Наталя Хандусенко Startup 6 October 2025, 12:25

Three friends created a lecture video editor Clipwise.io — all in one click, like filters in the good old Instagram of 2010. How a startup managed to become profitable from the first day of launch

Three friends (a product manager, a marketer, and a programmer) launched Clipwise.io, a video editor that allows users to record and edit educational videos, complete with a presentation and screencast. The startup generated over $300 in revenue in its first three weeks.

Andriy Osypenko, Senior Technical Product Manager and co-founder of the startup, told how to launch a product without investment — only at the expense of your own time — and conduct a free CustDev in a way that maximizes the needs of the target audience.

From a simple conversation with a friend to launching a startup

The idea of creating a video editor specifically for video lectures arose out of the personal needs of Andriy Osypenko and his fiancée Alla Malyshko, who have several of their own information products — each with over 41 hours of video content.

At that time, the biggest competitor on the market was OBS. And although it is free, one of its main drawbacks was the difficulty of setting it up. So, seeing that other content creators had a similar problem, Andriy decided to share the idea with his friend, Senior Full Stack Engineer Anton Kulik. Two and a half months passed after this conversation, when one day Anton visited Andriy with a ready-made concept for a video editing application.

«When I saw the concept, I realized that it looked really cool and we had to move on. So I sat down and literally drew the app design over the weekend,» says Andriy.

So in June 2024, the development of Clipwise.io began.

«When you plan any project, it’s not just about the time spent, but also about emotional and psychological motivation over a long period of time, when your activity is not supported by anything other than your desire.»

From the start of active development to the first beta testers who started using the application, it took about 6 months of active work, when friends devoted at least 5-10 hours to Clipwise.io every week.

Andriy says it could have been done faster, but he had his own projects and Anton had a full-time job. In addition, the timelines were affected by personal reasons and periodic fluctuations in motivation.

The startup is currently being run by its founders: Andriy, who serves as Technical Product Manager, Alla as CMO, and Anton as CTO. All of them have been friends for over 12 years.

In addition to the three of them, the team has three part-time employees: a tester, a designer, and a developer. All of them are involved in the allocated scope of work: for example, to create new functionality, fix bugs, improve the interface, etc. Andriy himself is responsible for support, but when changes are required in the technical code base, an additional engineer is involved.

According to Andriy, the cost of development is only their time. «But even in this context, we try to save and not spend more time than necessary on certain things,» the co-founder notes.

For example, at the start, we analyzed various sites and competitors to identify user problems and needs. Thanks to the co-founders' large social media audience, we were able to quickly find a focus group and get active feedback.

«We broke our product launch into several stages.»

The team decided to start with just one platform to shorten the development process as much as possible. To do this, they chose Apple Silicon devices — MacBooks with the latest M-chips. The reason for the choice is simple — the entire team has these laptops and it was more convenient for them to test on them. In addition, they are powerful enough for local video editing.

The launch process itself was divided into four stages, two of which are already behind us. First, we gathered a focus group to test the application to understand how it works on different devices and identify the biggest bugs. Then we held an open launch on our social networks to check people’s interest in the project and whether they were willing to pay.

«Long story short: we became profitable from day one. In just the first three weeks, we raised over $300 in MRR.»

The startup is currently in the third phase, which involves expanding to other platforms, such as Windows and Apple with Intel chips.

«We are right in the middle of this stage now. Once we do this and verify that we can work properly on all platforms, it will greatly unlock us in terms of revenue and active audience. We track which devices people are accessing our landing page from, and we understand that only 10% of our audience are people with M-chips. As soon as we confirm that everything is in order (we are already in the process of working with a designer on a complete redesign of the application), we will begin preparations for the final stage.»

The fourth and final stage is entering the English-speaking market. According to the team’s plan, this will include a launch on products such as Product Hunt and a major PR campaign in the English-speaking part of the Internet.

«While most products on the market focus on transferring information for work or communication in general (for example, Loom), we focus specifically on creating educational materials.»

The main goal of the Clipwise.io team was to create an application that was super easy to use. The user logs in, turns on the camera and microphone, launches a presentation, and starts recording — without too much customization to different parts of the product.

The idea is to be like Instagram when it first came out: you can take a beautiful photo, literally apply a filter to it with one click, and that’s it. The same goes for video editing.

So Clipwise.io is a video editing app where everything is at hand and requires a minimum amount of action from users.

At the moment, it is only available on Apple devices with the M version of the chip, but the team is already testing two builds: one on Apple with Intel processors and one for Windows computers.

» We are just finishing up a major server-side rendering feature.»
If before all videos were edited exclusively on our users' devices (it took some time, and the device had to be active all the time), now we will have active server-side rendering. This means that when you finish recording the video, it will already start rendering in the cloud. Then we will be available even on not very powerful computers that cannot edit the video on their own,» Andriy adds.

At the moment, 150 people use Clipwise.io every month. 6-10 hours of content are exported every day. It should be noted that this is only 10% of people who visit the site and see the offer. In addition, the application is currently launched only for the Ukrainian audience.

How Clipwise.io works

Download your presentation in seconds.
In the sidebar you can see yourself, the active slide, and the next one.
You can choose the background and position the video as convenient for the user, stylize the lecture and create a unified visual style.
It is possible to connect an iPhone as a camera and shoot from anywhere.
Quick editing without an editor: you can cut out pauses, lapses, and anything superfluous — only the final version will remain.
After recording a lecture, the application automatically generates a summary of your lesson and arranges timecodes.

Clipwise.io has a free version and a paid version — 650 UAH per month.

Instead of a conclusion, here’s a little secret to building a product from the co-founder of Clipwise.io

«The most important thing when you build a startup is not your time or energy, but your psychological state. For a very long period of time, you will do something simply on the belief that it should work, but this is not a fact at all. During this year, each of our team members either lost faith or lost energy in one way or another. And other people supported the project so that it reached production,» Andriy summed up from his own experience.

As mentioned above, the Clipwise.io team’s immediate plans include launching on all platforms and expanding the target audience. Next, entering the English-speaking market.

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