What it's like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI

I just got off a one of the most surreal video calls of my life - a live video call with a candidate who was interviewing to become an L3 software engineer at Kapwing, our online video editing startup. The interview started extremely well - the candidate seemed like a

Is it illegal to be a corporate spy? A founder's perspective on the Rippling vs. Deel saga

On March 17, 2025, the tech and business community on X woke up to some explosive accusations between two well-known startups in Silicon Valley. The CEO of Rippling, Parker Conrad, filed a lawsuit against their competitor, Deel, and accused them of "cultivating a spy" inside of Rippling, and

How Does Generative AI Change Video Production in 2025?

How will AI change video content creation? In this article, I share my predictions and best practices about how marketing, media, and communications teams can use AI to improve content velocity and reduce costs.

The Most Dubbed Movies and TV Shows of All Time

TV viewers are choosing dubs over subtitles to watch foreign shows and movies without looking at the screen. But which actors and titles have been re-voiced the most? And why is the practice on the rise?

Deepfake Global Interest Report 2024

Where in the world are people most interested in the subject of deepfakes?

CapCut Was Banned. What Happens Next?

CapCut has gone dark. Here's our predictions about what happens next and some alternatives that creators can use in the meantime.

What does the TikTok Ban Mean for CapCut and Video Editing?

The TikTok ban passed in April 2024. Courts denied the free speech appeal in December. Will TikTok, CapCut, and Lemon8 be banned on January 19 2025?

Only 7% of people can accurately choose between real vs fake AI generated videos

Last week I published an AI video quiz that got picked up on Reddit, Hacker News, and X, and it received a decent amount of attention. The quiz itself consists of 10 questions, each of which is a video of a notable person speaking, and asks the user to try

Introducing AI Personas

Introducing AI Personas, the latest addition to Kapwing's Video Storytelling suite. Try it out today to generate footage without needing to record yourself.

Texel + Kapwing: Announcing our lip sync partnership with Texel

Today, we introduced our newest feature to help creators: AI Personas. Personas joins one of 15 other AI-powered workflows paired with intuitive tools and smart integrations to make video creation accessible, efficient, and enjoyable. As part of this launch, we’re also excited to announce our latest partnership with Texel,

Sieve + Kapwing: Introducing our newest API Partner

At Kapwing, we help marketing and communications teams build engaging content fast. We’ve always aimed to make video creation easier, smarter, and more accessible. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership with Sieve, a leading AI infrastructure company focused on video data. Sieve is one

Kapwing x sync.: Taking Lip Sync to New Heights

At Kapwing, we’re always seeking out new ways to make video creation smarter, faster, and more creative. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our new partnership with sync. a leader in lip sync AI technology, to power our latest launch of AI Personas. AI Personas on Kapwing

Deepfake Videos Have Gone Mainstream—Now What?

High-quality deepfake videos are more popular than ever. Not everyone realizes how simple they can be to make. In this post, we hope to educate readers about the state of deepfake videos today: how easy it is to make one, how prevalent they are throughout social media, and how convincing

How Google's AI Overviews Change SEO Strategy for SaaS Marketers

How should SEO experts and content marketers change their SEO strategy with the new AI Overviews (also called Search Generative Experience) that Google added recently? This article shares how this news has changed our SaaS search strategy.

Meet the New Repurpose Studio: Turn a Long Video Into Social-Ready Clips in Minutes

Repurpose Studio is the AI-powered clip maker for brand-obsessed marketers. Now you can create even faster with custom brand templates, topic search, and auto-resize and Speaker Focus tools.

AI-Powered Dubbing & Translation is Now Available in Kapwing

Our new AI-powered dubbing platform lets teams of any size create accurate translations and bring them to life with natural-sounding AI voices.

Kapwing's Year in Review 2023: Everything We Built for Video Creators

We build Kapwing to help make video creators successful. Here's everything we shipped—and what we learned—in the past year.

