Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, everyone. So today, I have someone with me who almost needs no introduction. If you have ever been to micro con, you know who he is, if you have listened to makers dot Dev, you know who he is. If you have sent people files, at any point in the last eight years, there's a chance you might know who he is. And he also has something new coming out. Christian Genco, thank you so much for coming on.
Christian Genco 0:27
Hello, thank you so much. It's been a life goal of mine to be introduced, starting with a phrase needs no introduction. I've achieved I've achieved something important in life that that felt really cool.
Michele Hansen 0:39
I mean, you are the famous MicroConf note taker.
Christian Genco 0:42
That's, that's really cool to hear you say that? I don't, I don't consider that to have any level of fame. It's it came out of sort of a neurosis of having to take very detailed notes. But I'm happy to be known for it. That's, that's a cool thing to know for.
Michele Hansen 0:58
I will say that when I gave a talk at micro conference 2019 as an attendee, which was kind of my, well, my first big talk in the indie software space, I gave a talk at layer con a couple years before that. But it was the first one sort of like as an indie founder. And you made notes of my talk. And I was just blown away that somebody would want to write down things that I said, and then share it with other people like I was floored in a good way. And it made quite an impression on me. That's really cool. So you have been around for a while to in this world, as I mentioned, you founded file inbox eight years ago.
Christian Genco 1:44
Yeah. Spooky.
Michele Hansen 1:46
Do you want to join us? Tell me a little bit about that. First, refresh your memories
Christian Genco 1:50
I'd love to. So I came into this whole world through Patrick McKenzie, I was in college at the time, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. At the time I was in the pre med track planning and being a doctor. And I knew deep down, I didn't really want to be a doctor. But that was the path that my parents put me on. And I'm glad it was it was a good default path. But the whole time I'm in college, I'm just thinking, What's something else I could be doing? So I found several bloggers who were very influential. And me one of them was Mister Money Mustache, who taught me this ethos of being very financially frugal, and the other was Patrick McKenzie, who I realized was this path to be able to make money from the internet, that that the idea that you could have just a piece of software that you wrote, which I was doing every week for homework assignments and making stuff for myself, just for fun. And that was your job, that you could just make money from that I was thinking, wow, I got to get some of that. And especially at being a bingo card creator, I was thinking like, I can do that in a weekend, like, what, what's my thing for that gonna be, but the loose plan was like, I'm still gonna go to med school, I'm still going to be a doctor. And then at some point down the line, I'm going to have a really good idea for software as a service. And I'll make that and then I'll transition from being a doctor to having this be my thing. And so in college, as I'm just making stuff for myself, I had the problem of needing to send myself files from the school computers, because there were these lab computers where you had to do an assignment and then send it to yourself. And I didn't want to lock an email because I knew that keyloggers were a thing. And so people get access to my, my email if I did that. So I Googled for anonymous Dropbox upload, because that's the thing that I wanted. And I found this forum post with a whole bunch of people talking about needing the exact same thing, but no one had anything. So I said, Yeah, I know how to code. I know, Sinatra, and how to code in Ruby. So I'll whip something up to be able to do this. And I did, and I posted it in the forum for like, hey, all you people who are looking for this thing, I made a thing that does this. And then I used it. And then I sort of forgot about it. And about a year later, I got a whole bunch of traffic from TechCrunch and life hacker and several of these other blogs in that sort of space at the time that we're saying, Ah, look, check out this file inbox thing. It's amazing. I was called DB inbox at the time. And at the time, I was like, Wow, I'm getting so much traffic. What what do I do with this? And I let another year pass. A whole bunch of people sent me in requests for features and things. And I added paid plans and was very tricky about it. Because I said, Okay, you can have the features. But only if you pay me money. I thought what what schmucks, they're gonna, they're gonna pay me for work I've already done. And the first day that I launched that I had 10 people sign up for the $30 a year plan. And I was thinking, Wow, $300 that, that makes this whole thing worthwhile. That's really cool. And the next day, same thing next day, same thing by the first month. I've got about $1,000 in MRR I'm thinking wow, this is amazing. And I remember so vividly. This drive, I went down by this road drive to my parents house and I had all the windows rolled down and I just started laughing like, oh my god, I did it. And I did it without having to be a doctor first. But I had no idea why people were buying it. I just I just like made a thing. And so for five or six years yours I was running this just not knowing who the people were, who were buying it, or why they were buying it. I didn't understand any of the microcopy stuff of like, how to actually build this as a business. I did, the thing that people say doesn't happen, which is if you build it, they will come. And so I was left just sort of floating around, like, I don't know how to grow this, I know that I built this thing. And then after I built it an ad payments, people started using it, but I don't know how they found it. I wasn't doing any marketing. So that it was an advantage and a disadvantage. It was very fortunate that I made this my career, I didn't need to get a job. I've never worked in a real job, I didn't need to be a doctor, which was fantastic. But at the same time, I felt like I sort of stumbled into it in a way that I didn't understand how I got there. So that's been a struggle. Up until the last few years, I feel like I've finally gotten my feet heard me reading books, like deploy empathy and reading more about how marketing works, and why people buy things and learning that it's actually good to be marketing to people, if you have a good product that's helping them because you're helping them that was a that was a really difficult thought for me to get my head around. So that's where I am as of about a year ago.
Michele Hansen 6:07
And where you are today is that you are launching something new.
Christian Genco 6:11
Yeah, so all the things that I did wrong in file inbox, I feel like I've really nailed with the video clips. So like not knowing who's using it, I started with an audience, this time of people who make long form video content, like YouTubers and podcasters, like you, and not having a connection to the audience with file inbox. Because people use File inbox for things like loan officers and sign printers and that sort of thing. And I don't, I don't really, it's not that I don't care about though, like, I'm not I'm not curious about that audience, I don't know a lot about them, it's worked for me to better understand where they're coming from and what they need and what they buy. Where's the video clipper. It's people who make videos, and I am one of those people. I took Alia dollars, part time YouTuber Academy, and was was in this group of people who are all wanting to make more content. And I was just thinking, I love this, I would love to go to a conference of people who were making videos that that didn't, and hasn't yet applied to the audience for file inbox. I also know much more about marketing. So I'm able to figure out from the beginning SEO of what are people googling? And how can I put my thing in front of people who have these high search intents for the video clipper. And from a from a DevOps side, I feel like I've learned a lot of lessons of how to build better software that doesn't crash. And so I'm not always having to worry about software maintenance, building it in a serverless way entirely on Firebase. And, yeah, so it feels like a much closer alignment feels like I've hit much more of that product, market fit and the founder market fit. And it feels really good feels like a good development feels like I may finally know what I'm doing eight years into doing this.
