The first dollar

I made my first dollar on the internet! $3, actually 😇 And yes, I do plan to save a screenshot of this beautiful Stripe dashboard for the day when we can afford an office wall to hang it on.

We made it in our sleep - about 2am on a Friday morning - after launching a paywall on our website Thursday evening. Such a magical feeling to wake up and find dollars in our new bank account.

This tremendous revenue stream (joke) came from a user on our website, Kapwing. Kapwing is an online video meme maker; people can use it to add text captions to video without downloading or learning to use a new app/software. Eric, my co-founder, came up with the idea when these meme-like videos started taking over his Facebook and Instagram feed. Because of the cost and technical challenge of computing and storing videos in the cloud, there are surprisingly few good online video editors, but there are a lot of people in the world trying to create cool video content. And so Kapwing was born.

It took us about three weeks to build the website from scratch and another three weeks before we started asking users to pay. To remove the little Kapwing watermark on the output videos, we charge $1/video or $10/month for unlimited videos. There is still an “I really can’t pay” link on our paywall, and about 90% of our users don’t pay us anything. But even with this back door, we made an honest dollar!

Kapwing isn’t going to change the world; it’s just an online video meme maker. But it’s a good product, and it makes life for content creators a bit more creative and less tedious. With a high return rate, it’s growing little by little, and some of the videos are actually kind of cool. I’m not filled with pride when I tell my friends I work on a meme maker, but I am proud to be building something valuable, a tool useful enough to earn customers, an internet product that converts people I will never meet to customers. It takes more than something "cool" to be worth spending money on.

I knocked several zeros off of my income when I left Google, but every dollar is sweeter when you are building the product yourself and fighting for every customer. I'm proud of $3.

To breaking even and beyond! #StartupMilestones

- Julia and Eric

Update: Since writing this article on Saturday, we officially have our first 5 monthly subscribers! That's enough revenue to cover our own computational expenses! Now to pay the rent...