Wistia

Mat Patterson [00:00:00]: Chris Savage might have the name of a minor league wrestling heel, but actually he's the CEO of video marketing platform Wistia. Would a CEO by any other name be C-Suite? If he'd been born Chris Mild, would he have been as successful?

Chris Savage [00:00:15]: No, I don't think so. No, I'm pretty sure everything that I've done to my last name and I welcome that.

Mat Patterson [00:00:21]: So there you are, an immediate action item for all you future CEOs listening. Get yourself a powerful name.

"The Simpsons" [00:00:28]: From this day forward, your name shall be Max Power.

Mat Patterson [00:00:32]: This season on the Supportive I'm talking to founders about starting and staying customer centric. In this episode, Chris Savage tells us how he and his co founder Brendan have grown Wistia the product and Wistia the company over close to two decades. We get into company culture and values, customer feedback, and oddly, posting DVDs of actual surgeries. Let's go.

Chris Savage [00:00:58]: My name is Chris Savage. I'm the co founder and CEO at Wistia.

Mat Patterson [00:01:01]: Wistia's story goes right back to the early 2000s, when a young Chris attended Brown University studying art semiotics, which is exploring how artworks create and communicate meaning through signs and symbols, but also basically meant learning about films. Down the dorm hall lived Brendan Schwartz, who would go on to become Wistia's co founder and cto.

Chris Savage [00:01:23]: So the first year of college he lived right down the way and we had a lot of antics and craziness together, worked a lot of projects in college. He was in some of my film projects. He made websites. He actually created a blogging platform before blogging platforms existed.

Mat Patterson [00:01:41]: Chris and Brendan quickly became friends and soon were looking for ways to use their complementary skill sets to build something together.

Chris Savage [00:01:48]: I had coded in high school and thought for a while that that would be what I would do. And then when I as a part of making movies, I also ended up having to learn how to do a lot of graphic design and stuff like that. So I was like designing mockups of things that we should build in the early days, thinking about building the product itself and we were actually like, hey, let's. We should really divide and conquer in a, in a big way. It's like, so, okay, I'll do marketing and sales and try to go find us customers. I also am a very excitable person, love talking to people so that fit well. And he would crank on building the product. And even today, while we both do a lot of different things, those are still kind of how things are divided.

Mat Patterson [00:02:28]: As much as the tech world loves the story of a solo genius creating something from nothing. It usually takes more than one mind to make it work. Chris and Brendan meet in college at my old company, Campaign Monitor. It was founded by two mates from elementary school and ZSA keyboards from the last episode originated with Erez meeting his industrial manufacturing boss, Dima, and their two skill sets and approaches meshing together. There is a kind of magic in meeting someone at just the right moment in your life. Someone who has not just complementary skills, but who holds similar values. Imagine what today's music might look like if John, Paul, George and Ringo had never met. Although the biggest Beatles pretty famously went through some difficult times as they went through their life together.

Mat Patterson [00:03:13]: You should watch that get back doco.

Mat Patterson [00:03:14]: If you haven't already.

Mat Patterson [00:03:15]: And the same is true for Chris and Brendan.

Chris Savage [00:03:18]: Brendan and I, yeah, I think, I think we didn't. We knew that we had a lot of similar views about the world and about products, like, what products were good, what products were not good. I think we saw then and actually still see that what we, when we talk about where things are going to go, we're often very aligned in our beliefs as to like, how markets will evolve, how technology will be adopted, and that comes in handy to be aligned with your co founder on that day. Yeah, but, yeah, I think it's also, it's interesting. I mean, we've had a partnership for 19 years and I think in a, in any relationship, be it like a founding relationship in a company, a personal relationship that turns into a marriage, friendship, you, you have to experience life, you have to experience work, you have to experience challenges, to even sometimes test what your values really are. And so I think at this point, you know, there was, there was more maybe first five or six years, I would say Brendan and I were like pushing on things at different times, trying to figure out, do we actually agree on these, these hard to agree on points, um, and learned and evolved our values to the point where I think we're like incredibly aligned. He usually knows what I'm gonna think. I usually know what he's gonna think.

