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 then, of course, the focus on the other side of this allowed us to get much more profitable than we were expecting, much more rapidly. The team, suddenly we'd done something pretty polarizing, and that meant that everyone who was there really wanted to be there. And we didn't understand that there were people who were there for the wrong reasons.
And so suddenly the team felt much more unified and excited. Hiring, when we started hiring again, got much easier. It was like all like upside down backwards. And it was just basically having conviction about what we actually want to build. It worked out better than I could have imagined.
I remember my wife was like, so you're not going to sell? I was like, no. She's like, you've told me for a long time you're going to sell this business someday. And like, we're waiting to do stuff until he sells it. So I was like... And you know what I decided was, what if we act like we sold? Instead of selling, let's act like we did sell the business. What would we do?
And what we got to was, maybe we should really start taking very real vacations and taking more time off. and really giving more ownership and responsibility to more people on the team. It was interesting timing for me because my first child, she was probably one and a half when this was all happening. And so I was like, yeah, I will take more vacation. I'll spend more time with my family.
And of course, again, what ends up happening is you start taking more vacation and it turns out, oh, a lot of people didn't need you for certain things. So I would come back from vacation and people would have made all these decisions that previously I would have been involved in. And guess what? They mostly made great decisions. And so what does that mean?
I get less emails now and I'm in less meetings. The team is growing and people just are taking more responsibility. I didn't understand how vacations kind of cause people to take more responsibility. And also sometimes things didn't go well and then you figured that out. And it was like, oh, I'm holding this thing together and I didn't realize how much I was doing that.
And so, yeah, all these, again, just really counterintuitive things. But then when you start living a life while having a business, you start realizing it's actually really easy to keep doing this. The way I would sum it up is building a business is stressful. It's just like trying to get in shape or get really strong or something. Go to the gym, lift a bunch of weights. You stress your body.
If you just keep lifting every day and you never take a rest, you literally don't recover and you don't get any stronger. But if you actually take rests, you do. So what does it look like at work? You get stressed. But if you actually take weekends off and you actually take vacations, you recover. And guess what? It becomes easier to handle more stress. You're training your body.
You're training your mind. And so I think that's, again, one of the things that people miss is they go way too hard, especially after the business is up and running, and then they burn out. And so if you take actual breaks, you don't burn out. And this is different than what I was doing at the beginning, to be clear. I was working every weekend. I was working at nights. I was doing all that stuff.
But once we had enough momentum, I was able to add in the time and it had a tremendous impact.
Early days of Wistia, I was just constantly posting. I said before we had this portfolio site, I was like, what can I do? I was like, I can build a blog. And I posted twice a day and made this creative arts blog. And I, again, had no idea how successful it was. I thought it sucked. And I had thousands of people subscribing to the newsletter, reading all the stuff. I was like, oh, okay.
Like Lynn Heights, I was like, that was, I didn't realize that that happened there. And then when we figured out Wistia, I was basically sharing the story on Twitter all the time. Like we did this thing today, that thing, you know, it started with like what I had for lunch and it turned into, here's this product feature. We're thinking about XYZ.
And that worked, I thought, but I wasn't really sure how well it was working. And at some point I stopped doing it, probably like 2019. I was like, I don't really feel like this is worth my time as much anymore. So I stopped investing in it. And then COVID happened and I really stopped doing it. And then in 2022 or so, I felt like, wow, we are executing really well.
We have set off on this bigger, broader strategy. Wistia is no longer just this hosting and analytics platform. We're building editing tools. We're building creation tools. We're building a webinar platform. We're building group recording. We have all these things now, but we're building them then. What can I uniquely do? What can I do that just I can do?
And I started thinking, I can tell the company's story in a different way. I can tell the company's story from my perspective. And I used to do that. And I think it was working and I just didn't keep doing it.
And so in 2022, I started posting a little bit on LinkedIn and posting about Wistia, posting about my life as an entrepreneur, posting about what it's like to be a parent as an entrepreneur, posting about some of my other interests. And a lot of stuff took off. And I was like, whoa, look at these interactions.
And then over time, I've invested more and more in it and realized some really interesting things about building a personal brand. It's shifted how I think about brand building, where I still think there's a place to be building a company brand. I think you're crazy not to be building a company brand. But the expectations for startups for those brands keeps getting elevated.
Distribution is free, but that means you're competing with everybody. So you're competing with Netflix. You're competing with viral YouTube videos. You're competing with games. You're competing with everything as a company brand. And we're also, as a society, being trained to trust company brands less.
And actually, if you look at how we're spending our time, we're spending our time on social media where we trust individual people. And I think this is rooted in something that's always been true, which is if you have a group of friends and you have your techie nerd friend, you ask them tech advice. You have your friend who's learning soccer, you ask them soccer advice. That's how it works.
You have friends, you ask word of mouth. But now it's possible to build these relationships with people in kind of a parasocial way online. And so we have our friends in person and we have our online friends who we trust on different topics. But... On the B2C side, this has become a tremendous way of how we discover and learn about products. It's becoming the dominant way.
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