Lessons - The Introvert's Path to Leadership | Chris Savage - CEO and Co-Founder of Wistia

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being consistent experimental and fearless is key to creating a memorable presence in any industry I've let's know a couple of podcasts and you have a couple funny stories from when you were starting out I think one of my favorites is when you're using stock photos to make your team seem bigger than it actually was and you know this this is like a common trope with entrepreneurs they always feel like they have to they have to feel like they didn't have to make themselves bigger than they are I was speaking to Jan Bednar who's the founder CEO of ShipMonk and when he started out he was doing he was basically doing all the logistics from his house but then he had a customer who wanted to get ShipMonk which at the time was nothing to do fulfillment so he rented out a warehouse and then bought a whole bunch of shit on Amazon and put all the Amazon boxes into this warehouse and that was like his warehouse where he does like 3PL from so I love this so talk to me about like some of the most ridiculous things as an early stage entrepreneur outside of eating shared food which is already it sounds like a lot of fun yeah um all the stuff that you had to go through the lessons some of the the most brutal lessons that you learned including this stock photo story which I think is actually just hilarious but yeah some of those some of those things are always fun people to hear because I don't really realize the shit that entrepreneurs go through and the stuff they do yeah well I mean when you say that I'll I'll say that story first and I'll throw some other stuff in there but um yeah we we thought that we had to appear big because we had these big customers who were signing up for us now one key thing I didn't even lose in hides they very obvious but the moment was not they were signing we had no website basically we had nothing and they were still paying us as signing up and we weren't realizing that they were getting to know two two guys who were like 23 years old and they were signing up and we thought they were signing up despite that and what I didn't understand is they're signing up because of that right there's a lot of people who are looking for the newest thing always and they're looking for an edge they're looking for the startup they're looking for the new way to do things and we just got confused I think and we're naive and thought no we're a B2B business now we need to look and appear a B2B so we got all these stock photos put all these stockfos on the site to make it appear like we're a bigger company if you went to the team page it said management and it was like at this point there's four people on the team each versus a very long bio all the awards blah blah it was real stuff but it was there were only four people in the company you know the employees were like really the manager was to everyone it was everyone and any what I also didn't understand is anyone look at this would figure that out it's like really obvious and it kind of all happened by accident where we'd hired two more people on the team through it from four to six and we thought we should shoot some photos of the team and put it on the website because we felt bad for these two new people to join the company they had nothing they could show their parents you know to like prove they had real jobs and school he took a photo in front of a whiteboard and what if we thought in front of a whiteboard meant business because we're so excited to have a whiteboard you know what I mean lion die it's amazing yeah and so real whiteboard or in front bit it's not even clean it looks horrible we're not even we're not even confident enough for having up understanding to even really smile like so the photos are all like stayed in there like looking like we think it was it was business like his business like yes a serious you know like whatever that's just like personifying what business could be and then we took two goofy photos and the plan was not to use them the plan was just the one serious one that's ongoing site well my co-founder Brendan is putting this on the website is changing out this management page to our team page and he has three photos it was one serious and two fun and he decides because it's someone's birthday on the team that he's just going to and it's fun for him to do this that he's going to put a little Easter egg and if you type dance on this page it's going to randomly switch between the photos of each person so it looks like we're dancing right and he builds this thing and he does this and there was this artist of the time called girl talk who would remix all this I know girl talk yeah yeah I think we're like the same age I love me I thought awesome awesome digit and and girl talk was remixing all this existing music so it felt like hey maybe we can use the girl talk album I think maybe the girl talk album at that time was like totally free or something yeah so if you type dance it would randomly switch to a play girl talk and he'd bad he's lasers on the screen and we just thought this is so fun and delightful he's like happy birthday Jeff like what I did and then what ended up happening is that that page won viral and we didn't think that was gonna happen but it went on to the front page of like hacker news and it went on the front page of Reddit both these things were new and we got a ton of traffic and then the crazy thing that happened was two weeks later we had a two week trial at the time two weeks later bunch of new paying customers and it was the most I'll never forget that moment of wait we just were clear about who we actually are we don't look professional at all this is like a choke and yeah we just got more paying customers than we ever had with any of the marketing we'd ever done which was basically like look how great this video hosting is and it was like this lesson of showing people the real people behind the scenes doing something fun and interesting doing something that today I would just describe as good brand on doing you're having this really great brand moment caused people to care enough that they figured out what Wistia was they saw it could be useful to them and they side up and became paying customers and if you go back and you trace when Wistia started doing like wild