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Getting customers for my startup

Will Wang โ€ข 2025-04-02 โ€ข 20:57 minutes โ€ข YouTube

๐Ÿค– AI-Generated Summary:

Building a Startup: The Real Grind Behind the Scenes

Starting a tech company is often glamorized as a fast-paced journey filled with instant wins and viral moments. But the reality, as experienced by the founders at Clover, is far more grounded โ€” a blend of steady progress, problem-solving, and relentless iteration. Hereโ€™s an inside look at what goes into building a startup, from coding challenges to customer calls, and balancing work with life.


What is Clover?

Clover is a powerful tool designed for media teams and filmmakers. It allows users to search through hundreds of hours of footage using natural language queries. Whether youโ€™re looking for โ€œhappy momentsโ€ or a โ€œcoffee mug,โ€ Clover helps find the exact clips without spending hours manually sifting through content. This startup is all about saving time and making video editing more efficient.


The Early Days: From MVP to Massive Data

The team has already processed about 200 GB of footage from initial customers to gather feedback and improve the app. Now, the challenge scales up: processing terabytes of footage, including complex formats like RED footageโ€”a high-end camera format used in Hollywood movies. Handling such advanced data formats requires constant technical adjustments and learning, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of software development.


Stress and Growth: The Emotional Rollercoaster

Building a startup is stressful, but itโ€™s the "good stress" that comes with growth and opportunity. The founders reflect on how their stress has evolvedโ€”from uncertainty before funding to the excitement of having numerous ideas and possibilities post-funding. Despite the pressure, they embrace the hard work, coding late into the night, and continuously engaging with potential customers.


The Power of โ€œDogfoodingโ€

One of the most valuable practices the team shares is โ€œdogfoodingโ€ โ€” using their own product daily. This not only helps identify bugs and usability issues faster but also keeps the team closely connected with their usersโ€™ experience. Iterating based on personal use accelerates product improvement cycles.


The Startup Lifestyle: Building and Balancing

Their daily routine includes coding, customer calls, content creation, and community involvement at places like Founders Inc., where they collaborate with other entrepreneurs. This environment fuels creativity and motivation, although balance is essential. For example, basketball serves as a crucial outlet to reduce anxiety and live in the moment, which ultimately improves productivity.


Fundraising and Expansion

Recently, the team successfully closed an oversubscribed fundraising round, securing more investment than anticipated. This influx of capital is a significant milestone, enabling them to expand the product and team further. Meanwhile, they continue to work on exciting new features, like adding chatbot capabilities to interact with video documents, enhancing how users engage with their footage.


Marketing: The Experimentation Continues

Growth is not just about great technology but also effective marketing. The team has been experimenting with cold email campaigns and content marketing, learning that startup marketing is an ongoing experiment. Some channels show promise (like SEO and content creation on YouTube and Twitter), while others require tweaking. The key mindset is to view every effort as a test rather than a failure.


The Reality Check: No Overnight Success

Behind the scenes, the grind is real. Long coding sessions, late nights before demo days, and the constant push to ship products and content can be exhausting. Yet, the team finds joy in the process, focusing on consistent effort brick by brick, understanding that significant breakthroughs come from persistent daily work rather than sudden leaps.


Community and Collaboration

Being part of a supportive community like Founders Inc. offers not only resources but also camaraderie. The founders highlight working alongside talented engineers and creatives, sharing the journey, and celebrating small wins together. This sense of belonging reinforces their commitment and keeps the momentum going.


Practical Takeaways for Aspiring Founders

  • Embrace Iteration: Start with an MVP, get feedback, and improve continuously.
  • Use Your Own Product: Being a user yourself accelerates learning and improvement.
  • Balance Work and Life: Find activities that reduce stress and increase focus.
  • Experiment with Marketing: Try different channels and view results as data for learning.
  • Stay Consistent: Success comes from showing up and doing the work every day.
  • Build Community: Surround yourself with like-minded people for support and growth.

Final Thoughts

Building a startup like Clover is a marathon, not a sprint. It involves technical challenges, emotional highs and lows, and a commitment to constant learning. By sharing their authentic journey โ€” the stress, the excitement, the setbacks, and the wins โ€” these founders provide a refreshing, realistic view of what it truly takes to build something meaningful in the tech world. If youโ€™re an aspiring entrepreneur, remember: itโ€™s about persistence, adaptability, and passion every single day.


