I Built A $30K/Mo Video Editing Agency With Zero Experience

Hyunjae Lee

•

Published: June 27th, 2024

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Hyunjae Lee

Founder, Vimerse

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Vimerse

vimerse.com

from Boston, MA, USA

started April 2023

$29,999

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Hyunjae recommends to grow your business!

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Adobe Creativ...

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Tidio

social media

Twitter

YouTube

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Paypal

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Ok, my background actually has nothing to do with video editing.

I started my career working for Morgan Stanley in South Korea. In 2011, I came to the US to attend Columbia Business School. After business school, I worked for a mutual fund in New York for seven years, investing in global companies. Although I was based in New York, my wife worked in Boston.

My weekly routine involved waking up at 4 am on Monday to travel to New York and returning to Boston on Friday evening. While I loved my job, the commute was exhausting, with frequent train and flight delays.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the mutual fund decided to shut down, and I did not want to find a job in New York. So, in 2021, I decided to start my own business. Now I run a video editing agency called Vimerse and recently launched a video editor recruiting platform named Billionviews.ai.

We didn’t have a definitive launch moment. It was an ongoing process—building the team, developing the website, structuring the workflow, identifying the right clients, and testing different approaches.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

While working for the mutual fund, I was responsible for investing in consumer companies such as Nestle and Coca-Cola. These companies were rapidly transitioning from traditional media marketing to online marketing, particularly social media and influencer marketing.

I conducted a survey with 50 content creators through one of my Twitch streamer friends to understand their challenges and to see if they would be willing to pay for video editing services. Additionally, I held multiple interviews with content creators to identify the pain points in the content creation process.

Our own survey results from back in 2021...

...2/3 of high earning influencers showed interest in video editing service.

It became clear that video editing was laborious and time-consuming. For every minute of running time, editing typically required 1-4 hours of work. Furthermore, many content creators did not enjoy the video editing process and wanted to free up their time to stay more creative.

I did not have any experience in video editing or content creation. I thought, "I identified a group of people with problems. I can build a team to help them. How hard can it be?" I am very organized and enjoy developing structured processes, which content creators often lack.

Additionally, I was comfortable working with experts in other countries, having vast experience in researching and investing in companies outside the US. So, I took a leap of faith and started to build the business. It turned out that generating the first sales was extremely hard!

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

I'm not sure if I can call my journey to the first product “a process.” It was, in fact, a series of mistakes, and pretty costly ones too. Here are the five major mistakes I made:

The first mistake. Even before having a paying client, I hired a team of video editors who were interested in building the agency with me in April 2021. I paid the editors hefty fees to keep them around for potential new clients.

The second mistake. We started contacting content creators through cold email marketing, even though we didn't have a website. We demonstrated how their videos were edited and how we would have edited their videos.

These samples were costly to produce, and the strategy was ineffective because content creators were not ready to work with editors without a proper website. It was like bringing an engagement ring to a blind date. Despite making about 100 edit samples, we got zero clients.

Example of an email we sent with a sample edit.

The third mistake. We hired a web development agency and built the site. Because the agency had a rather rigid process, everything took much longer than I had expected. We ended up with a very minimal landing page with no features—it only had project submission links. Everything else was done over emails.

The fourth mistake. After preparing the website, we initiated cold email marketing pretty aggressively. Some major content creators tried our services, but many were not satisfied with the quality. Our team lacked experience with large content creators, and it took us some time to gain the necessary experience to deliver what they wanted. We got our first client in October 2021, six months after starting the business in April 2021.

The fifth mistake. We started social media marketing without properly evaluating what the cost will be and how to funnel clients effectively. We made a top-notch video ad for YouTube paid ad marketing.

We made over 40 YouTube videos for the company’s channel. After a year, it was clear that no clients were signing up because of paid ads or YouTube videos. Hence, we stopped the efforts.

We did not get any clients with this YouTube paid ad.