Chris Savage [00:04:41]: And it's made it really easy, honestly. But it took time to get to that place. And I saw the, at least for me, the same pattern in the relationship with my wife where it's like we spent a long time going through life trying to figure out, like, do we align on these very hard things, how you'd raise kids, how, how you'd spend money, how you'd spend time with friends and family, politically, all these different things. And yeah, eventually you kind of Go through enough hard stuff that you're like, we do have similar values and that makes things much easier.

Mat Patterson [00:05:09]: Values. Sometimes in a company, values are just trite slogans that you stick on the wall or post on your LinkedIn header and they have no impact on the day to day decisions made in the business. But what I'm hearing from all the customer centric founders that I've talked to in this series is that they came in wanting to build a company that works in a certain way, that treats customers in a certain way. And they all want to make money, of course, but they didn't choose their field based on money. They found the money by standing out being different in their chosen fields. Wistia's founders, campaign monitors too. They had never worked in a real job before starting their own company. If you don't know how companies usually work, you're not constrained by those norms.

Mat Patterson [00:05:51]: You just do what seems right at the time. And I can personally attest sometimes that means things go way off the rails. But it can also mean you end up building a company that is quite different to work in and different to be a customer of in the best ways. I asked Chris what type of company he had in mind when starting out, given his relative lack of corporate experience.

Chris Savage [00:06:12]: I think I knew what I liked. I liked companies and experiences that took a very long term view on, on building a great brand. Like I, I knew that I liked that. You're right. I think you come in with a blank canvas and we definitely came in with a blank canvas on how to do this. And what that has meant is that we found our ways to things that we didn't even realize how unique they were. And sometimes we've had to reinvent the wheel. And so I've tried to learn over the years how to know if we're actually reinventing the wheel or not.

Chris Savage [00:06:49]: In which case like let's shortcut to the end and otherwise when we aren't. And that really is like an open option, an open canvas for where you should end up knowing when to just.

Mat Patterson [00:07:00]: Use the thing that's already been done and tested a million times. And when that wheel actually needs reinventing, that takes judgment and experience. But before all of that, Chris and Brendan needed to figure out what product they should build. They had found some early traction with Tropist, a portfolio website for that is.

Chris Savage [00:07:19]: What we found our way to within like six months of starting. And we realized that monetizing that was going to be very difficult. And so we didn't even know what angel money was. So we had to, we had to figure out a way to make money. So we started talking to people that we'd met at meetups through our community that we were starting to build. And it ended up being a lot of startups and businesses who basically wanted to do something with video. Didn't really know where to go. And I should have mentioned at this moment in time, YouTube started 2005, this is 2006.

Chris Savage [00:07:52]: It's a year and a half later. There's not a lot of options, but people, you know, you have this idea of like, what, maybe, maybe online video will work? Because before this period, it didn't. So people were. Our customers were sending DVDs around and drives and all these different types of things. So we found our way to helping companies securely and privately share video. That's what our first customers were doing. It was something that we knew filmmakers would be interested in. I was a filmmaker.

Chris Savage [00:08:20]: I had friends who are filmmakers and, you know, I would finish edits and I, I print to a dvd. So I'd, you know, write a DVD with my computer. Then I would go over to FedEx and I would ship it to somebody so they could see the finished product. So I knew that was happening. And that seemed silly. So that was an obvious place for us to go. The thing that was surprising was we were able to get a medical device. Company was our first customer.

Chris Savage [00:08:45]: They were shipping DVDs around of videos of people doing surgeries with their device.

Mat Patterson [00:08:51]: Sharing DVDs of surgery. Some real dark web stuff when you take it out of context. But could Wistia have become the world's greatest online home for streaming surgeries?

Chris Savage [00:09:01]: I mean, we were definitely thinking about that. I, you know, there was, I remember features that that group requested that we didn't do because we didn't think they're applicable to other areas. And it was kind of hard to say no to that. But we felt like from the beginning, like, hey, if we're going to do this, let's try to make something that's like, broadly applicable. The closest thing to that we could have done where we would not have ended up here today was we had the potential to get HBO as a customer. And we were very close and actually ended up walking away from the deal. And HBO is going to be using us for dailies. So all the stuff that they shoot every day and that they need to send to producers all over the place, they had this problem they called the Tom Hanks problem.

Mat Patterson [00:09:46]: Okay, pause right now. Think about what the Tom Hanks problem Might be. Is it that weird bit with the adult woman in Big is it finding somewhere to store all of his typewriters is a chat.

Chris Savage [00:09:58]: Tom Hanks was producing a show that was being shot in LA and he was spent a lot of time in some castle in Ireland. And a courier, a human being would take the DVD and get in a plane and fly it. And that was a daily occurrence.

Mat Patterson [00:10:10]: All right.

Chris Savage [00:10:11]: And so we got into that deal, got really close. They used Wistia, they uploaded behind the scenes stuff from Sopranos and all these things. It was, it was such a, that was like account number four. It was insane that this was happening. But they, we, we knew that to really serve them right they would need to have an on premise solution. It was just Brendan and I, we were in Boston, they were in la. The only way to do on premise was going to go install something there. We couldn't do support across the country at this stage for this.

Chris Savage [00:10:39]: So we felt like if we did that deal we'd have to move to la. And then I think if we had done that, you know, hopefully we would have been successful in the media world helping them with secure sharing. But I don't think we have found our way to what we're doing today if we had stayed on that path.

Mat Patterson [00:10:55]: So Chris and Brendan made the hard call, doubled down serving their other early customers who were not all HBO level video specialists.

Chris Savage [00:11:04]: We felt like because we were seeing regular companies use us and they valued what we had so much because video is actually so hard for them. And that was like an interesting thing that was true then and is still true now where the production companies, they were experts of video so they were already measuring things in gigs. They understood like infrastructure, prices, like it was going to be a business that was going to be just very different to serve. And we were discovering that the interfaces we built, if they were actually really easy then that was valuable and it was particularly valuable to companies that didn't. Where video is not their expertise.

Mat Patterson [00:11:47]: And in those early days they were always hungry for customer feedback.

Chris Savage [00:11:51]: It's figuring out like what matches with what your customers actually need. And your customers needs are constantly evolving, the market is constantly changing. And so a lot of this comes down to I would say learning as fast as you can these different fronts and putting them, putting them together. But yeah, it's, you always have assumptions and you always have to try to figure out if you're going the right direction or not.

Mat Patterson [00:12:14]: And maybe the best place to talk to your current customers is when they're already coming to you to ask for help in your support queue. Wistia's founders stayed in that queue long after they had other people to take on the work.

Chris Savage [00:12:26]: Years and years and years. Ten years in, we're definitely still doing all hand support so everyone at Wistu would do support. And we felt that was incredibly important to make sure that people had a close connection to the customer base and their needs. Once we had enough customers, we realized that people weren't actually getting a full view of what you know, how common are the challenges that these people are running into. And we need to prioritize what we're building next. We had to build different systems and reports, analysis to kind of help us understand what to build next and but I still am try to stay incredibly close to customers. And I just, it takes doing it proactively. Like I've learned that the data, the quantitative data is not enough.

Chris Savage [00:13:13]: Like if you want to make these big decisions, you need the quantitative data so you can understand the trends, but you need the qualitative. You have to talk to individuals who are using your products, using competitive products, not sure if they should use your thing or not to really try to understand what's working and what's not for people. And you know, I think a thing I think about a lot is how important is for the is it for this problem to be solved. And you usually don't see that in like a graph, but I can tell you it's pretty easy to figure that out when you're talking to someone.

Mat Patterson [00:13:46]: Yes, not everything can be found in a graph. This is music to my ears.

Chris Savage [00:13:50]: Look at this graph.

Mat Patterson [00:13:55]: Get out of here. Chad Kroeger Take sting with you. Reports and metrics by their nature are only a shadow of reality. They reduce complex, confusing, inconsistent humans and their often inexplicable behavior right down to nice neat lines and numbers. Helpful for decision making, but incomplete. Talking to the actual customers in support or elsewhere makes for a much fuller picture. Chris went on to talk about how Wistia uses customer feedback when they decide what to work on.

