[00:00:00] Chris Savage: And the culture changed. The culture changed. Do you remember that guy who was on CNN and he was like doing an interview from home? I think it was CNN. And then his kid walked in the back and he tried to push his kid. And it was like this crazy viral moment. And now we've all seen that happen a million times. We've seen people's kids come in the room, their dogs, someone has to leave, blah, blah. If I just like to think about that as a representation of how much the culture changed, where now we like see inside of people's houses every day.

[00:00:36] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:49] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:02] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas, brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael and here's today's episode.

[00:01:14] Andrew Michael: Hey Chris, welcome to the show.

[00:01:16] Chris Savage: Thank you for having me. Good to see you again.

[00:01:18] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia, a complete video marketing platform that helps teams create host markets and measure their videos and webinars and all in one place. So prior to Wistia, Chris was also an editor, associate producer at Big Orange Films, taking you way back.

[00:01:37] Andrew Michael: And he was also previous guest of the show episode number 45. So more than almost four years ago. So lots of change since then which we'll chat about today, I'm sure. But my first question for you really is, what is it about your experience at Big Orange Films that drove you to start with Wistia?

[00:01:53] Chris Savage: Yeah, great question. I mean, you know, so I worked on this feature length documentary about the former mayor of the place where I grew up, Providence, Rhode Islands, who was the longest-serving mayor in Providence. And he actually had been mayor in the 80s, and then he had hit his ex-wife's lover, who was the chief of police, with a [inaudible]. He put out a cigarette on him and he was kicked out of office and he wasn't allowed to run for 10 years. And then he became a radio host, became very popular, ran again and won. So there was, I worked as feature like documentary there about this guy.

[00:02:29] Chris Savage: And, it was just a really interesting thing because I started as an intern and I was like logging and transcribing tape. So my job was we record on mini DV and then we'd back it up to VHS. And when we were editing, we'd use a worse quality video so that we didn't degrade like the primary initial one. And over time, I went from just doing that to learning After Effects, to learning how to edit, help to produce interviews. And like, I just saw the power of working on a very small team and what you can accomplish. And it made me believe in this power of startups. I didn't know to call it that, but like that's basically kind of that was an amazing experience for me.

[00:03:12] Chris Savage: And then when my co-founder, Brendan and I just started to start Wistia, it was driven by this belief of, we saw online video happening in a big way. And I had been and lived an experience of editing videos and then making DVDs and shipping them to people and getting feedback on them. And it all seemed kind of crazy to me as someone who grew up like as the internet started to happen.

[00:03:35] Chris Savage: And so when online video felt like it was actually possible, the two of us were like, Hey, we could help these people who make video every day. And so it was actually kind of in hindsight, a direct line to what helped me feel comfortable, like starting Wistia and even seeing the opportunity. Even at the time, it felt very different. And I had a lot of having to want to do my own thing, prove people wrong, yada yada, like a lot of other emotional stuff at play when we decide to start.

[00:03:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Very nice. But a lot of like good connections basically to the experience that you had as a founder as well in your previous role and then just seeing sort of how the [inaudible]. And you mentioned as well, like in the beginning, I think I mentioned that, Wistia started out really as like a hosting platform for video and analytics and that really gained popularity in that for like mostly for B2B, like at least my perception, using it to host their videos for their sites and for their different projects.

[00:04:25] Andrew Michael: It's evolved completely. And I think that's one thing would be interesting to chat today as well. Like where this motivation came, like why you decided to move away from like the core offering, which is almost in a way it was like a platform play and now you have led a lot more different tools and then moved more in towards the software as a service. It feels like you were like the AWS almost for video and now you've moved a little bit more into like this application layer and providing different services. So what motivated that strategy? And obviously call me on bullshit on anything I've just mentioned now as well.

[00:04:57] Chris Savage: Yeah, it was-I mean, I wouldn't probably call it the AWS of the video, but that's a nice thing here, I guess. But like, yeah, when we started, our goal was help people use video online, mostly filmmakers, then it turned to businesses pretty quickly. And then the core problem we can help someone solve is it turned out hosting videos on your website and having no ads, no related videos in extremely fast player and actually having the first party data was really important.

[00:05:23] Chris Savage: Like we launched video analytics before YouTube even had it. I didn't understand the impact of what we were doing. Like we're just talking to customers, they told us they want this, we built it, they used it. And we were showing them how every individual user was watching their videos and then aggregating that data together. Turns out that's extremely valuable for B2B, right? Because you can understand who's interested, you can understand trends in the data. And then over time, the hosting evolved to have more marketing tools, but we kind of built a strategy that was like, okay, if you're gonna have a video stack, we wanna be the part that's like the best part that you could choose possibly for hosting.

