Walk the Talk — Building in Public #4
Welcome back to Building in Public. Volume 4. Another snapshot inside the chaos and creation of VAPAI Studio as we invent original IP with AI.
Still of Low Clouds - our IP
Some Metrics
Last post we talked about how we are putting content out fast to iterate quickly, optimizing for fan-making. So these past weeks the goal was to set a baseline.
Admittedly, we are learning about creating an audience as we go and we know it won’t be easy. Aligning our content with our marketing is an area of improvement. Most of all, we are trying to think every piece of content as an experiment, where we fine-tune and decide looking for as much validated learning as possible. This is our quest for CMF (Content-Market Fit).
This has been our metrics as of today:
Views per video — 3180
Engagement Rate per video — 6.1
Interactions per video — 67
View time per video — 269 minutes
Are these numbers good? No
Are these numbers bad? Also no
These number are just the bar with which we will judge the coming content. Now every experiment should significantly increase some of these (or other) metrics, or be left behind.
Our storyboard process
Tool of the week — VAPAI Platform
Some shameless tooting of our horn. If you are a studio in 2025, any kind of studio, you MUST be building your own tools, and these tools should work alongside your third-party pipeline.
At VAPAI we build our tools by identifying our most pressing needs. We realized that one task our filmmakers were trying constantly to avoid was lipsync. So we built some awesome tools based on Multitalk and InfiniteTalk.
Then we realized they needed a custom platform to edit images, so we built it in-house.
Because we love working in ComfyUI, for prototyping. But we loath working in ComfyUI in production.
VAPAI Platform screenshot
Key lessons from the week
Focus, focus, focus.
Doing cool shit is great. Doing cool shit that aligns with your vision is where its at.
To focus you need to make sacrifices. If not, it’s not real focus. So don’t be scared and follow what you know is the way.
We had to learn to say no to clients that wouldn’t help us go where we are going.
Still of Low Clouds - our IP
What’s next?
Next week we have some awesome stuff going around. One of those is a talk our CEO, Yves, will give in the Uruguayan Advertisement Circle (Circulo Uruguayo de Publicidad).
Yves will talk alongside the referents in advertisement in the country and expose his vision on the future of content. We have some bombshells so don’t miss it.
Also, we are applying to a16z SpeedRun. Its a long shot but who knows, maybe in a couple of weeks our post is asking for SF recs.
Event where Yves spoke
Tool Recommendations
USO — Anyone who has been into AI pre-covid has a soft spot for style transfer related tools. USO from ByteDance appears to be the state-of-the-art for the new generation of diffusion-based style transfer. It’s a patch over Flux, which we love. We haven’t been using it a lot for Low Clouds, but it may save a few headaches down the road.
Freepik — This has become our go-to tool. It’s great having WAN, Kling, Nano Banana, Seedream all in one place. A bit on the pricier side, but you can’t always get what you want.
Reading Recommendations
This week our reading recommendation comes by Cata, our lead AI Director of Photography.
Our pick is Béla Balázs’s The Close-Up (1924). Balázs argued that the close-up was not just a technique but cinema’s defining invention. It opened a new way of seeing, where details and expressions became storytelling on their own.
It resonates with what we are trying to build. What will be the defining invention of AI storytelling? At VAPAI we have this almost messianic vision of creating a new way to tell stories. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. So we need to stand on the shoulder of giants.
A century later, let’s invent the next generation’s “close-ups”.
How you can help us
We are planning a trip to Buenos Aires in the coming weeks. If you know anyone that could be good for us to meet please put us in contact!
Clients
Production companies
Investors
Possible hires
Just cool people
Final thoughts
We are in a scary and exciting time in our journey. Sharing it with you is being an awesome way to keep grounded and acknowledge how hard its been but how fruitful.
See you next week.
Still of Low Clouds - our IP