Stay tuned for more updates from the Clover team as they continue to grow their product, tackle new challenges, and share their story with the world.


๐Ÿ“ Transcript (594 entries):

[Music] How we doing this morning? Doing doing well, dude. Got the morning coffee and ready to get the customers to start fully paying, right? If you watched our last few videos, you know that we have a couple customers already paid with a transfer fee Li signed and also we finished building out the MVP and got amount of iterations in. But with those, we processed about 200 GB of footage with them first so we can get a round amount of feedback and see how we can make the app better. And now we just need to process terabytes on terabytes of footage through. But if you're new to the channel for our startup Clover, essentially what it does is that it allows media teams or filmmakers to search through hundreds of hours of footage all through all their media with natural language. So you can search for like happy moments, you can search for something like coffee mug, you can literally search for anything and then it will basically find the right parts. So they don't have to spend hours looking for those footage, right? You've been stressed or what? Yeah, definitely definitely been stressed lately just cuz there's so many things going on. But it's like good stress though. When we were back in Vegas before we got funded, it was stress about not knowing what to do. But now it's more about, wow, there's so much stuff I want to do with the videos, with uh the startup. So, has been stressful, but can't complain, man. This is the the name of the game for building a business, right? But today got a lot of code to write still like always, and still getting on calls with a couple other new potential customers, trying to grow the platform more and get more users so we can make uh better iterations. in the market for like [Music] So, what's this different camera red footage situation? It's pretty tough, man. I mean, basically the customer that we have has a bunch of footage that is red footage. So, basically that's a type of camera that's used for like Hollywood movies. So, we have a big hard drive full of like terabytes of this type of footage and we need to process it. So, we're trying to get this conversion to work so that we can see the frame and and like, you know, run our processing on it. But it's Dude, I nearly just dropped everything, bro. Bro, that would have been so bad. Did you see that, Harry? Yeah, dude. It was right there, bro. Honestly, you always learn there's levels to this. Like, this camera I'm recording on is a Sony camera and it shoots log footage. And before this, I didn't even know that there's actually footage that is, I guess, more advanced than log footage. So now we got to deal with this. But I mean, that's kind of how it is with coding. A lot of times you can try to plan everything out, but until you start processing stuff and running stuff, you won't even know that uh these issues exist before. But just got to knock it out one one step at a time. All right, that wasn't They were just checking out the back. Let's see. How do we get to the next one? The only one keying my shit's my girlfriend. And Alex, how did you get this car, man? So, you launch and then what happened? Well, uh, I've been building my business for a few years. I launched my first software 2 months ago. Uh, and we took off. Even though I'm paying Elon $5,000 for the API, we took off. We got a whole bunch of users right off the rip. And I, uh, rewarded myself with a Cyber Truck. That's that's that's what it's about right here. There. That's my one my first car I ever bought myself. That's it. Now I'm done buying myself stuff for the rest of my life. There we go. I'm done. Dude, this it feels like you're driving like a video game car with a with a steering wheel. Yeah. Isn't it sick? Holy [ย __ย ] Now you're good. You don't even You don't Your hands don't even need to be there. Keep it in your lap. This is a full self-driving right now. Yeah. Full self-driving. It's going to do everything. You don't have to worry about a thing. This is like a Oh my gosh. It's like a trippy Whimo experience. I know. It's like a trippy trippy Whimo experience. [Music] How's your stuff coming, bro? You always look so stressed. I think I have I think I have an angry resting face. Sensiles doesn't work. So, don't worry. It's broken. Decent day of coding. I mean, just moving the ball ball forward, right? Not a lot of like new stuff happening today. Uh just coding up stuff that user requesting. And right now basically what I'm working on is eventually we can search through all this video data already, right? But what we think will be really cool also the users have requested and something I would use too as well is I'm working on this whole flow where you can eventually chat with all your video documents and probably going to take like a couple more days getting it together as well. But again man, this is the best part about Founders Inc. right now Saturday at like 8:43. Got my housemate Patrick there building. Got Max back there building. Everyone is still building and it really does feel like an environment where we aren't working, you know, we're just having fun and enjoying the journey together. But what I also do love about this product as I talked to a couple other founders today is that I can dog feed. I think that's the term exactly is that I will be a user of this. So I'm going to be using this product on a daily basis as I start