How we build VEED's mobile app and scaled it to millions

Our goal at VEED is to let everyone tell their story with video. It turns out lots of people want to do that on their phones. This makes sense, since its the most powerful camera most of us own and its also where we share and consume most of our video content. When exploring this opportunity we quickly noticed that editing video on your phone in the browser is quite finicky. It also didn’t play very well with local files in your camera roll. We decided that the only way we could build a “VEED-worthy” experience, was to build a native video editing app.

Convincing VEED
The data on our mobile usage was quite clear: lots of people found us via search, but the conversions were much much lower. So we knew there was a big opportunity we weren’t capturing. The bulk of the convincing was about: Why now? And how?

What to build?

So I got to answering those questions/

Why now?
We saw that our mobile traffic was taking off, and calculated that with relatively low conversions to paid we could probably break even on a mobile product, meaning the revenues from our mobile product would be higher than the cost of employing a mobile team. We also saw more and more copycats leeching of our traffic in the App Stores, which added a sense of urgency.

What type of product?
We decided to focus on a content format native to mobile: short-form talking videos. These videos are recorded, shared and watched predominantly on mobile. And when I say focus I mean relentless focus: You can’t make any other type of content with our app.

Finding our wedge
We started our mobile app as a tiny experiment with 1 freelance engineer working on it for 2 days a week. We needed to prove people wanted this, and we could grow the product. Therefore we decide to do one thing really well to earn our place in the market.

Given the focus on short-form talking videos, what would be the best thing to start with? We thought it was captions: A feature we saw was getting more popular across social media, and something existing video apps weren’t really solving too well.

How to build it?

iOS-first
Our goal was to build a high-quality product that made video editing accessible to a larger group of users. We wanted to have full control over the experience and low-level stuff (rendering, shaders), and not rely on tools like Reactive Native. Because we only got a tiny initial investment in this project (side project for me, and 1 freelance engineer, 2 days a week) we had to be lean. We decided to go with iOS only, as we saw more of our target audience on that platform and from reviewing data on Sensortower and talking to other product teams we figured out willingness to pay was much higher on iOS.

Build it right
That brings us to the next point: Doing one thing really well. This mostly came down to the love and craft of everyone who was involved. But also from staying focussed on one thing and making it very easy for users to give feedback (more on this later). This got us an average rating of 4.9 and many reviews like this one:

How to grow it?

Figuring out distribution
Since our mobile app was an experiment we couldn’t use existing VEED distribution or throw money at the problem. We had to be scrappy. Our best available bet was relying on Apple’s distribution and doubling down on ASO (App Store Optimisation). I did all the marketing in the first months (I’m now joined by Flo helping me out), but learned a lot from @nielsmouthaan and free resources on Youtube.

Free app first
To win the ASO game and rank high we needed to collect ratings and reviews. You need a certain amount of them to reach “escape velocity”. That’s why we decided to give away our app for free for a little while to get that flywheel spinning. I hear you say: “only VC-funded startups can do that”, and there’s some truth in that. But remember that running the team and tech was still very cheap by then, and even bootstrapped founders could apply similar tactics. Software is quite cheap.

Figure out monetization
Once we had a bit of critical mass, we started to play with monetization. First with a pretty loose freemium model where users got a watermark on exporting their video. Over time, we made this model more strict, paywalling certain features and showing paywalls on initial app opens. Every time this involved a bit of discussions if we weren’t over-doing it, but every time the data was quite clear: paywalling users more leads to more revenue. So one tip: when in doubt: always put up the paywall. Making this more strict greatly improved our download to paid conversion, but we’ve lost a bit of download traffic as a result.

Scaling the app
Now we’ve proven there’s a need and people want to pay, the next phase is scaling the app. We’re right in the middle of that and found great success so far. I’ll write more on this next time.

What’s next
We will continue to build out our vision of letting everyone tell their story with video. More specifically for our mobile app, we’re focussing on letting people create engaging short-form video in just a few clicks. If we do a good job at expanding our product to facilitate this, we will be able to acquire more users and charge them more (higher ARPU), which allows us to do more marketing.

If we do that well, more users will find value in our product and pay for it.

My journey
Conceiving, building and growing this app from scratch has been an amazing journey. I get to work with a small hand-picked team, we have a lot of freedom to forge our own path, both in product strategy and in how we execute. And the video market is incredibly interesting due to the fierce competition and onset of AI.