Everyone has that one podcast or video series they can’t stop talking about. That’s why long-form creative content is becoming a critical investment for all entrepreneurs and marketers looking to create brands that people and remember and evangelise.
Chris explains why effective brand marketing "shows" need to move away from discussing the value of a product, and instead tap into the passions of a niche audience, while providing actionable tips for finding a great idea and scaling video and audio content creation. He’ll also discuss building a company culture that values creativity and shifting product offerings to reflect changing marketing trends and drive growth.
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So next up, we have, Chris Savage, who's the CEO and co founder of Wistia. Wistia is a So if you're not familiar with Wistia, they're pretty much the premier video marketing software out there. And a really, really good company, a company that I've followed closely and actually in some ways with my last company, I kind of dreamed of having it Wistia esque in some ways.
Maybe Chris and I can talk about that later. But they've been doing really interesting stuff on a technical level. They've built a tremendous product. They've built a great brand and they've built a great culture within the company. So I'm sure we'll get into that with Chris.
But the brand part is what we're going to be hearing from now, hearing from Chris about now. And it's really about using content to, create a brand that can fuel your growth. So without further delay, over to Chris Savage. Turing Fest, how are you?
I am very excited to be here with you today. You know, I've wanted to come to Turing Fest many times. This is gonna be the year to be there in person and enjoy the Scottish Highlands and everything else you can do up there.
But we're all stuck at home. And so this is how we're doing it. So excited to be here with all of you. I'm going to be talking today about building a memorable brand and a content machine to fuel growth. Both of these things, building memorable brands, creating really strong content engines, this is stuff that I care a lot about that we've done here at Wistia that we try to encourage other folks to do.
So excited to go through this talk with you. And then if you have any questions at all, we're going to be doing a Q and A after. So get those questions ready. So first, what is a memorable brand? Well, when I think about memorable brands, I think about brands like Coke, Coca Cola.
And I think one of the reasons that Coke is so memorable is that they've made their values really clear over a long period of time. And their values, they got them across through advertising. Now, you know, Coke has been around for a hundred years or so.
They've done tons of sponsorships and endorsements and ads, and all of those things have been great ways for them to build their brand. But fundamentally, what they want to do is change your relationship with a caffeinated, sugary water drink. Right? Like, they want you to feel something when you drink a Coke.
They want you to feel good. They want you to feel joy. They want you to feel like you're taking advantage of life. To this is so clear that in taglines of theirs over the years, they've talked about tasting the feeling. And a strong brand, you could taste the feeling.
A strong brand, you know what the brand values are. But one of the key things that Coke had the opportunity to do is that they built the relationship over time, over decades. And they did it at a time when attention was in the same place.
Like, everyone's watching the same four networks in the US. Right? Not that hard. For a long time, it was the same four networks. It's not that hard to actually cut in and advertise and get a huge swash swathe, huge swath of folks to to see your messaging.
And that's how it was. But things have changed, and we're in a different moment right now. We have a very different set of competition, and there's a lot of things that have really that are making it much harder for us to build really strong brands.
And the first one of those things is that trust is eroding. Trust in government has been eroding. Trust in social media has been eroding. What's true? What's what's fake? It's hard to know. And that that's tough because when you have abundant trust, much easier to get a message across and have people believe it.
But if there isn't trust, it's a lot harder. Ads don't carry the same weight that they used to. This is for many reasons. We see way more ads than we used to. It's clear that people go farther and farther in the claims they make in the advertising that we see.
And so it's not as effective as it once was. And it's very hard to get reach where you can get in front of everyone at the same time and then get your message to be heard or seen over and over. And so it's getting much harder to get time with people so that you can build relationships.
Because building relationships takes time. It takes time for a brand to become memorable. It takes time to build a strong relationship with your audience. And so what we have to do is we have to start rethinking brand marketing. We're going show you an example of a company that is doing that, doing that really well, really successfully.
And let's see what we can learn from them. So I'm going talk about a company called ProfitWell. If you don't know them, they give you subscription analytics on top of Stripe or Recurly or whatever your billing solution is. And then they make it so that you can do things like reduce churn with tools that they've built in.
