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This episode, Co-Founders of Latte Michael Martin and Timothy Wu talk about their video production software that combines AI and social media, how they grew the Latte platform so quickly, and the future of video editing technology.
Michael Martin built the world’s largest student media platform with 10 million subscribers, 4 billion annual video views, and 3 million monthly web visitors. During this time he developed an understanding of community building, marketing, and how consumers think and behave.
Timothy Wu is an ex-cryptocurrency trader, lawyer, and self-taught programmer, with experience working across multiple domains and cognitive modalities.
Timothy and Michael are the Co-Founders of Latte, an online platform that makes short-form video editing effortless with AI. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:
- Combing social media and AI.
- Creating an automatic highlight extraction engine for video content.
- How to choose a product’s name.
- How ChatGPT affected other AI companies.
- Why startups need to be able to adapt quickly.
- Ways to promote a product pre-launch.
- How to grow a platform.
- The importance of building the right type of customer base.
- The future of video editing technology.
Resources:
Connecting with Michael Martin:
Connecting with Timothy Wu:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 11:28 – “The best way to promote podcasts possibly one of them there is to create these short engaging snippets to post on multiple social media accounts so that’s where this current version of Latte came from but we’ve since realized there’s a lot of problem with video itself and there is a lot more to be solved.”
- 19:27 – “They’re not going to post one video, they’re not going to use Latte post one video and then suddenly they’re viral on social they have to do it consistently over a period of weeks and months and years and this is something that’s quite hard for most creators, for the majority of creators who are just doing it for fun and just doing it for a hobby they’re just doing it for a passion and don’t want to turn it into a job and by subscribing to software that they have to pay for it becomes not aligned for why they’re doing it.”
- 21:43 – “The problem we’re solving was personal branding on Twitter and Linkedin and so we thought the best way to market this product was by embodying the product and so every single post we did we created with Latte itself and so we stuck to this and we made hashtag made with Latte and we teased the product before it was launched we started to hint towards things and then when it was out we were posting about it we were creating posts about Latte that were made with Latte.”
- 24:01 – “So creating several videos on TikTok one of them gained thirty thousand views in the space of a week and then this resulted in a spike of seven hundred users in a week which is very exciting but it led to a lot of problems people found out about the product who didn’t have the best intentions and they started essentially manipulating the product they found some vulnerability in our system and basically they were getting unlimited videos for free so we had to act quickly on that we had a very large power bill the following week.”
- 25:12 – “What we’ve realized from our previous founder experience and what’s the proper way to build a company is don’t kid yourself focus on the key metric which is revenue and are people going to pay for it now.”
- 28:07 – “A special property of early stage tech startups is that you’re always rehoning your focus at every step of the way you always receive new information from different stakeholders different parties different customer bases and you just have to try and make the best decision you can in light of imperfect information.”