🪄 OpenAI's Whisper Transcription SaaS for Adobe Premier Pro: $23,000 MRR in 4.5 months

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 151th issue.

Today's topics:

1. OpenAI's Whisper Transcription SaaS for Adobe Premier Pro: $23,000 MRR in 4.5 months

2. A tool to Get Real-Time Feed of All Posts on Social Media

3. One recommended video on "One Person, One Problem" Framework

OpenAI's Whisper Transcription SaaS for Adobe Premier Pro: $23,000 MRR in 4.5 months

Yuval Steuer and Roey Lalazar built Kaps, an automatic transcription service for video subtitles in Adobe Premier Pro, to $23,000 MRR in 4.5 months with a 30% month-over-month growth rate.

They found a gap in the market and went for it.

1. The Birth of Kaps - A Transcription Service for Adobe Premier Pro

Kaps is an automatic transcription service for video subtitles that you can use in Adobe Premier Pro.

Users upload a video and get back an SRT (subtitles) file.

The idea for the transcription service came from observing a friend's video agency where editors were manually typing subtitles.

They realized this could be automated using OpenAI's Whisper model.

So they built a simple feature to support speech-to-text in Hebrew, which Adobe didn't support.

2. Influencer Marketing Strategy

Yuval and Roey accidentally stumbled upon influencer marketing when they had their friend, who is a big influencer in the video editing space, post an Instagram story about their service.

They created a WhatsApp group for pre-orders and ended up generating $4,000 in pre-orders within 30 minutes just by leveraging the influencer's trust with his audience.

Influencers have cultivated trust with their audiences over 2-3 years, so promoting Kaps' service resulted in immediate sales.

They focused on the Hebrew-speaking market in Israel initially and reached $7-8K MRR within 1.5-2 months.

However, they hit a ceiling in that market and realized they needed to expand to other languages and geographies. In hindsight, they would have liked starting with expansion as early as possible.

Soon, they started building a system to launch in every country not supported by Adobe.

They hired a VA named Jeff to build lists of influencers in each geography and do outreach. Jeff started by just building lists of influencers but gradually took on more responsibilities like outreach and negotiation as he proved himself.

Jeff gets paid a base salary of $500/month plus $10-25 per successful influencer deal earning him around $1K/month total. Base salary in his country (Philippines) is only $300/month.

Jeff did outreaches better than Yuval. He followed them on Instagram and Facebook and got their phone numbers from job directories and lots of tiny details that Yuval couldn't get.

Jeff's response rate was 4x higher than Yuval's when reaching out to Arab countries, getting 26% of people to respond.

They are working with around 70-80 influencers (as of May 2024) out of a list of 1,000 and expanding rapidly into new languages. They support all languages supported by Whisper like Hebrew, Polish, Hungarian, Arabic, and others.

It is a simple task technically where you have to just change 2 letters per language to support it. For example, you can support Portuguese by changing language="en" to language="pt".

3. Offshore Talent Strategy (Hiring)

To keep costs low and scale quickly, Kaps hires affordable talent from countries like the Philippines using platforms like OnlineJobs.ph.

They got few DMs from VAs by someone snitching on Reddit about underpaying them. This might be a good strategy to do it from your own account.

Yuval, with his ex-military background, used a trust-building strategy with Jeff by sending him double increments of money to test his honesty.

Like instead of paying him $100 per week, Yuval would pay him more like $110 per week to see if he reports back. Examples of varying payments sent to Jeff: $120, $240, $130, $131, $135.

As Jeff consistently responded honestly, they gave him more access and responsibilities, including access to their bank account and WhatsApp group.

Since Jeff responded honestly and didn't keep their money, they gradually gave him more access and responsibilities like access to Bank Account, Whatsapp group, and more.

They've since expanded their team with specialized roles:

• Copywriter for specific languages

• Developer for new plugin versions

• Lead generation specialist

• Outreach specialist

4. Language-specific landing page

To cater to their expanding global audience, Kaps creates language-specific landing pages customized for each market.

This is their English Landing Page.

And this is the Arabic Landing Page.

Notice the design near the pricing page and footer. Its the same template (Tailwind UI Salient Template) on both landing pages.

As of September 2024, Kaps has reached an impressive $70k MRR just one year after launch.

Their success can be attributed to their ability to identify a market gap, leverage influencer marketing to build trust quickly, hire affordable talent to scale their operations, and create language-specific landing pages to cater to a global audience.

It is not too shabby to wrap around OpenAI's Whisper.

Partnering with influencers allowed them to "leapfrog" the trust-building process that would normally take years.

By building a tool that augments Adobe's product, Kaps was able to tap into an existing user base.

A tool to Get Real-Time Feed of All Posts on Social Media

Exorde Labs records billions of social media and news articles, globally, in real time.

They have thousands of sources from Twitter, Reddit, Youtube to local news outlets‍.

One recommended video on "One Person, One Problem" Framework

This video covers the famous Peter Thiel "One Person, One Problem" Framework.

Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And he would enforce it pretty strictly.

The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems.

A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they're difficult and you don't wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate on them.

If you have a company that's always solving B+ problems, you'll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Someone should plot a graph of IPO-price vs 1-week post-IPO price. If the graph is always up, this might be a great way to make money fast.

2/

Product Hunt saw a massive drop in organic traffic. They take $6,000 from VC-funded startups as a sponsored post. Maybe this was the reason for its downfall. One thing I've learned recently is if you are breaking TOS of any platform, don't talk about it on the internet.

3/

Now you can build AI SaaS with <$1000 if you use Text2Text and Text2Image models.

But Text2Video is still expensive. It won't take long until those prices drop as well.

Rabbit Holes

1. There’s no speed limit - "The standard pace is for chumps. If you're more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects" ~ Kimo Williams. Peter Thiel has a great quote on this: "If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months?"

2. YouTube algorithm hack - Smart YouTube hack to get more views on your videos.

3. How to build the most targeted account lists possible - Better targeting saves time, money, and resources. Plus the feedback loops are faster.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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Read all the old case studies here.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Josh Richards TikTok Growth Strategy (LINK)

2. Product-Channel Fit (LINK)

3. Find Top Instagram Influencers using Hashtags (LINK)