 Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Slush 2021. My name is Sabah. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Veed and it's absolute pleasure to be here today to be telling you about this crazy journey we've been on the last few years, bootstrapping our company. So me and my co-founder Tim, Bootstrap Veed, from just about zero to six and a half million in annual recurring revenue in just over two years, and it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of ups and downs, and I want to take you on that journey right now. So hopefully we have something that's going to resonate with founders and investors and everyone in between, too. So let's start with what actually is bootstrapping. And I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? But to me, bootstrapping is when you start a company and you do it about any external capital. So potentially you've been saving up some money at home and then like once you're ready and you have the right idea, you'll go straight into the idea and try and build it, or potentially another popular route is you build the company at the same time as a full-time job and then take that transition once you have enough revenue, or potentially when the product gets feature-rich enough, right? So in VC, there's this thing that a lot of people are saying which is there's so much money in the market, capital is so cheap, it's a great time to raise, and I agree with all of those things, and it's very, very much true. However, I would also like to argue that it's a really good time to bootstrap, too. There's thriving online communities such as indie hackers where people are exchanging great ideas and learning from each other. The cost of actually creating products has massively got reduced, too, and there's loads of really great marketing automation tools. So yes, it's a great time to raise, but it's also never been a better time to bootstrap, too. But to take you on the story today and tell you about my journey, we have to rewind the clock all the way back to 2016. And in 2016, if you asked me what I wanted to do, I would have said I wanted to be a YouTuber. I loved YouTube. I was addicted. I couldn't stop watching videos, and I was amazed by the audiences that were being created in the communities around just posting videos. And so I thought to myself, I want to do a bit of that myself, right? So in, I think, yeah, 2016, I was just like shooting videos, I was editing, I was getting them on YouTube, and it was great. And this is an example of one that I made. It was like Snapchat spectacles were just in the US, so I wanted some myself. So I decided to make some. I got a webcam. I taped it to an old pair of sunglasses, put the USB cable into my backpack, and then I'd film as I went around the city. And it was a lot of fun. I had a great time doing it. But the thing that was really, really slowing me down, creating more content, which is a byproduct, would help me grow my audience, was this. I was editing my videos in this really, really clunky video editing software that felt like it was designed for making films and TV shows, not four-minute YouTube videos, let alone a 20-second TikTok video. So as a very naive young entrepreneur, I thought I would do something about it. And I kind of gave myself a little bit of a challenge. I was like, okay, what does the future of video actually look like? And I thought, okay, well, everything's moving to the browser. So video editing in the future is going to be browser-based. That makes sense. I thought to myself, it's going to be really simple and very, very accessible, too. And I kind of had all these hypotheses, and this isn't a penny drop moment at all. It was just like, this seems like a really interesting idea. So me and a good friend of my co-founder, Tim, decided to basically take all the money that we've kind of saved up and one day sit down and start a company, because that's what you do, right? And just for some context, in terms of risk, at the time, friends of mine were moving into senior positions in their jobs. Other friends were putting down deposits on houses, and there was me and Tim deciding to start a company. And anyway, so we get going, we start building, we're having a lot of fun. And the flywheel of creating a company basically starts to turn very, very slowly. We then hire a couple of junior developers that graduated from university. And then we started doing pitch competitions like this, like the one next store, actually. And we got a little bit of recognition. And then a venture firm in London says, hey, do you want to use our office? We're like, yeah. So we did. And then what we found next was funding a company of 20,000 pounds with a team of four in London doesn't go very far. And cash started running out pretty down quickly. So we did what we thought the next logical step in the company building cycle was. So we went out to a bunch of investors. We spoke to angel investors, pre-seed and seed investors in London and tried to build some relationships and some networks. However, I think we were a bit too early or we didn't really know what we were doing. And rightfully so, it wasn't right for them. But as money was running out, things were getting tough. And the two developers that we hired both quit on the same day, which left us in a really bad technical spot for maintaining the code base. The office that was given to us for free were eventually kicked out of because you don't want a failing startup in the side of your office, obviously. We clearly failed to raise and now at this point we've run out of savings. So I kicked this wall. And what happened? And I didn't kick it out of rage, actually. I didn't