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
And the only reason we could survive is we were living in a 10-person house, and it was so unbelievably cheap. My girlfriend and I split a room, and we split food with everyone in the house. This is real. My total expenses on food per week at that time were $15 a week. So I spent $60 on food a month, and my rent was $320, and I bought nothing else. So basically, I was living on $400 a month.
And my co-founder, Brennan, was basically in the same spot. And that is the only reason we were able to start the business. We got our expenses so low, but we still were going to run out of money. And so we had the portfolio site. We're like, oh, if we put ads on this, how much money could we make? And we'd had a thing go viral that we put ads on and we made very little money.
And we're like, hmm, this might not be the way. We tried to talk to the people who were building the portfolio and they're like, this site's cool. Like, what am I going to pay for? You already gave me the thing. I was like, hmm, this doesn't seem good.
The one thing we were doing that I would highly encourage anyone who's at the early stage to do is we're just going to a lot of meetups and meeting a lot of people. And so every month, we're going to a couple of these things, at least. And just getting out there and talking to people and saying, everyone has their business card and says what they're doing. And we're like, oh, we're the video guys.
We're trying to do video stuff. And then people would be like, can you help my business with video? And we'd be like, no, we help artists. We're not in this to help businesses. Let me tell you, when we were like three months from running out of money, we started talking to the businesses pretty quickly.
And what we discovered was that some of the things we had built were actually quite valuable, but not in the way they were packaged. So we built the video hosting. We'd built a private way for people to share videos. And that was so that I used to edit movies and I'd send ship DVDs every night and didn't make sense. Why can't you just put it online? So we solved that problem.
And people saw that and they're like, that's interesting. Just this private, secure way to share stuff. But they weren't filmmakers. They were companies. And so we went into our first potential customer, told them we could give them this thing to privately share video, made up a price. And they said, if you can give this to us, we'll pay you. And so we did it and they paid us.
And that's how it started. And it was like one new customer each month at the beginning, which again felt painfully slow. But looking back on it was actually kind of fast.
And the thing that opened our eyes was... we were quickly talking to huge brands. Our first customer was a medical device company. Then we started talking to PBS. And we started talking to a production company as our second customer. Our fifth customer is Cirque du Soleil. And they were using us to share videos privately of people who apply to be in Cirque.
So it's like fire breathers and gymnastics would upload it to Wistia and then their team would look at it. And it was like, it's so crazy to me in hindsight. I mean, I remember so vividly doing the demo to them. sitting on the foot of my bed in this 10-person house. Brendan's upstairs in his bedroom. There's no video. You can't see anybody at this point.
So stressed as I'm doing the demo, you know, just like can't believe that I'm talking to these people. And they're like, this looks good. Let's do it. I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I mean, we couldn't even take their credit card. We were like faxing things to close deals at that point. It was ludicrous.
We got to about six or seven customers. And we realized, okay, this is going to be bigger than we thought. But we need help. And we're figuring out everything ourselves. And Brendan's building everything himself. I'm doing all the sales and marketing. I'm like blogging two times a day. I mean, it's not that different from now. It's just kind of funny. But We're like, we need help.
And through all those meetups we're going to, we'd met some people we really liked who seemed like they believed in what we were doing. And we started to realize, hey, maybe we should hire two of these people, the sales guy and this engineer. We need help on building the product faster. An engineer would be good. And then we need someone who knows how to sell, we think.
And actually, he closed a deal before he even joined the company. He sold a Wistia account to prove to us that he was going to be a good hire.
They were adults and we were children. And so they needed real salaries. We basically now are covering our basic living expenses. So I'm getting $400 a month. The bread is getting $400 a month. We've not changed our living expenses. We're saving money on top of that, which is an incredible feeling. But. I can't hire someone for 100,000 or something.
So it's through wanting to hire them, we think, okay, if we hire people, we'll go faster, we should raise money. And so we set out trying to raise angel money. And I quickly found my way to one angel investor, this guy, Ashton Peary. And he was super interested and asked a lot of good questions. And he also really believed that that we could take this a very long way.
It was surprising to meet this person who's like, of course, you could take this. This is going to be massive. And I'm like, oh, you think this is going to be massive? He's like, oh, this is going to be huge. This is going to be so big. He got excited. And then we just hustled our way again, randomly through the community, meeting random folks. But it probably took us five months or so
to close the first round. And the interesting thing was we'd show the deck and we'd show our current customers, show prospective customers. And on the list of prospective customers... was HBO. And we were talking to HBO about them using us for all their dailies, which no one could believe. Me as a filmmaker, I could not believe this. It was insane.
I remember when we first started talking to them, I didn't really believe it was them. They said, we just want to try the product. Like, okay. And they started uploading footage in and we go look. And it's footage from The Sopranos that no one's ever seen. Behind the scenes footage of The Sopranos. That's the first thing that gets uploaded.
What that meant was it was extremely attractive to angel investors. When they saw this, they're like, oh, wow, these children are talking to this company about a deal like this. And by the way, the quoted size of the deal was like $750,000 a year. So we looked at it and we're like, we just got it made. This is going to happen so fast and all this kind of stuff.
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