That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
Factor in the support you need to accommodate your customers and you have your answer :P
This is too much fun to brainstorm.
MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
Millions of people paying peanuts (attributable to this feature) is way less than a few hundred or thousand research / defense labs, contractors, etc., paying tens of thousands up to even millions on licensed software for this type of thing.
Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage.
Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials.
Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap).
The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project).
However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder.
>Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model.
No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.
Actually nowhere in your original post do you include this "not claiming to be an expert" disclaimer.
As a result, when I read your original post, I assumed that perhaps you were an expert as there was no self-doubt at all evident.
I think perhaps that's what the allegedly negative post that you are responding to is getting at.
Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end.
I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
Have you tried https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though.
[EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0]
He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work.
He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards:
1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”).
3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn.
4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat.
Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning.
Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive.
It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
1) most pros use green screens for background removal
2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed
3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually
4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible
Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction
https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.