🪄 Wavve: From $125k MRR To 7-Figure Exit

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The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 133rd issue.

Today's topics:

1. Wavve: From $125k MRR To 7-Figure Exit

2. A tool for Sub-second Generative Text-To-Image AI

3. One recommended video on Reddit SEO Hack To Get Millions Of Visitors WITHOUT A Website

Wavve: From $125k MRR To 7-Figure Exit

Wavve, an Audio to Social Videos tool, was born out of a failed social audio product known as uTalk. uTalk tried to be Reddit for audio that aimed to improve on poor quality call-ins to sports radio shows but it was too early in 2015.

It was similar to Clubhouse or Twitter/X Spaces but the timing wasn't right. Audio and podcast market was just starting to ramp up in 2015.

1. The Birth Of Wavve

The founders of Wavve, Baird Hall and Nick Fogle, tried to make uTalk work for 2 years but it was a flop. They even launched an iOS app, an Android app, social network, audio sharing platform, embeddable player, and secured multiple partnerships but nothing worked.

As a last ditch effort, they decided to do a marketing experiment to promote their app. They decided to share audio clips on social media to get more traffic towards their app.

Their thesis was if people could see interesting audio clips that they see on social media, they would want to download the app to see what the fuss was all about.

But they faced a problem.

Turns out, no social media platform allowed to share audio clips. You could only share video clips.

And thus, they stumbled upon the problem. They built an internal tool overnight that converted audio into mp4 video file.

They started to use it internally as a way to market their app. But podcasters liked it so much that they emailed asking about their "audio-to-video posts" on socials.

Podcasters knew it was a great way to marketing their podcasts.

2. Solve a problem, not an idea

They spent 2 years building a massive audio-sharing platform that didn't work. And the tool they built in 50 hours was outselling in pure dollar terms.

They didn't even have a domain name, it was just an IP Address.

MVP was entirely manual:

1. Customer pays them via Stripe. They upload their artwork image to AWS S3 Bucket (think of it as a hard drive on the cloud)

2. They shared their IP Address (http://52.36.108.20:8888) with customer for them to download. It contained every other customer's image too.

They did the designs manually for 9 months after which they built a full-fledged design editor.

3. Growth and Marketing Strategy

It took them 6 months to hit $1k MRR and around a year to reach $10k MRR.

Their breakthrough was adding customization features like Canva for audio after which they were growing 15-20% month over month. They also switched from using servers to going serverless to speed up their video generation process from 3-5 minutes to 30 seconds.

They tried a lot of marketing strategies that made them grow.

a. Cold Email Outreach

For cold email outreach, they would start by searching Twitter for people promoting new podcast episodes, especially if it was their first or second episode.

Then, using the iTunes API, they created a search dashboard to find relevant shows. This was an internal tool they had built for themselves. Pro-Tip: Use Listennotes to find the emails of podcasters.

They'd extract emails from the RSS feeds of podcasts, which usually included them, and send out 30-50 emails every day or two.

Most emails were personalized, using a template but also mentioning specifics like seeing the promotion on Twitter or noting something interesting about the podcast's subject matter.

Subject line would be a really short one about the podcast or the latest episode. The content of the email was about starting a conversation and in the follow up email, they'd pitch their product.

b. Social Media Outreach

Instagram and Twitter were taking off for podcasters. So they were focused on reaching out to podcasters.

Whenever a podcaster shared an image of their episode, they'd send a direct message suggesting, "Why not turn this image into a video with the audio included?"

c. Product-led Growth using a Watermark

The product is such that it grows by itself.

Their branding includes watermarks, particularly for users on free plans.

Additionally, even their premium users appreciate the unique animations, which are distinct to Wavve and help it stand out from the competitors.

Eventually, they built 2 other SaaS products, Zubtitle and Churnkey. Their products create spinoff products.

Zubtitle solves the caption problem as many users like to watch audio clips on mute.

Churnkey solves the churn problem as Wavve had a high 9-11% churn. Most podcasts are seasonal so Churnkey allows the users to pause their subscriptions rather than outright cancelling them.

Eventually, they sold Wavve for 7-figures to Calm Capital after growing it to $1.5m ARR and 200k+ users.

Sources: Wavve Origins and Lessons, How We Launched A $75K/Month Audio Sharing App For Podcasters, Wavve CEO Baird Hall: Wavve hits 9k for audio video tool, $70k monthly profits! and Indiehackers Profile.

A tool for Sub-second Generative Text-To-Image AI

Runware AI is a glimpse of the future of Text-To-Image AI. It generates images in mere seconds.

You can use Fastflux as a full-fledged version.

One recommended video on Reddit SEO Hack To Get Millions Of Visitors WITHOUT A Website

This video shows you the Reddit Strategy to get millions of visitors WITHOUT a website. Super short and super useful.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

With outreach bots crowding TikTok DMs, cold email is now the more effective method to reach an influencer's inbox.

2/

Twitter/X Algorithm explained for smaller creators.

3/

New problems require new solutions.

As said in Social Media's Unspoken Rule, Twitter/X blocks Substack links directly so smart ones are using a proxy.

Rabbit Holes

1. Talker’s block - No one ever gets a talker’s block. But they do get a writer's block. More often its just a self-limiting belief. Just write poorly until you can write better.

2. Revisit your prior assumptions - Psychological pricing, also known as Charm pricing ($0.99), as a strategy no longer works. That idea worked years ago but when a trick becomes mainstream, it loses its charm.

3. Copycat Strategy - How to Earn $60K Without a New Idea - You don't need to build an original idea. Just copy what works. Improve upon what's already out there. Its the fastest way to make money. Fun fact: There are no original ideas. Only improvements.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Asshole Consulting's Copywriting Genius (LINK)

2. Soulja Boy, A HipHop Marketing Genius (LINK)

3. Keysearch's Guerilla Meme Marketing (LINK)