
Wavve: making $76k a month turning podcasts into videos - richclominson
https://www.failory.com/interview/wavve
======
teejmya
My favorite podcast app ([https://overcast.fm](https://overcast.fm)) does
this, here's the creator's post about it:
[https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-
sharing](https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing)

------
Denzel
Semi-rhetorical question: why do customers accept something like this
delivered in SaaS form? It seems so antithetical to customer obsession when
this is the exact type of problem that lends itself well to a locally running
application.

Why not deliver this as a desktop application that users download and pay for
one-time? There’s absolutely no need for an ongoing subscription to a backend
service here. Outside of rent-seeking.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Semi-rhetorical answer:

1\. It still provides more value than the monthly subscription.

2\. People have shown a greater willingness to pay for ongoing features and
support in a SAAS model than in other formats.

3\. It better aligns with the costs of support and maintenance that the
provider needs to provide.

4\. It's less risky for the consumer to get started.

5\. There's no piracy or people decompiling your app and putting it out under
their own name.

6\. No updates to fiddle with and works across machines.

Not all answers above directly apply to the podcast->video service here but
these are the general reasons.

~~~
csallen
I built and sold an installable application in the past, and #5 was brutal.
For some reason it's rarely discussed.

~~~
ThomPete
I had a customer openly admit to me that they had been using a pirated version
of my app until now.

Pretty crazy when you see your own app on torrent sites.

~~~
z3ncyberpunk
Only when your goal is making money and not making apps to further humanity

~~~
ArnoVW
Making money allows you to invest. If you can't make money, the scope of what
is possible is restricted to "what one guy can make as a hobby".

Not all problems are workable within that constraint.

------
Mirioron
I made something like this once for a podcast. FFMPEG is a godsend.
Essentially I took a video (could just be the logo image made into a video)
and looped it to the length of the audio track. Essentially it just called
ffmpeg with the right parameters. The process only took a few moments and gave
me a video I could upload to YouTube.

Back then I was really surprised that I couldn't find a service like this. Had
I found one I probably would've used it.

------
throwqwerty
God that's impressive. takeaway: make products for people that use computers
but don't know how to use suites of tools.

~~~
jcytong
Maybe your takeaway is right but there's also a huge piece that wasn't
captured in your one-liner

"We lost about 2 years of our time and $30k of my savings (which was most of
it). "

"Getting those first 10/100+ customers was really hard. We relied primarily on
direct outreach via cold email and social media messaging to obtain those
first customers. Taking the time to reach out directly to customers for a
$7/month plan was painful"

~~~
throwqwerty
that's because all of that goes without saying (since I assume that the
typical hn reader already knows about 1. pivots being costly 2. the early
adopter grind). those points aren't key features of their succuss either
because every startup experiences those pains.

~~~
mikekchar
Or you could look at it another way. Perhaps there are many, many that would
be successful if only you can get past the first obstacles. The success may be
less due to it being a good idea and more to do with overcoming the obstacles.
I often wonder how things would be viable businesses if you were good at
grinding.

~~~
jcytong
I think most of the "overnight successes" are just stories where people look
at the end results without point out the steps in the middle.

Outside of the few "lottery winners", most are grinders that didn't commit
business suicide.

Major props for those who grind until they can share their tales.

------
ornornor
I must be thick but... I have no idea what their product does after reading
the interview. Can someone explain it for the rest of us?

~~~
nickfogle
Sure! Previously, podcasters and musicians didn't have a very engaging way to
share audio on social media. We built Wavve so creators can easily convert
audio files into a branded video with an animated waveform. Here's our Twitter
and Instagram accounts with some examples of what's possible:

[https://www.instagram.com/getwavve](https://www.instagram.com/getwavve)

[https://twitter.com/wavve](https://twitter.com/wavve)

~~~
megablast
Oh, doesn't seem like very much.

~~~
numakerg
It really doesn't. An experienced dev could recreate the core features in a
web app within two weeks or less.

The more difficult part:

\- Understanding the work that goes into making and releasing a podcast

\- Figuring out that a step in the process is not being done efficiently

\- Determining a balanced set of features whose delivery and maintenance cost
is low enough that people in industry will benefit from paying for them

\- Marketing your software to potential customers

\- Convincing them that they will benefit from purchasing your software

\- Maintaining the software to satisfy your customer base

\- Exploring and releasing new features to stay ahead of your inevitable
competition if the product is successful

\- Taking the initial risk to start development

But everybody here knows that already.