Michele Hansen 7:54
So let's back up what is the video clip or actually do
Christian Genco 7:58
all right, so if you have long form video content, something like interviews that you've done with people like this podcast, for example. Or if you have longer form videos, five or 10 minutes long on YouTube, the crazy new hot thing is to have really, really short video clips that are optimized for different social media. So I make a tool that makes it really easy to turn your long form content into those short video clips, which makes it you're able to syndicate work that you've already been doing, especially if you're sitting on a media backlog of a whole bunch of microcom talks or a whole bunch of interviews that you've done, or a whole bunch of videos that you've recorded in a longer form for your YouTube channel. Those are all videos that can be mined. And for these shorter clips that can then be syndicated on Tiktok, and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter and LinkedIn. And there's a lot of really tedious parts to that you have to open up your video editor and find the interesting clips. And finding the interesting clips is a very different tasks than cutting a different timestamp. So you kind of have to have two different people or two different modes of thought to do that one person who's looking for the interesting story, and the other person who knows how to use a video editor. And then once you've got the clip, you have to format it. And they all have these special formats that they want, like Tiktok really likes portrait format, with subtitles burned in Twitter really like square format with a title on top and the subtitle on the bottom. So that's another round of editing. And a lot of people use a custom tool for that. And my gosh, if you've ever done Subtitling by hand, it's, it's terrible. And then there's another layer to that of you need someone to be able to manage the social media account and post this with interesting titles and posted on a schedule in a way that people are going to engage with at the most. And so the idea of the video clip or is on doing all of that that can be done by a machine, which eventually is going to be all of it. You just give me your video. Right now you highlight interesting parts of the transcript. And then I do everything else. I can come up with a title optimized for each social media network with GPT three that part's really cool. And then I can format it automatically with all these serverless functions. That part's really cool. And then I can queue them up and publish them automatically on your social media.
Michele Hansen 10:02
So is it you doing it or your software doing it?
Christian Genco 10:06
I say I, it's the royal i It's my software. Yes. The
Michele Hansen 10:11
Royal? Yeah. Because it's kind of like people do sometimes a, you know, productized service approach, right? The whole sort of smokescreen thing where it seems like it's automated, but it's not. So I was curious. So and now we get to the reason why I have invited you here today, play a game I'm calling, you have one month to get something done on this, did it do so. So today is December 1, we're recording this. We're planning to publish this on December 26. Assuming that I have looked at calendars correctly. And so and that gives you basically, three and a half weeks, yes, to get something done on this. And I talked to you about this about a month ago now. And you said how you have this goal, to get it to 20k MRR in the next year, so that you don't have to go out and get a job, which you have never had or you know, freelancing or whatnot. Right? Yes. And I thought it would be fun, if we use this as an opportunity as sort of a forcing function for you to have to ship something, basically, with within, you know, a one month span of us having this conversation today. But the fun part about this is actually is I don't know what that is going to be like we like we have had some chats back and forth on like the name of it, because you originally had a different name for it. And both like I mean, you have a demo live, but people who can't pay you. And I don't know if that name transition has completed. And you have to build, you know, user accounts and stuff like that, right. And so I'm curious what it is that you would like to use as that thing that you have to get done. Three and a half weeks from today.
Christian Genco 12:10
This is very exciting for me too, because I also don't know what that is. But let's, let's get there. So, so the place where the product is right now, I have user logins, I have the ability for people to go in and upload videos that can go on to make clips. And then something I just added since the last time we talked about a month ago is that from the web interface, people can download the format of videos in the raw format, which is just the clip and in the square format, which is the title on top and the subtitles on the bottom. And I feel like that's enough minimum value to be able to start charging people, I think it's going to be on more of a alpha user, this, this isn't a fully fleshed out product yet, but you can get some value from it. So maybe there's a discount, because you're buying it super early when all the features aren't fleshed out. So a month from now, I would like to say, by the time you dear listener are listening to this, I would like for you to be able to go to the video clipper.com and sign up for an account on the website and upload your own video or I'll have a test video in there that you can clip out and download a clip that's watermarked. And to remove the watermark, you have to pay me money. And I'd like for that to be possible a month from now. And that feels attainable. All right.
Michele Hansen 13:40
So this is kind of a time traveling episode. So people will be able to know as they're like, you could be listening to this right now. That's exceeded?
Christian Genco 13:53
Oh, hold on. Wait, I haven't. Oh, you can look at
Michele Hansen 13:57
it. On your phone on your laptop
Christian Genco 13:59
on your laptop. Oh, yes.
Michele Hansen 14:03
No, I'm not gonna scope creep you. The point is to focus and get things out the door not add features. So that kind of gets me to my next question is, you know, I mean, you said your market for this is like tick talkers and Instagram and podcasts and stuff like that. And so it sounds like you're you're hoping for a very strong word of mouth or, you know, spreading it visually right through watermarks, right? Like you're hoping people are going to talk about this and other people ask each other when they saw this or you know what they used or, you know, someone makes a tick talk about how they use it right? Like that would be amazing. Having the watermarks on there. So it very much sounds like that that's kind of the marketing strategy you're going for which then kind of leads into the the pricing strategy and I think this is something that people spend a lot of time on. For good reason, though. Also you need to just throw some Hang up there in terms of pricing that kind of remotely makes sense with user behavior and then figure it out later. So what are you thinking on like price point? And like what like, what is the like pricing kind of flow look like?
Christian Genco 15:15
This is something I've been thinking a lot about that I don't know that I have a good answer for. And you're correct that one of the marketing channels I want to do is this sort of viral marketing. I think an unfair advantage I have in this space is advertising to people who are at these content creators who, if I can get them with a watermark clip, if if they're not quite ready to pay, there is what I'm effectively paying for is them doing some marketing for me, if there's somebody who's who wants to publish clips, and not actually pay me, I'm okay with that. As long as you're syndicating clips, and there's, there's a few other marketing channels I'm trying one of them is like SEO, I'm going to try paid ads. I think cold outreach would actually work pretty well in this because I could go to content creators who have a presence on YouTube doing longer videos, but don't yet have a presence on Tiktok, and Instagram and all that or aren't publishing regularly. And I can make them a clip and I can say, Hey, would you like software that can turn this out regularly. So I'm going to try all those different things and see what sticks. So to the point about pricing. In customer conversations that I've had with people, it seems like people are sort of clustered into these two different buckets, there's professionals who are making content, and they're making money from it either directly from the content because they have a huge audience, or they're making content that leads into some sort of product. And so they can see the direct value of you know, the more hits they get, the more videos they push out, that translates directly into income from something else a book or a course or assess. And then there's a second group of people that are sort of like this immature, amateurs the wrong word. They're they're dabbling in social media, but they haven't quite figured out how to make money from it. So for them, they're really comfortable paying for something like descript, which I think is around 20 or $30 a month, but they would gawk at something that that costs $100. Because that's, that's just out of their budget. So I think what I want to do is offer something at around 20 or $30, and offer something at around $100. And I don't yet know how I'm going to differentiate, differentiate those two, how I can figure out what something is that the 100 other people care about, that the $20 people don't really care about. But that's, that's roughly what I'm going for.
Michele Hansen 17:19
It almost sounds like there's two. Yeah, there's two different groups, there's like two different messages to them as well, right? Like that first group. Like, I wonder if the message is, you know, the professionals, it's social media clips, so easy. Your VA can do it, versus with like nobody else and they don't need any video experience required. versus the other group is. I mean, they're doing signups. You can do it yourself an hour a week. You don't have right, right spent spend an hour doing it rather than 10 hours. Yeah, I like that, which versus it's like, I guess someone doing it themselves in one hour versus 10 hours versus someone's assistant or whatever. Doing it in one hour versus 10 hours.
