Building Wistia: Discovering Success in Video Marketing with Chris Savage

I think it's very, very easy to underestimate online just how big markets can be. And like, you know, it's like if you get 10 customers that means you probably can get 100. And if you can get to 100, probably means you get to a thousand. When you get to a thousand, you probably get to 10,000. And if you get to 10,000, you could probably get to 100. And I think it's hard to think that way. That's like, hey, the Internet connects us all and if you're solving a problem that is a real tactile problem for people, they will expl and take a look and test it out and try it.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic Hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy.

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Hey Chris, it's awesome to have you here. I've been a fan of your show for a while now. You and Sylvie co hosting that. It's called Talking Too Loud. It's also on HubSpot's network. Thanks for being here on the show.

It's funny, when we started this, I've done other forms of shows. Like before Talking Too Loud, I had a show called Brandwagon and Brad Brand Wagon was so fun to put together, but it was insane. It was like a weekly interview show, but dressed up as a late night, kind of like a late night talk show thing where I would interview the guests and we had all these segments and we were also trying to get a car, a Brand Wagon, all this kind of stuff. And it was. We made the pitch video for that a month before we'd started recording the first episode and we said, in five weeks we're launching this show. And it was so crazy and so fun and honestly, in hindsight, performed incredibly well. But it like, we were basically all dead at the end of it. It, you know, it was like 10 episodes and we just like keeled over. Um, and so we started talking too loud. We said, okay. The interviews in that in Brandwagon, people love them. And actually a lot of the feedback was like, we want more depth. We were doing like 20ish minute interviews or like we want the full conversation. So talking to said, let's do that, but let's make it just that. And let's try to make it something where we feel really confident we're gonna be able to do a hundred of these, not like five or ten. And let's just not really judge it until we get to a hundred. And that's kind of how we started it. And then of course, as you know, you do anything enough, you learn, you figure out what works. Ideally, if it's fun, you keep going. And it's been fun. And it's kept going. It's done really well, which is great.

I totally remember that show. I used to watch it. It's kind of like a talk show style. You had Wistia branded all up. It looked really slick. The thing I liked the most was that you put a face to the Wistia brand. I thought that was super important.

I think that is like look, that's always been important. We kind of discovered that by accident. You know I've told this story before, so I'll keep it short but like we tried to pretend to be a big successful company when we were first starting. So if you went to our website, you looked at the team page, it would be like management. It didn't say management, it said the team or. No, it said management. And there were four of us. To imply there was more, there were more people than the management. There weren't. You know, like that's all it was. Um, and we didn't have our pictures cuz we didn't want anyone to know how young we were. You know, I was 22 when we started. Um, we had like a laundry list of accomplishments. They, you know, they included accomplishments from college and maybe some high school ones thrown in there. Like it was like it was just. Exactly. But we, you know, it's tried to, we were trying to seem big and it, you know, I think if you were to go back and look for this on the like Wayback Machine, you'd be like that doesn't look big, it looks small. But I didn't, I didn't understand that at the time. And it was actually when we started really being comfortable sharing who we were and the fact that it was. We updated the team page to go. When we, we'd hired two more people, we felt really guilty they weren't on the site cause they couldn't show their parents that they actually worked here. That's all we had.

And so we updated it. We had these goofy photos of us. And.

My co founder had. It was one of someone's birthday on the team. And my co founder Brendan thought it would be funny is if he. If you put an Easter egg on the page and so if you typed dance on the page it would randomly switch between three different images of us and it would play music and lasers would show up. And this is just like a joke. And what ended up happening is that that page went viral and people loved the Easter egg of this thing. And it was actually the least professional we'd ever been perceived as like in our B2B selves. Right? It was like the least professional we'd ever been. And yet two weeks later we used to have a two week trial. Two weeks later we got the most new sales we had gotten in a day. And I think it was like this moment of purity. Like there was no. We weren't big enough to. For it to be lost in the data. We were so small. That's the only way you could tell and see it was working. And it was like, wait, it's not professional, it's just us and people like it. And so it was this spark that like turned into the fire that I think is like a lot of how I still think about the brand is like you gotta put people out there, you gotta let someone connect with people. And actually I think you didn't ask this question, but with where we're going with AI, I think that people are gonna get, become even more important than they've been historically.

Go a little deeper there if you don't mind.

Oh well, when you can, when anyone can make a fake AI version of themselves or just a fake person in mid journey and put it into hey Gen and you know, animate it, we're going to start to think a talking head is not real by default. And that seems scary. But the question is, how will you know if someone is real and if you do, will you treat the information from them differently? And I think you're going to know someone's real based on.

Meeting them in person, based on spending enough time with them in different situations online to understand that this really seems like somebody who's real. There's AI talking heads that are stable today, pretty convincing walking around lighting changes, not convincing. And if you do connect with somebody in person, if you do feel like you know somebody, you're going to trust them like probably 10 times more than the thing that, that, that is completely AI driven, that you know, is AI driven. And so I think it's going to basically mean like we're going to need to lean into in person things, lean into real conversations, lean into the, the things that are not scalable that we've always done. And that's going to create the trust. And then if you have, you know, trust in Joe or Chris and you've seen us enough, you've interacted with us, then that will actually stand out even more than it does today.

So how do you suggest we stay authentic and real and still leverage AI in our business?

I think some simple things are going to be like when you're making videos, do them in, in environments where it's harder to fake. So like walking videos, lighting changes, multiple people on camera at the same time.

You know, selfie videos where we see like you into basically seeing people interacting with each other. Very hard to fake. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a long time I think before that is like really easy. And it might never happen because also it's there's gonna be no point to it. Like people are gonna go for the most obvious things to start. And I think it's gonna be kind of similar to what we saw with like when you could automate email marketing. So you know, before automated email marketing it was like I sent you an email, I sent you an email. And then it was like, oh, people send emails pretending to be me. And then eventually people might make these personalized ones and the merge tags and all this kind of stuff. And we're awash with email, which makes it actually pretty easy to ignore.

But if you can find a way again, if you, you get an email from someone that you feel like you actually know, you will read that one and you're going to know the other ones are fake or spam. And I think, I think we're going to be entering a, a world like that. Um, and by the way, I'm not saying that AI is bad for video. I think there's a ton of things that it, it's already making the video creation much easier and I think it's going to continue to do that. Um, and so I think you can probably make better authentic videos more easily today with AI than you could before because you can, you can automate and augment some of the production processes. But I think this like specific avatar ing of things and AI voice cloning is going to, it's going to create a lot of issues that are hard to predict and it's going to, it's going to create more demand for trust.

I take us back a little bit to when you were raising some capital at the very beginning and when you were starting to land your first clients.

When we started, my co founder and I really didn't understand any of this stuff. We didn't understand anything about fundraising or what was possible. Like I'd heard the term venture capital. I had met a couple venture capitalists, but I didn't really understand what they did. And so when we started we just had, we had some very meager savings and we said, all right, we're going to survive on this. So our funding was basically trying to figure out how to live as cheaply as possible. And that looked like moving into a 10 person house and you know, living and working in this house with a bunch of friends, sharing food with all of them, just getting expenses as low as possible. I remember it was to the degree where we, back then we needed printers because you know, we would print out a deal and people would sign it. And so I remember running out of ink and being like, well we can't buy ink Inc. Is so expensive. And so I went to my roommates, I'm like, someone's gotta have a printer from college they're not using somewhere in the basement. And they're like, yeah. And you go dig around, find the printer, go print out your pieces of paper, go try to get the deal signed, like. And that is just what we were doing. And so that was like, the initial approach is just cut cost as much as possible. And then it took us about, we started 2006, took us about a year to the day to get the first paying customer for what Wistia is today. And.

As we did that, we got about one new paying customer per month, which felt incredibly slow. You know, to go like 30 days or 29 days out of a month and not get a deal felt painful. But actually in hindsight, there were pretty incredible customers. Medical device company.

Big television company.

You know, a large telecommunications company, A Cirque du Soleil was one of our early customers. It was kind of remarkable in hindsight that like in our first 10 customers we had this mix of businesses. They were all like, they're mix of sizes and they were trusting us for the same thing. And when we started to realize what was happening, you know, I remember doing a demo, sitting on the, the foot of my bed pretending, trying to pretend to be big, right? And.

Trying to convince somebody, you know, that we couldn't even see each other on video back then. It's just an audio on audio call trying to convince somebody they should use Wistia and them being convinced and me thinking, I think we need help, like I think we need, I think we might be onto something. And so we ended up figuring out about raising angel money. And we went and decided to raise. We raised 650,000 in angel money. And we wanted to do that to get help. So we get. We had met two people, we wanted to join the team that were both more experienced than us. We thought we get these two people, things will happen faster. So we ended up, took us about four months raised around, hired these two people. It was still a slog. And just as we were running out of money.

Like literally, you know, we had a big legal bill that we didn't expect that showed up like, oh God, like this is the, this might be the last month of Wistia. Right? At that same time we had launched a new version of Wistia where you could self service purchase. It had embedding with analytics. We built analytics for people to privately Share video and understand if their teams were watching it. And we got requests. Can you make it so this works to the videos on our website. And so we started, you know, doing that and it seemed like it was going to work. So we launched new version of Wistiary, could do that and you could sign up without talking to us. And we were. Now, I mean, I'm fast forwarding a little bit, but we're three and a half years into when we started. We have like 30 paying customers. And in the course of three months, just as we're running out of money, we had gone from 30 to 200. And so it was clear we were onto something. And we had never seen that in this, you know, this pace before. So I went back to our original angel investors, one angel investor in particular, and I said, hey, I got good news and bad news. Like, bad news is we're running out of money. Like, it's bad. But the good news is like, look at this customer graph. Like, I think we figured it out. And they were incredible. And they're like, yes, that is amazing. You should raise more money. And I want to help you raise the money. I'm like, okay. They're like, yeah, raising money sucks. Like, we should raise this money quickly so you can get back to building the business. I'm like, that sounds great. How are we going to do it? And they're like, all right, fly down to Florida, meet me, I'll put you on my jet, I'll fly you around the east coast and we'll go meet a bunch of people who I think would be interested in this. And we did that. And basically the end of a day, we'd raised 800,000 bucks. And he goes, there you go. And so we closed that round.

And the funny thing of that moment too is we told all those investors like, hey, we got this figured out. We're not going to need to raise more money. And they're like, we don't. They actively said this out loud. They're like, we don't believe you, but that's fine. Just go ahead. And we never, we never raise money again. And so we were able to scale the business, scale it the old fashioned way with getting customers who pay you things for service rendered. And yeah, that's the way the business was for a very long time from 2006 to 2017.

So you spent one year or so developing Wistia without a single paying client. What was your take on that? That must have been gnarly.

I mean, the truth is we didn't spend a year developing Wistia. We spent a year trying crazy different things.

Yeah, I mean, we started with a very different plan, which was all. It was always in video. That's the one thing that really stayed consistent. Like we saw online video changing in a big, big way. Like we started like six months after YouTube and I saw on YouTube this community, this vibrant community taking off at this incredible pace. And I actually had done film and video in college and I tried to be part of these online video communities. And none of them were vibrant. None of them actually had like people uploading things on a regular basis. Everything was stale and old. And YouTube was really different. And one of our key insights was like, all right, the bandwidth is there now, like the broadband is there so people can watch videos at home. But also YouTube was doing the encoding of the videos for you. And before that, if you wanted to upload a video online, you had to do the encoding. So you had to know how to do it. And the problem was there was like you could encode into RealPlayer and the people who had RealPlayer could watch it. And if you didn't have real player, you watch it and a few other formats. And so you're taking a risk every time that some percentage of people wouldn't be able to see your video. And YouTube by doing the encoding all into a format that everyone could watch. That seemed like the key. And so when we started that's we, we said we're going to, whatever we do, we're going to make sure we do that. And the other piece of the puzzle was that YouTube was using open source tools to do the encoding so anyone could do it. That was the light bulb. And then it was like the first thing we tried to make was a filmmaking competition website where we would get big brands to sponsor the creation of ads. We got like, we started for about a month and then we gave up on that because we realized we had no connections to anybody. And we saw some vague competitor that got bought. And we thought that meant that like we were going to be in trouble. We didn't understand that meant that that competitor was basically going out of business.

