First Baby
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But in entrepreneurship, sometimes the reaction is neither equal nor opposite—it's exponential.
You know that moment when you realize you're either onto something brilliant or spectacularly stupid? Mine came in a mine apartment(room of apartment), it was more than 15 years ago, with two freshly smuggled iPads sitting on my table.
I was such an Apple fanboy back then – the kind who'd move mountains to get iPads shipped from the US to the middle of nowhere a week after launch. One was for me, one for my best friend. That's how we rolled.
Picture this: we're sitting there one evening, probably our third beer in, when my friend mutters something between coding sessions: "For fuck's sake, it's annoying as hell to get movies onto this thing. Download, convert in VLC, upload to iTunes... who has time for this shit?"
I asked him, probably sounding way too casual: "How hard would it be to stream files directly to the iPad?"
His answer changed everything(You know, he worked at the biggest video-streaming company at the world at that time): "Actually, it's pretty simple. Apple just introduced this HLS format. You just take the video file, cut it into chunks, create a manifest file with all the links, and boom – your iPad can stream it. All you need is a bit of ffmpeg."
(Side note: anyone who's worked with ffmpeg in 2010 is probably laughing their ass off at "a bit of ffmpeg.")
Then it hit me. You know about BitTorrent, right? The world's biggest content library just sitting there, waiting for someone to make it accessible. My sleep-deprived brain started connecting the dots:
1. Let users search torrent indexes
2. Let them pick their movies
3. Download and convert to Apple's format
4. Stream to their shiny new iPads
5. Profit?
Seemed legit. What could possibly go wrong?
The next part was a blur of caffeine and code. Domain name? Check. Hosting? Hello, Hetzner, you beautiful cheap bastard with your unlimited traffic. Design? My Google-refusing friend worked his magic for the landing page. Look how brilliant it looked, designed by a person who could not speak English but knew some words and knew how to use google-translate
But then came the fun part – payments. Try opening a merchant account in CIS in 2010. Just try. Stripe didn't exist, but Braintree did. Small problem: they wouldn't touch my country companies with a ten-foot pole. Something about "excessive fraud risk" (rude, but fair).
This led to the most insane leap of faith in my journey. Some friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend knew a guy who could set up a US company and bank account, he was in USA. ( Denver, I do remember you Sasha). The catch? He wanted 20% of revenue for three years and would have access to the bank account. Totally sketchy, right? But here's the thing about being a young and stupid founder: when your only options are sketchy or nothing, you choose sketchy.
A month later, I had a Wells Fargo account and a Braintree integration. The MVP was coming together: Rails backend (because why complicate things?), paid someone $20 per page for HTML/CSS (hated frontend then, still hate it now), and three crucial pieces:
- Torrent search index
- Download manager
- The transcoding beast
Two months of 18-hour days later, it worked. Holy shit, it actually worked! I could watch anything on my iPad. Sure, ffmpeg crashed more often than a drunk driver, and the speed was... let's say "artisanal," but it WORKED.
Then came the customers. First 10 felt amazing. And a month or two with fixing a lot of bugs while customer-base grew….Then I had this "genius" idea: invite a paying friend, get a free month. Went to bed feeling clever. Woke up at 3 AM to my phone exploding with "Why can't I watch my show?!" messages.
The problem? We had 500 new customers overnight. That's about $5,000 monthly recurring revenue, and our janky infrastructure was melting down. The transcoding queue hit 1,000 movies. Our DIY CDN was gasping for air. Oh, I have to hire someone to help me support all my mess…but first I need to fix what we have…
Growth kept coming. Before I knew it, we had quite a lot of paying customers. I was already dreaming about moving to SF, playing with the big boys. Silicon Valley, here I come!
However….
Then the payments stopped. Then came the emails. You know those emails that make your stomach drop? Yeah, those.
Turns out streaming torrent files isn't exactly... legal. Who knew? (Everyone. Everyone knew.)
The lawyers arrived. Did you know good lawyers cost more than good developers? They do. Trust me on this one.
It ended as quickly as it began. But you know what? Best damn education I ever got. Learned about scaling systems, handling growth, and yeah – maybe checking the legal stuff before building something next time.
Would I do it again? History will tell, but in a heartbeat. Just... differently.
Next time, though. Next time will be different story :)
Chin-chin! 🍻