Chris Savage
speaker
668 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2017
last heard Dec 2024
Chris Savage’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The most valuable things, they don't happen quickly. They take a long time.
Everything we do is about making it easy for you to get more value out of your video and enable you to use video better.
We thought we would do this for six months and then get rich. We thought that's how startups worked. It took a lot longer than I thought before things really started to connect and work. It's very hard to know if you're doing the right stuff, but if you do it long enough, you end up training your intuition.
The first thing I would say is...
Definitely not an overnight success, no. Yeah, I started Wistia with my best friend from college, Brendan Schwartz, and we thought it would be an overnight success. We thought we would do this for six months and then get rich. We thought that's how startups worked. And that's not how they work. It took a lot longer than I thought. before things really started to connect and work.
And it ended up being a lot more fun than I thought. And I also realized you can take things much farther than you think. And so, yes, that's how I would think about it now.
Yeah, so basically I had worked on a feature-length documentary in college and was very fortunate that we got distribution and won a bunch of film festivals and stuff. And I watched the filmmaker who had put so much into this movie. I watched it basically at the last second not get full distribution. And this is before streaming online, really.
So that was an industry that was gate-kept, which is not surprising. That's how the entertainment industry works. But I saw that so early and I was like, ah, this seems rough. This seems like a hard thing to work on something and actually have everyone tell you it's really great and then still not get distribution.
and she had spent four years five years on it i had spent three and a half years on it four years on it myself so that was the backdrop and then i graduated from college in 2005 the movie came out at the same time and very soon after youtube launched and i saw youtube and i was like whoa this is different
And one of the things was different about it was I had tried to be a part of these online film communities before YouTube. And I was pretty tech savvy and had a bunch of short films and I could get the videos online and they never took off. It was very bizarre. There's a lot of community building and not that much sharing of video. And so seeing YouTube, it was so different.
And after digging into it, it seemed like it was this confluence of different things. It was broadband internet and open source tools to do the encoding of the video. And everyone had Flash in their computer. And as we looked into this, Brian and I started realizing, like, wait a second. There shouldn't just be one company that could figure this out. Anyone could do this.
It's actually open source things. And so that got us riffing on ideas for what this company could be. Started very close to where I came from, which was going to be a filmmaking competition website. And then very quickly, we realized, okay, we don't have connections to brands and all these other things. And it evolved from there. But that's what got us to start.
That's right. Yeah, we won an Emmy, and... The thing that was so interesting about that was I was involved in a movie that was winning film festivals and people didn't seem to care. It was not what I thought the reception would be. And at the same time, actually, I saw this competition that was for a movie. It was called Slither, I think.
And basically, they said, we're going to release a bunch of footage from this movie. Anyone can edit it into a trailer. And then we're going to use the best trailer as the trailer. And I remember seeing this competition thinking, oh my gosh, if I win this competition, it's probably going to be better for my career than the feature length documentary. You get like 25 grand if they use your thing.
And I was like, well, that's amazing. And being able to say you did a national ad, that would be incredible. And so it was this weird thing of this online filmmaking competition. This was a one-off where like, this would be better for my career than the feature documentary. And that was what made us think something really big could be happening here.
And that was enough to start, which was the important part. But it was not an overnight success. We started and then pivoted and pivoted and pivoted and found our way to what the beginnings of what Wistia is today. But yeah, it was that understanding and this counterintuitive idea of maybe online will really democratize this. And it totally did. It just took a lot longer than we thought.
We started on this idea of the competition website, and we quickly realized we needed a two-sided market. To make it a real business, we'd have to have a lot of people who wanted competitions. And then we'd also need a lot of filmmakers to do the creation of the content. Well, which brands do we know? Well, we don't know any of them. We're just out of college. Are they going to talk to us?
And so pretty quickly, we're like, this is not a good idea, actually. This is a bad idea for us to do. But we got off of that idea. And then we went towards our next idea, which was, well, let's still help filmmakers. Maybe what we can do is just help them get their video online, help them build a portfolio.
This is an idea that makes a lot of sense because there's been a bunch of companies that have done this successfully. We started doing it. We built a portfolio builder. We built the video hosting part of it. And then we launched it and started trying to get people on it. We got maybe like 500 active people using this thing. Which at that time, again, I thought we'd be doing this for six months.
I thought it would go viral. Side note, we did some side projects that did go viral. So we had actually experienced that. And this was not viral. This was like slow, steady, getting more people on there. And we started thinking we need to make money because how are you supposed to survive? We didn't raise money at this point. And my co-founder and I are like a year out of college when we started.
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