want to underestimate, I didn't want to ever forget how tough it is to build a company. So it was almost like a physical kick to solidify my brain how hard this process is and I would never take it for granted. So now money is pretty much at zero. Me and my co-founder Tim were pretty upset and we don't know what the next move is. Then Tim comes up with this great idea, he's like, hang on, I'll get a job and I'll give you half of my salary and you can continue building Veed. So that's exactly what we did. He gets a job and the next thing we know, I've got enough runway in a couple of months to get the initial products live and do some very, very basic marketing collateral. So like get it on product time, get some blog posts up, some of the basics. But I was tired. I was really, really tired and so was Tim and my Kirk has stopped working. No, it hasn't. So I get a full-time job as well now. So Tim's working full-time, I'm working full-time and what we do is we take a portion of our salaries and we hire two more engineers to continue building Veed while we're working full-time. The other portion goes into another pot which is the runway pot and there's a little bit of money left over for us to sustain our lives. And this went on for eight long months, right? Eight months. We're working full-time but we started to get some results eight months later. We get to about 30,000 monthly users, the product's doing quite well and it feels like we're on a good track, right? We're on a really good trajectory. So we thought the next stage would be to instead of just jumping back in to building the company and maybe getting it wrong again, we thought let's try and go to like this world-renowned startup accelerator called Y Combinator and if we get in there, we'll move to San Francisco and then we'll do a series A round and then we'll be like the next Unicorn and Y Combinator. We've got all these amazing companies and stuff like that. So what we do next is we make the application, we go there and on the flight there we're pitch practicing, we're at the hostel, we're pitch practicing, we're having dinner, we're pitch practicing and then we go in to the final interviews, we come out and we feel like we've done a pretty good job. It's not a home run but we've been doing this for a little while now. We've got 30,000 monthly users. We think that odds are in our favor. And so for those of you who don't know how Y Combinator works on interview day is if you get in, they give you a phone call at 7 p.m. If you don't get in, they email you at 7 p.m. saying why you haven't got in. So we're now back at the hostel refreshing our emails, checking our phones, making sure no one's calling us and in my gut, I felt that finally things were going to go our way. But unfortunately, the rejection email came in and we were just devastated. It's like, oh my God, after all of this time we now get rejected from Y Combinator, it was painful, right? So we let off some steam, we have some drinks and the next morning all puffy eyes, we wake up, we're eating our cereal and we're looking at this email again and this one line sticks out to us and it's like in the end, we didn't understand why you waited so long to start charging for your product and we agreed with them and we had loads of excuses why we hadn't charged for the products but that didn't really matter, did it? We were trying to think about what is the next step forward now. So we thought there's no time like the present and then we had a genius idea. The genius idea was it was a Friday. If we started charging for our product that day, we could go back to Y Combinator on the Monday and on the Monday we could show them that we got 20, 30, 40 paid users and then they'd reconsider and would be admitted to their program. So we opened our laptops and we started executing on this idea. We were like building accounts, we're building paywalls, we're adding watermarks to the videos and to our amazement when we get the paywall up, the first $5 comes in and it was amazing. It was only $5 but it was fun and over the course of that weekend we got 20, 30 paid users on subscription and we were just like, we got this, we got this. This is going to be an amazing story. Everyone will talk about the time that this company changed Y Combinator's mind. And so I remember on the Monday at 9 a.m. on the dot 9-0-0 I made it a point to send them this email being like, hey guys, look, we're good for this, we work super hard, we're like willing to take risks, come on, give us a shot, please, this is the best thing for the company right now. And even though we got that far, they came straight back and said, look, sorry guys, not now, apply for the next batch. And at this point, we're numb, we're numb to rocks being hit at us. And so I now just want to quickly recap the amount of sands that me and my co-founder ate for the last one and a half years. We put all our money into starting this company and we burnt through it. We then hired a couple of developers that quit on the same day a couple of months later. We were given an office but then kicked out of it. We then worked contract jobs for eight long months to support the company. Then finally we get to Y Combinator and get rejected right at the last minute and then we try and change their mind and they rejected us again if you can get rejected twice or maybe just once. And I think this is the point, right, where most founders might be like, you know what, wrong idea or like it's the wrong time or the market's not ready or we're not the right pair. And me and Tim thought, let's just do it. And our mindset massively changed at this point. No longer did we want to make this huge company but instead