csavage

We use uberprints.com. Very cool that you've seen them in the wild!

Thanks, I'm very proud of those graphs. :)

Wistia does support HTML5, it's just that the current implementation of tweetperview is not capturing the HTML5 version of the video. The video is currently being loading in an iFrame by tweetperview.

We'll reach out to those guys and see what we can do.

This is a man who understands why people buy stuff. Awesome to see him talk.

What a cool concept. I love it. Make one for rdio and I'm sold.

Thanks. It was made by Chris Lavigne at http://www.crlvideo.com He's UBER talented.

Thanks, we like yours too!

This is a great point and something that has been debated extensively over here. I've got a blog post coming to explain our reasoning.

(edit)

Here's my fresh blog post: http://savagethoughts.com/post/3772138359/whats-in-a-name

I shaved that morning, but I had to chop down a tree and fight a fire on my way into the office. The result: a 10am shadow.

These guys are truly and insanely driven. I can't wait to see how their personalities influence http://shelby.tv

Great article.

The author, Jonah Lehrer, has an amazing book on behavior economics that I considering a must read for anyone trying to sell anything. It's been incredibly valuable to us at Wistia. It's called "How We Decide".

Jonah always finds incredibly interesting ways to pull apart behavior from a neurological perspective.

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/05472479...

The same rule definitely applies to images.

Great points. If you can figure out how to close one customer, determine what they're worth, and how much they cost, it becomes much easier to understand how to get the next customer.

Repeat this process over and over and you'll understand how to value a channel, which helps to approximate the value of the next channel and so on.

There's only way I know how to build a company. One customer at a time. Do it for long enough and you'll be fine.

Btw, checked out your startup. Looks cool. We talk to people sometimes who'd be a good fit for you. We should probably chat!

This is yet another unappreciated benefit of having a business model where someone is actually paying for something. You get to pay to get users.

Wistia, Somerville, MA

We're looking for great people to help us with operations, dev, and customer service.

http://wistia.theresumator.com/apply

Hey il,

Thanks for your feedback. The purpose of the post is not to say that one way is any better than the other. I was thinking about the differences between the two types of companies and trying to come up with a way to describe these differences.

You're right on that in general it's easier for a content site to get traffic then for a product site. But as you point out, a product can pay for traffic. Some would see the very fact that they can pay for traffic is a major advantage. Just my two cents here.

That said, your assumptions of my assumptions are also off. The 7 million impressions was the total number of impressions across different ads. That means that the site gets less that 7 million pageviews total. For easy comparison, I left this as is.

Great question. We actually have customers across the board, from public companies to 2-person startups. I'd say the thing that makes them typical is understanding how individuals watch their videos is important.

In the case of 2-person startup this might mean sending out pitches to investors and learning who's interested based how much time they spend watching demos. At the other end of the spectrum, it could be anything from empowering sales reps to compliance training.

That's true. If you look around you'll probably also notice that we don't provide a video ad engine. That's because our analytics provide quite a bit more value for applications that focus on tracking individual users and overall trends. Some good examples would be B2B applications, e-commerce, direct marketing, training, sales, etc.

That being said, we're always customer focused and will adopt to where people need us to go. You'll notice that as the volume of views goes up the price per play goes down. Given that you'd need a significant volume of anything to have an advertising play that makes good money the price-per-play should become more reasonable.

Andrew is definitely a special case when it comes to creating lots of engaging long form content.

That being said, we see many people adding their videos to youtube, vimeo, and hosting them with Wistia. YouTube is the worlds biggest video search engine so it's a no brainer. But if you're a business, the key is understanding who is watching your videos on your own site and how they're watching them.

We also see many other people doing much more than just hosting video. You can see many of the other sharing uses here: http://wistia.com/product/tour

It's great to see this makes its way onto Hacker News! I'd love to know what the community thinks of the approaches talked about in the article for finding new business (i.e. actively reaching out to tweeters using the search.twitter.com).

Disclosure: I'm the Chris featured in the article. ;)

The SaaS model works, infact it works really well. This is a great time to be selling SaaS because the TCO (total cost of ownership) tends to be much less than that of standard licensed software. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_saas_cheaper_than_li...)

The question you need to answer is "how big the opportunity is for your application?" The number of paying customers at other SaaS companies is irrelevant unless you're playing in the same market and you expect to steal their customers. Which by the way should be a valid strategy if you believe that your application is going to be better.

Figure out what you're replacing, guess the % of that market that you can own and decide if it's big enough for you to survive and thrive in.