making these mini docs. That also basically closes the iteration loops, right? Because don't get me wrong, taunted customers are great and I think that's important to kind of go through iterations of taunted customers and getting feedback from them. But now I can just play around with my own product and test the results and see if that's something I like. Now that's even a faster iteration by me just testing it by myself every single day. But it's already late. Uh so going to go home, get some good sleep, and get back at it tomorrow. So, we're finally here with the magical toy CEO Fatimine. How's the fundrais going? Can you share any details about it yet? Uh, we actually closed our fundraising last week. It's It's more than what we thought. We over subscribed around. So, pretty excited. We got more interest than we initially anticipated, which is a great sign. So, pretty excited to start building now. Nice, dude. You got to show the product, bro. So, how does magical toys work? Hey, Eevee. Oh, did you know your brain is kind of like a superhero? Dino, can you teach me how to speak Spanish? See, Eevee, let's start with something fun. Hello in Spanish is hola. Can you say hola like you're greeting a silly squirrel? Ola. So, this is the office space. That's the side. All the dinos over here. Actually, follow me. Oh, we going to show that to you? Yeah. No way. This is going to be sick. So this is the secret production facility. As you can see, we have tanners everywhere. Wow. To get shipped out here. So this is the packaging. Yep. This is the packaging for now. As you can see, these are all ready to get shipped out sometime tomorrow. And you're you're a Patrick. You're just working on what? We're going on right now, bro. And we also all live together before Fatine moves out in a couple days. I'm going to take over his room. Yeah. Don't leave, Fatimine. Don't leave. But I'm pretty excited to move to a new apartment. So Yeah, my boy. Get to play, huh? Bro, I'm so hungry. The fast ready to eat, bro. Look at this [ย __ย ] bro. Bro, bro, if this ain't a good time, I don't know what is, bro. If you ain't happy right now, how about demolish this? Hey, man. You scheduled an appointment yet? I am. I'm actually uh I just scheduled it. This UX is pretty clean, though, for this brand Superpower. I had to schedule my appointment. So, got to get my blood drawn and get my biological age. But basically, I'm partnered with this brand called Superpower. They'll show you like your biological age or superpower score and just a couple other like health metrics, which I'm pretty excited to see what the results are because it's funny. This brand actually reached out to me uh two weeks ago and when I was eating lunch with Jason uh who's also my tech CEO, I think a lot of you guys probably seen his like reals before. He's like a raging CEO. It was like very very funny content, very different from mine. But we're just talking about productivity and stuff and he was like, "Oh yeah, I actually um took this test from Superpower. They were like really cool people." And literally that same day uh they reached out to me and said, "Hey, do you want to get like a free test going? We're also interested like kind of partnering up for a video and stuff. So now I'm going through this whole flow and I'll probably in the next couple videos share about like the results of like my biological age and like different things like that as well." Got some bombers in the back. Oh, of course, bro. Now, now we got to reshoot the segment. No, I'm kidding. But yeah, going to go through this, get tested, see where it's at, where my baseline's at. You also want to get one, right? I'd be down. Thanks to uh Super Power for sponsoring this video. I appreciate them supporting the channel so I can be more consistent, get more camera gear, and make better content. Bro, what is this, bro? Who made this stuff? This is fire. Got to put it out, bro. How did you make this, bro? You code this up? Vibe coding. Vibe coding is the new thing, dude. Time in the future. People can also like SSH into it. I'll just like stream this for them. But I ain't going to do that right now. I don't get paid enough, bro. And there's like little like what is this as keys? Yeah, it's literally even implement this, bro. Actually, I don't remember. All I remember is like I wanted to download the latest videos we had on YouTube. I turned it into ASI inspired by Mischief's film thing. How's it dude? Make our own version of this. Where's Where's one of me, bro? There's no love. No love for the new founders. Hey, man. For a little sum. For a little sum, I could make a loop through one of your videos. Cash at me, bro. Cash at me. Get you a VC that can, bro. Code emails aren't really cooking right now, man. Yeah. Yeah. But I think last video we talked about we're starting this code emo campaign using smart lead and just trying to do more outbound. But so far the responses hasn't really been the best but I'm still learning more about this. I have heard that a lot of uh quick responses like code email takes a while right but also I have heard like another method of like writing a lot more like tailor copy. So we're also going to be working on that. But I think right now it's still too early to tell because we don't have enough data yet, right? We need to do more coding emailing get more volume here too because right now the setup we're running probably cost about like what $150 a month Ryan. Is that right? Yeah. Uh yeah, around there I think around let's say 150. But