This told story is based on an interview with Sabba Keynejad, co-founder with Tim Mamedov of the AI-powered video editing platform watermark. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2013, my flatmate at the time, Virgil, and I were obsessed Breaking Bad. Around mid-October, the season finale was coming up and we would finally find out what happened Jesse Pinkman AND Walter White. We loved it. It was our favorite thing to see and do as a flat when I was at university.
I was sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night, and we were both in art school, and Virgil had a gas mask for spray painting, and he walks into my room and he goes, “SPRAY BAD!” And I went, “Oh my god, we can sell it!” He says, “What?” and I said, “We can sell it! We can sell it like Halloween costumes!” And so it began. It was that simple.
“This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur.”
This was not my first experience as an entrepreneur. I previously had another business when I was 17, selling American style red cups in the UK, which surprisingly was a very underrated business, it turns out. After that, I moved on to the beer pong sets. But the sale of Halloween costumes it was just more fun; it was like a little side project.
Later that evening, around 11pm, my flatmate and I created a page eBay to sell this Halloween costume. We provided the materials: blue gloves, DuPont chemical grade suits and gas masks. We didn't order anything but made sure everything was available for next day delivery. We put the Halloween costume listing on eBay with a five day deadline to give us enough time to order everything we need. If we made a sale, we could package it and ship it.
“We're like, 'Wait a minute, we're onto something.'
We Photoshopped everything together, and by morning, we had our first two sales, so we were like, Cool. We sold it, and it was great. That day, we got four more orders, and we're like, “Wait a minute, we're onto something.”
Funny enough, we actually got it competitionand the way we handled the competition was by messaging them Breaking Bad quotes. They were joining together with the fun; it was all quite easy. But with the competition we also thought, How can we? add more value here? So we made this fake methology, which was basically just sugar and blue food coloring, and we cut it up and put it in a bag.
We also considered expanding to other platforms such as Etsybut Etsy didn't want us to sell there because it wasn't set up right, so it was just a huge effort to figure out how to do all of this quickly.
The other challenge was that we had hundreds of orders. So our apartment became a stock room and we got our flatmates to help us. It was a lot of fun.
A week later, we had returned $14,000 and earned $3,500 each.
“I use those skills to inform the business I'm running today.”
It got to the point where the UK ran out of chemical grade hazmat suits, so we had to stop it. Because these DuPont suits are for proper lab testing, there's only so much need for them, and obviously we ran it. request up like crazy.
My flatmate Virgil is now a very successful commercial film director based in Madrid. I run a tech startup called Veed, which is a it-Enabled video editing platform. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, which invested $35 million last year. The company has about 200 strong people. We have about 10 million monthly users and these users create about three million videos every month.
It's very interesting that I learned entrepreneurship in art school and used those skills to inform the business I run today.