2015: Left the first job right after college. 2016: Failed as a YouTuber. 2016: Failed as a freelancer. 2018: Launched the MVP of VEED. 2018: Went broke. Sold all crypto. 2019: Applied to YC. Rejected. 2019: Applied to YC. Rejected. Again. 2019: Thrown out of office space. 2019: Found first paying customer. 2021: Bootstrapped to $5M ARR. 2022: Raised money from Sequoia Capital. 2025: 10M+ monthly users. And we’re still just getting started. Still so much more to learn. As they say... You overestimate what you can do in a day and underestimate what you can do in a year.

Introducing VEED Fabric 1.0 The world’s first-ever AI talking video model. – 1-minute-long videos – 60x cheaper – 7x faster 🚨 Giving away unlimited FREE credits for the next 24 hours. (until they run out). Want access? • Retweet • Leave a comment

12 Months ago we had no revenue, where rejected from @ycombinator and had 3 months runway in the bank. We just crossed the magic $83,333 MRR - $1M ARR threshold, 100% bootstrapped. I am SO excited for what's next and am so fortunate to be working with such an amazing team 🎉

We had a 15% lift in trial conversion. What one do you think did it. Left or right

We built Cursor for video editing (and its live)

The last three years....

🎉 I'm giving away this brand new M1 MacBook Pro (M1) 🔄To enter, just Retweet this tweet. 👩‍💻We are growing our dev team at @veedstudio and looking for talented developers to join the ride. 🔗100% Remote, DM's Opens, apply link in bio. 🙏Thanks!

We just raised $35,000,000 from Sequoia! But as a profitable boostrapped company doing +$6M ARR, you might ask yourself why? Let's get into it 👇

Today, VEED just hit.... $5M ARR 🤯 100% bootstrapped 🎉 It was not always sunshine and rainbows ☀️🌈 Here is the story of how we got there, let me take you back to June 2018 👇

VEED Fabric 1.0 💥 The world’s first-ever AI talking video model. Now, available on API on @fal. – 60x cheaper – 7x faster 🚨 Giving away up to $2000 in credits to 5 lucky users. Want access? • Retweet • Leave a comment Winners announced via DMs.

How it started. How it's going.

Today is @ycombinator demo day. A day we tried hard to be part of.  But failed. Let me explain... In 2019, we made it to the YC final interview stage and got rejected (because we didn't have any paying customers yet). So we pulled some all-nighters, added a paid plan, got our first paying customers, and went back two days later and asked them to reconsider. They still rejected us. That hurt. A lot. But it turns out it was the best thing that ever happened to @veedstudio. A year later, we grew to $1M ARR, bootstrapped. 1 year later, we crossed $6M ARR, raised $35M from @sequoia (and have doubled ARR each year since.) This month, we just crossed 100k concurrent paid users, with our revenue growth accelerating YoY. For everyone who never made it into YC / got the opportunity to pitch at demo day, remember to: Focus on your customers. Focus on growing your business. Pretty much everything else will fall into place.

Alright, so this blew up. Correct answer: Left one. The majority of folks got it wrong It also got us: - 3% higher conversion to paid - 17% higher ARPU - 33% higher MRR

In 2020 we where rejected from YC 20 months later we bootstrapped to $6M ARR In 2022 we raised 35M from Sequoia This year we blew passed $40M ARR in ARR Im doing a talk at @WebSummit on the journey building @veedstudio What topics should I cover?

Gmail has 1.8Bn users and this is what it looks like!

I was exploring the design category in the App Store last night and stumbled across an interesting niche. 📸 Passport photos. I think this could be a $40K+ Mo / $500k Yr side project. Here is what I found and how I would build it.

So... I bought 100 Christmas trees 🎄 This coming weekend, I'm delivering Christmas to London 🎅 If everything goes to plan, I should make £6K in 2 days. Here is how I got the idea and why I'm doing it 🤑 😂

Dear @Sama Sora 2 api? From Sabba, the CEO of VEED

My team said we shouldn't launch today. One day after Sora 2 comes out! But here we are... VEED Fabric for Business. Create GREAT videos in seconds for your business. Wish me luck :)

How it started How it’s growing

We just crossed 1,000,000 users hitting VEED site every month 🚀🚀🚀 However, most people ask me: "How do I get my first 1000 users?" Below are 3 strategies you can use (I did) to get your first users👇

The goal of a startup is not to raise money. Focus on building a great product. Then, learn how to get it into the hands of users at scale and capture the value. If you do, pretty much all the other things fall into place.