[00:05:58] Chris Savage: And we're gonna integrate really well into everything else, into all the other tools you use to do your video. And that strategy really worked. It worked really well and it worked for a long time. But over time, we realized we actually had to get more focused as we grew. And that's a counterintuitive thing that ends up happening, where you start realizing like, if you're in a big market, these markets can be really, really big and to be the best, you have to be really, really focused on a segment within it. And so it was B2B and then it was SMB B2B. And then it was really marketers and SMB B2B as the core, lots of other use cases, people use this for all different sorts of things, but we knew we had to focus on that.

[00:06:39] Chris Savage: And then in 2020, when COVID happened, obviously we saw a lot of interest and people were using video way more. And what was surprising was pre-COVID, I felt like, there was always a governor on our growth. There was always something slowing things down, which was basically fear of being on camera. And if you didn't believe in video or you're afraid of it, you're not gonna use it. And then COVID happens, you have to use it. Like you can't meet people in person. And that was one of the most interesting things was just how large that fear was and how much it was holding people back.

[00:07:10] Chris Savage: And so we did a lot of research. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers. We talked to competitors' customers, everybody, and we saw the world shifting. And we're like, wow, this is gonna cause actually an explosion of video. I thought I had lived through one, but this is gonna be bigger. And it's gonna be bigger because people now see their computer as a camera. And like this podcast is the perfect example. We shoot on video, we're doing remote, where you and I are in different places. It's a given we're gonna be able to see each other. It's a given you could take clips on this, all that kind of stuff. That wasn't a given before. Lots of people were doing it, but it wasn't a given.

[00:07:47] Chris Savage: And so we saw that changing the needs of our customers. And basically what they told us is like, hey, we're using 10 tools, we're using 12 tools to solve our video problems. We'd prefer if there was one or two or three. We just prefer the number was shorter and someone could save us a lot of time. And so that kind of gave us permission to go after this opportunity of saying, hey, we're gonna do the hosting thing, we're gonna continue to do it really well.

[00:08:14] Chris Savage: But if we can make a platform that includes a lot of these other products that people are using on a daily basis, even if we don't replace them, but we can give them like an easier, more simple solution for some of these cases, we can save our customers tremendous amounts of time and maybe we can actually reduce the number of tools they're using from like 10 or 12 when they're using video down to like 2 or 3. And so that kicked off the strategy. Started that in 2021.

[00:08:41] Chris Savage: And then since then basically, we built single person recording into Wistia. You can record yourself on your screen. It looks really good together. We put group recording into Wistia. We built an editor that's like an AI first editor into Wistia. We built a full webinar platform. We built a social clip creator. We've added podcast hosting. That's just a small sample of the things that we've done, but we just changed tremendously what the platform is to be this more complete, more all-in-one solution versus like just focusing on video hosting.

[00:09:16] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's super interesting sort of that insight that came out of COVID. And I think like one of the hardest things, I think when it comes to, if we talk about churn and retention is really changing user behavior. And obviously like in your case, this was something that was stalling growth just because people were scared of using the camera or didn't want to see.

[00:09:33] Andrew Michael: I mean, I know from my own experience, like it's the worst thing watching myself read back. I like hardly ever tried to watch. I tried to avoid it as much as possible, but like that almost became a necessity then overnight. So like you almost had this like fast- user behavior was like forced to change basically, which was almost like this headwind that really helped like catalyze.

[00:09:51] Chris Savage: And the culture changed. The culture changed. You know, do you remember that guy who was on CNN and he was like doing an interview from home? I think it was CNN. And then his kid walked in the back. And he tried to push his kid. And it was like this crazy viral moment. And now we've all seen that happen a million times. We've seen people's kids come in the room, their dogs, pushing them to leave, blah, blah, like...If I just like to think about that as a representation of how much the culture changed, where now we like see inside of people's houses every day.

[00:10:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah. There's a very good chance [inaudible] will come in at some point as well. I know you interrupted the last episode. So, yeah, it's definitely like become a familiar thing nowadays. And I think like to your point though, as well around all the different tools then that you need to use, I think there's also this like education gap in the sense that you move online and now all of a sudden you need to learn all these different tools again as well. And like, okay, I'm producing video and being recorded. Like what are the ways that I can look better, how I can speed my workflow?

[00:10:48] Andrew Michael: And how did you then start to sort of think what this would be next step would look like? So you're posting analytics and now all of a sudden you're deciding to build a platform. But like, where do you get started? Like how are you sorting feedback? How are you prioritizing the use cases? [inaudible].

[00:11:04] Chris Savage: Yeah. I mean, basically...That's such a good question. We looked at all of the things that people wanted and tried to sort them and simplify them because there's a very, very, very long list. And we'd never let ourselves consider this list before. Like our strategy was so focused on hosting, but one of the things that we changed was like, let's get even more focused on who the target customer is. And so that was very helpful.

