Julia and Eric had worked on Google's Search engineering teams, and applied that SEO knowledge to optimize every Kapwing page and rank organically for high-volume, tool-intent queries.

Organic search became their most effective acquisition channel once they had built enough credible backlinks to rank, which they pursued deliberately through press stunts, blog posts, and design collections.

Free-tier videos carried a visible kapwing.com watermark; when users shared those videos on Facebook and Reddit, viewers who saw the watermark went and looked up Kapwing themselves.

After launch, the founders cold-emailed dozens of journalists and bloggers pitching Kapwing; only one of them wrote about it, but that early press mention still drove an exciting first month of usage.

The founders built and publicized small web tools and stunts with no business goal of their own, purely to earn attention from bloggers and journalists and the backlinks that came with it.

“A press stunt is something you build, write, or do something for the sake of attention from bloggers, journalists, and people on the internet.”

Press stunts reliably earned coverage and backlinks, but the founders found their own funding-announcement press coverage generated more, and more relevant, backlinks than an attention-grabbing stunt did, because publications syndicate funding news much more readily than fun consumer web apps.

“Even though Cartoonify got us thousands of links, it got fewer and less relevant links than the TechCrunch article following our seed fundraising round did.”

The side project was submitted to Product Hunt, was immediately featured, and reached number one Product of the Day with over a thousand upvotes.

“Result: #1 Product of the Day with more than a 1000 upvotes.”

It worked because the founders built it with the Product Hunt audience specifically in mind, and it paid off again later: at least two seed investors remembered having seen it.

“Makers should always have their launch audience in mind when building the product. Startup Demo Videos was a perfect match for the PH audience.”