brand things and wild content and putting a face onto the brand and all it all started with that with that moment which is which is crazy to me because it was such an unexpected thing a huge shout out to bank on yourself for supporting today's episode entrepreneurs here's the retirement secret that Wall Street doesn't want you to know well you are pouring everything into growing your business they want you gambling your future in their 401k casino with no guarantees as a business owner you already take enough risks why gamble with your retirement too it is time to discover the financial strategies smart entrepreneurs are using to protect their wealth bank on yourself is the proven approach that 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carried that through for the past 17 years is just like the thesis for how you market whatever we have made a mistake on our marketing it has been what we didn't care it though it's so interesting you know maybe just a thought on this because we're not going to solve every business is marketing problems today but I find that people still fall into the trap of being scared shitless of of being themselves online and they they write the most boring LinkedIn posts or they put out the most boring corporate updates and it's not just corporations it's not like big companies do like the small companies try and act big kind of like exactly replicating what you were doing when you first started out what's your advice what's your what's your one thing that you could say to a founder to really like drive this home like how do they get out of their shell and let like be a human online because I I'm bought into this word you know kindred spirits on we believe this I believe exactly what what you're saying but a lot of people don't know I'm speaking inbound about this too like five years later after I started posting about being yourself and being authentic I LinkedIn and now everybody speaks about being authentic but nobody does it yeah so why not what do we do I think it is fear of failure is so crippling and I think people look at it the wrong way and what I mean by that is you don't want to put a ton of work into something put yourself out there and then no one sees you know it's just no one sees it didn't work what if being myself doesn't work that's pretty scary idea yeah that is and I think what I've learned in this is because you know there's many different moments that you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable is if you are yourself and it doesn't work no one saw it and so there was no downside the worst thing you can do is spend a huge amount of time on something and no one saw it but if you're actually being yourself is not that hard to be yourself and so it's how do you can you get comfortable enough that you can put a lot of things out to the world and know that most stuff isn't gonna work and that's normal but if you do that and you are paying enough attention you will learn the things that are working and that resonate and like actually as human beings like you and I can only get to know each other so much in this podcast there's a lot more to each of us right that we could ever put into an hour long podcast and I think that that's what people miss is that there's so many parts of your life that are going to be interesting and compelling when you bring it in with your business and that's just how it's always been like we're just we're just wired to connect with other human beings that's what we want and so it's really about getting to that place of comfort of saying hey if I put this out there no one sees it that means nothing bad happened yeah not like it failed it means nothing bad happened like having something go viral for the wrong reasons it doesn't usually happen and even then if it did give out for the wrong reasons I think you can almost always get out there and try to you know give your full take and story to try to like turn it around from like a negative into a positive but that's there's it's it's it's really actually just like can you see it through can you get a night I'm learning you know um but that seems to be what stars people it's just this fear of like well fire release and no one's going to see it I was like and also people think that their opinions are way more um controversial than they actually are like the the the wrong reason for going viral is when you tweeted something explicitly racist like 10 years ago and that's why you're going to get canceled but having an opinion on anything business related no one's going to cancel you like like really people have better things to do in their day than to go find somebody that has a hot take on AI or like post a picture of them walking a dog like that's not gonna get you canceled so I think it's just oh I know yeah and I think that I think that you're exactly right and I think that there's I mean we were talking even before we're recording today of Laya having a conversation just getting going you're like we got a record because we both knew and this happens all the time it's like when you have a conversation with your friends and you're talking through some idea and you're willing to let ideas rip and you're pushing back to that that's normal and then you get into a podcast like well what can I actually say can I be myself and what you start to notice is that the podcasters is an example who really builds a real audience and follow their they're closer to being their cell themselves than a lot of other folks right and like they're willing to put ideas out there and we're smart and like you and I could disagree on a bunch of stuff and that's fine but like being comfortable being in the public disagreeing is is a different thing and I understand why people need to get comfortable doing it um that that's why I think it's like a lot of it is you know how not how do you do one or something but how do you do a hundred yeah I think about that a lot is like all right if you assume it takes a hundred attempts of something before you start to figure it out what are you gonna do I love that yeah yeah that's by way it's not just my idea I've seen that around but it I I really do feel that it is true and so you have to look at things that way and once you look at it that way that first a second the tenth the 20th not not so scared thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one