Full-Time Wanderer: My 3-Year Experiment as a Digital Nomad

As a full-time software engineer at Kapwing and full-time wanderer, I've learned a few things about how to be a digital nomad.

Is Sam Altman running for President in 2024?

The short answer is no, Sam Altman is not running for president. But folks searching on Google might be confused as to why the description for his X (formerly Twitter) account seems to suggest that he is: There's a lot of news about Sam Altman right now, given

Slack's Google Drive App can share your private Docs and Drive files

In 2017, Slack launched a popular Google Drive integration that makes it easy to embed, share, and get notified about new items added to Google Drive, including files, images, docs, and more. We use it daily here at Kapwing, an online video editing startup, since we run internally on top

How Will GPT Change Video Editing

Much has been said about ChatGPT and new AI technologies that will change the ways people work. But how will it change video editing? Today, we introduced GPT tech into Kapwing. In this article, CEO Julia Enthoven shares her predictions for the future of Video Editing + AI.

Tech Entrepreneurship and Shifting Sentiment

When I started Kapwing in 2017, it was cool to be a tech entrepreneur. People looked up to techies. How I Built This was one of Apple’s top podcasts. Stripe, then a tech industry darling, acquired IndieHacker, a popular website about resourceful entrepreneurship. In 2018, famous startup accelerator YCombinator

How to Build a Founder Network

Here's my tips on how to build a network of founders. If you're an early-stage founder, surrounding yourself with other sharp entrepreneurs is a tremendous competitive advantage.

Predictions for Creative Teams in 2023

What trends should modern creative teams know about going into 2023? Here's my prediction on how video content creation will evolve this year.

How to Build Culture at an Early-Stage Startup

How do founders shape culture at an early stage startup? In this post, I describe my learnings from nurturing company culture over the last four years as a founder.

Google removed our website from search because it uses youtube-dl

Update: Google accepted our DMCA counter notice and reinstated all 317 Kapwing webpages that they took down. In the week that the takedown was in effect, our website traffic was down 30%. A week ago, we received an email that every website owner dreads - a notification of a DMCA

Working with Lawyers: 9 Learnings for Startup Founders

When starting a company, founders often run into the question "Should I consult a lawyer for this?" In this article, I share my experience from working with lawyers, from incorporation to product counsel to fighting a law suit, from five years as an entrepreneur.

How to Get Started with SEO

We've grown our website to millions of monthly active users with zero ads spend. This article shares my advice to entrepreneurs who want to leverage Google Search to get more traffic and sell a product or service. Get started with SEO in two steps, for free.

Introducing Kapwing for Education: Free Pro accounts for students and teachers

We’re making Kapwing Pro 100% free for eligible teachers and students as part of our Kapwing for Education initiative. Read on to learn more about the program and how to apply for your free Pro account!

I Took a Bite from the Apple of Death

This weekend, I found a fruit that looked like a small green Apple on a beach in Mexico and decided to taste it. This article shares my story with a manchineel, the world's most dangerous tree.

Someone is Impersonating Kapwing in a Recruiting Scam

Our startup was recently the center of an elaborate recruiting scam. What do other companies do if they realize that someone is impersonating them to attack vulnerable job seekers? This article gives advice to job seekers and shares our story.

Making it Easier to Create Together

We’re building a better Kapwing experience for teams so that it’s easier to create and communicate when working with videos together. Today, we’ve refreshed our look to reflect this focus. Check out Kapwing's new visual brand and sign up below for access to collaboration in the Kapwing editor.

Making Kapwing's New Brand

Say hello to the new Kapwing! We've refreshed our look to better represent who we are and the community of creators we set out to serve. Read on to learn how we developed our new logo, colors, mascots, and visual identity.

Introducing the Kapwing App for Android and Chromebook Devices

Introducing the new Kapwing App in Google Play! Download the official Kapwing experience on an Android phone, Android tablet, or Chrome OS device. Read more about how and why we built the Kapwing native app for mobile and Chromebooks

How to Hire SWE Interns at a Tech Startup

How we recruited three talented software engineering interns for our tech startup for summer 2022. Here's my tips for other entrepreneurs considering summer internships.