Christian Genco 18:04
Yeah, that's a good insight, the sales pitch also to the 100 other people is that this is an alternative to paying a consultancy. For figures to be doing this for you, instead of that, you can have your VA doing it and get a product that's just as good. And then yeah, the the sales pitch, I think to the 20 $30 customers is, you know, you should be doing this, you know what it takes to do this because you've made clips of it before, but you're not doing it because the work sucks. And it's tedious, and you don't want to spend 10 hours doing it. So this is something that you can pay a little bit of money, and be doing it yourself to be publishing content on every platform you care about, for about an hour a week of your work.
Michele Hansen 18:53
That's an interesting insight. I don't know if you heard that. What like when you said that, that the professionals are paying an agency how much to do this
Christian Genco 19:01
1000s Like, for a month, 4000 Matsuya?
Michele Hansen 19:05
Forth? Okay, they're paying an agency $4,000 a month to do this. Right? And then the individuals who sort of, you're kind of you have your professionals and your prosumer is almost you said that your prosumers know they should do this. Yeah. Which is a little bit of a dangerous territory when you're because that's that's like behavior change territory, which in b2c is really hard. I'm curious about that. It's possible, but it's hard.
Christian Genco 19:38
Yeah. So the when I talk to people, the reason they're not doing this is that it's too much work. It takes too much time. It's the tools are too frustrating. It's something they would like to be doing. It sounds like if it was easier to do, and so I hadn't considered that as a problem. I think, to date, I've just thought about that as well. Here's the thing, you know, you know, you should be doing this, but your your tools that you have right now make this too difficult. So use my thing instead. And that's the difference between you not doing it and you actually doing it.
Michele Hansen 20:13
And it almost sounds like the professionals, one is too cheap.
Christian Genco 20:17
That's interesting. That
Michele Hansen 20:21
one is too expensive, and the professionals is too cheap. And granted, we won't know this until you actually launch it. Right. But like,
Christian Genco 20:29
you mentioned something at the beginning, also that I'm attacking this as a product. Oh, you asked, when I use the word AI, is that me? Me? Or is that me, the software. And something I've also considered is, I could be a consultancy for this, because this hour a week thing, you know, I could do that for someone else. If it's somebody else's content, I can go through their content and clip out stuff for an hour a week, and then make $4,000. So that's another angle of this, that I've sort of tabled, that is totally a possibility. I could be going after people as an agency, and then they don't necessarily need to know what sort of software I'm using, I could just be using my own thing.
Michele Hansen 21:08
Yeah, or you. It sounds like it'd be your advantage here that the agencies don't have is that you have built the software to do this. And so it sounds like you actually have another category there, which is an agency plan. So that they are either they are paying for it, or you are basically, you know, selling to the agency, and then there, when you're selling to an agency, it's always better to be a direct, like line item that's billed to the client rather than overhead. Right. So you know, something that like their clients get a discount, because you have this agreement with them. So they're paying $450 A month rather than 500, because of their special agency relationship. You can build software, you know, doing consulting is is is uh, I think I think for a lot of indie people is a good bridge, but that all the time you're spending consulting is time that you're not spending, building the product. And I think this is a this I mean, this is a situation Colleen has been in for the past year where she's working with a client on the thing that she's building, but she's doing the specific things for that client, rather than building the software so that instead of making, you know, in your case, you know, I don't know, $4,000 a month with one client, like, you could be making $32,000 a month from having 64 people paying for it instead, right? And then you're just building the software.
Christian Genco 22:31
Yeah, that's compelling. I am. I'm really curious about that. Specifically how to approach agencies I don't I don't feel like I know about agencies very well. There's one guy I know in this space. Who's doing this, who has a consultancy who's doing this for some pretty big name. So I could talk to him and just ask him like what he'd be interested in? Yeah, yeah, I have another insight into what an agency might like to have. I was talking to someone who, I think, by himself would sort of fit into this $30 category, but he's moving into doing more of the consultancy. So he's sort of going from prosumer to becoming a smaller consultancy. And he was saying that it would be valuable for him to offer to his clients that they could pick out the interesting clips themselves. And that was really interesting to me, because that then would leave him with like, no work to do. There, the client would value being able to say, you know, I think I said this interesting thing here from, you know, four minutes to four minutes and 30 seconds, and then the software would handle everything else. And then that's something that yeah, like you said he could build directly to his client. sort of level. One, yeah, yeah, that the client would go to his brand, dot, the video clip or.com or something like the video inbox.
Michele Hansen 23:47
Workshop that no more renaming.
Christian Genco 23:58
I like to play of going after consultancies.
Michele Hansen 24:00
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities here. And the most important thing is to is to get it in people's hands and let them pay you for it sooner rather than later. I mean, it really strikes me that, like, how long did it did it take for you to implement paid plans on file in box?
Christian Genco 24:19
The very first time I did it, I actually at the same time, totally rewrote all the software.
Michele Hansen 24:25
No, I meant, like from when you launched it to when you offered paid plans, like two years, two years. Yeah. And now you're looking at like, two or three months?
Christian Genco 24:35
Yeah, I've implemented pay plans on the same sort of stack before. Firebase has this really nice stripe implementation where you just click a button and they're automatically syncing all the plans and things for you. So that'll be really nice. And so I don't think it's unreasonable. Like I haven't haven't started it yet on this project, but I don't
Michele Hansen 24:51
know. I'm not saying that. Like, it's like, it's unreasonable to think it takes three months to implement a paid plan, which it doesn't it's more than like, you building a product. A time from when you are allowing yourself to charge people for it has shrunk dramatically, which I think is a hurdle that people have is like, Is this good enough that I can charge someone for it? Yeah. And I mean, you know, in my own career, I have been continually surprised by things that people will pay me for that I thought were not that great. So I think it's, it's, it actually sort of shows some growth on your side as an entrepreneur, right of like, kind of you have this sort of theme of sort of doing things better than you did them the first time.
Christian Genco 25:35
That's a good theme to have in life. Yeah, something else that I thought of when you were saying that was I've also shrunk the time, from starting marketing, I think I had this idea in my head that I had to start marketing, once I had a perfectly finished product that people could start paying for. And that's not true at all, you start marketing before you start coding. So I've been much more conscious about putting out Twitter videos and throwing up a landing page that's collecting email addresses and something I think, I think I could be doing that even much more aggressively. I think I could be buying paid ads for these search terms that I think are high intent. And just using that to to try to convert people to give me their email address. I think I'll do that today, actually. All right, that's another thing I want to add to my list of things I'll have done before the 26th. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a Google ad that's driving people to the homepage, that is just collecting email addresses. And that's it. Like I talked to so many people who are starting new things who have the same sort of mentality of like, well, you know, as soon as I get this one more feature done, that's when I'm going to start marketing, but like no, just you start right now, you do something in marketing, you start telling people about this, you at least tell them what you're working on. And that that's so much better informs even how you build the product, the more conversations you can have, the more you can get out there, even before you have something finished, it's even better. I was really impacted in this line of thinking by a book called Traction. There's two different books called Traction. I'm talking about the one written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maurice, which walks you through this method of figuring out all the different possible ways you could be marketing, try the top three of them, measure which one works the best measure how much it costs, to acquire a customer and each of them, and then double down on just that one thing, and start the day you start coding. And that's a very important idea that I feel like I'm still learning, I could be doing much more marketing.
Michele Hansen 27:25
But also in terms of marketing, you talked about the watermarking, and how important that will be. And it strikes me that. So have you built if you build the watermarking you already have a functioning demo of and like, can people download a video from the demo right now?
Christian Genco 27:46
Right now? December 26? They can't. Right? Yeah, December 1, they cannot.
Michele Hansen 27:52
So I think that once you get the watermarking and the download working, right, like once you get like, I don't know, less so than ads to me is getting those videos circulating. And yes, having you know, having a list like that those things are always helpful. But it sounds like to me is like you said you already have user accounts built and then allowing people to download it, adding the watermark. Like you can almost stop at that point, like release that. And then people can't pay you, but they also can't remove the watermark. And then you move on to doing the paid plans. Like there's that doesn't have to be one, you know, release all in one, right? Yeah, it's better to have people emailing you say how do I remove this stupid watermark and be like, Hey, pay me $100 A month or $500 a month, which is where I think your professional plan should be. Right. And or, you know, $20 a month to remove the watermark. But see that, like I think this the like this interesting kind of thing about about pricing and kind of structuring plans is like thinking about incentives, right? And for you, the more videos people make with your watermark on it, the better off you are because the more traffic you're getting back. And so you're playing it like that, like the the limitations on the plans basically need to be structured in a way that they don't discourage people from making videos, but they're limited in other ways that are relevant to them. And I'm curious what you're thinking like what the delineation between plans this?
Christian Genco 29:39
Yeah. So the watermarking is a play at a viral marketing channel. And I agree that I agree that that can be a thing that I ship, even before I had paid plans. I like that. So I think I think just laser focus on being able to do that. And that's so that I can get done like, I don't know, this week. That that's very close. And then
Michele Hansen 29:57
do you want me to do next week?
Christian Genco 29:59
Well, There's a complicating factor in this, I'm going on a cruise with my family on Sunday, and we're not gonna have
Michele Hansen 30:08
fun and you're going to enjoy it. So it's not going to be done in the next week,
Christian Genco 30:11
so much fun. So, like, having a having to go back to 26 will be good. If you follow up with me in two weeks, I would like to in two weeks be able to send you to a site where you can upload a video and download a watermark,
Michele Hansen 30:27
which is last week as of the speed, which is a time traveling episode. Yeah.
Christian Genco 30:33
Just before Christmas. Yes. So the Oh, what was the other way? Get
Michele Hansen 30:43
that out. Now while people are putting out all of those like Christmas wrapping videos and whatnot.
Christian Genco 30:48
Sure. There was another point you made that I'm having trouble remembering the viral marketing content during the video first where you can want to market and then focus focusing on pipelines. Oh, so this is a question I'm struggling with is what that differentiating thing is, between the free users who are watermarking, and the prosumer users and the Pro users, I don't yet have a good finger on my pulse of what that differentiating factor is. I don't want it to be number of videos. Because if people are using this for free, and they're pumping out free videos, and that are watermarks, and publishing those places, like go for it. Absolutely. And I think even with the cueing part of it of being able to have this buffer style, you can generate clips, and then you know, drip one out once a day or have it linked with your social media account. I think that's okay, well, actually saying that allowed, maybe the scheduling is something that Pro users care about. And free users don't care that it can be on a schedule, they just they but they would like to link their social media to be able to have one click publishing, to be able to publish it. So that okay, that that feels like it could be a good way to differentiate, but I'm struggling with what those other factors are of what the things are that the business users would care about. And only then we care about and what the Pro users care about, that only they care about. watermarking is one of those things. And then what about
Michele Hansen 32:09
storage? Like you mentioned that the professionals they will have like a year's worth of library that they are continually recycling. Yeah, and reusing versus someone who is an influencer, getting their influencing career off the ground. They might not have that. And I wonder if you have a time limit or like even like, you know, somebody uploads a video, like how long? are you storing the entire video? How long are you storing the clips, and maybe that's something like, if you're on the basic plan, you know, the video was stored for seven days or something and then it's automatically deleted versus if you're on a varying like levels of you know, you could, you could basically tear your plans by how much video storage people are getting. Like, isn't that expensive to like to be storing a bunch of video on your end, like, you'd
Christian Genco 33:05
be surprised Cloud Storage is getting really cheap. Yeah, for all I'm gonna forget the math, it's something like for me to store 100 gigabytes costs something like $1 per month, it's roughly in that range. So I could even I like I like differentiating on storage. And I could even be kind of clever with it. If like, I don't delete your video, you just lose access to it. And if you upgrade to the business plan, you can see your entire backlog. That also resonates with me, because several of the business people that I've talked to who are ready and willing to pay $100 a month, have this huge media backlog that I think it would feel tedious for them to have to juggle if they have a limited amount of storage, or if they have something where they have to edit it within seven days. That's that would be too frustrating to deal with. And if it's a difference between 30 and $100, they don't really care. They just want to upload the entire media vault all at once. And then have someone go through it and do the clipping. So yeah, I like storage, I think that's a, that's a high probability of being the differentiating factor, that would be a high signal to figure out the difference between the levels.
Michele Hansen 34:12
And then eventually, the professional plan could be gated in terms of the amount of storage you get to write because if they're going to upload five years worth of weekly content, like they should pay for that, right, rather than somebody who has, you know, 10 pieces of videos that they that they like, right like that, that feels relevant, and if somebody's already paying you $100 And then they're like, Okay, well, I'm using this a lot, you know, then okay, we got upgraded to 200 or whatever, because we're using it a lot. Yeah, right like that. That's also an alignment of incentives where they're getting more value out of it. You're giving them more value, therefore they pay more. Yeah.
Christian Genco 34:51
Okay, I like that. We may have to solve that problem. And then free users. I don't I sort of see Yeah, yeah, no storage like you just get the one A video that you're currently clipping and then I want you to use it as much as possible. Maybe I do, like maybe I do a few days of storage. Or maybe it's just maybe it's just one video at a time. There's a lot of things I can do with the free users. I think if, if the free plan was identical to the prosumer plan, except it had a watermark, I think that's enough to differentiate between free and prosumer. And the differentiating primarily on storage for the prosumer versus business. I think that makes sense. Okay, yeah, I think so too. Cool. Thanks. I think we just solved the problem. Well, I've
Michele Hansen 35:36
got a plan.
Christian Genco 35:38
Visit the video clip for.com on a laptop. You can view the pricing page, probably on a phone to see if that's actually what I did.
Michele Hansen 35:49
Well, Christian Genco thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we'll be hearing from you again. And I'm going to actually try to do something fun with this episode, where I am going to make a clip using the video clipper for this episode, which will be kind of fun. And I'm probably you know to what we said of earlier people think oh, it's so easy. Your Va Va can do it. I'm probably that level of competence around anything involving AV things. So we will see how it goes. But this video will actually be run through the video clipper. So amazing, kind of fun.
Christian Genco 36:30
Thank you so much for having me on. I consistently enjoy your chat.
