My August Update

First update in 5 months

Hey friends! I haven’t written one of these newsletters in 5 months and I miss you all.

It feels like the world has changed so much! AI is everywhere you look and summer is coming to a close (although it doesn’t feel like it’s ending in this Las Vegas 110° heat).

I could go through a bunch of updates but it all comes down to these two updates:

1. Video Tap is gaining traction! I’ll share revenue numbers

2. My wife and I had baby #2!

Video Tap gaining traction

😁 Before we dive into all the updates, here’s a 50% off coupon for your 1st month of Video Tap if you want to try it out.

If you tried it in the past, rest assured it’s had 1,000 improvements and is soooo much better now.

Traffic is growing nicely from a bump in SEO and referrals:

One big win we’ve had is we were able to help PlanetScale turn their 64 video MySQL course into a written course. Check out the PlanetScale course:

Almost $2,000 MRR

We were making about $1,000/mo on the pay-as-you-go pricing. I made the scary switch to turn us into monthly subscription pricing.

Pricing with pay-as-you-go feels like you are purely a transaction to a customer. There isn’t a strong bond or relationship that you’re building.

We switched to monthly subscriptions and it’s taken us 5 months to build up to almost $2,000 MRR. The beginning of the road is slow, but we’re finally seeing traction build.

It also helps that our pricing is 25/80/150. Easier to grow MRR when you price higher and target prosumer/business markets.

I’ve targeted the consumer market at $12/mo in the past and it was much harder (and more complaints) to grow that customer base.

Look at this growth chart. Some good acceleration happening.

I attribute the acceleration to our increasing SEO presence, more referrals from current customers, and our free YouTube Chapters Generator tool getting more usage.

LOTS more marketing to do but I’m happy with how it’s going so far.

Added Social Media Clips feature

Our goal is to let you turn any video into multiple types of content. Chopping up a video to create social media clips is a giant feature I’ve wanted to build. It took 3 months but we’ve finally done it!

Here’s the technical overview:

• We transcribe the video w/ start+end times for every single word

• We use OpenAI and Anthropic to figure out the most engaging sections

• We use remotion.dev (A video editor built with React) to let a user edit the clip

• We render the video using AWS Lambda

See clips in action and you can try them out for free at videotap.com

Vercel’s AI Accelerator

Video Tap got accepted into Vercel’s AI Accelerator. With a 2.5% acceptance rate, we were 1 of 40 that got accepted.

We got to present to 20+ investors which included the CEO of Vercel (Guillermo) and the ex-CEO of GitHub (Nat Friedman).

Watch me present to this superstar panel:

Baby #2!!!

Our baby boy was born in April. Our baby girl is now 1.5 years old.

Being a parent is the best. Two kids is a whole different game. Definitely less time to get to the computer to turn off the lights and code in a dungeon. But even though I have less time, I’ve learned to be far more efficient with the time I have.

I’m using Session to block apps (Discord) and the Block Site Chrome extension to block sites (X). I don’t even bring my phone into the office anymore. 0 distractions!

Here’s some pics of the little dorks, myself, and my amazing wife, Kapehe.

Other notable things

• My VS Code tweet went gangbusters to 1,300 retweets + 9,500 likes

• We’re moving to Colorado!

• My favorite AI tools: Cursor Code Editor and Phind and Claude

What’s next?

I’d like to build Video Tap to $10,000 MRR. To do that, we’ll need much better marketing. I’ve fallen into the “build it and they will come” trap.

If I don’t focus on marketing, we’ll never grow.

• We need:

  • Blog posts

  • SEO focused product pages

  • SEO focused use-case pages

  • Email flows

  • Tutorials

Let me know what you want me to write about while we go through this journey. I’m learning and making mistakes. Iterating every day.