Remotion - Putting Code In Motion

Company & Team Introduction

Remotion is a software developer tool that empowers developers to create incredible videos using the web-based programming framework React. Remotion was founded by serial founder Jonny Burger and Mehmet Ademi in 2021 before going full-time in 2022 after seeing the potential of what they were building. Burger previously started Bestande, a social networking application for University of Zurich students that amassed over 20,000 downloads. Remotion is based out of Zurich, Switzerland and is currently running a lean team of only three employees, including Jonny Burger (CEO), Mehmet Ademi (manager), and junior developer Patric Salvisberg.

Product Overview

Remotion is an open-source software that helps developers turn their React code into beautiful, high-quality animations for use cases ranging from product videos to marketing content. Remotion allows developers to use a skill they already have, programming, and apply it to a new area, animated video. We all know videos are just groups of images over a certain period. The remotion team combined this information with their knowledge of React’s innate ability to create user interfaces that change over time, so why not use React to create video animations that change over time? Remotion’s technology also allows data to be fetched and added into animations, such as the score of a sporting event or the weather forecast and program specific animations to display based on changes in the data. Remotion also offers APIs for developers to build out more specific use cases for applications like typeframes.com and hackreels.com on top of Remotion’s technology.

Total Addressable Market

The video creation market Remotion is going after is massive and growing strong. In 2019, the video creation market was already as large as 425B and is slated to grow at an 8.9% compound annual growth rate through 2029, inflating Remotion’s total addressable market size up to 776B.

Business Model & The Numbers

Remotion uses an open-source licensing business model, which allows Remotion users to view their source code on GitHub and contribute to the project. Remotion’s monetization model only charges licensing fees to companies needing over three seats, aid them in bottom-up adoption as people try Remotion free of charge, see the value the technology provides, and then bring it into their business. Once the 3-person team limit is reached, companies are charged $25 per developer seat + $10 per cloud rendering seat, which allows for the rendering of up to 2,000 videos. Paying customers receive priority support and can have more flexible licensing opportunities.

Traction

Remotion has already garnered strong interest from developers, receiving over 14K stars on GitHub and is beginning to build a strong Remotion community with a discord chat of ~2900 members. Companies are starting to post jobs specifically requiring applicants to be experienced with Remotion. It is also being used as a platform to build other businesses on top of their technology. A couple of recent examples are TypeFrames.com, created by Indie Hacker Lilian Bouiver, which has already reached over 1k in MRR and Hackreels.com, by David Parks, which already has over 300 users after launching just three days ago!

Competitors

Remotion’s code-based approach is unique and gives the company strong positioning in the video creation + editing market and creates extreme differentiation from its competition. Remotion has no direct competition as established competitors, namely Adobe with their Premiere Pro and After Effects products, focus on no-code tools for video creation. At the time, no-code was the only logical option for the product and still is the sensible option for people without the ability to code. The caveat is that since Adobe’s products were created 20+ years ago, multiple innovations have occurred that have changed the landscape and created the opportunity for Remotion to carve its position in the market. First, the React framework wasn’t even created, and Javascript was a slow, buggy language when Adobe’s products were created. Cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP weren’t invented yet, which makes cloud rendering impossible, and learning to code was incredibly difficult. Only a minuscule percentage of the population could code. With the progression of the JavaScript language and new frameworks like React, the invention of the cloud, and a much lower barrier to entry when learning to program due to the thousands of tools that have been built to simplify the learning process paved the way for Remotion’s code-based approach.

Funding

Remotion has only raised one funding round, a tiny seed round of ~200K in November 2022. The round was raised from 14 angel investors who are already Remotion customers like Jeremy Toeman (founder of Augxlabs), Michiel Westerbeek (cofounder of TellaHQ) and Heiko Hubertz (founder of Oxolo) to work with the team as they continue building out the platform. The capital raised will be used to expand its component + template libraries and to build out new tools to help further simplify the programmatic video development process.