Veed.io

Sabah Kainajad was working as a creative at production companies in London when he noticed a massive bottleneck: social media managers were perfectly capable of creating and posting content, but when it came to video editing, they were stuck. They'd ask him repeatedly to add text to videos—a task that took minutes but required expensive, complex software like Adobe's suite. Around the same time, Sabah was experimenting with Giffy's simple editor for adding text to GIFs and thought: what if we built something like that, but for video, in the browser? When Tim graduated from university, they decided to go all in together.

The founders entered the Kings College London accelerator and quickly made a critical mistake: they thought their "simple online video editor" idea wasn't sexy enough to win grant funding, so they pivoted to "AI-powered automated editing for e-commerce fashion videos." It worked—they won every competition and accumulated about £50,000 in prize money, got flown to Dubai to present, and even secured desk space from a VC. But the complex idea didn't work. With about one month's runway left, they ripped out all the complexity, went back to the simple video editor, and launched on Product Hunt. By the time they ran out of money, the MVP was live with a few users.

Needing to survive, both founders went back to contracting work—Sabah during the day while Tim was still employed. They worked on the product in the mornings at 5 a.m., a brutal schedule that lasted months. By March 2019, they had 30,000 monthly users growing from 10 to 1,000 per day. Despite these impressive numbers, every investor they spoke to said, "Great founders, wrong time," and no one committed. Frustrated, they refocused on the product instead of fundraising. In June, they applied to Y Combinator as a long shot. After a phone interview and flying to Mountain View, they made it to the final round and both quit their jobs, convinced they were in.

The YC rejection came via email while they were on the staircase of their hotel: "Why are you not charging your users?" Rather than give up, Sabah and Tim saw it as a challenge. They spent the next 48 hours building payment infrastructure, login systems, and accounts. On Sunday night, they went live with a paywall—putting a watermark on videos unless users paid $5/month. "Instantly straight away, we got a paid user come through," Sabah recalled. Within 24 hours, they had 20 paying customers. They emailed YC asking them to reconsider, but got another rejection. However, they left with something more valuable than funding: proof of product-market fit.

From there, growth came from two channels. First, they discovered that 80% of traffic to competing video editing tools came from organic search for long-tail keywords like "how to add text to video" or "best subtitle tool." They wrote 20 landing pages targeting these keywords, launched each on Product Hunt for initial traction and backlinks, and within weeks started ranking #1 or #2 on Google. Second, they became obsessed with talking to customers—Sabah spent five hours daily in conversations—and used that feedback to refine their messaging. When users repeatedly said they loved it for "adding subtitles simply," that became the homepage headline.

By August, they were down to one month of runway while their two part-time hires (Matt and Vilko, still with the company) depended on paychecks. With little hesitation, they doubled prices from $5 to $10, then doubled again to $20. There was "little to no impact on user growth," Sabah said. The pricing moves bought them runway and proved that customers saw real value in the product.

Today, Veed.io generates over $10,000 in MRR and is growing at 50% month-over-month. They've hired a small distributed team (based in Serbia, Budapest, and Vietnam) and are focused on reaching $1 million ARR. They're experimenting with team accounts at $100/month and planning value-based pricing for power users who consume massive amounts of storage and transcoding. While they've remained bootstrapped, they're now at a point where runway isn't a daily anxiety—the business funds itself and the team. Sabah credits their success to one thing above all: resilience. When investors said no, when YC rejected them, when they nearly ran out of money, they kept pushing. "Failure is a part of any entrepreneur's life," Sabah reflected. "It's how you bounce back that matters."