#5: Wistia’s co-founder and CEO, Chris Savage, on a years-in-the-making realization: “When we buy software today, we’re not just buying into the current benefits, features, and price. Instead, we’re making a bet on the product’s future.” (Source)
When we were starting, we noticed that people used Wistia for a million different things including internal training, collaboration, sales, marketing, and more. That felt fantastic.
The hard part is that when people use your product for so many different things, it’s tough to focus on any one use case. This is doubly true early on when you’re on-your-knees grateful for every customer that you can get.
Our website during that time revealed to our potential customers that we didn’t know where our product was headed. When you don’t know who you’re building your product for, it’s difficult to imagine the future.
During that time, our business struggled — and that struggle lasted for 4 years.
But then, we made a change, and Wistia took off at an unprecedented rate. This change was both incredibly simple and profoundly transformative.
We decided that we should focus primarily on video marketing. You can use Wistia for collaboration, internal training, and more — but Wistia is built for video marketing.
That resulted in an inside-out change for our company. We focused our external marketing site on the video marketing message and carried that through internally to our product roadmap, customer success, and even the way we talked and thought about our company on an individual level.
Everything we did reinforced the video marketing focus. By honing in on the vision of where we wanted to go, we made it easier to make product and marketing decisions that reinforced our value proposition.
For prospective customers, that clarified the future of Wistia. People told me the day that they saw Turnstile for email capture was the day that Wistia clicked for them. They could finally see where we were headed and why we were so different. That moment fundamentally changed their perception of us.
Our audience could look into the distance and see that features like Super Embed and Turnstile would become more and more powerful. They knew that better analytics were on their way. They could envision being a part of a community built around video marketing that didn’t exist anywhere else on the web. By honing in on our vision, we began differentiating our product.