All these mistakes turned out to be a blessing later. We were able to weed out ineffective marketing strategies quickly and address operational issues early on due to our extensive experiments. The website was fundamentally well-built, allowing us to add more features later.

I was able to build a team that went through tough times together. As a result, many team members continue to support my journey, leading to low editor turnover, which is critical in running a successful agency.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We didn’t have a definitive launch moment. It was an ongoing process (or again, a series of mistakes and adjustments)—building the team, developing the website, structuring the workflow, identifying the right clients, and testing different approaches.

Thankfully, I bootstrapped my business with enough funds to survive a year. Unless you know the exact steps to generate sales, it is very likely that you will have to make mistakes to move forward.

There is no easy way to estimate how much your mistakes will cost, which is why it is important to set aside more capital than you might initially estimate before starting a business. Adequate capital allows you to explore and eliminate paths that are not viable. The key is to explore and cut losses quickly when things don’t work out as expected.

After landing our first client, it was still challenging as our portfolio was weak and the website was not fully functional. We kept up our efforts, reaching out to more content creators, gaining experience with more complex projects, and streamlining our workflow with automations. Every week, we held team meetings to discuss what we could change to better serve clients and make the editors’ lives easier.

In three years, we were able to build a portfolio that we can be proud of. And the clients started to refer to other clients more frequently. Even without email marketing or social media efforts, referrals and Google searches began to grow our business.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Initially, cold email marketing was highly effective. When we first used Mailerlite in 2021, our messages had a 50-60% open rate and received encouraging replies. However, after a year, cold email marketing started to decline, possibly due to Gmail’s policy changes or our overly aggressive scheduling.

The open rate dropped to 20%, and we had to pause the campaign. Nonetheless, our first set of clients was acquired mostly through cold email marketing, and we still maintain great relationships with most of them.

The next set of clients came from referrals. After all, a video editing agency is a service business. Even when clients were somewhat disappointed with edits, they were happy with our process and communication, and they recommended us to fellow content creators. Building trust and staying relevant eventually paid off. We now have a formal referral program that properly compensates existing clients for sending us more referrals.

Then, we have some clients who found us on Google. They complimented our SEO, as we appeared on the first page of Google for keywords such as "video editing services'' and "video editing for content creators." However, we didn't do much for SEO beyond posting our portfolio and blog posts.

I suspect that the recurring nature of video editing also helped our SEO. Our clients visit our website nearly every day to check drafts and submit new projects. Additionally, our video editing cost calculator, a free tool, continues to work as a lead magnet. This was inspired by Neil Patel and Ahref’s free tool strategy.

...Emphasizing Our Service's Affordability

For client retention, we focus on keeping our costs low and continuously offering new features. We have not raised our fees since inception, thanks to more extensive automation. After all, the video editing market is very competitive. Although lower-cost options are unlikely to satisfy clients seeking high-quality edits, they are prevalent. Furthermore, AI tools might be sufficient for clients who aim to produce a high volume of content. Hence, we are extremely cautious with cost unless it can be viewed as an investment to find an optimal solution.

Find optimal solutions and people you can work with through low-cost testing. If your target market is large enough, you will eventually be able to recoup your investments and generate a sizable profit.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are currently editing for content creators with over 10 million combined followers. While we cover a broad range of categories, our main focus areas are beauty/fashion, talking head videos, and small businesses (ads, courses, and podcasts).

We are currently generating $30,000 in monthly sales, with year-over-year growth above 50%. The agency model is notoriously difficult to scale, but we are in a good position because our admin team is constantly trained to carry out essential tasks.

The video editing business has been profitable from year one, although most of the profit is reinvested or spent on new business opportunities. Specifically, we have started a new recruiting platform for video editors.

The most challenging part of scaling a video editing agency has been hiring good video editors. We developed a simple hiring process that ignores resumes and past work experience, focusing instead on asking for a short sample matching the reference style.

This approach can become overwhelming if you want to test 100 video editors. Therefore, we created the Billionviews.ai platform where editors are first screened and rated by us. This allows users to hire qualified candidates right away after reviewing their samples.

