Veed

Saba Kanajad came from an unconventional background—art school, creative technology, advertising agencies, and branding work. Unlike typical SaaS founders with deep domain expertise, Saba simply "liked" video and found himself naturally gravitating toward the space. This wasn't a burning pain point or a market analysis; it was genuine interest. The co-founder dynamic also stands out: Saba and Tim split equity 50-50, and the two have clearly defined roles—Saba as CEO handling strategy and Tim as CTO owning technical decisions. "If you're doing it right, someone usually has a little more or a little less," Saba said, then immediately qualified: "Actually, I'm a massive component for being 50-50. You have roles in a company. Someone's CEO, someone's the CTO... fundamentally, you know, I think we're aligned."

The company was technically launched two years before the interview, but Saba and Tim went full-time and started charging just 14 months prior—with zero revenue at the time. They had 4-5 months of runway saved up, which created urgency but not panic. "I'm single, I don't have a mortgage, I'm relatively young. I can get contract work if I need to, relatively quickly," Saba explained. "The thing that we're more scared about was getting to profitability super quick, so we didn't have to go back to our jobs." That fear drove focus. They built a product with an elegant onboarding: no email gate, no signup friction. Users could immediately upload a video and start editing. This "show value first" approach meant roughly 60% of daily visitors (6,000 out of 10,000) actually uploaded a video, and about 80 new customers converted daily.

Veed's growth strategy focused on understanding customer jobs-to-be-done rather than obsessing over conversion funnels. "We're not like super, super data driven on funnels and conversions. We spend most of our time talking to our users, understanding what their jobs to be done is," Saba said. The use cases became clear: governments and educational institutions needed subtitling for accessibility; podcasters wanted to turn audio into short "audiograms" for social media; marketers needed to repurpose long-form content into snippets for LinkedIn and other platforms. This diverse user base meant no single acquisition channel mattered—multiple paths led to the product.

Veed's primary growth engine became content marketing and SEO. They hired Alec, who discovered Veed by searching "social media jobs in London" and finding them at the top of Google results. Now Alec posts a YouTube video every single day to the Veed Studio channel, covering topics like "how to auto-subtitle a video" or "screen recording." These videos are doing more than generating views—they're capturing Google's featured snippet position ("number zero spot") for search terms like "auto subtitle video." YouTube videos also get automatically captioned and indexed, creating a virtuous cycle where the content serves both human viewers and search engines.

Paid advertising? Not yet. Veed's monetization relied on the watermark strategy: free users could edit unlimited videos but had a watermark on exports. For businesses, influencers, or serious creators, removing the watermark became a no-brainer at $15-$30/month. With 5,500 customers and an average revenue per user of about $22.50/month, this model was working.

What surprised Saba: monthly churn of 13% sounds high, but it's misleading. Many customers use Veed for one specific job (subtitle a video, clip a webinar) then leave—but reactivation rates were excellent. Looking at yearly cohorts, about 30% of customers from a year prior were still active, meaning the pattern was a first-month cliff followed by a stable base.

Two months before the interview, Veed hit $1M ARR. By the time of this conversation, they'd grown to $1.3M ARR. The team had just crossed 20 people (50% engineers, including Tim). Profitability came early: the founders reinvest about 30% of profits back into product, hiring, and content. They'd always paid themselves a modest $2,000/month and saw no need to increase that even at $1.3M ARR. "We're more than happy with that," Saba said.

When asked about raising capital, Saba declined repeatedly. Nathan Latka pushed hard: "Why not find someone strategic and let them invest? That's free labor." Saba's answer was pragmatic: "I see a decent path for the next couple of years to get to the 10 million ARR. And I think there's a very good possibility we're going to get there relatively efficiently... it's way too early. Capital is not going to make us grow any faster right now." He hadn't even fully staffed a head of growth yet. The YouTube experiment was just gaining steam. The acquisition channels hadn't been doubled down on. To him, raising would be premature.

Veed's story is one of staying lean, staying focused, and finding one defensible channel (content + SEO + YouTube) that compounds month over month. No paid ads. No venture capital. No pressure. Just consistent, profitable growth from a product that solves a real problem for creators.