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20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early

Sep 27, 2019

Julia Enthoven, Founder and CEO of Kapwing, shares her journey from Google to creating a platform for multimedia content. She discusses why marketing innovation is as vital as product innovation, revealing how Kapwing scaled to 1 million users with minimal spending. Julia emphasizes the advantages of building websites over apps for early startups, advocating a flexible and profitable approach. She also reflects on her decision to bootstrap rather than seek VC funding immediately, highlighting the strategic benefits of this choice.

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ANECDOTE

Kapwing's Origin

Julia Enthoven's co-founder, Eric, struggled to add subtitles to a family video.
She had trouble creating a photo slideshow for her grandma, sparking the idea for Kapwing.

ADVICE

Website vs. App

Build a website first, not an app, for easier user acquisition and monetization.
Websites allow faster MVP development and iteration due to the absence of app store constraints.

INSIGHT

Iteration and Validation

Kapwing prioritized rapid iteration and responsiveness to user needs during bootstrapping.
This iterative approach allowed them to build and validate product features effectively.

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Julia Enthoven is the Founder & CEO @ Kapwing, the startup that provides a new, collaborative platform for creating images, videos, and GIFs. To date they have raised $13m from some dear friends of the show including Saar Guur @ CRV, Mamoon Hamid @ Kleiner Perkins, Niv Dror @ Shrug and Nikhil Basu Trivedi @ Shasta. Prior to founding Kapwing, Julia was an Associate Product Manager @ Google where she worked on everything from image search to sign up workflows.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups and came to found the future of content editing with Kapwing?

2.) What does Julia believe are the 4 benefits to building a website over an app today? How does this change your development cadence and speed of product iteration? How does this change your economics and margin structure? Where does Julia see many founders making mistakes here?

3.) Why does Julia believe that marketing innovation is as important as product innovation? Kapwing is now at 1m users per month, what has been Julia's biggest lessons in scaling a customer base to this size with very little spend? How does Julia think about marketing channel mortality rate? How should founders approach this?

4.) Why did Julia decide it was better to bootstrap than straight away trying to raise VC dollars? What were the benefits of this? Was it the right decision? What was the turning point when Julia realised was the moment to raise external funding? How did her mindset change as a result of the funding? How does bootstrap life compare to VC funded startup?

5.) How is Julia finding the personal scaling journey from PM to CEO? What have been some of the biggest challenges? What has she done to overcome them? What advice would Julia have for other newly minted CEOs? What have been some of Julia's biggest lessons in what it takes to hire the very best talent early?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Julia’s Fave Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

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