We tried to make a portfolio website for artists. We did make a portfolio website for artists that we launched that was separate, that got hundreds of users. But we felt like we'd only ever be able to make money with advertising and we weren't ever going to get it to take off. We did a backend video hosting, an encoding thing that was the closest to Istia. Cause we'd built some of that tech now and we started to see the value in it. So we were trying to pitch startups on like, you know, using our APIs to add video to their products. People use Wistia for that today. But that was like kind of still pre Wistia. We were trying a lot of different stuff. And then we talked to our first customer who basically just said, hey, we need help with video. Can you guys come help us? And we went to talk to them and they said they wanted a private and secure way to share video. And we're like, huh? Why wouldn't use an FTP server? And they're like, well, we want a way place where people can comment and people can organize their videos. There can be access controls. I was like, well, that's funny because we were just about to build that into this filmmaking site that we've made. Maybe we should make it separate. And then you could just sign up for that. And they're like, that sounds great. And so two weeks we built this thing, we went back to them and like, would you pay 400amonth for this? And they're like, yeah, like again, in hindsight I understand how cheap that was for them. And it was that moment that was like, that was the first version of Wistia.

So tell me about the HBO thing. It wasn't long after that that HBO came knocking at your door, right?

We're probably three months into this new world. We have like three paying customers and we get connected to somebody who says, hey.

I think HBO might be interested in what you're doing. I was like, what are you talking about? And remember I went to school for film and video, so the dream was like to talk to hbo. And actually I'd worked on a feature, like documentary, and we tried to get HBO to distribute it and they were close and they said no. So here I am like, just like two years later and HBO might be interested in what we're doing. This is crazy. And so we go talk to HBO about managing all their dailies. So basically like, you know, the behind the scenes footage that they shoot every day, that is not the final edits, like the raw footage.

They need to send it to folks who are producers on shows and.

And they send it to them for approval that like, hey, we're making progress. And this is what the acting looks like, this is what the lighting looks like. You know, you can get a sense of what the show is going to be like. And what they were doing at that time is that they, at the end of Each day they would take the dailies, they'd print it on a dvd, they would hand it to a courier. The courier would get on a flight and they would fly it if they needed to, to get it to the right producers. And I can't tell you the exact names, but there is someone you have heard of who was producing a show, a very, very famous person who they were. They were basically, someone's getting a flight every day and they're flying, they're flying the dailies to Ireland so that this person could see it from la. They said, can you help us with this problem? And I'm like, so what you need is a private, secure way to, to share the video so you could upload it, someone could see it and comment on real time instead of waiting. And they're like, yeah. I'm like, we got that. That sounds great. And they're like, okay. And so then they start testing us and we're watching and you know, you can go. It's like, you know, back then I was like, count number four, whatever is hbo. And you go in there. The first videos they upload are, are dailies from the show Sopranos. It's, you know, it's videos that no one's ever seen of these actors. Everyone knows. And yet your mind is just kind of being blown. Like, is this is all happening? I. I can't believe it's happening. I can't believe how fast happening. It's just so mind blowing that this is us like, that we did this. And so the long and short of it is that they get really excited and we have to try to come up with what this deal is going to look like. And we come up with a price. And I should mention, the first customer's paying us $400 a month. The second customer's paying us like, I think maybe $300 a month. The third customer's paying us like $500 a month. That's the range we're talking about. And by the way, I'm excited about that because our total expenses at this period of time, and I am not lying, this is the truth, is the real number for Brendan and I to live for, the servers, for the food, for our basic needs. Our total monthly expenses for the both of us is sixteen hundred dollars a month.

So. So these three customers get us pretty close, right? So I don't feel like before the HBO thing, I don't feel like I need that much. I'm like, we get one or two more customers, like we're gonna be cash Flow positive. This could be, this is gonna be insane. Right? So the party that we're working with that's introduced us to them is like, all right, comes up with a plan. And they're like, we're going to pitch this deal at $750,000 a year.

And I am like, no, this can't be. Like, this is, this is impossible.

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But we decide we trust them. Like they know quote business better than us. So we trust this other party. We send the price to hbo. They don't say anything. They're just like, whatever sounds good. So I'm feeling pretty good about this. I, I, I am really starting to think like this might actually happen. And by the way, this is when, this is the time period of this is like we're raising our first round of angel funding. So in the deck of the angel funding, we're telling investors, here's our current customers and here is our perspective. And obviously HBO is the top of the list and obviously put the deal size in there. So it says $750,000, whatever.

So I'm feeling good and then I get this call, or actually I call, I discover that there is, like, going to be a meeting with HBO and it's going to happen in person in LA in two days. And the party that's introduced us to hbo, which is going to take some percentage of the deal, it's not totally figured out how much they're gonna go to this meeting. I start to get a really bad feeling and I'm like, like, this is our company. Like, this is our software, it's our product. Like, I don't know that we cannot be at this meeting because, like, we, we need to know what's being said, we need to know what's being pitched. We need to, you know, all this stuff. And so we, you know, remember, we're still losing money, we've not saved up money. We're a year into this thing, so we've dwindled our savings accounts, we have very little money. Uh, but we decide we have to go. And so I call the assistant of the person who I'm talking to. I'm like, where's the meeting happening? And they tell me, and we book flights, we go out to la and we show up at the meeting. We just show up, hey, guys, we're here. And they're like, whoa. Like this, you know, even more context on this. Remember, I'm 22, we're, I'm meeting with HBO, remember, I'm also trying to, like, present this, like, businessy vibe to the world. And we meet with their head of production and he's really there and he's like, I've been looking at this Wistia thing. It looks really cool.

And, like, whoever did this, like, has built something great. I'm like, oh, my God, this is amazing. Like, I can't believe I, I, I, I can't believe that the head of hbo, the production hbo, thinks that that thing is great. And he's also like, the coolest guy I've ever met. He's, like, wearing a leather jacket and he's like, he doesn't sit in a chair, he sits up on the counter. Like, it's just all this stuff, you know, it's just like, it's like a caricature of what you would think. And it's like come to. It's. It's happened in real life. Um, and, but, but the thing that they tell us in this meeting is that they love everything about what we're doing. But the. But it's really important that for them to use this, they need it quote on prem. They need it on premise. So they need a version of Wistia that's hosted on a server in one of their racks, like in one of their closets. And this SaaS thing that we're doing, which is brand new at the time, they're afraid of it.

And this is so we're excited at first we think this isn't a big deal and then like we go home and we talk about it more and more and more like, well, if H2 is customer number four and they need us on prem, like there's. We're not gonna get them to budge on this thing. Like it seems unlikely we're get them to budge. We could put it on prem. It does almost nothing. This is the most simple app you've ever seen. Like, we could do it.

But like we're gonna need to service this thing. We're need to take care of it. So if we do this, it means we're probably gonna have to move to la. That's probably the most likely outcome. And then if we move to LA and HBO is our one customer who's asking us for this and we know they're going to ask us for other things and we're going to have to build it for HBO because they're paying us so much money. We're probably going to end up changing what this product is. We're probably going to make it hyper focused on this segment of the market. Like large studios with custom things doing it on prem and we're like, how many large studios are there? And we're doing the math. $750,000 a year. Like maybe we can get them to pay more, but we don't really. We already believe it's so much. We're like, shit, is this going to be like a $5 million market? We're just going to tap out. As we're having this conversation in the week following this trip, Bren and I look at each other and we realize we can't do this deal.

