 a month
$31 seems like an incredibly good deal to me since the software is amazing (IMO) and I probably only need it once every 2 years at the moment.
But then again, I never even considered buying access to Adobe apps for just a month -- I'm wary of subscriptions, it's all too easy to forget cancelling them in time, and then you end up paying for software you don't need.
From the entrepreneurs perspective, SaaS is a much more appealing business model, though of course customers would prefer to pay once instead of every month.
Also, I'm not a technical person so I might be wrong, but I'd also imagine that an online video editing tool requires a lot of money to maintain, so random one-off $5 payments might not be enough keep the lights on.
That's a common fallacy here on HN. But it's just not true that one-off payments aren't predictable.
If you have a large enough number of potential customers, and some small fraction of them buys your product every month, you'll end up with very predictable revenue, even if each single customer only pays once.
As the number of sales per month increases, the variance goes down, and you end up with remarkable constant revenue. I don't know enough about statistics to explain why that is the case, but I know from experience that it does work like this.
Note that I'm not saying that pay-once is more or less profitable than subscriptions. I have no clue, and I suspect this strongly depends on the target audience. All I'm saying is that subscriptions are not "more predictable".
You don't necessarily need YC. You're growing at a growing rate. You're not at any kind of impasse, you're not making a transition. You'd be giving up 7% for a lesson you already got for free.
Bootstrap until you can't.
When I was working at Google I was not allowed to give detailed feedback to the person whom I was interviewing and I hated that, because I think people deserve to know why they weren't hired.
Sure, it is a lot of money they will get but it seems like they don't really need it?
Just to counter your argument though - getting into the NBA is the only way to be a successful pro basketball player. Getting into Navy Seals is the only way to be an elite special forces soldier (well, that and a bunch of other elite forces).
But getting into YC isn't the only way to build a successful company.
I understand the appeal - getting into an elite institution can open plenty of doors. But do consider whether that is worth whatever % of your company YC will take.
I'd love to be in your guys position and I have a hard time just understanding why you would want to give away control which is basically freedom, be essentially be cool or be part of an "elite" group?
You guys already are cool, you don't need someone else to be it.
I have never actually started a company myself, so I wouldn't know. I just think I would be extremely satisfied if I could sustain myself without any investor money.
Seems like a better way to grow in my mind, if you're not aiming to be a billion dollar company anytime soon.
But - it seems that you guys put more importance on being perceived as successful (= backed by YC), then actually building a profitable business.
> constant input and a nagging push to improve what you're doing
I get why this can be good, but honestly it sounds terrible when you lay it out like that. If I want to be nagged on, I would just get married.
Congratulations on your achievement!
Posting because I found the analysis of filmgirlcw in that discussion interesting.
This story and others ( like the one of Gumroad: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...) that show that success can be achieved even when others consider you a failure are refreshing and should taken as an inspiration from those who wish to become an enterpreneur (and possibly by everyone to be applied to life in general).
We started selling our product in January, We just signed a contract with Accenture, we are on track to have 1 million websites using our technology and we are about $20k MRR (which we know will be a much more thanks to some partnerships we are about to sign.
YC is an amazing opportunity, but it's just one of the many tools we have as entrepreneurs. Keep working, be better and more important than anything, be permissionless.
Isn't there a limit beyond which it's a bit disrespectful to keep asking?
How is disrespectful to keep asking?
Just the act of applying is a healthy exercise, and chances are that the people who got accepted are just better than our company. We keep moving, keep making progress and keep applying.
I don't see what is disrespectful about that. I would love to learn more if you care in elaborating.
Unless you knew why you were rejected and you improve on that.
Ultimately you are wasting time applying and then waiting for results. Every rejection is a step down the morale ladder so be judicious in your applications
And that's perfectly fine. Not every company needs to be a billion dollar unicorn. Not every founder needs to strive for that.
Continue to grow the company organically. You have clearly already found a path to success without YC. YC is great, but is not essential to your startup. Not getting in is not the end of the world.
You know, lots of VCs maintain a good list of anti-portfolio, the most famous being the BVP one (https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio/ ).
Similar to when you're in the lunch round during a job interview are told "oh don't worry, lunch is not an interview, just relax", I imagine attending office hours after you got rejected last time is in the same boat - it's another hidden interview. It's possible that there were indicators during that time period that indicated how the next batch might go for you guys :/.
Best of luck regardless