The First Product Moved into the Hub
Four hours without a break — and the subtitle editor is deployed to a domain that had been dead for years. The free half works, the paid half is planned, and $250 is set aside for ads.
By Georg Malahov
Today I got to the office at half past eight and worked on the subtitle editor for four hours straight. I wanted to push it to a proper milestone, so that a solid chunk of work was locked in — and I did: the editor is deployed on my server and officially added to the hub as a product. The domain is an old one — the very one you are reading this on right now — it just spent a long time dead. Now the first product lives on it: Subtitle Editor.
It's a browser-based subtitle editor: you load a video, edit the subtitles right in the editor, move pieces along the timeline, pick a style — and either export an srt file or burn the subtitles straight into the video. The burn runs through FFmpeg — a video-processing program — compiled for the browser, no server involved. Last night I generated the first clip from the already-deployed instance — with style presets, with fonts burning in properly. Technically everything worked; what's left is small flaws in the interface.
That's the free half of the product, and it works. The paid half is planned: generating subtitles from the video — transcription, cleaning up the resulting text with a language model, translation, highlighting the words the model is unsure about. It needs sign-up and payment right on the site — exactly what the product lives in the hub for, instead of on a separate domain.
Along the way I studied the competition: signed up for veed.io — a big online video editor — looked at how their onboarding and editor are built, recorded myself a video breakdown, and took away a few ideas.
The near-term plan: finish the paid half this week, tidy up the interface, refresh the landing page — and start running ads on the product next week. I have $250 of ad budget until the end of May; three weeks should be enough to test the idea. People will land both on the editor's landing page and on the hub itself with the blog.
I'm almost certainly underestimating the amount of work in my head — that happens to me. But this is the second time I'm building a product, not the first, with all the onboarding and launch lessons that came to me with Call Copilot. The second time should go better and faster.
What I don't like yet is the site itself. It's cold and technical; I want to bring it to life. Not long ago I wrote down an intention: learn the courage to publish the unfinished and the imperfect. So yesterday I also uploaded the about page and the clumsy first posts as they are — fixing them will be easier than keeping them in drafts for months.
Now the subtitles can rest for a while, and I'm switching to other projects. Three weeks of ads will show whether anyone besides me needs this editor.