And it's a great company, and they've really differentiated themselves with how they've built a brand and how they have brought that brand to market. So this is a still from one of the key approaches they've taken to building their brand, which is making shows, making interview shows, research shows.
This show is called Pricing Page Teardown. What they do on it is they do a bunch of research and analysis on a company's pricing that's like publicly available, and episode by episode they break down like, is this well priced? Is it not well priced?
Now if you're looking at this and you've never thought about pricing and you've never thought about business models, you don't wanna touch this, you might look at this and say, what the hell is this? This doesn't sound very good. But it but it turns out that if you're a company that is a SaaS business, you're trying to figure out how to grow, you're trying to figure out how to cut your churn, you care a lot about understanding the economics and the pieces behind how subscription businesses tick.
Pricing page teardown turns out that it's quite good. It's quite effective. And these folks have episodes that come out weekly going through different companies' pricing pages. Every episode is another chance to learn and also to build a relationship with ProfitWell. And this has worked so well for them.
They've built such strong relationships through their episodic content that they've actually built out a media network at this point. So they have like podcasts, daily shows, huge numbers of emails that's going out and all of this stuff. You might've heard the term marketing like a media company.
ProfitWell is the perfect example of this. So they are really, they have a media arm of their business. And the goal is to get people to spend time with the content and build a relationship with their brand. And instead of trying to interrupt, they're trying to let people opt in.
And that's what you want to do. You want to let your audience opt in to your content and opt in to spending time with you. And it's a pretty different way of building a brand than interrupting them. And it requires different tools and it requires different content to let people opt in to build your brand.
It almost seems like it's not possible. But what's happening is that there's a huge change happening in the market. There's tons of companies that are actually doing this. So they range from very large companies to small companies, SaaS businesses to to, you know, ecommerce businesses to Peloton.
Like what all of these companies on this slide represent Red Bull, the most obvious one out there is that they are switching budgets, they are switching their approach, and they are letting people opt in to spend time with them through their content. And by doing that, they're building really strong brands, you know, incredibly strong brands that then differentiate them in the market.
But it is a different approach to let people opt in than to interrupt. So let's look at what Mailchimp is doing. Mailchimp has a part of their website called Mailchimp Presents, and it's a huge series of content. It is podcasts, documentaries. They've licensed older documentaries.
They are making films. They're funding things that are coming out of South by Southwest, an enormous trove of content that exists on Mailchimp dot com. And they've invested so much in this that they've actually taken what was their brand advertising budget and put it all into brand content.
And if you know Mailchimp, you know they've built a very strong brand over the years. So it's a big deal that they've done this, and it's worked very well for them. What they found is that when people spend time with their brand and through this content, they act differently.
They act differently in the funnel. They buy more. They upgrade more. They churn less. They do all the things you want, which of course makes sense. Because if someone has a really strong connection to us, they understand our values, then they're likely to act differently than someone who doesn't understand our values, doesn't have a connection, doesn't relate, isn't a brand advocate.
And I asked Mark DiCristina, who's the head of brand about this, and they said it's pretty simple what they're doing. Instead of trying to be the ad of the podcast that people skip over, try to be the podcast and have a story that is lasting instead of an ad that's being changed out.
So what he means there is pretty obvious. You're not going be the ad in the podcast, you're going be the podcast. But the story that's lasting, I think is really important. When you're spending money on advertising and you stop spending money, people stop seeing the ads.
But when you are instead investing in the content itself, if you stop spending money to promote that content, if it resonates, people will keep sharing it and more people will discover it, and it will continue to be effective for you. And so what all of these companies are doing, it's a different approach, but what they're doing is that they're focused on building affinity and not just on building awareness.
And it turns out that great brands are built on affinity, not just awareness. And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit now is like, well, you want to build a memorable brand. You want people to understand your brand values. You want them to relate to them and you want them to have affinity.
