Lights! Camera! Experience! With Chris Savage of Wistia
Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, talks about why video matters for business relationships and how AI is changing video production. He argues that authenticity in video builds trust with customers, and that the best B2B companies are using video to tell real stories instead of polished corporate messages.
Foreign. Hi, I'm Adam Durrell, and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. And if you're a regular of the AX Podcast, you know that in every episode, I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders and thinkers so they can get to share their best practices and tips to help you develop your B2B account experience program and just get better at CX in general. Today's theme is video. And one of the lessons I've learned in my career is that telling a story really is the way to communicate. And I love the concept of this. You know, stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And Hollywood uses this classic hero's journey plot device again and again just to keep our eyes glued to the screen and munching popcorn. So how does this work in business? How does it work in sales and marketing? Well, I'm really curious to see how it can help in the specific area of customer experience. And my guest today is Chris Savage. He's the CEO and co founder of Boston based Wistia. They say their mission is to help every business thrive with video. Full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of Wistia. We've been customers, I think, for 13 years, and I'm so delighted to get Chris on the podcast today. Hello, Chris. How are you doing?
I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being a customer for so long. That's incredible. And, yeah, super excited to talk about video storytelling. Where it's going, where it's been. Whatever you want, let's do it.
Well, fantastic. We've been a customer for a long time. I have seen your product evolve. It's always, frankly, been a delight to use. You obviously take customer experience. We do, pretty seriously. But tell me about Wistia.
Yeah. So Wistia, we describe it as a video marketing platform. Our goal is to just really make it easy to get more value from video at work. And so we started with Wistia being a hosting management analytics platform for. For video. So, you know, think like putting a player around your video on your website with no ads, no related videos. Best analytics on the market to help you understand how to make your videos better, but also to understand who's in your audience, who cares, who doesn't, all that kind of stuff. Did that for a very long time. We started 2006, and it was up until 2020. That's the main thing that we did in the product. And then since then, we've really transformed into being a platform. And so now we have even Many more tools that are all really easily integrated into the platform to help you use video at work. And so that looks like single person recording right now. In beta, we have a group recording functionality that you can use to record podcasts, launch videos, things like that, if your team isn't all in the same place. We have an editor built into Wistia that's a text based, you know, AI powered editor designed to be incredibly easy to use for somebody who you know, isn't necessarily a video producer themselves. And then we actually have a fully fledged webinar platform that we've also built into the product. It's very video first, trying to make it really easy for you to have an incredible live experience, but the magic is how all these things play together. So, you know, if you put on a live event with us, you could be editing it just minutes after it's done because of course we're recording into the cloud. You can take that edited version, you can put it into a channel on your website, you can turn it into a podcast, you can use our AI Social clips tool. All of this stuff is designed to be really, really easy. And we're trying to make it so well incorporated, as we did over the many early years, that we can really just save you a lot of time. And that's what we've seen is that people want to use video everywhere, but there's so many different tools. It's very stressful to go between all the exporting and renderings and how do you keep it, the high quality and all that kind of stuff. We're trying to make it easy so you can do all that.
Your point about making it easy is really, really well meant. I the why we got into Wistia in the first place. I got hooked on your how to videos and this, you know, how you can do this. And I felt empowered as a, you know, when we were much smaller that we could almost do the stuff ourselves. And we'll get into some of how you give content away and do this. But I'm guessing this came from a personal experience you had. I mean, did you come from the filmmaking world, Chris?
