Thanks for doing this AMA! I would love to hear your thoughts on recruiting/hiring employees for your organization. How has it evolved over the last decade or so (early stage to growth phase) for Wistia & how will it change going forward with more virtual workforce?
I wrote a bit about this in my reply to Rajaraman, but the short version is we set yearly goals at the company level, then teams set quarterly goals (most of which roll up to the company ones, but donāt have to), then individuals set goals in support of team goals. Weāve been fairly loose about the individual goals and spend most of our energy making sure the company goals are right and clearly communicated. FWIW, this is a process we more strictly adopted when we were 80+ people. Prior to that weād try different things each year. I think the most valuable parts of this process for us are: 1) forced prioritization and debate about whatās truly important for success because this leads to focus, 2) having a simple and clear plan thatās communicated over and over is really helpful in maintaining that focus throughout the year. Most companies, even large ones, donāt have laser focus. So if our team of 115 people is all incredibly focused on a single opportunity, we can out maneuver much larger teams.
Great question! One of our longest standing all company meetings is a Show & Tell (Explaining Show & Tell ā Wistia Customer Showcase). Itās changed over the years, but the spirit is the same. Itās a chance for anyone and everyone to show in progress work, things theyāve learned, etc. Itās informal and fun. We do it twice a month now, and I always look forward to it! One other thing we started doing when we were around 80 people is after our monthly all-hands, Chris (my co-founder) and I meet with each team in the company for 30 minutes. We used to do Q&A in the all hands, but we found not everyone was comfortable asking questions in that setting, especially if the question was about how something affected their team because they didnāt want to waste other teams times. I learn a lot based on the questions people ask in these monthly touchpoints, and the quality of the questions is much higher since itās team by team and folks have had a weekend to reflect and donāt just have to think of questions in the moment during the all hands.
Hey @brendan thanks so much for taking the time to answer questions. My question is this:
What advice would you offer to an ambitious, early stage B2B SaaS company that aspires to be the mailchimp / wistia of their vertical and is all-in on the idea of bootstrapping and not taking VC? Access to capital obviously helped you to grow in the early days but it seems it didnāt fit with your long term vision of how you wanted to run a company. How would advise navigating that growth phase?
Hi Ravi, thanks for the kind words! Congratulations on your success ā those are both amazing achievements!
Itās certainly something that varies from person to person or team to team, and the conservative goal setting is what Iāve found to work best for me personally and Wistia as a company. In our case, weāve always been quite ambitious about growth and are never quite satisfied, so that motivation was always there. But that feeling of being behind each month was very demoralizing. I think one way you could try to balance things is set longer-term wildly ambitious goals, perhaps things that donāt have numbers tied to them, but make your annual goals achievable. The thing I try to remind myself of is that a goal is purely a tool, and you should look at that tool periodically and ask if itās working for you. If itās not helping you achieve what you want, try another tool or change the way youāre using it.
This is a great question. I tend to think that the best products are build by people with the most context and the people who care the most. At a smaller company any individual likely has more context about the customer, the market, and the business than their counterpart at a larger company because when you get bigger you tend to have folks specialize and that context gets divided up and compartmentalized. Certainly when youāre in more direct contact with customers and feel more direct impact over the business or product, youāll care more. I think that comes through in the work. Finally, focus matters so much. Likely thereās an aspect or area of your product that is better than the big guys or something that youāre particularly focused on. If your whole team is focused on that problem or area, itās possible you are actually investing more on an absolute basis than the bigger company because itās just one of many things theyāre doing and itās a small sliver of a number of peopleās time. I think about that a lot.
Thatās awesome! It sounds like you both have a great partnership. Itās cliche, but communication has been the most important thing for us. When we talk about how weāre each feeling about certain things and whatās stressing us out it helps us avoid things getting to a point where they boil over. I do think if youāre prioritizing your relationship above the business, thatās the most important thing because that forces those hard conversations.
Congrats again on the success and thank you for the thoughtful questions!
Hi Tomas, Iām sorry to hear that. Iām sure that wasnāt an easy decision. My instinct is to communicate as transparently as you can with your customer base. As a customer, even if itās not the news I want to hear, having a heads up about whatās happening will give me time to transition to a new solution versus being surprised about it later. Also, I think customers tend to notice when a product isnāt in active development. Weāve made plenty of mistakes at Wistia, and Iāve always found that no matter how bad the news is, people appreciate it when you tell them in a transparent way. Also, I wouldnāt be afraid to express how you feel in that communication.
I should also add that I find it helpful in hard situations like this to think of them as opportunities. Itās a time to build trust with your audience or really lead. The best leadership is done when times are hard, not when theyāre easy. I find this positive framing helps me to do the right thing and go above and beyond instead of being overrun with fear and not taking action.
