[amrit_b]

1> Frankly speaking I have no idea. If there are more than one buyer, then will give it to the higher payer.

2> Right now, users are using a free version - so no income.

3> As far as I know, there is no other product in the market with makes video transcoding this simple. So I don't think its tough to get users.

4> From a developer's prospective, it only needs a "forgot password" function before it can go to production. Everything else is ready.

5, 6> Here are the details -> http://amritbera.com/journal/why-i-built-transcode-io (transcode.io is a completely different thing - its code-less transcoding and CDN hosting)

[waterlooalex]

Thanks for the responses!

3. From what I've seen customer acquisition is the key challenge of any startup. If you can acquire customers for less than their life time value then you are set!

Without a process to acquire customers your business is much less valuable.

Someone would likely pay more for transcoder.io if it had a scalable way to acquire customers but no tech, vs what you have which is tech but no customer acquistion.

5, 6. I did read that blog post before posting the questions.

From the end user perspective they just want their videos transcoded, it seems like all 3 of these services do that. I was hoping you could summarize the tl;dr of why someone would use your service to get their videos transcoded vs someone else's.

[amrit_b]

Okay. Thats a valid point.

But I got ~40 customers without any kind of marketing and effort. All most all of them own video related websites.

Zencoder / bitsontherun have their own branding on user's videos. Even in the paid plans (which is extremely expensive) they show branded messages when some error occurs. Moreover you need to "upload" the videos somehow to initiate the process.

AWS elastic transcoder is of-course a good option, but again tat needs uploading and immense amount of code & development time. Not to mention, the developer should have enough experience to touch the AWS api/SDKs in the first place.

Transcode.io product takes care of your videos completely. From transcoding to hosting in a CDN. And you are free to theme your own video element. This absolutely needs no integration with api or sdk or anything.

Its like scaling and cropping images - just put the video path, and the rest will be taken care by the tool.

[waterlooalex]

OK makes sense. 40 customers, nice!

What are your transcoding costs? Eg what is your profit margin on $0.3 per min?

[amrit_b]

the transcoding price different and transferring price is different.. The invoice generation calculates it. transcoding_cost = 0.003 per second transferring_cost = 0.0003 per byte gets downloaded

Profit margin is double the expenditure.

but its flexible. need to tweak the values after production launch.

[waterlooalex]

I'd be interested in discussing further. Fire me an email alex at alexblack.ca