Chris Savage
Co-Founder and CEO, Wistia. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivehostauthor@csavage ↗LinkedIn ↗wistia.com ↗
Chris Savage co-founded Wistia in 2006, building it into a prominent B2B video marketing and hosting software platform. He is widely recognized in the SaaS industry for turning down buyout offers and raising $17.3 million in debt financing to buy out early investors, retaining long-term private ownership.
1shows
2appearances
28statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
11said about them ↓ Everything Chris Savage said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Savage: Overfunding killed early business video competitors
“Our market's been a very, very good market, but it has taken way longer than people expected. And you can look at the list of competitors we've had in the past, and many of them were overfunded, actually, and that's why they failed, because they tried to get t…”
Savage: Debt and profitability forced Wistia into long-term thinking
“It's almost like it forced us to be profitable, the debt, and that allowed us and forced us to be long-term focused, which again, these are like the opposite things I expected way before all of this would happen. Like I always assumed that, you know, people sa…”
Savage: SaaS predictability makes debt financing uniquely powerful
“And like, I think SAS actually can be incredibly, Powerful when matched with debt, because if you understand your unit economics with enough, enough depth, like if you understand churn, if you understand expansion, if you understand acquisition, you can actual…”
Savage: Targeting one-month payback forces 10x to 20x marketing returns
“What I've noticed is actually that people get obsessed with this, like year payback thing, because everyone says if you're not doing the year payback, then you're not investing enough in growth, but the problem is, like, it's so easy to do dumb stuff or things…”
Savage: Wistia only raised two angel rounds totaling $1.4 million
“We only ever raised two angel rounds. So for a total of 1.4 million, we raised 650,000 in 2008. And another about 800,000, a little less than that in 2010.”
Savage: Early angel investors held preferred shares with veto power over sales
“Their shares also were preferred shares. And so it meant that they had rights to a board seat. They could block a sale.”
Savage: Wistia's tender offer provided roughly a 20x return to angel investors
“Yeah, I can. So there's the two rounds. There's different returns, but it was around 20 X.”
Savage: Most Wistia employees sold options to join profit sharing
“Most did. So we actually, when we did the offer, what we said was we want to have one incentive structure for everybody. So you can either, you know, hold onto your options, or if you sell your options, you can participate in profit sharing.”
Savage: Wistia swung from -$500K to +$6M EBITDA in one year
“So we had like in 2017, we had negative EBITDA of half a million. And in 2018, we had EBITDA of six million.”
Savage: Launching educational content triggers same-day spikes in freemium conversions
“One of the best performing things we've ever done has been making content that is just like inspirational, useful content, sending that to free accounts. And that's like a reminder to people of like, oh, hey, I should check out this product. So for years, actu…”
Savage: Wistia reached an $18M revenue run rate in 2017
“Right at the time of the offer, I think we were about, like, an eighteen million dollar run rate or so.”
Savage: Three companies simultaneously offered to acquire Wistia in 2017
“We actually had three companies approach us at the same time that all said, we want to acquire you”
Savage: Wistia raised its first funding round at just $1,500 MRR
“When we raised our first round, our MRR was literally. 1000 dollars or like 1500 bucks.”
Savage: Accel-KKR provided debt financing to Wistia before it was profitable
“And so we worked with Excel KKR to fund the debt and they were willing to write debt against a company that was not profitable. Like we said, we're going to be profitable, but they had a growth fund side of their business.”
Savage: Wistia gained 3 gross margin points after introducing profit-sharing
“So they went and they spent some time and they came back and like we've made some changes. We've reworked how some things are working and we've got us three points of gross margin.”
Savage: Wistia's Average Customer Pays Around $100 per Month
“The average customer is around a hundred dollars a month and it's 25 cents per video per month as you add more videos.”
Savage: Wistia Made $0 in Year One, $13K in Year Two, $150K in Year Three
“Oh, there was no, we basically made no money in the first, in the second we made, like 13,000, and then the third year we made, like, a 150 or something, and it continued to scale at a good pace.”
Savage: Wistia lost money on users by offering unlimited storage
“We made a mistake because we weren't charging based on the amount of storage. We were like, all right, we'll go unlimited and we'll just charge people have a really big audience. And that got a lot of people signing up, but we also ended up completely underwat…”
Savage: Wistia's gross margins are in the 70s, below typical SaaS
“Yeah, I mean, we, not only were we under 80%, but like, we had a stake with the storage stuff, and like, our gross margins were like high seventies and just started precipitously dropping, and I'm like, Basically, if we didn't make a change, we're going to be …”
Savage: Wistia has tens of thousands of paying customers
“We've got tens of thousands of paying customers today.”
The other half of the tape: Chris Savage's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 3 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Phil Strazzulla 6Mike Zani 3Nathan Latka 1
Statements about Chris Savage, by other people (1)
Phil Strazzulla: Ignoring short-term revenue metrics improves founder focus and mental health
“Chris is like an amazingly smart guy and he's like a very sophisticated operator. He doesn't know for a reason. And that's because like he's focused on building a brand and an amazing product. And I think coming from the VC world, it's hard to let go of that s…”
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Top Founders 10
2020 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chris's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Wistia | 2 | 28 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |