Marketing Insights from NewViews Episode 11: Key Takeaways for Founders and Marketers

The December 2025 NewViews event at Venture Café in the CIC Cambridge ecosystem brought together marketing leaders from top companies to share real marketing lessons. This gathering offered founders, startups, marketers, and video content creators a chance to hear firsthand about the evolving landscape of marketing. The event focused on video storytelling insights, authenticity, and trust-building as key drivers for audience engagement strategies in 2026.

This marketing event recap captures the top insights from NewViews Episode 11, a live panel discussion held at Venture Café. The episode features expert perspectives from Chris Savage (Co‑Founder & CEO of Wistia), Carly Baker (Head of Creative Partnerships at HubSpot Media Network), and Nathan Pichette (Co‑Founder of Reticle Digital), with Tom Dodge of NewView.Media serving as host and moderator. Together, they offer practical, real‑world advice on building trust through authentic video storytelling, consistent messaging, and community‑driven marketing strategies — all tailored for today’s fast-moving, attention-fragmented world.

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<script src="https://fast.wistia.com/player.js" async></script><script src="https://fast.wistia.com/embed/da4eg4e0pa.js" async type="module"></script><style>wistia-player[media-id='da4eg4e0pa']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/da4eg4e0pa/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:56.25%; }</style> <wistia-player media-id="da4eg4e0pa" aspect="1.7777777777777777"><div class="wistia_preload_transcript_outer_wrapper" style="width: 100%; height: 100%; display:flex; justify-content:center; align-items: center; margin-top:-56.25%;"><div class="wistia_preload_transcript_inner_wrapper" style=" overflow: auto;"><p class="wistia_preload_transcript_text" aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" style="text-align: justify; font-size: 5px !important;">Livestream is now live. So I appreciate the in room introduction to start us off. You know, a little behind the scenes, that's important. Just making sure that you get a thumbs up, that we get this nice feature here in Wistia that the audience can't see or hear you. So I just want to double check that, Aaron. It's okay. So just setting the background here. This is episode eleven of NewViews. NewViews is a program that we're trying to, again, spark imagination through conversation. I think in this era of, I would say, technology evolving, we don't necessarily have to use the word that we're all talking about. We want real human connection. We want to foster creativity through conversation. And I think this is the way to do it. For those first time at Venture Cafe, or have been here many times, you know that this is one of the most unique ecosystems in the world for true connection. So I hope that you guys learned something. I hope that we have some amazing panelists here, like world class panelists that I think are gonna help spark some stuff within us. And I hope that you can take these strategies and really help all grow your causes going into twenty twenty six. Kinda crazy to think we're here in December and where we've come this year. So let's reflect on that. I think that I just want to start us off with introductions, that you guys get to know what's in the room and start getting those wheels turning. So I kind of want to lead to the panelists here. Can you introduce yourself, your company, and just talk a little bit about why are you passionate about marketing? Well, hello everybody. Nice to see you. My name is Chris Savage. I'm the co founder and CEO of Wistia. Wistia is a video marketing platform. What that means is we make tools to try to make it easy to use video at work. So started with hosting and analytics. We have creation tools, recording tools, virtual recording studio, webinar platform, lots of different stuff. And yeah, I'm very passionate about marketing. I've always been passionate about marketing. I love movies, which I think is where if I would look back on my youth, where I think I really I love movies and I always loved ads. There was a part of me that thought that I would be someday just making ads, because the idea of having to make different creative decisions for clients all the time was really exciting. And I think the thing that I enjoy most about marketing is that it's ultimately about storytelling, and it's ultimately about trying to actually build a connection with somebody and get a little space in their brain. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get you to remember us. We're trying to get you to feel something. And I think the creative playground that we get to play in as we do the job of marketing is what gets me so excited about it. Feel something. Well, I feel like it's pretty hard to go after that, but hi. Hi. My name is Carly Baker. I'm the head of media partnerships at the HubSpot Media Network. The HubSpot Media Network is a collective of newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, and social, and we're really focused you know, educating and entertaining people and helping them grow sort of no matter what their role or goal is or no matter sort of where they are in the business space. So really we really focus on being a a media first publisher that's meeting HubSpot's customers where they are and sort of continuing to educate them and provide additional resources outside of just our software product. Marketing for me is really close to my heart as someone who had to do a lot of work building a personal brand as a professional musician. So when you're a musician, yourself is your brand. Your ability to generate revenue is directly tied to how you're perceived in the market. And so a lot of how I think about marketing is really informed by those foundational years of having that in my career. I think being someone who's taken the journey of a creative to corporate path is a little bit of my sort of secret weapon. Having an understanding of sort of how marketing and brand works outside of sort of the context of business, and being able to take that into now the media space has been really exciting for me. Thank you. My name is Nathan Pichette. I'm the founder and principal strategist at Redical. We are a demand generation agency. Our real mission is to connect businesses to people. Oftentimes we think of media as just running ads, when in reality, we're opening a bridge of communication between you and your ideal client. And that really is our focus. Really what that means is I'm living out Chris's childhood dream of making ads. What got me into this was interesting. I started out in political science. I never dreamed of becoming a marketer. But the economy was tough and I got into sales. I happened to be selling advertising. At the time, didn't even know the difference between advertising and marketing. I thought the two were interchangeable. But as I progressed in my career and I saw how impactful the right ad could be, the right message could be, and how that impacted not only the companies, but the people that worked at those companies, the people that bought from those companies. I really became passionate about it, and I just dug into it. So that led me down this path. Thank you. Thank you all. So this is our great foundation. So we got, again, rock star panel. Let's dive in. So with today's changing technological landscape, what's a real lesson you've learned to how to approach marketing differently than the status quo? And I think I can start with an example of, I've learned that interview based storytelling is one of the most authentic