#110 – How to Prepare for Success From the Beginning With Chris Savage of Wistia

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2019

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Chris Savage (@csavage) and his co-founder started their business, they were convinced that they'd be able to sell it within six months. They never would've guessed that 13 years later, not only would they still working on Wistia, but the business would be $17M in debt. In this episode we talk about pivoting from a bad idea to a good one, prioritizing long-term thinking from the very beginning, and how Wistia turned $500k in losses into $6M in profit in a single year.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/110-chris-savage-of-wistia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Chris Savage, welcome to the ND Hackers podcast. Thank you for having me. Excite to be here.
0:05.5	You are the founder of Wistia, where you create software and guides that help other businesses
0:10.2	create and host their own professional videos and use their videos to convert more customers.
0:14.8	And you've been working on the business since 2006. It's been quite a roller coaster ride since then.
0:19.1	There are times where you had investors that came
0:21.3	a point in time where you bought out all of your investors. You've been growing at times.
0:24.8	You've been stagnant at times. You've been wildly profitable. You've also been $17 million in debt.
0:30.9	You've really been all over the place. How would you say things are going with Wistia today?
0:35.2	Things are great. Better than ever. We've made a lot of mistakes over the years.
0:39.6	And fortunately, some of, you know, some of our instincts were turned into conviction
0:44.2	through those same mistakes.
0:45.4	And so we are in, we're in a good place.
0:48.3	But yeah, we've had our ups and downs like everybody and learn the hard way that how your
0:52.9	company is set up really matters,
0:55.1	who you're working with really matters, expectations you set for yourself and your team
0:59.1	and your investors really, really matters.
1:01.6	Like getting that right makes a big difference.
1:03.5	I think in terms of how successful you can be and also how fulfilling the work can be.
1:07.3	How do you measure how successful you are?
1:09.7	Like if you're trying to paint a picture for a hypothetical
1:11.7	podcast audience, I might be listening in, how would you describe Wistie's success to them?
1:16.2	Yeah, you know, when we started, we thought, we honestly thought we were going to sell the business
	...

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