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Hello everyone! The 8th issue of "Micro-SaaS Wealth Creation Weekly" is now available ( click here to read the 1st issue ), thank you for your attention and reading! This weekly magazine is aimed at independent developers and early entrepreneurial teams, reporting their main product forms - the latest information and experience sharing on how micro-SaaS is realized. The so-called micro-SaaS is "SaaS for niche markets". It is characterized by the fact that it is generally operated by individuals or small teams, with relatively low R&D and operating costs, and it focuses on serving customer groups in a certain segmented vertical field.
The theme of this issue of the weekly is "Video Tools to Create Wealth", which will take stock of 16 wealth creation projects through 10 creative directions. In the column of wealth creation stories, we will introduce a rather bizarre wealth creation story that just happened recently, and its product promotion strategy is worth pondering.
10 creative directions and 16 micro-SaaS wealth creation applications based on video tools
The following content materials are mainly excerpted and compiled from a Newsletter[1] recently published by Micro SaaS entrepreneur and researcher Upen.
01 Personalized Sales Video
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Sendpark ( https://www.sendspark.com/) : Allows users to connect to their customers through personalized video at scale. In 2022, revenue will reach $4.907 million .
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LemList ( https://www.lemlist.com/ ): Lemlist is sales automation and cold email management software. LemList helps manage personalized cold emails, automates follow-ups, and facilitates communication with leads across all channels. Generated millions of dollars in revenue.
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Pitchlane ( https://pitchlane.io/ ): Automated video exploration, allowing users to generate 1,000 personalized videos for cold outreach.
02 Video recommendation tool
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Vouch ( https://vouchfor.com/ ): Users can communicate with short, realistic videos of their workflow. Vouch's Q&A-based video platform brings context and efficiency to sales, marketing, customer success, recruiting, and more. Founded in 2020, Vouch will hit $2.5 million in revenue in 2022.
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TestmonialTo ( https://testimonial.to/ ): In minutes, you can collect video testimonials from your clients without the need for a developer or website hosting. Made $3000 within 10 days of posting and has now grown to thousands of dollars in MRR.
03 AI Video Generator with Avatar
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Synthesia ( https://www.synthesia.io/ ): An AI video generation platform that enables users to quickly create videos with AI avatars, covering 120+ languages. The company was founded in 2017 and has projected revenue of $15.7 million.
04 Video interview
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MyInterview ( https://video-interview.myinterview.com/ ): Accelerates hiring and helps make better hiring decisions through video interviews, estimated annual revenue of $1.6 million.
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Spark Hire ( https://www.sparkhire.com/ ): Video interviewing platform where candidates answer interview questions in pre-recorded video interviews. On-site interviews are also supported. Founded in 2010 by Josh Tolan. Company annual revenue is estimated at $8.2 million.
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TalView ( https://www.talview.com/video-interview-software ): TalView's online video interviews allow companies to assess a candidate's soft skills, motivation, proficiency and expertise in one step. Companies can leverage natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to measure sentiment, analyze tone, psycholinguistics, and more.
05 Video Ad Generator
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Waymark ( https://waymark.com/ ): Lets users create professional-quality TV, CTV, and digital ads easily from built-in templates and a simple editor. It recently launched an integrated artificial intelligence tool that lets users generate video ads by simply typing in their business name. Founded in 2010, Waymark has raised $4.6 million in funding and has projected annual revenue of $6.9 million.
06 Generate short video clips from long-form content
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Pictory ( https://pictory.ai/ ): Automatically creates short, highly shareable branded videos from long-form content. Founded in 2019, Pictory raised $2.1 million in funding. In 2022, it hit $750,000 in revenue.
07 Video Analytics (Great for B2B)
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Lanva ( https://lanva.io/ ) - uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze video, create a searchable, actionable index of topics, and unlock key moments, insights, and knowledge otherwise buried. Lanva, founded by Alex Pesik, made $4,034 from 56 customers in a 48-hour pre-sale in mid-2021.
08 Convert Product Catalogs to Video Ads: (Great for B2B)
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Video Ad Machine ( https://www.videoadmachine.app/ ): A Shopify app that automatically creates engaging creative and powerful ad campaigns.