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Hey, everyone. So today, I have someone with me who almost needs no introduction. If you have ever been to micro con, you know who he is, if you have listened to makers dot Dev, you know who he is. If you have sent people files, at any point in the last eight years, there's a chance you might know who he is. And he also has something new coming out. Christian Genco, thank you so much for coming on.
Christian Genco 0:27
Hello, thank you so much. It's been a life goal of mine to be introduced, starting with a phrase needs no introduction. I've achieved I've achieved something important in life that that felt really cool.
Michele Hansen 0:39
I mean, you are the famous MicroConf note taker.
Christian Genco 0:42
That's, that's really cool to hear you say that? I don't, I don't consider that to have any level of fame. It's it came out of sort of a neurosis of having to take very detailed notes. But I'm happy to be known for it. That's, that's a cool thing to know for.
Michele Hansen 0:58
I will say that when I gave a talk at micro conference 2019 as an attendee, which was kind of my, well, my first big talk in the indie software space, I gave a talk at layer con a couple years before that. But it was the first one sort of like as an indie founder. And you made notes of my talk. And I was just blown away that somebody would want to write down things that I said, and then share it with other people like I was floored in a good way. And it made quite an impression on me. That's really cool. So you have been around for a while to in this world, as I mentioned, you founded file inbox eight years ago.
Christian Genco 1:44
Yeah. Spooky.
Michele Hansen 1:46
Do you want to join us? Tell me a little bit about that. First, refresh your memories
Christian Genco 1:50
I'd love to. So I came into this whole world through Patrick McKenzie, I was in college at the time, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. At the time I was in the pre med track planning and being a doctor. And I knew deep down, I didn't really want to be a doctor. But that was the path that my parents put me on. And I'm glad it was it was a good default path. But the whole time I'm in college, I'm just thinking, What's something else I could be doing? So I found several bloggers who were very influential. And me one of them was Mister Money Mustache, who taught me this ethos of being very financially frugal, and the other was Patrick McKenzie, who I realized was this path to be able to make money from the internet, that that the idea that you could have just a piece of software that you wrote, which I was doing every week for homework assignments and making stuff for myself, just for fun. And that was your job, that you could just make money from that I was thinking, wow, I got to get some of that. And especially at being a bingo card creator, I was thinking like, I can do that in a weekend, like, what, what's my thing for that gonna be, but the loose plan was like, I'm still gonna go to med school, I'm still going to be a doctor. And then at some point down the line, I'm going to have a really good idea for software as a service. And I'll make that and then I'll transition from being a doctor to having this be my thing. And so in college, as I'm just making stuff for myself, I had the problem of needing to send myself files from the school computers, because there were these lab computers where you had to do an assignment and then send it to yourself. And I didn't want to lock an email because I knew that keyloggers were a thing. And so people get access to my, my email if I did that. So I Googled for anonymous Dropbox upload, because that's the thing that I wanted. And I found this forum post with a whole bunch of people talking about needing the exact same thing, but no one had anything. So I said, Yeah, I know how to code. I know, Sinatra, and how to code in Ruby. So I'll whip something up to be able to do this. And I did, and I posted it in the forum for like, hey, all you people who are looking for this thing, I made a thing that does this. And then I used it. And then I sort of forgot about it. And about a year later, I got a whole bunch of traffic from TechCrunch and life hacker and several of these other blogs in that sort of space at the time that we're saying, Ah, look, check out this file inbox thing. It's amazing. I was called DB inbox at the time. And at the time, I was like, Wow, I'm getting so much traffic. What what do I do with this? And I let another year pass. A whole bunch of people sent me in requests for features and things. And I added paid plans and was very tricky about it. Because I said, Okay, you can have the features. But only if you pay me money. I thought what what schmucks, they're gonna, they're gonna pay me for work I've already done. And the first day that I launched that I had 10 people sign up for the $30 a year plan. And I was thinking, Wow, $300 that, that makes this whole thing worthwhile. That's really cool. And the next day, same thing next day, same thing by the first month. I've got about $1,000 in MRR I'm thinking wow, this is amazing. And I remember so vividly. This drive, I went down by this road drive to my parents house and I had all the windows rolled down and I just started laughing like, oh my god, I did it. And I did it without having to be a doctor first. But I had no idea why people were buying it. I just I just like made a thing. And so for five or six years yours I was running this just not knowing who the people were, who were buying it, or why they were buying it. I didn't understand any of the microcopy stuff of like, how to actually build this as a business. I did, the thing that people say doesn't happen, which is if you build it, they will come. And so I was left just sort of floating around, like, I don't know how to grow this, I know that I built this thing. And then after I built it an ad payments, people started using it, but I don't know how they found it. I wasn't doing any marketing. So that it was an advantage and a disadvantage. It was very fortunate that I made this my career, I didn't need to get a job. I've never worked in a real job, I didn't need to be a doctor, which was fantastic. But at the same time, I felt like I sort of stumbled into it in a way that I didn't understand how I got there. So that's been a struggle. Up until the last few years, I feel like I've finally gotten my feet heard me reading books, like deploy empathy and reading more about how marketing works, and why people buy things and learning that it's actually good to be marketing to people, if you have a good product that's helping them because you're helping them that was a that was a really difficult thought for me to get my head around. So that's where I am as of about a year ago.
Michele Hansen 6:07
And where you are today is that you are launching something new.
Christian Genco 6:11
Yeah, so all the things that I did wrong in file inbox, I feel like I've really nailed with the video clips. So like not knowing who's using it, I started with an audience, this time of people who make long form video content, like YouTubers and podcasters, like you, and not having a connection to the audience with file inbox. Because people use File inbox for things like loan officers and sign printers and that sort of thing. And I don't, I don't really, it's not that I don't care about though, like, I'm not I'm not curious about that audience, I don't know a lot about them, it's worked for me to better understand where they're coming from and what they need and what they buy. Where's the video clipper. It's people who make videos, and I am one of those people. I took Alia dollars, part time YouTuber Academy, and was was in this group of people who are all wanting to make more content. And I was just thinking, I love this, I would love to go to a conference of people who were making videos that that didn't, and hasn't yet applied to the audience for file inbox. I also know much more about marketing. So I'm able to figure out from the beginning SEO of what are people googling? And how can I put my thing in front of people who have these high search intents for the video clipper. And from a from a DevOps side, I feel like I've learned a lot of lessons of how to build better software that doesn't crash. And so I'm not always having to worry about software maintenance, building it in a serverless way entirely on Firebase. And, yeah, so it feels like a much closer alignment feels like I've hit much more of that product, market fit and the founder market fit. And it feels really good feels like a good development feels like I may finally know what I'm doing eight years into doing this.