And people with a huge amount of affinity, they buy more. They tell more people about you. Think about people who are the Apple fans, who the second anything comes out, they tweet every single announcement, they buy every single product. They won't shut up telling you about how great that product is because they have so much affinity that they have built towards that brand.
Now, a lot of us are aware of Apple, but that does not mean that we're all going be great, great customers of Apple. And I think that's the difference of what we're talking about. So when you're trying to go from interrupting to opting in, what you're really doing is going from just awareness to saying like, all right, I want to let you opt in.
If you opt in, I want you to build affinity. And that can be the goal. And it turns out that building a lot of brand affinity can differentiate you. Because if you have legions of brand advocates, they really care about your brand, your company, it makes your life much easier.
So how do we do this? What is everybody here doing that's the same? Two fundamental things. They're focused on making binge worthy content, and then they are marketing like a media company. So let's dive into each of these. Binge worthy content, what is it?
It's content that's so good that people actually want to consume it. It's a very simple idea. You're not writing something that's crap that you hope will show up in Google. You could still do that. You're writing something that if someone reads it, they think, man, that is, I can't get enough of this. Like, I want more of this.
Same thing for if it's video content, video shows, if it's podcasts or documentaries or a book. You're trying to make things that are so good and helpful that someone actually wants to consume it. And people will consume it if you can help solve problems for them and if you can entertain them.
And that's how you end up making binge worthy content. So one of the key pieces to this is when you're making this type of content, you need to think of the content itself as a product. You want to invest in a product like a product.
You want to research it like it's a product. You want to treat it like it's a product that you're going to launch and iterate on and make better. So you have to actually get feedback. This is not something you put out once you're done with.
This is something that you keep working on and keep iterating on. You keep adding episodes to. You need to iterate it in the same way that you would with a SaaS product. Second thing you want to do if you're making the content is you want to bring producers in house to help you.
Producers are the people who are going to be responsible for schedules, how the production can be put together, how you can use internal help, external help. And a lot of us are actually really close to being able to do this. So if you have a content marketing team and you want to try to turn yourself into being a studio, which is what I would say you want to do in this approach, you bring a producer in.
You bring somebody in who is figuring out how to marry the actual production of the content with the schedule and the budgets and the concepts and all of that. So back to pricing page teardown, Patrick was the producer of this show. He figured it out.
And one of the things that they did there is they realized, all right, we're going do ten episodes in a season. Each episode is going to be the same two people discussing a pricing page. Actually it's going be the same set. It's going be the same lights, same cameras.
We should do that once. So they shot a season in one day. That's where they've gotten to. Each season takes one day to shoot. And what that means, they do a lot of preproduction work. So they do all their research upfront. They figure out little snippets of things they want to say.
They go in there and shoot it in one go. And what that means for pricing page teardown and for ProfitWell is that they can shoot an entire season of their show for less than it costs them to produce an ebook. And that's one of the things that's interesting here is like, you can flip some of these economics on its head when you have someone who's a real expert in this focusing on it.
And you can make something that people actually want to spend time with, and they can understand your values. And so all of that is possible when you have the right producers thinking about how to actually make the content. One of the other things I'll say about shows is that they get better over time.
The natural idea behind a show in particular is that you can have a format. Maybe it's like Patrick and his co founder talking about pricing pages. Maybe it's an interview style podcast show. I don't know what it is, but you pick your intro, you pick your middle, you pick your outro, you figure out what goes into this mix of a show.
Is it a game show? Whatever it is. And then as you keep doing it, you will figure out how to make the production faster and better. And if you get feedback from folks, you'll also figure out how to make the content itself better and better and better.
And so a lot of this is figuring out how to stick with it. Casey Neistat, who I'm going to just assume everyone knows, but if well, I guess if you don't know him, incredibly popular YouTuber has said, when you think about actually building an audience, developing an audience, that it's the first subscribers that are the hardest to get.
The first ten thousand subscribers is by far the hardest. But by the time you get to ten thousand, you start to figure out what people want. And so going from ten thousand to one hundred thousand is actually easier Cause you just give them more of what they want.
