Chris Savage (Wistia) | Building a $100M Software Startup from Scratch
00:00:00 Chris Savage
That first year I was like, really sleep deprived and trying to figure how to balance it all.
00:00:05 Chris Savage
And I watched this guy give a talk. He had sacrificed everything to make the company work, but he ended up getting divorced and lost the connection to his kids. And his regret was that he hadn't made enough time for his marriage and for his kids. It hit me at this moment that my first daughter was one, and I eventually realized.
00:00:24 Chris Savage
Like the difference between this business working or not is not going to be. If I work out in the morning or if I come home at 5:00 to hang.
00:00:29 Joe Lemay
Out with my kids. If that's the difference. Like we have a problem. Welcome to eating glass. It's a podcast where in each episode we ask startup founders the questions no one else will. Our goal to reveal what it's actually like to start scale and exit a company. I'm Joe Lemay. And I bootstrapped my reusable.
00:00:44 Joe Lemay
Notebook company rocket book to a 50 million.
00:00:47 Will Nitze
Dollar exit and I am well Nitsa founder and CEO at IQ Bar, a nutrition company I took from zero to 40 + 1,000,000 in annual revenue or better or worse. We are your hosts.
00:00:58 Will Nitze
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00:01:02 Will Nitze
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00:01:58 Will Nitze
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00:02:55 Will Nitze
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00:03:15 Will Nitze
Changes our customer service had forced us to basically and I was like, why did you force us to do that? Why is gorgeous so much better? And he said #1 absent integrations are just better. We have a customer based on Shopify, Amazon. We want to be able to take.
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00:03:31 Will Nitze
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00:03:36 Will Nitze
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00:03:45 Will Nitze
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00:04:06 Will Nitze
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00:04:08 Joe Lemay
Chris Savage, welcome. It's awesome to Abby, man. It's why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what? Whiskey.
00:04:14 Joe Lemay
Does.
00:04:15 Chris Savage
Yeah. So I'm Chris savage. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Wistia. Whiskey is a video marketing platform. And what that means is we have tools that make it easy to record videos, edit videos. We have a webinar product, but we're really known for what we've been doing for most of the the history of the business is hosting analytics and management videos. So helping you understand.
00:04:37 Chris Savage
How people watch every video, what they skip, what they rewatch, giving you a pick.
00:04:41 Chris Savage
Sure that you can understand how to make your content better, but also how to figure out who's interested in what. So because we tracked the individual down to the individual layer, you can tie that into your marketing system so you can say, show me everybody who's interested in our coffee product. Show me everyone who's interested in our hydration product. Show what our protein product.
00:05:01 Chris Savage
And then you can do that based on what how they actually watch and engage and so.
00:05:07 Chris Savage
Couple other things.
00:05:08 Chris Savage
So we are about 200 people never raised venture capital, just raised a little bit of Angel money in the early days and we're not your average tech company. So we've been around for almost 18 years to start in 2006 and 2017, we decided we had an opportunity to sell the business, decided not to sell.
00:05:27 Chris Savage
But instead raised debt and bought out our early investors and got liquidity for our team to really try to be a large private.
00:05:35 Joe Lemay
Business what made you want to start a company?
00:05:39 Joe Lemay
Uh, how do you link up with your co-founder and like bring me back to the that very early days and and what what was motivating you?
00:05:47 Speaker 4
Yeah. So we basically my.
00:05:48 Chris Savage
Co-founder Brendan he's my best friend. We we met at Brown's freshman year, lived on the same hall and just got into a lot of hijinks and craziness at school, worked on some projects together.
00:06:00 Chris Savage
And we, I would say like we had ideas for like get rich quick schemes slash like you know and just like crazy ideas for companies who.
00:06:12 Chris Savage
Built and that came out of like we knew some other people. We knew someone in school or had heard of some school who had patented an idea and then sold it and made all this money when we were like juniors or something. And so we're always talking about that. And then I majored in film while I was in school, and he did computer engineering.
00:06:29 Chris Savage
And.
We.
00:06:31 Chris Savage
Were just really close and constantly talking about things were happening in tech and things that were changing. And so I graduated in 2005 and that was the same year that YouTube launched.
00:06:42 Chris Savage
And I saw YouTube really early and I had tried to be a part of a bunch of filmmaking communities online and all these communities. These are the people who could make videos right and make films. And so I would have thought that those would have been really vibrant, like people would be constantly sharing work, getting feedback from each other. So like that, and actually, there were really.
00:07:02 Chris Savage
Very debt. There was not a lot of sharing of.
00:07:06 Chris Savage
And then YouTube came along, and it took off. And it was interesting because the content on YouTube was really different. There's a lot of pirated content back then. There's a lot of, like, UGC user generated content, and it was raw. It was different, it was fast. And it one of the insights I had from this was.
00:07:25 Chris Savage
Pre YouTube if you want to put video online you actually had to be a video technology expert. You had to understand how to encode your videos properly so that people could play it back and there wasn't one specific way that everyone every videos could play back. It would be a choice. So there was quick time which was the apple form.
00:07:42 Chris Savage
Not, and I could encode things a QuickTime. It looked to us, but if you didn't have a Mac, you probably couldn't see my video. Or I could use Realplayer. Everyone had Realplayer, Realplayer. The encoding was worse, so it didn't. It didn't look as good. You could encode it to flash, and most people had the Adobe Flash. The time could play it back, but you had to make your own player. And so it was a mess. So it was this huge hurdle.
00:08:03 Chris Savage
And when we saw YouTube, anyone could upload anything.
00:08:05 Will Nitze
Work.
00:08:06 Chris Savage
And we looked into it and we realized they were using.
00:08:09 Chris Savage
Open source tools to do the encoding of the video, which meant you did not have to be a video technology expert to get video online, and that was the key. Insight was wow, they're using this thing and it's open source, so we can use it too.
00:08:23 Chris Savage
So we thought online video is going to get huge really fast and we started riffing on ideas of of what, how can we take advantage of this if we think this big thing is going to happen and most people don't realize it yet.
00:08:35 Chris Savage
What should we do is this?
00:08:37 Chris Savage
Still in college, this is a year out of school, so I'm doing like.
00:08:42 Chris Savage
I helped produce a feature length movie. At that time I was doing short films. I was working at commercials. I was doing production assistant work. I was doing all different sorts of things, and Brandon had a job as a software engineer at a company in Boston. We were just constantly talking about this.
00:08:57 Will Nitze
To get back to the motivation part, was it just were you doing those things and you're like, I'm going to start.
00:09:02 Will Nitze
Something I'm just doing these things until I get to the something like. Was it a foregone conclusion that you were just waiting to the project where you and Brendan would?
00:09:11 Will Nitze
Do something.
00:09:12 Chris Savage
That's a good question. It was not a foregone conclusion that we were definitely going to start a company. I mean, honestly, we didn't really understand what starting a company meant, but I had a really interesting experience because of that film I worked on. So I worked on this feature length documentary.
00:09:26 Chris Savage
With the filmmaker I joined her, she'd already shot most of it, and I worked with her for 3 1/2 years, helping to edit and all these things, and this this documentary like we got into a bunch of.
00:09:36 Chris Savage
Film.
00:09:37 Chris Savage
Festivals and we won them and we won an Emmy and all this stuff and I was credited as associate producer on this thing.
00:09:46 Chris Savage
And so I had this really unique experience at 21, wanted to film. I had a feature film that I was associated with. We won festivals and all this stuff, but we couldn't at that time breakthrough on distribution was very we distributed ourselves and the film made money, but we couldn't get like HBO. As the premiere documentary distributor at that time. And we really wanted to distribute the movie. They're actually really close to.
00:10:06 Chris Savage
Doing it and then one person just decided one day I don't want to do it.
00:10:10 Chris Savage
And I had this feeling in my core of, like, man to work on something for this long and have one person be able to control your destiny. That's horrible.
00:10:20 Chris Savage
And so I had this bad feeling about that.
00:10:24 Chris Savage
And I also had seen that I some of my instincts were good was we'd been making the film.
00:10:30 Chris Savage
And so it just kind of drew me to this idea of, like, I just want to be in control of my destiny. And I didn't know that that would look like starting a company. Exactly. But I knew it probably looked like trying to create my own projects. And so.
00:10:42 Chris Savage
Then it was a natural fit. Brent and I, you know, he was like I thought partner on all this stuff. I'm constantly talking to him about this and he has all these.
00:10:48 Chris Savage
It is and so that's how it just kind of turned into, hey, let's actually start a company to to try to solve a problem there. So it was basically an overnight success as soon as you jumped in there.
00:10:58 Chris Savage
Right. Oh, yeah. What was the?
00:11:00 Joe Lemay
First concept that you.
00:11:01 Chris Savage
Were working on so the very.
00:11:02 Chris Savage
First concept was we would make a filmmaking competition website. So imagine Coke wants an ad.
00:11:09 Chris Savage
They say to people like the best ad that you make will give you 30 grand and we'll use it and then tons of people create ads for Co.
00:11:17 Chris Savage
And I had seen a few competitions like this that brands were just kind of starting to figure out and I participated as some as an editor. And I realized that if I won one of these competitions, it might be better for my career than having a feature film. And that was like a shocking.
00:11:34 Chris Savage
Revelation. And so we said, let's make a platform to do this.
00:11:39 Chris Savage
I mean, we started, we had a very complicated idea within a within a month we gave up on it because it was like who are we like, we don't have the relationships.
00:11:46 Chris Savage
With these brands, like how are we like?
