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Millions of people watch revenue-generating shorts on YouTube and TikTok daily – but what many don’t know is that these videos can be produced with automation, and one forward-thinking entrepreneur has seized the market even without deep tech expertise.
Jacob Seeger is the co-founder of Faceless.video, a SaaS startup transforming how anyone can become a short-form content creator on social media with no video editing experience required. Along with other co-founder Alex Steinberg, Seeger has established a thriving business with a growing user base that reaps the benefits of its automated approach to writing, editing and even posting short videos.
“Faceless.video enables anyone to create an automated TikTok or YouTube channel on any topic of their choice. It supports multiple languages, AI voices, and even automatically adds royalty-free music to your videos, enabling hands-free content management which is ideal for anyone looking to get started with running a TikTok or YouTube channel,” says Seeger.
But many people who learn about Seeger’s story could be surprised to know that he doesn’t come from a decades-long background in technology. He’s an avid songwriter, and for many years, a recording artist. It’s not until September 2023 that he teamed up with Steinberg to create Faceless.video, and just one year after launch, it has been a runaway success story.
“I had to learn by myself how to grow my personal TikTok as an artist, and I built it to more than 30 million views and over 100,000 followers,” says Seeger, who initially applied that earned knowledge to launching a music marketing agency to help other artists get the same results.
“But I’ve also always wanted to build software tools and loved how scalable software is as a business model,” he adds. “I spent two-plus years teaching myself how to build web-apps, utilizing no-code resources, with the hopes of one day owning a profitable bootstrapped software as a service (SaaS).”
The self-taught route is an unusual one for the co-founder of a viable SaaS platform. As an article on BufferApps notes, one of the biggest hurdles to launching such platforms has long been that the person who has an idea for SaaS lacks the necessary knowledge of an industry or technology, and so they fail to see their concept proceed to realization.
Seeger’s story is living proof that succeeding in a new industry doesn’t require domain expertise if an aspiring founder is willing to put in the upfront work and be resourceful in order to bring their idea to fruition.
From performing music to helping aspiring content creators of all backgrounds achieve solid, ongoing growth, Seeger’s experiences show that entrepreneurs do not need to have years of educational and practical know-how of technology to create a successful SaaS platform.
“A through-line between all my experiences is the strong desire to create something of value to others, and that I love building solutions to help accomplish this,” he says.