[00:11:33] Chris Savage: It was like, all right, we're looking at small and medium-sized businesses, within that we're looking with businesses, like generally less than a thousand employees. We think the core group that's gonna love this product the most and has the most pain is like, companies with 50 to 200 employees. And so we went deeper and deeper and deeper. And when we did that, we're like, okay, editing is really important. It's important, it turns out, because most of the people who are using video are not video producers. Like we're talking about a major democratization, right?

[00:12:03] Chris Savage: And this democratization is causing people whose job is like, they're a marketer, they're in charge of demand gen, they're in charge of customer success. They're adding videos on a knowledge basis, they're adding videos into their products, they're adding videos all over the place. They are responsible. And so we looked at that, we're like, okay, on the editing side, what if we make something so simple that you don't feel this intimidation factor of like a nonlinear editor?

[00:12:25] Chris Savage: And that was like an initial goal for us. And if we can... we also saw that a lot of people wanted the ability to edit videos that were already hosted on their sites. Like that would be, they'd want to make small tweaks. They would change their branding. They want to add a bumper. They'd want to remove something small. They'd want to  replace the video, which is something that was popular already in the hosting world. Now it's like, well, should you replace and edit it? Should you do a new one? So that was like a pretty obvious first thing to do.

[00:12:54] Chris Savage: We'd also built a recording product that was like a side project for years. And it had been very successful from a usage standpoint, but we really struggled to get the business model right. And hold it into Wistia properly. And so all of the expectations were like, with that product, it was like, why doesn't it have all the functionality of Wistia? So we knew, like we'd gotten that feedback for years. We tried to make it separate. We're like, no, we have to roll this into the core platform and not treat it as a side project that has nobody on it. We need to make it like a core part of the platform.

[00:13:26] Chris Savage:  And the other big one was when we just talked to companies was like, people often don't think of webinars as videos, but there are a lot of companies that are doing webinars all the time. And they have all the same challenges with a finished webinar they do with a video. And we saw like 100% of webinars are basically edited because people, when they publish it out, most people don't show up so the recorded assets are really important.

[00:13:51] Chris Savage: Often you edit out the Q&A or you edit out flubs or you edit out the beginning before people turn on. And like, it was just an obvious connection of like, well, an editor is going to be valuable to those people. And we integrate with zoom so you could pull the recordings and stuff like that, but if we could actually give you a platform that hosts it and have the data, we could connect everything. So we could say, Oh, you do live event. You see how people are performing the-, or sorry, you see how the audience is engaging in real time. You have that data, then you have the published version after the fact, you can marry it all together. So it just made sense to us.

[00:14:22] Chris Savage: And what that also meant was that we decided to make like a, we had to make a huge investment to do all of this. So we were quite profitable going into 2020. And we said, hey, we're gonna take most of our profit and we're going to hire aggressively. And so we took our product and engineering team, which pre-COVID was like 45, 50 people, I think 45 people. And by 2022, it was like over 100. And we funded that all ourselves and we built squads to do all this stuff. And we just trusted that we could do all these things at once, which was a little insane. I'm not sure I would recommend that to everybody, but it's so far it's worked out, which is great.

[00:14:59] Andrew Michael: Nice. I have a couple of questions and I'm trying to figure out the best order to ask them, but maybe let me start with this last one then is that, as a bootstrap company, that feels like quite a big gamble to take them like literally doubling your team size, investing most of your profits. What are some of sort of like the KPIs that you're setting yourself to understand, okay, like was this investment working and like how did you stagger it? Was it like all at once or did you sort of like ease into it? And then what gave you the confidence to feel like, okay, this was the right bet that we've made?

[00:15:31] Chris Savage: Well, I'm gonna answer that in reverse. So the thing that gave us the confidence was that I had learned that betting on yourself is often one of the best investments you can make. And so it's not always right. You're not always right, everything doesn't work necessarily. But usually, if you have a strong belief and you bet on yourself and it doesn't work, you don't usually regret it because like, at least you tried. Like I think most people regret not trying.

[00:15:59] Chris Savage: So when we talked about this investment, it was kind of obvious to my co-founder and I were like, well, if we do this, it doesn't work. That's gonna suck. But like we saw this big opportunity and we went hard for it. And the worst case is you have like a bunch of people working on something that's not connecting and people aren't engaging with, maybe the company's continued to grow as it's been growing and there's a lot of other stuff for them to do. Or if it's really not successful, you tell them, I'm sorry, this isn't working and you send them off to do something else and you just make the business more profitable again.

[00:16:28] Chris Savage: It kind of felt like not crazy risky. Also, like when you do something for a long time, I mean, technology doesn't last forever. So there's also this feeling of like, you have to be pushing and innovating. Like it's a requirement. It's not like an optional thing. And it's just a lot of innovation at once.