Chris Savage [00:14:24]: You know, people write in with feature requests every single day. We have a huge number of them. And in there there are some that are going to really resonate with when we solve them. Some there are going to be like, you know, you'll have some incredible person with instincts who suggests something that most people would never even think to suggest. But if you can understand how much pain all of the collective people using your product experience when they have that issue, if it might be the perfect thing to Solve. Even though there's a small number of people talking about it. Right. Like the.

Chris Savage [00:14:55]: So that's what I mean is, like, you have to get into the conversations and understand how someone's really living their life. And like, at work, in B2B, like, how much does this really matter for your career, for the success of the company where you're at? How much time can I give you back? And that when you really are talking to a person and can see them not as a number on a graph, but as a human being, becomes much easier, in my experience, to prioritize those things. And that's just something I think in general with Internet businesses that people can. You should strive not to forget. Right? Is that, like, when there's four people, you know, if you have four customers, you're going to talk to all of them all the time. You understand what their needs are. You're going to understand if your product is your services, like, I'll buy them or not. There's 4,000.

Chris Savage [00:15:41]: You can't. And you shouldn't sit there and not talk to anybody. You should figure out, how do I keep talking to four a week? Just different ones. And that is such an important thing and something I think about a lot. Like, whenever I go to a sporting event or any. Anything where there's a big audience, I like to try to guess, how big is this audience? And then I like to think, like, what if all these people are Wistia customers? And often we have a lot of customers. You know, one of these stadiums, like, there might be the amount of Wistia customers. And I look and I think, this is how many people is like, this is it.

Chris Savage [00:16:22]: This is what that number means. Try to remember that. Because when you look at that and you think, if everyone in this stadium spent $20 a month on this product, that would be insane. That would be wild. And yet we see numbers like that all the time in software, and we just lose the emotional connection to them. And I think it makes it actually harder to make the right decisions sometimes.

Mat Patterson [00:16:46]: Is it that filmmaker's brain, that visualization of trying to tell a story through not just numbers on a graph, but trying to humanize something that tells you something more deeply?

Chris Savage [00:17:02]: It's funny. I've talked about this a lot, and I have not had someone make that direct connection before, but I think you're right. Yes, I think it is that. How do I tell that story and really understand the emotional or the financial impact of it?

Mat Patterson [00:17:18]: These days, Chris can talk to a few customers every week, but the Wistia support team talks to tons of them every day. Do all of those customer conversations just end in a quick answer and a quick resolve or does Wistia try to glean insights via support staff? I asked Chris.

Chris Savage [00:17:36]: There is a, there is a reality in business that we do need to reply it to customers and make sure that we have enough people and are full enough staffed. I think it just comes down to it's an investment level in the company which is like are we investing enough in this area that people actually have the time to do this, have the time to make our documentation and self service support as solid as possible. And so it's, I look at it as like a mix of things. It's like you want, you want to have everybody on that team able to actually respond to customers in the best way that we can. We also want to have at least some people on that team, if not everybody, but like make it somebody's role who's taking the stuff that's working really well and helping solve issues. Especially if there are issues that are not going to be solved fixed in the product, putting that in a place where it's as self service, as obvious as possible and then also coordinating directly with product managers on what are the issues and things that we can take away that we can improve. We'll do something. Usually it depends what what the cadence is.

Chris Savage [00:18:42]: But often like monthly, sometimes quarterly on like hey, here's the quarterly insights on things that are coming up a lot, things that have changed a lot based on products we've launched recently and it's a big report and you'll see big changes. You know, there was a moment we're having a lot of billing issues and that was then prioritized support kept bringing it up. A lot of them were pretty easy, were solvable issues in terms of like we could help somebody with them. But there was clearly an issue in, on the product side and so that got brought up isolated. This is, this is what we should dig into. Our team that was dealing with billing digged into it, solved it and we saw like a huge decrease the number of tickets. That's obviously what you want. And I think that's what you're saying is how do you make sure that you're doing that in a world where incentives might stop people from doing it?

Mat Patterson [00:19:30]: Is there a particular practice you have in terms of connecting those support people and the product managers? Like is there a process to it?

Chris Savage [00:19:38]: Part of it is on the product management side is like it's a requirement of the job so, you know, you must be talking with the customer facing teams on what's coming up from those channels. Everybody on the support side knows that, just like we know that on the success side and the sales side. And they are categorizing things right. So that's why it's important. Like, good hygiene in the inbox is important, like tagging these issues properly so we can get back quickly and pull them together. We use a. I think we're using a product called Canny that people can submit, like feature requests and issues and then they get upvoted. And so our team can do that and we go through all the tickets and like source other issues in that way too, which is like an AI layer to try to make this more efficient.

Chris Savage [00:20:27]: But ultimately I think it's just making space for it and telling people like, that's what you expect with the job.

Mat Patterson [00:20:33]: The real trick with customer insights, once you've collected them, is to do something with them or sometimes to intentionally decide not to do something.

Chris Savage [00:20:42]: I learned a lesson at one point which was if you're very clear about who you are for and you focus enough on those people, you'll build a better solution for them. There might be tons of other people that can benefit from what you do, and if you're very clear about what it is that you're doing, they can make the decision, is this still going to be good for me or not? And what. But what that does is it gives you more freedom when you are. It basically lets you move faster on the product development side because you know who to talk to when you're making those decisions. And yeah, I think that's. That it's very possible you could go in a direction where for existing customers, it doesn't make as much sense. It adds like some friction when you're figuring out what to build exactly.

Mat Patterson [00:21:33]: Like, we've.

Chris Savage [00:21:33]: We've seen people who have left for sure because they're like, I don't think you're going the direction for me, but I don't think we're going the direction for them in the first place. So it is probably better if there's somebody else who's more focused on them that they should go to them that information.

Mat Patterson [00:21:47]: Obviously there's a decision made at the top about like, this is sort of who we're building for now. How do you filter that down to like, your support people? Because sometimes they're the ones who have to basically be telling the customer.

Chris Savage [00:21:59]: I mean, part of the way, I think that the way that we do that is it's a, it's a few different things. So it's like our product marketing team defining how we're talking about these products and features internally, how it shows up in sales, but also how it shows up in support. So we have a lot of documentation that's available for people there. I think the biggest way is how we talk about the stuff at all hands meetings. And so we go through it on everything on the monthly basis. I'm like, how are we doing? Here are, here are our financials, here's our data. This is what's working, this is what's not. These are the big challenges and you know, everyone is empowered basically to take from that what they need to help communicate better.

Chris Savage [00:22:44]: I think it is for, I imagine in a much larger like we're about 200 people, I imagine a much larger organization probably you can't assume that, that everybody has the time to like even maybe attend these meetings and know what's going on. But for us they do. And so that's one of the main mechanisms. And you know, we do also like Q and A with everybody on a monthly basis. And that is another place where I'll see a lot of stuff like this that comes in that's, you know, someone will be saying, hey, this is really confusing. How do we answer customers on this particular thing? And if we can solve it in that Q and A, we will, and otherwise we'll follow up and do it after.

Mat Patterson [00:23:23]: Now we've arrived here at what I think is maybe the core reason that even some companies that start out very customer centric can lose their way. In the early days, things are simple and the founders know all the customers by name and they talk to them regularly. There's a small team of people who spend all of their time just building the product. But a few years in that slice of the time pie that is actually doing the work or talking to customers has shrunk. Because now there's all sorts of got to keep the business going. Work that's people management, financial compliance and internal communications. It is easy for that bright laser pointed dot of customer focus to be spread out into a vague red tint like you're working in the dark room of a film lab. What works to keep everybody aligned when you've got 20 people won't work at 50 and then you'll need different systems again at 100 and 300.

Mat Patterson [00:24:14]: Customer centric companies are not just founded, they are actively maintained at every stage. And a strong culture can really help maintain that momentum and focus and wistia has talked a lot about their own culture. Chris has actually spoken about misunderstanding what company culture was in his early days at Wistia. And I asked him about that.

Chris Savage [00:24:35]: Yeah, I said it was because of the. I thought it was like the office. No, I think, yeah. I mean, look, you're always trying to imagine what the stuff is before you've done it. And so before we had a company, I had no idea what it was like. I really didn't. And I remember asking myself, like, can I do this when it's 10 people? Can I do this when it's 20 people? Like, I kind of thought about, like, the job in terms of the size of team you're managing. And eventually, you know, I remember when we.

