Semi-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.
A subscription as opposed to an upfront one time payment allows them to pay on a timescale that more accurately reflects the value they are receiving. This is generally a good thing.
Renting is often exactly what businesses want to do. They have better uses for their money than pre-purchasing all of their future expenses. They rent office space, lease cars, pay salaries fortnightly instead of at the start of the year, pay for their inventory not only as they receive it rather than in advance, but often on terms of credit. Software doesn't have a reason to be an exception to this. If I can pay $X now or $X spread over a number of years, I'm going to pick the latter.
The payment terms of a product are effectively part of the product itself. I'm in sales and I've won and lost deals against comparatively priced competitors on the basis that my/their pricing schedule better matched what the prospect wanted.
I took renting to mean just ongoing payments by the way. If you meant rent seeking as in the concept in economics then 1. this isn't it and 2. using IP law to prop up the value of locally installable software would be a closer example of it than doing so by keeping some of the code under your own control is.
With this specific product, I would argue that being OS and desktop independent is actually a feature. I can imagine that a significant amount of the users might even upload the videos to their social media profiles from their phone.
The choice is between maintaining 2 mobile apps + a desktop app that is compatible with macOS and Windows and maintaining a single webapp.
It looks to me like the video isn't "trapped" in their app - in fact it's intended to be uploaded elsewhere? So once you've used it, you only need to continue paying if you're continuing to use it.
That's the opposite of rent-seeking, that's .. charging money for a service.
One-time fee means that you pay more money upfront. Plus you have to install it, which is both a security issue and unnecessary hassle if you don't like it and need to uninstall it. If you change your machine you need to reinstall the app. If you need it from more than one location (home, office) you need to pay for more licenses. Support is way more complicated for desktop apps. And then next year they release a new version of the app, and you need to pay for the upgrade, so it's pretty much the same dynamics as annual subscription.
To me the easiest answer is that they are leveraging FFMPEG which is GPL. If they had embedded it in a mobile or desktop application they would have had to release it as open source.
The main point people make about differentiating your digital product is to not compete on price. A lower price means less money for advertising and marketing, so a losing proposition.
What you're proposing with the one-time upfront fee model is to compete on price, so smart entrepreneurs steer clear of that model.
I 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.
Maybe 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"
Sure! 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:
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.
If 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?
They'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.
I 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?
Baird 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), and he's given invaluable feedback to younger, budding entrepreneurs. Great job Baird and team! Hope to see the platform grow even larger.
Having 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.
Question 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?
Elastic 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.
I 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?
Inspired 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.
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.
[+] [-] teejmya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Denzel|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|6 years ago|reply
1. It still provides more value than the monthly subscription.
2. People have shown a greater willingness to pay for ongoing features and support in a SAAS model than in other formats.
3. It better aligns with the costs of support and maintenance that the provider needs to provide.
4. It's less risky for the consumer to get started.
5. There's no piracy or people decompiling your app and putting it out under their own name.
6. No updates to fiddle with and works across machines.
Not all answers above directly apply to the podcast->video service here but these are the general reasons.
[+] [-] austhrow743|6 years ago|reply
Renting is often exactly what businesses want to do. They have better uses for their money than pre-purchasing all of their future expenses. They rent office space, lease cars, pay salaries fortnightly instead of at the start of the year, pay for their inventory not only as they receive it rather than in advance, but often on terms of credit. Software doesn't have a reason to be an exception to this. If I can pay $X now or $X spread over a number of years, I'm going to pick the latter.
The payment terms of a product are effectively part of the product itself. I'm in sales and I've won and lost deals against comparatively priced competitors on the basis that my/their pricing schedule better matched what the prospect wanted.
I took renting to mean just ongoing payments by the way. If you meant rent seeking as in the concept in economics then 1. this isn't it and 2. using IP law to prop up the value of locally installable software would be a closer example of it than doing so by keeping some of the code under your own control is.
[+] [-] oDot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobofan|6 years ago|reply
The choice is between maintaining 2 mobile apps + a desktop app that is compatible with macOS and Windows and maintaining a single webapp.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
That's the opposite of rent-seeking, that's .. charging money for a service.
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
I'm happy to do a free trial, and have it instantly accessible on all my devices that have a browser and etc.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] QuantumGood|6 years ago|reply
Your second (main?) point: "no need" / "rent-seeking" is addressed well by michaelbuckbee, particularly point #5.
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] register|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devinplatt|6 years ago|reply
Also maybe there could be automation with this service that saves time?
[+] [-] heliodor|6 years ago|reply
What you're proposing with the one-time upfront fee model is to compete on price, so smart entrepreneurs steer clear of that model.
[+] [-] jcytong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mirioron|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwqwerty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcytong|6 years ago|reply
"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"
[+] [-] jonshariat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ornornor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickfogle|6 years ago|reply
https://www.instagram.com/getwavve
https://twitter.com/wavve
[+] [-] soheil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blinky1456|6 years ago|reply
You can capture video and download it from canvas: 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-cap....
You could also recreate the waveforms and add to the canvas: 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_...
[+] [-] soheil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Farbklex|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tasuki|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vincentmarle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknadal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autonoshitbox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viklove|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ackbar03|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hpen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidwyn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alharith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anitil|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] eric_khun|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dodobirdlord|6 years ago|reply
Check out https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-ffmpeg.
[+] [-] trevyn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] uzername|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quezzle|6 years ago|reply
Seriously there’s lots of people happy to clone it and get a bite.
[+] [-] wastedhours|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bingojess|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplesimon1|6 years ago|reply
I’ve seen this a lot in stories like these as a way to get started and gain initial traction.
[+] [-] throwqwerty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] person_of_color|6 years ago|reply