Last week a two amazing things happened 🤩 1. Our first offsite, 100+ incredible people! 2. We crossed $10,000,000 ARR!

Here is an idea for a $1M yr side hustle. It all started with changing the fuse on my GF's car radio. When I turned the radio back on it asked for a CODE? I tried 1111 and 1234 with no luck.

Building a startup is hard.

Introducing AI Generated transitions by VEED. Let me know if you'd like to test?

It took VEED 12 months to hit $1M ARR. We then hit $2M ARR just 6 months later. I believe the speed up is due to compounded learnings that you apply overtime. Now out mobile app will hit $1M ARR in just 5 months (Small team) Our growth has been mainly through ASO, WOM & Brand. If you know an IOS devs who wants to build AI-powered video editing tools on mobile, please drop me a DM.

how it started: how it’s going:

Wana join a fast-growing bootstrapped startup? Our world-class growth team is hiring 🚀 We are democratising video editing DM's Open ✉️

We have build an online video editing platform, scaled to $4M ARR and have only just added the ability to re arrange videos on the timeline... Younger me would have made sure this was in the first release. Maybe if it was, the product would have never went live?

Big news at VEED.IO!! Thrilled to welcome Peter Steinauer as our new CTO. Pete is an Apple veteran with 32 years under his belt. He helped create some of the most iconic video tools that we all have used: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Clips, and many more. When we first spoke, it immediately felt right. His mix of deep experience and relentless curiosity is exactly what we need as we take VEED into the next chapter of building the next generation of AI-powered video tools. Super excited to see what we’ll ship together. Welcome aboard, Pete.

VEED Captions just hit $1M ARR. We did this in just 5 months!! 95% of the growth was from WoM and ASO Huge well done to the very small team at VEED who did this. Lots more to come! Link in bio if you want to check it out 🙏

We just hit No. 1 on Google for: #1 – AI video #1 – Text to video AI #1 – Video generator ...and a huge long tail of other terms. This was the result of a massive effort over the past 12 months. Here’s how we did it:

The good old days of $6K MRR

Bootstrapping forces you to identify the core growth leavers in your startup. There is simply no room for anything else. The discipline is unparalleled. If you work it out… You are in a extremely strong position for fundraising. Take it or leave it

If I bought 100 bitcoin for $1 each in 2013. It would not even come close to the revenue & value created by starting my own company in 2018. Takeaway: Invest in yourself. That being said, it would have been a great buy🤑

This pic is from 2019. I made handwritten signs for every new paid user. Today, we have over 2,00,000 paid users. Here's how we scaled VEED from 100→1,000→100k paid users:

Like @nikitabier I was also rejected from every university apart from one. I was also rejected from YC on every application. Later I learnt that I was just seeking permission and validation from institutions.

Video GPT + Voice cloning. Makes videos in 2 minutes with AI... Using your own voice!

We just opened our first space in Shoreditch. Thing have come a long way since starting the company from my kitchen table. Come say hi 👋

How to design a logo for your startup in 30 seconds. Step 1. Get Inspiration from logos you like ✅ Step 2. Realize they are all just Helvetica ✅ Step 3. Type our your brand name ✅ Done

99% of startups fail... We were almost one of them The first 2 years of starting VEED were tough. No funding. No savings left. No users. We only kept the lights on because my co-founder Timur Mamedov got a job and gave me half his salary so I could keep building. Fast forward to today, VEED is now 6 years old. We ended up building a profitable boostraped company and then raised funding. We have now been a venture-backed company for just over two years. Since then we have: → 5X our revenue → Crossed +2M videos created monthly → Passed 100k concurrent paid users Incredible results. HUGE thank you to every single VEED customer and employee. We wouldn't be here without you!

Competition = Market Validation. I wish I was told that years ago. I was always trying to be 100% new and innovative. This led to me building things people did not need. In reality, startups win by addressing an underserved & outdated market/offering.