Chris Savage [00:25:04]: We hired our first two folks on the team, Brendan and I used to. Before they joined, we wore T shirts, shorts. We were unbelievably casual. And. But we hired these two people because we'd raised an angel round and we had the money to pay them, and we started wearing business casual because that's what we thought you should do, you know, like, well, no, we're a funded company now and yada, yada. And that lasted for like, a year until we're just. What are we doing? This isn't us. Like, it was.

Chris Savage [00:25:34]: Like, it's much better to be ourselves than it is to, like, be this other thing. And as we kept going, you know, it took longer for us to build momentum on the revenue side than I would have thought. Right. Like, even we had 10 customers. Like, we're not talking about a lot of revenue. Like, 10 customers at that point is probably like 12,000amonth in revenue or something. And so it's going to be a while before we have enough where we can hire more people. And so by the time it was like five years in, before things really started to connect.

Chris Savage [00:26:02]: And one of the things we realized is that we just loved what we did. And it was so fun. It was. Actually, we were still doing it five years later when. When we started the company, I thought I would do this for six months. Like, I don't think I'd be doing this for six years. And so we started to realize that there was something in the. How about how we treated each other, about how fun it was, about how collaborative we were.

Chris Savage [00:26:23]: And we eventually realized that the thing. The. How the work is done is culture. And we'd actually built a culture that we really liked that was very creative, took a lot of risks. It was a safe place to take risks, really cared about the customer Went above and beyond with the customers we talked about before. You know, if we could not have all the features but go above and beyond with the customer, we could still win. Eventually we realized that, like, building a brand around this really mattered. And so I always saw culture as this.

Chris Savage [00:26:57]: It went from this thing of, like, this big company, corporate values, integrity, to like, what, how do you work in a wisty way? And how do you make decisions in a wisty way? And let's try to democratize that by writing down our values so that anyone can look at our values. They can have a guess of how to do things in a wisty way.

Mat Patterson [00:27:17]: Did you find in the early days maybe that you hired people when you didn't have that understanding of, like, this is the wistier way to think about things?

Chris Savage [00:27:26]: We certainly made mistakes we actually didn't make. I would say we didn't make any big cultural mistakes for a long time. We were so worried about this that we were purposely very slow to hire. So I remember when we went from like, five, we. We would not. Even if we could afford to hire people more quickly, we would go. We would purposely try to slow ourselves down and make sure that the new people who came in understood what made Wistia unique and could, like, be a part of the strengthening this culture like this. I remember being really, really nervous about this because we've been at it for so long and the growth kicked up so much that it just seemed like, I really, really don't want to screw this up.

Chris Savage [00:28:11]: And we were probably 20 people before we had our first hire. That wasn't, like, exactly right on the culture. And then we made a lot of mistakes when we were like, 50 people.

Mat Patterson [00:28:23]: Mistakes are inevitable for any business, but the repercussions of those mistakes can vary wildly. If, for example, you needed to get that 10x return to some impatient investors, you might not have the space to slow down and rethink your approach to an issue of culture.

Chris Savage [00:28:40]: I think our funding model definitely helped us. And I think if we had raised a lot of money and had to grow much faster, it would have really depend when exactly when we did it. There's times when it would have completely broken us. There's times when it maybe would have been okay, but what's so easy to screw up? And, I mean, I've seen this when we've made mistakes and we've had people managing teams who are the wrong person. While it's not always the case, sometimes if you're the wrong manager, they end up building the wrong team. Like maybe even like first strategically what the company needs culturally. And it's not just one person that has to be, you know, turned over. It's often many people.

Chris Savage [00:29:26]: And that can be incredibly painful and it can really hurt a culture. It can put things to a crawl that were going quickly before. And so I think we've been very fortunate that we've had our funding model because it's allowed us to be patient in a lot of those moments, but also be so patient that we didn't get ourselves into those situations as often.

Mat Patterson [00:29:48]: And was that intentional or is that just how it happened to work in terms of.

Chris Savage [00:29:52]: It was. It was intentional. It was from when we were about 10 people. We were talking about culture a lot. I remember bringing it up in a meeting and someone was like, why are we talking about this? This is a big company thing. And I was like, no, I, I think this is what makes us special. I really think it is. And yeah, it's kind of amazing how many people we have were very long tenured and stuff.

