Ups and downs promoting EazyCaptions

Meet Fernando Palacios from Lima, Peru.

Fernando is currently working a full time job, and working on his side project EazyCaptions every night.

The story told by Fernando

A few years back, I thought about creating a world-class product that could reach thousands, if not millions of users. I imagined maybe involving the whole country or some big organizations… nothing further from reality. I learned that what really matters is solving a problem that saves people time, money, or even gives them a sense of status, that’s it.

Since then, I have tried to look around my own problems for a way to solve them and monetize them. That's why I'm currently focusing on EazyCaptions.

EazyCaptions is my bet. It's a tool that makes it easy to jazz up short videos by adding cool captions, sound effects, and b-roll. It's perfect for content creators who want to put out professional-looking videos but might not have a lot of editing skills and want to save time on this activity.

The idea to build a product like this came to me because I’m producing short-format video content specifically for the Latin American audience. I just have a daily short time to work on my own projects, so speeding up the editing process would be excellent for me.

With that goal in mind, I began developing the product at the end of December 2023 and launched a private beta (see X post below) along with a waitlist on January 2nd 2024.

Until mid-January, I was on vacation with my family, so my time was quite limited. I made the most of the few hours I had, which were pretty precious, to keep fixing things and develop basic features. Finally, in February, I decided to release the first version of EazyCaptions to the public (see X post below).

Getting the first 100 users was quite a challenge for me. It actually took me about three months.

I receive around 30-40 visitors daily and around 180 people have tried the product so far. Recently I got my first paid user, of course this is the beginning.

I feel like my biggest challenge has been actually creating content. I also struggle with putting my ideas into action. I've been planning to write blog posts, create tutorials, and add more video content to my official YT channel, but most of these tasks are on the queue.

Right now, I'm handling my marketing myself using my X account . I post updates about the product and try to put together a creative or fun video (see X post below) whenever there's a release.

Also recently I wrote documentation for the Help Center on the product website. I think this contributed a bit.

A few weeks ago, I won the service of Sergiu to list my product on various AI Directories, which definitely helped drive some traffic to the product.

In my short experience doing marketing for EazyCaptions, I tried using cold emails, but they didn't perform as well as I hoped. I specifically reached out to about 50 YouTube creators who didn't have short-format videos on their channels.

With the first 20 emails, I actually made a before-and-after video using content from their own YouTube channels. I then included these videos in the emails to show what I could offer.

This is an example:

For the remaining prospects, I decided to go with a shorter message. This time, I focused on presenting a limited-time free offer, hoping to catch their attention and interest quickly:

The final outcome wasn't very encouraging. Out of about 50 emails, I only got one negative reply simply saying 'no thanks' and one positive reply from someone interested in trying it.

Given the limited number of targets, this approach didn’t really work out for me. In the future, I’d like to reach out to a larger group, but I'm thinking of skipping cold emails and trying something different, like a newsletter, which might engage people more effectively.

Get in contact with Fernando

• Email

• X profile

• Product website