My favorite podcast app (https://overcast.fm) does this, here's the creator's post about it: https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing

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.

Semi-rhetorical answer:

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.

I built and sold an installable application in the past, and #5 was brutal. For some reason it's rarely discussed.

I had a customer openly admit to me that they had been using a pirated version of my app until now.

Pretty crazy when you see your own app on torrent sites.

Exactly, a SaaS product is the ultimate DRM and it's socially acceptable. Make this a native app that needs always-on internet and customers who care about it being native will flip and eat your margins like a giant Pareto Pacman.

Making money allows you to invest. If you can't make money, the scope of what is possible is restricted to "what one guy can make as a hobby".

Not all problems are workable within that constraint.

For most people, money is a tool and not a goal.

Can you share some examples of how you've furthered humanity while living for free?

Can't you do both? Why should people be expected to work for free?

I thought the idea was that you were allowed to make money by furthering humanity?

I've spent a lot of time on my app and I still had to pay people to help do the app.

Until the UBI arrives I still have to work for money.

Isn't that implied if you charge money for your app?

Mind giving details on the product and experience? I’m interested.

If your app was a SaaS those people wouldn’t have paid for it anyway, they’d have signed up for the free trial then quit and signed up with a fresh email over and over.

The best thing you can do is identify them and segment them into beta / test updates for experimental features which you wouldn’t test on paying users.

I run a SaaS and in my case, this doesn't happen. Not only is it super annoying for the user but you lose all your data each time.

All fair points, a mix of which some focus on customer benefit and others on benefit to the business. Perhaps the motivation behind my question was wondering whether there’s an opportunity to eat SaaS margins with products that compete by changing the distribution, and whether there’s any market data to support that hypothesis.

1, 4, and 6 align with the customer. 4 could be alleviated even with a local application a la Sublime Text. I concede 6 is marginally easier to manage, but then again represents a con from the customer perspective in that the software they’re using could disappear at any time since they don’t own it.

JetBrains model seems to represent the best compromise to the customer here: subscription fee for constant updates and support, cancel anytime and keep your current version with no updates or support.

2, 3, 5 benefit the business, not the customer. In fact 3 is probably the most beneficial to the business in that cost of support and maintenance isn’t aligned, they’re decoupled! Hence the 70-80% margins this company is touting.

5 is brutal as csallen said, but then again there are counterpoints to this in that people will certainly pay and not pirate for the right experience: iTunes, Kindle, etc. even when the pirated versions are readily available.

I appreciate your response.

A eureka moment is realizing that customers interests are actually aligned with businesses being profitable. If the business provides the customer with something they want - and they usually do, if the customer is willing to pay them money at all - then it is in their best interest for the business to continue operating, which means it is in their interest for the business to have a profitable business model. This is part of why you see a bias toward big companies winning sales, even at a higher price point: there is less risk that they will go out of business and leave you in a lurch. It isn't actually in the customers interest for a business to barely or not at all be able to make ends meet, which is what your proposed business model has often led to.

I'm not disputing that customer interests are aligned with a business's profitability insomuch as they'll be around to continue to provide you the product or service you want. We agree here.

I'm simply wondering if there's a "your margin is my opportunity" play here where a company could devour SaaS companies by changing the distribution model. That's all. This thought has been banging around in my head for the past couple years due to a few data points, but I haven't had time to formally test the hypothesis.

That's all it is: a hypothesis that there's an opportunity here to change the distribution model to one that focuses on the customer and destroy a large number of SaaS models.

I think what you need to consider is how that opportunity looks different than the business models that SaaS overtook, and how it solves the problems that led to those models being overtaken. I'm sure SaaS isn't the last software business model we'll ever have, but your response to the list of questions read to me like it lacked understanding of why SaaS won the most recent battle.

Number two certainly benefits the consumer, speaking as a consumer. Back in the old days you had the choice of paying hundreds of dollars for some software, then hundreds more for the next version, then hundreds more for the next one and so on. And if you wanted to try it but wasn't sure you'd actually use it, you either had to pray there was a demo or pay the full price and deal with the consequences.

Microsoft Office, for example. $250 license cost every three years, or $99/year for the SaaS model. If you want to try it, you pay $10 for a month and if you don't like it you lost $10 rather than $250. And if you subscribe long term, the SaaS version's pricing is very much on par with the old style of selling software.

All of your concerns are alleviated with a simple return policy. (A customer-focused benefit.)

How much software have you bought that has a return policy? Darn near every software product I’ve ever bought specifically says there is no return policy after the license key has been entered.

Anytime a business model allows a company to profitably provide a product that a customer wants, its good for both the consumer and producer - barring negative externalities.

The alternative is the company going out of business and not providing the product or the company’s founders getting acqui-hired followed by a final “Our Amazing Journey” blog post before the product is cancelled.

> Anytime a business model allows a company to profitably provide a product that a customer wants, its good for both the consumer and producer

I never said anything to the contrary?

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.

The 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.

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.

I've kinda reached the point where I don't want to install anything... unless I'm 100% sure I want it.

I'm happy to do a free trial, and have it instantly accessible on all my devices that have a browser and etc.

> 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.

And buyers choose less money over more money.

