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Wavve: making $76k a month turning podcasts into videos
- alharith 7y agoJust watching the marketing materials and presentation once again highlights just how important marketing is. Well done on that front.
- anitil 7y agoHaving been in a few failing businesses I can tell you that marketing and sales are _the_ core reason tech (maybe also non-tech) businesses fail. Fundamentally you can do without code, but you can't do without sales. I have a lot of respect for sales people and people who can market themselves. One of my favorite videos about this is by a bodybuilder/powerlifter Stan Efferding [1] - he is some sort of marketing savant, with a product that I think is kind of silly, but he can market the hell out of it. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFhe8yHKdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFhe8yHKdY
- smabie 7y agoYeah the product is kinda dumb (or not, what do I know), but his attitude and mindset is spot on. I've met a lot of smart people with great ideas but they don't have the growth mindset and the perfect combination of both irrational optimism combined with realism, if that makes sense.
- alharith 7y agoThanks for showing me this. This isn't silly, this is awesome! Just what a serious gym goer needs!
- _curious_ 7y ago"I can tell you that marketing and sales are _the_ core reason tech (maybe also non-tech) businesses fail." Could not agree more, especially underestimated by the vast majority of devs turned entrepreneur. But you don't have to be that statistic - get a complimentary cofounder/partner/outsource if it's not your passion.
- paulie_a 7y agoThat entire article seems like the same person doing the questions and answers "What makes you so resilient against failure and so damn charming?" But seriously I dont take issue with the concept of those kind of conversions, the problem I have is they tend muddy search results.
- darkwizard42 7y agoHuh? There are no sorts of leading/praising questions like that in the article. If anything, I found the questions to be very generic and templatized - which again isn't a bad thing and seems to fit the profile of the overall site (a resource for young startups/curious entrepreneurs) The questions (for those who won't click through): "What's your background, and what are you currently working on?" "What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?" "How did you build Wavve?" "Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business?" "What are your goals for the future?" "What were the biggest challenges you faced and obstacles you overcame?" "Which are your greatest disadvantages? What were your worst mistakes?" "If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do?"
- paulie_a 7y agoThe questions were soft even for little league. most interviews are marketing pieces, but this might as well been an infomercial. But at the end of day there is no innovation.
- cstrahan 7y agoWhat are some examples of questions you would like to see?
- _curious_ 7y ago...and what's wrong with a commercial for a proven successful saas in a world of fail+noise...suggesting you can't learn something from it? Or are we to assume you commercial efforts are well exceeding $76k mrr?
- soheil 7y agoI made a similar website here inspired by wavve https://0work.co https://0work.co
- marknadal 7y agoWow, even better / awesome! Thank you!
- vincentmarle 7y agoI like this one a lot better, thanks for sharing.
- Gys 7y agoCool company name!
- tasuki 7y agoIf you wouldn't mind me asking, what's your revenue? Follow-up question: what most likely makes for the difference in revenues between 0work and Wavve?
- Farbklex 7y agoI really miss a preview / demo here. With wavve, I instantly see how the shared clip will look like. I can even scroll down to the social media links and see a lot of examples directly in instagram / twitter / facebook.
- soheil 7y agoAdded a demo on the homepage.
- unbalancedevh 7y agoI think your demo would be a lot more enticing if you fix the captioning. It flows poorly, omits critical words, and has spelling and word choice errors.
- ornornor 7y agoI must be thick but... I have no idea what their product does after reading the interview. Can someone explain it for the rest of us?
- soheil 7y agoIt turns a podcast into a video with some animation and transcripts. I made a similar website here https://0work.co https://0work.co
- conjectures 7y agoThis is the missing description.
- crispyporkbites 7y agoDo you also make 77k/month with this? If not, why not? Genuine question.
- findjashua 7y agomarketing
- nickfogle 7y agoSure! Previously, podcasters and musicians didn't have a very engaging way to share audio on social media. We built Wavve so creators can easily convert audio files into a branded video with an animated waveform. Here's our Twitter and Instagram accounts with some examples of what's possible: https://www.instagram.com/getwavve https://www.instagram.com/getwavve https://twitter.com/wavve https://twitter.com/wavve
- wodenokoto 7y agoI did not catch what the animation was. I thought it maybe was some sort of power point swipes between images from the studio or something. That sounds tacky but I remember watching a clip from a Bill Burr podcast where he talked about super rich middle easterners bringing their gold Ferrari’s to London. It had a slide show super imposed with pictures of such cars in London and it Really helped bring the story to life.
- keiferski 7y agoThe actual website in question: https://wavve.co https://wavve.co
- marknadal 7y ago(no affiliation) https://www.headliner.app/ https://www.headliner.app/ will do this for free < videos/month.
- csunbird 7y agoThe side thinks I am using Chrome, while I am on Firefox
- teejmya 7y agoMy favorite podcast app (https://overcast.fm https://overcast.fm) does this, here's the creator's post about it: https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing
- bluthru 7y agoSimilar but with less features and free: https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing
- mlcrypto 7y agoNobody should be making 76k a month when millions of hard working Americans are barely making 1k a month /s
- saadalem 7y agoLol ?
