Wistia

“In fact, Morgan is the brains behind building out this course, and we built it, Nate, using Entreport. We house the videos on Wistia, and we also use OptimizePress.”

“Which is nice, and I mean, you know, there's, it's, there's good expansion that comes because, you know, as people use the product more, so that more than offsets it, which is nice.”

“The ones that are directly attributable are probably 15%.”

“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 …”

“We've got tens of thousands of paying customers today.”

“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.”

“There's a few 100,000 on that.”

“So our total, the total amount of money we needed to make to cover all of our expenses was like 1500 a month.”

“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…”

“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…”

“So we raised two angel rounds, one in 2008 and one in 2010, but we only raised a total of a million so we've actually much more been on the bootstrapping path which has been good.”

“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…”

“1.6% a month, yeah.”

“Nope.”

“The average customer is around a hundred dollars a month and it's 25 cents per video per month as you add more videos.”

“No, they're still on the cap table.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Yeah. We're right, right past there.”

“When we raised our first round, our MRR was literally. 1000 dollars or like 1500 bucks.”

“So we had like in 2017, we had negative EBITDA of half a million. And in 2018, we had EBITDA of six million.”

“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.”

“We actually had three companies approach us at the same time that all said, we want to acquire you”

“Their shares also were preferred shares. And so it meant that they had rights to a board seat. They could block a sale.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Right at the time of the offer, I think we were about, like, an eighteen million dollar run rate or so.”

“Yeah, I can. So there's the two rounds. There's different returns, but it was around 20 X.”

“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…”