Yeah. So I did film before Wistia and I had worked on a feature length documentary for three years. And I grew up in Rhode island and Providence is the capital of Rhode island. And the mayor of Providence was this guy named Buddy Cianci and he was at the time the longest serving mayor in the US and he had actually. But he'd actually been kicked out of office for 10 years because he had assaulted his ex wife's lover, who was his best friend and chief of police. And then so he was on probation for 10 years. He ran again one, and he kind of like revitalized the city. But he was this. This complicated character where he revitalized the city. He eventually was taken down by the FBI. Use it with a RICO law, which is essentially like being like a mob boss. So we followed him for six months before he went to jail, when he was sure he wasn't going because he was so confident. So that's what I had done. I had started an intern as an intern on that. I did that in college, and then it came out right after I graduated. So I was awesome. But that was at the same moment that YouTube launched. And I saw YouTube and I will never forget, I was on stage at the premiere of this film. It was being shown to 600 people. And we went up to answer questions at the end. And I had this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was doing the wrong thing because YouTube was so different and was. Had thousands of videos of millions of views already. They weren't films. And we were sitting here with like 600 people. And I was like, is this going to disrupt that? Like, that's. That's kind of the thought that I had. And it caused me to go into starting the company. But that joy of telling stories and making videos, like, didn't go away. So it took a few years before we realized that actually, hey, we're making videos ourselves to market Wistia. And the questions we get are, how did you do that? Like, how did you script that? What lights are you using? What camera are you using?
Yeah.
And so we started making content to teach people about that, in part because we were like, it's not about the equipment. That's what I remember thinking. I was like, it doesn't matter what camera we have. You just have to get it on camera. But as we did that, things started to take off. And we eventually figured that's really what our brand became about, was educating and helping on all the things with video that actually our product didn't really do. And it was kind of counterintuitive, but it really worked. And the other thing that we found early was just the power of being really authentic and being ourselves and having fun. And I'm sure you've been a customer for a long time. You see a lot of these videos. A lot of them are really silly, A lot of them are really absurd. And it was kind of the opposite of how I thought a business should be, you know, I thought, I thought businesses were like adults selling to other adults.
Yeah.
And we made it pretty clear that we were at 20 something so didn't know what we were doing and that worked better. And that was just so interesting.
Yeah, I think your vision was, was spot on. And by the way, thank you for, for creating that. And I just also should say congratulations. You just celebrated 19.
Yes, that's right. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Yeah, that's, that's really awesome. And, and I think that you, you showed, you showed me the way actually that there could be a different way. And we have used your video hosting so much. I, and I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of examples because I want to go on to how, how the, how I think they really can be used. We use it when we have a new prospect on who comes on. I may I, I do a one on one to the camera.
That's awesome.
And, and just say, hey, we'd love to have you as a customer. This is, this is what I think we could do. We record onboarding videos for customers. Of course we do product videos. And I find the more and more we do, the more of our humanity we put into a video, the more successful we are.
Yeah.
So why doesn't everybody do it?
Well, I think there's still the same reason as people are afraid to get on camera. Um, and it's, if you're not doing something, it's really easy to justify that everything's fine. Right. I think that, I think that about a lot of things like this is like a human, just a very basic human thing which is like, if I'm fine doing this thing I'm doing today, like why do I need to change it? Why do I need to do something new? And if I'm at all afraid of public speaking or getting on camera, then maybe I just shouldn't do it. So we people justify not doing it. I think the challenge is that our world, the world around us has changed dramatically. Right. Like Gen Z likes to watch instead of just reading.
Yeah.
And they can, they and you know what? They expect to be able to always find a video to explain how to do something. And they can. There's enough, there's enough people out there, there's enough content that's been created that I don't care what the product is that you have, you can go. If you have a problem with it, you can go and search and you will find a video of multiple people explaining like how to Use this thing. And so the expectations have shifted. And because it's so much easier to make videos, expectations have shifted for that reason as well. So it's not just the viewing, it's the creation. And I think that that's just where the world is now. It's not where it was when we started, let me tell you. It was a very, very different world. Yeah, but all of these major shifts that started with like the DSLR making it possible shoot video and then mobile phone shooting video and then people seeing their computer as a camera. And I mean that we're going through another major one right now that's just beginning, which is AI. It's super interesting. It also creates a lot of interesting challenges for us too, to figure out where should you make videos, when should you do it yourself, when should you not all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I'd love to get into that. But for me, the. I see that the video is a little bit like when I was in desktop publishing, so 30, 40 years ago, you know, when there was the printing was taken out of the hands of experts and it was democratized. But what you saw was an explosion of fonts and colors and design just looked horrible. And it took a while for people to go, okay, it's easy to produce. You know what? We still need the skills of the people who are good at this. And I'm wondering if it's the same with video. I mean, anybody, and I'm picking up my phone here, anybody can shoot a video with one of these and stick it on TikTok, but the content's not all great. So what, you know, how do you see that evolution and what tips have you got to pass on for people to. To hone their skills?