[00:16:47] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[00:16:48] Chris Savage: And then in terms of KPIs, I think this was the most surprising one is, you know, a lot of us like to think because I think we're trained to see, we see success and we want to understand if this is what success looks like often from our vantage point, looking at someone else's business, someone else's company, some startups, some organization, a viral hit. You often think like, well, that's the first thing that they've done. Like they must just be really good and they must just be really lucky when in most cases it's like the thousandth thing they've done.

[00:17:17] Chris Savage: You know, they've been like iterating over time, figuring out what resonates and what works. And so this, but this can work perception internally where you launch something new and you think it has to generate a ton of revenue quickly. It has to change the business instantly. And we learned over the years of launching lots of features and things like, it just doesn't work like that. It just takes time.

[00:17:41] Chris Savage: So actually the first thing I looked at was like the quality of people we're hiring. Like, do I feel like these people are really amazing? Do they ask really smart questions? Do they have really good insights? How driven are they? How quickly do they work? And I remember the moment when it started to feel like that was right. I would go around the room and be like, damn, these people are incredible. And it started to give me faith that these different things are gonna work. And we did so much at once. Some stuff wasn't perfect, and you have to work on execution and work on the team. And some stuff just went quickly.

[00:18:14] Chris Savage: And then once you start launching things, it's often like, you're gonna get quantitative data, of course, but I found that the first versions of things, it's the qualitative that's the most important because you can get 10 people using something new and if they all hate it, you're in trouble and you're gonna have to change it quite a bit. And if they all love it, but they have a lot of feedback, you're onto something, you know?

[00:18:39] Chris Savage: And it doesn't take that many people to say that. Like if 10 people are like, oh my gosh, I would use this, but I want XYZ ABC thing. Like if you're not solving a real problem, people don't give you feedback. Like if you get true crickets, you have an issue. And sometimes you might get crickets from like a quantitative standpoint. Like in your perspective, like this is 10 people. But if you get to the qualitative and you can understand the passion and you can see the details, that makes a huge difference.

[00:19:07] Chris Savage: Then I think like the thing that we focused on was actually getting the right inputs in place. So how do you make sure that we're getting better fast enough? And so that actually looks like measuring are we shipping value to customers on a fast enough basis? And so we actually tried for a little bit to look too much at like, how is this changing trajectory and culturally like trying to get the perfect roadmaps and stuff and we gave that all up and said, what we're gonna focus on instead is making sure we believe the team is really great, making sure that they're shipping customer value every two weeks, getting a lot of qualitative feedback and we trust this system. And if we do this, it should show up in the quantitative. And basically that's exactly what happened.

[00:19:53] Chris Savage: And so then we start to see usage numbers. So you're tracking usage numbers of features. And the key thing I have found there that you wanna look for is feature retention. So did you make something that someone tried once or did you make something that someone tried today? And then did they come back again next month or next week?

[00:20:11] Chris Savage: And the second those feature retention numbers start to get- creep higher, you can tell you're on the right path. So for us, there was some features we'd launched should be like 20% feature retention to start. But to be a lot of qualitative feedback, the team would ship really quickly. And then the next month it's like 25% and you keep going and then you get some, we've got a lot of these numbers, for these new things up to like 70%, 80%.

[00:20:35] Chris Savage: And if you're at that level, the growth gets much easier, right? Because you're trying so hard to get someone to try something new, you get 100 people to try, there's 80 people next month, you get another 100 people to try, now there's 160. And so that has been really important. Once you have enough people using it, you can look at the impact it has and starts to have on other core metrics. And I mean, obviously this is what your whole podcast is about, but the most obvious thing that we started to see pretty quickly was once people start using something new, like they're literally, you've now solved another job to be done for them.

[00:21:14] Chris Savage: If you're now solving two jobs to be done, one of the first places it shows up is reduction in churn and higher retention. And it's just a question of how much, like how different is the thing, the job that you're solving? And if it's different enough, then those numbers like often are pretty, like pretty remarkably different. And you just keep compounding that process.

[00:21:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So many, like good things to press on in that as well. I think definitely obviously like expanding use cases is one of the greatest ways to increase retention and reduce churn. I think also what you mentioned is something like, I had a very different misconception of this when I first joined Hotjar. Because I'd came previously, I had raised a little bit of venture money. I had like pressure from investors to have every metric under the sun. And I believed like as an early stage startup, like metrics were the answer and data was the answer.

[00:22:06] Andrew Michael: And slowly over time, I really realized like, actually, no, it's like qualitative feedback, intuition at the start, getting as close to your customers as possible. And like data is almost too much noise to begin with because you never really have any good signals at the very early stage and they need to be used. And then there comes a point in time when you start to hit the scale, when you start to reach significant numbers, then that becomes important and it becomes like a little bit of a tipping point. But in the early days, when you're trying to figure things out, when you're trying to get product market fit, like my go-to is no longer like data, like I use it just to get signal, but it's more, as you were saying, like speaking to customers, like hearing that feedback, is there love for the product or isn't there? And if there is like iterating on that.

