Scalar retro and post-mortem

i've rewritten this post some many times, but most of it was in feb 2024 but updated in dec 2024

scalar was a professional collaborative video editor think of it as a figma for video editing.

this is going to be long, and a lot of story telling.

The leap

I spent the last three years trying to beat adobe at their own game, why would I do something so stupid? I'll explain but first a bit of context.

This story starts in 2020 at University of Toronto, and I really hated it there. But when the world shut down in March 2020, it was the perfect excuse to convince family to let me take a gap semester. This was largely due to a close friend Arnav. He had taken a gap year before uni and had showed me how it could be done.

This was the first large bet I had taken on myself, I ended up not picking any classes for the fall and knew I had spent my time well so I immediately installed a linux distro where I couldn't play video games. This is when I started experimenting with WASM which was really new. Many linux distros have license problems with video codecs especially h.264 and I wanted to make a quick UI for ffmpeg to solve video workflow tasks I did; without having to pull my hair out. This lead to building videotranscode.space, it was an open-source attempt to get ffmpeg to work on the browser.

One morning it blew up on Hackernews. Suddenly we had 15k users. During this time, I was participating in Pioneer, at the time an infinite tournament. It was awesome I loved posting updates every monday and getting feedback from the community. The Pioneer leadboard really helped me hone my product sense.

To my absolute surprise, I got accepted into Pioneer in October 2020. At this time I was still a college kid building an open-source project looking for an internship. But here Pioneer changed the trajectory of my life, those first couple of office hours with Daniel and the team were incredibly motivating and lit an ambition in me.

Zack

Zack is a vital part of this story. I met him in college where we hacked on random shit together in our school’s startup incubator. Even at this time Zack was an incredible engineer, over the course of the next couple of years morphed into a true 10x engineer. I’ve always said Zack was our Evan Wallace, and incredibly critical for the kind of product we were building.

When Zack mentioned he was taking a semester off in early 2021, I knew I wanted to work with him.

During this time period, we were purely motivated by curiosity and technology; just wanted to push the limits of what we could do with WASM and video. During this period we were working on a client side video editing sdk: api.modfy.video/

We really wanted to make a video editor, but weren’t particularly confident in ourselves yet. So we decided the next best thing would be client side components for editing. The sense was customers faster building out this SDK while still building the same core tech needed for the video editor.

The video editor

The core inspiration for a collaborative video editor came from my experience as an amateur film maker. I was making a 20min long short-film after high school and I used to drive an hour and half everyday to be able to edit with my team (my friends). This had always been my experience with editing short films we made. We always had to edit in-person.

The core thesis came from my personal experience but we validated this problem by talking to hundreds of video editors. They ranged from small to medium creators, freelance editors and later even some folks in hollywood.

The vision for the product was to build a real professional class collaborative video editor. A product with a low floor², a high ceiling - one you can use 8hrs a day. A figma like experience, one where it is seamless to have sync or soft async experiences³ something that is really not possible in video editing workflows without being in person.

We thought this was finally possible because of WASM which would let us do everything client side, providing an excellent performant experience like figma had. We were especially fascinated by using WASM to render videos locally. Our thinking was the unit-economics would be much better and would provide an incredible free-tier experience. This was a mistake for a few reasons; First trying to render video locally was just not performant or stable enough. Second, users didn't really care about this and we were optimizing for unit-economics too early. Finally we were just nerd snipped by WASM. This mistake cost us about a year of our lives.

We wanted to rethink how video editors could look if they were built from the ground up for collaboration. A lot of ideations of user interfaces and experiences came up during our Moonshot sessions.

There were many many experiments wanted to share a few highlights here, these sketches com from a 10min sketch idea a friend gave us for expressing some of these moonshot ideas. All of the amazing design work is curiosity of Malay, our excellent designer.

There are countless iterations that I could go on for days about. I find the UX iterations a bit easier to consume but there is plenty on the tech side too. Maybe Zack or I could write an entire other post about that side.

Trying to hack GTM

We knew the product we wanted to build would takes years, and we really wanted to find ways to hack GTM and be engaging with our users well before our product was ready. Not sure if this pursuit itself was a good idea or not but nevertheless we tried many times.

The first of these was Anno.so, this was early 2022 and we had just started ODX⁴ and wanted to see if we could get users who were already collaborating using us while we worked on the core editor. Tbh we did a great job with anno initially, it was built and launched completely in two weeks - yes it was just a basic frame.io clone but simpler but we good good traction initially with it. We had film students using us, some creators and even netflix india for a minute - but most of these users never wanted to talk to us and churned 2/3 months in. Moreover while we though, sharing a lot of code with anno would make sure it wasn't a distraction it definitely split our focus and ended up making poor progress on both ends.