Well, I think you're spot on that anyone can make a video, but doesn't mean it's going to be good. Yeah, we also have a lot of warped expectations because all the videos we all see have huge numbers of views on them. That's why we're seeing them right as the algorithms have. Are popping them up. But when you start, you're not going to get a lot of views on things. That's just normal. And yes, I think we've put these unbelievable tools into everyone's hands, but what it's really doing is upping expectations on the storytelling.
Yeah.
And we actually, we do something called the State of Video Report at Wisti every year where we analyze like hundreds of millions of videos, we interview thousands of marketers, we partner with lots of other companies to get More data to kind of pull out the insights. And one of the interesting things that we've seen in the last year is actually people's attention spans for short videos is going down. And so what's happening is everyone's being more judicious about how they're spending their time with short videos. If you find, if you make something that really resonates and connects with people, they will watch the long version. That's the other thing that's really interesting is like, we also now live in a world where YouTube is a dominant streamer on TVs, right? So if you can make a great video podcast, you can get people literally sitting on their couch watching it. That was not possible before. And if it's on a topic that they think that they're going to learn a lot on, that's going to help them in their career or, or something that's really funny or really interesting, they will sit there and watch that on a tv. That was not possible before either. So it's. It's amazing. It's. It's so cool. But that first moment of how you get someone to pay attention is actually the. The expectations are going up, it's getting harder to do. And so it is going to be about people with a ton of talent, really good storytelling, people who are figuring out, like, how do I make every second count to get somebody to pay attention? And I think it is going to. Yeah, it's, it's. Right now I'm seeing, like, I'm seeing people who had no access before, no budget, who can make something amazing, which is super cool. But at the same time, we're also seeing people who have a huge amount of talent, taking these AI tools, for example, and making something unbelievable that we never could have had the budget to even try before. And so it's. Both things are happening at once. But overall, what it means for all of us is like, yeah, we have to focus on telling the right stories. We have to focus on finding the people who are the most interested in our audience and finding ways to get better and better and better. That is the game.
Yeah. Now, if you think about the business that I come from, which is business to business, I'm guessing within your customer base, you've got a good proportion of companies that are doing that.
Most of them are. Yeah.
Yeah. And so how can you pick out a couple of good examples of how you think people are really using this to help get a closer relationship with their customer base?
Oh, my gosh. I mean, millions of examples. I mean, you Said some of them already. I think for the people who make it to your website who are at the bottom of your funnel and are only going to become more at the bottom of your funnels, it gets harder to get traffic to your website. Those people are so valuable, right? Like they're, they've done a ton of research already. They've, they've researched you in other places, they've searched in AI, they've looked at reviews, they've had your site making sure you have videos on your website that actually convey who you really are and give people the answers. To take somebody from like an anonymous viewer who's like, who's maybe considering, hey, maybe this is the right thing to someone who is exactly the right person to be a customer. What I think you want to expect is you're going to be able to increase the conversion rate of those people over time and that's going to be with customer testimonials. It's going to be showing real customers using your products. That's going to be with having long form explanations and details of how to use your products or services, what people can expect, what it's like to work with you. You have to remember if someone makes it there, they're already at the bottom of the funnel. This is different than it was 15 years ago. 15 years ago they might have been at the top. That might be the first time they ever heard of your brand. That is not how it works anymore. So I think all of those are important. We see lots of people doing the same thing that you do, which is making custom videos for specific prospects or customers. So recording a quick video and sending it to somebody and saying, hey, just want to introduce myself. This is what you can expect in the process of working with us. This is who we are. All of that's really important. I think using video in your brand building is incredibly important. So if you're doing ads, I would highly suggest exploring video ads. It's the one place where you can have all, you know, where you can get people to see and hear and find a story in, in one go. It's harder than ever to get organic reach on social media unless you're an individual. So as a, as a company, as a brand, you're going to be needing to spend money on ads. I think that brand advertising in general is about to become more important. I think we're going back to like pre Internet days in a weird way of like having to do surveys. Where do you hear about us? Sign up forms. Understanding if your brand is, is Resonating. And what we've seen in a lot of our testing, what we've seen with our customers is that just video resonates in a way that is much deeper than most other medium. I could go on. I mean there's so many other examples.
Well, no, I, I agree and I love that, I love that you can cat make a catalog of it because there's some really good ideas to do it. But I, I, let's get a bit deeper because I'm gonna think about the average business to business relationship. You know, million dollar deals for where I came from, they were serious things. You know, it's a contract.
Yeah.
You need to go through purchasing and, and but what I want, I'm picking up on something you said in, in there, which is about they can see who you are.
Yeah.
And I've had, you know, I know that business of business buying is actually very irrational. It really depends a lot on chemistry. So what is it, what is it about video? Like the stuff that we're doing now, looking at each other on a zoom. It's not perfect, but I can see your face is animated. I, I'm getting non verbal communication. It's all of those things. But you know, how can you put this in a video and really maximize your impact?
Well, so basically, historically, up until right now, video has been impossible to fake. Right. So I'm going to get into how you can fake it. But first let's talk about pre generative AI video. You look at video, you see somebody talking, you see their imperfections, you see them explaining things. You were very used to seeing human beings and making calls all day. We're programmed to do this, do I trust this person or not? And so anyone can write anything. But saying something in a video is almost always more convincing if it's genuine. So I think historically that's why we're wired to do this. And video is, is just so critically important. It's the closest thing to being in person with somebody.
Yeah.
Now we have generative video coming and there's a lot of magical things you can do with this. Right. You can type in a script and it will animate an avatar and say the things for you and clone your voice. And I would say you can still tell most of these things are AI but there are versions of this where you can't.
Like I've been playing definitely in that direction. It's going to get harder and harder.
I mean I don't know if You've played with VO3 yet, which is Google's new model. But I made an ad with VO3 that I can send to you that is so you can see it, which is a race car driver and he's driving and he looks to the camera and basically says, like Wistia's new video player, Aurora is the fastest video player in the market. It's super light and blah blah, blah. And trust me, I know speed. And then he zooms away. Looks like a real person talking to you in motion in a car. The entire thing's fake. And so I think looking at that, if you know it's made with AI, you also know that it didn't require as much human work and so you value it less. Right. It's like the perfect time for Tom Cruise to be doing the new Mission Impossible movie. Right? We've had action movies for a long time and we also had CGI now for a long time. And if you watch an action movie with a bunch of cgi, it can be really fun. But you don't think of it as people really risking their lives. If you watch the Mission Impossible is the Tom Cruise you know, he actually is. And so there is a very heightened feeling that you have, which I can't believe this guy is hanging off the bottom of this plane. I can't believe this guy has a parachute that's on fire. You know that's interesting.
Just to expand on that. I'm also a huge movie fan, but they do a lot of work showing the behind the scenes.
Yes, that is the biggest part of their market.
Yeah, that's right. So you see these clips on Tick Tock and everything. You get to see how the magic is done in a reversal. When you actually see the movie, you know, it's. That's interesting, right?