6 Pro-Tips from an 11 Month Software Engineering Intern

Hi, I’m Derrick. For the last 11 months, I’ve been a software engineering intern at Kapwing. In a couple of days, I’m going back to school to finish my degree, but before I go, I wanted to give you some pro-tips on succeeding as a software engineering

How Elch3w Achieved Over 3 Million Karma on Reddit

Within only 2 years of being on Reddit, meme creator Elch3w has accomplished more than he could've ever imagined. With upwards of 3.1 million karma, Elch3w has become the 4th top contributor on the subreddits r/memes [https://subredditstats.com/r/memes] as well as the 2nd

Working With the Google Chrome Team

Over the last several months we have had the opportunity to work with the Google Chrome team to optimize our frontend performance. Their team helped us refine our implementation of various web APIs and introduce webcodecs into our application. Below is a blog article we wrote that was initially published

How the Founder of Cowbelly Grew His Community to 15 Million Followers

If you're on TikTok or YouTube, chances are you've seen a meme that was created by Cowbelly, a meme creation studio. Cowbelly has grown their YouTube channel to over 2.5 million subscribers and their TikTok account to over 13 million followers. Jack at Kapwing recently

Reflections From an Underprivileged Software Engineer

How Brian Nguyen started working as a software engineer at Kapwing, and his path to get there.

We increased our revenue by lowering prices

There's a common rallying cry amongst Silicon Valley investors and tech Twitter pundits: raise prices! Marc Andreesen, the famous tech founder turned VC, went as far as to say he would hire a skywriter just to write it across San Francisco: Legendary investor Marc Andreesen's advice:

Top YouTubers Who Swear the Most

In this article, we're revealing the top YouTubers who swear the most. Did your favorite creator make the cut?

Introducing Share to TikTok on Kapwing

Now, video creators can publish TikToks directly from the web! Make a video in the Kapwing Studio and use the TikTok button to share teh video directly to social media.

Which MUNI Lines are Usually Late?

With the mask mandate eased and more of our team wanting to work from our office in San Francisco, the number of employees commuting on public transportation has been increasing over the past few weeks. Our company, Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com], is an online video editing [https://www.kapwing.

10 Non-Secrets for Success I’ve Learned in 4 Years as a Founder

In honor of Kapwing's four year anniversary, I wanted to share some of my learnings from the journey in Startup Land. Here's 10 non-secrets to success for other entrepreneurs just starting out.

There's no such thing as an organic positive review

When we first set out to build Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com], a collaborative online video editor [https://www.kapwing.com/video-editor], our approach to getting positive reviews online was to focus solely on building a good product. We subscribed to the prevailing startup wisdom to "make something people

What I've Learned from the 16 Engineers who Turned Down Job Offers at Our Startup

In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we've made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down. Here's what I've learned about convincing engineers to join your startup.

Should we put a weight rack in the office?

Recently, our team at Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com] moved into a new office space that we've been using sparingly due to the pandemic. As part of setting up the new space, we dealt with a variety of logistics, from setting up desks to figuring out spacing to

Our AI Art Generator Isn't Being Used To Generate Art

When the VQGAN+CLIP image and video generation techniques started trending on Twitter earlier this month, I was excited to try it out for myself. I've always been interested in the intersection with between technology and art, and it felt like the perfect opportunity to create an easy

Scaling Kapwing to 100k+ Projects a Day

After more than a decade of engineering experience, I joined Kapwing in 2018 as the first employee. Now, I lead the engineering organization and have touched nearly every part of the stack.  In the time I've been here Kapwing has grown from a few scrappy engineers pushing production

Introducing Kapwing Plugins

We're opening up Kapwing to developers, animators, musicians, and more to build a video editor for modern creators. Welcome to Kapwing Plugins and the future of online video editing.

How We Built It: Audiograms in the Browser with Web Audio API & HTML Canvas

In Kapwing Studio, users can upload an audio or video file of their podcast, favorite song, or interview and make an animated representation of the audio frequency and amplitude over time using our Audio Waveform tool.

Content Cleanup: How We Acquired 100k Users on Search by Updating Old Content

In the first quarter of 2021, we ran 7 experiments on content maintenance to measure the ROI of refreshing old SEO content. Here's everything we learned.

Green Screen in the Browser With HTML Canvas

Kapwing's Studio now supports chroma key-based background removal, also known as green screen editing.  This allows users to upload green screen videos, remove the green background, and replace it with whatever they choose. Kapwing Creators can now composite people and objects onto background images and videos without having

Product Analytics at Startups

A solid product analytics stack is the foundation of data-driven culture. But, in the early days, how and when should founders invest in their startup's product analytics stack? This article explains how to set up a product analytics stack and enforce good data hygiene at a startup.

Why Online is the Future for Creative Software

As we've grown Kapwing to millions of creators, people - especially professionals used to the Adobe suite - sometimes discount our product because it's fully online. Given decades of reliance on heavyweight desktop editors, creators seem skeptical about a browser-based tool they can use on any

How We Consistently Write Trending Content

Trend Content Marketing has helped us scale our business to millions of users and hundreds of thousands of MRR. This article shares how we have scaled our approach to trending content

How to Implement Undo in a React + Redux Application

How to implement undo functionality in a react + redux web application. This article explains how we designed Kapwing's undo stack with notes on technical design and edge cases. A resource for other web developers adding undo to a browser-based productivity app.

How to Grow a SaaS Startup on YouTube: Learnings from Year 1

How does a startup get to their first 1000 YouTube subscribers and leverage YouTube to grow a SaaS business? In this article, I share our journey for other founders considering YouTube as an organic growth channel for their startup.

How to Rename Your Master Branch to Main in Git

If you're a software developer in 2020, you're likely familiar with the term "master" as the name of the primary branch of development in Git. One recent movement in the tech industry has been around changing the default "master" name to another

Seed Fundraising: 13 Tips You Won’t Get on Twitter

The interwebs will give entrepreneurs a lot of advice when it comes to raising money, but much of this literature is written by investors rather than founders, and some popular resources are from a decade ago. My cofounder (Eric Lu) and I raised a $1.7M seed round for our

How To Know When Your Startup is Failing

In 2017, I left Google to work with a friend and former co-worker on a startup idea. We named [https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-we-chose-an-onomatopoeia/] the company Hot Barber and bought the domain hotbarber.com. For two and a half months, we worked long hours to get the business off

Do Product Managers From Google Make Bad Startup Founders?

My cofounder and I both worked at Google for two years as Associate Product Managers. Then, we started a content creation website called Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com] together. When raising Kapwing’s Series A, I got the opportunity to pitch to Keith Rabois, a GP at Founders Fund. He

Security Hole in Heroku's Mailing Service

Heroku recently exposed our private database information because of a serious security vulnerability in their email service. I wanted to share this security hole with other developers and Heroku customers who might be affected. We’ve generally had a great experience with Heroku and have been customers since we started

Introducing Studio 2.0 by Kapwing

Enable your team or organization with simple, collaborative multimedia software. Work together in shared digital workspaces to get more work done faster. Make images, videos, and GIFs that are high-quality and up-to-date. Perfect for media teams, marketing orgs, schools, and more.

VIRAL: How We Used Watermarks to Grow our Startup

We put a watermark on every video made with our website. Here's the story of the Kapwing watermark and how this growth strategy helped our brand and user base go viral.

