Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, discusses SaaS customer acquisition payback periods with Nathan Latka.
0:00 / 0:34exact quote · 34.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 that look like they're working that aren't actually, and it's so, you know, you get on that, that, that rat race of trying to continue to fund that, when we've found that sometimes just thinking the other direction of, like, all right, we want a month payback how do you have to just almost like open your brain to the things that are the 10 X to the 20 X returns when you start doing that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chris Savage
Insight
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…”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 14:111757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
Insight
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…”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 20:251757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
Insight
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…”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 26:421757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
Disclosure
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.”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 2:351757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
AssertionNot checkable as stated
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.”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 9:431757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
AssertionSupported
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.”
Chris SavageMay 16, 2020▶ 14:561757 How Wistia Hit $18m Revenues, Used $17m Debt from ACCEL KKR To Buy Out $1.4m Seed Investors With Tender Offer
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.