A SaaS Founder Shares His Lessons on Overcoming Failures

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Sabba Keynejad is the co-founder of Veed.io, a UK-based SaaS startup that provides a simple online video editor.

Sabba and his co-founder Tim were frustrated working with complex and time-consuming video editing software. They realized that for many tasks, these products were overkill.

So they set out to build a simple online video editing tool.

They failed to raise seed funding so they had to work contract jobs during the day. And then they worked on their business at night.

A few months later they applied to YC and made it to the final interview. They flew out to the YC offices in Mountain View excited to be on a cusp of a big break.

But they were rejected by YC because they weren't making any money.

So 48 hours later, the founders implemented a paywall and had their first 20 paying customers. It was a promising sign that they were solving a worthwhile problem, so they kept going.

But by August, they had less than one month's runway left and knew they were going to struggle to make payroll. So they doubled their prices with little to no impact on user growth.

Today, they're generating over $10K in MRR and are growing 50% month over month.

The key takeaway from this story is that failure is part of life. It's how you bounce back that matters.

I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is part of our PLG & Growth series.

Links

Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

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