00:11:49 Chris Savage
Skill. This is.
00:11:49 Will Nitze
Something else I kept thinking about 99 designs with that original project I was like, oh, this is 99 designs for video. That's kind.
00:11:56 Chris Savage
That's kind of what it was. We just thought like, this is it's gonna be so hard for us to turn this into a real business. We don't have that much time because the other part of this is we looked at our savings, we looked at how long we could survive.
00:12:07 Chris Savage
And we thought that we could give it six months and then our plan would be alright. We'll give this six months and then we'll sell it because I was so naive. I had no idea that you obviously can't do that or we just give up and we wouldn't tell the one that we.
00:12:18 Chris Savage
Tried it, we'd.
00:12:18 Joe Lemay
Just go do something else. I actually found my video, my first videographer on a site like that, and he later became my head of operations.
00:12:28 Joe Lemay
That rocket book I was just like I found all those contests sites. There were like some cool quirky videos. I found one of the one person that was like that's a cool video and he was based, you know, in a few towns over and I like got in touch with him and we started making him the first rocket book video together.
00:12:45 Chris Savage
So those those were a thing, right? Were you the first idea to and you you bailed on it before they were a thing? I think so. But like, we had a few things that turned into at our that we we tried for a little bit and then we we didn't understand how long you had to invest in things to see if they're gonna work or not.
00:13:01 Chris Savage
Yeah.
00:13:03 Chris Savage
We had a few things go viral that first year that were not us. We made a A we were just buying domains left and right. We bought this domain ironing theflag.com.
00:13:13 Chris Savage
Just thought was like kind.
OK. Yeah.
00:13:14 Chris Savage
Of cool rolls right off the.
00:13:15 Chris Savage
Tongue yeah, ironing the flag. It's like a patriotic thing or something. I didn't really know. We just, like, found the domain bought it.
00:13:21 Chris Savage
And we're having a conversation one day.
00:13:23 Chris Savage
About being in the Iraq war and we realized that we had been in the Iraq war, we were we we were like, have we been in the Iraq war longer than we were in World War 2?
00:13:32 Chris Savage
So we looked it up and we were like 4 days, three days away from being in Iraq, War 2. So we took iron in theflight.com. We made it a countdown.
00:13:40 Chris Savage
Until we been.
00:13:41 Chris Savage
In Iraq, we were in World War 2.
00:13:44 Chris Savage
And it went viral. And you know, it was on the front page of Reddit and Hacker News and all this stuff got tons of traffic. And it was kind of amazing to see this happen because our expectations were so warped because we launched this.
00:13:55 Chris Savage
Thing.
00:13:56 Chris Savage
That was actually we launched even before.
00:13:58 Chris Savage
We it was right around. We're giving up with the filmmaker, comes just decide I care. We hadn't launched anything else. This is the first thing we did. We got 40,000 visitors the first day.
00:14:07 Chris Savage
And I was like, wow, OK, so I guess you just make stuff and it takes off and we put and we put advertising on it to use our plan to make money and.
00:14:16 Chris Savage
Actually, it was crazy because it was also like there were articles written by like, major news publications about this. And I'm not sure if it was because of our site or not. It certainly felt like it at that time. Anyway, we put the ads on maybe we get like 150,000 visitors and we made like 100 bucks in ads. And I was like advertising hard business model that's.
00:14:35 Speaker 4
Ever thinking is like this is.
00:14:37 Speaker 4
This is gonna be it would be very tough to make anything cause if we just went viral. I don't think that happens every.
00:14:42 Speaker 4
Day pretty hard to make an advertising business model.
00:14:45 Will Nitze
So you had done the. The first one was kind.
00:14:47 Will Nitze
Of a network.
00:14:49 Will Nitze
That would require network effects to really work the the sort of 99 designs business model to where it just becomes a big enough marketplace. The second one. So that's like scratch that and then then this other ones like the ad model and then you're and then W you as the total is the third model, that's just.
00:14:55 Joe Lemay
Yes.
00:15:07 Will Nitze
A better model.
00:15:08 Chris Savage
But we hit even other things along the way. We did. We did this one then we thought of an idea that was kind of similar because it we're like, OK, there's like a stunt element.
00:15:19 Chris Savage
And do you? Do you guys remember million?
00:15:20 Will Nitze
Dollar home page. Yeah, yeah. With everyone buys a.
00:15:22 Chris Savage
Pixel. Yeah, so a million pixels. Everyone buys a pixel for a dollar. We're like, who does this guy think he is? Thinks he can make 1,000,000 bucks with, like, a million pixels like we could do better than that. So we came with an idea called fame thrower.com. And on flame thrower, you would like, upload an image of something and link it. And whoever spent the most it would like test slate.
00:15:40 Chris Savage
Ever spent the most their image would be the biggest, so the idea was like that. We try to build hype around this thing. It would be so absurd that would build hype and more people would want to, like, get in front of the attention they would pay. And what?
00:15:50 Chris Savage
Ever. So we made this thing in like a week and I went to my home page. I just clicked a bunch of pixels of people who were, like, willing to spend a dollar on one of those pixels. And I just, like, sent to the e-mail to all these people.
00:16:02 Chris Savage
And I was like, hey, do you want to get on fame tour? This is the new thing, like $1,000,000 homepage. It's like more exciting.
00:16:07 Chris Savage
And we got.
00:16:10 Chris Savage
$1500 the first day.
00:16:13 Chris Savage
And I remember thinking, huh?
00:16:16 Joe Lemay
Let's keep doing that.
00:16:17 Chris Savage
This didn't go viral. I thought it had failed. And of course, in hindsight it had worked and I like my whole perception was like upside down, like making $1500 in a day for like a stunt like this. Obviously, if we just kept going and like actually shared that, it probably would have built into something. But we were expecting it to go. We just had something go viral. This one didn't really feel like it went viral.
00:16:38 Chris Savage
I don't think it's going to work.
00:16:42 Chris Savage
And then after that, we're like, OK, let's build something more simple than this competition on the website. Let's build something people can really understand and say it's valuable. And so we made a portfolio website.
00:16:54 Chris Savage
For these film makers, so like you could take your work and you could show it off like you're real of stuff.
00:17:00 Chris Savage
And that we actually built that took like four months to build and got it out there and we started getting people using it like hundreds of people are using this thing.
00:17:10 Chris Savage
But now?
00:17:12 Chris Savage
We're running out of money. We're like 8 months in.
00:17:15 Will Nitze
Are you paying yourself salaries?
00:17:18 Chris Savage
Ohh no salary. We both quit our jobs. We took our collective savings and we the way that we did this was we said we're just going to live as cheaply as we possibly can. So we lived in a ten person house in Cambridge. We shared food with all our roommates.
00:17:34 Chris Savage
It was the era of cloud computing was just starting, so it's very cheap to do the hosting and.
00:17:39 Chris Savage
Stuff. So our.
00:17:40 Chris Savage
Total expenses for the two of us were including the business expenses and personal were $1600 a month at that time for both of us total. That's how we're able to survive. And but we were getting really low and we had this portfolio thing. People are using it we're like.
00:17:56 Chris Savage
Hey, do you wanna pay for like a premium version? Do you wanna pay for a way to collaborate with people on work and everyone's like, maybe. But, like, I might spend 5 bucks and with, oh, God, this is not.
00:18:06 Chris Savage
Going to work.
00:18:07 Chris Savage
Uh.
00:18:08 Chris Savage
The fortunate thing is this whole time that we from the very beginning when we started, we were going to these like startup meetups. There's this thing in Boston called the web innovators group.
00:18:18 Chris Savage
And we're just going to commiserate basically with other entrepreneurs. And when we watch these things, people like, hey, you guys, you guys are the video guys. You keep trying to do video stuff. We're like, yeah, they're like, can you help me with video stuff? That's these other startups are saying. And we were like, no, no, no, no, no. We help artists like we do other things like we don't do business stuff like definitely not.
00:18:38 Chris Savage
And eventually.
00:18:40 Chris Savage
Eight months in, we're running out of money. We go to one of these things, someone says the same thing like, oh, you're the video guys like, hey, we're trying to do video in our business and we actually decided we should talk to them. And so we started talking to companies and very quickly, within a couple months.
00:18:55 Chris Savage
Realized got basically at our first customer of wistia.
00:18:59 Chris Savage
Who came to us and they said, hey, we need to use video.
00:19:02 Chris Savage
But it's really not sexy. It's really simple. Like we said, DVD's around the world. This is a medical device company. They send DVD's of surgeries. They were doing, like, could you give us a?
00:19:10 Will Nitze
Way to do that online? What was the pre-existing modality at that point? Like where where people using YouTube to would that was?
00:19:17 Chris Savage
Not secure, no. YouTube had no private way to share anything.
00:19:22 Chris Savage
The closest online version at the time was like an FTP server. If you remember this, it was there was no way to securely share the stuff very simply.
00:19:31 Chris Savage
And but for us, we thought this is gonna be really simple to build. Like, really easy. We need a login structure. We need video hosting which we had built as a byproduct of the portfolio thing.
00:19:43 Chris Savage
And we'd over built a lot of stuff and done a lot of complicated things. So we said we're gonna do this. It's gonna. We're gonna make this simplest thing we possibly can make to solve the problem, and we're only going to build stuff that customers ask for. And so.
00:19:55 Chris Savage
We had this first customer potential customer. They were really interested in this and we made-up pricing for them. They were willing to pay us as consultants to build it. We said no, we want to own the thing.
