If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing you can do is to make service completely free. Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. Focus on adoption, not revenue. Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. Focus on buyout by big players because ultimately they have the platforms with millions of users where you can provide far more value.
Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.
The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired.
That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.
Better yet, create a "Help Center," that has 1,900 articles that all have a link that says, "Need more help?" and then that link goes to another of the 1,900 articles that also has a link that says, "Need more help?" And that link goes to another article, which has a popup that reads: Call 1-800-ABCDEFG. Then they call that number and get an automated system that says, "Thank you for calling. How can I help you today? You can say things like, 'I need help,' and 'I need different help.'" And then they have to speak all the menu choices. And the 0 button doesn't take them to a representative, only back to the first prompt.
> people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.
MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
Surveillance video processing and intelligence services are probably by far the largest use cases for video background removal and similar techniques. Far smaller in terms of number of customers, but far far larger in terms of revenue specifically for this capability.
Millions of people paying peanuts (attributable to this feature) is way less than a few hundred or thousand research / defense labs, contractors, etc., paying tens of thousands up to even millions on licensed software for this type of thing.
No, not true. Surveillance cameras mounted on police cars, helicopters, etc. Even in stationary cameras, scene understanding is a hard problem. Suppose someone wheels a dolly of boxes into a warehouse and leaves them. Are they now part of the background? Are they suspicious boxes? The coarse level state transition of objects in the scene is really hard to solve even with heavy ML.
My rule of thumb for advice on the Internet is that if it is mostly in the form of statements like "You need to do X, Y and Z" and has very few questions intended to dig deeper into the nuances of the product and business model... then it's not generally worth much at face value.
Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
> Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell.
A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage.
Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials.
Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap).
The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
There is a lot of negativity in your response without even deluding to what's really wrong with the advice. There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. You are entitled to your opinion and frankly we are all armchair pundits here, however, it's bad form to spew out so much negativity without any reasoning or even alternative.
>There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period.
As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project).
However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder.
>Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model.
No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.
Yeah I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe my reply broke my own rule of giving advice without a personal story.
Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end.
I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
We've built Unscreen on top of the tech of remove.bg, at least partly, and the #1 design goal for both products is a high result quality. We've summarized a few of the improvements recently here, if you're curious: https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2
He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work.
He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards:
1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”).
3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn.
4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat.
Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning.
Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive.
It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
1) most pros use green screens for background removal
2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed
3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually
4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible
Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.
Would this be a good candidate for P2P? As what if your computer GPU could be used by other app's users to do a small part of such heavy operation? (when your GPU is not doing anything else)
> Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos.
https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
The very first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't "ooh, cool tech for voice chat", it was "man, the special effects industry will KILL for this - no more manually going through every frame of an effects shot and painstakingly removing background elements!"
So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
The quality level here is way beyond what Zoom has or needs. This is a professional tool for creative pros — knocking out an image background is too easy but video is a real challenge. And this kind of work at this resolution would be prohibitively expensive to do for live video ... you’d need a Titan RTX or similar.
I'm curious if this is just repackaging existing OSS algorithms for isolating foregrounds, or if they have an actually new implementation that outperforms them
It's a hint for outdated browsers, it's not an ad and there's nothing malicious behind it (unless there's an issue in your local network or machine perhaps?).
I think trying to emulate a built in browser notification is the wrong way to go. I wouldn't have got as concerned if the popup looked more like a web page overlay, with wording along the lines of:
"Hi we're from Browser-update.org (clickable), and this site has asked us to check your browser version. Your browser version is out of date, and should be upgraded. Please go to your [settings] menu to update, or visit [us] for more information."
Of course, feel free to totally ignore my suggestions - it's a free world. ;)
Fresh Chromium installation, no adblocking or other content blocking plugins. Zero advertisements and popups on that site. I keep reading these kind of comments on HN and everytime it seems to be only that one person reporting the problem that sees that behavior. Are you sure your network is not compromised?
