How I Gained 5M Users In Just 7 Months | OpusClip, Young Zhao

0:00 so after 3 months of the launch we only gathered about 200 users however only 7 months after we launched the product we see so many users saying like I want to pay to jump over the quebe I want to pay to guide a higher resolution I want to pay for more downloads I want to pay for more credits and by the end of 2023 we had nearly 10 million AR as well as 5 million user signups but for the live streaming tool we didn't save any time we didn't really help them make more money if you can't make more money or save time for your users they just feel like it's a cool product it's cool from look at feel but not from a business perspective a p Market fit is probably something that you see users are hi I'm y I'm the co-founder and CEO at Opus clip so we Opus clip turns your long form video footage into social engaging

0:46 short video clips in just one click that saves about over 99% of your time and resources and expertise of social video production we've gathered user signups supports and Trust from over 5 million creators and business worldwide you can probably see that people who create social apps are really introvert they can't socialize in real life in real person so they have to figure out another hecky way to socialize with people especially I want to socialize with people when I'm not sober I co-founded a social Lab company that was called sober so the name you can tell is that after you drink how you want to socialize with other people right we raised about 1.5 $5 million back in 2013 however you know unluckily

1:33 that was you know just two months before Snapchat was launched we Shar the very similar concept that you know all the friendship and all the content will disappear in a few seconds or in just a day the company definitely failed after a year however I I really enjoyed being an entrepreneur through that experience I think in the early stage when people become an entrepreneur is probably driven by solving their own needs and trying to expand that solution to more people right I think people who want to be an entrepreneur in the early days by Nature are people who want to impact more people impact the society and impact the world so back in early 2015 I went to China with a couple other friends from Silicon Valley at that time the popular Trend was to copy the successful business models from the US to China and we discovered a pretty cool business model from post that helped

2:19 restaurants speed up everything all the way from POs to martech to HR Tech however it didn't really turn well because of the completely different landscape and ecosystem but throughout the journey that we realized we are actually the helper for the local restaurant and we should not only build a software but also Services whenever needed so I quickly formed the talent agency focused on food review just actually 4 months after Tik Tok was launched I know that short video can redefine how people Market themselves and we recognize the huge opportunity out there I spent about 4 years expanding that agency we had about nearly 500 creatives in the team after running the agency for about 4 years years we realize that all the top talents left us because all of them want to be a solopreneur it is pretty easy

3:06 and intuitive for a super creative person to become a solo prer they want to create content for themselves not for some local restaurants so I thought about it instead of managing these creatives directly in my team why don't I build some AI power product that can enable all of the creators there must be an AI solution that can automate as much as possible and remove the pain for creating contents because I was running the business I know how painful it is all the successful entrepreneurs have some sort of ultraone they want to help others it is pretty straightforward that they can get benefit the benefit is not commercial it's not business but is more spiritual benefit from helping

3:54 others so the first product idea we came about is AI powered live streaming tool but that was during the pandemic and everyone is working from home and watching live streaming content so we founded the company back in January 2022 we spent about half a year building the live streaming product with all sorts of cool AI features like AI generated memes AI populated interactions and so on we realized that it is not solving any real pain points so after 3 months of the launch we only gathered about 200 users so these 200 users we actually SP SP a lot of effort we want them to continous to use op Studio to give us feedback but none of them is willing to do so so we pay them like $20 $30 a session to use

4:40 our product so that we can gather the feedback but after we stopped paying for the dipen none of them is continuously using the product however the last feature we built for the AI powered live streaming product was a clipping feature because a lot of users keep asking us that after the live streaming we want to repurpose the content so that we can reuse for distribution so we add a feature that during your live streaming you can hit the button and we will add a mark and after the live streaming content is ready we can deliver the clips for you directly and also we use some other AI to recognize the cool moments that was the only feature that these 200 users liked they say all the other stuff are nonsense it doesn't help how can I only use this

5:27 feature so we decided to turn feature into a stand loone product and amazingly in just two weeks tens of thousands users sign up for Opus splp and by the end of 2023 we had nearly 10 million AR as well as 5 million user signups and that was only 7 months after we launched the product the real part of Market fit comes from people who are really willing to pay for it when we launched Opa Studio we asked the user during the interviews like how much you want to pay for them and they're too shy to give us an answer they're like um I will probably think about it or something like that right so you can know that they don't have any dedications or commitment to pay for the product but for Opus flip we see so many users saying like I want to pay to jump over

