Hi Krish — thanks for having me here!
Long-term company thinking is one of our four company values, so I’m proud to hear that’s evident from the outside looking in and that we’re living up to it.
We do point to One Ten One Hundred (One, Ten, One Hundred - A Wistia Original Series) internally as an example of this. The idea for it came up somewhat organically after Chris, my co-founder interviewed Adam from Sandwich Video on stage at a user conference that we did that year. After the interview folks on our creative team (Dan and Chris, who are in OTOH) were talking with Adam about how fun it would be to work together and they were throwing around all kinds of ideas. They hit on this idea of making three commercials for Soapbox each with different budgets.
When Chris and I were thinking about this project and investment, we tried to imagine all the ways it could be successful:
- We’d have an amazing ad campaign for Soapbox
- The OTOH documentary would be a hit with our core audience and build brand affinity
- Our creative team would level up because they’re working on a really ambitious project with a team we really admire.
- Morale boost for the whole team. This type of work is really motivating to the whole company because it’s creative and fun.
- If part of this flopped, we could write about what went wrong and that would likely be a really interesting story to our audience.
We looked at this list and tried to estimate how confident we were in each. Because there were so many way for this to succeed, even if only one or two worked, we would view the project as a success. For instance, if the ads weren’t successful but our core audience liked the documentary, that would be a success (this is basically what happened).
We try to use this line of thinking when evaluating projects that don’t have specific metrics attached.