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Comment by huffmsa | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't you out it in a browser? Saves tons on OS specific builds, works on any machine you log into.

Google docs, Invision, canva, all browser based.

And then, if you really want to make a desktop version, you take a shortcut and put in in electron. Which is just a browser.

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Because it _sucks_

Video Editing in particular is graphically and resource heavy process. Veed doesn't even work on my browser (qutebrowser via webengine).

In general web based apps are just inferior to native ones in every aspect except for "don't need to install" aspect and I don't think that many people who edit videos mind that. If you're spending hours on this might as well spend 10 minutes to install proper software, right?

Its main purpose is probably video editing for social media videos. I doubt anyone would use it for their actual time-consuming, resource-heavy work.

Just guessing here. I haven't used the service nor do I have any use for it.

This strikes me as the main difficult proposition of this business, at least for the VC model—people aren’t going to pay much for this if they perceive it as being only for ‘casual’ use. That can be ok if you can get tons (millions) of users, but otherwise it’s a really hard road.

While it’s a huge achievement for an entrepreneur, investors aren’t interested in a 10k MRR business except for the potential it demonstrates to be 1000x bigger. This seems like the part of the story that the OP is missing.

>people aren’t going to pay much for this if they perceive it as being only for ‘casual’ use.

You don't need people paying much for this to be monetarily successful. You just need many people paying a little bit.

I honestly believe that if GarageBand was multiplatform, browser-based, and priced at something around $10-15/mo (as opposed to being free, but native and limited to apple devices only), it would make a lot of money, despite not being a full replacement for software targeted at people who are professionally making music (like Bitwig, Ableton, Logic Pro, etc.). A simplified video editing service would make way more than that, because the number of casual users who need to make simple changes to a video is way larger than the number of casual users who want to mix or edit a simple track.

"Many people paying a little bit" certainly works but it's really hard to pull off without funding, an extremely compelling product, or some kind of brilliant viral growth strategy because you have very little room to spend on user acquisition. That's why investors in a product like this want to see early growth metrics that are on fire. They are looking for something that can rocket up into millions of users, so if your growth slows down too much as you reach 100k users or whatever, investors will start questioning whether the market is big enough or whether the product is appealing enough to go the distance.

If you make something people will pay more for, it's just a very different calculation because you then have the potential to sustainably convert capital into growth. It allows you to grow more under your own power through sales and marketing rather than relying so much on virality.

For this reason, the GarageBand comparison isn't really helpful. Sure Apple could make a lot of money with that strategy because they could easily market it to millions of people. A new unfunded startup doesn't have that ability.

This reads very similar to the classic Dropbox response. You seem pretty unaware of the technical expertise of average people.

> If you're going to be sharing files seriously, just install an ftp server.

> Less serious people should just use email.

Almost the exact same response. No concept of the prosumer / intermediate user.

Average people who edit videos are already doing so with existing native apps or Youtube's in-browser editing capabilities.

The ones who aren't _yet_ editing videos aren't.

What if you don't want to put it on YouTube?

Most people who are editing video online are uploading it to some social media sites, and most of those are uploading to YouTube.

And there are free editing apps for every platform, and every digital camera probably comes with one.

Also a search for "online video editor" returned plenty of results. I don't know about the quality of capability of those sites, but it doesn't seem like "video editing for amateurs" or "video editing in the browser" were unsolved problems until veed.io came along.

I don't know anything about video editing, but if they are at $5k/MRR, doesn't that serve as a proof of concept?

Clearly there are people who are willing to pay for what Veed is offering.

A proof of concept? Yes. A viable business? probably.

A revolutionary, industry disrupting, potential billion-dollar concept? Something worth injecting VC money into? I don't think so.

> qutebrowser via webengine

So you're an edge case?

Modern chrome/ium has ever improving GPU acceleration.

And this isn't for people who spend hours, it's for those who want some editing power better than adding a star wipe and filter, but don't need full blown color grading and multichannel layering.

Webengine _is_ chromium. I'm just trying to illustrate that the main advantage of "being crossplatform" is a bunch of bs if you can only run it on _some_ versions of chrome or firefox, _sometimes_ with _some_ addons. Such complex apps fail too often - there's no "crossplatform" benefit here.

They can just do the heavy lifting on the backend if they run into browser limitations.

> Veed doesn't even work on my browser (qutebrowser via webengine).

FWIW it seems to work fine for me in qutebrowser.

I've been sitting on bit of an older version, will update it and see if anything changes.

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