How Veed CEO Sabba Keynejad grew Veed to $40M revenue and 25K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is sabah tanejad he is the founder of a company co-founder and ceo of the an online video editing platform all right salba are you ready to take us to the top let's go let's do it all right so how'd you get into this space were you like an ex-video producer at a cable network or something how did you think of this problem not at all um my background went to art school i worked in creative technology advertising agencies branding agencies and just kind of found myself into video i just liked it interesting okay so you came on the show actually back in um no no sorry you didn't come on i found you via indie hackers because you had there's some good growth i think you'd passed what was revenue 110 grand a month when now uh when was it when you posted on indie hackers do you remember when you posted uh we did a one million arr yeah uh we're about one and a half now when did you hit a million in ar you remember two months ago oh just reach okay so you're growing pretty quickly here okay so okay so give us the back story what you're doing company in uh launched the company technically uh about two years ago but went full time on it about 14 months ago and that's when we started charging okay and who is we we uh me and my co-founder tim two years ago uh and then a few months after that we got a couple of developers to help us out and then yeah just went full time quite our jobs uh 14 months ago and that's yeah when we started charging very cool and you know obviously the biggest question for any hacker getting started is i have a co-founder how do we have the tough equity question if you're lazy you split it 50 50. if you do it right someone is usually has a little more or a little less how did you guys do it that's not the right way to do it if you're doing it that way then you shouldn't be your co-founder i mean like come on i mean like you're gonna be doing this for years hopefully you're gonna make a really big company if you you everyone needs to be incentivized from your co-founders and employees so you know just don't be greedy vector give it away and get everyone on board right i think clarity is also very important and it's clear and it's helpful to understand who is leading the company which is why i always advocate that someone owns more than 50 percent uh it just makes it crystal clear how things are working completely disagree with that very good have you guys ever just agreed on a question you have you i mean you have roles in a company right so like someone's ceo is a cto and i'm ceo of the company and tim cto he makes and leads conversations and decisions in technology and i'm not going to push back on that and i'll take strategic decisions for the company and he probably doesn't push back on that like we do push on each other but like fundamentally you know we're i think we're aligned and maybe that's just you know the synergy that we have and other co-founders would be different but i'm a massive component for being 50 50. interesting okay so you jump into this uh you quit your full-time job what was the company doing in terms of revenue when you decide to finally quit your full-time gig both of you yeah so zero interesting so so i mean that must have been a scary time you're not sure if you're going to get revenue you have some life savings built up how much i mean how many runway how much life runway did you have when you quit your job so about four or five months interesting was that nervous or anything make you nervous yeah yeah how do you feel i mean like you know you got i mean like you know i'm single um i don't have a mortgage i'm like relatively young i can get contract work if i need to um relatively quickly so it didn't seem like a massive decision at the time i think the thing that we're more scared about was getting to profitability super quick so we didn't have to go back to our jobs that's that's what we're worried about are you profitable today yeah yeah we've always i mean you know once we had this really beautiful moment where our savings and our revenue crossed over at this perfect point um so yeah we've yeah we've been profitable since then basically and still profitable now that's great and when you say profitably like 10 to the bottom line 50 of the bottom line each month no no i mean you know like three four months ago our runway was zero and we'd spend everything we would on you know growth and putting it back into the company now we're probably putting away about 30 percent that's great so what do you do with that right any founder indie hacker reaches that beautiful moment where you start to have some cash flow and you go do we just do we pay ourselves more or do we leave it in the company and reinvest it yeah so i mean like i think it depends like we were paying ourselves about two thousand dollars a month until i mean even to the million i think when we hit a million arr we paid ourselves more than two thousand dollars a month um and we don't even today we don't need to pay ourselves any anymore we're more than happy with that um but yeah i mean definitely reinvest in growth like it's if you have a company that's growing it's hungry and it needs it right it needs more people and customer service it needs more people in design needs more development to keep it moving forward and you know you don't want to stunt that growth so put it straight back in what is the team size today uh we're just 20 now i think that just yeah just crossed that yesterday 20 folks very good and how many engineers uh i think a good 50 yeah 50 including uh including tim yeah yeah interesting okay so tell me more about the product right so obviously you've got some customers on the product how are they using it what do you help them do so there's a bunch of things that we help them do i mean when you make a tool in general it's very broad it you know attracts different types of people of different use cases but the ones that we see really that are really powerful is uh subtitling content so most videos on social play without audio so subscribing is a really great way to you know help people um consume that content but then also for accessibility reasons so we have a lot of governments and educational institutions as well using it for that reason we have a lot of podcasters kind of turning the audio into um you know the waveform videos i think i've seen you do some of those no you have i no maybe not maybe someone else we've tested you know the ones i mean yeah what did you find i mean what the the issue for me is it's a price it's it's less about does the tool do what it says it does it's more about we do one episode a day so like it's that's too if it if they call them audiograms right if i did an audiogram every day there's just i would overwhelm my twitter feed with audiograms so it's just more about we strategically do one here or there and my internal team typically takes care of it but but i know this is a very hot space i mean we just had um i forget the founder's name but i think a company called wave just came on and they're doing about the same amount and they only really do sort of podcast audiograms amazing right yeah no exactly um and so yeah i mean you know in terms of use cases that's that's another one but also just you know a lot of people make the gary v style videos for linkedin a lot of people trim content into different snippets get it out on different channels you know there's a bunch of different things and as the tools getting more complex you can do you know more and more things of it and that opens up the use cases in the market size as well yeah i mean one thing that's interesting i mean my first company heyo was a full drag and drop facebook application builder and i remember with our dev team in our sprint sectors we'd say what we need is if they can drag and drop to create anything we've finally spent like months building a freeform drag and drop thing which when i go to your home page and i look at sort of how you have drag and drop here it's sort of the same but what we found is when we gave people all that freedom they created really shitty designs so we're like well crap maybe we have to take away some of the freedom to make sure it's high quality how do you balance that right it's an interesting question i think you know the same on canva you look at canva templates and you're like these look amazing and then someone goes in they're like oh yeah but i want comic sans because it looks really friendly and this stock video from shutterstock it's beautiful right so i mean you've got to give them enough freedom for them to make a mistake right but you just kind of want to push them in the right direction so you know we don't you know we you know we actually give our users as much food as they like and we it's it's an interesting question i think you know i think the most important thing is at least as long as the user feels really really comfortable using the product and making those changes it's great if they feel scared using the products and they're going to mess something up then they're not going to be very confident and creative so you know let them go how many customers...