we thought, look, if we can get to five, six thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue, no one, absolutely no one can tell us that we can't build our company. We won't have to rely on any investor, any Y Combinator. We wouldn't have to do contract jobs. We could just build our company and that became the new goal. We're just going to get to five, six thousand in monthly recurring revenue. So we already had those 20 paid users, right, from that Y Combinator weekend and then we already had 30,000 monthly users and things just started snowballing a bit, right. So we're getting more paid users every day. We're growing in traffic every single day. And when we started charging for the product, our users started getting a lot more articulate about what they wanted us to build next, what they'd be willing to pay for. And we took all this information, we put it straight back in the product. We were tweaking copy and landing pages that would resonate more with our users. We were going on as many calls as possible. And then to our amazement, five months later, we're eating ramen because we got to five thousand in monthly recurring revenue. The point where you can't stop me and my co-founder running our company anymore, which is a great point. And that was a lot of fun, right. And a lot of people asked me, like, oh, what did you do to grow the company? How did you do it? Well, I can tell you exactly how we did it. I did 160 posts on Quora. I made 30 YouTube videos. I did 10 blog posts, 20 landing pages. I was active in every single Facebook group. I did 15, yes, 15 product launches on Product Hun. And I also built external tools that will funnel people into the product. So that's how we were doing it. I was just solely focused on growth and that was the only thing I was doing. So, yes, videos continue to grow and exactly 12 months since that Y Combinator rejection, exactly 12 months, we hit 1 million in annual recurring revenue. And we were just so happy. We were, like, speechless. It was amazing. And what you might realize is when you put a tweet like this on LinkedIn, a tweet, sorry, a post on LinkedIn like this, and also send a tweet, something strange happens. Loads of investors start flooding into your inbox like you've never seen before. Honestly, I would say over 100. It was crazy. And, yeah, but, you know, just 12 months ago, we were not the cool kids on the block and we felt quite burnt by this experience and we were just like, you know what, we're just going to keep running our company the way we know how. So that's going to be what we do next. Obviously, when you start getting to the point of making a million dollars in ARR, your team grows and as the team grows, you can pour it back into products and do more marketing initiatives and everything is now going up into the right. Everything is growing and it's really exciting. And then when you get to that 2 million ARR, for us anyway, it felt like we really had product market fit. We knew who our users were. We knew what they wanted from us and we were able to build it and distribute it to them at scale. And it felt awesome. Now, Veed is a lot more complex than when it just started as a basic trim and crop and filter tool. It's a fully fledged video editor with ways to create videos, to edit them and distribute them and share them as well. And I'm so proud of the work that the team's done to get us to this point and the belief that a lot of those early teams had because as I said, we didn't have investors. It's the team that believed in us. It was our customers that paid for us to be there to do it for them. So it's incredibly meaningful for me. So, yeah, that was really awesome. And so, yes, as of today, we're about 6.5 million annual current reverie. It's just over half a million a month. And that's awesome. There's no sign of it slowing down any time soon. Well, that's all great. But now, I want to go into six lessons I learned as a Bootstrap founder. However, I don't think these lessons are exclusive to me as a Bootstrap founder. I think there's something for everyone here to hopefully take away from the experience that we had. So the first one that I'd like to go over is start niche, but start niche in a big market. So there's so much advice about starting companies in niches. It's a great way to start your niche. However, if you don't do it in a big market, you hit ceilings incredibly quickly. A good example of this is a company like Adobe has a whopping 300 billion, yes, 300 billion market cap. It is enormous. Ridiculous. Inside Adobe, video is a relatively small part of their creative suite. However, it is quite a meaningful chunk of revenue. Under that, you have another public company like Vimeo who has a suite of video tools, and they're valued at about 5 billion. So when LittleVid is doing trim filter crop video doing 1000 MRR, the good thing is it's quite easy to see how we can then start making more products and building out that better video editing and then going into hosting and potentially live streaming. So there's ways for us to expand, and we never hit the limit. And so if you're building in a niche, what you might find is you get to an upper limit and you can't break through it, and that's because your market's not big enough. So number one, start niche, but start niche in a big market. Number two, every product has an acquisition channel. When I started my company Veed, I knew nothing about growth at all, but I needed to, and I needed to learn as quickly as possible, and I started recognizing trends across different products and product competitors. So above us here, you can see Veed and two of our competitors, and there's something, and this