Ask HN: How to sell my startup transcode.io | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to sell my startup transcode.io

10 pointsamrit_b20 comments

I am facing a lot of troubles with govt polices to run this startup. And also its getting tougher to take it forward alone. I got an exciting response when I launched it last September http://goo.gl/JHoMQK (~10k visits in a 3 hours span).

I built many missing parts, and also worked on the UI, payment gateways (2checkout), invoicing system, support ticketing system, etc. Everything works fine now and good to go for production.

Many of you (from the HN community) have registered and tested it, and gave valuable feedback (and few are already using it on production) - Thank you all for your support! And sorry, many accounts are still not activated.

Many of you tweeted about it https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=transcode.io&src=typd - Thanks you guys as well for spreading the word :)

I tried to team up, but failed miserably. There are so many things to do - coding, testing, marketing, support, financing, fraud detection, refunds, taking care of customers, expansion, new features, legal, etc.

English is not my first language, hence I face a lot of difficulties while writing official emails and stuff.

I need suggestions/directions for selling it or getting funded or getting co-founders.

Cheers!

(http://amritbera.com/journal/why-i-built-transcode-io)

I have no experience with video transcoding. But I do run a single founder online business. So hopefully I can help.

We (technical single founders) have a bad habit of spending time developing code while we should be spending time understanding the market and the customer. Running an online business in my experience is 20% coding and 80% customer support and marketing.

My advice is to follow the below steps for 2 weeks.

1. Stop all development work on transcode.io. 2. Remove the message that this is not production ready. If there are some restrictions (e.g. output fixed to 360p), mention them. 3. Setup a Google Adwords account. Run some ads for keywords that potential customers would use. 4. Setup an online chat widget on your site. (e.g. zopim.com). This should not take more than 5 minutes. Be logged into the online chat all day. 5. As potential customers arrive, you can start an online chat with them. Speak to them about how they use transcoding in their business, find their pain points and find out what they are currently using. Try and get people to use your site by handholding them. 6. Email your existing users (40+) or people who have shown interest. Find out the same info from them. 7. If enough customers have the same pain point and you can fix it by adding a feature, add this to your list. Do not start development on this yet.

This will help validate whether transcode.io solves a pain problem for the customers. At the end of two weeks, you will have a better idea about 1. Is transcode.io solving a real pain point. If not, can it? 2. What are my costs of customer acquisition? 3. What is the market size? 4. Is this a sustainable business?

This will help you decide whether to continue working on transcode.io or whether to sell it. Also try and go for some tech/startup events in Calcutta. Who knows - You could meet your business cofounder there.

All the best!

It's no surprise you're demotivated, you've been creating empty work for yourself like an invoicing system and a support system when you don't have any customers. This kind of work does not make your company better and it's so premature it's not even useful.

Launch the paid version and focus on getting customers. Then your work will have meaning and impact and your company will be able to move forward.

Yeah definitely demotivated.

But there are ~40 customers and I needed that invoicing system to bill them :)

Have you tried integrating Stripe, Braintree, Balanced, Paypal? They make it quite easy.

I have already integrated with 2Checkout which works fine. But the initial idea was to integrate it with an Indian gateway. The govt here wants to see a decent office in a commercial location before giving access to a local payment gateway.

hey amrit, i think u should focus on solvable problems & not get swayed away by doing too many things which can be avoided.

for eg. in our earlier days, with less than 50 customers we used simple excel to manage invoices. we only came out with annual plans to contain the billing logistics.

we hired many interns from different fields like engineering & management (little cash & loads to get done by logically better people).

hope this helps.

Ok you have 40 customers that need invoices, support, fraud detection, refunds, new features etc.

Which is the bigger problem:

1) you have to do some manual amount of work per customer per month that could be less

or

2) you only have 40 customers and they're not giving you money yet

Definitely (2).. and that puts me in deciding mode again!

I think you just need help on the business side because it sounds promising to me. If you are truly burnt out or you are in financial trouble, then I certainly would recommend to stop. Otherwise, just take a two week break and find someone to help with the business side of things.

I think a lot of the billing stuff can be handled by Stripe or a similar service. For legal, finding a good lawyer is most of the work. After that, they will guide you through the rest.

Thanks! Do you know any site to find marketing people?

I do not. Sorry.

Just like finding a good lawyer will help guide you through the legal stuff. Finding a good business person will likely have a better idea on how to find marketing people.

A few questions:

1. How much do you want for it?

2. How much revenue do you have?

3. Have you found a way to acquire customers?

4. How much will it cost the new owner to get it developed further?

Also:

5. What are the reasons someone would pay to use transcoder.io instead of zencoder?

6. What are the reasons someone would pay to use transcoder.io instead of elastic transcoder?

1> Frankly speaking I have no idea. If there are more than one buyer, then will give it to the higher payer.

2> Right now, users are using a free version - so no income.

3> As far as I know, there is no other product in the market with makes video transcoding this simple. So I don't think its tough to get users.

4> From a developer's prospective, it only needs a "forgot password" function before it can go to production. Everything else is ready.

5, 6> Here are the details -> http://amritbera.com/journal/why-i-built-transcode-io (transcode.io is a completely different thing - its code-less transcoding and CDN hosting)

Thanks for the responses!

3. From what I've seen customer acquisition is the key challenge of any startup. If you can acquire customers for less than their life time value then you are set!

Without a process to acquire customers your business is much less valuable.

Someone would likely pay more for transcoder.io if it had a scalable way to acquire customers but no tech, vs what you have which is tech but no customer acquistion.

5, 6. I did read that blog post before posting the questions.

From the end user perspective they just want their videos transcoded, it seems like all 3 of these services do that. I was hoping you could summarize the tl;dr of why someone would use your service to get their videos transcoded vs someone else's.

Okay. Thats a valid point.

But I got ~40 customers without any kind of marketing and effort. All most all of them own video related websites.

Zencoder / bitsontherun have their own branding on user's videos. Even in the paid plans (which is extremely expensive) they show branded messages when some error occurs. Moreover you need to "upload" the videos somehow to initiate the process.

AWS elastic transcoder is of-course a good option, but again tat needs uploading and immense amount of code & development time. Not to mention, the developer should have enough experience to touch the AWS api/SDKs in the first place.

Transcode.io product takes care of your videos completely. From transcoding to hosting in a CDN. And you are free to theme your own video element. This absolutely needs no integration with api or sdk or anything.

Its like scaling and cropping images - just put the video path, and the rest will be taken care by the tool.

OK makes sense. 40 customers, nice!

What are your transcoding costs? Eg what is your profit margin on $0.3 per min?

the transcoding price different and transferring price is different.. The invoice generation calculates it. transcoding_cost = 0.003 per second transferring_cost = 0.0003 per byte gets downloaded

Profit margin is double the expenditure.

but its flexible. need to tweak the values after production launch.

I'd be interested in discussing further. Fire me an email alex at alexblack.ca

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