OneTake AI

Just in time for the end of 2023, I'm happy to share that we'll be having our first cashflow-positive month !

Our first pre-sale for OneTake AI (then called Nuro.video) was in January 2022, so it's been just under two years from inception to turning the first dollar of profit.

Our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) now stands at USD $500,940.
A year ago we were at $150k, so we've gone 3.3x this year so far (and December is not over!)

It was really tough over the last couple months, as I could feel that we were just on the verge of breakeven, but our costs had spiralled up from building more infrastructure (e.g. our video translation features consume a lot of GPU power).

I then looked to raise a pre-seed round but that whole process was a total pain. I've got a lot of respect for founders who can put up with this. Only two women - one family member and one friend - trusted the vision and the progress and put up a small investment (but big for both their and our finances) which kept us running at this critical time.

So I stopped the fundraising effort ; there was much more upside in drawing my energy back to getting to breakeven faster.

With a lot of creative effort and help from the team, we slashed our expenses in half and cut our contractor payroll by a lot. We also could count on a +10% month-on-month growth, so finally, today (December 17th) is when the "expenses + payroll" curve and the "recurring revenue" curve crossed.

It had to happen at some point, and that point was today!

It's a happy day 🥳

Sébastien

This has been a pretty epic year so far: we've grown MRR at almost +15% month-on-month for the whole year (so we've tripled our MRR so far).

As a result I was in Dubai last week to receive a "Hotmart Black" award from our payment platform (Hotmart) to celebrate being one of their fast-growing clients :-)

I think applying to Y Combinator in March was a huge inspiration to keep our focus on growth. Even though our March application was declined, it was so eye-opening to have to put in the month-by-month MRR in this application form, that it seared into my brain how important it is to not get distracted.

Now that we've crossed the $420,000 ARR mark, the next stage is $500,000 - I'm putting out all the stops to get there before Christmas! Let's go!

It's been an intense three months!

• Found an awesome cofounder on Indiehacker (more about that info a future post)
• Got our first English-language customers and Portuguese customers (~15% of paid customers already are either on American or Portuguese accounts)
• Got churn down from 19% to now 8%! Still a way to go to get to 4%, but we are already ahead of the 20% I was fearing at the outset!
• And we're almost ready to launch a once-in-a-lifetime Lifetime Deal - before we increase our prices soon (due to new AI features we're rolling out this year!)

I was getting exhausted of updating a Google Spreadsheet to track our MRR, so I set up Profitwell, and manually added all the data by looking at each subscriber history individually (that was a long evening).
And, because we were just running a new campaign...

We finally broke the 10k€ mark! 🥳
(and we are 3 sales away from $10,000 )

I'm celebrating with a cold bottle of... San pellegrino 😂
(the previous celebration was : a glass of tepid tap water at $5k MRR)

Next up on the celebration list: $25K MRR with a glass of white wine!

This update is a bit late in the month, because I held off on publishing it.
I felt that it was more respectful to customers and clients to personally make the big announcement (that we’re shutting down our training/coaching business) to them, before publishing this online.

So here’s – finally – the story of August, which has been quite crazy:

While most of the world was on summer holidays, we were hard at work on Nuro.video.
We knew we’d have to face some churn from all the new July users (see: last month's crazy update where we added AI and tripled signups), so we had to work on balancing that with new sales, plus providing extra love and care to everyone who joined during the July surge.

🔥 TL;DR

• Revenue is UP 22%, and we ended August just 2 users short of the $100,000 ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark!
• We now have a financial forecast!… And it says we have 5 months to prove ourselves a viable company 🙂
• Big news: We are shutting down the training business (the Free Entrepreneur Movement).
• And… Big time success —  I presented the proof of concept of a crazy new AI feature at Hotmart’s Fire Festival in Brazil, and immediately received multiple offers to partner on distribution of Nuro.video in Brazil, Europe, Latin America and Japan!

⭐️ Elevator Pitch (how to talk about us)

For experts, coaches and online course creators, Nuro.video is the AI video editor that takes your raw video content, and provides you with a high-value, fully edited video – in any language that your audience speaks.

_This has changed a little since last month – because of our recent AI breakthrough_​ (see the full letter here).

❓How you can help

I am looking to « dig the well before we’re thirsty » to get in touch with the international markets we want to launch in.

So I’d like to speak at events (physical and online) in the following markets: USA ; Colombia ; Mexico ; Brazil.

The ideal event :

• Has an audience of information marketers, coaches, online course creators
• Has 400+ people in the room
• Takes place in early 2023

We should be launching internationally in early 2023, so I would appreciate any introductions, since events take time to plan.

Please let me know if there are people we should be talking to that you can connect me with (or if you’re running an event where I can speak!).

The full update (with cartoons!)

I was going to put the full update in a post like last time, but there are several images / screenshots / videos (and two cartoons) in it, and the editor won't let me.

So you can have a look here if you'd like. I put down in writing:

• 🏆 Our key growth metrics
  • How we beat Churn! 🥵
  • Because we did this… We’re still winning! +22% ARR🤘
  • Are we really on track to $1M revenue, $300k MRR a year from now?
  • Bottom line: we’ve got 5 months to earn our stripes (and survive) 👀
• 💪 Learnings since last update:
  • #1. How the app evolved
  • #2. Speaking at Hotmart FIRE Festival (7,000 attendees!)
  • #3. Our affiliate program is ON!
• 🙌 The end of an era… we’re shutting down the training business
  • Does it seem crazy to shut down a 7-figure-per-year information business in order to focus on a $98,000 ARR software business?
• 📅 Review: Last Month Commitments
• 📅 Priorities for September

Am I crazy to shut down a 7-figure-per-year information business in order to focus on a $98,000 ARR software business?

