I'm Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia. AMA 💞

[brendan (Brendan Schwartz)]

@Anushree

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for doing this AMA

As an early stage startup founder, would love to learn more on these things:

1. How did you discover who’ll be your first few customers? How did you get them to talk to you given that you may have been very well in between the recession?
2. Your key learnings from your journey from the first version of your product to the PMF version. If you were to do it all over again, what is one mistake you wouldn’t repeat?
3. How do you differentiate in a crowded market today? What was the state of the market when you entered,back in 2008? In case you guys were the early movers, how did you shape up the market?

Thanks,
Anushree

Hi Anushree! Thanks for the questions.

1. For us, it was all through networking and talking to our first customers in person or over the phone. In our first year of business we built a portfolio website for artists that was ultimately a failure. We took the tech and product learnings from that and built a prototype of a private video sharing service for a friend’s company needed to share videos of surgeries. From there, we started talking to some folks from the video production world who my co-founder had worked with and they became our second and third customers. One thing that wasn’t obvious to us until much later was that we thought being a small company with no customers was something we needed to hide, but it turns out that there are many people in bigger companies who get personal satisfaction from being a really early customer of a startup and helping shape the product. We met a number of early customers at startup events. Many of these folks were working on a side project or startup but worked during the day at a big company. One of our earliest customers was someone we met like this. He ran training at a huge telecom and took a shot on us mostly because it was fun for him
2. When we built our portfolio website for artists, we were very naive and had a “if you build it, they will come” attitude. We didn’t understand the power of marketing or building an audience before you have a product. I would start building an audience and doing marketing from day 1.
3. I think brand is always the right answer about how to stand out in a crowded market. I don’t mean that you need a fancy logo and polished marketing. But you need to stand for something and build an audience who cares about that thing. It doesn’t have to be directly what your product does. We found our brand voice and audience when we started making DIY video content that connected with marketers who wanted to learn how to make videos.