00:20:06 Chris Savage
And we had a a I remember there's a we made a print out of the price that was completely made-up and there was a light plan that was like $100 a month. There's a medium plan that was $200 a month and then there was a heavy plan that was 400.
00:20:19 Chris Savage
And I slid the piece of paper over to this guy Ron, and he looked as like we'll take the best we'll take.
00:20:24 Chris Savage
The heavy plan, and I was like, Oh my God.
00:20:26 Will Nitze
You're like ****, I.
00:20:27 Speaker 4
Should.
00:20:27 Will Nitze
Have should charge more for that.
00:20:30 Chris Savage
Well, it's crazy. I mean, I had. No, I I, I had no idea how little that was perceived to be at that time because remember, we had like.
00:20:38 Chris Savage
100,000 visitors to this irony of the flight thing we made 100 bucks and that seemed rare and hard in the sense of, like, not easy to repeat going viral. Now I have one guy would to pay.
00:20:48 Chris Savage
$4.00 a month for this thing.
00:20:50 Chris Savage
And so, yeah, then it was like basically from that point about, which is a about a year into when we started, we started to get a new customer each month and they were all wanted private secure video sharing. And that's really where things.
00:21:02 Will Nitze
Started, so you're picking up steam slowly, but you're picking up steam like, obviously, people took notice.
00:21:09 Will Nitze
And and how quickly did copycats like emerge they they must have at some?
00:21:14 Chris Savage
Point it took a while so.
He.
00:21:18 Chris Savage
Because it was. We were so early. I mean, that's what I didn't understand. Like, it seemed obvious to me the video is going to get really big. But like when we talk to companies who are potential customers of the time, most people are like, this sounds cool. But like, I don't make video like, it's way too expensive because back then it was like you want to make a video. You needed a production team and then that changed over time.
00:21:39 Chris Savage
So, like we had the DSLR, started supporting video and that I would say it's kind of like I think of that as like the price per video went from 10s of thousands of dollars to thousands of dollars and then the iPhone came along and added video and then it dropped it to like hundreds of dollars. And then it's changed again, actually in 2020 where it's like any everyone sees their computer as a camera now. And so anyone can make a video.
00:22:00 Chris Savage
But it back then it was.
00:22:02 Chris Savage
It was so early and there were a lot of other companies that saw this market and thought because of YouTube is going to take off really fast. So we had a lot of competitors that raised a lot of money, but they were going after different segments of the.
00:22:15 Chris Savage
The market, they're.
00:22:16 Chris Savage
All basically ended up going enterprise.
00:22:17 Chris Savage
And you were going SMB. We started thinking like, yes, we we realized.
00:22:22 Chris Savage
A few years into this that the magic was in SMB because they needed to use video. There's a lot of broad use cases, so really simple product was really.
00:22:32 Chris Savage
Helpful. They valued it really highly because they were not video experts. That was another interesting thing is like the companies are using video that were not a video production company valued us even more.
00:22:45 Chris Savage
And we found our way towards, like, giving you the analytics to track the videos, which started for internal purposes and then embedding the videos. And that was the moment that things like really took off. When did you decide that you were ready to and you wanted to raise some money?
00:23:04 Chris Savage
Yeah. So we we had about 10 customers and they were from a bunch of different industries and there were some really big companies we were talking to and really big companies that had signed up.
00:23:16 Chris Savage
And we thought, well, there's too much work for us to do. We need help and we had met a couple of people we wanted to hire, but it was going to take a couple of years before we'd have.
00:23:25 Chris Savage
The.
00:23:25 Chris Savage
Money to actually hire them. And so one of them who were talking to is like, hey, do you know what Angel money is? The Angel investing. And I was like, no, he's like oh, well, you can raise money now from these people who are called angels.
00:23:36 Chris Savage
They're called angels because they give you the money. They don't really expect that much in return. They'll just help you out. And like, what the heck this is.
00:23:41 Chris Savage
People. And so we ended up raising 6 or 50,000, which was two years after we started to hire these two folks.
00:23:51 Chris Savage
And.
00:23:53 Chris Savage
Yeah, that was like.
00:23:56 Chris Savage
I mean, we got a lot right there. We got a lot of wrong there, honestly in terms of how we did that. The the thing we got lucky on was that as I mentioned, we had some competitors who raised a lot of venture capital at that moment.
00:24:08 Chris Savage
And they the requirements of their business to grow revenue were so high.
00:24:13 Chris Savage
That, and the market wasn't ready that they're forced basically to go fully enterprise. And so they started selling huge, really expensive things, have built huge sales forces. The market was not there to support them and they most of them went out of business. And so we were able to just like eat and survive on on like the little market that was there and that as the market showed up.
00:24:33 Chris Savage
We were still there. We built a great product and eventually a lot of those customers that went with competitors who'd raised a lot of money end up.
00:24:39 Chris Savage
Just coming their way.
00:24:40 Will Nitze
To us, what was the valuation and had you arrive?
00:24:42 Speaker 4
At it ohh the original valuation.
00:24:45 Will Nitze
Yeah.
00:24:46 Chris Savage
Ohh man, I mean first of all is made-up.
00:24:51 Will Nitze
I.
00:24:51 Chris Savage
Think it was like 2.7 million.
00:24:54 Chris Savage
Pre something like that.
00:24:56 Joe Lemay
They were like convertible notes in the.
00:24:58 Chris Savage
Vote it was a convertible note, yeah.
00:25:02 Chris Savage
And then we we that's that first round was really helpful. It caused us to think differently. I mean, I remember we had a forecast we were going to be 8 people at the end of the year.
00:25:12 Chris Savage
As it would run to the money quickly, but this is 2008 where we had like, you know, a recession effect.
00:25:19 Chris Savage
And so we saw this happening and we're like, hey, this seems really stupid to hire a bunch of people right now. We should just survive as long as we can.
00:25:27 Chris Savage
And so we didn't hire anybody else except these other two people and we just decided we just stay really close to the customer and understand their problems, their needs as well as we possibly could. And so we did that.
00:25:39 Chris Savage
And just as we were.
00:25:40 Chris Savage
Running out of that 650.
00:25:43 Chris Savage
Was when we really start to get traction and it was a combination of.
00:25:48 Chris Savage
We'd never had embedding in the product, but our customers were asking for it. They're saying, hey, we love your analytics. We want to see it out in the videos our website and we were the secure thing. So we're like.
00:25:57 Chris Savage
No, we shouldn't. We're.
00:25:58 Chris Savage
Secure. We don't want that. No. Like, no, we do want that and.
00:26:01 Chris Savage
We actually listen to them and so.
00:26:03 Chris Savage
We launched a version of the product I'm betting with the analytics and actually up until that point you had to do a demo to to use the product and we made it self-service. And so we launched a free trial and right we were just starting to run out of.
00:26:17 Chris Savage
Money.
00:26:18 Chris Savage
We had like a month left to go at the end of the summer and that summer we end summer. We had 30 customers. We were three years in basically from when we first got the product to market.
00:26:28 Chris Savage
And at the.
00:26:28 Chris Savage
End of the summer we had 200 paying customers.
00:26:31 Chris Savage
And so we went back to our Angel investors and said, hey, look good news and.
00:26:34 Chris Savage
Bad news.
00:26:35 Speaker 4
Bad news. We're going to run out of.
00:26:36 Chris Savage
Money real fast, like.
00:26:37 Chris Savage
We got a problem. Good news is look at this like it's actually working. Customers are actually signing up. They're sign up in the middle of the night. They're using this thing. It's really growing. We think if we will raise one more round, we can get through to profitability. And they were like, that doesn't seem.
00:26:55 Chris Savage
We don't really believe you, but it seems like there's something here. So we we will help you. And so I had one of our investors who like helped me put the round together.
00:27:04 Chris Savage
There, which was a crazy story of itself and very quickly a few days we had the round closed and just continued forward and that was.
00:27:11 Chris Savage
The last round that we raised.
00:27:12 Joe Lemay
From an early stage and and growing, how have you thought about marketing and spending on marketing? I mean, if you've only raised, you know, less than a couple, $1,000,000 total, you probably aren't out over your skis in terms of customer acquisition costs and things.
00:27:28 Speaker 4
Like that? Yeah. I think the early days.
00:27:30 Chris Savage
Were.
00:27:31 Chris Savage
We figured out kind of.
00:27:33 Chris Savage
By accident.
00:27:35 Chris Savage
You know, so I was making a lot of content and I believed in content as like the future, like getting your stuff indexed to Google, helping people find you in that way.
00:27:45 Chris Savage
And we were writing a lot of blog posts and.
00:27:49 Chris Savage
That had kind of worked even with the other previous products that talked about. Like, you know, we I'd made written blogs for those things and I'd gotten thousands of subscribers at different moments in time. And so I I believed that it was possible we could make a lot of content that would be how people would discover with you. And so we did that pretty early and it was kind of working, not working that well.
00:28:09 Chris Savage
But it was kind of working. It was getting us more try.
00:28:11 Chris Savage
Like and then there's a few discrete moments where we had, like big learnings forward. One was another accidental one, which was we've grown the team to six people from 4:00.
00:28:24 Chris Savage
And that we grew that with customers like you know, there was some word of mouth going, but it was small, but it was enough that we were getting, you know, more new customers are coming in. We're growing revenue. We hired 2 people and we felt really guilty because our on our website at the time we had a team page.
00:28:39 Chris Savage
And the team page just had four of us on it, and actually the team page said the management and we were trying to, you know, getting to be customer. So we're trying to like look professional. We're trying to look like a big company. So the implication was the managements for people, but there's a lot of other folks here, you know, you can really just just set the thing.
00:28:58 Chris Savage
And I don't think it really looked like that. I don't think people really thought, I don't think it was having much of an.
00:29:03 Chris Savage
Back.
00:29:04 Chris Savage
And so anyway, these two new people during the team, we felt guilty because they couldn't prove to their parents they actually worked it with you.
00:29:10 Chris Savage
So we shot a photo of the six of us.
00:29:13 Chris Savage
And we did that in front of a whiteboard. That's how we decided to keep.
00:29:16 Chris Savage
It business, he.
00:29:16 Chris Savage
Was like we had a whiteboard and we're all like stoic, like.
00:29:20 Chris Savage
Just kind of staring into the camera.
00:29:22 Chris Savage
But the guy who took the photo.
00:29:25 Chris Savage
He got us to do 2 other silly photos that we didn't think we're going to use, just like kind of hands up, whatever very goofy silly photos.
00:29:33 Chris Savage
So we got to put the team page together and Brendan decides it's one of those new people, Jeff, on the team. It's Jeff's birthday and he wants to give Jeff a birthday gift. And so his birthday gift is he makes on the team page an Easter egg, which is if you type dance on the page, it randomly switches between the three photos of each person. So everyone's in different poses.
00:29:53 Chris Savage
And it plays music we were using like Girl talk music.
00:29:56 Speaker 4
And so he's like here, Jeff, happy birthday. Like, yeah, do this.
00:29:59 Chris Savage
Easter on this.
00:30:00 Chris Savage
Stage.
00:30:01 Chris Savage
And he did that and he bought away by it. Everyone thought it was this funny little great thing. We put it on Twitter, thinking nothing would happen, and it went viral.
00:30:10 Chris Savage
And we saw a huge spike instantly of traffic to that page.
00:30:15 Speaker 4
Well, that's cool.
00:30:18 Chris Savage
And then went away. And The funny thing that happened was 2 weeks later, we had the highest number of new customers signed up in a day that we had ever seen. And it was like a huge spa.
Like.
00:30:31 Chris Savage
Why did that happen?
00:30:33 Chris Savage
Well, we had a two week free trial back then. So what happened is a bunch of people saw this team page, saw the East drag.
00:30:40 Chris Savage
They thought it was funny or interesting. It caused them to care enough that they looked around, what with Sia was thought it could help them sign up for a trial 2 weeks later, got a bunch customers.
00:30:49 Chris Savage
And that was like a crazy moment, because I thought that B2B.
00:30:54 Chris Savage
Needed to be like buttoned up.
00:30:57 Chris Savage
And professional and this team page was the least buttoned up, least professional thing we'd ever put on the website, but it was like, fun and endearing. And it showed the people behind the company and that was enough to hook people to.
Help.
00:31:08 Joe Lemay
Hair.
00:31:10 Chris Savage
And so once that happened, we start to have more permission just to honestly have more fun in our.
00:31:15 Chris Savage
Marketing.
00:31:16 Chris Savage
And so we would teach you how to light something in a video, and we'd actually have jokes and it would be silly. And it would be endearing to show the actual people on the team, and we just did that type of thing over and over and over. And our content got bigger and bigger. And our e-mail lists got bigger and we got more getting traffic.
00:31:32 Chris Savage
They just built into this kind of engine of word of mouth that's just continue to continue to continued it. So it's honestly been one of.
00:31:39 Chris Savage
The.
00:31:39 Chris Savage
Most efficient ways you could possibly go.
00:31:42 Chris Savage
Wow.
00:31:44 Chris Savage
And been interesting because it was so different than everything else out there. It just like it stood out and it caused people to.
00:31:50 Chris Savage
Care.
00:31:50 Will Nitze
OK, as you were talking, so I used to work in B2B SaaS. This company called Power Advocate which got bought by Verisk Analytics and the public Big publicly traded company. But I had such a different experience and I'm wondering if it was price point.
00:32:07 Will Nitze
To where I was selling supply chain and OPS software to oil and gas companies, which is in Texas, which is like a stodgy industry in and of itself, right. And so I would fly to Houston and I would sell 200,000, three, $100,000 a year enterprise B2B SaaS. And I was wearing a suit.
00:32:27 Will Nitze
And it was very like comporting yourself in a certain way was very important. And then we would lose out to SAP or Oracle because they were even more buttoned up and.
00:32:41 Will Nitze
And I wonder if the difference there is like price point to where it's a different level like the buyer is a different person and the price point is different and so you can just have more fun and be more.
00:32:52 Will Nitze
Authentic.
00:32:52 Will Nitze
And there's you're not gonna get fired for buying. Wistia over whatever. Maybe whereas, like you might literally get fired over buying power advocate versus SA.
00:33:01 Will Nitze
The arriba.
00:33:02 Will Nitze
How do you?
00:33:03 Will Nitze
Like, do you think that's like accurate?
00:33:06 Will Nitze
Depiction of the.
00:33:07 Chris Savage
Difference I do think brand if brand really matters. Obviously at the high end of the B2B market, right, like there's a reason why, you know, we see Oracle SAP advertising on like F1 races and like on major news channels and all these like things like the brand matters.
00:33:26 Chris Savage
But I do agree that.
00:33:28 Chris Savage
What are you buying in that moment? Because the fundamental thing about which is that anyone can sign up and use it themselves. So it's like you're making a personal decision.
00:33:36 Chris Savage
And I think that is a key part of that. And I agree with you that I think I think brand really matters, but I think it just matters in different ways based on.
00:33:44 Chris Savage
The segment of.
00:33:44 Joe Lemay
The customer? No, I mean you still do a lot of.
00:33:48 Joe Lemay
Content today and you do a lot of your own personal content.
00:33:52 Joe Lemay
How do you?
00:33:53 Chris Savage
How do you justify it today? What do you think it actually delivers to you and to wistia as human beings, we want shortcuts, and we're thinking about options, right? Like we want to know.
00:34:05 Chris Savage
What can? How can I kind of guess at how this company will act or what can I expect from them going forward? And I think it's subscription businesses that really matters, because if you're, you're not just buying today, you're buying what you believe the thing will be in the future. And one of the things that we saw in those early days was that people really had a connection to.
00:34:27 Chris Savage
Individuals on the team at Wistia.
00:34:29 Chris Savage
Like you know, we'd host our customer conference and you know that 10 people on videos that most people come up to like, I feel like I know you, Chris. And it was like really kind of amazing to watch that happen.
00:34:41 Chris Savage
And as we got bigger, the initial strategy was like, OK, we're just having more people on camera, which is a human business going to show more humans. And while that works, the connection with each individual was like not as strong. And so a few years ago, we made a conscious choice that was like, OK, I am effectively media trained at this point. I've done a million interviews.
00:35:01 Chris Savage
Written a million things. I've done tons of talks like I enjoy doing it. We should lean into Chris Savage again and Chris Savages stories, which is going to be not 100% wistia, but it's going to be maybe 30% wistia.
00:35:16 Chris Savage
30% entrepreneurship and 30% like marketing content.
00:35:20 Chris Savage
And I just had a few things that really took off and I watched the same thing happen with my personal content would be like, oh, I you reminded me about Wistia. You reminded me about this feature you showed me this thing, and then I went and used it. And you.
00:35:31 Chris Savage
Hear enough of?
00:35:32 Chris Savage
These stories that are qualitative, that's how it always starts. You hear people telling you qualitatively like, yes, this, this, there's a connection here that over time.
00:35:41 Chris Savage
You can see the quantitative with enough scale so we can see that like my personal investment in LinkedIn drives traffic to wistia and people sign up because of it and whatever that was not obvious probably in the.
00:35:52 Chris Savage
This year, but what was obvious really quickly was, you know, all this stuff of people reaching out, asking specific questions and mentioning it like we're we're like listening for that. So we discovered that pretty quickly.
00:36:06 Chris Savage
And content if you know.
00:36:09 Chris Savage
One of the mistakes that we made at Wistia was not actually doubling down on some of the things that work, and I I think that's the thing that a lot of people do. And I, you know, where you want to diversify your risk. So you have something that's working like for us, like these big bold creative content place.
00:36:23 Chris Savage
And then you think yourself well, this is working. I should also add advertising in. I should also add partnership channels. I should also add affiliate you start layering in all these other channels that you want to add into and obviously if you add them and they they all work great, fantastic, but they're all going to take a lot of effort. They're going to take a lot of time.
00:36:40 Chris Savage
Getting them working really well is very hard and money.
00:36:43 Will Nitze
And they all cause.
00:36:44 Chris Savage
Money. They all cost money. They all cost time.
00:36:47 Chris Savage
And so then I think the other thing is like what we often underestimate is the thing that's working. How much farther can you take?
Yeah.
00:36:55 Chris Savage
And I think if I had, if I were to start over, that's one of the things I would look at really differently is like, OK, if I have a child, it's working.
00:37:04 Chris Savage
Can I take can I-10 access channel and if that's still working, can I 10X this channel again? And I think we underestimate how big the world is, especially in an Internet connected world. We underestimate that all the time and it's like.
00:37:16 Chris Savage
It's actually not. It's not more risky to invest more in a lot of kids, often less risky, to invest something in something that you know already works. And just to do it again and again and again and.
