This as-told-to story is predicated on an interview with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder with Tim Mamedov of AI-powered video modifying platform Veed. The piece has been edited for size and readability.
In 2013, my flatmate on the time, Virgil, and I had been obsessive about Breaking Dangerous. About mid-October, the season finale was coming, and we might lastly work out what occurred to Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. We beloved it. It was our favourite factor to look at and do as a flat after I was at college.
I used to be sitting in my bed room one Friday night, and we had been each at artwork faculty, and Virgil had a fuel masks for spray portray, and he comes into my room and he goes, “BREAKING BAD!” And I went, “Oh my god, we are able to promote it!” He is like, “What?” and I used to be like, “We will promote it! We will promote it as Halloween costumes!” And that is the way it began. It was that easy.
“This was not my first expertise as an entrepreneur.”
This was not my first expertise as an entrepreneur. I beforehand had one other enterprise after I was 17, promoting American-style purple cups within the UK, which surprisingly was a really underlooked enterprise, it seems. After that, I went on to beer pong kits. However promoting the Halloween costumes was simply extra of a little bit of enjoyable; it was like slightly facet undertaking.
Later that night, round 11 p.m., my flatmate and I arrange a web page on eBay to promote this Halloween costume. We sourced the supplies: blue gloves, DuPont chemical-grade fits and fuel masks. We did not order something however made positive all the pieces was out there for next-day supply. We put the Halloween costume itemizing up on eBay with a five-day lead time to present us sufficient time to order all the pieces we would have liked. If we made a sale, we might bundle it up and ship it off.
“We’re like, ‘Grasp on a minute, we’re onto one thing.'”
We Photoshopped all the pieces collectively, and by the morning, we had our first two gross sales, so we had been like, “Cool.” We bought it, and it was superior. That day, we received one other 4 orders, and we’re like, “Grasp on a minute, we’re onto one thing.”
Funnily sufficient, we truly received competitors, and the way in which that we handled the competitors was by messaging them Breaking Dangerous quotes. They had been becoming a member of together with the enjoyable; it was all fairly lighthearted. However with the competitors, we additionally thought, How can we add extra worth right here? So we made this pretend meth, which was principally simply sugar and blue meals coloring, and would lower it up and put it right into a bag.
We additionally thought-about increasing to different platforms like Etsy, however Etsy did not need us to promote on there as a result of it wasn’t correctly custom-made, so it was simply a whole lot of attempting to work out the best way to do all of this shortly.
The opposite problem was that we had lots of of orders. So, our flat grew to become a inventory room, and we received our flatmates to assist us. It was a whole lot of enjoyable.
One week later, we might turned over $14,000 and made $3,500 every.
“I take advantage of these expertise to tell the enterprise that I am operating immediately.”
It reached the purpose the place the UK ran out of chemical-grade hazmat fits, and that was how we needed to cease it. As a result of these DuPont fits are for correct laboratory testing, there’s solely a lot want for them, and we clearly drove the demand up like loopy.
My flatmate Virgil is now a really profitable business movie director primarily based out of Madrid. I run a expertise startup referred to as Veed, which is an AI-powered video modifying platform. The corporate is backed by Sequoia Capital, which invested $35 million final 12 months. The corporate’s at about 200 folks robust. We have now about 10 million month-to-month customers, and people customers create about three million movies each single month.
It is fairly cool that I realized about entrepreneurship at artwork faculty and used these expertise to tell the enterprise I am operating immediately.