And as they get connected, as they become brand advocates, they tell other people who are going to like your content and it gets easier and easier and easier over time as you figure out how to align the format with the production, with the creative, with all of the different things.
And so that's one of the things that makes investing in this way really attractive. And why I think if you go ask anyone who's making a podcast, for example, any business who's making a podcast, someone I talk to, just they want to keep doing it because they figured out a way to do it and they can get in front of more people over time.
And it's, you know, if you compare many of these things to things like webinars, like you get a thousand downloads of a podcast, That might not see like seem like a lot on the face of it when you compare it to, you know, serial, the serial podcast.
But if it's compared to your webinars, you might be absolutely crushing it. And and as it gets easier to make it, it gets easier to make each episode, you get more benefit. Okay. So we've talked about how to actually make this binge worthy content.
Let's talk quickly about how to market like a media company. Simple idea. We're going to treat each piece of content like it is a product and then market it like it's a product. I'm going use the show The Good Place as an example of how The Good Place did this with NBC.
So every episode of The Good Place before it came out, they'd have an ad which they would release on their own channels. Then they would take that ad, put it on social. Then they would take that ad, they'd cross promote it against the other shows that they have.
That's kind of the first part of the promotion. Then the folks who are in the content go do PR, and they go out there. Kristen Bell from the show does PR. She gets an interview. They take the best clip from that. They put that all over social.
Ted Danson, also on the show, same thing. Finally, the episode's out. So there's been a fair amount of work done to get people excited and interested in this first episode. After the episode is out, they start taking clips. They put the best clips in the episodes in all those same places.
They have a podcast promote to show. It keeps going and going and going, right? And that is what it looks like for one episode. So every episode gets the same treatment, which means you have an enormous network of content that's out there for people to find and connect with.
And what they want is for someone to see and experience one of those clips, one of those ads, one of those trailers, and think that's kind of funny and be drawn in. And if they can be drawn in, so they promote these assets.
But if they could be drawn in, then they're opting in to spend time with The Good Place. And they can spend a hell of a lot of time with them and build up an enormous love for a show, right? So that's the idea is you want to create promotional assets to put them out there to draw people in so that then they can opt in to spend time with your brand.
Well, how does this normally look in B2B content marketing? Make a blog post. Put that blog post on social. Maybe we email it. That's it. That's it normally looks like. So the approach is very different, and it really does require, instead of thinking of these things as transactional, you want to think of these things as living, breathing products that people are going to continue to experience and love.
Last thing I'll say on this really quickly is that you want to be building an owned audience. So you want to have a direct connection to your audience. This is really important. So if you have this content on your site, if it's a podcast or it's a show, or it's a very long ebook, whatever it is, you want people to be able to connect via email.
And the reason is that then you can look at the impact and you can give super fans more. Like if people love the content, you can let them find all the other things on your site, let them experience all the other things that they're doing.
And then you can actually connect. If you watched my content, if you listen to my show, how did that change how you act on the rest of my funnel? And I kind of spoiled this earlier, but Mark from Mailchimp said this very simple thing.
The people who engage with this content are paying us more quickly. And when they are paying us, they pay us more money, which is just completely mind blowing. So content unrelated to the product, teaching people, educating them, getting people to spend time with you, getting them to understand your brand values will impact the ability for people to buy and stick around.
And that's a pretty powerful thing when you can start to unleash If you want to learn more about brand affinity marketing, we have a playbook at wistia dot com. It goes through all the different facets of this. How to pick a problem to focus on, how to create where you should use a niche at the beginning, how you make your content marketing, how to measure all this stuff.
And if you want to learn more, you can go to wistbandplaybook. That's it for me right now. You can hit me up on Twitter, but I think we're going do some Q and A. Here we go. That was tremendous stuff from from Chris Savage.
As always, I don't know if if any of you have had a chance to check out Chris's podcast. We'll probably talk about that a little bit in the chat with him, but he has a podcast called Talking Too Loud, which I think is great.