00:37:27 Chris Savage
That's what I yeah, I think we kind of learned that lesson to the point that now we're investing huge amounts more into content. Again, it's all working. We have a bunch of different shows that we do. We have much more organic stuff that we do. And the mistake that I've made is just not pushing hard enough on that same.
00:37:42 Will Nitze
Thing diversification is riskier than concentration in so many.
00:37:48 Will Nitze
Cases. It's very similar actually. In consumer goods, there's this concept that.
00:37:54 Will Nitze
I'm going to diversify, so I'm going to be in Costco, but also Walmart, but also target but also sprouts but also Wegmans.
00:38:01 Will Nitze
And what you find is it actually degrades the business model, so it's in a way it's good, you get more revenue sources, but now your your focus is divided in 10 different retailers. They all have different promo schedules. You're at different price points and most of them yadda yadda yadda and so on paper like, oh, I'm I'm nice and diverse.
00:38:20 Will Nitze
Side and you look at a business over here where it's like, you know, 70% costs go 20%, Walmart 10% need to see. You know that's a worse business.
00:38:29 Chris Savage
So your point in that case, it's like you might be 70% your business, Walmart, but if you really build that real connection with Walmart, they give you more space. They understand your products more, they start trusting you more.
00:38:40 Chris Savage
That part of the business has a shot at like growing dramatically faster than something.
Yes.
00:38:46 Chris Savage
And they're gonna deal with somebody. So if they don't deal with you or you don't deliver for them that that actually become that you add your risk, right. Like, that happens with partners all the time. And also to be to be where I've seen you build a relationship with a partner, the relationships really good. Like, I should have other relationship like this. And you go do it and now you're watering down what you're actually can actually deliver on because like, focus is actually the name of the game.
00:39:08 Chris Savage
And now you're less focused and so you don't. You're not as responsive. You don't know their the problems that they have in the same way you can't scale the same way. And it's it's such an easy mistake to make because you want to diversify, but it's actually often adding more risk. How do you like, keep keep creativity alive in a company that's, you know, starting to become big? Right. So you've got a meeting about like.
00:39:29 Joe Lemay
IT systems one day and HR stuff another day though. How do you like, stay creative yourself and also keep your team.
Those.
00:39:38 Chris Savage
I think, yeah, I think what you need to do is a little counterintuitive. I I spent a long time searching for this honestly, because I knew the creativity was what was making us different, right?
00:39:51 Chris Savage
And I thought the secret to creativity was chaos.
00:39:54 Chris Savage
And it turns out it's not. It turns out there's an amazing book on this Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull that I that really was enlightening for me. He is the creator of Pixar and talks about how you can make something like Toy Story with like 1000 people working on it. And yet it still pulls your heartstrings. It's still super creative and interesting, like how.
00:40:16 Chris Savage
To do that.
00:40:17 Chris Savage
And I I look at it as like.
00:40:20 Chris Savage
It's about like how do you create the right constraints and the right areas of ownership?
00:40:26 Chris Savage
Such that each individual person or team actually has the freedom.
00:40:30 Chris Savage
To be creative.
00:40:32 Chris Savage
The way the way that looks at we sit today is we have really clear, OK ours for the year.
00:40:37 Chris Savage
Everyone understands what they are, their work, they're OK is ladder up into the company. OK, so you can understand if I'm successful with the my and my team, this is going to help the business. Like I can see the.
00:40:48 Chris Savage
Action.
00:40:49 Chris Savage
And then we try to have the teams be self-sufficient that they have everything they need ideally to do the job they're trying to do.
00:40:56 Chris Savage
But then it's up to them to solve it however they want, and so there's actually within that create that constraint space.
00:41:05 Chris Savage
That really you should have a lot of freedom to be creative there and I think that's like how I think about like the team level.
00:41:13 Chris Savage
There's also this. There's this great Steve Jobs quote that's like, creativity is just the connection of things and.
00:41:21 Chris Savage
I'm gonna. I'm gonna link two people together. So Steve Jobs said that and then Ben Chester, who is the CEO at MailChimp, the founder MailChimp, he said, which I thought was really resonate with me. The most important part of that sentence, like creativity, is the connections of things. Is the things part. What? What that means is like.
00:41:37 Chris Savage
Do you?
00:41:37 Joe Lemay
Mean by that?
00:41:40 Chris Savage
You can only make so many different connections between existing things. If you have a lot more things, it's a lot easier to be creative and so from like a holistic business perspective.
00:41:50 Chris Savage
What you want is like. You want people to be shipping a lot of stuff very fast, and if you're going really fast, you're making a lot of things then.
00:42:02 Chris Savage
It's easier to see.
00:42:03 Chris Savage
How they connect to each other?
00:42:05 Chris Savage
And that ends up letting you be really creative. So in our world, in software, you know, WIST is like editing tools, recording tools, hosting, analytics, live tools.
00:42:16 Chris Savage
So if we make our live tool better, great, you have a better live experience, but then we make our editor better. You put that together, you can do a better job of taking clips from live events. And if our analytics are better, then like the clips you made from the live events, you know faster, whether or not they're working and all that might be why someone signs up is for that one specific workflow. But there's hundreds of workflows when you start combining the things in all different.
00:42:38 Chris Savage
Ways and so the faster we ship and the more things we have, the more opportunity we see of ways to link things together. And so it actually as a business makes it easier to be creative and speed I think is like a huge part of that. The core of your business is you're helping people who are using video online to be successful with that. And if you get more velocity, it's probably like more velocity of features you've got like.
00:43:00 Joe Lemay
200 person team now I found when I started to grow my team, I expected to double it and then have two or 4X the amount of velocity of stuff coming out of them.
00:43:12 Joe Lemay
And I kind of found the opposite. I discovered the opposite was true. We like we have all of these people and it seems like we're are we slowing down? How is this possible? Like have you?
00:43:20 Joe Lemay
Encountered anything like?
00:43:21 Joe Lemay
That or what? What do you think?
00:43:24 Chris Savage
Oh yeah, we we doubled.
00:43:26 Chris Savage
Our project engineering team and expected to go twice as fast and we.
00:43:29 Chris Savage
Went half the speed basically.
00:43:31 Chris Savage
And it took cultural change to get fast. It took us saying, like, hey, the way we used to work was we'd look at Rd. maps and the senior management would like approve the road.
00:43:43 Chris Savage
The app seems simple enough, seems like a good idea. We should know we're building, right? But what ended up happening was people would prepare for these meetings where their road map is going to be approved and they would need to have research and vet why one is the top priority and 2 is the second and three is the third all the way down. So we have these meetings. I'd ask all these.
00:44:01 Chris Savage
Questions I would get ready for these meetings at these.
00:44:03 Chris Savage
What's the hardest question I can ask and no one's thinking about, you know, and go in there, but what ended up happening was like we didn't realize that culturally.
00:44:12 Chris Savage
Even if someone thought maybe like #7 on their list might actually be the most impactful, but they maybe didn't have that much research, it was like their intuition telling them or like 1 customer conversation that really stood out or something.
00:44:25 Chris Savage
In a world where they're prioritizing their own road map completely, they would take #7. They would make it 1, especially if it was easy to do, they would never do that in this context, and so we cemented accidentally this culture of trying to be really sure about what we were building.
00:44:41 Chris Savage
And so we said no, we're gonna flip this. I would say it wasn't working. We thought it would go faster. We said, alright, we're gonna change this. It's our problem. We've created a cultural issue here.
00:44:50 Chris Savage
We want to we're not going to control your road map. You ship whatever you want to ship. These are the. This is the OKR that you own. This is the part of the product. The customer problem that you own.
00:45:00 Chris Savage
We need you to do whatever you think is best in that period of time, but the most important thing is we want.
00:45:04 Chris Savage
You to ship something every two weeks.
00:45:07 Chris Savage
And if you could ship every two weeks, you can learn like a two week cycle and you can get better, much faster, right. So we'll go through a year, we'll do 26 things that we ship, not like one or two that we're pretty sure going to work.
00:45:19 Chris Savage
And I can't tell you like the speed change for which it was unbelievable. It was within a month.
00:45:26 Chris Savage
I saw the difference. I had teams coming to me that before had said.
00:45:31 Chris Savage
We think this thing we're going to build is 6 months away and they.
00:45:33 Chris Savage
Got it built in two weeks.
00:45:36 Chris Savage
As cause they had the freedom to do it their way and they thought it was gonna be impactful.
00:45:41 Chris Savage
And often it wasn't.
00:45:42 Chris Savage
So it was like a huge cultural shift of, like, letting go and empowering the teams. And then we give a lot of feedback and we try to make sure that the teams have the right combinations on them. Like, do you have a great product manager, do you have a great designer? Do you have a great tech lead? Do you have great.
00:45:57 Chris Savage
Engineers, if you get that mix right, then it it really works, but it it took breaking and changing a lot of stuff to go fast.
00:46:05 Joe Lemay
I mean, the way you tell the story, it sounds like you, like, woke up one day or like, hey, we need to do this different and you let everyone know and like, alright, we're just doing it differently now. But like, I'm imagining if that maybe some people had to convince you that things had to be done differently, there were arguments, people were fired and quitting and things like.
00:46:21 Chris Savage
Oh yes.
00:46:23 Joe Lemay
That it was not.
00:46:25 Chris Savage
Super messy, but it was messy. I mean, it was people. People were saying we're going too slow and we had for a long time. We had the excuse that we were understaffed, so.
00:46:35 Chris Savage
We were pre COVID often like trying really hard to hire the to build the team and hire, but it's very hard to hire, very competitive to hire in Boston.
