Will Hankinson is a full-stack engineer, game developer, product person, and side hustler. After honing his craft for several years in Silicon Valley, he’s now raising a family in Atlanta. Will currently splits time between a W-2 agency job and IntroCave, a YouTube intro maker which he acquired in 2018.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is IntroCave all about?
IntroCave is a YouTube intro maker. I’m closing in on around 200 video templates to choose from. Customers select a video template, choose their customization options (logo, text, sometimes colors), and fire that off to my render servers to get a low-quality preview video. If they like what they see, they can purchase an HD version for $5 (720p) or $10 (1080p). IntroCave started off as a gaming intro maker and still heavily leans in that direction, but I’ve started branching out into other categories (news videos, exercise videos, eventually food videos).
I call it an intro maker and that’s how most people find the site, but really it’s a video clip maker. If you’re only going to buy a single video, that probably means it’s your intro video. I have a few customers that buy lots of videos, though, and they tend to use them more like section titles or more traditional motion graphic transitions in longer videos. Making YouTube videos is pretty time-consuming, so I think of my videos as a specific type of motion graphic that helps video makers speed up their production times.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I’ve bounced back and forth between web development and game development for pretty much my whole career. My family likes to go to bed pretty early, so I’ve always been a bit of a night-time tinkerer. At the time I acquired IntroCave, I was running a small mobile game studio in Atlanta. I would work on games by day and then come home, spend a few hours with the family, and then jump right back into either the main game I was working on or other new prototypes. Whenever I veer too far into games, I start missing web development and vice versa.
I read an article on Hacker News a few years back about someone that bought a business through a broker, and that really opened my eyes to that idea. I’ve built LOTS of small side projects in those evening hours, but I never really got momentum with anything other than a few Flash games way back in the day when that was a thing. I shopped around for a year or so before IntroCave was listed.
I was a film major with ambitions of becoming an animator in college (before I got the programming bug), so the idea was appealing. I thought YouTube was nowhere near its potential (this was 2018, I still don’t!), and the idea of making tools for content creators seemed like a fun niche to play in.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
I’m currently using some pretty dated technology to render my videos. A preview render takes 2-3 minutes to render and an HD video can take up to a couple of hours at 1080p. I haven’t started offering 4K renders yet because I’m not sure users will understand needing to wait 10-15 hours for a video (and I don’t want to deal with the headache of doubling or tripling my render farm just yet).
If you look at what shows like the Mandalorian or movies like Rogue One are doing on a technical level, they’re learning how to speed up production using realtime rendering (through game engines). With my background as a game developer, it’s something I’m interested in exploring. I think it’s going to be possible to rebuild a decent chunk of my templates using 3D game engines, and I think those templates are going to render significantly faster than my current solution.
I purchased intromaker.com at around the same time I bought IntroCave.com. My current plan is to build out 20-30 templates using a game engine and offer that as a downloadable product on that domain, but if the technology works well I can also use it as a backend for IntroCave.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
IntroCave has a ton of registered users (over 200,000 right now), but many are from outside the US and not likely to convert. The site wasn’t sending out much email when I acquired it, and the logistics of sending out a monthly newsletter to 200k people is just beyond my abilities. I started running into problems around the 30-40k mark and spent most of last year building out my own newsletter system. I’ve basically given up on mailing everyone who has signed up for an account at this point — after about 40k emails in a month, my newsletters just go into a black hole. I’ve started aggressively culling the list in the last few months (down to around 25k).
That’s helped with deliverability, but I hate how beholden to Gmail we are in this space. I’m sending 25k emails when I could be sending 200k just to keep Gmail happy. I’ve got a few sequences in place now, but I’ll probably expand those in 2021 to make up for the difficulty I’ve been having with newsletter deliverability.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I definitely underestimated how hard some things would be. I’m an engineer, so my default thought is that I can fix anything with code. SEO, link building, marketing emails — those aren’t really code tasks. The site needed a sprinkling of backend updates and optimizations, but it was fairly well built already.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Almost everyone in this space is targeting small businesses with monthly subscription plans. That might make sense for businesses and social media managers who are posting videos to Twitter and YouTube multiple times a month, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense for people who just need a single intro to get their channel started. I catch a lot of first-timers who just want a single animation. I’d like to move into subscription plans eventually ($10/render is expensive if you need 3-4/month), but I don’t plan to stop offering the single purchases.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Pre-covid, I would drop the kids off at school and spend 15-20 minutes in a bagel shop planning out my day over breakfast. With two kids in remote school, I’m not doing much these days. If we can just make it through the day with no meltdowns and I can get 3-4 hours of focus time, that’s a good day.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
Some good ones I’ve enjoyed in the last few years:
- Company of One – Paul Jarvis
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work – Jason Fried
- Every Tool’s a Hammer – Adam Savage
Really, though, just build something. You’ll learn more by building and failing and iterating than you will by reading books and listening to podcasts.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I would just say be wary of a prospectus that says a business can be operated in 10 hours/week. That’s definitely true some weeks, but the amount of work is spiky. Because IntroCave is just me for support and tech, it’s basically taken up shop in my brain and sucks up a small chunk of my mental bandwidth 24/7. Unless a business is highly delegated (which brings a different sort of challenge), it’s going to be hard to fully timebox that into one day a week or 2 hours a night or however you envision operating that business.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
The monthly newsletter and lifecycle emails were a pain to set up, but they’re definitely driving sales for me. The newsletter is kind of high-effort-low-return for me, but the lifecycle emails have proven to be a great return for not a lot of effort. If you’re collecting emails and not sending sequence emails, that’s a pretty easy way to improve your business.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
If I only had $1000, I would go get a job. Desperation and over-leverage are a great way to get yourself in trouble. Get a job that overlaps with the skills you need to build your business and tinker on the business on nights and weekends. Work on keeping your expenses low so you can go full time on it as soon as you have some income coming in (note: I was terrible at this, but this is what I would do if I didn’t have 2 kids and a mortgage).
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Start making things! If you don’t know how to code, use no-code tools. Learn just enough to build the things you want to build and go from there. Don’t get too bogged down in feeling like you don’t know enough or you’re not experienced enough.
How can we get in touch with you?
I’m active on Twitter (either my personal account @SimianLogic or the business account, @IntroCave). You can also email me directly at learnyourabcs@gmail.com -I respond to most emails.
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