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

[brendan (Brendan Schwartz)]

@bhavya

Thanks for taking the time to do this Brendan. Quickly wanted to know a couple of things.

• What worked for you in the product-led company?
• When did you move from a Product led company to a sales-driven model
• Your secret sauce as to how you survived the recession

Hi Bhavya! Thanks for the questions.

We haven’t moved to a sales-driven model . We operate as a product-led company and that’s not something we’re planning to change. We have built out a sales team in the last few years, and having a sales team is not incompatible with being product-led in my experience. A big reason we decided to invest in sales is because prospective customers were having a really bad experience. There were occasions where folks wanted to talk to us about the product before trying it or they tried it but still had questions. We used to only have a support team and they often weren’t well equipped to help and they certainly didn’t want to get on the phone with people. The other thing that’s been super valuable for us is that our sales team is on the phone with prospective buyers all day and as a result has really good insights about what to build in the product and how to message and position the product.

I’m not sure we had one secret for surviving the recession and in building our business there was certainly a lot of luck and good fortune, but here’s what I know helped us:

• Keep burn low — this is an obvious one. We were incredibly thrifty from the start. It takes time to build a product and get fit with the market. You want to give yourself as much time to experiment and try things.
• Stay super close to customers — in 2008 we only have a handful of customers. We talked to them weekly and made sure we knew what they wanted and were happy. Many of these conversations led to core innovations in our product that powered the business for years and years (e.g. video heatmaps came out of a conversation with an early customer that was doing sales training and asked us how she could know if people really watched the videos).
• Do things that don’t scale — in good times it’s easy to spend a lot of thought and energy preparing for success and you’re often asking the question “will this scale?”. I’d argue you should never ask that question in an early stage startup, but you definitely shouldn’t ask it at a startup during a recession. Before we had video embedding in our product, Ben (our first teammate) would generate embed codes for videos by hand and email them to customers. We weren’t sure if we should add it to the product, but we wanted to make customers happy and see if it was something they’d use. Needless to say, it was a hit, and we later figured out a way to scale that once the demand was there.
• Recognize your advantages — many of the things about your startup that are valuable to customers are even more valuable during a recession:
  • Better support and help — your customers talk direct to founders/team building the product.
  • Flexible — you can solve adjacent problems for customers. You can be flexible while bigger companies cannot.
  • Likely cheaper that more established competitors because you have lower overhead. But DO NOT under charge! Your prices are probably too low.