How Wistia Got An Absurd Zoom With Two-Pizza Bundles

Chris Wild once raised $17.3 million in debt to do a leveraged buyout of his private company.

At the moment, that company is a $67,000 video promotion platform. I met with Wistia’s CEO to hear how he increased Wistia’s product updates six-fold, or 6X.

Lesson 1: Every now and then, just move with your instincts.

“Two-pizza crew” is a Jeff Bezos term for a ramshackle business methodology. Ideally, teams should be small enough to make two pizzas. That’s about 5-8 people. (Unless, after all, one of you is a college student. Then it’s about one or two people, haha.)

After years of overly elaborate approaches, Savage put Bezos’ philosophy into practice.

Before switching to two-pizza teams, Wistia introduced 12 product updates each year. This included a brand new webinar tool and new interactive video components such as in-video quizzes.

After restructuring its product teams and simplifying its strategies in 2023, Wistia introduced 72 updates, which is 6 times more than in the previous 12 months.

How? By means of the turn distant from impeccable avenue maps and memorable internal communications, and against innovate based on customer feedback every two weeks.

“This change has fostered a more dynamic approach to product development and feedback, and has encouraged constant evolution and learning across all teams,” Savage tells me.

Its two-pizza teams are made up of product managers, designers, technical managers, and engineers. They basically work like a small business within a business.

“The vital factor for innovation is the creation of small teams that work in the best way a startup can: in rapid sprints.“, he says.

Supply of symbols

This is the AsAlternatively, what I look for most appealing is the Why: Previously, Savage says his employees consistently proposed bulletproof, data-driven tasks, but gut-driven projects, often based on limited customer feedback, were shut out.

“The information may have had very limited exposure, so it wasn’t at the top of the checklist at all,” he says. “Instead, it seems like some of those ideas were some of the most impactful. It completely changed Wistia as a company.”

If your employees are constantly updating in-house clinicians and crafting sophisticated presentations to present to management, you might ask yourself: Is this helping to improve the effectiveness of your work?

Lesson 2: If more than one person likes something, share it.

Savage has a burning opinion: If you can get 10 people to love your product, you can get a thousand people to love it, too.

He is so convinced of this concept that he claims that “there is no need to do extra checks” every time you have demonstrated that some people think it is a good idea: “We tend to underestimate how common an experience can be and rely too much on quantitative data.”

Sometimes gut-driven ideas don’t get expressed because you don’t really feel like you’ve been given the information to re-examine them. Alternatively, if you rely too heavily on quantitative knowledge, you’re likely ignoring real-time feedback that could lead to your next big idea. (Uber is famous for starting with little or no information to bolster its thinking.)

“Focus on your first satisfied customers, decide what they like, and keep doing it.”

Lesson 3: Focus on what works to scale faster.

Savage is candid about his early mistakes: “To begin with, I honestly didn’t know how far we could go with Wistia. This can be a pretty easy mistake: when leaders get something that works, instead of doubling down on that type of activity, they diversify to reduce the odds.”

Savage understands the temptation to add new choices or products to your repertoire, but he firmly believes that just a few options are enough to drive shopper behavior.

“If you just want to double down on those problems, you might be able to expand sooner.”

Keep it simple, focus on one product or service, as it will most likely consume 90% of your adoption, and you will take off.

Curious to find out how artificial intelligence is changing the world of endless video? Check out my interview with Chris LavigneProduction Manager at Wistia

Lingering Questions

Each person we interview provides us with a question for our next phase of outreach.

Last week, Anna Sokratov, brand manager for a particularly disgusting-tasting liqueur called Jeppson’s Malört, asked us this question for Savage:

What unconventional promotion method would you like to adopt and the best way you would go about doing it? something aren’t you finished yet?

Attack: My instinct is to look for inappropriate product placement in a summer blockbuster: the dream could be like the next one Unimaginable problemEthan Hunt must use Wistia to decipher something.

And it’s a scandal: it should be a really exaggerated product placement.

Savage’s question for our next promotional acquisition: Is there something you do that works so well that you’re afraid to tell others about it?

Come back next Monday for the answer!

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