A week ago, we received an email that every website owner dreads - a notification of a DMCA takedown request that has resulted in our website being removed from Google Search. In this email, Google summarized the takedown request (which can be viewed here) which accuses our compa … | Continue reading
We've grown our website to millions of monthly active users with zero ads spend. This article shares my advice to entrepreneurs who want to leverage Google Search to get more traffic and sell a product or service. Get started with SEO in two steps, for free. | Continue reading
Our startup was recently the center of an elaborate recruiting scam. What do other companies do if they realize that someone is impersonating them to attack vulnerable job seekers? This article gives advice to job seekers and shares our story. | Continue reading
Say hello to the new Kapwing! We've refreshed our look to better represent who we are and the community of creators we set out to serve. Read on to learn how we developed our new logo, colors, mascots, and visual identity. | Continue reading
The first web-based automatic video editor. Auto remove silences from videos in just a few clicks with Smart Cut from Kapwing | Continue reading
There's a common rallying cry amongst Silicon Valley investors and tech Twitter pundits: raise prices! Marc Andreesen, the famous tech founder turned VC, went as far as to say he would hire a skywriter just to write it across San Francisco: Legendary investor Marc Andreesen's adv … | Continue reading
When we first set out to build Kapwing, a collaborative online video editor, our approach to getting positive reviews online was to focus solely on building a good product. We subscribed to the prevailing startup wisdom to "make something people want". Our thinking was that build … | Continue reading
In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we've made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down. Here's what I've learned about convincing engineers to join your startup. | Continue reading
Recently, our team at Kapwing moved into a new office space that we've been using sparingly due to the pandemic. As part of setting up the new space, we dealt with a variety of logistics, from setting up desks to figuring out spacing to making sure everyone had physical access. | Continue reading
When the VQGAN+CLIP image and video generation techniques started trending on Twitter earlier this month, I was excited to try it out for myself. I've always been interested in the intersection with between technology and art, and it felt like the perfect opportunity to create an … | Continue reading
Create AI videos with this simplified generator that creates AI art using VQGAN and CLIP. Input your text and get a video back in just a few minutes. | Continue reading
After more than a decade of engineering experience, I joined Kapwing in 2018 as the first employee. Now, I lead the engineering organization and have touched nearly every part of the stack. In the time I've been here Kapwing has grown from a few scrappy engineers pushing product … | Continue reading
Kapwing is the internet's best tool for editing MP4 files. Make a video from one or more MP4 files. Upload MP4s from your own local computer, or paste a link to any video source on the internet. Use our easy drag and drop editor to easily rearrange and trim clips. Kapwing is comp … | Continue reading
Learn how to get started in the world of crypto art with our step-by-step guide to creating and minting your first NFT. | Continue reading
How to implement undo functionality in a react + redux web application. This article explains how we designed Kapwing's undo stack with notes on technical design and edge cases. A resource for other web developers adding undo to a browser-based productivity app. | Continue reading
How does a startup get to their first 1000 YouTube subscribers and leverage YouTube to grow a SaaS business? In this article, I share our journey for other founders considering YouTube as an organic growth channel for their startup. | Continue reading
If you're a software developer in 2020, you're likely familiar with the term "master" as the name of the primary branch of development in Git. One recent movement in the tech industry has been around changing the default "master" name to another name like "main". This move is one … | Continue reading
Video made on Kapwing | Continue reading
The TikTok algorithm is mysterious, powerful, and frustrating. It finds and promotes quality content with superhuman accuracy. TikTok philosophers have long tried to decode its brain and share “hacks” to guarantee views, making it seem like everyone has a different theory about h … | Continue reading
The interwebs will give entrepreneurs a lot of advice when it comes to raising money, but much of this literature is written by investors rather than founders. Here's some practical, up-to-date tips from an entrepreneur who recently raised a seed round from KPCB in Silicon Valley … | Continue reading
In 2017, I left Google to work with a friend and former co-worker on a startup idea. After two and a half months of work, we decided to shut it down, despite our enthusiasm for the product. In this article, I want to share our story and advice for other entrepreneurs about how we … | Continue reading
When raising Kapwing’s Series A, I got the opportunity to pitch to Keith Rabios, a GP at Founders Fund. He didn’t invest. I found out later that Rabois had previously tweeted that he almost never invests in Google PM or engineering founders. In this post, I investigate his claim … | Continue reading
Heroku recently exposed our private database information because of a security vulnerability in their email service. I wanted to share this security hole with other developers and Heroku customers who might be affected. | Continue reading
Studio is a simple, yet powerful, editor for creating content online. Combine images, add text, and mix videos together to produce engaging content for your audience. Perfect for memes, collages, music videos, and more. It's free, easy, and online with no downloads required. | Continue reading
