8K MRR in 3 Months After Launch. The Power of Productized Services.⚡
Hey, fellow indie builders! 👋
I'm Heleana and I've been building Videodeck for the past four months https://videodeck.co/
Videodeck is a productized service that helps companies kickstart video production.
We own the entire production process from sourcing talent to recording the videos, editing, and creating graphics. And we do it at a competitive price.
We launched it three months ago on ProductHunt and BetaList. Other than those two launches we haven't done any other marketing efforts yet.
We've spent $0 on marketing and we are currently at 8k MRR and growing.
Almost all our leads came from the Product Hunt campaign which is surprising since it only had about 150 upvotes.
We quickly understood that we've entered a pretty underserved market where our biggest competitors were in-house production teams and high-end video production agencies.
Here's how we do it:
- Productized service
This lets us set clear production processes that allow us to produce videos at scale.
- A pricing model that encourages volume
Once a client is onboarded (we have visual assets, tone of voice, set design) our clear production processes enable us to produce videos at scale. That means that we want to prioritize customers that want to produce multiple videos. We control this from the pricing. You can buy just one video for $1500 or you can order 10 of them for $750 each. On top of getting 50% off for each video, we also offer free thumbnails, shorts, and branded props.
- Underpromise and overdeliver
By overdelivering on what we promise we are turning a lot of our customers into promoters.
"We can't believe this service exists at this price point", "I've been happier with Videodeck than I have been with any video agency I've worked with. No kidding." is what we often hear from our clients.
- Using our network
The leads that didn't come from ProductHunt came from our own network. Your network is where you will probably find your first user for the service/saas you are working on. Use it.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the productized model and your brutal feedback on what we've built so far. 🙌
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Amazing service and website! I am sure you guys are gonna kill it.
Why not do a package 1 video? I would need just 1 video :D.
Also, https is not set up yet.
Hey Quentin,
Ahh, I now realized I linked to HTTP and https. I changed it and working on the redirect now.
We do have a one video package. https://videodeck.co/pricing/
It's $1500 for just one video. As mentioned in the post, doing videos as scale makes a bit more sense for us so doing just one video cost a bit more.
Let me know what you think.
Congrats, although I think the #1 reason for your success was you making something the PH community wants :)
Thank you @zerotousers!
I think it's also because most Saas companies want to kickstart and improve their video presence.
Video is not as easy to get into as written content marketing is. Videodeck makes it just as easy at a slightly higher cost than writing an article. (depends on the market, technical articles might be more expensive than our videos.)
But you are right, the PH community was a perfect fit for Videodeck.
Congrats! Looks amazing. As I don't see subscription for the service, I guess all three plans are one time purchase, I am curious what does MRR in this regard mean actually?
Hey @itsbalal
So far all our clients but two have re-ordered the next month after the first order.
While it might not be a monthly plan, most of our clients are ordering videos on a monthly basis.
What would be a more appropriate metric to use for measuring financial growth?
Honestly I don't think it matters, since as you say most of them are recurring, I was just trying to understand the business model here. If it were my product I would be more curious of how much of that revenue is made of really recurring users and offer them an annual subscription so that you lower down the churn and increase profitability.
I was thinking something similar. The pricing is high too, so does this mean you had 1 person at the 5 video tier and 2 at the 1 video tier?
I'm all for a high priced service, a lot less marketing required to bring in money. But you mention your customers are all coming from a product on product hunt with 150 upvotes, so probably thousands of views and then 3 customers? Again, your initial success is great! Just trying to understand the actual volume here.
Hey, we introduced the new tier pricing just a month ago. We offered significant discounts early on since we were new and still working on setting up our processes.
Most of our initial clients bought one video as a test and then moved on to a larger package. (new orders haven't been accounted for as the payment is due next month)
The price being too high is debatable.
If you ask for a quote from a typical production agency (As I did) you'd likely get a quote closer to 10k/video.
You could go the Upwork/Fiverr or In-house production route but you will still get close to our pricing. Plus it's hard to get a high-quality product going this route.
I'm not trying to justify our pricing. I guess you either see the value in it or you don't. :) So far our clients are happy with the pricing.
But hey, we are just three months in, who knows, the price might go up soon. haha
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! How do you handle scope creep / revisions / waiting for assets when you're on a fixed project fee? This is always a challenge for me.
Hey @Mptrsn
We have one free revision and then charge $100 for each new revision. So we usually get only one round of feedback. If the client wants something else changed after the first round, we charge $100 for each change.
The only issue is when the video needs to be reshot because of a mistake made in the script or something that wasn't in our control. In that case, we charge for a full reshot. This only happened once though and the client was happy to reshoot it. :)
We promise a 10-day turn around time but we make sure the client understands we can only provide the video in 10 days if we have access to all assets.
Getting the assets from the client is a prerequisite for starting shooting and editing.
I hope that helps!