And even though all we want to do is do the deal and tell everyone we've done the deal and be excited about this, we, we realize, like, we think it's going to pigeonhole us and we're going to end up doing something too Small. And I know that sounds crazy for a company that's making like $1,300 a month in revenue, but it made. It made sense to us. And so we told the party that it introduced us, we told hbo and they were disappointed, and we said no. And then we had to go back and tell all the angel investors that we'd said no. And why. And I remember being, like, feeling kind of dejected and kind of terrified that we'd made this decision. And also, like, kind of crazy that we made this decision.

But obviously it worked out. And I think, like, one of the other interesting things in this for me over the years is now having also done angel investments myself and worked with entrepreneurs, is like, we actually had clarity on what we want. We were building clarity on what we wanted to do, which is build something for, like, SMBs, do something at scale, not rely just on one customer, Think really long term and try to work in, like, a really big market. And all those things, like, eventually did come true, but it was a very, very scary thing to say no to and kind of shocking that it even happened.

So this kind of seems like when you develop the North Star of Wistia, right?

It was the beginning of that. And I think if we hadn't been like, talking to such a diversity of customers, I think we probably would have done it right. Like, if they had been our first customer, then we probably would have said, like, look, the calculus on this is like, we should do it, and if only the only people who are interested were, like, film production studios, we probably would have done it. It's. It's more just that, like, our first customers, it was like 10 customers from 10 different industries. That was. What was so surprising was that so many different people were looking for this. I think it's very, very easy to underestimate online just how big markets can be. And like, you know, it's like, if you get 10 customers, that means you probably can get a hundred.

And if you can get to a hundred, probably means you can get to a thousand. When you get to a thousand, you probably get to 10,000, and if you get to 10,000, you can probably get to a hundred. And I think it's hard to think that way. That's like, hey, the Internet connects us all. And if you're solving a problem that is a real.

Tactile problem for people, they will explore it and take a look and test it out and try it. And like, it came true just more in a way than I ever thought it would.

Is there a framework or some kind of methodology you can share here that helped you build a solid customer base and help you scale your company.

Well, it's funny cause also, like, I put this video out about my goals for 2024, which is something new. I haven't done this before, but I've been trying really hard, like as we talked about earlier, to like, really put myself out there more, learn more openly.

Get more feedback, openly share what I'm learning, all that kind of stuff. And my goals this year are really trying to listen even harder to folks. Um, and what I mean by that is there's often a message behind the message. Um, and. Or we might be biased to think something's wrong. And you have to overcome your own bias to hear the truth. And so listen harder means like, listen and then ask more questions. And then listen and ask more questions. Then listen and ask more questions. I also talk about getting closer to our customers. And this is something that happens as you scale is early days. I mean, I'm giving you really a lot of specifics about a couple customers, right? I knew every specific about every customer. Over time, you end up with graphs, you end up with data and analytics that show you what are the popular features, what people don't like, what do they like, what has a high nps, what doesn't. And it's really easy to rely on that as opposed to relying on the qualitative on the ground stories and issues and challenges that people have. And you have to explicitly try to do that. And as a company grows, you have to try to do that in different ways to get closer to the customer. My last goal, just to finish that thought, is like, to try not to spin people out as much. Because again, one of the other things that happens as a company gets bigger is like, you know, there's more people that you're not working with every day. You could say something that's a thought that I might feel comfortable saying to a friend or someone that I work really closely with that's I'm testing it out. I'm trying to get feedback, I'm trying to. I'm trying to share something that's in progress, but it doesn't come across like that to somebody who doesn't know you. And so you say one thing and they go do a bunch of work trying to figure it out when that was not the intention at all. So trying to be even more aware of the things that I'm saying. And I think like, so I say all that as context because I'm still working on it and thinking about it and trying to do right by customers, both qualitatively and quantitatively. But when you go to scaling, I really look very, very closely at, like, the people who are actually using something. Why are they using it? What benefit do they get? What do they feel like when they use it? What's. What's missing? What's stopping them? If you started using something, it stopped using it. Why? And the closer you get to that and the. The specific examples, you can start to see what are the things that are the same across the specific examples, that of customers using your products. And if you do see things that are similar, if you're thinking at. About those things in kind of an exponential way, you'll realize, like, hey, if this. If people are having problems, for example, problems with the product, that's not recording things properly, when you're trying to record videos, they're going to stop using. They're not going to tell you that necessarily. They're just going to stop using it. They're going to change their behavior, they're going to do something else. But if you can find a way to make that really reliable, and you could find a way to make it not only reliable, but actually delightful, if you could start to save them time in different ways, suddenly it switches, and they're going to start telling lots of people about it, they're going to start using it a lot more. And like, this specific example is actually not that unique. Like, it's indicative of a much larger problem often. And so, you know, whenever we do something new, we've done a lot of new things at Wisti the last few years. I try to get really close to the customer stories. For the first few, the first five, the first 10, I'm asking questions. The first 100, what does it look like? And then as it starts scaling, you start seeing, like, each specific thing, each specific challenge that somebody has, you can fix it or help them overcome it. That doesn't affect them. That affects the other 10,000 people who are using the thing. There's. There's always more nuance than you would think. Um, and I think there's a trick I try to play on myself is if I'm ever in a room with a lot of people, I try to estimate, like, how many people are in this room and what percentage of the customer base is that.