Michele Hansen 7:54
So let's back up what is the video clip or actually do
Christian Genco 7:58
all right, so if you have long form video content, something like interviews that you've done with people like this podcast, for example. Or if you have longer form videos, five or 10 minutes long on YouTube, the crazy new hot thing is to have really, really short video clips that are optimized for different social media. So I make a tool that makes it really easy to turn your long form content into those short video clips, which makes it you're able to syndicate work that you've already been doing, especially if you're sitting on a media backlog of a whole bunch of microcom talks or a whole bunch of interviews that you've done, or a whole bunch of videos that you've recorded in a longer form for your YouTube channel. Those are all videos that can be mined. And for these shorter clips that can then be syndicated on Tiktok, and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter and LinkedIn. And there's a lot of really tedious parts to that you have to open up your video editor and find the interesting clips. And finding the interesting clips is a very different tasks than cutting a different timestamp. So you kind of have to have two different people or two different modes of thought to do that one person who's looking for the interesting story, and the other person who knows how to use a video editor. And then once you've got the clip, you have to format it. And they all have these special formats that they want, like Tiktok really likes portrait format, with subtitles burned in Twitter really like square format with a title on top and the subtitle on the bottom. So that's another round of editing. And a lot of people use a custom tool for that. And my gosh, if you've ever done Subtitling by hand, it's, it's terrible. And then there's another layer to that of you need someone to be able to manage the social media account and post this with interesting titles and posted on a schedule in a way that people are going to engage with at the most. And so the idea of the video clip or is on doing all of that that can be done by a machine, which eventually is going to be all of it. You just give me your video. Right now you highlight interesting parts of the transcript. And then I do everything else. I can come up with a title optimized for each social media network with GPT three that part's really cool. And then I can format it automatically with all these serverless functions. That part's really cool. And then I can queue them up and publish them automatically on your social media.
Michele Hansen 10:02
So is it you doing it or your software doing it?
Christian Genco 10:06
I say I, it's the royal i It's my software. Yes. The
Michele Hansen 10:11
Royal? Yeah. Because it's kind of like people do sometimes a, you know, productized service approach, right? The whole sort of smokescreen thing where it seems like it's automated, but it's not. So I was curious. So and now we get to the reason why I have invited you here today, play a game I'm calling, you have one month to get something done on this, did it do so. So today is December 1, we're recording this. We're planning to publish this on December 26. Assuming that I have looked at calendars correctly. And so and that gives you basically, three and a half weeks, yes, to get something done on this. And I talked to you about this about a month ago now. And you said how you have this goal, to get it to 20k MRR in the next year, so that you don't have to go out and get a job, which you have never had or you know, freelancing or whatnot. Right? Yes. And I thought it would be fun, if we use this as an opportunity as sort of a forcing function for you to have to ship something, basically, with within, you know, a one month span of us having this conversation today. But the fun part about this is actually is I don't know what that is going to be like we like we have had some chats back and forth on like the name of it, because you originally had a different name for it. And both like I mean, you have a demo live, but people who can't pay you. And I don't know if that name transition has completed. And you have to build, you know, user accounts and stuff like that, right. And so I'm curious what it is that you would like to use as that thing that you have to get done. Three and a half weeks from today.
Christian Genco 12:10
This is very exciting for me too, because I also don't know what that is. But let's, let's get there. So, so the place where the product is right now, I have user logins, I have the ability for people to go in and upload videos that can go on to make clips. And then something I just added since the last time we talked about a month ago is that from the web interface, people can download the format of videos in the raw format, which is just the clip and in the square format, which is the title on top and the subtitles on the bottom. And I feel like that's enough minimum value to be able to start charging people, I think it's going to be on more of a alpha user, this, this isn't a fully fleshed out product yet, but you can get some value from it. So maybe there's a discount, because you're buying it super early when all the features aren't fleshed out. So a month from now, I would like to say, by the time you dear listener are listening to this, I would like for you to be able to go to the video clipper.com and sign up for an account on the website and upload your own video or I'll have a test video in there that you can clip out and download a clip that's watermarked. And to remove the watermark, you have to pay me money. And I'd like for that to be possible a month from now. And that feels attainable. All right.
Michele Hansen 13:40
So this is kind of a time traveling episode. So people will be able to know as they're like, you could be listening to this right now. That's exceeded?
Christian Genco 13:53
Oh, hold on. Wait, I haven't. Oh, you can look at
Michele Hansen 13:57
it. On your phone on your laptop
Christian Genco 13:59
on your laptop. Oh, yes.
Michele Hansen 14:03
No, I'm not gonna scope creep you. The point is to focus and get things out the door not add features. So that kind of gets me to my next question is, you know, I mean, you said your market for this is like tick talkers and Instagram and podcasts and stuff like that. And so it sounds like you're you're hoping for a very strong word of mouth or, you know, spreading it visually right through watermarks, right? Like you're hoping people are going to talk about this and other people ask each other when they saw this or you know what they used or, you know, someone makes a tick talk about how they use it right? Like that would be amazing. Having the watermarks on there. So it very much sounds like that that's kind of the marketing strategy you're going for which then kind of leads into the the pricing strategy and I think this is something that people spend a lot of time on. For good reason, though. Also you need to just throw some Hang up there in terms of pricing that kind of remotely makes sense with user behavior and then figure it out later. So what are you thinking on like price point? And like what like, what is the like pricing kind of flow look like?
Christian Genco 15:15
This is something I've been thinking a lot about that I don't know that I have a good answer for. And you're correct that one of the marketing channels I want to do is this sort of viral marketing. I think an unfair advantage I have in this space is advertising to people who are at these content creators who, if I can get them with a watermark clip, if if they're not quite ready to pay, there is what I'm effectively paying for is them doing some marketing for me, if there's somebody who's who wants to publish clips, and not actually pay me, I'm okay with that. As long as you're syndicating clips, and there's, there's a few other marketing channels I'm trying one of them is like SEO, I'm going to try paid ads. I think cold outreach would actually work pretty well in this because I could go to content creators who have a presence on YouTube doing longer videos, but don't yet have a presence on Tiktok, and Instagram and all that or aren't publishing regularly. And I can make them a clip and I can say, Hey, would you like software that can turn this out regularly. So I'm going to try all those different things and see what sticks. So to the point about pricing. In customer conversations that I've had with people, it seems like people are sort of clustered into these two different buckets, there's professionals who are making content, and they're making money from it either directly from the content because they have a huge audience, or they're making content that leads into some sort of product. And so they can see the direct value of you know, the more hits they get, the more videos they push out, that translates directly into income from something else a book or a course or assess. And then there's a second group of people that are sort of like this immature, amateurs the wrong word. They're they're dabbling in social media, but they haven't quite figured out how to make money from it. So for them, they're really comfortable paying for something like descript, which I think is around 20 or $30 a month, but they would gawk at something that that costs $100. Because that's, that's just out of their budget. So I think what I want to do is offer something at around 20 or $30, and offer something at around $100. And I don't yet know how I'm going to differentiate, differentiate those two, how I can figure out what something is that the 100 other people care about, that the $20 people don't really care about. But that's, that's roughly what I'm going for.
Michele Hansen 17:19
It almost sounds like there's two. Yeah, there's two different groups, there's like two different messages to them as well, right? Like that first group. Like, I wonder if the message is, you know, the professionals, it's social media clips, so easy. Your VA can do it, versus with like nobody else and they don't need any video experience required. versus the other group is. I mean, they're doing signups. You can do it yourself an hour a week. You don't have right, right spent spend an hour doing it rather than 10 hours. Yeah, I like that, which versus it's like, I guess someone doing it themselves in one hour versus 10 hours versus someone's assistant or whatever. Doing it in one hour versus 10 hours.