The worlds first AI talking video model.... Fabric 1.0

It took about 4 years... But If you search "Video Editor" in the UK... We are 1st 🎉

As promised... Here's how @veedstudio got 100,000 paid users. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿 Timur and I did everything we could to get VEED in front of as many people as possible. We spent time on Quora, Facebook groups, and Reddit, having convos about VEED and trying to push our editor. I even recorded YouTube tutorials on how to use VEED. (Some are still up on our YouTube channel!) Our hustle paid off. We drove a ton of traffic, worked really hard to get up a paywall, and FINALLY got our first paid user. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 Two things got us here. 1. We obsessed over our users We spent countless hours on calls with users, trying to understand what they liked, didn't like, and wanted to see from us. (I believe every founder should make time to chat with users) We then took all those learnings and... 2. Doubled down on what users loved For us, it was our auto subtitles tool, so we doubled down on it. We built content and landing pages and even tailored our product around it. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 We leaned heavily on two acquisition channels. For VEED, we relayed on SEO and doubled down on YouTube. We hired Alec to own video content and went all in on SEO. We scaled what worked for us. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝟭𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 Discipline got us to 10k. We focused on showing up daily, internationalizing landing pages, and building a product our users love. We didn't look for shortcuts and continued learning. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝟭𝟬𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 We invested in an all-star team (great hires make all the difference) and diversified our acquisition channels. That's what got us to this milestone. Oh, and a ton of hard work. Up next, 500k paid users. (BTW the photo below is the handwritten signs Tim and I made for every paying customer early on)

Today, we're launching VEED Transitions! Create mind-blowing cuts with AI in seconds. Getting better engagement just got 10x easier... Try now on VEED.

🗓June 2021 (TODAY) Exactly 12 months later, still, 100% bootstrapped We went from $1M - $5M ARR I have no idea what's next. But I want to keep going! Yet, feel so humbled and privileged to be where we are. Any questions... just shoot!

We just past 500,000 users hitting VEED.IO each month! This would not be possible if editing was not a big market. I can still remember posting on Quora trying to get just a few more people to the site every day. Any SEO / growth questions, drop them below 👇

OH WOW! Thanks for sending this @OpenAI Honoured... Great to be part of the token club, finally :)

Introducing VEED Animate 💥 (powered by WAN 2.2) The world’s first-ever AI model to: – Restyle videos from an image – Swap characters instantly – Create clips 10X faster 🚨Giving away 500 FREE credits for the first 250 users, who: • Retweet • Leave a comment Link in DMs.

The @IndieHackers community inspired us to start VEED.IO We are now +$500K MRR We have been an open startup since the start We have now decided to stop sharing our revenue and growth. Here are the pros and cons of being an open startup. 👇

150 hackers building Gen AI tools in our office this weekend. London's AI & tech scene 🔥

The amazing @thepatwalls and @starter_story team interviewed me for their youtube channel. The only problem is, I cant bear myself to watch it. Please let me know if I should hide from public.

I need to make a website in 1 hour. Its for an internal hackathon. What should I use?

In 2021, I bootstrapped VEED to $6M ARR. Free APIs helped us scale. Today, I’m giving away $1500 in credits.. ..for our AI talking video model Will pick 3 lucky bootstrapped founders, who: • Retweet • Comment what they're building Will pick winners via DMs.

Submagic has a blog post that ranks for: "how to cancel VEED subscription" At the end, they share their value prop. I have not seen this one before, very smart.

June 1st, 2019 at 10:18 PM. That's when we got our first paid user. 1,767 days later... We now have 100k concurrent paid users. (For scale, that's enough people to fill out Wembley Stadium on a good day, like a Euro final, with England playing, and it's 26 degrees out). Insane result. I know this is a shameless brag, but it's important to recognise how far VEED.IO has come. Unlike the England team in the 2020 Euro final. Still upset we lost. But enough about football. Next week I'll tell you how we did it.

🚫Done make something people want. ✅Make something people search for. By making something people search for, you are validating ideas and distribution at the same time. Here are 3 examples 👇

Last night, we launched three products: 1. A cutting-edge generative video tool 2. Text-to-video API, powered by GANs 3. A zero-shot LipSync API also GAN-based Let’s take a look 👀 👇

SOOO EXCITED TO SHARE THIS 🎉 We have been working on a new Screen Recorder It does 3 FUN things no other screen recorder does 🌟 What do you think? Drop me a DM if you wanna be a beta testers ❤️

@Superhuman has $33M in funding and are still using @stripe default checkout. I have a lot of respect for this. Building a new checkout flow is clearly not a priority for superhuman. Focusing on creating a great email client is. What should you really be focusing on?

