This guide is based on Mixergy’s interview with Chris Savage.
After working for ten months on an artists’ job board that had no users and made no money, Chris Savage built a successful company that enjoys recurring monthly income. It was all done by marketing to businesses, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.
Chris Savage is the founder of Wistia, which provides video marketing tools for businesses.
Here are the actionable highlights from the interview.
Chris decided that Wistia should focus on businesses that don’t often use video after entrepreneurs asked him for help and he saw that their businesses had money to spend on video products.
Chris found out that his first customer read the Boston Globe and had never heard of Hacker News, which suggested that focusing his marketing on the techies at Hacker News was a mistake.
Chris realized that Wistia could offer analytics for video like Constant Contact does for email and that $100 a month was a reasonable price.
Chris learned from analytics that only 20% of people watched the crucial part of a video he distributed, and he was able to identify the people who didn’t and direct them to the most important information in the video via email.
One customer used Wistia to share a sales demo video, and he saved two to three hours a day that he would have spent doing demos in person.
Wistia sold an early version of its product that allowed the customer to invite people by email to watch videos even though it didn’t yet support embedding or playlists.
Wistia’s customers were more understanding when they knew they were dealing with a 12-person organization.
Chris flew to L.A. for a meeting with HBO despite having a $15-per-week food budget.
Chris made Wistia’s product much easier to use after his girlfriend asked where the upload button was.
Wistia allowed first-time website visitors to follow instructions like “pause” and “rewind” while watching a video and then to see a visualization of what they’d just done.
Watch the full interview now
Written by Sarah Brodsky, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz