Create amazing short clips in minutes — Lera’s journey to founding Clipwing

​​Today we have an interview with Lera Kuntsevich, the founder of Clipwing. She’s an ideal guest because she has helped tons of other founders as a designer during the Nano Grit and Bootcamp challenges earlier this year.

Now she’s striking out on her own as a founder of Clipwing which is a tool to make shorter clips out of longer video content. I really love it and I think it’s going to go far as a great tool for creators.

Lera is open and radiates positivity among the Build in Public founder community. But she’s also transparent about the challenges she’s faced along the way and how she tries to overcome them.

As always the show is made possible by Paralect and if you have a moment after listening to this show please do go check out Clipwing.pro make a few short clips from your longer content and share them with the rest of the internet.

Roadmap

• Lera’s journey from designer to founder
• what happened in Momentum With Paralect and Igor and Nano Grit
• building Clipwing in the Nano Accelerator
• how Lera builds in public so well (and how it helps as a founder)

Can you describe a moment of pure joy that you’ve had with Clipwing recently and what caused it?

To be honest, I think that I’m happy with Clipwing every day, but as much as sometimes I’m upset with some bugs, but every new deploy, every new feature or every new improvement, it makes me happy.

Every time I speak with someone about Clipwing it also makes me happy. I use Clipwing daily because I’m a founder and of course they should even if I don’t want any new videos, I should test it.

And every time I upload long video and I see some good parts of transcript and I export it as a short clip — I think that, yes, this is just the result that I want and I got it — I’m just happy because it works and it’s super simple.

I’m a bit lazy and I don’t like to check the new tools and to learn how they work and what I love in Clipwing — you don’t need to learn it.

You just open it and everything is really simple and I just enjoy how it’s simple to make everything here.

Were you a very active video creator searching for ways to make short clips? Is that what brought you to Clipwing?

I never created some videos before Clipwing so it wasn’t really my pain — it was Igor’s pain as he records Do it in Public podcasts and he was always like oh I hate it it’s so slow I need to do a lot of things manually I have 100 videos I can’t upload them.

It’s so hard and he always wanted to have some super simple tool that can cut it this long video into short clips to make to upload super simple cover image for the video and such things. So it was his idea, but of course when we started to build Clipwing, I also started to create my own videos and I started to go to podcasts and to understand this pain too and become more close to potential customers and target audience.

So yeah, now I understand a lot of hard moments in video editors and such things, but when I started I wasn’t really into videos at all.

What has surprised you the most or least over these last 10 months at Paralect?

I didn’t expect something from Paralect to be a surprise, but I can say that still I was surprised a lot with my teams. So I joined the design team and also the VeroSkills team.

We have a lot of different product teams in Paralect, but I think my two teams are the best. And I love everyone who is here.

So, for example, Veroskills — it’s my first experience with working not only with the founder, but also with a PM. And for me, it’s a lifesaver.

And our PM is Sasha Melnikova. And she’s just, she’s just my angel. I don’t know how to say it. She’s so cool.

Every time I come to daily calls, the atmosphere is amazing. I think that to be a good manager, team management, team leader or something, it’s very hard and Sasha does really great and I just want to learn from her how to do it.

It’s my inspiration or something and my teammates — I’m just happy to learn from them even if this is a developer and I don’t code or something I just like to watch how they work because they are so talented and we can learn a lot from them.

For example, our developer Ivan — I think that he is more than just a developer. He also joined calls with founder Daniel and he asked questions. He thinks about how to improve the product. He’s not only coding because we have a request from the founder.

He also thinks how to make it good, how to get new customers, how to make VeroSkills the best product in the world as you know.

So I just saw so much inspiration in this team.

How did your design experience prepare you for life as a founder now?

I think if I had no experience in design I would start Clipwing’s interface from scratch. I would think ok I need to make a table, a dashboard and I will start it with a blank paper just to make these prototypes and spend a lot of time on it.

And with the design experience, I know that there are a lot of templates, a lot of websites with some free tools, websites that have some templates or just interface elements that you can use for free for your projects.

Also, you can use something from your previous projects because it’s just the same buttons but in different colors or something

So no need to make it every time from scratch and it helps me to save my time when I need something — also if we speak about some marketing things, when you do something in your own style you have a lot of templates also in your own projects in the past or something personal and you can use it.

What did you learn from the Nano Grit founders that has helped you now as you’ve launched Clipwing?

I think it’s my favorite time from the last year — when I took the part in Nano Grit challenge. Because it was my first experience with speaking with founders like this — with early stage founders and not speaking with them as a designer who should design their needs, but to help them to grow their products.

And of course to learn from them too. Okay, I was too afraid to have these calls with these founders.

I was too shy. Now I’m not such a shy girl. I love calls now!

When you speak with all these guys in Nano Grit, they were so positive. There was such cool energy.

