Kit#4 Julia Enthoven
| First name: | Julia |
| Last name: | Enthoven |
| Country: | United States |
| Occupation: | Developer and entrepreneur |
Where to find Julia online:
Julia, what do you do?
I’m a Co-Founder, Developer, and CEO of Kapwing, a video editing website
What is your background?
I got in to tech because of my interest in public policy. I started taking math and programming classes in school because they were prerequisites for economics, but then surprisingly enjoyed CS more than Econ.
After graduating from Stanford, I went to work at Google as an Associate Product Manager. I loved Google and learned a ton about the internet and consumer behavior, but I disliked the bureaucracy of a huge company and wanted to have more ownership over my work.
In June 2017, a fellow Xoogler, Eric Lu, proposed that we try working together on a web project and I left Google the following month to work with him on startup ideas full-time.
Your favorite tools to help you with your work?
Stripe is our payment processing platform. We chose it because we felt like it was the simplest, most supported platform for collecting credit card information from website visitors. As a Stripe user, I think it’s a great developer product; Stripe has an easy-to-use web and iOS app, sends automatic receipts, enables refunds, and enables us to track revenue KPIs on clean dashboards.
Drift supports the messaging chat box we have on Kapwing. We can talk directly to customers from either the web or mobile app.
Google Analytics (and other tools like Google Trends, Search Console, and Keyword Planner) helps us increase website traffic by giving us more feedback about volume, referrals, customer demographics. We use the Analytics dashboard as a proxy for the success of our SEO efforts.
I use the Hunter Chrome extension to find the contact information for bloggers and journalists who cover topics relevant to video editing. Although most of my outreach doesn’t get a response, it has lead to some great partnerships with journalists and bloggers. Since we’re making a tool that’s actually useful for social media managers and content creators, some people have been excited to cover it organically.
Kapwing is the web tool that we’re building for video content creators, so of course I use it everyday. Kapwing lets users resize videos for different social media platforms, trim, add watermarks and effects, make video memes, and add subtitles. Since it’s online, it works on both your computer and phone, and you don’t need to download or learn to use any software. Plus it’s free to use!
We publish Kapwing blog posts using Markdown, so I’ve adopted Stackedit as my default Markdown editor. Like Google Docs for Markdown, Stackedit simplifies the process of adding links, photos, formatting, etc to our articles and makes it easier to save to the cloud so that I don’t lose my work and so that Eric and I can easily share/get feedback from each other.
Your favorite tools on a personal level?
I just recently downloaded WeChat and use it to chat with some of my friends in Asia. The reason I think it’s interesting is that so few of my friends in California use WeChat or even know what it is, yet it’s the second largest social platform in the world and essential to SO many people’s lives. I’m excited to get to know the product more over the next year, but I’ll never get to experience it the same way people do who have their entire network on WeChat.
My friends and family know that I’m obsessed with Google Photos. It’s an amazing product that has everything I want for storing and organizing photos: unlimited storage, background sync on every device, search, albums, etc. I use it daily for both work and personal photos on my phone and computer.
Yes, I’m on the HQ Trivia bandwagon :) It’s fun to play with so many other people in the world at the same time, although I’ve never gotten question 5.
Your absolute favorite tool in one sentence?
If you pay for iCloud storage, you’re wasting money.