09 Build micro-SaaS around video API/SDK:
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Dyte ( http://dyte.io/ ): Provides real-time video and voice solutions for developers, integrating high-quality video/voice calls into web, mobile and desktop applications. Dyte offers call recording, live streaming, webinars, live transcription and translation, chat, polls, quizzes and many other features. Dyte's annual revenue is estimated at $4.1 million.
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Shotstack ( https://shotstack.io/product/video-editing-api/ ): Users can develop video-centric applications using a cloud-hosted, fully managed, automated video editing service, saving hundreds of hours of development , time to configure software and maintain infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by Derk Zomer and Jeff Shillitto.
10 Online Video Streaming/Subscription Platforms
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SproutVideo ( https://sproutvideo.com/ ): Powerful live and on-demand video hosting services for businesses. Easy-to-use tools for secure video sharing, video marketing, player customization, analyzing audience engagement, and more. SproutVideo was founded in August 2010. The company's 2022 revenue will reach $627,000.
Wealth Creation Story: TBH Metamorphosis: Changing the shell and selling it twice, earning a total of 50 million US dollars
This story comes from the Twitter account of CourseKey founder Luke Sophinos[2].
The protagonist of the story is Nikita Bier. In January 2023, his social application GAS was acquired by Discord for nearly 20 million U.S. dollars. In fact, GAS replaced another of his software, the closed TBH software, and TBH He had already sold it to Facebook for $30 million in 2017, which created such a bizarre story: the same product was sold to two companies, earning a total of $50 million.
Legend: Nikita Bier, the protagonist of this story
What are the subtle twists and turns? Take the arrow of time back to 2017. Nikita Bier, a serial entrepreneur who failed successively at that time, had only two months of funds left in her pocket to maintain the team, so she bet on a social application that focuses on "anonymity" and "positive energy": TBH (To Be Honest), featuring “Anonymous touts” — where users hear nothing but praise from their friends and become famous in one fell swoop. Next is the key point, and it is also the key to Nikita Bier’s ability to sell it twice: the reason why TBH ushered in a big explosion, in addition to the product design hitting the soft underbelly of human nature "love to listen to good things", but also because of its ingenious The marketing strategy has recruited a large number of users on a large platform such as Instagram. Specific steps are as follows:
1. The TBH team noticed that teenagers often listed their high schools in their Instagram bios, such as "RHS sophomores", and followed all accounts including this school with "RHS" as a clue.
2. Send a message to the following account, such as "You are invited to participate in RHS activities, please pay attention." to lure the teenagers of the school to apply.
3. After 24 hours of collecting the application requirements of all high school students, at 4:00 pm (local high school dismissal time), the TBH team added the product’s App Store URL to the configuration file, and then released their private photos share.
4. Teenagers who received the notification will see product introductions and download links when they visit TBH's profile.
That's how the TBH team went from high school to high school, gaining 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users in just 9 weeks. Nikita Bier was subsequently sold to Facebook for $30 million, and as part of the deal, he himself joined Facebook as a full-time employee. Unfortunately, only one year later, Facebook shut down TBH due to its "low daily active users"!
But Nikita Bier was not reconciled to TBH's "flash in the pan", and in 2022, after the expiration of the "non-competition order" with Facebook, he founded a new company and made a comeback. This time the product name is GAS, and the function is similar to TBH. Encouraging kids to brag about each other, and at the same time launching some paid activities, such as want to see who is complimenting you? pay. The main growth strategy of GAS is still following TBH's "following the gourd painting": hugging the thighs of the Instagram platform and mopping up high school students. Such a strategy is completely timeless, and soon GAS surpassed BeReal and TikTok, etc., and jumped to the first place in the Apple App Store, followed by the acquisition of Discord.
What an incredible journey it has been! There are two key points:
1. It is necessary to have the same strong executive power as the research and development of products to win users.
2. I remember that Zen practitioners have a saying that "you are always right", which is also suitable here. Of course, it needs to be added-you must fight for yourself to prove that you are right.
The above is the content of this weekly magazine, thank you for reading!
References:
[1] Material source:
https://microsaasideapro.substack.com/p/micro-saas-products-around-video-tools-pro
[2] Source of story:
https://twitter.com/lukesophinos/status/1628767923795030016