And so, like, I was at a comedy show that was in an arena, had 10,000 people, and I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is what 10,000 Wistians would look like 10,000 people using Wistia. This is what it would look like. And we're like, fuck, that's a lot of people. And I think we screw it up. We get obsessed with these huge numbers and we forget that there's actual people behind the numbers. And when you actually think about it, there's a lot of small numbers that are really big. And what I mean, you can have 200 people watching an hour long podcast. That's 200 people is a ton. That's a lot, a lot of time. And I think people, it's really easy because you compare that to like a million here or 10 million there, whatever, it feels small and you don't actually do it justice. And I think we lose perspective on that. And I think it's when you have that perspective, it's like much easier to get excited about the right things and then to learn the right things.

All right, so someone's about to jump into Wisty or considering it right now. What's something that they really got to know about it?

The thing I would say is like if you've used Wistia in the past, we've just changed a lot in the last couple years. So um, our, our vision is to be an all in one, easy to use video marketing platform, which means hosting and analytics, the ability to create channels of your content, get your content indexed, understand what's performing, collaboration around videos, all that kind of stuff. And so things we've been, I'll even last year we launched 80 customer facing features that we told them about. Like we launched more than that terms of bugs, but like 80 features that we announced 12 in 2022. So huge change for the business and huge change for the customer base. And what you would see if you were to go look through those is basically Wistia is trying to help you make videos, repurpose videos, edit videos.

And do kind of all these different things. And we're also making a really big push on webinars in particular. And so our vision is like marketers spend too much time using too many different tools and the time between tools often like kind of painful. So you know, you do a live event and then you have to download it and then you put it in editor and then you have to adjust it and take out the mistakes or delete the black at the beginning and then take out the Q and A and then you re upload it to something like us, then you publish it. And so we're trying to get to that place where it's like and We're. And we're mostly there today where it's like you do a live event shows up instantly on your account, and there's an editor, and it's not designed for.

A professional video artist, designed for a marketer. So there's a transcript. You can edit the transcript. You can make quick adjustments and changes. You can then directly publish that onto your site or put it in a channel or send it out to a. All. All that kind of stuff. And so it's just, it's honestly a lot of the stuff we've talked about in our content for a very long time. We're trying to deliver the product versions of those in the product. And I would say it's like mid 22 is when it's all started happening. So just very, very different. If you haven't played around with us recently, this sounds funny to say, but shipping product that is good quickly is hard. And you know, we've been around 17 years and it was really like year, like 15 and a half, year 16, where we finally figured out how to do it at scale, where finally it's like, oh, we are shipping a lot of product very quickly on many fronts. And I'm really proud of the product that we're creating. But the way that you get there is with customer feedback. And so that's the thing I would say is like, if you do get in there and try stuff, like tell us, tell me you can find me on LinkedIn, shoot me notes for your feedback or questions or issues or what have you. And the team craves this stuff. And so that's the other thing I just put out there is like, if you do try us out, please, please, please send us the feedback. It makes it easier for us to build better stuff and hopefully can reduce pain and make your life a little bit easier in the process.