[00:22:46] Andrew Michael: I've actually experienced what you mentioned, like firsthand where I had a startup as well, we had an onboarding experience. We ended up going from, I think it was like around 11% conversion rates on the landing page to around 25%. And we increased this experience. It was amazing. Like, one of four visitors were signing up.

[00:23:05] Andrew Michael: And then after we shut it down, like I was asked by a competitor to try and help with their growth and I worked on it. Then I replicated the experience except for like one or two parts, just because of like the engineering resources weren't available at the time to make it happen and almost like crickets, they went from like 11% to 13% or 14% and like such a small couple of details, but just made so much difference. And I think this is often we overlook these things, like we ship something and it's like, oh, this is not great. It's not working and like we can it or we like write it off, but really like it's that iteration and figuring things out. And as long as you're speaking to customers, you're hearing that feedback and you, it's positive, then you know to pursue and to push on and to make things work. So I love that like wisdom. I see it just from my own experience as well.

[00:23:50] Andrew Michael: I'm keen to backtrack a little bit though as well, because you brushed over it quite quickly and I wanted to get into the nuance and understand like what made you decide to go. So it sounds like you went through a process of identifying your ideal customer profile. You came to like a segment, you said SMB mid market up to 1000 people, sweet spot, 50 to 200.

[00:24:13] Andrew Michael: How and why did you decide that this was the segment? Like what did that process look like internally? Because obviously like, I think if you think about the opportunity, like most companies decide, okay, like mid market and enterprises where it's at, they eventually try to scale the business. But Wistia is always really like staying true to this SMB mid market segment. What is it that's attracted you and why did you end up picking it to mean with?

[00:24:36] Chris Savage: I mean, we've been in it for a long time and found that like the SMB space is hard.

[00:24:42] Andrew Michael: Yes.

[00:24:43] Chris Savage: Because they're everywhere, which seems good. But the hard thing is how do you actually get a message in front of them that like resonates, how do you find them? Where do they hang out? All that kind of stuff. And I always felt like it was hard, but actually it was like a secret advantage for us that we've been at this so long. We built a brand for so long because we actually have generated word of mouth in that world. And so that seems like an advantage. So it seems crazy to give that up.

[00:25:09] Chris Savage: Then like the research, we worked with an external firm so we could get it done in a more like unbiased way. Like we were pretty concerned at this moment that we could get like high on our own supply. That like we were just like too excited about the things we were doing, we weren't going to have like a broad enough view at the market. So we worked with an external research firm to help us question a lot of things that we were wondering.

[00:25:32] Chris Savage: And that meant that we were able to do like a huge number of customer interviews in a pretty short period of time. So in the course of, I'm gonna say six weeks, we did like 400 to 500 customer interviews with all these different folks. And it was just looking through all of that data and seeing like clear trends.

[00:25:52] Chris Savage: I mean, it was really just like something's happening and the bet we had to make was COVID was still happening. So the bet was, what happens if COVID ends soon? What happens if there's a vaccine and everything goes back to normal? I think we can say it's basically back to normal at this point, but will these trends continue? That was kind of the biggest question point. And we decided that they would.

[00:26:19] Chris Savage: And the reason was that we'd actually seen a lot of changes like this already occur in our market. And it was actually just part of something that was already happening. It was just happening faster where when I first started talking to customers, I mean, we started in 2006. I remember the first time I talked to a business customer and I cold called them and said, Hey, do you want to use videos like 2007? And they're like, this sounds great, but like, I can't spend 20 grand on a video for a website. Like I can't. I don't have the budget for that.

[00:26:47] Chris Savage: And then DSLRs came along and added video and the price for a video went from like 20 grand for one of those blog videos, like two grand. And then we watched the iPhone ad video and it went from two grand to like, you could do it for the price of an iPhone, which you already had. So it was like free.

[00:27:02] Chris Savage: And then so then when that context, that's where it's like seeing the computer as a camera, like, oh, now they're gonna do it at work. Like it's finally gonna happen because they're gonna show presentations. They're gonna show their website, sure they're gonna show their product. And so we're like, this just seems the same. And by the way, the one that's happening now is AI. Like AI, generative video, AI avatars, translations, voice cloning, it's the same thing where it's just like yet again, another huge step change. It's gonna make video easier to use, it's gonna increase people's confidence, it's gonna open up more use cases for folks.