Yes, it's super interesting. And I think that's what we have to look at with all this generative AI is anyone's going to be able to make anything. So how do you show people that you are real? How do you show them in recorded videos? Some of the ways is it going to be making mistakes? Some of the things is going to be. It's going to be taste and cleverness. It's going to be just truly being human and authentic. And you know, a lot of these AI products are trying to cut to copy that exact thing and you might miss it at first blush. But it also means that when you are making big business decisions, anything that's expensive, you, you. I think you're going to want to rely that there's like a human in the loop There's a human you can trust, there's a human you can hold responsible and accountable. Right. Like if a sales rep sells you something and it sucks. And like this sales rep sucks and this company sucks. If the sales rep sells you something and it's great, you're like, this sales rep's great. Especially if you can feel like you trust them. So we're going to be looking for all the things that prove that people are real. So it's going to be, I think, longer form interviews where you hear someone telling really specific things that are hard to fake and that you trust is going to be meeting people in person, it's going to be going to live events and asking real questions and proving that somebody's real. Yeah, it's going to be obviously like I'm saying, live events online, live events in person. It's going to be, it's going to require more, I think it's going to require just more trust and belief that this person really says what they do. And if someone can prove that they're real, they're going to be valued a lot higher than anything that you think is AI.
So if I play this back to you, this is very much about authenticity.
Yes.
Maybe vulnerability. All of these things help trust. And that is the thing that AI cannot really convey at the moment. And, and, and if, and, and going further, I love your using Mission Impossible as a metaphor. So it's actually showing the stuff behind the scenes maybe to customers.
Yes.
Brings the authenticity of that, genuine, of that interaction, I think.
Yes, I think we're gonna see a lot more behind the scenes stuff. You know, it's interesting. Like this is, I hope this doesn't date this too much, but Apple just had their recent launch yesterday, like wwdc and the way they do it now is pre recorded videos and people watch them in an audience, in person. And the nice thing about the prerecorded videos which they started doing Covid is they're perfect. But the thing that kind of sucks is you don't have the risk of someone actually doing a presentation live to have you feel a connection to them.
That's so true.
And you know, I watched a, a demo, a launch video recently where James Dyson introduced his new vacuum. It's called the Pencil Vac. And he's on stage and this thing, this vacuum is super thin. It has great suction, it has some like motor that goes like 120,000rpm or something which is like 10x more than like an F1 engine. And it feels so real watching him do this.
Yeah.
That if you were to compare the two, I bet a higher percent of people who will be newly convinced by the Dyson presentation by then. The highly produced Apple one.
That's interesting and I agree. And from personal experience doing a demo, you've probably done this as well before. Chris, Software demo, it's a bit of a high wire act, isn't it? Is that, will it work?
And so yes. And I think the interesting thing is not that it's only going to be one or the other. I don't think any. Everything's going to be perfectly authentic and I also don't think that everything's going to be perfectly polished. I think the challenge is actually where do you use the different things?
Interesting.
So it's like I kind of look at it as brand ads and brandy things which are very top of funnel. People won't know if it's AI or not yet. So it's going to be more about how clever it is. Right. Like we have, if you think about ads we've had over the years, the production quality of ads have gotten really, really good. You don't really know if they're CGI in them or not. You don't really care. What you care about is like does it actually make you laugh?
Yeah.
Is it, does it actually connect with you? Is it, does it, is it real in some way? But like that's, it's kind of doesn't really matter what the production is. But once you get deeper into a relationship with a potential, any product you're considering buying or like especially B2B, you start caring a lot more if it's real, I think and you start caring a lot more about like if there's a person you can trust. And so I would like. Another thing I would bet is that the next 10 years we're probably going to see conferences take off a lot more.
Yeah, I agree.
And it's going to be people who are basically ready to buy and they're, they're not going to say I'm going to see if you're real. They're going to believe you're a real company. They're going to go and they're going to see does the experience I got in person match up with what I think this product is going to do. They really deliver on the promises that they have. Is there some real person there that I can talk to that and I can feel comfortable, I can email if I have a problem and because that's going to be the limiting factor it's going to be humans that, you know, are now scarce. And that is going to be. It's actually make the value of human interaction much higher, which I think is going to probably cause us do more in person events, more conferences, more things where you feel like you build up real trust with somebody.
