October 2017 marked the start of Kapwing’s journey, founders Julia and Eric (both ex. Google) hit the 1 million videos created through their SaaS viral video editing platform 12 months later and $24k in MRR after 18.
How?
This post explains…
Kapwing is like Canva for videos.
You create a free account and can do various things to your videos through an easy to use and intuitive interface:
– Meme Maker
– Subtitles
– Multi-Video Montage Maker
– Video Collage
– Video Filters
– Image To Video Converter
– Add Overlaid Text To Video
– Add Music To Video With MP3 Uploads
– Resize Video
– Reverse Video
– Loop Video
– Trim Video
– Mute Video
E.g.
Kapwing bootstrapped for their first 12 months or so, how did they grow?
Their founders understand the following SaaS law:
Anything you can do to have your users show other people whilst they use your product could drive viral growth.
The first and most famous example of this is the “P.S. I love you” email hack that single-handedly grew Hotmail to its $400m acquisition by Microsoft.
You can use Kapwing’s full functionality for free but have to pay per video or per month to remove the Kapwing watermark from the output.
Kapwing initially let users dodge their paywall by simply giving an apology:
(Read the full story here).
They soon removed this…
But if you think about what’s going on here: each new Kapwing user breeds little Kapwing branded video babies and releases them into the internet.
If a single watermarked Kapwing video receives 1,000 impressions as it is shared on the creators Instagram story.
This exposure of the Kapwing brand could lead to 5 organic brand name searches as others that want to create their own videos, which could lead to 1 more free user.
And the cycle continues…
This viral loop enables the Kapwing team to focus less on marketing activities and more on making their product awesome.
Optimized onboarding flow -> Better video tools -> More videos shared -> More free exposure for Kapwing -> More paid subscribers for Kapwing -> More resources to invest in the product
What is the lesson here?
How can you enable your users to tell other people that they are or have used your SaaS tool?