[00:27:38] Chris Savage: There are obviously downsides to all of this technology in every case, I'm not gonna go through all of them, what they are right now. But like, it's gonna have another tremendous change and we focus on companies and helping them use video better, so they're gonna make a lot more video, they're gonna use it better, they're gonna do more themselves, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:27:52] Andrew Michael: So the bet was that this trend would continue post-COVID and like you'll just continue to see. It's interesting using external for like, agency, whatever, that reduce a little bit of bias, I think from your own internal notes. But if a startup like listening today wants to sort of conduct similar research to figure out like which segments to focus on and which audience, like what are some of the things that went into that study that you'd recommend people look into at least question with their audience?

[00:28:20] Chris Savage: So, I mean, the biggest thing was these interviews and that processing the interviews. So I would say like, the...what I would do is start interviewing customers. You can spend money to interview people, right? Like this is a thing I think I wish I had known early because it just never occurred to me. But like you can tell someone, I'll give you this $25 gift card if you do an hour long interview. And a lot of people will respond.

[00:28:49] Chris Savage: So I would go to LinkedIn. I would find who I think your target customers are. I would reach out to people saying you're doing interviews. Offer them the gift card if they do it. And I would just record, get their permission, obviously, record all these conversations, come up with the questions you want to ask them about your market, which really are going to be about like, this person's, if you're in B2B, what is this person's job? What are they struggling with? What are the other things they do? Where are they wasting time? Where can they get an advantage?

[00:29:14] Chris Savage: And then in today's world, I would take all these recordings and I would transcribe them and I'd put them directly into ChatGPT or Claude and I would start processing the transcriptions looking for trends. And I would gut check with your own experience. Like, does this map up with what I felt like were the takeaways in all these meetings? I mean, OpenAI just launched on their pro plan, the deep research product like yesterday, which we'll think for a very long time before it gives you an answer. I was playing around with it yesterday. Unbelievably impressive, especially for market research type things.

[00:29:48] Chris Savage: So I would like take your own interviews. I would use something like OpenAI's deep research thing and I would compare the two. I would like be like, what came from all these interviews? And then what does it look like if you're looking at like the top down market signal data, and then try to work between those things to come up with how it would impact your strategy.

[00:30:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And the questions that you mentioned as well, like you're asking about their job, the problems that they face and how then are you sort of correlating like their responses to matching up that they're an ideal customer profile for you? Like, do you have any specific like use cases or problems in mind that you look at solve and then try and understand who that resonates most with?

[00:30:30] Chris Savage: So we basically cut the data different ways. So we looked at people who were just getting started. We looked at people who were, had been doing this for a while. So basically we looked at like, how long they'd be using video. We looked at size of business. We looked at tech stack. We looked at location. We tried to cut all the data in different ways. And what we ended up finding, which was different, we'd done the type of thing in the past actually.

[00:30:54] Chris Savage: And in the past, we didn't see big differences in terms of like size of business, what people were doing. It all was like basically the same. That was one of the most surprising things from the research was that it was quite different, the features and tools that different size businesses wanted. So then when we were looking at our own strategy, we just mapped it against it. We're like, hey, we're really good at this stuff. We think we could do this other thing really well, this other thing feels pretty far off. So we just kind of put that together. You put the Venn diagram together, it was like, oh, it's obvious where we should focus.

[00:31:26] Chris Savage: And so I think, yeah, it was just like, it was just combination of data and sorting it different ways to help us figure out where to go. And then when we got there, in some ways, I think it felt really obvious. And that I think was a good sign. Like our intuition, not just like for me, the senior manager team, Brendan, the intuition of the team. When we communicated this to the company, our support team, our sales team was like, oh, that's amazing. Like we hear about that all the time. Customers are asking for these different things.

[00:31:58] Chris Savage: And so it gave us like, it was just, but part of this is feel. It's like, what can you- what do you believe you can accomplish? And if you believe it and you know in your heart, like, hey, I know we do this thing really well and I think it maps this opportunity and I don't think it maps that one. It gets back to kind of like betting on yourself like, probably follow the one you believe in and not do the one you doubt.

[00:32:20] Andrew Michael: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. I think to your point as well, like betting on yourself, like when you mentioned that earlier, I was thinking to myself, like every single time I betted on myself, like I've always come out on top, like there's never been a time, even in like the worst of failures, there was always something better that happened. So like, if I think to start up experience, I maybe launched a company, it folded, but then the next job I got, I was getting paid double than I was getting the previous job and like, there's always just been like, these wins and betting on yourself, like doesn't necessarily have this huge successful outcome, but like it's my experience as well, it's always been a positive outcome, no matter what the actual outcome of the bet that you make.

[00:32:59] Chris Savage: Yeah.

[00:33:00] Andrew Michael: So you go through this exercise, you figure out your ICP or your core and a focus on you sort of identified this opportunity was going to continue to grow and scale this change in behavior now is here, you've built this platform. And then along comes ChatGPT and Generative AI and like totally disrupts the space again. So you've gone through this first wave now of COVID now we're going through this wave of generative AI. How are you approaching this next wave in this next change? Like what is top of mind for you now? How are you trying to see what's next in this paradigm?