Yeah. Nice, Chris, let's pivot a little bit to the customer experience of Wistia towards its customers. You know, you, you've. I, again, I can only react as a, as a customer. I love using the product. That doesn't come about by accident.
No.
So what are the. Some of the things that you do in your company to get you closer to customers and to bring their experience into your business?
I mean, the first thing, I mean, I use a product all the time. I am in Wistia every day and I'm using it for real reasons. Like I am making videos, we are doing live events, I am looking at analytics. I host a podcast. I also use a lot of other products, like I use YouTube all the time. I use LinkedIn all the time. I use Instagram. And I'm constantly looking at how these things fit together. And so I have feedback that I think is like, real, where also it stinks. Like, if something isn't working the way it's supposed to, or it's too slow or it's confusing or I feel like I have to teach myself how to use it because the interfaces, I share the feedback all the time. I'm sure it could be annoying too, for folks on the team, but we've kind of built a culture where everybody is sharing feedback all the time. And, you know, we did that in the early days. It felt like a really important thing to do. And then there was a moment where we didn't do it as much. I thought my job was more to be the CEO, like, you know, managing goals and capital allocation, all that stuff. And that is part of my job. But I wasn't close enough to the experience of the average customer. And so using the product all the time is one way to do that. Literally talking to customers, which I do all the time. I talk to partners. I try to have a lot of free time on my schedule where I'm using lots of other products and asking questions of different people, people who I know use Wistia, people who I know don't use Wistia. And I just try to get that, that, that on the ground experience because there's no, there's no better thing, I think, than seeing or feeling viscerally that a challenge or how great something is yourself. It, you can see in the data, oh, the retention rate of this feature is really high. Or the, the loading speed of this thing is, is very rapid. Is not the same as when you just finish something and you're watching it in code and it, it doesn't work or it works really quickly like that you feel like you're wasting your time. And so it's just that it's just trying to be in touch with that visceral feeling. And the only way I know how to do that honestly is to use the product and talk to customers myself.
Okay, I like what we said before about authenticity and vulnerability. So I'm going to ask you for a little bit of that and tell me about was there any, was there a product or a feature that you loved and that your customers didn't and you had to backtrack? I know there's plenty and plenty in my backpack. Was there anything.
I mean, yeah, if we want to go into mistakes, we might need a whole podcast. But the first one that came to.
Mind, long form, but that we're not, we're just, let's just talk about a nugget and if any people want to come.
Yeah, I mean there's been a bunch of mistakes we've made, usually where we presume to know the answer and spend a lot of time designing, designing a solution without actually putting things in front of customers faster.
I agree.
Probably the biggest mistake we made is to. We made a way to record videos as a separate product from Wistia. So we thought you're gonna be able to make videos with your browser. We saw the technology coming. Chrome had launched this. We're really excited. And the first thing we did was made it. So in Wistia, in a project now a folder, you could click record a video and record a video. People started using it. But then we started thinking, oh, this is a really big opportunity. Maybe Wisty is going to be a multi product business. We're going to have all these different products, we're going to cross sell these products, upsell these products, we're going to sell seats, it's going to be different. And so we ended up making, pulling it out and making a separate product called Soapbox. And we did a lot of research, we did a lot of pricing research that made us think, oh, people see these as separate products so we need to charge for them differently. We need different billing, different user management, different signups. And we made Soapbox separate products. And honestly it took off like we got tens of Thousands of people using this thing, tons of videos being made with it. We were really excited about it. And then over time we started to hear feedback like, hey, why aren't the analytics the same in Soapbox as in Wistia? We're like, oh, well, you can push videos from Soapbox into Wistia and then you can use the Wistia analytics. And they're like, no, like, I expect Wistia analytics in Soapbox. And that's like, oh, I have all these users. I imagine Wistia. Why do I have a different user list in Soapbox? Like, well, we thought maybe different teams are music. No, that's confusing. Well, ultimately what we did is we had made a mistake and we never should have pulled it out. We overthought it. And so we, we shut down Soapbox. After we had rebuilt it back into Wistia, we built up a separate brand I still think was a sweet name, sweet brand. It stinks that we had to do that. We had to like basically re. Kick off getting the recording going as a native part of Wistia. And it ultimately was like a huge circuitous loop to where we started. And we had undervalued just how much simpler it could be for the customer if it was in one place. How you'd get the benefit of all the organization and the management tools, analytics and all that kind of stuff, all the integrations we had done and so built it back in. It's taken off in a way that it should have taken off in the first place, but we distracted ourselves and we even convinced ourselves that the revenue we were generating from it was not enough. When we eventually got like, the main competitor for Soapbox was actually Loom. And when we eventually, once Loom got sold and we heard the numbers on what they had, we had been generating more revenue with Soapbox than Loom was.