00:46:44 Chris Savage
And so it was kind of a given. Oh, you want to hire 20 engineers this year? Good luck. Probably not going to 20. Maybe you get 12 or whatever, so.
00:46:51 Chris Savage
It felt like.
00:46:52 Chris Savage
We were always understaffed, so this we had our speed breakthrough after COVID happened and so we were remote business. We became a remote business after COVID. So hiring changed. It was no longer hard, it's.
00:47:04 Chris Savage
Much easier for us to hire great people. We get hundreds of people will apply for a role versus having to convince people to consider it.
00:47:11 Chris Savage
Like that was very different. We lost our excuse.
00:47:15 Chris Savage
We went from feeling understaffed to actually hiring all the roles we expected to hire. The teams were fully staffed.
00:47:21 Chris Savage
So that under staffed excuse was kind of gone, we let it run the way.
00:47:25 Chris Savage
It was for.
00:47:27 Chris Savage
I'm going to say eight months and didn't see a change in speed and we kept waiting for the change to happen.
00:47:33 Chris Savage
Kept waiting. You know, there's this. You need to make sure you've heard the like, form storm. Norm perform, which is when you're building a team, you first need to form them. Once they form, they're going to storm, which means that there's going to be different ways that people want to work. They're going to be challenges. Whatever. They and then they have to after the storming part occurs, they're going to norm. So what are the norms we use for how we work?
00:47:53 Chris Savage
And once that happens, then they can finally perform. OK, so.
00:47:57 Chris Savage
Form Storm, norm, perform.
00:48:00 Chris Savage
We knew that these teams had to go through that process, so we were like waiting and waiting and waiting. And eventually we just felt like we'd waited long enough.
00:48:07 Chris Savage
And then we also had people on the team.
00:48:08 Chris Savage
Complaining we're going too slow.
00:48:11 Chris Savage
And in particular, it was some of our designers who were complaining they were going to slow and we had a great designer quit. And I remember that was the moment finally of, like, this designer was really great.
00:48:22 Chris Savage
I trusted their designs. I could see the work they were doing. It was really good and they felt that they were too far removed from, you know, they make something take way too long for us to actually build it. And that was the moment that everyone was like, you're right. Like we have a we have a.
00:48:36 Chris Savage
Problem we have to change.
00:48:37 Chris Savage
Everything, but it was shocking how fast it changed. That's what I never believe I thought of.
00:48:42 Chris Savage
Either say, like many things in business, like we'll make a change and I hope in a year it's better, you know, a lot of businesses paying really patient.
00:48:50 Chris Savage
And and it was a month, and once it changed, it was really interesting because once you saw teams going fast, other teams like I want to go fast too. What are they doing? And so then we just kind of the kind of norming part of this, it was easier to spread across everybody like, hey, what's what are people doing this working and it just.
00:49:10 Chris Savage
Yeah. Yeah, it was. I mean, I guess that changed in October of 22.
00:49:15 Chris Savage
And like in 2022, we shipped 12 products, updates that we told customers about.
00:49:20 Chris Savage
And in 23, we shipped like over 70.
00:49:23 Chris Savage
Same team, same number of people, basically the same people.
00:49:28 Chris Savage
At 24, we're shipping faster than we were in 23 and it's all been this like cultural shift that got us there.
00:49:35 Will Nitze
As you were talking, I just. I was reminded of something that I say all the time, which is trial and error is still the best strategy.
00:49:43 Will Nitze
Trial and error is still the best strategy. Every time we did a similar thing, did a bunch of research, or maybe you hire a consultant or whatever and you're operating under the past. Results will dictate future.
00:49:56 Will Nitze
Happening.
Yes.
00:49:58 Will Nitze
Half of the time it fails, right? And so you're better just trying it and probably have the same success rate, but you need half as many people to do it. You don't pay the consultants to do it. And so long that of course the critical variable is can you reverse the decision if you can reverse the decision, just do it today because you can reverse it. It's not.
00:50:19 Will Nitze
The fallout is.
00:50:20 Will Nitze
Not.
00:50:21 Will Nitze
Meaningful. And so just do it. Do it today. What really, really, really sucks is you spend a bunch of money in like, 3 months producing an epic video and it falls flat. You could have just tried four or five 6-7, really cheap videos and had the same.
00:50:36 Will Nitze
Or better results.
00:50:38 Will Nitze
And done it in half the time, so it's like.
00:50:42 Will Nitze
Cheaper.
00:50:43 Will Nitze
Quicker, iterate more, and if it's reversible, just try it.
00:50:48 Chris Savage
We've talked about that as like you need to be able to sustain some failures and then you're fine. Like if your system allows you to be able to reverse the decision because it didn't work, then you're good. The problem is, like I think when people put themselves in a spot where.
00:51:02 Chris Savage
It has to work and then it.
00:51:03 Will Nitze
Doesn't right? And there is no way to predict like people. It's weird that we pretend there are ways to predict everything rather than acknowledging we we can't predict. Like when Justin TV. I've also been thinking about Justin TV as you talk because they had that famous pivot too and they just there was no way to.
00:51:22 Will Nitze
Predict that people would love watching people playing video games. That was not really a predictable thing, I mean.
00:51:30 Chris Savage
The I we met those guys the day they launched because we went to some like why she was in Boston back then and we went to, we knew someone and we went to some event and like Justin was wearing the camera.
00:51:41 Chris Savage
And he's like, this is our big idea. And I was like, what the hell is this guy doing? Like, what is this guy talking about? And then it when it they turned and then when they turned into Twitch, that was very.
00:51:51 Chris Savage
That seems so surprising, but from their perspective, that all these at this point they launched a live streaming thing, people are using it. I think people are using it for video gaming like relatively quickly and they saw an opportunity and went for it right. And like if they hadn't tried that, they would not have found it. I think you're absolutely right, trial and error is the right strategy.
00:52:10 Joe Lemay
I actually think that so few people can get themselves just psychologically in a position where they're willing to just, even if they can fail, just fail.
00:52:19 Joe Lemay
Over and over.
00:52:20 Chris Savage
I think school right, like if you think about.
00:52:22 Chris Savage
It.
00:52:22 Chris Savage
As like if if you got if someone told you you're going to get 20F's and then you're going to get the best a you can get.
00:52:30 Chris Savage
Maybe like what are you talking about? Like it doesn't make any sense. It's like everything is supposed to be perfect. And so therefore, it's really you're. You're trained like your brain is trained not to want.
00:52:39 Chris Savage
To do this.
00:52:41 Chris Savage
It feels it feels horrible.
00:52:43 Will Nitze
And speed and speed matters less and speed and iteration matters less in school too.
00:52:48 Chris Savage
Yeah. And I think it's just like if you can't fail and like I completely agree, you you handed a thing and it's C, But maybe it could have been the, but, you know, whatever the paper could have been the best paper ever, cause your your concept so cool. And you just need more feedback. You don't normally go back and like, write the version that actually could be the A and I think.
00:53:07 Chris Savage
It's.
00:53:08 Chris Savage
I think people like there's so many different types.
00:53:10 Chris Savage
Of failure and.
00:53:11 Chris Savage
The most common is like no one cares. That's like the most common main thing. No one cares. What does that mean? That means no one saw it.
00:53:20 Chris Savage
Usually it's pretty rare to have something that everyone saw that no one cares about. That's.
00:53:25 Chris Savage
If everyone saw it, they carried some, they carried it in some way and I I think that that's like in terms of a mode of failure. It's like really not a bad one, but it's to your point, if you spent one year, you had one opportunity and you did it and no one cared. That sucks. But if you did 12 or 50 things in a year.
00:53:44 Chris Savage
And people didn't care about.
00:53:46 Chris Savage
Let's say 12. They didn't care about 11 of them, but one they really cared. That might be all it ever takes, and I think that's that's the other thing we don't appreciate is like failure isn't as bad. And if you find something that works, you're probably gonna underestimate how far.
00:53:59 Chris Savage
You can take it.
00:53:59 Will Nitze
Main thing I'm curious about is how do you not get bored? Because inherently entrepreneurs are so ADD and just I want to do.
00:54:07 Will Nitze
30 different projects and and my sense is you can correct me if I'm wrong, but doing things like the podcast.
00:54:15 Will Nitze
And some of the personal stuff helps you scratch that itch a little bit. It helps you do new stuff, talk to new people, maybe talk to people in different industries that you're not in. And so by aggregating these, these things around wistia, it adds that novelty, it breaks the habituation.
00:54:34 Will Nitze
Process. That's kind of a a death knell that can cause boredom, which is the worst case, right?
00:54:40 Chris Savage
And I think like you're right on that part of the podcast for me is that it's actually fun to do. And I learned a lot of stuff. I'm constantly learning. And what people don't realize is I'll ask questions on my podcast talking too loud and I'll get some answer like, ohh. They don't realize what they just gave me, like how good this is.
00:54:56 Chris Savage
And that it shows up. It was just six months later, you know, and that happens all the time.
00:55:03 Chris Savage
I also just think that like if your vision for what you what you're doing.
00:55:08 Chris Savage
Can keep growing and changing. Then there is actually like we're constantly constantly building new things at wistia and I see my job is to be in, like, really far the future. Like, what are the big trends coming and things we need to be aware of. And in the ultra present like I am using our products every day. I'm using competitive products all the time.
00:55:28 Chris Savage
I'm constantly playing with and trying to understand where things are going to go and so it's like Ultra present ultra future and that actually keeps me really engaged and entertained.