Christian Genco 18:04
Yeah, that's a good insight, the sales pitch also to the 100 other people is that this is an alternative to paying a consultancy. For figures to be doing this for you, instead of that, you can have your VA doing it and get a product that's just as good. And then yeah, the the sales pitch, I think to the 20 $30 customers is, you know, you should be doing this, you know what it takes to do this because you've made clips of it before, but you're not doing it because the work sucks. And it's tedious, and you don't want to spend 10 hours doing it. So this is something that you can pay a little bit of money, and be doing it yourself to be publishing content on every platform you care about, for about an hour a week of your work.
Michele Hansen 18:53
That's an interesting insight. I don't know if you heard that. What like when you said that, that the professionals are paying an agency how much to do this
Christian Genco 19:01
1000s Like, for a month, 4000 Matsuya?
Michele Hansen 19:05
Forth? Okay, they're paying an agency $4,000 a month to do this. Right? And then the individuals who sort of, you're kind of you have your professionals and your prosumer is almost you said that your prosumers know they should do this. Yeah. Which is a little bit of a dangerous territory when you're because that's that's like behavior change territory, which in b2c is really hard. I'm curious about that. It's possible, but it's hard.
Christian Genco 19:38
Yeah. So the when I talk to people, the reason they're not doing this is that it's too much work. It takes too much time. It's the tools are too frustrating. It's something they would like to be doing. It sounds like if it was easier to do, and so I hadn't considered that as a problem. I think, to date, I've just thought about that as well. Here's the thing, you know, you know, you should be doing this, but your your tools that you have right now make this too difficult. So use my thing instead. And that's the difference between you not doing it and you actually doing it.
Michele Hansen 20:13
And it almost sounds like the professionals, one is too cheap.
Christian Genco 20:17
That's interesting. That
Michele Hansen 20:21
one is too expensive, and the professionals is too cheap. And granted, we won't know this until you actually launch it. Right. But like,
Christian Genco 20:29
you mentioned something at the beginning, also that I'm attacking this as a product. Oh, you asked, when I use the word AI, is that me? Me? Or is that me, the software. And something I've also considered is, I could be a consultancy for this, because this hour a week thing, you know, I could do that for someone else. If it's somebody else's content, I can go through their content and clip out stuff for an hour a week, and then make $4,000. So that's another angle of this, that I've sort of tabled, that is totally a possibility. I could be going after people as an agency, and then they don't necessarily need to know what sort of software I'm using, I could just be using my own thing.
Michele Hansen 21:08
Yeah, or you. It sounds like it'd be your advantage here that the agencies don't have is that you have built the software to do this. And so it sounds like you actually have another category there, which is an agency plan. So that they are either they are paying for it, or you are basically, you know, selling to the agency, and then there, when you're selling to an agency, it's always better to be a direct, like line item that's billed to the client rather than overhead. Right. So you know, something that like their clients get a discount, because you have this agreement with them. So they're paying $450 A month rather than 500, because of their special agency relationship. You can build software, you know, doing consulting is is is uh, I think I think for a lot of indie people is a good bridge, but that all the time you're spending consulting is time that you're not spending, building the product. And I think this is a this I mean, this is a situation Colleen has been in for the past year where she's working with a client on the thing that she's building, but she's doing the specific things for that client, rather than building the software so that instead of making, you know, in your case, you know, I don't know, $4,000 a month with one client, like, you could be making $32,000 a month from having 64 people paying for it instead, right? And then you're just building the software.
Christian Genco 22:31
Yeah, that's compelling. I am. I'm really curious about that. Specifically how to approach agencies I don't I don't feel like I know about agencies very well. There's one guy I know in this space. Who's doing this, who has a consultancy who's doing this for some pretty big name. So I could talk to him and just ask him like what he'd be interested in? Yeah, yeah, I have another insight into what an agency might like to have. I was talking to someone who, I think, by himself would sort of fit into this $30 category, but he's moving into doing more of the consultancy. So he's sort of going from prosumer to becoming a smaller consultancy. And he was saying that it would be valuable for him to offer to his clients that they could pick out the interesting clips themselves. And that was really interesting to me, because that then would leave him with like, no work to do. There, the client would value being able to say, you know, I think I said this interesting thing here from, you know, four minutes to four minutes and 30 seconds, and then the software would handle everything else. And then that's something that yeah, like you said he could build directly to his client. sort of level. One, yeah, yeah, that the client would go to his brand, dot, the video clip or.com or something like the video inbox.
Michele Hansen 23:47
Workshop that no more renaming.
Christian Genco 23:58
I like to play of going after consultancies.
Michele Hansen 24:00
I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities here. And the most important thing is to is to get it in people's hands and let them pay you for it sooner rather than later. I mean, it really strikes me that, like, how long did it did it take for you to implement paid plans on file in box?
Christian Genco 24:19
The very first time I did it, I actually at the same time, totally rewrote all the software.
Michele Hansen 24:25
No, I meant, like from when you launched it to when you offered paid plans, like two years, two years. Yeah. And now you're looking at like, two or three months?
Christian Genco 24:35
Yeah, I've implemented pay plans on the same sort of stack before. Firebase has this really nice stripe implementation where you just click a button and they're automatically syncing all the plans and things for you. So that'll be really nice. And so I don't think it's unreasonable. Like I haven't haven't started it yet on this project, but I don't
Michele Hansen 24:51
know. I'm not saying that. Like, it's like, it's unreasonable to think it takes three months to implement a paid plan, which it doesn't it's more than like, you building a product. A time from when you are allowing yourself to charge people for it has shrunk dramatically, which I think is a hurdle that people have is like, Is this good enough that I can charge someone for it? Yeah. And I mean, you know, in my own career, I have been continually surprised by things that people will pay me for that I thought were not that great. So I think it's, it's, it actually sort of shows some growth on your side as an entrepreneur, right of like, kind of you have this sort of theme of sort of doing things better than you did them the first time.
Christian Genco 25:35
That's a good theme to have in life. Yeah, something else that I thought of when you were saying that was I've also shrunk the time, from starting marketing, I think I had this idea in my head that I had to start marketing, once I had a perfectly finished product that people could start paying for. And that's not true at all, you start marketing before you start coding. So I've been much more conscious about putting out Twitter videos and throwing up a landing page that's collecting email addresses and something I think, I think I could be doing that even much more aggressively. I think I could be buying paid ads for these search terms that I think are high intent. And just using that to to try to convert people to give me their email address. I think I'll do that today, actually. All right, that's another thing I want to add to my list of things I'll have done before the 26th. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a Google ad that's driving people to the homepage, that is just collecting email addresses. And that's it. Like I talked to so many people who are starting new things who have the same sort of mentality of like, well, you know, as soon as I get this one more feature done, that's when I'm going to start marketing, but like no, just you start right now, you do something in marketing, you start telling people about this, you at least tell them what you're working on. And that that's so much better informs even how you build the product, the more conversations you can have, the more you can get out there, even before you have something finished, it's even better. I was really impacted in this line of thinking by a book called Traction. There's two different books called Traction. I'm talking about the one written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maurice, which walks you through this method of figuring out all the different possible ways you could be marketing, try the top three of them, measure which one works the best measure how much it costs, to acquire a customer and each of them, and then double down on just that one thing, and start the day you start coding. And that's a very important idea that I feel like I'm still learning, I could be doing much more marketing.