Congratulations.
But like we shut it down. So it was one of those things of like, talk about a big mistake. It was just presuming an answer too rapidly and missing the fact that we could have just saved people much more time. Like, it doesn't know. It doesn't matter what we want to be. It's what the market wants. So we want to be multi product. These separate products. That's not what the market wanted. What we heard from our customers, they wanted all in one. And so we took that lesson and all the new things we've built are now all built into one product in one easy way.
Thanks for your transparency on that. Actually, I was a Soapbox user and I think I felt the same way. Why is it separate? And now I also use it. In fact, that's what I use if I need to send a video to somebody.
Yeah.
Just click on it and I. And I send it. Thanks for being so transparent.
No, total.
I really appreciate it. Okay, listen, let's start to wrap up on this. You spoke a little bit about the AI future, but where can you give us a few crumbs of where you're going on your product or strategy? Where are you going to be in the next few years?
Yeah, I mean, so the thing, it's funny, you started by talking about how easy Wistia is and how it's hard to do that. And it is hard. It is hard to build a lot of. Of functionality and features, solve more problems and keep it easy. It takes a huge amount of design work and forethought to do that. And so that's something that, when I look at the next few years, like, I hope that all of our products, like everything in our platform, actually gets easier to use. And I think that AI is going to help us do that in a lot of ways. So one of the really cool things that has happened the last few years is these different models are really good at different things, and they've taken things that before required human work, and now we can do it for free. So an example is transcription. We've had transcription in Wistia for years, but you had to pay for it. Now it's free, it's done by AI. It's really good. And what that means is that now we actually know what your videos are like. We know the types of videos that people are making. We know we can take that data and we put it against where they're embedded, size of embeds, we have performance data by industry, all these different types of things. And so what I think you can expect from Wistia in the next few years is you're going to get more insights from Wistia. It's going to feel more like Wistia has somebody working in it for you. Where you come into the product, it's like, hey, you should fix this video, or, hey, this is an opportunity. There's something here that's an opportunity that you could turn this into more assets. This thing's outperforming, this thing's underperforming. We have a lot of AI. There's some really magical things that we've launched that I think we're going to launch more of, which I'm really excited about. So we launched AI dubbing this year. So you can take any video and you can translate into another language.
Oh, that's cool.
And not only does it, we transcribe the video for you, we translate it with a model that's really good for that. And then we clone your voice so the voices of the people on screen you can have multiple people talking about and it actually redoes the lips. So when you, when the dubbed voice is coming back, it looks like that real person has the same intonation, all that kind of stuff. And for me, this is one of the most magical, accessible features I've ever seen. And we're gonna just, you're gonna expect to see more stuff like this from us. So we see our jobs as really all AI is. It's like a massive technological leap forward.
Yeah.
