Marketing Crafted

The Marketing Strategy That Grew VEED.io to $3.75M/Month

S
Veed logo

Sabba Keynejad & Timur Mamedov

Founder, Veed

Follow on X

$3.7M

Revenue/mo

Business Type

SaaS

Monetization

Subscription

Founded

2018

The Beginning

When Sabba Keynejad and Timur Mamedov started VEED in 2018, they didn't have a fancy growth playbook. No mega-marketing budget. No influencer partnerships. No bullshit.

They had two things: a frustration with complex video editing software and a weird idea that would eventually make them one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history.

Today, VEED is doing $45 million in annual recurring revenue. They have 10 million monthly active users. And they've raised $35 million from Sequoia Capital.

But here's the thing nobody talks about: the real growth didn't come from aggressive advertising or viral campaigns. It came from understanding a simple principle—give people something useful for free, and they'll find you.


The Unglamorous Beginning (2018)

Sabba was frustrated. He'd just graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in design and wanted to start a YouTube channel. But every time he tried to edit videos, he hit a wall. Adobe Premiere? Too complex. Final Cut Pro? Required expensive hardware. Quick online editors? Terrible.

Timur had a different problem. He was a computer science researcher at King's College London working on an AI video summarization tool for his dissertation. The tool could automatically turn news articles into short, bite-sized videos.

They met at an online hackathon in 2016 and immediately clicked. For two years, they brainstormed startup ideas together. Nothing stuck. Then they realized Timur's AI project could be the foundation for something bigger—a simple, browser-based video editor that anyone could use.

So they quit their jobs. They bootstrapped with their personal savings. They took freelance contracts on the side to fund development. This is important: there was no venture capital. No investor pressure. No requirement to "scale fast or die."

They had about 6-8 months to figure out what they were actually building before they started coding.

The MVP Launch (November 2018)

After three months of coding, they had something. Not great. Not polished. Just... functional.

The MVP could do basic things: trim videos, add filters, rotate clips, draw on frames. It was stripped down to almost nothing. But it worked in a browser, which was the whole point. No software to download. No complexity.

They launched on Product Hunt on a Tuesday morning.

The reaction was cautiously positive. People liked the simplicity. But nobody was paying. Nobody needed it badly enough. They were getting traffic, but they weren't converting users into revenue.

The founders had a decision to make: keep building for free, hoping to figure out monetization later, or find a way to charge.

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