Kapwing Blog

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 process. For us and for many founders, the process of raising a seed round was discouraging, stressful, and very difficult. In this post, I describe the side of fundraising not covered in outcome announcements, the lessons and realities that inexperienced entrepreneurs should know to expect. »

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. Background There’s humble glory in bootstrapping a business because you can take full credit for every dollar in revenue. Eric and I celebrate every uptick in daily video count, every Stripe notification, every new link from bloggers and journalists. »

Company founded by two former Googlers aspires to make short-form video production a quick, intuitive task for everyone rather than a specialized, full-time profession SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — July 16, 2018 10:03AM — Kapwing, the popular video editing website, announced today that it has raised $1.7M seed round to expand its online video editing platform for casual creators. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Shasta Ventures, Sinai Ventures, Village Global, Shrug Capital, and ZhenFund. »

When it comes to social media, subtitles increase audience engagement. If you’re building your professional following and personal brand using videos on LinkedIn, you should add subtitles directly to your video so that you don’t rely on audio to communicate your story. In this post, I’ll describe how you can quickly add subtitles to LinkedIn video using a free online tool called Kapwing. Background In August 2017, LinkedIn started supporting video uploads. »

If you are the founder of an Internet startup, you should care about SEO. With billions of daily users, organic Google Search is the cheapest, most efficient platform for reaching people who need your product right when they need it. My co-founder, Eric, and I both worked as Product Managers on Google Search before leaving to start Kapwing, our video editing website. We leveraged Search engine optimization (SEO) to grow from 0 to 100,000 MAU and $7k MRR in six months with no marketing spend. »

The American Chopper scene, clipped from an old reality TV show, is a hilarious meme for any two-sided argument. In this post, I’ll describe how you can make your own American Chopper memes for the passionate debates in your life. Type 1) Video with Subtitles One type of American Chopper meme is the video meme. To make a video meme, add original “subtitles” to rewrite the dialog. I just made an example for the Kapwing YouTube channel: »

If you filmed a video on Snapchat that you want to upload to Twitter, Instagram, or your IG Story, you might want to make it longer so that people can appreciate the effect. In this post, I’ll tell you how to create a new video of your Snap playing on repeat using free, online tools. Why loop? Snapchat videos are often really short - only 1-3 seconds - so it’s more fun when you play the moment on loop. »

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 as a growth tactic. Inspiration I got the idea for chalking from my college days. As part of student groups promoting an event or a fundraiser, my peers and I would chalk reminders across Stanford campus so that students saw them on their way to class. »