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If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its alre

If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing you can do is to make service completely free. Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. Focus on adoption, not revenue. Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. Focus on buyout by big players because ultimately they have the platforms with millions of users where you can provide far more value. Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.

rbinv 6y ago
Sounds like that would evolve to become Google AdSense for your home office.
lawlorino 6y ago
According to the FAQ this only works with prerecorded video, not live video.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage. Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials. Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap). The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
- sytelus 6y ago
  There is a lot of negativity in your response without even deluding to what's really wrong with the advice. There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. You are entitled to your opinion and frankly we are all armchair pundits here, however, it's bad form to spew out so much negativity without any reasoning or even alternative.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    Yeah I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe my reply broke my own rule of giving advice without a personal story. Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end. I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
  - abraae 6y ago
    > Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. Actually nowhere in your original post do you include this "not claiming to be an expert" disclaimer. As a result, when I read your original post, I assumed that perhaps you were an expert as there was no self-doubt at all evident. I think perhaps that's what the allegedly negative post that you are responding to is getting at.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    >There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project). However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder. >Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.
onion2k 6y ago
The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
- abraae 6y ago
  The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.
    - epanchin 6y ago
      Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.
      - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
        > people are very willing to spend money on their video calls. MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
    - addandsubtract 6y ago
bioipbiop 6y ago
There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.
- mattigames 6y ago
  Would this be a good candidate for P2P? As what if your computer GPU could be used by other app's users to do a small part of such heavy operation? (when your GPU is not doing anything else)
  - theon144 6y ago
    Latency.
- Roritharr 6y ago
  Can you elaborate more? What are the approaches?
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Not OP, and not in this field, so do some more research, I am just sharing what I found: https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction
- maktouch 6y ago
  I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam (https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam)
  - atombender 6y ago
    Anything like this for macOS?
NicoJuicy 6y ago
Pre-existing example: Snapchat has an app to apply filters in webcams
ponker 6y ago
The quality level here is way beyond what Zoom has or needs. This is a professional tool for creative pros — knocking out an image background is too easy but video is a real challenge. And this kind of work at this resolution would be prohibitively expensive to do for live video ... you’d need a Titan RTX or similar.
codethief 6y ago
> I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. Have you tried https://www.remove.bg https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though. [EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701
- groe 6y ago
  We've built Unscreen on top of the tech of remove.bg, at least partly, and the #1 design goal for both products is a high result quality. We've summarized a few of the improvements recently here, if you're curious: https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2 https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2
- htrp 6y ago
  remove bg/unscreen are pretty much cool ML applications looking for a market
bitL 6y ago
This looks like it's targeting pros like me who need to remove background from high-quality videos. The price is completely OK.
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
My rule of thumb for advice on the Internet is that if it is mostly in the form of statements like "You need to do X, Y and Z" and has very few questions intended to dig deeper into the nuances of the product and business model... then it's not generally worth much at face value. Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  haha you said what i wanted to say in a way more concise way. nice one
dividuum 6y ago
> Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
jchook 6y ago
Reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work. He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards: 1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis. 2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”). 3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn. 4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat. Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning. Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive. It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
- bitL 6y ago
  The price and business model is perfectly fine: 1) most pros use green screens for background removal 2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed 3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually 4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  Also recommend "The Mom Test".
Hydraulix989 6y ago
Right, this seems like a feature, not a product -- and it's not difficult to replicate. ML is becoming more and more of a commodity these days.
isochronous 6y ago
The very first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't "ooh, cool tech for voice chat", it was "man, the special effects industry will KILL for this - no more manually going through every frame of an effects shot and painstakingly removing background elements!" So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
manmal 6y ago
I don’t think it’s feasible to do this level of processing in real-time _for free_.

rbinv 6y ago

Sounds like that would evolve to become Google AdSense for your home office.

lawlorino 6y ago

According to the FAQ this only works with prerecorded video, not live video.

bergstromm466 6y ago

> Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage. Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials. Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap). The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.

sytelus 6y ago
There is a lot of negativity in your response without even deluding to what's really wrong with the advice. There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. You are entitled to your opinion and frankly we are all armchair pundits here, however, it's bad form to spew out so much negativity without any reasoning or even alternative.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  Yeah I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe my reply broke my own rule of giving advice without a personal story. Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end. I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
- abraae 6y ago
  > Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. Actually nowhere in your original post do you include this "not claiming to be an expert" disclaimer. As a result, when I read your original post, I assumed that perhaps you were an expert as there was no self-doubt at all evident. I think perhaps that's what the allegedly negative post that you are responding to is getting at.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  >There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project). However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder. >Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.

onion2k 6y ago

The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.

abraae 6y ago
The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?
- onion2k 6y ago
  I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.
  - epanchin 6y ago
    Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.
    - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
      > people are very willing to spend money on their video calls. MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
  - addandsubtract 6y ago

bioipbiop 6y ago

There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.

mattigames 6y ago
Would this be a good candidate for P2P? As what if your computer GPU could be used by other app's users to do a small part of such heavy operation? (when your GPU is not doing anything else)
- theon144 6y ago
  Latency.
Roritharr 6y ago
Can you elaborate more? What are the approaches?
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Not OP, and not in this field, so do some more research, I am just sharing what I found: https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction
maktouch 6y ago
I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam (https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam)
- atombender 6y ago
  Anything like this for macOS?

NicoJuicy 6y ago

Pre-existing example: Snapchat has an app to apply filters in webcams

ponker 6y ago

The quality level here is way beyond what Zoom has or needs. This is a professional tool for creative pros — knocking out an image background is too easy but video is a real challenge. And this kind of work at this resolution would be prohibitively expensive to do for live video ... you’d need a Titan RTX or similar.

codethief 6y ago

> I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. Have you tried https://www.remove.bg https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though. [EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701

groe 6y ago
We've built Unscreen on top of the tech of remove.bg, at least partly, and the #1 design goal for both products is a high result quality. We've summarized a few of the improvements recently here, if you're curious: https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2 https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2
htrp 6y ago
remove bg/unscreen are pretty much cool ML applications looking for a market

bitL 6y ago

This looks like it's targeting pros like me who need to remove background from high-quality videos. The price is completely OK.

CathedralBorrow 6y ago

My rule of thumb for advice on the Internet is that if it is mostly in the form of statements like "You need to do X, Y and Z" and has very few questions intended to dig deeper into the nuances of the product and business model... then it's not generally worth much at face value. Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.

bergstromm466 6y ago
haha you said what i wanted to say in a way more concise way. nice one

dividuum 6y ago

> Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.

jchook 6y ago

Reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work. He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards: 1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis. 2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”). 3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn. 4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat. Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning. Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive. It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.

bitL 6y ago
The price and business model is perfectly fine: 1) most pros use green screens for background removal 2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed 3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually 4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
cvhashim 6y ago
Also recommend "The Mom Test".

Hydraulix989 6y ago

Right, this seems like a feature, not a product -- and it's not difficult to replicate. ML is becoming more and more of a commodity these days.

isochronous 6y ago

The very first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't "ooh, cool tech for voice chat", it was "man, the special effects industry will KILL for this - no more manually going through every frame of an effects shot and painstakingly removing background elements!" So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.

manmal 6y ago

I don’t think it’s feasible to do this level of processing in real-time _for free_.