How Veed CEO Sabba Keynejad grew 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 you have today uh 5 000 just under five thousand five hundred fifty five hundred interesting so what does that mean how much are they paying per month on average uh average so we've got thirty dollar and we've got fifteen dollars and i think the average is twenty two 22.50 when you add it all up and yeah yeah that sounds about right and and so let me i mean you do a very unique thing on your home page which you just you there's not really like enter your email sign up for a trial it's just upload a video and start using the thing i'm curious what this looks like so so how many people sort of hit your website each month and how many new like how many people click upload video and actually upload a video each month yeah um no idea i mean i know how many people you know we've got about ten thousand people hit the site every day um how many upload uh let's say like six thousand maybe okay that that's actually sixty upload some sort of video file yeah no we're pretty good on that to be honest i mean you know there's a bunch of people who did like 20 videos there we had this guy doing like 100 videos a day and it was crazy but like you know there's skewed in that but you know a lot of people that upload and try out and you know you can also enter urls from youtube and stuff like this so so i love that you put the utility value of the product right at the front but at some point you have to pick the perfect moment to show that paywall or that trial wall where you have to get the email and get an account set up what's the activation metric you want to see a user hit before you show them the actual sign up or paywall yeah interesting i mean we give away as much value as possible upfront and we can do that um you know when they download the video and there's a watermark they've got a decision right if they're a company business or an influencer you know it's in their best interest to remove it because it's their content but a free user who just maybe wants to put something on reddit doesn't mind the watermark but that's great marketing for us so yeah we just put all the value up front and if they want to get rid of the watermark and become a subscriber they can for you know 15 or 30 a month and how many new customers have you had over the past 30 days firstly i don't know that we did we did uh 80 yesterday which is good anywhere between anywhere between like 60 to 80 today something like that so is it fair to say if we just look at a flash point the average day at feed looks like 10 000 unique website hits 6 000 uploads of which 80 convert into a new customer yeah sounds about right something like that very interesting i'd say i would say no i would say renders i would say you know i don't know about unique uploads but unique renders a day with about six thousand what's the difference between an output on a render well an upload is probably uh yeah that's a good question actually yeah i mean you know we so in general we're not like super hot on funnels conversions and stuff like this like we spend most of our time talking to our users understanding what their needs are and what their jobs to be done is right and we just yeah and the reason why we're not like going deep on these funnels is because we're just not at that stage yet we're still at this stage of trying to build the product understand who our user is and i think there will become a time where we start looking really deep into these metrics and starting tightening up all the funnels and you know tracking what happens at every stage but right now i think we have a good understanding of our user and who you know how they want to use the products and you know we can see that in the in the revenue metrics right how much have you raised or are we bootstrapped today no we haven't raised any money i love that so totally any plans to raise no what if someone that was hyper strategic came along they did not shaking no they did actually yeah if someone culturally aligned with you and could help get your product into the hands of more creators and you like the deal terms you'd still be opposed to you'd still be opposed to taking outside capital so let me this is the way that i'm looking at it i see a very comfortable like i kind of see a decent path for the next couple of years to get to the 10 million ar and i think there's a very good possibility we're going to get there and we're going to get relatively efficiently um you know now it's not the right time we haven't literally our head of growth hasn't even started yet we haven't even started doubling down our acquisition channels like once we do that i'm going to feel really comfortable um yeah i just feel like it's too early it's just way too early like what if so here's one thing here's what i'm gonna make capitals not gonna make us grow any faster right now i can't see that happening and in terms of acquisition if we were to understand that now it's way too early unless the revenue multiplier is really really good right well okay so so at all fairness i think you're missing like a critical point though what if someone that came along that could be your head of growth but is already wealthy and has had success so you can't hire them you could not get their strategic thing without letting them write a check to invest in the company so then you're essentially not even paying them a salary they wrote you a check to invest and they over time actually become your full-time head of growth why don't founders in your stage ever think about the fact that letting someone put in money is a much cheaper way to get very smart talent on your team i completely agree i've emailed garyvee like 50 times no he's not going to be your head of growth he's like he's not yeah i think i think way that i the way that i think about this um is like the people that you're talking about um they've already done it right they don't want to do it again they might want to do it again but we need to find the people who are going to step into their shoes who is going to be the next dot dot dot and like i actually think we've been very successful at finding and hiring those people and i do hire them why hire them though and hit your hit your head count expense why not find someone like that and let them invest and then they'll do it for free because you let them invest i don't know who these people are that you're