The one time purchase could have been, let's say, $20, but if I want to use it a couple of times, paying $5 per month might be a better deal. And you're always getting the latest version

Customers "accept" an explanation of value vs. alternatives, which is largely marketing communication.

Your second (main?) point: "no need" / "rent-seeking" is addressed well by michaelbuckbee, particularly point #5.

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.

Cash flow? If it was a one time purchase they'd have to charge more upfront.

Also maybe there could be automation with this service that saves time?

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 like SaaS but one time has the advantage of being able to use more money on growth. So if you have your acquisition dialed in it can be advantageous to offer a larger annual or lifetime model.

Have to disagree with your conclusion, counterpoint being Jeff Bezos who maintains a number (a majority?) of business lines that compete on price.

Maybe you can do it and compete with them?

Customers are typically stupid, cash-rich and easily exploited.

Sounds like you are really good at finding customers.

Correct.

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.

God that's impressive. takeaway: make products for people that use computers but don't know how to use suites of tools.

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"

that'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.

Or 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.

I think most of the "overnight successes" are just stories where people look at the end results without point out the steps in the middle.

Outside of the few "lottery winners", most are grinders that didn't commit business suicide.

Major props for those who grind until they can share their tales.

Automate their pipeline, save them loads of time and open it up to more people.

I 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?

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:

https://www.instagram.com/getwavve

https://twitter.com/wavve

I 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.

Thanks. Do you generate the subtitles as well with text to speech or do the creators upload the transcript themselves?

> Wavve automatically generates a transcription of your audio and makes adding captions to generated videos a breeze.

It really doesn't. An experienced dev could recreate the core features in a web app within two weeks or less.

The more difficult part:

- Understanding the work that goes into making and releasing a podcast

- Figuring out that a step in the process is not being done efficiently

- Determining a balanced set of features whose delivery and maintenance cost is low enough that people in industry will benefit from paying for them

- Marketing your software to potential customers

- Convincing them that they will benefit from purchasing your software

- Maintaining the software to satisfy your customer base

- Exploring and releasing new features to stay ahead of your inevitable competition if the product is successful

- Taking the initial risk to start development

But everybody here knows that already.

Also want to chime in that just building the core features (or shall I say a very simplistic version of the core features assuming two weeks time) isn't going to make an app successful. Rather, it's handling the endless amount of edge cases and the different ways your customers will end up using your product.

$76k/mo sounds like quite a lot to me!

Sounds like the person to whom you're responding is talking about the development effort, not the revenue.

I can't say it's my best moment, but they were belittling OP's achievements so I was belittling their statement. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a joke, but I thought it might show a bit of support for OP

It turns a podcast into a video with some animation and transcripts. I made a similar website here https://0work.co

Do you also make 77k/month with this? If not, why not? Genuine question.

marketing

This is the missing description.

I 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-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_...

Probably 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.

The advantage is reduced server costs + more efficient use of computing resources in general. I personally am always happy to offload processing to the client side wherever possible.

For the user?

I made a similar website here inspired by wavve https://0work.co

I 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.

Added a demo on the homepage.

I 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.

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?

I like this one a lot better, thanks for sharing.

Cool company name!

Wow, even better / awesome! Thank you!

Love to see brain genius programmers charging money for a Fourier transform of some audio.

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.

76k mrr with some contractors, this guy is printing money and I'm very jealous.

Unfortunately, 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

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?

The actual website in question: https://wavve.co

I was thinking maybe they used Deep-fakes to "turn podcasts into videos" haha

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.

Just watching the marketing materials and presentation once again highlights just how important marketing is. Well done on that front.

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.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFhe8yHKdY

"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.

Yeah 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.

Thanks for showing me this. This isn't silly, this is awesome! Just what a serious gym goer needs!

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.

Check out https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-ffmpeg.

Exactly what I was looking for lately. Thank you!

A script that calls ffmpeg? What exactly are your needs?

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.

I 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.

Why do people reveal this stuff?

Seriously there’s lots of people happy to clone it and get a bite.

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.

"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.

> I know entrepreneurs / developers sitting on both sides of this table - doing the copying and being copied.

Exactly - if there's a successful business format, it wont stay a niche product without copycats forever. It's unlikely that showing your revenues will have any greater impact than being a number one featured product through any other route.

You can be copied if you stay silent and just do direct sales as well - if you're a company reliant on broad reach of a semi-technical, small-business (/revenue aspirational) audience, it seems like it's worth the risk.

My 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.

Totally. And depends on what the upside of signaling is? Some entrepreneurs like to drop their numbers so that they can generate competitive inbound finance or acquisition interest without having to shop round. It also attracts talent. Transparency can be an incredible powerful competitive advantage too.

And also getting all the critical comments

Interesting 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.

it's called outbound sales. there's no "big break" there. literally everyone does it.

That's pretty tiny revenue. It's about the turnover of a restaurant (pre-coronavirus).

Seems like there is very little overhead, so the profit must be huge unlike restaurants.

(no affiliation) https://www.headliner.app/ will do this for free < videos/month.

The side thinks I am using Chrome, while I am on Firefox

Similar but with less features and free: https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing

That 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.

Huh? 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?"

The 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.

...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?

What are some examples of questions you would like to see?