~~~
Axsuul
Also want to chime in that just building the core features (or shall I say a
very simplistic version of the core features assuming two weeks time) isn't
going to make an app successful. Rather, it's handling the endless amount of
edge cases and the different ways your customers will end up using your
product.

------
blinky1456
I wonder if it is possible to make a simple version to run entirely in the
frontend, for short clips?

You can capture video and download it from canvas:
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/10/capture-
st...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/10/capture-stream)

And it looks possible to add separate audio to it:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39302814/mediastream-
cap...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39302814/mediastream-capture-
canvas-and-audio-simultaneously).

You could also recreate the waveforms and add to the canvas:
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Visualizations_with_Web_Audio_API),

Not widely supported, but you could try to add speech recognition too
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API/Using_the_Web_Speech_API)

~~~
soheil
Probably possible, but what would be the advantage? I know for instance using
something like Google Speech to Text API is a lot more accurate than Web
Speech API.

~~~
osrec
The advantage is reduced server costs + more efficient use of computing
resources in general. I personally am always happy to offload processing to
the client side wherever possible.

~~~
soheil
For the user?

------
soheil
I made a similar website here inspired by wavve
[https://0work.co](https://0work.co)

~~~
Farbklex
I really miss a preview / demo here.

With wavve, I instantly see how the shared clip will look like. I can even
scroll down to the social media links and see a lot of examples directly in
instagram / twitter / facebook.

~~~
soheil
Added a demo on the homepage.

~~~
unbalancedevh
I think your demo would be a lot more enticing if you fix the captioning. It
flows poorly, omits critical words, and has spelling and word choice errors.

------
autonoshitbox
Love to see brain genius programmers charging money for a Fourier transform of
some audio.

~~~
viklove
76k mrr with some contractors, this guy is printing money and I'm very
jealous.

~~~
smabie
Unfortunately, making a lot of money with software and the technical
complexity of said software are weakly correlated.

Or maybe it's a good thing because it means a stupid simple idea can make you
a millionaire

------
ackbar03
I didn't realize there was such a strong demand for this kind of service. How
does one go about knowing there is a market for things like these? I assume
you also need to be somewhat involved in podcasting in this case?

------
keiferski
The actual website in question: [https://wavve.co](https://wavve.co)

------
hpen
I was thinking maybe they used Deep-fakes to "turn podcasts into videos" haha

------
sidwyn
Baird is an amazing person. I've had the chance of talking to him and seeking
advice while building out my own podcasting platform
([https://kyrie.fm](https://kyrie.fm)), and he's given invaluable feedback to
younger, budding entrepreneurs. Great job Baird and team! Hope to see the
platform grow even larger.

------
alharith
Just watching the marketing materials and presentation once again highlights
just how important marketing is. Well done on that front.

~~~
anitil
Having been in a few failing businesses I can tell you that marketing and
sales are _the_ core reason tech (maybe also non-tech) businesses fail.
Fundamentally you can do without code, but you can't do without sales.

I have a lot of respect for sales people and people who can market themselves.
One of my favorite videos about this is by a bodybuilder/powerlifter Stan
Efferding [1] - he is some sort of marketing savant, with a product that I
think is kind of silly, but he can market the hell out of it.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFhe8yHKdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjFhe8yHKdY)

~~~
_curious_
"I can tell you that marketing and sales are _the_ core reason tech (maybe
also non-tech) businesses fail."

Could not agree more, especially underestimated by the vast majority of devs
turned entrepreneur. But you don't have to be that statistic - get a
complimentary cofounder/partner/outsource if it's not your passion.

------
eric_khun
Question related to video encoding: We are spending quite a bit of money on
Amazon ElasticTranscoder for video encoding. Wondering if anyone had
experience or advices to selfhost that kind of service? Any project I should
consider for a proof of concept?

~~~
dodobirdlord
Elastic Transcoder is hilariously expensive. And in traditional Amazon
fashion, is just a roundabout way to call ffmpeg. You would almost certainly
be better off bundling ffmpeg into a Lambda function, and you would almost
certainly be best off with an EC2 instance, two S3 buckets for the
input/output, and an SQS work queue.

Check out [https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-
ffmpeg](https://github.com/binoculars/aws-lambda-ffmpeg).