Michele Hansen 27:25
But also in terms of marketing, you talked about the watermarking, and how important that will be. And it strikes me that. So have you built if you build the watermarking you already have a functioning demo of and like, can people download a video from the demo right now?
Christian Genco 27:46
Right now? December 26? They can't. Right? Yeah, December 1, they cannot.
Michele Hansen 27:52
So I think that once you get the watermarking and the download working, right, like once you get like, I don't know, less so than ads to me is getting those videos circulating. And yes, having you know, having a list like that those things are always helpful. But it sounds like to me is like you said you already have user accounts built and then allowing people to download it, adding the watermark. Like you can almost stop at that point, like release that. And then people can't pay you, but they also can't remove the watermark. And then you move on to doing the paid plans. Like there's that doesn't have to be one, you know, release all in one, right? Yeah, it's better to have people emailing you say how do I remove this stupid watermark and be like, Hey, pay me $100 A month or $500 a month, which is where I think your professional plan should be. Right. And or, you know, $20 a month to remove the watermark. But see that, like I think this the like this interesting kind of thing about about pricing and kind of structuring plans is like thinking about incentives, right? And for you, the more videos people make with your watermark on it, the better off you are because the more traffic you're getting back. And so you're playing it like that, like the the limitations on the plans basically need to be structured in a way that they don't discourage people from making videos, but they're limited in other ways that are relevant to them. And I'm curious what you're thinking like what the delineation between plans this?
Christian Genco 29:39
Yeah. So the watermarking is a play at a viral marketing channel. And I agree that I agree that that can be a thing that I ship, even before I had paid plans. I like that. So I think I think just laser focus on being able to do that. And that's so that I can get done like, I don't know, this week. That that's very close. And then
Michele Hansen 29:57
do you want me to do next week?
Christian Genco 29:59
Well, There's a complicating factor in this, I'm going on a cruise with my family on Sunday, and we're not gonna have
Michele Hansen 30:08
fun and you're going to enjoy it. So it's not going to be done in the next week,
Christian Genco 30:11
so much fun. So, like, having a having to go back to 26 will be good. If you follow up with me in two weeks, I would like to in two weeks be able to send you to a site where you can upload a video and download a watermark,
Michele Hansen 30:27
which is last week as of the speed, which is a time traveling episode. Yeah.
Christian Genco 30:33
Just before Christmas. Yes. So the Oh, what was the other way? Get
Michele Hansen 30:43
that out. Now while people are putting out all of those like Christmas wrapping videos and whatnot.
Christian Genco 30:48
Sure. There was another point you made that I'm having trouble remembering the viral marketing content during the video first where you can want to market and then focus focusing on pipelines. Oh, so this is a question I'm struggling with is what that differentiating thing is, between the free users who are watermarking, and the prosumer users and the Pro users, I don't yet have a good finger on my pulse of what that differentiating factor is. I don't want it to be number of videos. Because if people are using this for free, and they're pumping out free videos, and that are watermarks, and publishing those places, like go for it. Absolutely. And I think even with the cueing part of it of being able to have this buffer style, you can generate clips, and then you know, drip one out once a day or have it linked with your social media account. I think that's okay, well, actually saying that allowed, maybe the scheduling is something that Pro users care about. And free users don't care that it can be on a schedule, they just they but they would like to link their social media to be able to have one click publishing, to be able to publish it. So that okay, that that feels like it could be a good way to differentiate, but I'm struggling with what those other factors are of what the things are that the business users would care about. And only then we care about and what the Pro users care about, that only they care about. watermarking is one of those things. And then what about
Michele Hansen 32:09
storage? Like you mentioned that the professionals they will have like a year's worth of library that they are continually recycling. Yeah, and reusing versus someone who is an influencer, getting their influencing career off the ground. They might not have that. And I wonder if you have a time limit or like even like, you know, somebody uploads a video, like how long? are you storing the entire video? How long are you storing the clips, and maybe that's something like, if you're on the basic plan, you know, the video was stored for seven days or something and then it's automatically deleted versus if you're on a varying like levels of you know, you could, you could basically tear your plans by how much video storage people are getting. Like, isn't that expensive to like to be storing a bunch of video on your end, like, you'd
Christian Genco 33:05
be surprised Cloud Storage is getting really cheap. Yeah, for all I'm gonna forget the math, it's something like for me to store 100 gigabytes costs something like $1 per month, it's roughly in that range. So I could even I like I like differentiating on storage. And I could even be kind of clever with it. If like, I don't delete your video, you just lose access to it. And if you upgrade to the business plan, you can see your entire backlog. That also resonates with me, because several of the business people that I've talked to who are ready and willing to pay $100 a month, have this huge media backlog that I think it would feel tedious for them to have to juggle if they have a limited amount of storage, or if they have something where they have to edit it within seven days. That's that would be too frustrating to deal with. And if it's a difference between 30 and $100, they don't really care. They just want to upload the entire media vault all at once. And then have someone go through it and do the clipping. So yeah, I like storage, I think that's a, that's a high probability of being the differentiating factor, that would be a high signal to figure out the difference between the levels.
Michele Hansen 34:12
And then eventually, the professional plan could be gated in terms of the amount of storage you get to write because if they're going to upload five years worth of weekly content, like they should pay for that, right, rather than somebody who has, you know, 10 pieces of videos that they that they like, right like that, that feels relevant, and if somebody's already paying you $100 And then they're like, Okay, well, I'm using this a lot, you know, then okay, we got upgraded to 200 or whatever, because we're using it a lot. Yeah, right like that. That's also an alignment of incentives where they're getting more value out of it. You're giving them more value, therefore they pay more. Yeah.
Christian Genco 34:51
Okay, I like that. We may have to solve that problem. And then free users. I don't I sort of see Yeah, yeah, no storage like you just get the one A video that you're currently clipping and then I want you to use it as much as possible. Maybe I do, like maybe I do a few days of storage. Or maybe it's just maybe it's just one video at a time. There's a lot of things I can do with the free users. I think if, if the free plan was identical to the prosumer plan, except it had a watermark, I think that's enough to differentiate between free and prosumer. And the differentiating primarily on storage for the prosumer versus business. I think that makes sense. Okay, yeah, I think so too. Cool. Thanks. I think we just solved the problem. Well, I've
Michele Hansen 35:36
got a plan.
Christian Genco 35:38
Visit the video clip for.com on a laptop. You can view the pricing page, probably on a phone to see if that's actually what I did.
Michele Hansen 35:49
Well, Christian Genco thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we'll be hearing from you again. And I'm going to actually try to do something fun with this episode, where I am going to make a clip using the video clipper for this episode, which will be kind of fun. And I'm probably you know to what we said of earlier people think oh, it's so easy. Your Va Va can do it. I'm probably that level of competence around anything involving AV things. So we will see how it goes. But this video will actually be run through the video clipper. So amazing, kind of fun.
Christian Genco 36:30
Thank you so much for having me on. I consistently enjoy your chat.
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