I built an online video compressor for Discord

Introduction

Introduction

Being an entrepreneur is scary, much like a box of chocolates that's constantly affected by ever-changing external rankings on a search engine. You never know what you're going to get. There are moments of great success and, at times, also some duds. It can be a roller coaster, especially when your income is directly tied to the winds of entrepreneurial change. The trick is to keep creating new stuff; some of it is bound to stick. For me, it's about one in eight projects, if that.

Today, I'm super excited to showcase a new project that's establishing itself in the successful category: an eight megabyte online video compressor for Discord.

The Problem with Discord Video Uploads

Discord has become incredibly popular almost overnight, initially among gamers but now mainstream. However, for anyone who has tried uploading a video to Discord, you've likely encountered the "your files are too powerful" error. Unless you pay $ 10 a month for Nitro or have boosted your server, the upload limit is only eight megabytes. This is roughly the size of a single smartphone photo, making it impossible for 99% of all videos to fit.

I enjoy sharing memes and videos of my dog. Sometimes, I have content that I don’t want to upload elsewhere for privacy reasons. Because of this, I found myself keeping Adobe Premiere open all the time just to resize videos. This process is stupid and annoying, so I built an online video compressor service to automate it.

Introducing the 8MB Video Compressor

The main draw of the site is its speed and ease of use. It works great on both desktop and mobile. You can drag and drop files onto it, select files from your camera roll, or even paste a link to an online video. Feed it a huge video, and it’ll spit out a smaller one. The default settings have been optimized to balance encoding time and quality, but there are optional settings for high-quality mode, muting the video, or trimming unwanted sections.

Development and Metrics

Watching the growth of the service has been fun. Since its launch, the service has experienced an average of 38% growth month after month. We’re about to hit a milestone of 5,000 unique users per day. Assuming that 5% of these users would have bought Discord Nitro, the service potentially saves users $ 600,000 a year.

I built a custom metrics display to keep track of various stats, such as the number of unique users, YouTube subscribers, and customers for another project. This display updates in real-time and helps me monitor the primary goals of the service.

Support and Future Plans

I've recently started a Patreon to help support my projects. Supporters at the $ 3 a month level get extra features on the site. Any amount of support grants access to patron-only posts, surveys, and a special role on our Discord server.

The Discord server initially served as a support forum but has evolved into a fan club with discussions on video compression, FFMPEG, programming, and memes. We recently hit 100 users and are looking forward to more joining.

Conclusion

There are some other exciting projects in the pipeline, including something involving video and outer space. If you enjoyed this article, please share it and consider supporting the project on Patreon.

Thank you for reading!

Ciao!