Announcing a New Milestone: Series A

I’m thrilled to announce today that we’ve partnered up with Saar Gur at CRV to grow Kapwing’s content creation platform. This Series A financing allows us to make Kapwing free to use, to grow our engineering team, and to evolve from a tool to a full multimedia

Online Multimedia Editor Kapwing Announces Series A From CRV

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — September 24, 2019 10:00AM PT Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com/], a free online image and video editing platform, announces an $11M Series A financing round led by CRV [http://crv.com] . Kapwing strives to empower a rising class of modern creators who need faster, simpler, and

What Happened When We Asked 200 Companies for Free Swag

In the venture-bloated Startup Land, it seems like every founder is trying to give away branded products for free. So how does a company leverage branded gear (“swag”) to win brand affinity? We work at a startup trying to set up a brand ambassador program and build brand awareness with

What It Takes to Hire 10 Employees in San Francisco

We started Kapwing (an online image and video editor [https://www.kapwing.com]) almost two years ago and grew the company from 2 co-founders to 12 full-time employees in the last 12 months. Our team is based full-time in San Francisco, where the unemployment rate is astonishingly low. I wanted

Finding SF Office Space: A Startup Story

In the last two years, we've grown Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com] from two cofounders to 13 full-time employees and secured two rounds of venture funding, but we just moved into our first office space. In this article, I tell the story of our journey between offices and

Postering San Francisco: Lessons from a scrappy growth marketing experiment

Hello world! My name’s Grace. I’m a rising senior studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, and I love creating videos [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJmROZn74xDKAKTt65Yle5Q], adventuring, laughing at memes, and telling stories. That’s how I ended up interning as a Growth Marketing intern at Kapwing

Business Needs vs Customer Interests at SaaS Startups: Questions for Founders

In the world of subscription payments, service providers face ethical dilemmas on how to charge customers and set policies for their business. A large company might have the financial freedom to take the high road, but startups face a constant existential threat that can force them to make revenue-first decisions.

Cofounder Conflict and Resolution

Two months ago, I tweeted [https://twitter.com/JuliaEnthoven/status/1110779292760195072] “TIL that cofounder conflict is best resolved over tacos.” A lot of founders appreciated the tweet (IndieHackers RTed), but my investors did not. A few hours later, one of my investors messaged me “Are you and Eric okay?” Then,

In 2019, is YC worth it?

Right now, YCombinator - the famous Silicon Valley startup accelerator and incubator of Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and many other tech giants - is interviewing [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/] for its Summer 2019 class. Hundreds of founders are considering the opportunity to move to Palo Alto for $150,000 in

The Case Against Email Sign In

My cofounder and I recently decided against building an email sign in flow for our users. Our website, Kapwing, relies entirely on Google and Facebook OAuth. In my opinion, too many startups unnecessarily build email sign in into their MVP. Although every product has different requirements, I think that, in

How to Write Investor Updates

As a first-time startup founder, I didn’t realize that entrepreneurs were supposed to send regular email updates to their investors after raising money. For two months after we closed our seed round in June 2018, I didn’t send investor updates, and our investors didn’t ask me for

An Unoffical Guide to Product Hunt: Learnings from 15 Launches in 2018

Product Hunt [https://www.producthunt.com/] has been an amazing launch platform for our image and video editing startup, Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com]. We got to >300K monthly-active users last year with little marketing spend due partially to Product Hunt exposure. In this article, I’ll describe how

Don't Pay to Acquire Your First Users

Recently, a founder asked to chat with me about SEO. During our call, the founder - whose startup is backed by a top-tier VC - said to me “I assume that you acquired your first users through paid marketing.” Really? Is this an assumption nowadays? Since we’ve raised money

Evolution of a Landing Page: Website Design for Startups

How do you organize your startup’s website? It depends on the stage your company is in. We have redesigned our landing page more than seven times since launching in September 2017, and we’re about to do another. I wanted to share takeaways from my startup journey for other

Video Usage At Startups: A Report

November 27, 2018 -- Today, Wistia and Kapwing publish a co-authored report on “Video Usage At Startups” [https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/video-usage-at-startups]. In the last several months, Kapwing surveyed 132 startup founders about their use of video for business purposes and partnered with Wistia to publish the insights. The

Press Stunts: The scrappy way to grow to a $20K MRR business

My cofounder [https://www.kapwing.com/blog/find-a-cofounder-before-you-find-an-idea/] and I have grown a $20,000+ MRR business in a year with trivial (<$1000) marketing spend. We’re 25-year-old product managers, not marketing gurus, but we are lucky to have discovered the power of SEO early on. Link building is

How to Quit Your Big Co Job to Start a Company

Last July, I left my dream job at Google to work on a startup full-time. Since then, many of my entrepreneurial friends have asked me about the decision to leave a good corporate job for the risky unknown. In this article, I’ll give my advice to first-time founders who

'Entrepreneurial': Natured or Nurtured?