6:13 the queue I want to pay to guide a higher resolution I want to pay for more downloads I want to pay for more credits we didn't have the payment set up on day one but so many these are just paying to knock our door and email us and calling us even because we really save tens of hours for them but for the last streaming tool we didn't save any time we didn't really help them make more money if you can't make more money or save time for your users they just feel like it's a cool product it's cool from look and feel but not from a business perspective in the era of AI there are definitely way more teams great at Technologies than teams great at building a prodct market fit they believe they have a really strong technology through like a paper through academic research but the user really

6:59 want it so I think definitely start with what user was stay with your user or even try to become a user and then think about whether your technology is the best solution whether AI is the best solution so many AI products that can deliver over 100% of quality at times but also really under deliver really disappoint users so I think from a user experience perspective how you manage your user expectation is really tricky once AI delivers some results can user touch up on that so that's why we spend a lot of our resources buing some manual features that comes after the AI first approach which means once AI deliver the result if user think is 80% perfect they can still continue the workflow from what we generate for the user this is going to really completely solve a user

7:46 problem because you're building a product you're solving a business problem that eventually has to be 100% resolved AI if AI can only to 80% you have to make sure the other 20% can be well handled by has right now at opos clip we launch new feature every single week that is one of our culture and that is one of the trend user love our product they see opas clip not only the current product but how fast we out iterate the market by launching new features every single week making sure you experiment extensively before launching an AI product because AI is not so controllable nowadays the result can be versatile can go beyond even your expectation I see most of the AI features or AI products start with like

8:32 a lab start with the beta version and after quite a few more month when it is really stable when the cost really came down then it become part of a core product don't spend too much time building an AI Core product try to launch it separately try to launch some small experiment and get early users feedback before cutting down the cost before integrating that into your main product and our product is also very unique in in terms of user feedback is that the user not only directly give us feedback through using the product but also once they post a video from our product to the social medias we can gather the number of user views the number of comments number of favorites and number of reshares so all these what we call audience feedback is actually 10

9:19 times or even 100 times more than our user direct feedback and we're going to use these amount of feedback to fit into our model training so that we can judge whether we are generating a good video clip even before the user publish to the social media channels so our vision is to enable anyone to become a Creator without the effort and hassle of video editing and prompting skills we don't want AI to remove the human authenticity we want humans to focus and spend more time on creating an idea create your script F the relevant content and then we Opus clip will take over all the boring and tedious and timec

10:05 consuming work so there are in general for own video production perspective there are three major stage the first one is pre-production where you edit a topic you read the scripts and you prepare the storyboard and then it comes to the production where you f the content you record the screen or you prepare the media assets the last one is the post- production right where you edit the video you assemble you you cut the scenes and you sequence them in orders previously most of the AI or technology is only focusing on a specific scene or the specific frame but nowadays the overall Story the overall narration and curation can be well enhanced and automated by AI the second thing is definitely the generative AI Technologies we can see that most of the

10:51 time it's really hard to feel my content but nowadays with Sora with paika with other AI models you can generate like a few seconds long footage or b-roll from just a few words so I think one is the understanding the other is the generation these two huge advancment of AI is actually automating the whole process and also generating new footage I think with the advancment in these AI Technologies creators are actually shifting from creating content to being creative they don't have to spend so much time to specifically create each piece of content AI can do this job for the but they should spend probably 10 times more time to think about how to be creative because everyone is being more and more creative everyone have more

11:37 time to be more creative everyone have more resources to be more creative I think the parad shift is how can you be 10 times 10 fo more creative than before I think in the AI era being authentic and being genu is probably going to be more of a rare fight because it's easy it's super easy to leverage AI to generate a lot of fabricated content so my advice would be just be yourself be human be real and you know maybe nowaday it's easy to be like that but think about 5 or 10 years later when AI is everywhere when AI generated content is everywhere like being super real being super genuine and authentic is probably going to help you be the most creative