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 without going too long into this story, we eventually actually had to walk away from the deal right before we were going to close the angel round. And we had to walk away from it because while they were really interested in what we were doing, they were like, hey, for us to use this, it needs to be on premise.
It needs to be in a closet, basically, at HBO's offices, which is terrifying to us because it was all in the cloud. And we'd never done a deal like this. And we realized that if we were to do that, we would probably have to move to L.A., And that was the only way we'd be able to support it.
And then if we were to move to LA and we just got the movie series, like, is this really going to be that big of a market? And we were just like, oh, this is, well, it sounds, I mean, so we decided to say no. And I remember the feeling of going back to the angels and telling them, We said no to HBO. And I thought no one would write a check.
And again, I think this is one of those moments that it took many years for me to realize that's probably why they wrote the check was we actually had conviction of what we're trying to do, which was build this thing for SMBs and... not go do it on-prem and whatever. So yeah, I could go on and on and on about that.
But it was very hard, but also in a way, it was just being honest, I think, about where we were and then being optimistic about what we believed, but also saying it might not work.
The thing that I underappreciated back then that I appreciate now is that a lot of times we don't realize how long it takes before something works. I was talking about this before. You think it's going to happen really fast, and often it's like you have a good idea. It often takes a lot longer than you think. But once it's working, there's usually a reason why.
It might be that you have a great brand and an easy-to-use product in a market that's craving this. That's the hole in the market. It might be because you have the cheapest solution to an age-old problem that everyone understands. So if you come in really cheap, they're going to pay attention.
It might be they're doing something completely new that no one's ever seen before, and it causes a different person to be the buyer or something of a product than it could be. It changes where the budget is. Whatever it is, often we get something working, and when growth starts to happen, To keep growing, you often just have to keep doing that thing.
It's just how it shows up and how you have to accomplish it is very different. So you want to stay focused on what's different and unique, but the how you get there might change tremendously. And so what I think we didn't really appreciate at the time was that what people wanted was something really easy to use and something that anyone who was using video could use confidently.
We did a lot of different things, but if you look at where we are now, that's basically exactly the same thing that we do today. When things started to take off for us, it was when we started having a lot of fun in our brand and we started being ourselves. We were transparent about the fact that we were a six-person company when we were later six people.
We made fun, silly videos, which was the counterintuitive thing to do because businesses are serious and B2B is serious. So why would you trust a company that's making these fun, silly videos? It was like, no, because we're actually authentic. unafraid to share who we are, that is attractive. And that worked in our market. It also meant we're using our product in the marketing.
And you look back and when I pull the thread, it's like the same exact thing today. But it wasn't obvious then that those were the things. It was like those things and 15 other things we were doing. And the hard part was sorting through which of the pieces are actually driving growth and which are actually not. So when I think about...
decisions around what we're going to do, about what we're going to build. Any big decision, I try to look at it through that lens. How can we keep delivering on the thing that caused stuff to work in the first place? And how do we stay focused? Focus is the hard part usually. But the last piece of this, the way we deliver, it's very, very different. The product's different. The brand is different.
The content's different. The people's different. Spend more on ads, all these different types of things. But ultimately, the thing you're delivering stays the same.
I think it's whatever needs to work for your market. If we were doing outbound sales and we were selling enterprise deals, you see people do wild, crazy things to try to get someone's attention. But ultimately, if you're selling a massive deal, you're helping people decrease risk or manage costs or increase revenue. They have to believe you're going to do that.
So a brand that has them believing that is really important. And I think for us, what we found is that a lot of people knew that they needed to use video, but that they were afraid. And they were particularly afraid they're going to hurt their brand. That was one of the most common things we heard was like, oh, man, if I use video and it goes poorly, it's going to hurt my brand.
I still hear that all the time. People afraid to get on camera. Exactly as you're saying. And so if we can show you irreverent, silly, funny, but educational things, and you can kind of subconsciously realize, like, for example, we have a campaign right now that's called Webinar Wizard. And it's a song. And it's an incredible song. It's really amazing.
You can see if you go to wiz.com slash webinar wizard. And we're doing all these ads of this thing. And there's a wizard dancing around. And the song gets stuck in your head. This thing, if you see it, you're like, wow, this is silly. This is absurd. But it's amazing. I get it. If you can put that together subconsciously, know like... Hey, if they can do this, then what can I do?
That's permission almost to use the product, right? And we're doing all this stuff. I didn't understand the connections earlier on to how much... What we really need to do with our brand was give people permission to market in this different way, show themselves in a different way. And then if you use Wistia and you feel like this is a place you can do that, then we're delivering, right? And so...
It just depends on the customer. And I guess that's my point. If you have something that's working early, what you want to do is just pay super close attention to why is it working. If you could figure that out, then you could scale it.
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