~~~
tallgiraffe
Exactly what I was looking for lately. Thank you!

------
xwdv
I got a question, clearly a SaaS like this can easily be a desktop application
if someone wanted to make one.

When your business starts making real money, at what point are you forced to
start buying out these standalone apps so that your business model isn’t
threatened?

------
uzername
Inspired by the Overcast variant of this kind of tool, I built a very basic
browser based version using canvas and various web audio/video apis. It was
fun to build over a couple weekends, but it ended up not being usable broadly
due to speed (runs in realtime linear) and browser limitations of file export
types (webm in chrome). If ffmpeg could reliably run in wasm, there could be
alternative approaches. I concluded after I built it, I should make a headless
non-browser version and it would be more usable, but haven't gotten around to
it.

~~~
mslev
I spent a day or two last week trying to get ffmpeg.js working and it was
nothing but headaches. If you had more luck I'd love to learn some details.

My use case: trim and append multiple (4+) MP4s in the browser into one
continuous video.

------
quezzle
Why do people reveal this stuff?

Seriously there’s lots of people happy to clone it and get a bite.

~~~
wastedhours
There's probably more people who see a successful product in a space (thus
social proofing the brand) and want to pay to use it than those who will
actually pull their finger out and build a competitor.

~~~
_curious_
"There's probably more people who see a successful product in a space (thus
social proofing the brand) and want to pay to use it than those who will
actually pull their finger out and build a competitor."

Of course there are, in fact I drove a few customers to them based on this
post! Never heard of the service before and it looks interesting in the right
setting.

However, it only takes 1 or 2 determined competitive efforts to start taxing
your saas business even in small ways that only make life harder. Is showing
your hand worth the trade-offs? That's up to each individual to answer. I know
entrepreneurs / developers sitting on both sides of this table - doing the
copying and being copied. Way of the road.

~~~
Axsuul
My take on this is if the market is big, it's not going to matter anyways
since large markets will naturally attract competitors based on the amount of
people screaming for solutions. If it's a niche however, you're probably best
keeping to yourself about it.

One caveat is if your target market is entrepreneurs then being open about it
might help differentiate yourself from competitors.

~~~
_curious_
Totally. And depends on what the upside of signaling is? Some entrepreneurs
like to drop their numbers so that they can generate competitive inbound
finance or acquisition interest without having to shop round. It also attracts
talent. Transparency can be an incredible powerful competitive advantage too.

------
simplesimon1
Interesting how so many startups get a break by effectively email spamming (or
“cold calling” as they refer to it).

I’ve seen this a lot in stories like these as a way to get started and gain
initial traction.

~~~
throwqwerty
it's called outbound sales. there's no "big break" there. literally everyone
does it.

------
person_of_color
That is insane revenue <3

~~~
pjc50
That's pretty tiny revenue. It's about the turnover of a restaurant (pre-
coronavirus).

~~~
newen
Seems like there is very little overhead, so the profit must be huge unlike
restaurants.

------
marknadal
(no affiliation) [https://www.headliner.app/](https://www.headliner.app/) will
do this for free < videos/month.

~~~
csunbird
The side thinks I am using Chrome, while I am on Firefox

------
mlcrypto
Nobody should be making 76k a month when millions of hard working Americans
are barely making 1k a month /s

~~~
earthtobishop
I can't tell if you're trolling...

Also I find it hard to believe that there are millions of Americans who barely
make $1,000 a month.

~~~
cstrahan
Check out [https://graphics.wsj.com/what-
percent/](https://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/)

Plug in $12,000 as the annual income, and that'll tell you that 24% of U.S.
workers made that or less in 2014.

Looks like the number of full time U.S. workers in 2014 was 118.72 million:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-
monthl...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthly-
number-of-full-time-employees-in-the-us/)

That works out to be 28 million U.S. workers making <= $1,000 per month.
Considering that's excluding part time workers, that should be make the
calculation fairly conservative.

See also: [https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in-
wage...](https://howmuch.net/articles/how-much-americans-make-in-wages)

The specific numbers have changed in 6 years, but I don't find it all that
unreasonable to suspect that there are many millions of U.S. citizens making
less than $1,000 per month.