The job of us is we have to try all these different models, try all these different tools, figure out which ones actually deliver and when they deliver, get them in. And we want to make it so you can do less work and have more of an impact. And so, yeah, you're going to see it become a lot easier to edit. You're going to see it becomes easier to make more polished things. You're going to see it become easier to see the types of videos you should make, which ones you should fix, which ones you should not all that kind of stuff.
That's great. I'm looking forward to that, Chris. Now look, before I let you go, I'd like you to see if you can pass on one or two tips for somebody that is in a company they want to talk to their customers about, to get experience from them, to get them to learn. How would you go about doing that? What would be the one thing you do?
The thing I would do is it's going to be tempting to just like type a script or ask for AI to make you a script to make a video. Most of those are not going to have human elements in them. Right. They're lacking heart. And so what I think you want to do is start to get better at making content yourself. And I would suggest finding the low risk ways you can do that. It's even just doing it internally. Making videos to explain a presentation internally, I think is a great way to start. Something I found that works really well is if you have a meeting with somebody and it goes well, like you're moving on to the next step after the meeting, record a video. And if you have a deck, great. If you don't find record a video. Summing up the takeaways and what people are going to do. What ends up happening when you do that, especially if you do it externally, is that gets shared around. That's the type of thing. Sounds like. I had this great meeting with Wistia. The CEO sent me this video about this new stuff that they're doing. They're going to share that and other people see it. Then they see me, they can have a sense of my personality, they can see that I'm real and I'm helping that person follow up with whatever the thing is that we want to follow up with. I have found that to be incredibly powerful when building partnerships and relationships. And the video is scaling you as a human, I would also say. So that's where I would start. If you're doing nothing, I just want to drill down.
That's a fantastic tip. And so I can do this on my iPhone. And how long should it be? Like a minute or something like that? 30 seconds.
I mean if you just had an hour long meeting, you can be three minutes. You don't have to. It doesn't have to be super fast. As long as it's useful. Right. Like if you're saying, hey, it was awesome talking about all this stuff, I'm really pumped. Let me know if anyone on your team wants to chat about this soon. And I'm going to show you some details of the stuff so you have it all here. And then maybe I might take the Wistia editor and add in like the product videos or something so then they have one asset that they can share.
That's a great tip.
Oh, it's worked so well because most people don't do this. Like people think of video as a way to send out to prospects.
Yeah.
Which can work. But there's. We're already getting better at managing our email. Right. And like I use Superhuman and my AI and Superhuman blocks all outreach from coming to me. I have like no emails in my inbox all the time unless they're from real people. So that's going to get harder. But the part of like an actual follow up to somebody, you just had a great meeting with them. Like even if you don't send a video, it's always helpful to send a nice email. Being like, thanks, it's nice to connect. But if you send a video in there that actually has some is packaged in a way where it can be shared internally. That's the type of thing that works incredibly well. Really what you want to do is build up confidence that you can be human and you can be yourself on camera. And that's, that's going to become really important. And yes, you can use your iPhone, you can use your computer, you can walk around with it, you could do it from your car, you could, you could do it in any way. I mean, last week we did an off site for Wistia. We do a once a year and I made videos basically every day. And my first one was me in the airport drinking like a Dunkin Donuts coffee. And I did one. They're all one take. Literally one take every time. And one of the comments is like savage, Stop being so human. Haha. Because it was just so clear that I am not an AI. It is like so clear that we're actually doing this. I'm actually an airport. And I think that stuff all adds up. And honestly, it's pretty easy to do. You just got to start doing it.
I think that should be the payoff. Make it clear you're not an AI. Keep it authentic. I love that. Chris, that's fantastic. And this is something that I need to pick up myself. My 14 year old daughter is already way better than making content than I ever will be. And I think that's going to be a great skill in the future. Totally. Hey Chris, thank you for giving us your time today. Once again, I just want to say it's been great to have a relationship with Wistia over the years and I hope it continues. I'm really looking forward to what's going on in the future.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being a customer for so long and this was super fun.
Appreciate it. Cheers then.