In this post, I’ll tell the story of how we got some of the world’s biggest celebrities and brands to organically share our brand name and logo across surfaces without paying them. I’ll also describe some best practices and tips for other entrepreneurs considering a watermark to … | Continue reading
In the venture-bloated Startup Land, it seems like every founder is trying to give away branded products for free. We asked 200 free companies for free swag to see how liberal they are with showing love to users. | Continue reading
We started Kapwing almost two years ago and grew the company from 2 co-founders to 12 full-time employees in the last 12 months. Our team is based full-time in San Francisco, where the unemployment rate is astonishingly low. In this article, I share a list of our tactics and lear … | Continue reading
Professor Brian Kernighan presents on 'How to succeed in language design without really trying.' Brian Kernighan is Professor of Computer Science at Princeto... | Continue reading
In the world of subscription payments, service providers face ethical dilemmas on how to charge customers and set policies for their business. A large company might have the financial freedom to take the high road, but startups face a constant existential threat that can force th … | Continue reading
This article is a confessional to break the mold. Eric (my cofounder and CTO) and I are doing great and have an excellent working relationship. Our startup is thriving, and we’re growing a team and user base together. But we definitely argue. Conflict is a natural and important p … | Continue reading
Right now, YCombinator is interviewing for its Summer 2019 class. Hundreds of founders are considering the opportunity to move to Palo Alto for $150,000 in seed funding and three months of storied startup programming. In this article, I’ll explain why we decided not to do YC for … | Continue reading
I think spending money to acquire your first customers is an unhealthy approach to product validation and, frankly, a waste of capital. In this post, I’ll make the case for acquiring users organically rather than through paid acquisition. | Continue reading
There are lots of video editing options out there on the market, each with its own tradeoffs and price-tag. In this article, I want to describe why I think Kapwing is the best video editing software for beginners and people making videos for the first time. | Continue reading
In this article, I want to share my experience with brands seeking sponsorships. If you’re a startup looking to raise brand awareness or generate leads through influencer partnerships, here are some tips about what works and doesn’t when reaching out to bloggers or influencers. | Continue reading
Working at a small startup (Kapwing) as a “creative” with a non-technical background I often hear words like “pivot,” “benchmark,” or “move out of the way” that confuse me. I brought this up to my boss and she outlined a glossary of common terms that I’ve written up here. | Continue reading
My cofounder and I have grown a $20,000+ MRR business in a year with trivial (<$1000) marketing spend. We’re 25-year-old product managers, not marketing gurus, but we are lucky to have discovered the power of SEO early on. In this post, I’ll describe the “press stunt” growth tact … | Continue reading
Last July, I left my dream job at Google to work on a startup full-time. Since then, many of my entrepreneurial friends have asked me about the decision to leave a good corporate job for the risky unknown. In this article, I’ll give my advice to first-time founders who are torn b … | Continue reading
Are entrepreneurs born or are they made? Is there a certain level of conviction, predisposition to risk, or desire to be the boss that you just have or you don’t? In this article, I discuss the classical debate in relation to startups and entrepreneurship. | Continue reading
For the last decade, it has been a mobile web UX standard that users can long-press on photos and videos to save the media to their local camera roll. In a recent iOS update, Apple removed this capability on mobile Safari. Here's how it impacted my video editing startup. | Continue reading
Last July, I left a six-figure salary to work with a friend, Eric Lu, on starting a company. It didn't work. We had to try out multiple ideas before we found one that stuck. Now that we’re running a thriving startup, Eric and I both know that we wouldn’t have been able to start K … | Continue reading
A blog about entrepreneurship has been the highest return on investment for my startup, driving leads worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to our website with little engineering effort. In this post, I’ll share some strategies and tips for blogging for the tech community. | Continue reading
Last week, I was asked by a talented engineering candidate about my startup’s paternity leave policy. In this post, I’ll share how I designed a paternity leave policy for other clueless early-stage startup CEOs. | Continue reading
Last week, we announced Kapwing's seed round publically. Like most startup founders who have just closed a financing round, we’re thrilled to have found investors and optimistic about the future. But I also feel that these reports paint a misleading picture of the fundraising pro … | Continue reading
In the beginning, all we wanted was to eat ramen on our own dime. Now, we’ve raised $1.7 million from Silicon Valley VCs. In this post, I’ll tell the story of why we decided to raise money from investors for our online video editing startup, Kapwing. | Continue reading
If you are the founder of an Internet startup, you should care about SEO. We leveraged Search engine optimization (SEO) to grow from 0 to 100,000 MAU and $7k MRR in six months with no marketing spend. In this post, I’ll detail our approach to link building, the core ingredient to … | Continue reading
The growth strategies that earned us our first paying customer, and the ones that didn't work at all. | Continue reading
On Tuesday night, we took to the streets with sidewalk chalk to let the world know about our video editing startup, Kapwing. In this post, I’ll tell you about our experiment with chalking SF. | Continue reading