How This Founder's AI Tool Hit $6K MRR In Just 5 Months
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗
Hey, I’m Alex, Founder of Vidon.ai. Vidon.ai is an AI tool that instantly turns your blog posts into shareable videos. The videos get better engagement on social media, help with SEO, and let you share your written content with a broader audience on video-only platforms like YouTube or TikTok.
In 5 months we’ve scaled to $6K MRR and have helped 200+ small and large companies transform their written content into video.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?🔗
My background is in artificial intelligence but I have a passion for psychology and marketing. This led me to launch a handful of products over the past few years which use AI to help companies scale their marketing.
The idea for vidon.ai arose at my previous startup. Our primary marketing channel was content marketing which worked really well for us. But, we saw that content marketing was getting more and more competitive every day. If you Google anything you’ll find 100s of articles all on the exact same topic. This makes it really hard to stand out.
We had experimented with video marketing and got amazing results. However, the video was far too much effort for our small business. The equipment was too expensive and too time-consuming for our team. Having seen the higher engagement from video, I wanted to find a way to make it easier to create video content from our existing content.
I got serious about the idea and gave myself 6 months to build and validate it as a product. I didn’t have heaps of cash but didn’t want investment either. So I realized I’d also have to get inventive about marketing.
Take us through the process of building the MVP.🔗
We wholeheartedly believe in Eric Raymond’s advice,
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers”.
We decided to focus on one specific feature. The vision was a single button, you input your blog's URL, press the magic button, and out pops a video ready to share.
We built it and spoke to some content marketers and they loved it! But they also gave us tons of reasons why they hated it! The main one was there was no way to edit the video after it was created. Quite a big oversight by us!
After 2 months of feedback, we went back to the drawing board and started prototyping version 2. We spent a long time iterating in Figma on how we can make an intuitive video creation UI that didn’t need blog writers to learn a whole new tool to use.
We settled on the idea of a document editor. Vidon.ai looks like any editor like Google docs or Notion. But it can take anything you write and turn it into a shareable engaging video. Write some text and it’s spoken out loud, add a title and it becomes an animated title section in the video, drop an image and it’s added to your video.
Describe the process of launching the business.🔗
We didn’t do a traditional launch. As we were creating a new type of video editor, we knew we would have to do plenty of tweaking to nail down a product that people loved. We are a small team so we didn't want tons of people using the product all at once. Rather we wanted a small but steady trickle of early adopters.
Early on we would spend one-week building and then the next week marketing. This let us constantly iterate on our offering as we spoke to more and more people. Also, it lets our team fully focus on our goal for the week rather than having to constantly switch back and forth.
Our initial customers came from very targeted cold email campaigns to content marketing agencies. Our logic was that they create lots of content and would be willing to try a new tool to make their lives easier. We quickly found that you can get great engagement by adding video to your cold emails.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?🔗
We still do some targeted cold email campaigns for big clients. We’ve fine-tuned the emails to provide as much value upfront and still feel personal. To do this we find a recent blog post from the company and turn it into a video, we send the video to them and tell them they can use the video however they like. This often piques their interest and opens the door to a conversation about how else they can use video.
Programmatic SEO is another tactic we are using to scale. If you’re unfamiliar, programmatic SEO uses automation to create content in order to target low-search volume pages. For example, Product Hunt has a database of 1000s of products. For each one, it creates a page showing alternative products e.g. "Best Canva Alternatives''.
We share content targeted at niche blog authors on the vidon.ai learning center. And use our API to create videos for every page. Adding video to blog posts helps them rank higher on Google. We wrote a blog post breaking down the entire campaign if you're curious.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?🔗
As we haven’t taken any investment we were profitable from day one. Our main costs are our video rendering and the speech generation AI. We’ve only used free marketing channels like email and content marketing so far.
You may currently be an expert in one aspect of running a company but you need to be proficient in all areas. Learning all this doesn't happen overnight. That's why I feel persistence, patience, and consistency are key for any entrepreneur.
We currently generate $6k MRR, the bulk of this comes from half a dozen content marketing agencies with big contracts. Our goal is to diversify our customer base a bit more, so we are less reliant on a few large customers.
Today our most profitable channel is cold email. We expect this to soon be an organic search, but SEO can take months before seeing results. We knew the importance of SEO and that setting a good foundation would really help in the long term. And so our short-term goal is to continue to produce content to aid this.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗
We’ve learned LOADS!
Early on our website didn’t really convert traffic. We experimented with adding a slimmed-down version of our video editor to the homepage. People loved it! Visitors would love to play with the demo as it’s quite fun, and it gets them to the “wow this is cool” moment early.
A few times we would go too long between speaking to customers and just had our heads down building the product. This burnt us when we would launch a new feature only to find nobody actually wanted it. We had to learn to keep in close contact with our customers.
As we are a team of builders, the easy part for us was building the product. The hard part was scaling it. We learned to tackle the problems we were least comfortable with first. This gave us more time with them and helped us upskill ourselves.
Adding the structure of alternating between building and marketing really helped us balance the easy and hard parts of the businesses. This not only helped us grow but also helped our mentality as we would all get a break from the grueling marketing. It also taught us to lean on our skill sets, which is why much of our marketing is automated/programmatic.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?🔗
We are tool minimalists, we look for tools where we can do a lot in a single tool. Even though sometimes having 3 or 4 tools lets you do more. We prefer to have a handful of powerful tools which we become experts in and heavily integrate.
We run the entire company from:
- HubSpot - Analytics, CRM, email, blog, etc.
- Notion - Tasks, documentation, planning
- Fullstory - Website monitoring
- Webflow - Website builder
- Figma - Design
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?🔗
I love stories that follow founders at the start of their journey. When they had a partner, 2 cats, a child, and a full-time job and had to juggle it all to start something. It inspires me to see what's possible with enough grit. Indiehackers is full of these stories and well worth a read if you need some inspiration.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗
I find lots of stories of entrepreneurs leaving out the loneliness, uncertainty, and anxiety that goes along with starting a business. I think it's important for entrepreneurs to understand that these feelings are normal and that they shouldn't be discouraged by them. I would advise other entrepreneurs to find a group of people who are going through the same thing so that they can support each other.
Also, as a founder, you need to wear many hats. You may currently be an expert in one aspect of running a company but you need to be proficient in all areas. Learning all this doesn't happen overnight. That's why I feel persistence, patience, and consistency are key for any entrepreneur. Your first business may fail, and your second one may fail, but if you don't give up, the third one just might be a success.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?🔗
Yes! We’re always looking for amazing people to join the team. If you’re reading this thinking “But why didn’t they try X”, then we want to speak to you!
Where can we go to learn more?🔗
- Vidon.ai - Try out the editor for yourself!
- Our Blog - For more marketing tactics
- My email - If you want to chat!
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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