You speak with them and you feel like you’re recharging with every minute of your call and it was great.

Every time we ended our calls, I felt super great and I had a lot of thoughts in my mind and I was so motivated also to do something.

When you speak with them you understand that they’re only starting. And some of them were really energetic and some of them were afraid of something — it was interesting because you understand that they all are just people — real people who also have their positive and negative thoughts.

They also stress, they can be tired, they can lose motivation for some time and you start to learn also how people behave and how people think. You learn more about these troubles when you start your product and you have no waitlist users.

Because when you don’t build your own product you think that it’s probably simple — you launched your landing page and okay 100 users in the first minute! But no it’s hard and it prepared me that this founder’s journey will not be super easy.

My self-confidence was growing while we had this Nano Grit challenge because you understand that people hear, you people follow your advice, they believe you and they trust you.

I think that’s the moment when I started to believe in myself too and think that okay I’m I’m not useless!

Who did you talk to when you started building Clipwing and what did you learn in the validation process?

First of all was as Igor was the first customer. It was his request and also he made his podcast.

So he shared his pain with me. Also, I spoke with you from the start about your pains. I remember that I asked on Twitter like guys if you record podcasts, what do you need to make it more simple, to spend less time on video editing and so on?

So yeah, I got some replies — mostly they just met my expectations.

Right from the start, I started to check other tools, how they work, like Clipwing, so competitors or just other video editors.

And then I decided all these tools, mostly all, they have the same features that we are going to build, but it’s just hard to navigate on these tools — you should spend a lot of time to learn it.

So when you learn it, maybe it’s fast to make the video — but from the start, you see a lot of interface elements, a lot of buttons, a lot of this, you know, when you’re a video editor and this timeline with videos — and okay, I’m not a video editor, I just want to cut my video. How can I do it?

And I just understood that there are a lot of solutions for people in different tools, but everything is too hard. So what we should do just to make it simple?

How are you trying to people to use Clipwing? Why should we check it out — what experiments have you done with paid marketing as well?

So this week I’m experimenting with different podcasters — I found them on YouTube and also check if they have accounts on Twitter and I cut their long videos into short clips I’m sending them emails with short clips in a Google Drive link.

I’m just afraid that they don’t know me — I’m just sometimes afraid that they will just mark it as spam. So I’m also attaching my Twitter link so they can check that I’m real — Clipwing is real.

So I hope that people will notice it and it may be like a win-win. So I have a real case study — a real long video and cool short clips made with Clipwing in minutes.

Of course if they like the results that I made for them they can share it on their social media accounts and continue growing their profiles with short form content. So that’s my main strategy this week.

But also I tried to launch some paid ads and it was really like an experiment because I spent not much money. I spent maybe five dollars on Instagram, five dollars on tik-tok and a lot on YouTube, but only by mistake.

And what I got: Tik-tok worked the best because I got a lot of website visits, a lot of likes and impressions and profile visits and even followers.

But other social media accounts didn’t work for me, maybe for such little money — I had not really a lot of views of this video ads and not a lot of website visits, but that was an experiment, first try, so I’m not upset.

It will be more interesting when we will launch ads again because we also have new features like captions — we only recently added it.

We’re working now on AI-generated clips and of course when we will have this big update we will launch ads again and check it.

I also do marketing like personal brand marketing so people follow me and they may like my content and they will be interested in what I’m building and they will be interested to learn more about Clipwing and try it too.

When you respect someone or when you just love someone’s jokes or something, you want to support this person. Well, I know that I will always support someone if I like someone.

Because I know that it’s hard to build something, it’s hard to get new users, especially paid users.

But it doesn’t cost anything to make a repost or to write kind words.

What have you learned from the Build in Public Community?

I love to build in public because I love to share everything. Every new feature or every new plan I love to publish it because it also helps me not to forget something.

I don’t like like Notion, I don’t like Linear. I like only my paper notebook and Twitter.

So when I should remember what I’m going to do today, I just can open Twitter and I see my post with my to-do list.

But now, you know, also when you’re in beta launch, like Clipwing now, it’s always about a lot of bugs.

I think it’s something personal maybe because I love to publish updates about bugs, about stress, about happy moments too, but when we had this bad week with a lot of bugs with Clipwing, I had no mood at all to build in public because I didn’t want to be like a loser founder — everything is bad.

I didn’t want to write it so I was more focused on testing how we fix everything. Testing it hard — literally a whole day on the laptop with Clipwing open. But then we fixed everything.

I’m becoming more active again on Twitter But I think it’s also depends on some time for now.

I’m more focused on making clips for other people and promoting this way, but we’ll be more active soon on Twitter too because I also I’m going to launch Clipwing on Product Hunt, of course.

But to do this, we also need some great users who use Clipwing regularly. So yeah, waiting for it, making everything for it. And yes, prepare your support!