let's say if I only get one client a month from that 150 then it'll make it worth it, right? Then I can basically make my money back. So still too early to tell. Probably tweak the copy a little bit, try it out and see what happen. But this is I think the name of the game of a startup, right? You're always trying new things out, new channels out and seeing which one will work. a lot of times too just because something is not working. Ryan and I kind of change our mindset to be like looking at everything as an experiment so you don't feel like something failed and again too. And each vlog I'll update you guys how it goes and see if it's an effective uh growth channel for us or [Music] not. Today's actually found in demo day for the new bro to ship it. So, it's going to be pretty crazy. That's why I'm also wearing founders in hoodie going to help out with uh devil day tonight. So, according to effing, there's going to be about like 500 people coming. And that's also coding the jungle setup. You want to show them, Ryan? Since now to move everything around since uh at the main stage, that's where we're going to be doing the event at. I really have no idea how you can fit 500 people. Ryan, last time we had what, 300 for ours? I think there's around 300. Yeah. But today's a good day, man. coding just doing doing some UI changes and also adding this chatbot feature. Let me show you guys who's who else is here right now. We have Harry over here logged in. Crack the 18-year-old engineer making it happen. Alexa go share. What up, dude? She's locked in over here. Bless Art and the rest of the FA team. So busy right now. Dude, none of these people are real. I'm not real, bro. Wait, my camera's not focusing. What' you say? Are you frozen? None of I'm frozen in time. Like ideal thing for you. What What would you be like searching for? You know, let's say if you want to search for a specific part. This is like a search query. What What would you search for? Yeah, just doing the thing, man. The whole game is just to talk to more customers. had a later call today about like 8:45. So, I got on a call with users and just been coding and making content all day. Ryan, show your screen. Your code's literally still processing stuff right now. Like, I was uh I was doing this discovery call over here and Ryan just over there coding. And that's really the thing, man, is that I think a lot of times like people on X and Twitter just like try to glamorize everything and everybody makes everything seem fantastic. But just pull from a start. The truth is majority of us like me and Ryan right now, we're just grinding every day trying to get to that one point where we hit that exponential growth. And it really isn't that glamorous. It isn't really as fantastic as people make it seem to be. It's like the funny part is is we all in a way know what we have to do. We should be taunting customers. We should be launching our product and coding it, improving it, and making content to try to get distribution right. But the real hard thing is just to show up every single day to do it because It's not every day you have like really big like momentum changes. For example, I'm still finishing my features right now. This video is still not done right now. I only kind of feel good sometimes when I hit that upload button. But I also been learning something with Ryan and I talking about. So kind of enjoy these moments too. Just enjoy going through the motion the dayto-day because it's like a brick by brick type of thing. This is how we're going to get to that next phase and eventually hopefully really build something that people love. Getting pretty late, so it's definitely time to get out of here. You agree, right? Yeah. All right, let's do it, man. Let's go home. [Music] You got the sink lab video coming or what? Uh, yeah. I can't show you that yet, though. Getting more clients. What's What's the next move, bro? What's the next move? I don't know. What is the next move, FZA? For me or for who? Probably make this video today and then get it out, right? But uh I got two people I'm working with right now and then after that I just want to chill for the rest of the months. You're the most free flow guy I know, bro. Just living in your car making videos. You still you still in the car? Uh here and there. Here and there. Yeah. You know, some uh some opportunities on Maven and I are cooking this up. Trying to build this for like the homies. Can I have it? Yeah. Yeah. When we're done with it, we want to we want to make it a little bit more like like what was this for? And this is heavily inspired by the buildspace OS and we want to just keep like something for we want to bring like group chats to like your OS cuz for me like little events there. Yeah. Where it's like yo want to pull up to blah blah blah so we can like leave each other messages. Yeah. The next meet up or the next movie to watch. It's like bro nobody knows about the nobody knows you can do this. I'm going to I'm going to raise a half a million dollars on this. You're going to run this [ย __ย ] up. Huh? N [ย __ย ] that. I'll make a million dollars bro. Okay, Ryan and I, we just had our weekly meeting just now and we were just talking about growth and we're kind of looking at how people have been found out about the product. One way is mainly through kind of search AI tools. So, I guess SEO that's how the traffic has been coming. Another way actually is just mainly through content. So through these YouTube videos and also I uh post a lot on Twitter and I do