*The investor update letter above includes our financial forecast

So have a look, and let me know what you think :-)

This is my first IndieHacker update - I was inspired by fellow French entrepreneur Aurélien Amacker who documented his journey here. Aurélien is a good friend and I credit his transparency for a lot of my motivation to start a SaaS myself.

So here's my August update (based on the "investor update" I sent out to my prospect list) :

🔥 TL;DR

• Recurring revenue is up 3x from June, 5x from May, getting close to $100k ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
• Our first free challenge was a success and we’ll do a new one in September
• The « Magic button » (our AI which edits your videos for you) is now the single feature that defines what Nuro does. See a demo here, because we now have a homepage! https://nuro.video/en

⭐️ Elevator Pitch (how we talk about Nuro)

For experts and online course creators, Nuro.video is the AI video-editing software to create and publish video content in one click.
Just provide your unedited raw footage. Nuro will instantly transcribe, analyse and edit a ready-to-publish video with titles, transitions and animations!

Note: This has changed tremendously in the last 3 months (see the « Learnings » section)

🏆 Growth: our key metrics

Up until the month of June, I was so deeply engrossed in shipping the AI feature that I didn’t focus much on signing up new paid users. (We had given free access to many of our coaching clients, but I didn’t do a lot of promotion to sell subscriptions).

Two friends lit the fire under me for weeks to go out and get people to pay up!

So in July we started with a free 5-Day Challenge to my list which led into the offer for the software. I should say « offers », since we pivoted the offer 3 times until we found one that worked.

Obviously this is still early days, but I’m super excited by the shape of this curve 🙂
You can see the screenshots here:
https://nuro.video/en/stakeholder-updates/2022-08-added-ai-tripled-signups/

• Paid accounts went from 19 to 61 following our free Challenge
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) went from less than EUR 3,000 to over EUR 7,000
• After we switched to a software-only offer, we went from $30k in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), to almost $100,000 in ARR now! (it's our next milestone)

Almost all users are on the annual plan. I think we can afford to keep the focus on the annual subscription and roll out a monthly plan a little bit later. It’s better for cashflow and allows us to not worry about churn too soon.

❓How you can help

Now that our webinars are getting good conversions (10%) and users are starting to love the software, I want to progressively roll out a series of webinars with partners – starting in French for now.

• Any pointers on how to run this kind of rolling campaign are much appreciated (I’d like to do 2+ webinars per week with partners).
• Also if you know of potential promotional partners (preferably folks with an audience of infopreneurs / online course creators) – in French for now ; I’d love some intros since there are many new players in the market I might not know. Our software is the perfect complement to programs on how to build/sell a video course!
• I want to improve on the English demo for the tool (See it on nuro.video/en/ ). All feedback is appreciated. I’d love to make it a bit more dramatic!

💪 Top 3 Learnings since last update

#1. The « Magic Button »: How Nuro became an Artificial Intelligence video editor

I've been a member of Jeff Walker‘s Platinum mastermind group since its inception in 2010. (Jeff's the author of the New York Times bestseller "Launch").
In March, I shared with them a link to a video I had edited from a guest presentation that happened at this mastermind’s last meeting.
Several folks watched the video and happily used its content with their teams, but I had a call with Brazilian entrepreneur Victor Damàsio and he was less than enthusiastic:

« You said it took you 5 hours to take notes from the presentation,
and then 45 minutes to edit the video itself…
and I understand that 45 minutes is way shorter 
than it takes to edit this kind of videos normally.
But – dude – 45 minutes is a freaking long time, 
let alone 5 hours of taking notes! »

And he added,

« What I want is a BUTTON. One button.
I upload my video, I click the button,
I’m done! »

This comment led us to spend the next three months developing the AI behind the « Magic Button » feature, and it kicks ass!

This might be the single most valuable feature we have and it’s now the thing that clinches the sale.

I no longer do a content webinar.

All I do is a demo : people give me a topic in the chat, I improvise a 1-minute talk on the topic, and I click the Magic Button. The video gets edited in 15 seconds, I show the result, attendees gasp, and then buy.

Thank you Victor 😄

#2 Going international… in time

Our software is already available in both English and French, and I was initially gung-ho on launching in English and Brazilian Portuguese in 2022.

However I got the chance to talk 1-on-1 with Marnix Van der Ploeg (one of the first people at Booking.com, and investor in Hotmart.com, a unicorn in the infoproduct space that we recently partnered with to run a fantastic event in June).

Marnix strongly recommended a more gradual strategy. He was kind enough to outline a ramp-up plan that I will execute diligently. This will give us time to get all our ducks in a row in the French market before selling abroad.

#3. Community is great

I’ve been hosting a live session with our users every 2 weeks, which lines up with each new release.

It’s been a huge source of clarity to reprioritize our roadmap. And I enjoy the community-building element of having both the super-enthusiastic folks, in the Zoom room with the doubtful ones who encountered bugs / are waiting for XYZ feature.

I’ve also signed up to Indie Worldwide's "100 users in 100 days" challenge.
It was a pretty epic month!

It took a couple of months to get the Proof-of-concept ready for multi-tenant access (we had started pre-selling at that point, but couldn't launch without allowing each user to have their own account to save their video projects)

I had a Live Zoom party with all customers, and did a demo to show them how to use the tool! It was the first in a long series of live sessions and demos, and taught me a lot.

I had a very specific goal of launching a SaaS company for over a decade, to complement my expertise and my existing audience in the information marketing industry.

My very first step in that journey was in April 2011... but I always looked for a partner to actually start and run the software business, while I would just focus on the information product side, and provide marketing input and leads.

It was a terrible idea, and it took me 10 years to figure that out!
The breakthrough was when I read Victoria Labalme's bestseller ("Risk forward") and this quote remained in my mind for weeks:

Stop outsourcing your dream