I've listened to a good few of the episodes, really cool stuff. So an example of what he's talking about in action. Just checking if Chris we're gonna go over and have a chat with Chris now if he is there. Aaron, have we got Chris?
We have not got his camera in there, just one moment. Okay, we're just, so we're just, figuring out bringing Chris back in, so just bear with us a minute while we get, we have Chris, but we don't have an image coming up. He's just leaving and joining again.
Getting all the technical gremlins today. It's funny, week five. I think it's been pretty plain sailing, up until today. But today, definitely some issues. But we appear to have Chris Savage back. Chris, are you there? Can you hear me? Alright great. So I just, while we were rebooting that, I mentioned your podcast to the audience.
I love the podcast. It seems like you love it. Do enjoy doing it? I love it. Yeah. It's really fun. Yeah. It's something we started actually during the pandemic in March, and we'd planned to do it. And, then it was like, wow. This is actually one of the formats that is going to work because we can talk to people while they're at home and get access to them.
And for me, I just I love I love any type of content creation where it's actually enjoyable to do because you get to just keep doing it. It just is so easy. And yeah, the conversations are genuinely fun. And that was part of the goal of the podcast was like, all right, I'm already having all these conversations with friends and leaders and people I look up to and people I have questions for, but they're behind closed doors.
And so what if we open that up and talk about the things that get me really excited and hopefully get the guests really excited? And then if you're trying to do the types of things that we're trying to do at Wistia, if you're trying to scale a SaaS business, if you're trying to be really creative, if you're trying to build an independent business, if you care about the balance between even conscious capitalism, how we build companies, that's the type of stuff that we're exploring on the show.
And so hopefully listening is enjoyable because you hear people having a conversation about something that they're passionate about. And the name of the show, Talking Too Loud, is just literally like, I've always been told I talk too loud when I get excited. I try to follow follow that when it happens, and I I hope it comes through in the show.
But to the kind of point of brand affinity marketing, the goal is to get that out there and for the creation side, make it genuinely fun and interesting to do. And then if you listen to it and you enjoy it, hopefully it is you understand my values and you understand Wistia's values.
And by doing that, the association, eventually, I'm not trying to get you to become a customer. That's not the goal. I want you actually to love the show and to help me make the show better. But if you can do that and we can build an audience around that, I'm certain that that will help lift the brand and that in the future will help the business.
Yeah, I was wondering about that exact question, actually. How much, and it goes to what you talked about earlier. How much are you becoming the Wistia brand? Or how intertwined is your personal brand or self, as we used to call it, with Wistias?
And how much has that changed over the past, is it ten years, Wistia? Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So the early days, we didn't really have a brand that we because we were trying to make it seem like we were a bigger company than we were.
We thought that you had to look really professional if you wanted to be B2B. And so everything on our site was not showing who we were. And then partially because we were bored, partially because we wanted to show our parents that we felt like we were building something legitimate, We started showing who we were, and we started having more fun with the brand.
And as we did that, the cast of characters became the eight or so people who worked at Wistia at that time. And so I was really, I think, a big part of the brand. And then the company, as we scaled, I tried to step back.
And the brand evolved quite a bit. And where we are now is talking too loud is my way of helping to advance the brand. But there's actually a lot of other shows and content that we put out there that features tons of other people.
And so today, I think, yes, if you look at the most recent stuff we're putting out there, it's very much trying to leverage the fact that I have an existing audience to bootstrap talking too loud. But I would say if you look at what we're doing in six months, you're going to say, oh, I see.
There's five different shows, a bunch of different topics that are being tackled. Some of them are like this, farther removed from the product. Some of them are really close in. Some of them are talking about totally other things that we really care about at Wistia and that we think if we share what we're learning with the world, that it'll attract more people who care about those things too.
End up with the people who believe in what you believe in, and that probably creates a lot of affinity between you and your customers. It's funny you mentioned about the early days of Wistia, where you guys were essentially bullshitting about who you were.
