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 we're like, oh my God, we broke our drought. We got a customer. But who's the customer? And he's like, oh, remember that machine company I was telling you about, this machine and tooling company? We're like, yeah. He's like, well, the marketer there wants to use this for his kid's hockey team. And we're like, oh, OK. How much is the deal? He's like, oh, I sold it to them for $12 a month.
And we're like, oh, you know, it's just like, this isn't going to be good. And at the time we had this sheet. We were all in person, a sheet on the office that showed every day in the month and like how many deals. And Brendan went up there and he put like a little line and it was like $12. And we were losing $40,000 a month. So our goal was to get to break even.
And he was like $39,988 or whatever. And... That was pretty rough. But the funny thing is, of course, we realized we need to give ourselves more flexibility. It's too early to pick just one size customer. And so the person who's doing sales starts testing more pricing. And we start closing deals at $100 a month, at $150 a month, and yada, yada.
And then eventually, by that next summer, we have 30 paying customers. We're like, okay, this is better. And we make a change. You could find the price online. You could sign up online. It would start at $79 a month. And that summer, we went from 30 paying customers to 200. And I remember thinking, oh my God, we've finally done it. This is it.
And then I got a call from our lawyers and they're like, hey, remember that funding round you raised? We never sent you the bill. So you need to pay us this bill now. And it was a $40,000 bill. And we had like 75,000 in the bank. So half our money was going to go and then we were going to have payroll and very quickly run out of money. And so it was like one hard moment. Okay.
Over at the nether, extremely hard moment. And we were just really fortunate that that summer had turned out the way that it did. Cause I went to one of our angels. I was like, Hey, I've got good news and bad news. Here's the bad news. We're going to run out of money. It happened really suddenly. We got this huge bill we weren't expecting. But the good news is, look at this customer graph.
I think if we just keep doing this, it's going to work. And he looked at this and he was like... You're right. And he wired us like a check for $100,000. And then he said, Chris, I want to fly you around on my jet. And I want to help you close this round because I don't want you to waste any time. And we went around and basically within a few days, closed the round.
And that was the last time we ever raised equity.
It is a roller coaster. You start to love it, I think, is the thing, actually. You start to realize that a lot of the hard moments, what it takes is focus and commitment and working with great people. And that's how you get through hard moments. Sometimes the hard moments are short, and sometimes they're really long.
But it basically always comes back to if the culture's right, if the people you're working with give you energy, and if those people believe in what you're trying to do, it's a lot easier to get through the hard moments.
Basically, we had this opportunity to sell the business. Three different companies trying to acquire us. Brendan and I talk about it all the time. And we eventually start getting to what would we do if we sold? Okay, well, it's a life-changing amount of money. We'd not have to work again. But would we work again? We're like, well, we'd work again. The two of us would work together. That's clear.
We have a unique partnership. We're still best friends. We've been best friends from the beginning. By the way, the way you do that is you put your friendship first, which actually matters because then you show up and you care and you give each other hard feedback and all that kind of stuff. counterintuitive thing. But anyway, we'd work together. What type of market would we get into?
Well, like we'd get into this SMB market. We think it's underserved. We would still focus on video where this is like 2016, 2017. And it feels like the tech around video is changing tremendously. Like it's getting cheaper and cheaper to make videos. And so there's more ways that people can use videos. So like, okay, we'd do that.
We'd focus on a company where we could be really creative and we'd run the business really profitably because we, at that moment, we're not running profitably. We'd run profitably for many years after we got traction. And then we ran at a loss trying to grow faster. And we admit to ourselves in this moment that it's not working. We're both unhappy.
And the thing we would do is we just basically try to rebuild Wistia. That's what we'd do if we sold the company. So it seems very stupid to give up on this company 10 years in when we're still in control. We could fix it. And so that is what led us to say, hey, actually, let's not sell.
Let's just get this business back to a better place, to a place where we feel like it's creatively fulfilling, but also we think that's going to do better. Let's get back to being profitable that we think that counterintuitively, that's actually going to let us be more long-term focused, more patient in our investments if we're profitable. And we think it'll probably be more fun.
And so worst case scenario is if it doesn't work, we're going to have to sell the business anyway, but at least we'll have tried. We bet on ourselves in the first place. Let's bet again. And so we got really excited. And I think this is an interesting point here because we got so excited. And actually, the reality is we're still losing $300,000 a month at this moment. Bank accounts going down.
We have lots of things that aren't working in the business. You would think this was like a bad moment. And you would think this would be very stressful. Like on the roller coaster, this should seem like the bottom. And it kind of was. But the thing that was funny is what turned it around was instantly having a plan. We're like, ah, we're going to raise debt.
And actually, because we're not going to sell, we're going to buy back control from our investors. And we're going to get a return for our employees. It'll be like we sold. They'll all be happy. But for us, it's going to force us to be profitable. And we think that's the right thing for the business. And so... We basically are signing on a take on debt, running at a loss, have to turn it around.
And I wasn't stressed. Because I had a plan, I was sleeping really well. I was really relaxed. And so that was funny. It was like, oh, having the plan is the important part. And then we went and enacted the plan, raised the debt, $17 million in debt, did the buyback, got the business back to being profitable pretty quickly.
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