00:55:38 Chris Savage
Because.
00:55:40 Chris Savage
We're working on big problems and like we don't know what the answers to a lot of these things are gonna be. So it's this constant. There's parts of business that are constantly iterating, constantly changing constantly.
00:55:50 Chris Savage
Innovating. And then there's parts that need to be operationalized and scaled, and that is not, as there's parts of that that I find interesting. But there's other people in the team who find.
00:56:01 Chris Savage
That far more.
00:56:02 Chris Savage
Interesting than I do. So a lot of is just getting matched up to like, do you have the right team in place and the right people? And if I had to be the one person's constantly for example.
00:56:11 Chris Savage
Building our OK, our system, I would get bored or I might change the system too dramatically every time.
00:56:17 Chris Savage
That's that's what I would do.
00:56:20 Chris Savage
So I look at that as like it's like, do you have the right team in place because we have the right team, everyone's owning the right things. People are thinking about the right problems, thinking about the right time scale. And I asked myself that question. I've I've had to ask it a few times and we've had the opportunity to sell the business of like, what would I want to spend my time on?
00:56:38 Chris Savage
And the truth is, I'm so engaged and find the problems I'm working on so interesting that I actually genuinely want to spend my time on them. And if I and if I sold.
00:56:49 Chris Savage
I would be searching for big hard problems to work on. That's just how I am. That's I. That's how I'm wired. So I I feel fortunate. I figured that out, you know, because that that's the thing that I think like, not everyone can keep doing.
00:57:02 Chris Savage
A job like this but for me it it is so fun that it feels kind of like part of the secret sauce is like, well, we can be unbelievably persistent.
00:57:12 Chris Savage
And that gives me a lot of freedom to try things. And also as we're talking force sustained failure like we can have failure 20 times in a row. But if we get it right out of the 21st and the 22nd like we're gonna be in really good shape.
00:57:22 Joe Lemay
Well, what about burnout? Have you had sustained amount of time periods of time where you?
00:57:27 Joe Lemay
Just kind of.
00:57:28 Joe Lemay
Felt, you know, building a business can be just deeply frustrating for some periods of time, or it can be exciting. You have like adrenal fatigue. After some chaos, you know, have you had burnout? How have you gotten yourself out of a bad?
00:57:41 Joe Lemay
You know funk.
00:57:44 Chris Savage
The closest I've had that was like really bad was we our senior management. There's a moment our senior management team was not high functioning and so it was very, very, very hard to get things done and people weren't working well together and that was I found that to be extremely draining and tiring. And as I was going through tried.
00:58:02 Chris Savage
To fix that.
00:58:03 Chris Savage
Those were the moments I was like, man, I don't know, like, this is this is the. This is where I was like, I could just stop doing this.
00:58:11 Chris Savage
And.
00:58:13 Chris Savage
I think it's.
00:58:15 Chris Savage
You know, at some point also when we decided before we decided to do the buyback. So at that moment the opportunity to sell, right, I'd always told my wife.
00:58:27 Chris Savage
I was like someday gonna sell this business? I would be here all the time. We're.
00:58:30 Chris Savage
Gonna be able.
00:58:30 Chris Savage
To do tons of shifts, OK, great. And then when I told her I'm like, and I, that was justifying me working on the weekends and working at night. And I mean, I love working. So I was doing all.
00:58:40 Chris Savage
Time.
00:58:41 Chris Savage
And then I decided not to sell. I was like, so hey, honey, so we're not going to sell right now. She's like, OK, alright. And I'm like, I think I need to, I think I need to change something about how I work.
00:58:55 Speaker 4
And let's pretend what would?
00:58:57 Chris Savage
I do. If I did sell.
00:58:59 Chris Savage
Well, I was like, we would travel more, we would take more vacations. We were not traveling that much.
00:59:04 Chris Savage
And I was like, how about I start taking a lot more vacation?
00:59:07 Chris Savage
And like I actually start, we actually start traveling those vacations and doing things like that.
00:59:11 Chris Savage
And she's like, alright, I'll see it. You know, I'll believe it when I see it.
00:59:16 Chris Savage
And so I started actually taking, you know, six weeks of vacation a year at actually trying to turn off.
00:59:24 Chris Savage
My e-mail and you know.
00:59:27 Chris Savage
Not to meet all the stuff.
00:59:29 Chris Savage
And it took some getting used to, and then I was able to actually do it and actually take vacation, real real vacations.
00:59:35 Chris Savage
And what I realized is I think it's.
00:59:40 Chris Savage
It seems so obvious now, but it was not obvious to me then was like you need to take real vacations for many reasons like it helps you avoid burnout, but also it's just like working out like you want to get strong.
00:59:52 Chris Savage
If you lift every day and you do take rest days, they don't sleep well. They don't, right? You're not gonna get stronger. You get injured, you gotta get strong. You need to lift a bunch. You need to get. You need to do the right exercise. You gotta eat, right? You got to sleep well. You got to take rest. Days. Like, that's the secret. The secret is in the rest of the recovery. I mean, we know this right in the fitness world.
01:00:10 Chris Savage
The same thing is true at work like you can get really stressed at work. It's not necessarily bad to be stressed, but if you don't have the time to actually recover and process and come back stronger.
01:00:19 Chris Savage
You will burn out. You will get injured, you will not be able to sustain it. So the way I look at it now is like I.
01:00:24 Chris Savage
Have to take.
01:00:24 Chris Savage
Vacations. I work out all the time. I try to sleep, right. Try to eat right.
01:00:30 Chris Savage
And I see that all as my building up my ability to manage stress in both my you know, physical stress when I'm working out and actually mental emotional stress when I'm at work. And I I think that.
01:00:42 Chris Savage
Stress is not a bad thing. Stress is bad. If you can't recover from it, and so that's how I kind of like I look at the Business Today and I encourage people on my team to do the same thing, like take real vacations, the other by product, by the way, of taking real vacations is it causes you to scale because when you take a real vacation.
01:00:59 Chris Savage
And you tell people do not contact me.
01:01:02 Chris Savage
They often will. We're used to solving problems with specific people, and so if you're not there, someone else has tried to figure how to solve the problem. And almost always they they often can. And so that was another big thing was like, I'd come back from vacation. I just get less e-mail, I guess, get less slack messages because someone on the team would have taken on some problem that previously I was always involved in.
01:01:23 Will Nitze
Two kids.
01:01:24 Chris Savage
You have two kids, 6:00 and 8:00.
01:01:26 Will Nitze
So how did that change? Things like did you obviously like what did you not see them when they were little? And then you felt guilty about that? And then you're like, I want to see them more and, like, how did?
01:01:37 Will Nitze
That affect the ark, yeah.
01:01:41 Chris Savage
So my first kid was about 1:00 when we decided to do the buyback and.
01:01:50 Chris Savage
I.
01:01:52 Chris Savage
I was just like.
01:01:54 Chris Savage
Really thinking about I was kind of surprised that this year I'm 10 years in right about. I was surprised. I was still doing it. I was thinking about that a lot. I was like, how am I still doing this? It's been 10 years like we thought we do this for six months. This is just insane.
Right.
01:02:07 Chris Savage
And I went to some of that and this thing called the Tugboat Institute. I don't know if you've heard of that, but it's like this.
01:02:15 Chris Savage
It's this event for founders who run private businesses. A lot of them are, like, very long living private businesses, really successful, trying to figure out a lot of them are like family businesses, generational wealth, like all this kind of stuff we we were like.
01:02:29 Chris Savage
The smallest company at this we went to it.
01:02:32 Chris Savage
And I watched this guy give a talk and the talk was about how he had been the CEO of a company and he had sacrificed everything to make the company work. But he ended up getting divorced and like, lost the connection to his kids.
01:02:45 Chris Savage
And his regret was that he hadn't made enough time for his marriage and for his kids while he was building the business. Like he didn't understand that like he could have actually made that time. And it just it hit me at this moment that my first daughter was one.
01:03:02 Chris Savage
And I was like, and then we decided to that first year I was like.
01:03:08 Chris Savage
Really sleep deprived and trying to figure how to balance it all.
01:03:13 Chris Savage
But then we decided to do the buyback, decide not to sell, decide I would take more time for vacation, and I eventually realized is like the difference between this business working or not is not gonna be if I work out in the morning or if I come home at 5:00 to hang out with my kids. Like, if if that's the difference. Like we have a problem.
01:03:28 Chris Savage
And so it really did change my perspective.
01:03:33 Chris Savage
The other thing that happens you have kids is your life becomes really programmed about drop offs and pickups and daycare and all this stuff. You start thinking about time differently. And so I noticed that when I came back to work after this, I would get really frustrated if people started a meeting late or if the meeting ran late and my schedule got screwed up. I would get ******.
01:03:53 Chris Savage
And so people be like, oh, we with this person doesn't here we can't start you. I'm like, yeah, we can. We're starting now and like what? And like no, we start now we're done in an hour. If they're not here they missed the decision. Sorry. Like that's just I've got more important things to deal with and I think it was like it was like a healthy thing for me I think a healthy thing for the company to grow up and I realized why all these other parents have been so annoyed.
01:04:14 Chris Savage
By how, like lackadaisical, we had been about meeting times before that.
01:04:19 Joe Lemay
Yeah, I can. I can relate to that. I'd say I did make some of those mistakes in terms of.
01:04:24 Joe Lemay
Ruining vacations because of work and things like that. But having kids definitely made me triage my time, way more ruthlessly, and I think that was ultimately good. Good for the.