In twenty fifteen, before in the old version of what was during Festival, before this iteration, we had Phil Nottingham speak. And I think he was probably quite new at Wistia at the time. And he did a talk about that, about brand authenticity. And he showed some great photographs of the, like, screenshots from the Wistia corporate website and Yes.
Photos from The Office at the time. And just when I look at what you guys have become and the brand that you've become, it's a hell of a journey. You dug into so in your presentation, you talked a lot about, I think, stuff that is gonna maybe intimidate some people.
Right? How do you you've gotta become this you've gotta create a studio. You've gotta put out this binge worthy content. There's a lot of stuff in there that makes sense. But if you're a five or ten person team, you're looking at that and you're going, well, where do we start?
We've got one person in marketing or two. So what would say for those small teams who have one or two people in marketing who are already pretty overwhelmed? Yeah, I would say, you know, it's funny. It seems hard to do, but actually and what I'm talking about is like where you can take all of these things, right?
And we didn't talk about the timeline that you're looking for a return on this. And I would say generally, the brand affinity marketing, it is you're trying to build a stronger brand, which will become a moat, right? And that's going to take time.
So how do you balance the short term where you want to get you want to get a really good response, and you want to see it lift the business, and you want to see it justified to be able to continue to invest. And then there's a question of how you create the content.
So I think on the first one, how do you actually do it if you're a small team and you see the benefit? One of the ways of doing it is thinking a lot about, who do I want to feature in whatever content I'm making?
Whether it's an interview or it's a docuseries or it's ProfitWell style where they don't even have a connection to the company they're featuring. But if they're if you do that and you look at potential prospects, like prospective customers, and you feature them, often what can happen is it's just so flattering to be featured by anyone that what we've seen, we've seen a lot of companies who will make a series, and each episode will feature a different prospective customer.
And then they use it both to, one, build a show, but two, outreach, and trying to have a way of connecting with those prospective customers. And depending on how much a customer's worth to you, that can be something that makes a lot of sense for doing an outbound strategy.
In terms of making the content itself, there's actually a lot of really small companies who do this incredibly well. And I think the secret is, if you're doing something new, you are trying to solve problems that haven't been solved before, or you're trying to solve problems in a different way.
And there's something unique about that, hopefully. I mean, if it's gonna work, there's gotta be something, there's likely something unique. And so I think zeroing in on what those unique things are, and then finding a way in the regular cadence of the work to make content is actually like part of this secret.
And so what I mean by that is, like today we have a pandemic. It means everyone is at home. It also means that the production quality that was the bar before is gone. Like we all have the same ****. Like I'm in my home right now.
Everyone watching is in their homes for the most part. And so what that means is that you, before it would be, it was kind of harder to break through. It's easier to break through now from like a quality perspective. And so you just have to figure out like, maybe it is customer interviews you're doing about the product, and you want to open up some part of that to your other customers.
And so you start recording those conversations. Maybe it's the debriefs that you and your co founders are having about how the business is going. And you kind of take the transparent open startups approach. Look at what Buffer's done. Look at what ConvertKit's done.
Or if you have somebody who is a creative who you've hired in the marketing area, that one person can have a really, really big impact. So it's really actually about how do you start small, and how do you start with something that isn't intimidating, that is very aligned with all the other work you're doing.
And I'm a big believer that a lot of things that are obvious to do and good ideas, but they're hard to get going because they have a long term benefit, is you have to figure out what's the short term stuff you're going to measure.
What's the short term stuff that's going to motivate you to keep going? And that's often the secret between continuing to go and not going. And so an example of talking too loud even, it was like, all right, we're going to start this. And I'm obviously the CEO of Wistia, I could just like say, let's keep doing it, but we're not going to keep doing it if it doesn't work.
So how do we know if it's working? Well, the first stuff we're going to hear is all going to be qualitative. It's going to be literally people mentioning it. Maybe mentioning it in support conversations, in sales conversations. It's going to be random pings for people.
And we're going to pay attention to those, and we're going to take those comments and the context that people send us, and we're gonna put it together in one place and look at it and say like, what we learn from this? My expectation is that in a year, maybe less, maybe more, the numbers will be big enough that we'll be able to see a direct impact from the show on the business.
But I'm not going in expecting to see that month one. And I think that can be how we are able to do something hard and make it much easier. It's just like setting the expectations for what good results look like at the beginning.
Yeah. It feels like there's a lot of parallels with blogging from ten years ago, where a lot of companies and a lot of there was a lot of personal blogs as well. People would kick off these personal blogs and be like a burst of creativity and they'd write three or four posts in the first month and then if you look back then there's like six months to the next post and then the next post is two years later and then it's just abandoned it seems like cadence
and I guess just being realistic about what you can realistic about what you want to achieve and how much resource and how much you can can get done. Your pod in the Talking Too Loud podcast you have Sylvie, your producer who you've got a, you seem to have a great relationship with.
How much like when, when you started into that process, does Sylvie, she does more than just produce that podcast. How does that work? You mentioned in your talk about getting somebody in to own that side of things. Yeah. Yeah. What does that process look like? Yeah.
So Sylvie has experience in podcasting. She'd works she's worked for a bunch of different podcasting companies. We knew her. We were excited about working with her and we brought her in. And then we did some test episodes and we had a guess at what we thought could happen in the test episodes, where we thought that the two of us could have some like, I wanted it to be, as much as possible, remove the filter.
I think historic for me, everybody's different, but I've always kind of had a filter on what I say when I'm in public. It seems normal to do that. But when I pay close attention to the things that really resonate, a lot of times it's people being willing to share those ideas that are actually unfinished, those ideas that they're working through that really resonate.
And so that was part of my goal for the show. And so when we did tests, Sylvia and I were just trying to get really comfortable talking about different things and seeing how much of the filter we could remove and how much trust we could put into the editing process, that if we go too far and say something that's too ridiculous, too silly, too dumb, whatever, that we can edit it out, because you obviously can edit stuff out.
And we liked how it felt from the first episode that we had done. And I had actually when I say I was having these conversations already, like at the beginning of the pandemic when we went fully remote at Wistia, which we were a hybrid model before, like, you know, ten percent of the company was remote, we weren't one hundred percent remote.
I called up my friend Nick Francis, who runs Helpscout, and their company is one hundred percent remote. And we had a conversation about all the differences between being one hundred percent or not. And I recorded that conversation and shared it with the company because I wanted everyone to learn.
And so our pilot episode was like internally was Sylvia and I talking and then taking that interview. And that was helpful to get buy in. And then when we are actually making each episode, what happens is we have a guest who we're excited about talking to, and we have a bunch of ideas that we think they might be a good fit for before we even reach out to them.
And if they're excited about doing the show, Sylvie has a conversation with them and walks through those ideas and hears through the other things that they wanna talk about. We're trying to keep my conversation with them on these topics to, as much as possible, be fresh, to be like the first time that we're having it is when we're recording it.
And then she coordinates the schedules. We get this stuff recorded, which is the easy, fun part. And then they take the scripts and they do a paper edit. So they get everything transcribed, and we basically just cut and paste and try to make a story that makes sense.
And then that goes into editing and then listen to how that sounds. And so Sylvie really helps run the like from preproduction with a guest through to the getting this totally edited. And you know, as I talked about in the talk, like, the magical thing about having a producer who's doing this is she knows a lot of freelance editors, and she knows freelance sound mixers and stuff.
And so instead of hiring the ten people you would need if you needed all the skills on your team, She gets one person for two hours, she gets another person for an hour here, she sets up a deal where the show comes out every other week, and so she knows how much time she needs and she gets those blocked on people's calendars.
And then the system is just running. And so it becomes very easy to make the content. Like, that's actually more and more it's about like, what's the prep for the interview? And then how do we get myself, Sylvia, and the guest type really comfortable?
And if we can do that, then we can hopefully have a conversation that is honest and talks about things that other people would wanna hear. You talked about, in your presentation, you talked about that if you become a content producer as a company that it gets, the content you put out gets better over time.