[00:33:32] Chris Savage: Yeah. So, I mean, so, let's see, when did ChatGPT rollout was like?

[00:33:38] Andrew Michael: 2022, I think.

[00:33:39] Chris Savage: Yeah. October 22, I think. So I think every leader needs to be exploring the new things in their space all the time. I think that's extremely important. You have to build up conviction. Are these new things real? Are they not? Can they add value to their customer? Can they not? So when ChatGPT launched, just like everybody else, I was like wowed. We had some people on our team who had been playing with their language models in the past. So I had seen it before, but I was more just shocked by the scale of it taking off like this.

[00:34:11] Chris Savage: And we realized like, hey, we're not in a position to even know every place we can use this. So the first thing we did was we did a hackathon based on AI, I'm gonna say in like, January or February of 23. I was like, hey, let's like try some stuff out and see what's possible. And hackathons for us have been a really great tool because it gives people permission to make prototypes and understand what's possible. Yes, the bulletproof production version, you can't make it a day or two usually but the hackathon version you actually can.

[00:34:44] Chris Savage: And what that does is it can change things culturally because I had a bunch of people who were afraid of AI, just like everybody. And then we did the hackathon, I was like, oh wait, like you're telling me we could just automatically make the title for people or we could automatically create tags or we could automatically add chapters. Like a lot of those things are small annoyances and we could remove them, right?

[00:35:05] Chris Savage: And so like we should do that, right? And so it started like that. And basically I think it's like, just like any new thing, this happens all the time. There's the hype cycle, there's the chaff of sorrow, and then it comes back to like real uses. The thing that's really, really hard is again, predicting the timing. Where are we in the space? And so I think like it is very helpful in moments like this to be an extreme early adopter and also look at it with the view of like, I'm gonna try this stuff. It's probably mostly not gonna work, but it's still valuable for my time to do it.

[00:35:39] Chris Savage: And so that's the way we took our approach is just current encouraging constant innovation. And we purposely didn't want to make a separate team that was like the AI team. We're like, no, everyone had this, we believe this change is going to be so huge is going to touch and impact everybody. So we need everyone to be exploring and playing around with it. And then over time, basically, what's happened is we found certain tools, certain basically AI models that are really good at specific things that could actually change what we provide to customers.

[00:36:09] Chris Savage: So an example is you feel we've been able to order transcription in Wistia for 10 years where you could basically say, give me an automated transcription or pay more for like a human perfect transcription. That's per minute. Both you had to pay for both. But what we saw was that the automated transcriptions that we had in the platform were not that good. They're like 95% accurate. So when you look at it, you see errors all the time, requires a lot of correction. It turns out there's new AI models that are unbelievably good. They're like 99.9%.

[00:36:42] Chris Savage: So when we saw those and they were tremendously cheap, we're like, oh, this is an opportunity to change the platform. So now every video that gets put into Wistia is automatically transcribed instantly and the transcription is quite good. And so that was like a win from AI that we could provide to the customers. Then we realized, oh, the transcription's really good. We want to make this editor. How can we make it really easy to edit a video? We can make it so that you edit the text and we are going to edit the video for you. So we built that into the product.

[00:37:11] Chris Savage: And it just continued like that of like, we do translations of the captions into different languages. We have, give you automatic like titles, automatic AI chapters, and it just keeps evolving. And there's actually a bunch of stuff we're doing now that's even bigger, more tremendous changes, I would say. Some of which have rolled out. We launched a partnership with Adobe. And now we have like Adobe speech enhance for their podcast product built into Wistia. So any video that you upload or you record, you can make it sound like you recorded on a studio mic by just clicking a button and processing it. And there's a lot of other stuff like that coming. So I think the big thing is like, you have to continue to play with this stuff and actually know when it's good enough that it should be production ready. And then you have to commit to it.

[00:37:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think I mentioned this on the last episode as well. Like Sam Altman, I think at some point he mentioned like, you should just build assuming that things are going to get better. And I think to a point, like there's maybe a year ago, two years ago, the transcription was decent, but then like with each release has just been getting better and better and looking more and more use cases. And obviously like now with new models as well, coming out that are totally open source, like DeepSeek and costs being reduced significantly.

[00:38:18] Andrew Michael: There's so many new use cases that get unlocked four years [inaudible] to figure out what to do with this technology. And I think in the space of video, like it is incredible, like day in and out things you are seeing. So I'm excited to see how that evolves and how like enables new tools for creators to build and create things with video.

[00:38:37] Andrew Michael: I see we're running up on time. So a couple of questions, a quick fire. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:38:47] Chris Savage: I think the easiest, yeah, I think the one thing, man, so many things I wish I knew earlier. Yeah. I think the one thing that stands out to me is like the simplest way to improve both churn and retention is actually to get your activation and onboarding to be really, really solid. And it's easy to ignore that part and like try to solve a churn problem. But usually by the time you're only on churn, it's too late.

[00:39:23] Andrew Michael: Yeah, 100%. I think that's something like we talk about quite a bit on the show. It's definitely like... the first response for people is to go to see the reasons for churn and try to fix those, but ultimately the biggest impact you have is really focusing on that activation points and getting more people to that successful state.

[00:39:40] Andrew Michael: Next up is, and maybe we'll take this one in the context of video. And I'm pretty sure like a lot of people come to you for advice and say, hey, Chris, like, how can I get more out of video for my business? But what's one question that you wish more people would ask you, but they don't.

[00:39:57] Chris Savage: Good question. Yeah, I think like people don't ask enough or understand often enough the impact that a video can have even with like a small number of views. And I wish more people talked about this because I think we're so used to seeing every video we see on social networks are like the most popular videos and we just get like blinded by like the likes and the view counts. Like I saw some short clip the other day. There's some comedy short clip of somebody who I've followed for a long time and it had 600,000 likes on it.

[00:40:32] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[00:40:33] Chris Savage: And I was thinking to myself like, man, it's crazy that this person has this many. So it's very hard to go into your business and look at- you might actually have videos that are getting 30 views a month that are having a tremendous impact because they're hitting people at the exact right spot of the funnel with a question that they really want an answer to. And I just think there's like not enough attention on that. And that doesn't, it doesn't make sense to make those videos. If every video costs 20 grand, but when you can do it yourself in five minutes, like it makes a lot of sense. So I think that's just an area that I think people should pay more attention to.

[00:41:09] Andrew Michael: A hundred percent. I think this applies to everything though in marketing. And I think about it like from my perspective, from like podcast lessons, like, one of the things that we underestimate, like, even though like the podcast run like 10,000 monthly or whatever.

[00:41:22] Andrew Michael: It's not a huge audience compared to some of these other big podcasts, but like for advertisers, it's been incredibly successful because it like hits the niche. Like three years in a row now hits a 2X return on ad spend. And obviously that compounds over time. So, but it's like, it's not massive, but it's like significant. It's reaching the right people at the right time with the right message, as you say, like, and like shouldn't be discounted. Like it's too easy to discount. I think.

[00:41:49] Chris Savage: The number of people who give up on something because they get numbers like this and they actually had a successful thing is crazy. Like I think it is like, it's such a sad thing to see. I sometimes think about startups that I knew that were actually, they didn't realize how successful they were. They just had these like horrible perceptions of what they needed to be. So they gave up.

[00:42:13] Chris Savage: And I was like, no, you had a thousand customers. You had a thousand customers in like 2011. And then you pivoted away because you didn't think it was going fast enough. And I was like, if you would only stay on that, I can only imagine what you would be now. And I think it's just this like dopamine society, personally, imposter syndrome. It's such a bummer. Like I wish more people could get comfortable with the smaller numbers because they would actually find their way to success more often.

[00:42:36] Andrew Michael: I mean, that's one thing I get quite often, like people send me a message on LinkedIn, like I'm starting a podcast. Do you have any advice? And like, that's the one piece I always say is like in the beginning, it's like incredibly difficult. It'll be crickets for a long, long time. Like I think for me, it probably like took two years before the show started to like take off and start to get like 2000 listeners an episode or anything like that.

[00:42:55] Andrew Michael: Before that it was just like very minimal. And yeah, like it was very easy to give up. I think for me, I was lucky in the sense that I was learning so much, like I was getting to chat to so many amazing people. So it was like, okay, it was a two sided thing and it wasn't really about the money, but, I think it's so easy, like just to ignore the fact that some of these things just take time and the things need to compound over period for you to actually see the results.

[00:43:19] Chris Savage: Totally.

[00:43:20] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you again today. Is there any final thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with, like anything they should be aware of to keep up to speed with your work?

[00:43:29] Chris Savage: I mean, if you wanna learn more about what we're doing, check out wistia.com. I host a podcast called Talking Too Loud with Chris Savage on all podcast platforms where I talk about like the journey of building the company, entrepreneurship, and also like really just like what it takes to build great brands and great products. And yeah, if you ever want to chat or have questions, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. But thank you, Andrew, for having me. It was great to see you again. It was really fun.

[00:43:52] Andrew Michael: Thanks so much. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes. So you can check those out there and yeah, thanks a lot. I wish you best of luck going forward in our cruise.

[00:44:00] Chris Savage: Thanks. See ya.

[00:44:01] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:44:09] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.

[00:44:29] Andrew Michael: Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you and you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening, see you again next week.

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