I first posted on @thepatwalls website, Starter Story, 5 years ago. At the time, we had $0 revenue; we were both just getting started. Yesterday, he invited me back to tell the VEED story on their YouTube channel. Can't wait for this to come out!

Using AI to create a video end-to-end. ✅ Generate Script ✅ Auto Edit ✅ Auto Subtitle ✅ Eye Contact ✅ Generate Titles & Description ✅ Accompanying blog post too

VEED is still profitable and growing $ consistently MoM. Being a bootstrapped company for so long forced us to develop good financial habits, even with $35M in the bank this remains. We are still hiring and have a bunch of exciting roles open, link in bio ❤️

I just made a slack app in 5 mins with @zapier Every morning at 9AM, it sends me a 5 minute morning meditation video. Here is why i think this could be a great side project 👇

My friend started a startup called "founder mode" 5 years ago. It never took off. Last week he sold the .com domain for $80K Excited to see what the new buyer will do with it

Adding “Dark mode” will never get you to product market fit.

How we got to product market fit: When I started VEED, anyone who took a pro plan could book a call with me. I would personally onboard them. I would do this up to 10 times a day. I learnt so much about our users, what they needed and why they bought VEED. I used this information to guide the product and marketing too. Still to this day, I believe this is the best tool for any founder to get to product market fit.

The CapCut ban is driving huge growth to @veedstudio mobile app in the US!

🇺🇦 Ukrainians can now use all VEED's pro features for free. This is in response to volunteers wanting to translate official Ukrainian statements into English for global reach.

Family & Friends rounds are bullshit. Impossible if you are young and dont come from a privileged background / education. Someone should start a fund called "Family & Friends" and back founders who don't have that kind of wealth.

Introducing VEED Fabric 'Emotions' 💥 World’s first AI talking video model now with: More expressive faces. More real emotions. 🚨 Giving away 200 credits to the first 200 users, who: •⁠ Retweet •⁠ ⁠Comment Link in DMs.

We just launched an IOS app that lets you: 1. Auto caption your videos 2. Enhances the audio (sounds like a mic) 3. Lets your translate videos 4. Resize them for social. We are live today on @ProductHunt and the App Store - Link in bio

We are hiring like crazy at VEED Tag the best Product Designer(s) you know. If we have an interview with them. I will send you brand new AirPods Max. There is no limit, you can tag yourself too. RT to spread the ❤️🙏 #ProductDesign

How it started How it's going

I think most SAAS companies can and should bootstrap to $100K ARR. At that point, you can tell if there is a market opportunity that is worth raising capital for. If you don't raise, you have a great business. If you do, you have more leverage and less dilition.

$1M ARR and under. I want something done, I just do it myself, ship that day/week. $5M ARR, I want something done, make a pitch, brief designers & PM’s, calls, add it to the backlog, test feature, wait for release cycle, live weeks later. The realty of growth

We are a fully remote company. But if there is more then 10ppl in a city, you can get a clubhouse. A place to meet, have coffee and hot desk.

We said we would be the first to ship @sama

I sold around 40 ETH for $10K in 2017 I did it to start a my own startup. Today that ETH is worth around $150K! Investing in yourself is the best trade you can make.

Thanks for getting back to me @sama

Another example of AI-powered eye contact correction in VEED. Here I am reading notes off-screen and later just corrected the gaze with one click.

I just ran my first ever marathon. This year I stopped smoking and reduced my alcohol consumption too. I felt no benefits until mid feb, I starting running new personal bests - I felt strong, I felt fast. When I found out the Barcelona marathon was at the weekend, I was confident I could complete it. Tickets were sold out, I search online and found a guy called Martin who was selling his ticket due to injury. Martin put himself in the group expecting to complete the race at 3:30 - Now that I was Martin for the day, I had to follow his pace. When our group set off, It was fast. I called a friend 10K in to ask for his advice. He told me to slow down. I ignored it, it was having fun! In the final 5K my legs crammed, my pace slowed and tears started streaming down my face. My non existent training hit me like a ton of bricks. It one of the hardest physical challenges I had ever faced. Martin finished the Marathon in 3:31 and Sabba was not able to talk for 3 days 😂 I still drink but much less and have the odd smoke. But if feels like I have traded my addictions for running