How it works:

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

It's difficult to imagine now, but outsourcing video editing was not easy 6-7 years ago. The transfer of large files was still prohibitive with an average internet download speed of 30Mbps (in the US), and key tools for task management and video proofing were primitive. When we started, things had improved significantly, with average internet download speeds of 100Mbps and much more advanced tools.

So, the timing of our business launch was ideal, given the maturity of these technologies. We constantly try different video editing tools and task management tools to see if we can further improve our workflow.

The competition has certainly intensified over the past 12 months. Yet, most competitors attempt to charge monthly subscriptions, which is clearly not the right pricing model for content creators who have fluctuating workloads. Maintaining a flexible service package for clients requires extra coordination, but our decision to prioritize client satisfaction is evident from our pricing strategy and seems to enable us to win a greater market share.

Because video editing is a recurring business and relationships can last multiple years, we apply a disciplined approach to pricing and try to avoid excessive margins. While this results in a smaller marketing budget, it helps us reduce the churn rate, which is more important. Considering the intensifying competition and high paid ad costs, our focus should be on retaining clients and getting referrals.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

As an agency, we rely heavily on task management, automation, and communication tools. We use Clickup to track all projects and their statuses. While ClickUp had its unique advances back in 2021 (e.g., email automation, time tracking), other task management tools have since caught up, and features and costs are now quite comparable across different platforms. We still appreciate ClickUp’s continuous upgrades and its ease of use.

We use automation extensively. When a project is submitted, all necessary information is automatically added to the corresponding ClickUp task. When a project is assigned to an editor, the editor receives a personalized notification on their phone. When a client requests changes, the editor again gets a notification on their phone. Editors’ salaries are paid automatically based on their tracked hours. We initially used Make.com for most of the automations. Now, we mainly use AWS and Azure as they are much cheaper, although they require developer involvement.

We also developed specialized tools to serve niche market clients. For instance, some clients make videos using other YouTube clips. Downloading these clips and compiling them is a very labor-intensive process. We strive to avoid doing anything tedious, so we created a tool that allows us to download YouTube clips and cut them based on provided timestamps automatically.

Because this tool has been very useful for YouTube automation channels, we made a web version so that anyone can use it for free! Once you upload a voice-over, it will generate a storyboard. After you fill the storyboard with video links and timestamps, you can download all clips and generate XML and MP4 files synced with the voice-over.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Obviously, I love the Starter Story! I have been religiously watching all the episodes on its YouTube channel.

Over the past few months, this lecture by Graham Weaver has been monumental in every aspect of my business and life. A great business is all about execution, and execution requires an unwavering pursuit of improvements through refinements. Without being prepared subconsciously, this is impossible.

Furthermore, the approach and attitude explained by Graham Weaver should be shared with the team. A business thrives only when passionate and skillful people collaborate to achieve a common goal. A clearly written goal allows others to support you more effectively as they know what you are trying to accomplish.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

If you have co-founders who can complement your skill sets, it would be ideal. If you already know how to generate sales by yourself with your expertise, you don’t need my advice. However, I have advice for those who are starting a business without much experience in the field and without co-founders: make sure to prepare sufficient capital. Your perseverance is only as good as the available capital.

While starting an agency costs less than other types of businesses, your agency will likely cost more than you initially estimated, particularly if you do not have ample experience in the field.

Find optimal solutions and people you can work with through low-cost testing. If your target market is large enough, you will eventually be able to recoup your investments and generate a sizable profit. This profit can also be much larger than you initially estimated.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are constantly looking for video editors with over three years of experience who can pass our sample test. Additionally, we are seeking partnerships with services and apps that cater to content creators. Both Vimerse and Billionviews.ai have referral programs that will be beneficial to our partners.

Where can we go to learn more?

For Vimerse (video editing agency), for Billionviews.ai (video editor recruiting platform)
Twitter: Vimerse, Billionviewsai
YouTube