All right, so I gotta shout out wistia.com definitely go over there, see what they're cooking up. It's what we've been talking about here. And go follow along with Talking Too Loud. That's. That's your podcast, Chris. It's definitely. It's super fun, so you'll love it. Lastly, before we wrap up, what's something that you've been totally obsessed with lately that you can share?

I'll just go with the first thing that comes to mind, which is I last year decided that I wanted to read more books, like physical books. You know, I was early adopter to the Kindle. I've done lots of audiobooks over the years, and that Felt like a really nice thing. I was like, oh, I'm working out and I'm listening to an audiobook or I'm communing analysis. This is. I'm just. I'm multitasking. So great. And last year, for one day, I was just like, you know what? If someone recommends a book to me, I see a book that sounds interesting, I'm gonna buy a physical copy of it. I'm just gonna put it around my house. And I've put books all over my house. And what. It's changed my behavior so much. I can't believe it. Like, I went from reading a few books a year to, like, last year I read 15. I've already read one this. This year. And we're on since January 4th. And I found that it's been this incre. I know this sounds so simple, but honestly, this behavior change has been just so lovely. And it's meant that I'm spending less time on TikTok and Instagram and just, like, scrolling and a lot more time just like, thinking and then talking to other people about this stuff. And so I'm just really excited about that right now. And I encourage you, like, if you're considering this, like, give yourself permission. Get the books, buy physical copies, litter them around. Cause the other thing happens, people ask you about them, like, why is this here? I'm like, I don't know. Someone told me it was good and then you read it. And the other thing I would say is if you read a book, it sucks. Throw it out. Like. But that's. That's kind of what I'm excited about right now. And it's. It's really. The fact that I've already read a book this year completely shocked me. I couldn't believe it. The other thing I'm really excited about is.

My family does, like, Secret Santa. And normally when you do it, like, you know, everybody. There's my family, there's a lot of people in it. So it's like, you know, I'm getting my. My nephew or I'm getting my brother or whatever, and everyone makes their list of their stuff that they want. And I expect I'm gonna get, like, stuff that I want, but, like, socks and, like a sweater and whatever. And my older brother. This year, I. In my list of wants, as a joke, I put like an F1 simulator. I was like, no one's gonna get me this. It's way beyond the limit of, like, what people are gonna get. And he was just like. I think felt like the older brother energy, and he just decided to go for it. And so on Christmas, I open up, like, you know, a wheel and pedals and the seat and, like, all this stuff. And then my wife got me PS5. So now I have, like, I'm, like, playing grand trees all the time. And, like, I have, like, an F1 simulator at home, and it is so fun. It's unbelievable.

Chris, I appreciate you, man. This was a blast. Thank you for spending the time with us here. I got to get my hands all over one of those F1 simulators. I'm already jealous.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. And thanks for having the podcast. I mean, I think, like, you know, building companies is hard. It's really hard.

And I think the stories that are told around this stuff, like, hopefully if you're in a situation where you're dealing with this hard stuff, like, it gives you a little glimmer of hope, like you can get through it, because that is what it takes. It takes perseverance more than anything. And that's why I love, like, the stuff you do is just helping more people, you know, hopefully glean a little bit more perseverance and inspiration to keep going.

Thank you again. Hope you had a fun time listening y', all and watching. Until next time. Take care. All right. All right. That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all about living to work. It's all about working to live if you need to do the work. But, you know, work can be fun, and it should be fueling for your life. So if you enjoy enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others. The way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through word of mouth. So if it is telling your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list, writing a review or whatever it might be. Everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the Hustle and Flow channel, our podcast, and I will see you next time.