hope to try to make some uh short form content soon showing like the powerful content and it's pretty great being at Founders Inc. because you guys have seen Aiden and Josh from the vlogs. They are like super creative people and they make some great content. I'm also surrounded by a lot of other business people. A lot of starter people that are more businessoriented. What we noticed is that most of the creative people what they tend to struggle is that they become like perfectionists. you know, you really really want to make the thing perfect. It's like art, right? And sometimes when I'm editing these videos, too. Next thing you know, I'm like spending forever on one little segment, but in reality, that wouldn't really increase how much better the content is. It's like a marginal returns. It's just not worth it, right? But for business people too, I I definitely on this side too. I love the feeling of hitting the upload button. I love the feeling of like finishing a chunk of code and trying to get more users and launching the product. And but at the same time too is that it it really also is important to make like good content, not just post to post. And for me personally, that's like really a daily battle. There will be times where I just want to keep editing and making something good. But next, you know, the anxiety creeps in, right? Ran will see me. I'll be like, Ryan, is this good enough? At this point, I can't even tell. I'm just like, I just got to ship it and get it out there. And just like these vlogs, you know, I'm always just trying to get them out there as quickly as possible. Tough kind of balancing coding and making content, but trying to stay consistent and keep it going. [Music] I'm gas. I'm tired. We had some good runs today. How you feeling, bro? Gas, bro. Tired today? Yes, bro. It was fun, though. Yeah, we have some uh good competitive runs today. We're probably going to be the last one for a while since Farcon's actually getting a surgery on his ACL. So, that's going to be happening. But going to try to find more outdoor courts to hoop at because when I'm usually playing it's like one of the few things basketball really helps me not think about work. So I'm just like living in the moment and I'm trying to find more activity that just really helps me with that and just kind of focus on living in the moment. And the second thing also is just not even for work. It just lowers my anxiety level. Just makes me feel better and happier and also that also do help with work since when you have less anxiety right make better decisions. So, I think it's important it's more than have it's more find a hobby sometimes and do something outside of work. And I'm still learning and trying to find a balance. Same light as that one. Like just like a normal podcast setup like two lights like that and then one with no no softball. So, how was demo day? It was fun. It was fun. Too many people. Too packed. Stressful. Thankfully, some some of the homies pulled through and gave me really good presentations. Some of them maybe have to chat with afterward, but for the most part it was all really good. How many all nighters did you pull before demo day? Just one. Just one. It was like late nights. Late nights all week, but one allnighter on demo day to make something that none of you will see for another month. N you about to drop some heat though, bro. You working on taking out the room? I'm I'm at the candy store right now, bro. Show the people the design, bro. For Khan gave me the go-ahad. Well, I mean, it's very simple. It's not like, but that room over there is going to have a lot of money poured into it and cool camera equipment and stuff. And my favorite thing on earth is cool camera equipment and group equipment especially for my G& people out there who know what that means. Um, do you know what that means? G& uh, what's that mean? You ain't a filmmaker, bro. I'm not. What's a What's the budget you got with, bro? I'm not going to ask. Okay, so I didn't get a budget, but I was originally going to try and set everything up for like 4K, 3K because I'm I'm a cheap person myself. I always try to find the cheapest things. And when I was chatting with Fcon about it, he just goes, "Listen, I know it's going to be like $10,000." And I was like, "Oh, 10K, you say? What a nice surprise." So now I'm I'mma push it as far to that number as I can get it, bro. See how many people actually use it. I don't know. I'mma use it, but uh I'm gonna use it, too, I think. Yeah. Yeah, just we don't make companies here. We just make content and vlogs and Oh yeah, I'll cut that out. What you doing? I am actually on Facebook Marketplace right now because Fatine is finally going to be moving out at end of this month. Well, I guess end this month already, but it's going to say a couple extra days. So, trying to get a bunch of furniture. We actually already sniped a bunch of stuff. I got a free standing desk, uh a free monitor, and a couple different things really because definitely on a budget right now. So, sniping some items off Facebook Marketplace right now to save money. But things are looking good. Uh we actually already scheduled another call with our customer. So, majority of code is done again and we should be able to actually have MR after this call. So, I'm looking forward to that. And at this point, I think the next videos is really just about continuously growing the product and iterating through these loops. So, I'm going to keep you guys updated about that. But pretty good night right now.