Veed: How I Grew to 200 Paying Customers — My Survival Story
Veed is a video editing tool. After being rejected by VCs at the beginning, we only had enough money to last a few months. To keep the company alive, we needed cash flow. At the time, we already had 35K users, but we hadn't started charging them yet.
There were mainly several concerns back then:
1. Fear of user rejection 2. Worry that the product wasn't good enough 3. Concern about not creating sufficient value 4. Fear of adding another feature
To survive and minimize impact on users, the charging method was to remove watermarks. Within 48 hours of the VC rejection, we launched paid premium features. We immediately got 20 paying users. Six weeks later, there were 200 paying users, and our MRR reached £1,000.
Here are nine key lessons we learned:
1. Charge users — you can only grow sustainably with paying customers
2. Keep technology simple & move fast with small steps
3. Find your user acquisition channels
4. Create authentic content
5. Ignore the competition
6. Listen to your users
7. Share your own story
We hope this list is helpful. There are no tricks, growth hacks, or shortcuts. Just a lot of hard work, late nights, coffee, and crème brûlée. So far, we may have made many mistakes, but we kept pushing forward, and things started to take off.