- throwaway123x2 7y agoThey pay their taxes that which helps provide social safety for those Americans. Should they be paying more taxes? Probably. Vote someone in who will increase corporate taxes. Criticizing successful people isn't the answer.
- balls187 7y agoTheir business is making 76k in MRR. They state their profit margin is around 70-80%, and have 3 equity partners. Lets assume they split the profits as their earnings, and each partner makes exactly a 1/3. That would be about $20,000 a month (less taxes) or an annualized salary of approx $240,000. Which is very, very nice, but not worth spouting social change for.
- earthtobishop 7y agoI can't tell if you're trolling... Also I find it hard to believe that there are millions of Americans who barely make $1,000 a month.
- cstrahan 7y agoCheck out https://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/ https://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/ Plug in $12,000 as the annual income, and that'll tell you that 24% of U.S. workers made that or less in 2014. Looks like the number of full time U.S. workers in 2014 was 118.72 million: https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl... That works out to be 28 million U.S. workers making <= $1,000 per month. Considering that's excluding part time workers, that should be make the calculation fairly conservative. See also: https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in-wages https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in-wage... The specific numbers have changed in 6 years, but I don't find it all that unreasonable to suspect that there are many millions of U.S. citizens making less than $1,000 per month.
- unixhero 7y agoSounds nice... but Sigh, only iOS?
- Veen 7y agoIt’s a one-man effort (Marco Arment). It’s not reasonable to expect him to develop for multiple platforms.
- snazz 7y agoThe market for indie apps is far better on Apple devices in general. More people are willing to pay for an ad free, nicely integrated app than on Android.
- alexbanks 7y agoSource?
- bnchrch 7y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/apple-users-spend-twice-apps-vs-android-charts-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-users-spend-twice-apps...
- kick 7y ago"App Store made almost twice as much as Google Play in 2018" https://www.cultofmac.com/601492/app-store-google-play-revenue-2018/ https://www.cultofmac.com/601492/app-store-google-play-reven... Market Share 2018 Android 85.1% iOS 14.9% https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os
- willmacdonald 7y agoAs for paid versions of Monument Valley, sales from the iTunes App Store far outpace sales on other marketplaces. Purchases on iOS account for 73 percent of Ustwo's $14.4 million of revenue, while only 17 percent of that total revenue came from Google Play. https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/20/11724058/monument-valley-sales-revenue-download-numbers-ustwo-games https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/20/11724058/monument-valley-s...
- uzername 7y agoInspired by the Overcast variant of this kind of tool, I built a very basic browser based version using canvas and various web audio/video apis. It was fun to build over a couple weekends, but it ended up not being usable broadly due to speed (runs in realtime linear) and browser limitations of file export types (webm in chrome). If ffmpeg could reliably run in wasm, there could be alternative approaches. I concluded after I built it, I should make a headless non-browser version and it would be more usable, but haven't gotten around to it.
- mslev 7y agoI spent a day or two last week trying to get ffmpeg.js working and it was nothing but headaches. If you had more luck I'd love to learn some details. My use case: trim and append multiple (4+) MP4s in the browser into one continuous video.
- blinky1456 7y agoI wonder if it is possible to make a simple version to run entirely in the frontend, for short clips? You can capture video and download it from canvas: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/10/capture-stream https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/10/capture-st... And it looks possible to add separate audio to it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39302814/mediastream-capture-canvas-and-audio-simultaneously https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39302814/mediastream-cap.... You could also recreate the waveforms and add to the canvas: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Visualizations_with_Web_Audio_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A..., Not widely supported, but you could try to add speech recognition too https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API/Using_the_Web_Speech_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...
- soheil 7y agoProbably possible, but what would be the advantage? I know for instance using something like Google Speech to Text API is a lot more accurate than Web Speech API.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwqwerty 7y agoGod that's impressive. takeaway: make products for people that use computers but don't know how to use suites of tools.
- jonshariat 7y agoAutomate their pipeline, save them loads of time and open it up to more people.
- jcytong 7y agoMaybe your takeaway is right but there's also a huge piece that wasn't captured in your one-liner "We lost about 2 years of our time and $30k of my savings (which was most of it). " "Getting those first 10/100+ customers was really hard. We relied primarily on direct outreach via cold email and social media messaging to obtain those first customers. Taking the time to reach out directly to customers for a $7/month plan was painful"
- throwqwerty 7y agothat's because all of that goes without saying (since I assume that the typical hn reader already knows about 1. pivots being costly 2. the early adopter grind). those points aren't key features of their succuss either because every startup experiences those pains.
- mikekchar 7y agoOr you could look at it another way. Perhaps there are many, many that would be successful if only you can get past the first obstacles. The success may be less due to it being a good idea and more to do with overcoming the obstacles. I often wonder how things would be viable businesses if you were good at grinding.
- throwqwerty 7y ago>I often wonder how things would be viable businesses if you were good at grinding. you should go ask a miller.
