The executive summary says Veamcast has been “built over several years of self-funded development.” That’s true in the way that a résumé is true. Here’s the actual number: I started building this in 2010. It has been in the Microsoft Store for fourteen years.
If you’re an investor and you’ve just read the summary, that number is probably the first thing you’d want explained, and it’s the one thing a two-page document has no room to explain. So this is the long version.
What it was
The original idea was small and specific. I wanted to send someone a video the way you’d send them an email — no account, no app, no platform in the middle deciding whether it got delivered. A message that just arrived and just played. I called them VEAMs. Video Email and More.
That is still the core of the product. Almost everything else Veamcast does now grew outward from that one interaction, and the reason it took this long is not that the interaction was hard. It’s what happened around it.
July 2012
On July 12, 2012, I gave the first public presentation of Veamcast. It was an investor event in Cebu, where I was living at the time, and it was the first time I had shown the thing to anyone outside a small circle.
Four days later, police raided a call center in Mandaue City called 724Care. In 2006 I had signed its incorporation papers, because Philippine law then required five incorporators and small startups signed for each other as a matter of course. I held roughly a tenth of one percent of it. I never worked there, never took money from it, and had been inside the building twice, both times for parties.
On July 21 the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group issued a press release naming the company’s officers. I was on the list: Joseph Dean, an American. The wires picked it up and it went around the world inside a week — Manila Bulletin, Rappler, PhilStar, MSN, the Daily Tribune, the Qatar Tribune, the Arab Times, the Aruba Times, and a long tail I never finished counting. Most of them reported that we had been arrested.
Nobody was arrested. The CIDG said so themselves a few days later, in a second release headed CIDG CLARIFIES REPORT; NO ARREST OF 724CARE EXECS IN CEBU RAID. The correction did not travel. The headlines did.
I am not going to claim any of that was aimed at me, or at Veamcast. I do not believe it was. I was a name on a 2006 filing standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment. The account I wrote at the time, with the headlines and both police statements, is here.
I did what I could. I asked for corrections. I spent months looking for a lawyer and eventually found one who filed a complaint; a prosecutor in Cebu declined it, and the appeal has been sitting in Manila ever since. Then I plodded on.
What I learned by losing
At the time, Facebook’s growth was vertical and it looked like they were going to be the White Pages of the Internet. They had everyone’s contacts, and they offered an API around all of it. I invested heavily and integrated it through the entire app — the way you’re supposed to. You read the documentation, you get the API key, you build the integration, you ship.
The promise was bigger than an API. Facebook had convinced the world to hand over its address book, and the deal on offer was custodianship. They would keep it, and they would profit from connecting people. Developers were part of that deal. We were told we could build on top of the graph and I did.
It worked. From March to August 2016, Veamcast revenue grew at an average of 108.6% month over month. Then in September it fell 74% in a single month, and by January 2017 it was down 99% from peak.
None of that is recollection. The revenue curve is Exhibit W2, and twelve years of my AdSense payment records are Exhibit W3 — both filed as evidence in the Meta case. The full exhibit record is public here.
They moved the ground.
I did not know that at the time. What I saw was a business that stopped working, and for a long while I assumed the fault was mine — the product, the market, something I had built wrong. It was only later, [WHEN — while trying to get an unrelated issue resolved], that I saw the evidence of what had actually happened.
I want to be precise about that, because it is the part people assume wrong. It is not that I thought Meta was harmless. By then I suspected them of interfering in an election. It still did not occur to me that they would bother with something the size of Veamcast — I assumed I was too small to be worth a decision.
I’ve since sued both Meta and Roku over it. My claim, in short, is that dominant platforms open their APIs to induce developers to invest, and then revoke access selectively when what a developer built starts to look like a problem. In the Roku case, the API requirements changed the day before they moved to dismiss. I’ve litigated both pro se. I lost the Roku appeal; it went back down and was dismissed without prejudice. The Meta appeal is ongoing. I have spent an absurd number of hours learning appellate procedure for a software engineer, and I would not recommend the education.
I’m not writing this to relitigate any of it. I’m writing it because it is the single largest influence on how Veamcast is built, and you cannot understand the architecture without it.
After I understood what had happened, I stopped designing systems that assume a provider will still be there tomorrow. Every third-party dependency in Veamcast is something I have tried to make replaceable — the AI layer, the ad networks, the media sources, the delivery path. Not because I think everyone will revoke, but because I’ve learned that you find out you were dependent on the day it stops working, and by then the choice isn’t yours.
That’s not a philosophy I read in a blog post. I paid for it.
The years that weren’t about software
There were stretches in here where I did not write code, and they weren’t strategic.
I lost people in my family. My wife was diagnosed with cancer. I broke my hip. Those years happened in the same span as the ones on the commit log, and mostly the code sat still while they did.
I’m not going to write that up as adversity that forged something. It didn’t forge anything. It was just time, and it went, and the project waited because there was nothing else it could do. If you want a version of this story where the hard parts were secretly making me better, someone else will have to write it. What I can tell you is that the thing survived them, which after enough years starts to count for something on its own.
The pivots
There were three real pivots, and each one threw away work.
The honest summary is that I was early on the idea and wrong about the shape of it more than once. The current shape is the first one where the pieces reinforce each other instead of competing for my attention.
What the delay actually bought
I want to be careful here, because “the timing is better now” is what every late founder says.
But something real changed. Building a browser, an email client, and a multimedia platform used to be three engineering organizations. With current AI tooling it is a small team that moves fast and is willing to try workflows that an incumbent won’t risk. The work I could not afford to do with a team of one in 2016 is work I can do now. That is not a rationalization of the delay — the delay was the delay. It’s an observation that the cost curve for this specific product bent, and it bent in my direction.
The other thing fourteen years bought is that the monetization layer is actually built. Channel owners can select Amazon products and CJ campaigns against their content, with the integration structured so other affiliate networks slot in behind the same interface. That is not a roadmap item. It is shipped code, and it is nowhere in the executive summary, which tells you something about how bad founders are at describing their own work.
Where it actually is
Veamcast is live and downloadable today. The core loop works: you create a VEAM, you curate content into a channel, you send it to any inbox, and the person who receives it can open it on any device without an account. The browser and email layers are real and incomplete. The mobile client is mid-port. There is no billing yet.
I’d rather write that sentence myself than have someone discover it in diligence.
Why I’m telling you
I’m raising $500K. If you’re reading this because you’re considering it, the thing I’d want you to take from fourteen years is not persistence, which is cheap and which every deck claims.
It’s that I’ve already been through the failure mode that kills companies like this one — building on a platform that could turn me off, and being turned off — and the product I’m asking you to fund is the one I built afterward, by someone who knows exactly what that costs.
The short version is in the executive summary. This is the part that isn’t.
Joe Dean is the founder of Veamcast. joe.dean@veamcast.com