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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

1757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6683 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chris Savage is the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a web-based software solution that helps marketers turn viewers into brand advocates to grow their businesses. After graduating from Brown University, Chris and his co-founder Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Brendan’s living room in 2006. They founded the company with the goal of helping businesses effectively market their products or services more creatively through video. Recently, Savage and Schwartz turned down an offer to sell Wistia and took on $17.3M in debt instead, which allowed them to buy out their investors, gain full control of Wistia, and take the path less traveled in the tech industry. Now, more than 500,000 businesses across 50 countries depend on Wistia's products to build their brands and their businesses, including HubSpot, MailChimp, Sephora, Starbucks, and Tiffany & Co.

Transcript

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0:00.0

All right, guys. What's up? Nathan Lackey here. Today, our guest is Chris Savage. He's the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a web-based software solution that helps marketers turn viewers into brand advocates to grow their businesses. Now, more than 500,000 businesses across 50 countries depend on Wistia's products to build their brands like HubSpot, Mail, Chimp, Sephora, Starbucks, and Tiffany and co. Chris, you ready to take us to the top?

0:23.5

Let's do it. All right, man, I already told you I'm envious of your video set up here. You're totally

0:27.4

putting me to shame. I'm just at my desk, man. This is just how it looks. Just another day in the

0:33.7

office. All right. So we just said on the bio, but anything you want to add in terms of Wistia for folks that,

0:40.0

you know, if they haven't heard of you guys, what you guys do?

0:43.3

Yeah.

0:43.8

I mean, I would just say we've been around for a long time.

0:46.5

We're a classic overnight success, you know,

0:49.3

failed in obscurity for many, many years.

0:51.9

And then figured out like how to build a freemian business.

0:56.1

And we just help small and medium size businesses use video better. And that means analytics

1:00.8

see how your videos are performing, hosting, sharing tools, marketing tools, the ability to build

1:05.9

channels. Like we have a ton of stuff to help people do that. Yeah. Now the context of this,

1:09.9

what I want to talk about is something very unique to what you've done,

1:12.2

which is an acquisition offer you got recently and decided to do something totally off the rails,

1:16.4

which was instead of taking the acquisition offer, raise debt and buy the folks out.

1:19.9

So we'll get to that in about two or three minutes.

1:21.7

But first, give us context in terms of where you're playing. So would you categorize yourself as kind of SMB mid-market enterprise? What's the

1:27.8

average customer looking like? Yeah, we're in the SMB space. I mean, you know, there's a,

1:34.1

that's where we've set our target. I think like any business that's freemium, you end up,

1:38.3

you end up with customers across the spectrum, right? Like we're mostly SMB. There's some mid-market. There's a little bit of

1:44.4

enterprise in there. But what it means for, like, how we've built a business is that, like,

...

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