- hpen 7y agoI was thinking maybe they used Deep-fakes to "turn podcasts into videos" haha
- Denzel 7y agoSemi-rhetorical question: why do customers accept something like this delivered in SaaS form? It seems so antithetical to customer obsession when this is the exact type of problem that lends itself well to a locally running application. Why not deliver this as a desktop application that users download and pay for one-time? There’s absolutely no need for an ongoing subscription to a backend service here. Outside of rent-seeking.
- autonoshitbox 7y agoCustomers are typically stupid, cash-rich and easily exploited.
- stallmanite 7y agoSounds like you are really good at finding customers.
- autonoshitbox 6y agoCorrect.
- oDot 7y agoThe explanation is that this is probably the best offering they're aware of, and whatever the price is, it's less than the value they receive.
- jcytong 7y agoMaybe you can do it and compete with them?
- lotsofpulp 7y ago> Why not deliver this as a desktop application that users download and pay for one-time? Because when given the option, sellers usually choose more money than less money. Anyone is welcome to create a competing product and take their margins.
- 7y ago
- autonoshitbox 7y agoLove to see brain genius programmers charging money for a Fourier transform of some audio.
- viklove 7y ago76k mrr with some contractors, this guy is printing money and I'm very jealous.
- smabie 7y agoUnfortunately, making a lot of money with software and the technical complexity of said software are weakly correlated. Or maybe it's a good thing because it means a stupid simple idea can make you a millionaire
- pjc50 7y agoThey're enabling a lot of people to do something they couldn't do otherwise. And they've convinced those people to give them money to do it for them. The most core form of a specialised business.
- person_of_color 7y agoThat is insane revenue <3
- sidwyn 7y agoBaird is an amazing person. I've had the chance of talking to him and seeking advice while building out my own podcasting platform (https://kyrie.fm https://kyrie.fm), and he's given invaluable feedback to younger, budding entrepreneurs. Great job Baird and team! Hope to see the platform grow even larger.
- Mirioron 7y agoI made something like this once for a podcast. FFMPEG is a godsend. Essentially I took a video (could just be the logo image made into a video) and looped it to the length of the audio track. Essentially it just called ffmpeg with the right parameters. The process only took a few moments and gave me a video I could upload to YouTube. Back then I was really surprised that I couldn't find a service like this. Had I found one I probably would've used it.
- xwdv 7y agoI got a question, clearly a SaaS like this can easily be a desktop application if someone wanted to make one. When your business starts making real money, at what point are you forced to start buying out these standalone apps so that your business model isn’t threatened?
- simplesimon1 7y agoInteresting how so many startups get a break by effectively email spamming (or “cold calling” as they refer to it). I’ve seen this a lot in stories like these as a way to get started and gain initial traction.
- throwqwerty 7y agoit's called outbound sales. there's no "big break" there. literally everyone does it.
- eric_khun 7y agoQuestion related to video encoding: We are spending quite a bit of money on Amazon ElasticTranscoder for video encoding. Wondering if anyone had experience or advices to selfhost that kind of service? Any project I should consider for a proof of concept?
- trevyn 7y agoA script that calls ffmpeg? What exactly are your needs?
- dodobirdlord 7y agoElastic Transcoder is hilariously expensive. And in traditional Amazon fashion, is just a roundabout way to call ffmpeg. You would almost certainly be better off bundling ffmpeg into a Lambda function, and you would almost certainly be best off with an EC2 instance, two S3 buckets for the input/output, and an SQS work queue. Check out https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-ffmpeg https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-ffmpeg.
- tallgiraffe 7y agoExactly what I was looking for lately. Thank you!
- ackbar03 7y agoI didn't realize there was such a strong demand for this kind of service. How does one go about knowing there is a market for things like these? I assume you also need to be somewhat involved in podcasting in this case?
- quezzle 7y agoWhy do people reveal this stuff? Seriously there’s lots of people happy to clone it and get a bite.
- bingojess 7y agoAnd also getting all the critical comments
- wastedhours 7y agoThere's probably more people who see a successful product in a space (thus social proofing the brand) and want to pay to use it than those who will actually pull their finger out and build a competitor.
- _curious_ 7y ago"There's probably more people who see a successful product in a space (thus social proofing the brand) and want to pay to use it than those who will actually pull their finger out and build a competitor." Of course there are, in fact I drove a few customers to them based on this post! Never heard of the service before and it looks interesting in the right setting. However, it only takes 1 or 2 determined competitive efforts to start taxing your saas business even in small ways that only make life harder. Is showing your hand worth the trade-offs? That's up to each individual to answer. I know entrepreneurs / developers sitting on both sides of this table - doing the copying and being copied. Way of the road.
- Axsuul 7y agoMy take on this is if the market is big, it's not going to matter anyways since large markets will naturally attract competitors based on the amount of people screaming for solutions. If it's a niche however, you're probably best keeping to yourself about it. One caveat is if your target market is entrepreneurs then being open about it might help differentiate yourself from competitors.
- 7y ago