Jason Hsiao

We actually didn't really know who was going to use Animoto.

The one thing we did right, well, we did a couple of things right, but one thing we did right, because we actually remembered from the first dot-com bubble and burst in the late 90s, now I'm really aging myself, that the big lesson learned there was you don't just create eyeballs and then tack on your business model.

You have to figure out how to actually make money.

So we're like, okay, well, we're actually going to

against the advice of so many people because they're like guys no one pays for anything on the internet look at google look at yahoo look at you know about netscape and like you have to figure out how to do this for free and we're like no we think that if we can do something well enough people will pay for it and so we kind of stuck to our guns and it was like in the early days it was like three bucks a video and or 30 bucks for you know 30 bucks a year for all you can make and we just kind of made that up because no one else was really um charging for stuff and

And then we launched.

We didn't really know who was going to use it.

And then we got lucky.

I think in that first day or two, Michael Arrington, who used to be the head of TechCrunch, with a big following, he caught wind of us and wrote this really nice thing.

Like, here's these guys who are doing one specific thing really, really well.

And he just kind of became a fan and followed us for a few years.

And so that exposure in the early days really kind of set us in motion and gave us a lot of great exposure.

Well, because we were also focused not just on businesses, but basically anyone who wanted to create video.

I mean, we had thousands right away, especially since we were charging per video, $3 a video.

I mean, we had tens of thousands of customers in those early days.

So it felt like we were successful in those early days.

We were like, wow, everyone's using Animoto.

And then, you know, fast forward several years, we're like that.

This is actually not real success because we have no idea where we're where we're at, what we're actually doing and who we're focused on.

Yeah, for someone who's, you know, kind of notorious for being pretty cynical.