p.s. I figured I'd give doing an AMA a shot on HN, but if it's the wrong place for it I'll move it to anyasq.com or somewhere else.
Are you using any interesting solutions for storage of the video?
Are you using any interesting solutions for streaming the video?
I have a couple of ideas that would involve users uploading large video files and me having to store them at least temporarily.
I don't yet know if this is a show stopper for what would be a on the cheap side project.
Storage is pretty cheap. S3 starts at $0.14 per GB for the first TB and then drops to $0.125 for the next 50TB and so on. There might be some cheaper cloud storage options out there. If you don't need the durability that S3 provides, you can use their reduced redundancy option which is like 40% cheaper. There are other cloud storage provides out there worth considering like Rackspace's Cloud Files, although I think S3 is the cheapest. CDNs also often include their own storage so that might also be something to consider. You might be able to get a good rate if you committed to a minimum storage and bandwidth package. If you wanted, you could even go the route of building your own storage units (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...) which presents it's own pros and cons.
Delivery also isn't that expensive. CloudFront, for instance, charges $0.12/GB for the first 10TB and $0.08/Gb for the next 40TB. If you're streaming over 10TB per month, you can start to get discounts by committing to monthly minimums. Again, there are other providers out there, such as limelight and akamai, but as far as I can tell, they don't publish their prices. That usually means you probably need upfront commitments with them. Because of that, there is probably a lot of room to negotiate the price of bandwidth. Delivery will most likely be your highest cost just because of the volume unless you don't plan to be streaming that much video.
Lastly there is encoding. Encoding can either be done by yourself on your own serves or through one of the many providers online. Doing it yourself takes a bunch of time to figure out all of the quirks of all of the different video and audio codecs and containers. It's not a fun process, but ultimately, if you can get it right, it might be cheaper. There are a bunch of transcoding services out there. They have different pricing models so you'll want to make sure that the model fits your use case. For instance, Zencoder charges for the minutes of output video created but something like Encoding.com charge by GB (Combined input and output file sizes). If you're dealing with a lot of short, but really large, videos, the Zencoder model would fit better. If your files are small, but really long, (like webinars) the Encoding.com model might work better.
If that's the case then it makes life easy as from day 1 you can pass the entire cost onto the customer in your pricing. Has that been your experience?
I used to work for a company that offered a very similar service which had many paying customers who validated the idea. The company was acquired, but not that particular business unit. We essentially stepped in and took over that unit so the customers would not be left out in the cold.
Our site is based on a combination of two template we bought and we outsourced our logo design to oDesk.
The idea was in no way original, but came out of an opportunity to both prevent hundres of people from losing their videos when my old company was sold to SnapFish and make a bit of money. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2833008
The web design came from a combination of two templates that we bought. I'm currently talking to a designer about redesigning everything so it doesn't feel so much like a template site and does a better job of showcasing the product.
In other words, what was the bootstrap amount you needed?
There were very few costs durting that period other than maybe a hundred dollars in server costs for testing and food.
Edit: Now that I think about it there actually were a few other costs such as incorporating the company, outsourcing the logo and business card design, setting up the bank account, and so on. The total came to around $2k.
To maintain growth, we've mostly marketed our site using PPC though AdWords. So far, even without much optimization, it seems to be working fairly well. When I have more time to devote to it, I'll be able to spend more time optimizing our ad campaign and explore other methods of marketing.
What price range is your PPC? What % of clicks convert? What is your customer's total lifetime value?
Thanks!
It's hard to say when the initial idea came about, but it probably existed in some form or another for 6-8 months before launching although no action was taken until around a month or two before launch.
40% - Coding
30% - Customer Service
10% - Marketing
10% - Sys. Admin
10% - Business