My dad was born an entrepreneur. When he was 7, he sold lemons and avocados from the tree in the backyard on the side of the street. When he was 11, he got a job as a paperboy that required him to wake up at 4am before middle school. In

How Apple got away with weakening the web

History For the last decade, it has been a mobile web UX standard that users can long-press on photos and videos to save the media to their local camera roll. On most Android phones today, you can long-press on a photo or video in Chrome and download it from the

Find a cofounder before you find an idea

Last July, I left a six-figure salary to work with a friend, Eric Lu, on starting a company. It didn't work. We had to try out multiple ideas before we found one that stuck. Now that we’re running a thriving startup, Eric and I both know that

What I've learned about writing viral blog posts for the tech community

A blog about entrepreneurship has been the highest return on investment for my startup. Popular posts have driven leads worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to our website with little engineering effort. In this post, I’ll share some strategies and tips for blogging for the tech community. Background I’

Paternity leave at startups: how and why to design a policy for new parents

Last week, I was asked by a talented engineering candidate about my startup’s paternity leave policy. In this post, I’ll share how I designed a paternity leave policy for other clueless early-stage startup CEOs. Background I’m the CEO of a seed-stage startup called Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.

Why We Decided to Raise Money for Our Startup

In the beginning, all we wanted was to eat ramen on our own dime. Now, we’ve raised $1.7 million [https://www.kapwing.com/blog/kapwing-press-release-06-16-2018/] from Silicon Valley VCs. In this post, I’ll tell the story of why we decided to raise money from investors for our

The Terrible Truths of Fundraising: Lessons from a First-time Founder

Last week, we announced Kapwing's seed round publically [https://www.kapwing.com/blog/kapwing-press-release-06-16-2018/]. 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

Kleiner Perkins, Shasta Ventures, Sinai Ventures invest $1.7 Million in Popular Video Maker Kapwing

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

A Founder's Guide to Link Building and SEO

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

How to Make an American Chopper Meme

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

How to Loop Snap Videos

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

What happened when we chalked SF to promote our startup

In the early days of Kapwing, we drew our logo on the streets of SF as a marketing stunt. This article tells the story of how we chalked SF to get the word out for other scrappy marketers and entrepreneurs.

Introducing the Kapwing for EDU Pilot

Update: As of December 15th, 2022 we are putting a pause on accepting new applicants for the Kapwing for Education program as we focus on product improvements. If you’re interested in joining an education program in the future, please visit kapwing.com/edu and fill out the form to

A female engineer's opinion on why fewer women go in to tech

Over the last several months, I've witnessed many controversial discussions among my friends, in my San Francisco community, and on online forums about James Demore’s memorandum [https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320] . People of both genders are wrestling with the fact that fewer women go into computer science and

Is your idea good enough to start up? Lessons since leaving Google

As the tech giants grow, more and more young CS graduates start their careers at big companies with aspirations of founding their own one day. I was one of them, and, in July, I left Google to found an internet startup with a friend. In this post, I’ll share

What they don't tell you about naming a startup

In the last two years, I've named eight different websites and side projects. It turns out, naming a startup is a lot harder than advice articles make it seem. In this post, I’ll share what I learned the hard way about choosing a startup name. Background Many

Why We Chose An Onomatopoeia for the Name of our Startup

Some people strongly dislike the name "Kapwing," but we've embraced this onomatopoeia for our online video editing startup. Here's the 7 things we love about the name Kapwing.