Chris Savage [00:30:13]: Now they've grown their careers massively, had a huge impact on the company and continue to. And it doesn't even feel like they've been here that long. And I think that's a, a big part of our culture is like giving people the space to grow and this like belief that it's very hard to just hire a world class team by taking other people in. Part of their theory is that if you're hiring someone from a world class company and that company knows that they're world class, they're going to who the people who are there who are world class and they're going to work like hell to protect them. So it's hard to pull the people in who might have been the people, the driving forces of things. And so it's actually easier to build a world class team. And to do that you have to take risks on people. You got to let them grow, you got to let them try different things than they have before.

Chris Savage [00:31:05]: And you need a culture that allows that to occur. And so, you know, that means taking risks on people. It means having some ability to sustain through failure. A lot of different things. But I look at the culture as like the heart and soul of what allows us to do what we do. And yeah, I mean, I think knowing what I know now, could I raise money and protect the culture? I think so. But if I had done it five years in, I don't think we would.

Mat Patterson [00:31:31]: Have protected it the same way. Wistia is in the business of helping Their customers thrive through the medium of marketing videos in a business of software talk. Some years back, Chris once said that Wistia took too long to focus on their own marketing videos, failing to be a primary customer of their own product. That's a mistake that they have since corrected completely, producing tonnes of both educational and inspirational video.

Chris Savage [00:31:55]: I mean, I think Wistia is the creative inspiration around how you tell stories. Hopefully, you know, I think that's if, if, if we can help people who aren't even Wistia customers through our content, our education, I mean, even our ads. This in the last year, we've done a lot more brand ads and I see really positive reactions to them and people being like, I can't believe a company is doing this type of thing. For example, we have a whole series about a webinar wizard who is this kooky wizard who helps people put on like amazing, amazing webinars. And it seems silly and webinars have been around forever and yet like they're transforming rapidly and like a wizard to help you make great webinars seems like a good idea. And so, yeah, I think if people could see us as that creative wizard who comes in and inspires, but also gives you like really tactical, useful things, that would be great.

Mat Patterson [00:32:58]: Yeah, the wise wizards are not known for tactical and practical, generally speaking.

Chris Savage [00:33:02]: That's why it's trying to put these two together. Put the two together.

Mat Patterson [00:33:05]: Yeah. Maybe a wizard that's also had an MBA at some point.

Chris Savage [00:33:09]: Exactly.

Mat Patterson [00:33:10]: Yes.

Chris Savage [00:33:10]: The MBA wizard. Yes.

Mat Patterson [00:33:12]: Yeah.

Mat Patterson [00:33:13]: Helping people who are not your customers, but who can still benefit from your knowledge. That's the sort of marketing tactic that people love. It's also what we do with our content at Help Scout. Although if you do want to be our customer, please use promo code ilistent to the podcast with that Australian guy. And I want a discount, please. All uppercase for 0% off for the lifetime of your accountant or, you know, take a free trial. I loved chatting with Chris. His intentionality around company culture and customer focus suggests that Wistia is one well positioned to move into whatever this next AI enhanced video world looks like.

Mat Patterson [00:33:49]: And he's excited about it.

Chris Savage [00:33:51]: AI is now showing up and again changing video in another massive way where, you know, we have features in Wistia today like AI dubbing, where we take a video of somebody and translate it into another language, redo the lips so that it works like it's changes the pacing. I wouldn't have thought this was possible.

Mat Patterson [00:34:10]: Like three years ago.

Chris Savage [00:34:11]: And the fact that it's in Wistia is just remarkable to me. And we're only scratching the surface and at the very, very beginning of the things that we'll be able to do with AI and video. And I can't tell you how much it excites me. It feels like it feels incredibly early stage and really fun.

Mat Patterson [00:34:32]: If you're still having fun after two decades in tech, you are doing something right. Huge thanks to Chris for joining me for this episode. Visit the show Notes for links and key points and a full transcript. And if you enjoy this, please do rate and review in your podcast app. I will see you next time when I'm talking to YNAB CEO Todd Curtis.