Hey Brendan - I donāt have a question (my cofounder @ncameron asked one!) but just wanted to say that your brand (1-10-100, the dancing homepage videos etc) is one of the small handful that I hold up as being truly refreshing and different in a very samey SaaS space. Iām a huge fan, so thank you!
Weāve probably changed our pricing over a hundred times since starting Wistia. The current iteration has been largely untouched for a few years now though and has been working well for us, particularly having videos as a value metric. Before this, usage was more or less unlimited, so we had customers getting huge amount of value and paying very little. In this mode, the price more or less scales with value. Itās imperfect (a single video is worth different amounts to different businesses) but all pricing is. We have talked about shifting to a free trial instead of a free plan since three videos is limiting to a lot of businesses. In general, I am a fan of freemium if your free plan can be truly useful to folks. Yes, it will cost you money, but I think of it as a marketing and acquisition expense.
Weāre very happy to have someone using us for free with three videos and never upgrading. Theyāll likely tell other people about the product if theyāre getting value from it. Regarding helping people make more videos, we do this indirectly through our content (The Beginner's Guide to Video Production). But youāre right, the product itself doesnāt make videos for you. Thatās always been something thatās limited us, but our thesis was and is is that more businesses are making more videos every day and that will continue indefinitely, so thereās plenty of opportunity, even if we canāt directly accelerate that trend as much as weād like to. We do also have a product called Soapbox that helps you make professional-looking videos very quickly: Screen and Webcam Recorder - Soapbox is Now in Wistia.
Hi Sachin, thanks for the question! A lot of our early hiring was done through our networks or networks of people we brought on. We also did a very poor job of assessing peopleās skill and fit and things were really inconsistent. Those practices were also terrible for Diversity and Inclusion, which is something thatās really important to us. Here are a few things weāve done and Iāve learned since then that have helped us a lot. You can do these easily even when youāre a small team, and if I could go back in time, I would do them all:
Have a hiring manager and everyone knows itās that personās decision. Shared responsibility often means no one feels truly responsible.
A job posting is an advertisement, approach it like writing copy for your homepage.
Script your interviews. Write questions in advance and what a good answer for each question is. This makes sure youāre asking candidates the same things and it makes for a better candidate experience because you donāt have each person on your team asking them the same set of questions. Also, doing it in advance will likely produce more interesting and thoughtful questions.
Do behavioral interviewing instead of asking hypotheticals. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
The current situation has changed our thinking about remote. Before being 100% WFH, about 10% of our team was full time remote. We also have really flexible working in general, so many people WFH one or two days a week. Weāre still hiring, and many of those roles are now FT remote where they would have been in person. I think itās likely weāll end up 30% remote in a year or two.
But we are still plan to continue to be an in-person first team. We do a lot of creative work and much of our company culture comes from being in the same space together. Video chat is great, but I find itās much harder to achieve limbic resonance (just learned this term last week and love it) than it is in person. I think that resonance is really important for certain type of creative work.
First off, thank you for the compliment We have looked up to Mailchimp for a long time (and continue to) so itās flattering to be mentioned alongside them as a company to aspire to.
The angel money we raised helped us hire two experienced folks and brought us a small network of advisors. As you probably know, itās generally quite easy to get advice as weāre thankful to work in an industry where many folks like to pay it forward. The hiring was quite helpful and it may have taken us another year or two to build up enough revenue to hire someone else. But really, most all of our growth was funded by customer revenue because by the time we got to PMF we were nearly out of cash.
If we were doing it again, Iād try to only raise money to fund efforts to meet demand. We raised money before we had fit in the market and Iād try to avoid that unless absolutely necessary. If we were to raise money, Iād look at structuring a round similar to what Indie.vc offers ā have a preset way to buy equity back from investors so if you want to run an independent, profitable company for the long-term you have a clear path to doing that from the start.
I think itās awesome that youāre going the bootstrapped route. I think being forced to make it work on customer revenue produces really great products, resilient businesses, and pragmatic founders.
Dang, thanks Jonny! This really made my day. You and Neil are very kind. Really appreciate your support and best of luck with everything at Progression! Looks very cool!
Thank you for taking the time out and answering all the questions with such care and detail! Your spin on how āsales team are compatible with being product-ledā is super interesting. And what you said about ādoing things that donāt scaleā esp. in a recession, particularly resonated with me.
So glad we could get a chance to host you and get to learn from your hard-won lessons and insights! Much like @jonny said, thank you also, for the incredible work you and the entire team at Wistia does. Itās indeed an inspiration.
Thanks, Brendan! Investing in internal learnings and having specific internal targets by itself makes it much more appealing to try those long term initiatives.
This is excellent. The stance highlights such a significant issue with how we perceive work in general. The fact that itās so easy to conflate a big-number goal with something that actually challenges and helps a team become a better version of themselves. Thanks for sharing this.
We have looked up to Mailchimp for a long time (and continue to) so itās flattering to be mentioned alongside them as a company to aspire to.