talking about but i'd love to know who they are you look at head of growth at garyvee not gary vee but the head of you look at everyone who's in the head fourth and fifth so they had a graphic card it's a multi-billion dollar company why would they leave why would they leave canva and join you you have to find people that are like just below that right where where they see your growth they see the incentive structure and they get something from you that they can't get at canada or at vaynermedia so i think we've i think that i think like um yeah i know i get i get what you're saying but i i feel i feel i feel good about who we've just got as our head of growth and has been trained by the best so yeah sorry my question though you're missing my my question is why don't founders in your shoes when i say would you take capital from a strategic partner the answer is we're not we don't want an acquisition and we're too early they people never think about investors as free labor which is i think a very smart way to think about i mean look at how buffer grew they took twenty thousand dollars from 150 influencers right like that was their growth channel um yeah i mean so we could go around in circles about this all day i suppose um but i think you know i think great that worked for buffer but i think we've got a good growth channel at the moment it's working super well like i mean like do i want to put more fuel on the fight yes like but i'm not i'm maybe i'm just not in a position where or we're in a position that we need to do it i don't know i i'm happy to look more into it definitely but i just that opportunity hasn't come about and it yeah yeah no makes good sense i'm just i'm pushing you to just get in your head more that's all right no i think i think that's i think i think it's a fair point but i haven't been proposing that opportunity and i don't know who those people would be and i haven't come across it but i'm sure if i did and it looked like an incredible opportunity then i would 100 snap their hand off and take that yeah are folks sticky once they join what's that what's the turn look like uh churn is about 13 so you know much higher than a normal sas company should we say but you know like the way that we think about this is um is you work in a marketing department you get asked to subtitle the video or clip a webinar or whatever you come on you do the job you pay and then you leave right and actually i'm going to put our chair messages on our website as testimonials because i think they're really good and you know we're happy with people using it once but the reactivation rates are great so they come back you know so why do you choose to measure churn then on a monthly basis if they always come back why not measure it on an annual basis and measure it as do they create at least 10 videos per year on the platform yeah i mean i suppose you're right i am but it's just because we haven't been like super super data driven on this sort of stuff um but yeah i mean like churn i mean i'm comfortable with people using it just for one video and i think there's enough people staying and there's enough people coming back that i feel like it's pretty healthy yeah um yeah you're talking 13 per month right so about how you turn through your entire customer base each year about 150 annual return no we retain about 30 percent so the people that first joined a year ago we got about 30 percent of that first cohort still on got it got it got it so so really what's happening here is you have 70 drops exactly exactly you your top of funnel is so wide you're getting some people that only just come and use it once and fall out but for people that signed up a year ago and stuff you have about 70 retention or sorry 70 churn 30 retained yeah exactly yeah very interesting are you doing any experiments that's that that's stacking up as well so like you know the the product we had a year ago is not what we have now right so that's we can see that cohort by cohort getting much much better yep um besides your watermark on videos are you doing any sort of other tactics to drive growth paid marketing anything like that no we haven't been paid um maybe that's something we experiment with in the future um mainly content seo um you know as i said building out this sort of like jobs to be done framework where you know people have a job we just need to intercept them we also have a we're doing really nice stuff on youtube at the moment alec incredible he's been making youtube video for us every single day for like four months who is alec alec oh he's incredible um he googled social media jobs in london and we were the first link apparently and uh he's been making a one youtube video for us on our youtube channel every day [Music] see him um he's full-time on the team yeah yeah interesting so so i see like when he posted five days ago how to screen record a specific window or entire thing has gotten 55 views he's extremely consistent though i'm putting these things up and great great with the thumbnails yeah this is super interesting so i mean would you credit the youtube to one of your number one acquisition channels uh i believe it will be yeah and i i the other thing that's super interesting about youtube is like we're we're getting the number zero spot on google with it right and we've been experimenting with how to do that and it's just super powerful especially when a lot of the search terms are at video it's very natural to show a video you know for google in that in that space yeah good stuff captioning those videos as well and putting those segments in it also resolves search terms as well and they can google can give you the perfect part of the video which is great too yeah let's uh let's wrap up here uh with the famous five number one favorite business book uh i read seven powers recently which is the foundation of business strategy which is a very good one about defensibility and you know thinking strategically about your business all right we will we will wrap up without saba i'm not sure what happened there guys but you just learned about the dot i o again a company that's passed 1.3 million bucks in arr they have over 5 500 customers helping people quickly create audiograms for their podcasts for marketing purposes continuing to scale totally bootstrap team of 20 today one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take 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