01:04:35 Joe Lemay
Team.
01:04:36 Chris Savage
It's a good thing. I mean, I think it's like we start things because at least I started the company because in part because I wanted to be my.
01:04:44 Chris Savage
Us like I don't want to be told what to do. I wanted freedom. You know that. You realize you need all these systems and structure and schedules and timing and whatever. And like, well, this doesn't look that different from like probably a lot of other well.
01:04:55 Chris Savage
Companies. It's like, ohh it's a different type of freedom. It's a different type of opportunity. It's a different type of problem solving and like, actually, you know, there's a lot of good in structure. If you can get use it to get to the right place, what's going to make you feel like you spent the next 10 or 17 years in a way that makes you say that was a really successful.
01:05:16 Joe Lemay
Ah.
01:05:17 Joe Lemay
Decade or so.
01:05:19 Chris Savage
I think it's like.
01:05:20 Chris Savage
I've come to realize that.
01:05:23 Chris Savage
I just get a huge amount of joy out of out of working with world class people and working on hard problems trying to break their own. Solving hard problems is like my favorite thing.
01:05:37 Chris Savage
And I I have enough trust. As long as the problems are working on are big enough, we will build something that continues to be more and more valuable throughout that.
01:05:50 Chris Savage
And I also have come to learn that like if you get the right.
01:05:56 Speaker 4
Group of people working on something.
01:05:59 Chris Savage
It doesn't feel like work. If I look back in 10 years or 17 years and I think, man, I really loved what I did that whole time. And I learned a lot and also the company grew and the people on the team took on more responsibility and that ultimately means like we delivered better things for customers. I'll feel like I spent my time well.
01:06:19 Chris Savage
Yeah, it's just it's hard to. It's hard to find stuff that you really care about that you're good at, that you enjoy. And I think if you find out like, hold on to it, you know.
01:06:29 Will Nitze
It reminds me of the I I I mentioned habituation earlier. I think the whole like work to live thing is you talk about people who sold their business and now they're living.
01:06:44 Will Nitze
But they're just kind of hanging out. Maybe they ski here or whatever, sit by the pool, and they habituate, and then they get bored. It's like.
01:06:53 Will Nitze
Goes from, like chaos, to habituation to boredom, and then ultimately find themselves to be like, as unhappy as they've ever been in their entire life.
01:07:03 Will Nitze
And so for me, it's always just about.
01:07:06 Will Nitze
How do you fight that? And the best way to fight that?
01:07:11 Will Nitze
Is will work.
01:07:12 Will Nitze
Doesn't have to be professional work. It could be philanthropic work, it could be whatever. But it's work like that is what it is. It's work. And so, yeah, I I have the same perspective as you do.
01:07:22 Will Nitze
It's.
01:07:22 Will Nitze
It's it's living at work.
01:07:25 Will Nitze
Because that's the only way or the best way to fight habituation and to fight boredom, which ultimately drives unhappiness.
01:07:33 Chris Savage
Yeah, I think we just want to feel like we're a part of something, right. I think we all want to be a part of something, part of a family, part of a community.
01:07:39 Chris Savage
Part of a gym, part of a company, and when you're working and trying to improve on that, it always feels good, especially in hindsight, like it's funny.
01:07:49 Chris Savage
I look back, I never thought this would be true, but I look back at some of the hardest moments I've had at wistia so fondly now. It's really bizarre, and I've realized it's like a lot of the hardest moments are where I learned the most.
01:08:03 Chris Savage
And that it's just not what I would have expected. You know, I again, I thought I would do this for a short period of time. I would get money and that would be it. And like, that's not it. Like, there's more to life than that. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, everyone has to find the thing that gets some jazz excited. I just feel.
01:08:19 Chris Savage
Lucky.
01:08:19 Chris Savage
That I found something.
01:08:21 Joe Lemay
That does that. I am excited about.
01:08:24 Will Nitze
Something and and I would argue you need pain on a daily basis.
01:08:28 Will Nitze
Right. There's a reason why rich people called plunge.
01:08:32 Will Nitze
You know, and that I think that's true for work. Yeah. Work sucks. It's like, you know, well, I don't have to work. Why do I endure this? This suckiness sometimes on a daily basis?
Yes.
01:08:42 Will Nitze
Because you need that pain like you just need it.
01:08:46 Chris Savage
Well, it's yeah. You can't get resilient otherwise, right? Like if you because you cannot know like life is unfiltered like we can't control what's going to happen to us, what's going to happen to our family is gonna happen. Our friends, we don't know the day you're gonna wake up and get bad news.
01:08:59 Chris Savage
But what you can control is like your ability. You can try to be more resilient when those things happen, and the only way to do that is to experience something really hard, some kind of pain or something on some consistent basis.
01:09:10 Joe Lemay
Is awesome. Do you want to move on?
01:09:12 Joe Lemay
To some rapid fire questions.
01:09:14 Joe Lemay
Let's do it, all right.
01:09:16 Joe Lemay
Uh, I'll take the first one here. It's a Peter Thiel question. It's a classic. Chris, you have an important truth that you believe in that very few people agree.
01:09:26 Joe Lemay
With you on.
01:09:30 Chris Savage
I mean, I did probably go back to earlier in the conversation on this, but.
01:09:35 Chris Savage
I think that people dramatically.
01:09:38 Chris Savage
Underestimate the power of brand in B2B.
01:09:42 Chris Savage
I think there's often there's some belief when you're making a B2B buying decision.
01:09:47 Chris Savage
And you have to believe that a product is going to deliver for you and that's inherently like there's uncertainty and there's emotion and there's like, there's stakes there. And I think that.
01:09:58 Chris Savage
There, that brand kind of a really big impact and I think that's very under use our.
01:10:02 Will Nitze
#2 what are commonly sighted, latitudes, things people say you have to do to make your startup win that you just think are.
01:10:11 Will Nitze
Not right that are falsehoods.
01:10:14 Chris Savage
I think people really get like MVP's wrong a lot.
01:10:20 Chris Savage
I think that MVP, like minimum viable product is a cool concept, but.
01:10:28 Chris Savage
There's often like some hook or detail or some level of quality that like, is the difference between companies that really take off and ones that don't.
01:10:38 Chris Savage
And so like if you if you evaluate a company only with an MVP, you are probably missing out on.
01:10:45 Chris Savage
A lot of opportunity.
01:10:46 Joe Lemay
Next one is what do people dislike about you?
01:10:51 Chris Savage
I'm sure a lot that I don't know.
01:10:53 Will Nitze
Give us the full list. Give us. Give us the laundry list.
01:10:55 Chris Savage
Yeah.
01:10:57 Chris Savage
I mean, I am very excitable. I can. I can really distract people. I have the power to distract at a very I think that's why really, how I annoy people the most in meetings. I send them off on tangents or I get them excited about things with like small amounts of information or.
01:11:14 Chris Savage
Yeah, I think I can spin people out pretty easily. I'm an extreme early adopter and that annoys people around me cause I will, you know, embarrass my family as I wear vision bro on the plane and I'm. I'm happy to do it and they're not happy for me to do it.
01:11:29 Chris Savage
I'm sure there's other things that there's a lot I think probably, but that's probably enough for now.
01:11:33 Will Nitze
Right. Yeah, maybe the maybe the listeners will try, man.
01:11:38 Chris Savage
Yeah, please chime in.
01:11:40 Will Nitze
Alright, what's been your what's been your biggest mistake or regret throughout the journey? I'm sure there's many about what is where. Is there one where? Like. Hmm. I wish I could take that one back.
01:11:49 Chris Savage
When I've made big decisions that I went against my instincts.
01:11:54 Chris Savage
That that's what I always regret, especially if my instincts were like very different from the data.
01:12:01 Chris Savage
We made a A a business model decision with one of our products.
01:12:06 Chris Savage
5-6 years ago and it felt wrong at the time.
01:12:12 Chris Savage
And but like the data all said like basically it's like should we have separate products or should they be all one? It was like ohh the data all says our our our MP, our MBA analysis is like these need to be separate and that was like and it ended up being like a huge mistake.
01:12:29 Chris Savage
And my instinct was not to do it, and I should have, like, actually listened to it and trust some more cause, even if I had been wrong.
01:12:35 Chris Savage
I would never regret it it.
01:12:36 Chris Savage
The same way. What's what's the hardest?
01:12:38 Joe Lemay
Decision you ever had to make along your journey.
01:12:41 Chris Savage
I think the hardest decisions have always been around people because you know.
01:12:47 Chris Savage
Can this person step into this role?
01:12:50 Chris Savage
Is this actually the time you need to let somebody go who's been really amazing before and it's uncertain like people are really complicated creatures?
Totally.
01:13:00 Will Nitze
Same here. Hey, this was.
01:13:01 Will Nitze
Great. Boom.
01:13:02 Chris Savage
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks guys. Really got in there on.
Look.
01:13:05 Chris Savage
This one got.
01:13:06 Chris Savage
A little heady. Got deep. It's good. It's.
01:13:08 Joe Lemay
Good. That's what we tried to do here. So that was awesome, Chris. Bye.
01:13:13 Will Nitze
All right, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening and thank you to our sponsors IQ bar go to Amazon.com, search for IQ bar, buy one, wait for it to arrive, leave a review. Please leave a review. Reviews are massive. Our second sponsor is ramp go toramp.com/glass. They give you 250 bucks.
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01:14:03 Will Nitze
In a couple.
Of weeks talk to you then.
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