As more physical events started happening in 2022 again, we realised a good place to get user feedback and talk to users were film festivals. The problem was our video editor was nearly stable enough → remember our product didn’t work for a user if they could use us for 15/30 mins a day, it was their daily driver. So we weren’t selling a just a leaky bucket but a bucket with no floor. While this festival was a great motivation for the team, as we got such a positive response from 100s of editors and filmmakers in person, overall it wasn’t a very fruitful endeavour.

Not finding PMF

While we started in 2021, 2022 was our like first proper year with real capital and alignment on what we were building, by the end of it we felt all over the place and nowhere near reaching PMF. Zack and I sat down for hours and wrote a detailed reflection of that year, and the plan for the next. Thankfully our visa stuff had been sorted out, so we both flew to SF with a much clearer goal.

Around this time, we made some keep changes to our strategy too.

we dropped wasm entirely and decided to drop the focus on a good free tier experience
we wanted to introduce a new video editing experience which we called "infinite canvas", we thought this was better for collaboration but also by moving away from an expected user experience users gave us more leeway.⁶
we also did a full rewrite of the product and it actually made us move a lot faster, it cleared out all the technical debt.

These were some of our best months, we were shipping with a small group of users in a filmmaking discord, talking to 100s of users a month, having email threads back and forth with users.

It all falls apart

While things seemed to be going well at first, we knew we were in a sticky position - we had to build for another year or two to get to product to a truly usable state for 8 hrs a day and the video editing space had become hyper competitive.

Around this time is when GPT-4 started this new AI wave and it was clear to us that we had to stay on top of AI enabled editing features as well, we felt that if we had a good base editor we could easily go after this but fighting on both axis seemed like a losing battle.

So we decided that we had to close a much larger seed round or pivot - we pushed for this round but went into the classic fundraising death spiral. as we focused on fundraising, the product lost momentum and vice versa. In all honesty, retrospectively we probably should've pushed harder here but we got jumpy.

We had done a few small/soft pivots inside video by this point, but while considering hard pivots it was clear Zack and I were interested in different things and decided to just work on what we found interesting.

A fair question to ask here, is why didn’t we sell? get an acquisition or an acqui-hire? We had a few offers as early as 2021, and even had a serious offer around the same time in 2023. Tho this offer was when things were going well, but regardless we both sorta felt like doing our own thing and not necessarily joining another org.

The acqui-hire would've only really helped in saying "oh i sold my last company".

Feelings of failure

i promise i will get to the reflections and lessons soon

I loved working on Scalar, it had some of the best moments for me and I really wanted to solve the problem of having this seamless collaboration. It sorta broke me to see myself fail, i knew the statistics but it always felt like we/i were different - that we would win at any cost.

I loved my team - Zack was a truly incredible engineer and great thinking partner. Malay was an incredible designer and thought me so much, we had these incredibly deep conversations about design and product. Geek was a great engineer and a blast to work with. And to so many others that contributed over the years.

It was also sort of my identity and if i am being honest sort of a proud status symbol i wore - so i was lost what was i, if not a founder?

Reflections

I've spent so much time thinking about this and made so many arguments to people as i explain what went wrong to them, here is what i think are the real things that we did badly.

We were wishy washy about the type of product we were building, we knew what we wanted to build and had conviction about the problem but not on our approach to company building. We didn't really call our shot.

This lead to poor decision making overall, we let the noise get the better of us - listened to advice for different type of companies and products. But primarily it let us make poor product and engineering decisions that were not suited for the type of company we were building.

The key example here, there is no world in which we should've MVP'd our multiplayer engine but we did cause we were in the MVP and move fast for everything stage - this cost us an year and a half.

To extend on that point, for "deep software" product you have to nail technical abstractions that compound the way you would for deep tech companies. This is not something to MVP at all.
Bad relationship with capital, we didn't think we needed it as much as we actually did. And we didn't use the money we had well, not aggressive with it and very skiddish - we were too cheap.
Remote sucks! it works for some people but it really sucked for us - we had to be in person for this product to work (and ideally in sf were late to this train too).
More a finer point, but i think we should've spent more time prioritizing the co-founder relationship specifically when things were bad - we were both young, immature and definitely harder on each other than we should have been.

End credits

i had a what's next section but so much has changed since i first wrote this that it doesn't make sense anymore, just follow Zack or my twitter for the latest

There are an incredible amount of people that have supported me across this journey, some have been mentioned here but there are countless many more - this was one of my favourite aspect of the silicon valley culture, just the amount of people that were incredibly helpful was so immense.

I try as it is to pay it forward as much as I can, and would love to help in any way I can. Feel free to reach out, have an open cal link here and my email is [email protected]