Let me know when you launch Vdeio Karate, it looks like a cool project. :)
This is very cool @heleana! I'm building a productized service as well in the content creation space and was wondering - how do you measure your MRR. Considering clients can order any # of videos per month your revenue would fluctuate a bit month by month. Do you use an average order size per customer or anything else like that? I'm curious because I'm in the same situation right now - approx 6 - 8k MRR and wondering what a better way to measure recurring revenue is.
Hey, Heleana quick question, which channel brings you most of your clients?
Any nuggets on productizing services? What are the biggest challenges being dependent on other people? I'd assume it's getting all the necessary context/content from them, but have you had to deal with difficult customers?
This stuck out insanely well to me:
"Underpromise and overdeliver: By overdelivering on what we promise, we are turning a lot of our customers into promoters and ambassadors."
Love it, makes 1000% sense. Do you have any kind of referral program baked in, or just customers who dig it share it with others?
Oh absolutely, it's so good for our bottom line as well. Yes we might put a few extra hours in each project that are not billable but we've been getting tons of leads from our customers and amazing reviews.
We do have a referral program. It's not live yet but we are doing 10% of all sales. Forever.
If you know someone that could use a service like Videodeck, do an intro at hey@videodeck.co and we'll give you 10% on all the videos they buy.
Love to see video stuff on Indie Hackers. This is where I am focused as well. The fact that you're going for physical production at scale is cool too. Nice work.
A few questions:
So you have "productized" the production pipeline. I'm curious what that actually looks like. Batch-recording and template based editing? Any automation? How much customization can any one client do, or does that break the model?
Also, can you elaborate on "MRR?" If you have video packages of finite numbers of videos then isn't it just a few months of runway per client, as opposed to true recurring revenue? Maybe an indefinite / retainer option would be good to have as well.
Wow you guys are awesome, I have upvote it, super exciting. Btw how come creating 10 videos could be more cheaper than creating 5 videos?
Hey @selamatpagiamir
Thank you so much!
The price per video is cheaper but the 10 video package is more expensive than the 5 video one. (7500 vs 5000)
The reason why we give such significant discounts is to encourage buying in bulk.
We are positioning ourselves as a video production agency "at scale" meaning that we want to offer incentives to customers who want to work with us long-term and for a higher amount of videos.
We also offer free thumbnails, shorts, and branded props to clients buying more than one video to further incentivize these larger orders.
Once a client is onboarded with Videodeck, we have their brand kit, we know their style, and we went through a few rounds of editing so we know how they want their videos edited. This means that creating new videos for them takes a lot less effort than creating videos for a new client.
On top of that, there are economy of scale advantages regarding studio operation, editing, talent management, and more.
Great job on finding and moving on the underserved market.
What insights led you to building this service out?
Thank you @IndyDevDan
I started as a freelancer producing videos for a Saas company.
Since I was listed as a creator a lot of people wrote me about creating their videos. Since I couldn't or didn't want to handle all the post-production work by myself I put together a team and got two more co-founders to help me bring Videodeck to life.
Great work! Super clean design, can't wait to see where it'll go!
Thank you so much, @zachburau
Congratulations. I am so glad you made it. Personally, I failed in the past, trying to productize my services. So I know how hard that can be. From that perspective I admire you even more.
Thank you!
What didn't work for your productized service? Maybe there's a lesson there that I could use. :)
Any plans of giving it another shot?
Yeah, I do not think so :D I will just try to start the product instead.
I guess what was wrong was lacking marketing, and me being not so good at managing people.
Very clean design, I like it a lot!
I found some spelling mistakes on the pricing page.
YouTube-optimized thumbanil
Sharable social media shorts
Thanks a lot! Both fixed!
@heleana - Please update the link to 'https'. You might be hurting your SEO. I see that https works fine on your server. I'd also enforce
httpsat the webserver and redirect the traffic.Impressive pricing strategy; and 8K MRR is 3 months proves that you're doing it right. Could you share your experience with BetaList? Is it worth listing with them?
Done updating the link to https and I'm working now on the redirect. Rookie mistake uff. 😅
Yes, Betalist is worth it but don't expect much from it. We had 2-3 leads from Betalist and I believe one became a client.
I'd rather focus more on ProductHunt and now that I think about it, IndieHackers. haha
Only just saw your service yesterday and you've done an amazing job on the website explaining what you do and more importantly, showcasing the quality of what you do. Great example videos as I was able to instantly understand what a customer would receive.
Congrats!
Just a note - on a pricing page you have "10 Video" instead of "10 Videos"
Question - did your first customer come from PH, or your own network?
Fixed! Thank you!
So I had my first client as a freelancer before I started Videodeck. That client decided to order eight more videos when I moved to Videodeck. So the first Videdeock client came from my network.
But a large majority of customers came from PH.
Hey @heleana 👋
Really cool and interesting project, I really like the idea 👏
Do you plan on adding more speakers for the videos?
I feel like it might be interesting for indies to be able to show features, course, or other things with videos if we could roll the speaker from time to time to avoid repetition 😊
Thank you for the kind words!
We do! We are adding three more speakers next month and we'll have a more diverse lineup.