Vento is a screen recorder tool I started building from December 2022 - May 2023. Vento differs from any other screen recorders out there because of its rewind feature; User can pause anytime during their recording, rewind and re-record over their mistakes.
When Chris Lee (ex-colleague) approached me to build this as a side project, I couldn't be more excited. The problem that Vento solves resonate deeply with me; I've once spent 45 minutes recording a 10 minutes demo, because I would stutter at different points of the recording and having to restart each time all over again.
why build vento?
I wanted to build Vento because of the 3 following reason:
- I wanted to learn more about product and achieve product market fit - Vento has the potential to do that.
- I wanted to expand my engineering knowledge and skills
- I wanted to build a reliable stream of passive income
Ultimately, I'm proud to say that I succeeded when it comes to achieving the first two goals. Vento turned out to be my most successful side project to date and the accomplishment is largely due to working with the right partner.
While Vento did not surge in popularity and generate a massive user based as we had hoped for, we did attract around 1600 users in the span of 6 months with 25 of the users paying for the subscription service. However, due to work reasons, I had to step down from working on Vento and sold its assets for a low five-figure sum. I had to let go of the idea of building a passive income stream altogether.
Throughout the process of building Vento, I acquired valuable knowledge and skills that I hope to be of use throughout my career.
validating the idea
I noticed from building Vento that there's couple waves of validating your product.
- First Wave - No Code Protyping
- Second Wave - MVP and Launch!
- Third Wave - Continue validating until Product Market Fit
First Wave - No Code Prototyping
Chris took sometime to de-risk the idea by validating via his network through a combination of prototyping in Figma and assembling a pitch. The reception we got was pretty great, most thought that it is a no-brainer feature and wanted to try it out. However, I learned later on that without the real functional product, users can be only imagine use cases in their head and hence the idea isn't 100% de-risked, but we thought it's good enough to move on to the next step.
don't get to excited and jump straight into writing code! Unless you 100% believe in this idea, I believe that coding an actual MVP takes way too long as opposed to prototyping it in Figma. THe first wave of validation should happen as fast as possible. YCombinator suggested a timeframe of 1 Month to validate and build out an MVP.
Second Wave - Building out the MVP
Though Chris never officially invited me to build this project with him, I was way to excited about the idea and offered to build an MVP :). The next week involves grinding out an MVP on Electron, a desktop framework built around Javascript and Chromium. Electron has some learning curve but their documentation is well written enough to make the MVP process relatively straightforward.
Chris and I played around with this MVP, showed it around a couple folks and decided that the idea of rewinding will bring a ton of value to screen recorders.
Launching the Product
Once I finished building the product, even if lacking in features, we wanted to get this out in the public to further validate the idea. Another thing I learned from Chris is that, during the first couple months of launch, we're still validating the idea until we achieve product market fit and hence launching it to the public as soon as possible is key to speed up this process. Although I believed that we could have easily polished our initial launch a little better by doing the following:
- Lay out Product Roadmap - Your initial product will no doubt be lacking in features or even buggy. A roadmap helps build hype and gain user signups that would have otherwise shrugged off your product for being unpolished.
- Include Pricing Info - List out pricing details of your Sass product as well as what's included in each of the pricing tiers. If premium features are not yet available, allow users to submit their email so they could notified when they're ready to release. Not only can this help boost some conversion, it also serves as validation; Lots of emails means that people wants to pay for your product.
PS: Let me know if you have any more suggestions!
Our first big wave of user influx comes from ShowHN on Hacker news. By being ranked #2 on HackerNews, we received about 6000 page visits and 200 user sign ups in the span of a day.
I remembered going into dinner giggling and all, how cool is it being ranked #2 on HN?
We also posted on Reddit's /r/internetisbeautiful and garnered 4k+ upvotes, which was truly epic. Aside from receiving a spurt of virality from these posts, we also noticed 2 other bonus side effects that helped Vento.
- SEO Ranking - Now that HackerNews and Reddit both have reputable backlinks to our site, we saw that our site ranks pretty high for keywords related to our product. I would highly recommend anyone to launch their product on any popular sites such as Reddit, HackerNews, IndieHacker etc, even if it doesn't amass massive upvotes, you still have the benefit of generating backlinks to your site.
- Free Content Marketing - We noticed that some publisher sites as well as content creator started making content promoting Vento - for free!. The most reputable creators include Matty McTech with 1.5 million followers on Facebook and Hasan Toor with 200k followers on Twitter. Usually these creators charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars for creating content, but my guess is that they source ideas from sites like
/r/internetisbeautifuland Hackernews for highly upvoted products to make content from.
However going forward, I would curb my expectations when it comes to getting viral like we did with Vento, which had a catchy pitch to grab people's attention. And we come to learn that going viral on these platforms doesn't necessarily mean that the product will be successful. Though it does indicate some level of user demand, it's up to the founders whether the product actually sticks the landing, per se.
tips for myself in the future
Technical
- Try to use commands to spin up any cloud services. This is useful if down the line you want to create similar instances in a different stage etc
- Related to above, create a dedicated service account for each service with minimal permissions
- Don't use technology that is TOO new. New changes come out so fast that you might spend more time than needed migrating between versions. Stick to stable technology 🤣 (looking at you, NextJS)
- Write good docs 😅
Business
- This one is life saver, but provide FANTASTIC customer support. Vento had lots of bugs, there are times when customers got really mad from bugs, until the point of almost churning. But this was saved by great customer support.
- I don't believe Vento had churned customers due to bugs. We use Crisp as our CRM, ultimately, the point is to have an easy way for client to reach out.
- Customers aren't always right. You probably get requests from users to add X features. My Initial instinct would just be "why not do them, make them happy". But Chris would remind me to take a step back and weigh the risk and benefit of working on X feature.
- Risk can be X amount of eng hours that could be used on something else, allocation of resources was important for Vento (0 funding 🤣).
- Chris likes to derisk by first building and releasing a really basic version of X feature, and use tracking or customer feedback to gauge engagement. I liked that a lot.
- Distribution is just as important as the product, it's a 50/50 relationship. For Vento, we found SEM to be a promising channel with some luck on the influencer side, but because of my early step down, we never really validated if this is the case. Would love to have experienced with more marketing channels.