Brendan Schwartz is the Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video.
Victoria talks to Brendan about the latest updates on the platform, interesting problems he found that Wistia was able to remove and help his team get to speed and velocity, and the personal value that drives his decision-making.
Wista (https://wistia.com/)
Follow Wistia on Twitter (https://twitter.com/wistia) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/wistia/).
Follow Brendan Schwartz on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanschwartz/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/brendan), or visit his website (https://brendanschwartz.com/).
Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots!
Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video. Brendan, thank you for joining us.
BRENDAN: Thanks so much for having me.
VICTORIA: And I believe this will be your third time, at least, on the Giant Robots Podcast, right?
BRENDAN: Yes, I think this is my third appearance. Thank you for having me back.
VICTORIA: Yes.
BRENDAN: Is there anything I receive? What is it when you host SNL in a [crosstalk 00:39].
VICTORIA: You get a jacket.
BRENDAN: A jacket, yeah.
VICTORIA: Yeah, we should.
BRENDAN: [laughs]
VICTORIA: We should do a Giant Robots jacket or something from returned guests. I love it. So it's been great to follow along your journey here. So, for those who don't know, like, what is Wistia? And I'll say, just a precursor, that thoughtbot is a client of Wistia. So we use it ourselves. But why don't you just give us a little bit about what is the product and what makes it different?
BRENDAN: Sure. And thank you so much for being a customer all these years. You kind of hit it at the top, but we help businesses of all sizes thrive with video. And so we serve mostly marketers. To dive a little bit into the history of the business, we'll be around seven...is that right? 17 years. It sounds like a long time when I say it out loud, [laughs] 17 years this June. And, for most of our history, we were, I'd say, a video-hosting platform for marketers. So if you want to put video on your website, track who's watching it, how they're watching it, and integrate that data with your other marketing systems, that was our focus and what we did.
And over, I'd say, the past two years, we've brought in that focus to help businesses with all aspects of their video marketing from creating video...We recently introduced a live video product for webinars and for live events last fall. We just launched last week, which I'm very excited about native video recording in the Wistia platform. So you can record your webcam and your screen. And there's also a very simple video editor in the platform, which has been really powerful for folks to make small adjustments to content or to atomize content, take out highlights or sections of things, and to be able to publish them to their audiences.
VICTORIA: Thank you for providing that context. And I'm curious if there were any, like, environmental or market forces that pushed you in that direction with the latest updates on the platform.
BRENDAN: So, like I mentioned, we...in a large part, our success came (We're a relatively small team.) it came from being focused. And so for, you know, that decade or more, there were a lot of things that we had heard from the market or from customers. Like, live video was an obvious one we had been asked for a really long time. When will Wistia do live? When will Wistia do live? And, you know, our approach to that is we want to be really