Making Movies With Kapwing

"Video editing" is a broad, overloaded term. Video editing software helps creators with complex tasks like pixel adjustment and simple tasks like making a meme. We think that one of the basic functions of a video editor is the ability to combine and arrange clips [https://www.kapwing.

Make your own lightning

To make money and acquire users in the startup world, you need lightning to strike, a rare moment of sheer luck that propels your company towards success. So how can tech founders cope with this randomness? In this post, I'll share my tips on making your own lightning.

Fundraising: A conversation with myself

Five months ago, my co-founder and I started a video editing website called Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com]. We have been building Kapwing with our own savings and haven’t taken any investment or debt, so we own 100% of the small company. Recently, we’ve been discussing whether to

How to make a video collage with Kapwing

Kapwing recently added the Collage Maker to it’s online video editing toolkit. Like the Filters and Meme Maker, our Collage Maker supports images, GIFs, and video, and it’s the only way to make a video collage online. In this post, I’ll describe how you can use the

Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website

I’m a 24-year-old female web developer and founder of Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com], an early-stage software startup. When my co-founder, Eric, and I launched the website in October, we decided to add a chat messenger so that users could message us directly with feedback, feature requests, and bugs.

How to Add Dynamic Meta Tags Server Side with Create React App

This issue [https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/1261] in the create-react-app repo has been getting a lot of attention recently, so I thought I'd write a brief tutorial with an example of how to add dynamic metadata tags server side with React. Want to skip right to

How to filter video online

This week, we launched a tool on Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com] to help users filter videos and adjust color online. Kapwing is the first website that allows you to create a filtered video to publish across platforms. In this post, I'll show how to use the filters

Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet

Before I left Google to work on my own startup, I hadn’t thought much about monetization. I believed that, because so many websites do it everyday, charging people for online services would be straightforward. But as I started growing Kapwing, my video editing website, [https://www.kapwing.com/] with

Narcoleptic in tech

I’m a tech startup founder, a web developer, and a diagnosed narcoleptic. In this post, I’ll share what it’s like to live with narcolepsy and how it affects my work in the tech industry. Background I’m a 24-year-old software developer living in San Francisco, and I

Cloud costs aren't actually dropping dramatically

Since starting work on Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com], I’ve noticed a lot of buzz in the Silicon Valley about cloud costs "dropping dramatically." Entrepreneurs, VCs, and the media write about this trend, claiming that it’s enabled a new wave of startups in fields like artificial

Why the Kapwing Subtitle Maker is the best tool for adding captions to video

Background Three weeks ago, we launched a Video Subtitle Maker [https://www.kapwing.com/subtitles] on Kapwing, our online video editing website. When we announced the new feature on HackerNews [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15967913], several people asked us why our tool was any different than the existing

How to Add Subtitles to Video Permanently Online

We all know that it's hard to add subtitles to your video. But in this post, I'll show you how to easily add subtitles to any video without downloading any software or using any complicated tools. Kapwing's Subtitle Maker lets you automatically generate subtitles

The easiest way to make Stop Motion videos for Instagram

Stop motion videos - the effect of strobing images in sequence - are all over Instagram. Instagram is experimenting with a Stop Motion effect for the Story camera. In this post, I'll introduce Kapwing's free online software tools to help you make and share good-looking Stop

Cold emails didn’t work: How we got our first 10 customers in two weeks

About three weeks ago, Patrick McKenzie of Stripe published an article [https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales] on how to get your first ten customers. My co-founder and I had just launched our video editing website, Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com/], and were looking to attract our first paying customers

Why I'm founding a startup I don’t really care about

I'll admit something that most startup founders won't: I'm not passionate about my product. In this post, I'll share my thoughts about building a meme generator that won't change the world. Background Three months ago, I left an amazing job

We let users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology - here's what happened

We added a paywall to Kapwing [https://www.kapwing.com/], our video editing startup, two weeks ago. But to help ease the transition, we allowed users to skip the paywall if they wrote an good reason for why they couldn't pay. In this post, I'll share