Yeah. Is there, and I'm thinking, there's one example that I love, which is Ran Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday. Have you ever seen the first two or three Whiteboard Fridays? Oh, yeah. They're terrible. Yeah. Yeah. They're worth going back to look at. And now it's just slick.
I don't know if Miles is still doing it. Think they are. They are, yeah. Are you damaging your brand at the start when you're putting out what is essentially kind of ****** content relative to No, actually, yeah, that's such a good point. Yeah. Are you damaging your brand at the start? No.
You know why? Because no one's watching. No one's listening. And even if you have an existing brand, it is hard to get people to pay attention to something new. The world is busy. And so yeah, it's actually the opposite. You'd be surprised how often, if you have a kernel of a good idea, people will tell you that they liked a good idea, and they will ignore the fact that the conversation is too long or that the lighting isn't just right.
That stuff matters a lot less. And yeah, I think it's very, very much the opposite. It's taking a risk and putting stuff out there that you're a little bit embarrassed of is it's a classic launch when you're a little bit embarrassed. Because if you wait to launch until it's perfect, you're never going to launch.
And I think that's true with content. I think that's true with products. Yeah, there's always we always know more about what we want to do to make something better. And usually, we know it before the thing's out the door. And that's, I think, a healthy feeling.
Now, I will also say, if you put stuff out there and it's really crappy and you don't actually ask people what they think of it and you don't make yourself open to the feedback, you might just waste a lot of time, right? Like you might make something that's not that good, that has a kernel of something in it that's worthwhile, and then you keep making stuff that's not that good, that has a maybe the kernel goes away.
Like I think really trying to listen hard to how people respond is just really important. And then being willing to change and adapt. And that's the whole game. And that's kind of how you can end up making something that is much better in actually less time if the format is similar.
So like that, yeah, I think that's, that you just need to get that cycle going. And I think that's also to the point of like, that's the same stuff you're gonna measure at the beginning to know if it's working at first. So they really do go hand in hand.
And I would actually say the hardest one of the hardest parts is just deciding what conversation do you have the right to enter as a brand and how far away from what you're doing with your product or your service can you start? Is, I think, are really hard questions.
And I don't have an easy answer on that. I just think you have to ask yourself a lot of, well, what do we want our brand to be? And where can it be in the future? And how will that change our position in the market?
And then how sustainable are the different approaches we're taking to making content? And if you can find the right balance, then it's magic. So that's that's a kind of a reassuring reassuring thought that, you know, at the beginning, it doesn't matter if it's rubbish because nobody's there.
It's but it it it kind of is how you gotta start. Right? You've just gotta just gotta get going. You know what's funny? It's even true with product launches. Like, I've had people be so terrified of launching something that no one's gonna respond.
And then guess what? If no one responds, no one saw it. Like, it's just like, quickly move on to the next thing. But it's but it stops us from doing stuff all the time. It's it's, you know, it's like one of the great battles as an entrepreneur is how do you overcome that feeling?
Yeah. Yeah. It's totally true. I think it's just, just got to be brave and, you know, jump in. Chris, it feels like that's a really good spot to wrap up our conversation. We're running a bit late as well. So just before you go, I just wanted to say, I've told you this before.
I've been a big fan of Wistia since the beginning of the brand, of the product. We still use it. And you guys have been a partner of TuringFest since, well, I don't know, since almost the beginning as well, actually. So thanks so much for helping out with TuringFest.
Thanks for speaking to us today. And yeah, keep going with Wistia. It's going great. Look, thanks for having me. I'm so excited about what you guys are doing. Can't wait till we have some vaccines and we get some herd immunity going and we can see each other in person.
That'll be that'll be really exciting. For sure, man. We'll definitely get you over over to to Turingfest some other time, and we'll get those those Highland whiskies we talked about. All right, take it easy, Chris. All right, see you. Bye. Bye. Okay, so that's our second talk of the day.
We're going to take a quick break now. We're back at four pm and we're going to be talking with John Cutler from Amplitude about NorthStar framework for product teams. So see you then.
