Wistia, Inc.

But that's kind of the mission.

And now what's kind of cool is Wistia's getting into the game.

Jay Akunzo's getting into the game.

Everyone's kind of starting to converge on this concept.

Totally.

It's just renaming stuff.

So it's like, OK, how do you reinvent email? Well, Vidyard and Wistia with Soapbox, some of these things have been good.

Like, hey, I can put a video, I can put a thumbnail in there, and I can send it.

Yeah.

You know, yesterday when I was at LA Tech Week at an event hosted by Wistia, I ended up at some point kind of being able to give the pitch on zero-click marketing.

And something I kind of had fun with was, so the audience there was, it was creative LA people.

So there was a mix of like some entrepreneurs, founders, right? Some designers, but also like...

We did a lot of video, hosted a lot with Vimeo and looked at some of the other players.

I think Brightcove was big back then and Wistia too.

What's the shape of the market now? Obviously, there's YouTube, which is almost competing more with Netflix and other platforms now in terms of being...

mass market entertainment, but for hosting video, what's the shape of the market? How big is Vimeo now? How big are the other players? What are you getting yourself into in terms of the competition here?

And now they are well into enterprise and enterprise now is probably the thing that makes a fairly good chunk.

That has kind of like spread them out quite thin and they then compete now in with lots of other segments.

So you've got Wistia and you've got Brightcove who are also then much more on the slightly more enterprising side, especially Wistia.

And those are areas which for Livid we are not focused on.

So recently, I was in Boston with my SaaS Academy group.

And we went and visited Chris at Wistia, the founder of Wistia.

And what's really neat about their story is here's a company.

If you don't know Wistia, they're a video hosting platform.

They also have some sales tools.

But here's a company that raised I think a million and a half dollars in early seed stage funding that's now, well, tens of millions of ARR company.

But what's not fun, having built and sold multiple companies myself, is the early times trying to figure out product market fit and making the same decisions you've already made several times in the past.

So if you're going to build it again, you might as well just shift to whatever's causing you to even think about selling the business and keep the path.

you want it to be hard because you don't get to learn or grow when things are as expected.

So I almost feel like if you spend all the time and energy building the environment that you love, exiting to then, and this is a conversation I had with Chris at Wistia.

We were just there in Boston.

I brought my JFDI group.

They went and raised debt equity.

You can all go online to read the article post they did.

Because they realized that if we sold, and they could have sold, that him and his co-founder would just start doing something similar space as Wistia and in the same area with the same kind of people.

And it's

Yeah, I think we still haven't figured this out, but that's kind of like the mission.

And now what's kind of cool is like Wistia's getting into the game, Jay Akunzo's getting into the game.

Like everyone's kind of starting to converge on this concept.

Dan Martell's getting in the game.

Totally.

It's just renaming stuff.

So it's like, OK, how do you reinvent email? Well, Vidyard and Wistia with Soapbox, some of these things have been good.

Like, hey, I can put a video, I can put a thumbnail in there, and I can send it.

Like if you're not, then, OK, maybe maybe when you add in.

The digital infrastructure that you use to run the business, the actual software systems, Slack, Klaviyo, Shopify, Wistia, whatever.

Okay, maybe that's another 5% or something.

But the point is that that's what you're looking at is, okay, you're growing, but like, Where's the money going? The money that's coming in, where's it going? And how much of it is going to each of those buckets? And is that in line with what you can actually afford to run this company? If there was a bias in this category, people are biased towards investing in team and they're unbiased towards investing in marketing.

So actually removing unlimited and making it structured so there's a number of accounts per different plan.

This is, I mean, I've seen this with companies like Wistia with the number of videos.

You can do it on other data points.

It's really whatever, when you look at your customer's usage, okay, amongst all your customers, there's probably really clear breakdowns where somebody transitions from this level activity to the next tier of activity and that's where you wanna start adding some constraints in the upper end of their usage that kind of forces them into the next plan that you might offer.

Oh, you want to host it to just your students so that only they can see it? Or...

whatever like there's a website that I used to try to do some marketing for like four years ago called Wistia and that was their whole thing like you host your videos here and not YouTube okay I think that you know is interesting and I think that it works well for like paid courses like I go to paid courses sometimes I think six string country is one of them and I'm pretty sure those are not hosted like private videos on YouTube I think they use a different platform and it's interesting yeah

Yeah.

Yeah.