~~~
earthtobishop
Do you have access to a formatted source of the data that was used to make the
percentile calculator ? They claim it is based off the 2014 American Community
Survey's Public Use Microdata Sample, but clicking on the provided link takes
you to a directory with hundreds of zip folders.

Also the last link to "howmuch.net" states that their numbers include any wage
earners whatsoever.

"There is one important caveat to keep in mind when thinking about our
dataset. The SSA numbers include any wage earners whatsoever, even part-time
workers like students and teenagers. If the worker reports his or her income
to the IRS on a W2 form, he or she is included in these stats."

~~~
pests
Why single out part timers, students and teenagers? How does any of that
matter when talking about Americans earning less than $1000/mo? "These
Americans make less than that, but let's not count them"???

~~~
ArnoVW
Teenagers are supposed to have a support net, and be in school. It is not
abnormal for them to have a living wage.

The same is true for students, albeit in a lesser form. Nevertheless, students
will rarely have full time, qualified jobs. They need the time to go to class,
and have no qualifications or experience.

The fact that part timers are discounted, is because if you work 50% then it
is to be expected that your monthly salary is half that of full time
employment. Sure, some people may _want_ to work more but cannot, but for many
it is a choice that enables them to do something else. Raising kids for
example.

Were not counting infants or dead people neither. Because it would not make
sense. The point is to understand the wage situation of people when their
wages are not influenced by something else, so that we can compare.

------
bluthru
Similar but with less features and free:
[https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-
sharing](https://marco.org/2019/04/27/overcast-clip-sharing)

------
paulie_a
That entire article seems like the same person doing the questions and answers

"What makes you so resilient against failure and so damn charming?"

But seriously I dont take issue with the concept of those kind of conversions,
the problem I have is they tend muddy search results.

~~~
darkwizard42
Huh? There are no sorts of leading/praising questions like that in the
article. If anything, I found the questions to be very generic and templatized
- which again isn't a bad thing and seems to fit the profile of the overall
site (a resource for young startups/curious entrepreneurs)

The questions (for those who won't click through):

"What's your background, and what are you currently working on?" "What's your
backstory and how did you come up with the idea?" "How did you build Wavve?"
"Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business?" "What are your
goals for the future?" "What were the biggest challenges you faced and
obstacles you overcame?" "Which are your greatest disadvantages? What were
your worst mistakes?" "If you had the chance to do things differently, what
would you do?"

~~~
paulie_a
The questions were soft even for little league. most interviews are marketing
pieces, but this might as well been an infomercial.

But at the end of day there is no innovation.

~~~
_curious_
...and what's wrong with a commercial for a proven successful saas in a world
of fail+noise...suggesting you can't learn something from it?

Or are we to assume you commercial efforts are well exceeding $76k mrr?

------
unixhero
Sounds nice... but _Sigh_ , only iOS?

~~~
Veen
It’s a one-man effort (Marco Arment). It’s not reasonable to expect him to
develop for multiple platforms.

~~~
snazz
The market for indie apps is far better on Apple devices in general. More
people are willing to pay for an ad free, nicely integrated app than on
Android.

~~~
alexbanks
Source?

~~~
willmacdonald
As for paid versions of Monument Valley, sales from the iTunes App Store far
outpace sales on other marketplaces. Purchases on iOS account for 73 percent
of Ustwo's $14.4 million of revenue, while only 17 percent of that total
revenue came from Google Play.

[https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/20/11724058/monument-
valley-s...](https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/20/11724058/monument-valley-sales-
revenue-download-numbers-ustwo-games)

~~~
leppr
This particular data point is irrelevant since the game launched on Android
one year after its iOS debut, losing the novelty and marketing factors.

~~~
prepend
Do you think it was a random factor that had it debut on iOS.

Despite far fewer devices, the Apple App Store has always made more revenue
than Android. The most recent real numbers [0] I could find show this is a big
difference.

I always assumed that’s why app devs roll out on iOS first.

[0] [https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/10/11/as-usual-apples-
ap...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/10/11/as-usual-apples-app-store-
revenue-leads-google-pla.aspx)

~~~
leppr
I didn't contest the overall conclusion, but as engineers and entrepreneurs we
normally have a propensity to disregard binary thinking. The numbers in your
link are useful to predict expected revenue from an iOS vs an Android
exclusive. The 73/17 ratio from the parent post is not, but could be
misleading to someone who didn't know the app's release schedule.

