To win customers, we need Kapwing to show up at the top of Google results for queries like this:
Organic discovery on Google was definitely our most powerful acquisition channel, and all ten of our first customers found us after searching for "meme maker" or the like. Most things didn't work.Įven though Eric and I both used to work on Google Search, we were basically clueless about the importance of SEO until we started promoting our own startup. We tried cold outreach, paid advertising, social media, getting press, leveraging our networks, and offering discounts. How have you attracted users and grown Kapwing?Īfter we launched the paywall, we shifted from development to growth mode and brainstormed ways that we could grow our traffic and revenue. Once we felt good about the product, we built a paywall with Stripe and started charging users to remove the "" watermark in the corner of videos. We added a Drift chatbot to the website to help us catch usability holes and bugs. Based on their feedback (which we solicited over email), we iterated and added features like a font selector, watermark editor, and trimmer. Our first few users loved the meme maker. The MVP cost about $50/month, including costs to buy the domain, rent the server, and host the website.
#Kapwing gif maker download
Users could upload a video, add text, and download a meme. We launched the bare-bones product online by emailing these subscribers and the initial site's power users. (We ended up with ~100 initial addresses from our "email subscribe" box.)
We bought the domain on Namecheap, paid someone on Fiverr to make the logo, and put up a landing page while we were developing to product to get a few email addresses from interested early adopters. Kapwing is a pretty simple React web app, and it took us about three weeks to build. What went into building the initial product? So we rebuilt the old site from scratch, and Kapwing was born. was pretty high, despite there being very few web apps to help people make them. But eventually these users' encouragement and enthusiasm pulled us back to Kapwing.įrom research on Google Trends, we found that the query volume for "video meme maker", "meme generator", etc. These raving fans said that they loved the site and used it every day, some for work and some for personal channels.Īt the time, I had just left Google, and the two of us were working on other ideas.
#Kapwing gif maker Offline
When he took the meme maker offline this summer, several users wrote us urgently asking for us to bring it back. But just a couple months later, he had to shut it down because it was losing him money. Several months ago, he built a website that let users make these memes for free. This year, we noticed that video memes - with black or white caption bars around the video - seem to be eating our news feeds and surging in popularity.Įric got the idea for Kapwing when he tried making a video meme in iMovie and discovered that, despite the trend, making it on his computer was a huge pain. We're both heavy Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter users. What motivated you to get started with Kapwing? We are bootstrapping, living off of our savings, and building everything ourselves from a couple of spare desks in a friend's office. We stayed in touch, and in July I decided to leave Google to join him.
He was one year above me in Google's APM program and left after two years to build his own projects from scratch.
#Kapwing gif maker free
Our customers include marketing agencies, brands like Chubbies, social media influencers, small business owners, and casual creators, and we have hundreds of free users and thousands of memes on the platform.Įric and I met as associate product managers at Google. Now, Kapwing has more than 20 subscribed customers and brings in over $240/month in revenue. We launched Kapwing about two months ago and added a paywall a month later. Kapwing is free to use, but customers pay to remove a small watermark that appears in the corner. Right now, it has three features: a modern meme maker, a trendy sound effects editor, and an online video resizer.įrom both desktop and mobile, users can upload their video, add text and effects, and download the output. Kapwing is an online toolbox for short-form video. My co-founder Eric and I are building an online video editor called Kapwing. Hi! I'm Julia, and I'm a 24-year-old web developer and first-time entrepreneur living in San Fransisco. Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?
0 kommentar(er)