Back in 2021, we bootstrapped VEED to $5M ARR. Only then did we raise from Sequoia. Here’s what I tell founders before they fundraise👇 Some of it was accidental. We got rejected by YC. Twice! Then focused on something that (really) mattered. –– finding PMF –– monetizing the product Eventually, we hit: >$5M ARR >50,000 MAUs With just product, SEO, and brute-force execution. And later raised, when it made sense. Few things you should keep in mind before raising: 1./ Start niche, but in a big market. This is how you can scale without hitting a ceiling. - Figma started with UI (now they own the design workflow) - Canva started with templates (now they’re coming for Adobe) - VEED started with basic edits (now it’s full-stack video) Your niche should have infinite headroom. That’s the cheat code for growth. Otherwise? You’ll hit a plateau fast! 2./ Raising money won't get you PMF. When you’re bootstrapping, the path is brutal and clear: Build → Ship → Acquire users → Iterate fast. Forget the fancy features. Forget the perfect website. If users aren’t raving, nothing else matters. We got our first 20 paying users in one weekend. That was the real signal. So we doubled down on understanding why they chose us. Finding users who’ll pay you (again and again) is the only game that matters early on. 3./ Get crystal clear on customer acquisition. For us, it was organic search from day one. We reverse-engineered what competitors ranked for. Then, built content around high-intent, long-tail keywords. Over and over again. That focus compounded. And gave us ROI that most channels couldn’t touch. Even today, we rank #1 for: – AI video – Text-to-video AI – Video generator This kind of clarity only comes from being scrappy and doing the work. It’s not your investor’s job to teach you this. The best part? Bootstrapping’s never been easier: -Ship MVPs fast -Tap indie founder communities -Distribute for $0 (Reddit, TikTok, X) Final thoughts (TL;DR): > Start niche, but in a big market > Raising money won't get you PMF > Get clarity on which acquisition channel works for you

Starting a startup is the most rewarding thing I have ever done. Super proud of the whole team at VEED. Building the company from nothing to what it is today. Exciting times ahead 🦄

When we joined @IndieBeers , we had $0 revenue. Last night, we went back and shared the VEED journey in full. Thank you @charlierward and the community for making London an incredible place to build. 🙏

This video was generated from text using AI. Text goes in and video comes out.

We recorded a podcast! Me & @charlierward just made a pilot, and we're looking for your feedback. We cover: - How much my local sauna makes - Why I'm fascinated by fine tuning LLM's - Why calling your pet could make you millions Reply "podcast" and I will DM you the link.

Snowboarding on Primrose hill, Central London.

Since starting a SaaS I have always dreamed of hitting $12M ARR Why? Because it's $1M a month and that's cool.

Introducing my AI twin My new face & voice has been 100% generated by AI. I can use my twin to make videos saying what I want, when I want. I would not be surprised if 2024 if the year that video based AI influencers become mainstream. What do you think?

Just casually watching a show on HBO and a nice big VEED.IO watermark appears 🤯 I really don’t think there is any growth attribution to having it, but it’s cool to see from time to time

I made £13,500 in 2 weeks selling breaking bad Halloween costumes. I did this when I was a student in 2013. With no upfront capital, no website and no audience. Here is how 👇 It's a fun story 🙃

I love finding little niche businesses like this. Stay curious and ask yourself: "How many other people have this problem" If you found this interesting, let me know. I have another story like this for a site that can make $10M

Barcelona, such an underrated city for digital nomads. Stunning, close proximity to nature & Just 20% tax on foreign income.

I want to scale VEED to $14M ARR next year. How? 1. Invest in core product & build new product 👀 2. Ramp up go to market with enterprises💸 3 Build growth teams to work on PLG, WOM & monetisation. It’s a stretch, but more than possible. What’s your?

We made our first acquisition! Welcome to the team @getwelder 🎉 Here is the back story 👇

Want to build a profitable startup & minimize the risk of failure? Then you should: "Make something people search for" How do I do that? 1. Validate Keyword Demand via SEO 2. Distribute product via SEO

Youtube is such an untapped marketing channel. 10,000,000 users have now seen a VEED video tutorial on youtube🤯 Video is so powerful becuase it helps solve the user's problem in an entertaining and personable way.