is public data from a website called SimlaWeb, and what you'll notice is that search for us and our competitors is the primary acquisition channel that is used to get users onto the platform. The sooner you are able to identify the primary acquisition channels in your company, in your industry, in your niche, the better because you'll be able to product market fit much quicker. This is something we identified very, very early on in our journey, and it's allowed us to scale incredibly quickly. So find the acquisition channel in your industry market product category. Brilliant. Number three, make something people search for. So I clearly have a chip on my shoulder about the whole Y Combinator experience, that's fine, we're right with that, and Y Combinator say make something people want, and that's a brilliant tagline, right? Of course you should make something people want, but making something people want is really hard, it's very arbitrary, it's like of course that's what you need to do, but I think make something people search for instead is a lot more actionable, and I'm going to explain why. So when you make something people search for, you're doing two things, one is your identifying demand for that product, and number two is your identifying the way in which you're able to ship that product to the user, so you've identified idea and acquisition channel at the same time. We have used this technique at Veed to work out what features we're going to build next, and in what order, based on the potential monetary value that that tool can bring. For example, would you build trim that has, for example, 100,000 searches or crop which only has 50,000 searches? Of course you'd go for trim, but if the CPC cost per click value is much higher on crop, it might actually outpace it and to the bottom line of your business have a more meaningful impact. So I've prepared a few examples up here of how this system works. You can see the keyword chart maker generates about 100,000 searches every single month with a CPC of four and a difficulty ranking of 50. So there's 100,000 people looking to make charts, right, and no one's really solving this problem. And there's this huge long tail as well, you've got Gantt chart maker, Flip chart maker, Pi chart maker, Donut chart maker, and I just think it's really interesting that I was going after this, and another really good example is like signed PDF, right, so slightly more 115,000 searches, but this time of a CPC of eight, and this is an example of higher monetary value, but of course PDF signing has higher monetary value, it's because it's used by businesses and there's public companies after, you know, trying to solve these problems. So yes, number three is make something people search for, don't make something people want. Number four, don't be a dev. So when we got that Y combinator rejection, there was this like shift in me, like the way I thought, the way I operated everything that I did, I was just solely focused on growth. And I have to bring this slide back. What did I do to grow the company? I did 160 blog posts, I made 30 YouTube videos, I did 20 landing pages, 10 blog posts, I joined every Facebook group, I did 15 product launches, and built additional tools to funnel people into our product. So again, if you are struggling to grow or want to grow and you haven't done these things, do these things. And if you've done these things and it hasn't worked, come talk to me, I'd love to help problem solve that with you too. Okay. Number five, the goal of a startup is not to raise money. So a lot in the tech press we read about all these, all this fundraising that's going on and how there's another fundraiser, another fundraiser, another fundraise. And I think it can almost cloud our judgment a bit of what success metrics are for startups as the only thing the press really talk about is how much funding we have. Instead, the goal of a startup is actually to make a product that people really, really love and find a way to distribute that product to users at scale. If you're able to build a product users absolutely love and you are able to distribute that product to users who need it at scale, everything clicks into place, revenue clicks into place, hires click into place, investors start coming into your inbox. So it's very important to remember what you're actually doing. You do not want to optimize evaluation, you do not want to optimize the size of your funding round. The only thing you should optimize for is building a great product and distributing to that product to your users at scale. Okay, so final one and this is an obvious one and I'm sure everyone's heard this a million times before, but it's care about what you do and work with amazing people. So in the story of how we bootstrap Veed, there were so many pitfalls and there's so many points where it all could have just done, right? The time that we ran out of money and then Tim paid me half of his salary so I continued building the company, if Tim wasn't such an amazing co-founder we would have stopped or potentially that long eight-month journey that we went on when we were both working as contractors. If we weren't loved, like if we didn't have like affinity for the products and love the products that we were building, maybe we would have just sacked it in and moved on to the next idea. So it's important to make sure you're working with great people and you really care about what you're working on because that gets you through the hard times. So that's everything. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this talk. It's been really fun, so thank you so much. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, cheers, guys.