From idea, to exit, to terminating the product and starting something new. Our story of Welder.

It's almost 3 years since we started Welder - a high-quality remote video podcast recorder.

The project was terminated in Q1 2023 and I wanted to do it justice by doing this sum up of the journey. I love how winding our business journey is. It's tough and hard. And I have a huge impostor syndrome all the time. That I am not good enough, that we are not good enough, that we will not make it, and that, once again, our next product will fail again.

But the opposite is the truth. Whenever it gets hard, hard for a long time, something new and amazing sparks and gives the energy back. I love it so much. And I love my team. Yesterday as I was feeling down, we were all in the office and laughing so much, breaking apart my bad mood. I felt great and grateful for the people I could work with.

I am so excited about what's next!

Back to the story

Welder caught great traction in the early COVID pandemic as everyone was home, with a lot of time for recording podcasts.

After a year of working hard and helping tons of podcasters record amazing content, talking to VCs like Sequoia or Credo, we decided to exit Welder to VEED.

We were good at building a product, but we struggled with growth that would allow us to continue focusing on the project for more time.

It was a massive opportunity for us to join a fast-growing bootstrap business of like-minded founders. We learned much about growth and got great resources to build the best remote podcasting tool ever.

The pivot

We also decided to pivot into live streaming - the product was called VEED LIVE, as it seem like a natural way to go. Our mission from the start was to allow anyone to create content that works for your business - easily.

We believe that creating podcasts, doing interviews, and streaming updates is the easiest way to produce valuable content for your target audience. And we knew it was not an easy task, and there was a lot involved, from planning the content through recording, editing, repurposing and distributing it.

VEED had it all. All of it is under one roof. Streaming, recording, editing, and repurposing.

But we made mistakes. It's not easy to integrate one big product into another. Users come from many different channels and mostly into a video editor. How do you make them discover and use a streaming tool? How do you teach them that it's not an OBS but a tool for content production that can do it all? How do you do it so it's not messy and confusing?

And then there was the competition. The market grew fast through the first year of COVID. We saw it as a 12-month window to grab the land. And we were just that 1 year behind. After the pandemic, the demand for streaming and remote podcasting fell drastically.

Many content creators realized they couldn't stand out without putting in much effort and that it was not sustainable for them - those indie and small business podcasters were most of our clients.

We also made a few bad product decisions. But to call out the biggest one was to rely too much on our ideas and imagination and too little on signals from users. Sounds cliché and like a reason for which every other product fails. And even though we knew doing this is a mistake, we still did it. Because it's not black and white and figuring out the line between your innovative ideas and what users actually need is what makes you a master of your craft.

All this led to good results but not great ones. VEED is a fast-growing startup with great goals and a high tempo. A product like VEED LIVE would take years of commitment to building into something game-changing, and by then, the market could move somewhere else completely.

We missed the timing and made a few big product mistakes.

That's why it was decided to terminate VEED LIVE by the Q1 of 2023 - almost a 3-year journey with one amazing product. I loved it so much.

It's always the darkest before the dawn

But as a tradition of our team now - it's always the darkest before the dawn. Once again, over and over, when we were really tired of pushing this project, AI came out, and our brain neurons started to fire at 200%.

That's when we came up with the idea of Magic Cut. You can literally make professional video edits with AI. It's insanely good. And we have everything we need in VEED to pull it off and turn it into a game changer.

So I visited Predrag a day after, and we tried a prototype. In just 3 hours, we knew it was going to work. A day after, we pitched it to the leadership team and got a full buy-in.

We are now opening up Magic Cut for early access and I am very pumped about it. It's so much fun and pleasure to use. Like making shorts from YouTube videos is one click now. Turning raw footage into a watchable video is fun, and my Loom messages are no longer boring.

We are doing a side project as well!

Of course, we haven't forgotten our roots, and we are building Surfkey on the side. I love that project by heart, and we are changing the game of Reddit marketing with AI right now. It's still early, but we have some promising signals as well as a great tech in place that just blows my mind every time I use it.

I am looking forward so much to what our next journey brings. For the long hauls of "nothing is happening, we are just building the products and watching for the smallest signals". For the big wins of someone saying they want to buy your product. For the laughs in our office.

I can't imagine doing something else giving me so much joy and experience. Thank you, team, world. Thank you, me!