π How VEED got traction and reached escape velocity
Corey Haines | Swipe Files
I loved this Reddit AMA with the founders of VEED on how they got initial traction. Here are some of the highlights... What is the top tactic you've deployed in the last 2 months as it relates to increasing MRR? There is nothing we have done differently in the last 2 months, we are just doubling down on what works... An example to be more specific, we have been posting one video to youtube every day for over a year, this is now a huge channel for us. As it has been successful, we now have a team of 4 creating out better content more frequently... We hired Alec, he was the 2nd growth hire we made after Diana. At this point, we were at 0.5M ARR. Alec had this incredible energy and wanted to build something cool and also learn more about youtube too. This is his first video and here is his most recent. He did an amazing job over the year and grew the channel to 15K Subs. This kinda comes back to what a lot of people say about "Hiring the best people possible" We were so lucky to find him. What was your approach to validating idea, what tactics did you use and what would you do differently in this area if you had a chance? PH launches provide pretty spiky traffic and that peak doesn't last for long, but it is enough to get your word out there. But some people will stick around and its enough to get a bit of momentum initially.
So, next we understood that most of competitors traffic came from SEO and we started going really heavy on SEO. Now our strategy was to get as many backlinks as possible. It's pretty much the same to this day actually. But this means -> we made lots of landing pages for every usecase that people googled and we could think of. E.g. 'add text to video', 'add image to video', etc.. Next we wrote blog posts, shared them on social media / popular websites with high domain authority all the while linking our landing pages to them. Same with Quora and reddit and other sites. We are still doing same stuff just at bigger scale.
And we kept doing all that while talking to users and responding to everything they wanted us to build.
In hindsight we should have started charging much earlier, because talking to users is how you validate your idea. and PAID users is where honest feedback is. But if you don't have users, do marketing.
How to market your product if you have zero skills for marketing? Talking from a developer perspective. Also had 0 marketing experience when we started. Marketing is not super hard, but marking blogs makes it seems like some sort of witch craft. In simple terms, if you have a video hosting site, you need to turn up in google for "Video hosting" Therefore you need need to make a web page "mysite.com/video-hosting" I call it "Make something people search for" How do you deal with competition? The video space is big and getting bigger. There is enough space for a few players here. But like I said above, we dont really think about competition. We just make sure we build the best product for our users.
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I don't think we 'deal' with competition so to speak or not directly :) We are aware of the trends and those trends are ultimately what users want, so if our users want that too, we build it for THEM, not to compete with some other company. Otherwise, we welcome competition, it helps us grow together. Sorry if it sounds cheesy but its kinda the truth Any tips on how to find a niche to develop a product towards? Get http://ahrefs.com/ for a week for 7$ and poke around with the keyword explorer.
For example, get this. the word "teleprompter" is searched over 130K times a month! Now give it a google and check out the top result! I mean come on, what an amazing opportunity. Therefore we are building one as part of VEED.
For more, go read How we got our first 200 paid users for our SaaS app. βCorey
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