SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Wavve Hits 9k For Audio Video Tool, $70k Monthly Profits!
19 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's SaaS based on usage. The lowest price is $10 and it goes up to $60. But our average revenue per user is $12.63, just 12 and a half bucks. So it really took us a long time to build the customer base out to the point where it went from a side project to full-time.
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Chapter 2: How did Baird Hall transition from a failed startup to success with Wavve?
And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
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Chapter 3: What unique features does Wavve offer for podcasters and video creators?
Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Baird Hall. He's building out many different companies, but most importantly, he's a tech entrepreneur.
He's co-founded three bootstrap SaaS companies designed to help podcasters and video creators to get more reach and engagement on social media. As a founding partner in Lo-Fi Ventures, he's co-founded Wave, Zubtitle, and Duplicate. All right, Baird, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, let's do it, Nathan.
Chapter 4: How does Wavve ensure effective engagement on social media?
Thanks for having me.
So what came first? I mean, it sounds like you're trying to help. You said podcasters and video creators specifically. Did you start out as a podcaster?
No, we fell into it. We actually tried to build back in 2015, we tried to build a social audio network. It was think of like Reddit based on audio. So like these forums and threads all based on audio messages. And it was a failed startup.
Chapter 5: What are the pricing strategies and revenue models for Wavve?
We worked on it for two years, tried to raise money, really did all the things incorrectly. And at the end of that project, we had this little internal tool that took a lot of these audio clips from the startup that didn't work out and shared them on social media. We used that as an internal marketing tool. So We actually built it internally, used it ourselves.
And when that company folded, we started selling it. And that was January 2017. And we've been running with that ever since.
So 2017, and I assume you're talking about WAV, W-A-V-V.co? Yep.
Chapter 6: How does Baird Hall manage customer acquisition and outreach?
Yep. Yeah, that's our audio sharing tool.
Okay. And so the first, I guess the first user was you, but the first sale was what, in 2017?
Yep. January 2017. That's when we launched kind of version one and started getting our first sales in the door.
And you're selling direct to podcast hosts that want to take the audio clips out and put them on social.
No, it's directly to the podcasters themselves. So they use this independent of their podcast hosts.
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Chapter 7: What challenges and successes has Wavve experienced in its growth journey?
The podcaster signs up, uploads their audio content and can clip it, choose animations, images, and really make it exactly look exactly the way they want it for Instagram, Facebook, wherever they're trying to promote their podcast. So I think podcast trailers is kind of a good one liner for it.
One of the things I always struggle with with this is if you look at consumption of video content on these social networks, especially on mobile devices, a very large, I don't know the actual number, but a very large percent actually happens on mute, which means you have to have a very compelling visual in the first two seconds to get people to actually unmute.
Otherwise, these clips are totally useless. How do you approach that?
Yeah.
The first thing we did was provide a lot of customization so people can use images. The best thing to do is put a headshot of somebody, of the guest, ideally usually for interview-style podcasts, and make the visuals look really good, really sharp animations.
But the big key was having automated transcriptions and captions so that even if it's on mute, whatever the person is saying, identifying multiple speakers and having the words show up as the clip's playing, uh, was really key.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Baird have for expanding Wavve and its products?
So we got that in, um, and people have been using them and, um, you know, it's a lot of podcasters that don't have an audience. They're really trying to build it. So they're trying to find really unique ways to stand out and, um, you know, get people checking out their podcasts for the first time. So that's kind of our core, uh, core audience there.
And how do you make sure that that doesn't kill you from cost perspective, right? If I take one of my 15-minute episodes and want to transcribe it, I pay Rev $1.50 to transcribe each minute, essentially. If you're doing this for free as part of your tool, I can see this adding up as a massive cost center for you.
It's not bad because we only transcribe the clips themselves, which are usually pretty short. So while that podcast episode is 15, 30 minutes, the promotional clips, we usually recommend being anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes. So the transcription cost has really gotten more efficient over the last couple of years. So between that and
just video generation through AWS's tools has gotten a lot cheaper. So we can run pretty lean from a technical perspective these days.
What would you estimate in terms of number of minutes of sort of transcribed segments you're producing each month across your entire customer and user base?
That's a good question. I haven't looked lately. I mean, it's well over 10,000 videos that average on, you know, between one or two minutes. So I think that's probably the best guess I would start with.
And how many videos is each sort of user making per month? Or maybe just a better question would be how many customers do you have paying for the platform?
We've got, let's see, active subscribers should be, it's 9,000 active customers right now.
Okay. And you're using a tool. I was curious what tool people use. Are you using BareMetrics or ProfitWell or what?
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