It's definitely not. Also used 3 different browsers - each one showed the same dialog but with the name and version of that browser. It doesn't happen on my mobile over WiFi (rules out network injection).
The c: -3 is the crucial bit that should cause it to trigger if your version is at least 3 versions out of date.
Yours isn't though. Can you access http://browser-update.org ? If not, then there might be something with your DNS settings. Have you tried tethering through your phone? Have you changed your user agent?
That's interesting. Number of versions is probably a weak signal for this --- but how many browser versions should the dev a small site be looking for?
Things DO break...
Are you sure it's malware? Looking at the code it seems to redirect to "browser-update.org" and is genuinely redirecting only older browsers based on unsupported features.
It's actually quite funny that the Zoom auto remove background does a pretty good job. I can't get the same results easily in Adobe Premiere actually.
Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects.
I really wondered if I was missing something so watched a lot of YouTube tutorials on background removal and object tracking and all I see is that it is very laborious and even than not always a good enough results with edge/transparency artifacts etc.
Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.
Most kinds of professional applications I could think of would better off with a green screen. On the other hand, using this for editing videos in the wild with messy background still not good enough.
Video background removal, when hair is involved, is painful. Clearly this is not targeted at webcam footage. Anyone who has had to manually remove a background using a tool like Premiere or After Effects from pre-recorded video would see the benefit of this tool/api. It is pricey but i can see motion graphics studios using this regularly.
That pricing looks very much "what it costs to run the service, plus some profit margin".
A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.).
None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.
I'm guessing the OP aims at professional, high-quality video editing rather than at a hobby use. Which is probably the right thing to do as there are low-quality free options already. Hard to compete with that.
I think some of the artifacts on the video at 0:12 (handbag thing) are very noticeable. Same thing at 0:19 (cat)and at 0:28 (cat again). Otherwise, looks nice :)
Some scenes, foregrounds, backgrounds, lighting conditions, movements, etc work better than others - there's a lot of potential for errors in videos and the videos from the examples page are straight from Unscreen Pro. We're continuously working on improving the AI though (NB: We don't use video uploads for that - see unscreen.com/privacy)
This is sort of the inverse of gimp's "foreground select tool". It was a PHD thesis on the algorithm to select foregrounds that was contributed to the gimp photo editor as open source.
I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner.
There's one quick video on the main page which shows replacement backgrounds, but the "Examples" page shows about 15 or 16 examples of the same thing, removing a background. It quickly gets to the point of "Ok yeah, so what? Show me something cool to do once the background is gone."
I get that it may be difficult to remove a background the way this service does, but the customer is going to be less impressed with the fact that it works correctly than they are going to be about it having an actual engaging or useful purpose.
Since it doesn't do live video so no chat background virtual camera tools - but what if you did a video in the area you wanted to remove could you then use that for some sort of baseline for removing the background? So you do a video in the area you want to use your virtual camera in, and then when you're live it knows what the actual 'background' looks like so it can be used to remove live.
If you can keep the camera at a fixed position, that’s surely a great option. I think that’s not the use case this tool is for. A green screen would also work obv.
I want to integrate your service to remove background for product images. However, not everything works well, especially when background and foreground color are close.
that's fine. The thing is that on the website, there is a tool to fix imperfect results, but with the api, there is no such tool.
Since you mention images I assume you are referring to remove.bg, not unscreen.
We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready: https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe
Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and ideas in here!
This is the MVP release of Unscreen Pro, so there's many more things to come in the future, from quality improvements, to an API, integrations, editing tools and more. Appreciate all the inputs :)
Thanks! Yes, professional 360° product shots are way too hard to produce right now and we're aiming make them much more accessible, particularly for smaller vendors
It's a combination of deep learning and traditional computer vision algorithms. We do a lot of basic research, evaluate many different approaches, train them in dozens of variants and ultimately combine what performs best, then try to make it as easy to use as possible
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com