Veed — $4.2M/mo
Generate and edit videos that fuel your feed and build your brand.
Launched 2018 · Subscription · United Kingdom · SaaS · AI · Marketing
Monthly revenue: $4.2M · Annual run rate: $49.9M
Website: https://www.veed.io
Founders
Revenue source
My startup's revenue over the last 8 years: 2018: $0 2019: $100K 2020: $1.5M 2021: $4.2M 2022: $7M 2025: $50M and climbing. People always want to know the secret... Tbh, there isn't one. Just years of doing the unglamorous work nobody sees.
Founder tweets
Today, VEED just hit.... $5M ARR 🤯 100% bootstrapped 🎉 It was not always sunshine and rainbows ☀️🌈 Here is the story of how we got there, let me take you back to June 2018 👇
2015: Left the first job right after college. 2016: Failed as a YouTuber. 2016: Failed as a freelancer. 2018: Launched the MVP of VEED. 2018: Went broke. Sold all crypto. 2019: Applied to YC. Rejected. 2019: Applied to YC. Rejected. Again. 2019: Thrown out of office space. 2019:
In 2019, it took us 171 days to hit first $100K ARR. Here's what those 171 days looked like👇 1/. My co-founder Tim took a job and gave me half his salary. 2/. We worked on product 13 hours daily. 3/. Doubled prices to $10 in June 2019. 4/. I spoke to every single paying
Today is @ycombinator demo day. A day we tried hard to be part of. But failed. Let me explain... In 2019, we made it to the YC final interview stage and got rejected (because we didn't have any paying customers yet). So we pulled some all-nighters, added a paid plan, got
It took VEED 12 months to hit $1M ARR. We then hit $2M ARR just 6 months later. I believe the speed up is due to compounded learnings that you apply overtime. Now out mobile app will hit $1M ARR in just 5 months (Small team) Our growth has been mainly through ASO, WOM & Brand.
At 27, I started my company. By 30, it was doing $10M ARR. Here’s every idea I tried before my big win: 1- At 16, imported red Solo cups into the UK. Sold leftovers on eBay. Built a tiny site. Made £1,000/month dropshipping. 2- At 19, launched an online Breaking Bad
In 2020 we where rejected from YC 20 months later we bootstrapped to $6M ARR In 2022 we raised 35M from Sequoia This year we blew passed $40M ARR in ARR Im doing a talk at @WebSummit on the journey building @veedstudio What topics should I cover?
From around the web
- How an art student went on to build VEED.IO, a video editing platform with 100,000 paid users. — Apple Podcasts
- #195 – Be Discoverable in a Competitive Space with Sabba Keynejad of VEED — DEV Community
- How VEED.io Used SaaS SEO to Grow from $100K to $2M ARR — SaaS Club
- How VEED grew to $1.7m ARR in less than 2 years - Sabba Keynejad, Veed.io — Indie Bites · YouTube
- Building A Tech Startup with Veed.io founder Sabba Keynejad — Brand Builder University · YouTube
Snippets
What is Veed?
Veed is a browser‑based video editing and AI video creation platform, focused on making it easy for non‑experts to create subtitled, social‑ready video content. It combines a simple timeline editor with AI features like auto‑subtitles, text‑to‑video, eye‑contact correction, and an AI “agent” that can perform complex edit commands from natural language.
Founding story
Veed was co‑founded in London in 2018 by: Sabba Keynejad – CEO: Art school background, worked in creative technology and branding/advertising agencies before starting Veed. Tim (Timur) Mamedov – CTO: Leads engineering and technology decisions. Both founders quit their jobs and went full‑time on Veed around mid‑2019 with zero revenue and just 4–5 months of personal savings as runway. Sabba emphasizes that being single, without a mortgage, and able to return to contract work quickly made the risk more psychologically manageable. A few key parts of the early story: They launched Veed as a simple online video editor targeting podcasters, marketers, and social media creators needing subtitles and quick social clips. Veed was bootstrapped for its first several years—Sabba and Tim paid themselves only about $2,000/month until the business crossed $1M ARR. In interviews Sabba often frames the first $5 online payment as emotionally more significant than any later revenue milestone—marking the moment the product became a “real business.”
How Veed got their first customers
Sabba goes all in on manual growth
Sabba effectively became the “growth engine” himself: answering over 100 Quora questions, being active in niche Facebook and Reddit communities, writing blog posts, and repeatedly launching on Product Hunt. This aggressive manual distribution created early awareness and seeded SEO authority.
Aggressive QA platform strategy
The Quora work was so intense that Sabba eventually got banned, but by then those answers had already driven meaningful traffic and sign‑ups. The mindset: use existing audiences wherever your target user already hangs out, even if it’s unscalable.
SEO "verb" landing page factory
Instead of generic “online video editor” pages, Veed built high‑intent pages for specific actions—“add subtitles to video,” “resize YouTube video,” “compress video,” etc.—and funneled traffic straight into the editor. Each page captured a unique search intent and converted that into product usage.
Daily Youtube tutorials targeting search
Veed hired Alec to publish one YouTube video every day for months, built around how‑to topics that users were Googling. These videos: Ranked in Google’s “zero position” for video‑friendly queries like “auto subtitle video.” Acted as content marketing, onboarding, and SEO assets simultaneously.
Upload first, frictionless homepage
The homepage ignores the traditional “sign up” gate and simply invites you to upload a video and start editing. This minimizes friction, maximizes usage, and lets Veed defer account creation until users see value.
Watermark paywall with viral upside
Instead of blocking exports, Veed lets free users export with a watermark, turning their work into advertising for Veed. Professionals and brands pay to remove it, while casual users spread Veed’s logo across social platforms.
Systematic customer interviews and 1:1 calls
Veed offered calls to any user who wanted to talk, collecting over 500+ “why I bought” responses. This surfaced that auto‑subtitles/transcription were the real value driver, which then informed product focus, SEO pages, and messaging.
Side project marketing and indie-friendly branding
Sabba has repeatedly talked about “side‑project marketing”—launching small utilities, templates, and content that drive attention back to Veed. Combined with indie hacker‑friendly storytelling (transparent revenue numbers, bootstrapping narrative), this built goodwill and organic distribution among creators and founders.
Jobs‑to‑be‑done framing for content and product
They mapped growth around jobs to be done (“subtitle a webinar,” “turn podcast into social clips,” “add waveform to audio”), building landing pages and features for each job rather than generic “video editing” messaging. This sharpened positioning and improved SEO conversion.