mediums to actually get a story. You can script everything out. You can spend a lot of time overproducing something, but just talking, sitting down and talking with someone, making them feel comfortable, of course lighting them well, getting good audio quality, getting two cameras. But if you ask people the right questions, they want to talk about what they're most passionate about. And I think that's one of my favorite lessons from the past decade of the power of interview based storytelling. But I want to turn it to the panel and share any insights that we can help the audience learn from. Well, I love your example. That's a great example. Yeah, I think that the thing that I try to think about is what stuff is going to stay the same and what stuff is going to change? And so WhatsApp is going to stay the same. We're going to keep marketing to people. We're going to keep trying to get them to feel something. We're going to have to differentiate even more and more and be probably more pointed and more clear to do that. And then when we look at how we measure these things, that's something I think about a lot. Because depending on when you started your career in marketing, you have seen an enormous change in the data that is available. So it was basically pre-twenty ten, there was not perfect data, on, especially online. There was some better than in person, but you couldn't really tell what, like the impact of a campaign. And then we entered an era of perfect data, where every single time someone searched on Google, you saw the exact keywords that they searched for. You saw that you could advertise to very, very, very specific people. And a lot of marketing became actually just like data analysis. Like how I optimize this funnel and this flow that I have to make sure I get one dollar in, dollars four out? And now it seems that we're returning to an era of having, it seems like infinite data, but actually a lot less. It's much harder to track across the funnel. AI search is making it much harder to figure out how to even show up in AI search. What are the things that you need to do to get there? And so I think we're actually entering an era that is a return to where things used to be, which is getting a lot more qualitative feedback. So that's a big thing I would put out there is actually asking people in surveys, where did you hear about us? What do you like about us? What do you like about us? What do you not like about us? Using more like open text fields as ways to understand where people came from. LLMs are giving this magical power to be able to go through these open text fields and actually correlate things that you did to the impact that it has had. And that's a lot closer to like nineteen ninety five, putting on a big campaign, doing surveys, and then seeing how much it moved the revenue. So it's showing up in a different way, but I would say that's something I'd be paying a lot attention to. Thanks, Chris. I love all of your examples. I think, Tom, especially being someone in the media world, I love sort of the focus that we're seeing just on really powerful interviews, and about that being a really good storytelling vehicle, both for businesses, but also for people that are in businesses. I think it's a great way for employees to share the work that they're doing and, you know, for it to not be as much centered on telling the story of the business, but more telling the story of the people within the business. So I think it's really powerful when it's done well. Of course, the challenge with interviews is that it's highly saturated, right? So you have to do a lot, and Chris knows this too with his podcast. You really have to differentiate yourself as the interviewer be able to provide sort of a distinct POV that's going to sort of break through all of that noise. But the one thing that sort of I keep coming back to, and something we had chatted about previously, is just the really sort of swing back and importance and just having a high amount of trust with your audience and a high amount of credibility. I think right now, we're at a point where media literacy is at an all time low. People are really afraid of being online in some ways. It's really hard to trust what we're seeing and to know whether it's authentic or not. And so when we think about marketing strategies, staying true to being authentic to your voice, to staying truthful, to understanding sort of what the ramifications of not, you know, sort of taking that path and, you know, sort of chasing some of those viral trends and sort of what that can mean in terms of, you know, your reputation and having it damage your brand as a whole. So I think really sort of refocusing in on wanting to build trust and credibility with that audience and sort of, looking past sort of all of the noise and maybe some of the other less favorable tactics that are going on. Thank you. The thing that I think I'm keying in on right now, and I love what you both said, you both highlighted some really important things. Chris, the idea of attributing every single vanity metric and chasing those returns, I think we are past that because it is hard to track. Let's take it back though to how do you communicate with your core audience. Saw a quote recently that I absolutely loved. It was very simple. It was your customers don't want to hear your story. Right? How many of you have been working on your own story, whether it's trying to raise money or get interest? What the shift is going to be and what it needs to be to break through some of that noise that you were talking about and stand out, you need to make sure that you're telling their story, but elevate it. So when you're talking about the problems that you solve for people or the things that your company does, the outcomes that you help other people produce. When we're talking about marketing, break through that noise and to get people to pay attention, they really want to hear how you're helping them. Right? So everything that we do, can track it, we can get really technical in it. But what it comes down to, the success of your campaigns going forward, is how well you connect to people and how well you solve their problems and elevate them. Powerful stuff, gang. That's why we're here. And we can take this as more of a rapid fire, because I think it's a repetition. But I want to hear, how do you consistently show up in front of these audiences? I think that's an important thing to know is what strategies are you implementing, but what is your take on consistently showing up? Go for it, Nathan. You need to know where they're spending their time first, right? How do you show up in front of your ideal audience if you don't know where they're spending their time? You have to know how they're searching for you, what kind of conversations they're having. That's really important. I met with a founder a few weeks ago. We were talking about the product and kind of the market, really exciting. I loved what they were doing, and I won't get too deep into the details. But when I asked how he's planning on finding that next customer, right, He kind of gave me a canned response that felt like marketing speak. And it was inbound, hate to throw that out for HubSpot, because I love HubSpot and I love inbound, all things great. I believe in it totally. But the problem was he was trying to create a new category and there really weren't conversations that were happening. So to reach that customer couldn't rely on some of the same tactics that could be a great play for another business that has a developed category, maybe even a challenger brand that's going against a big player where people are aware of the problem, right? You have to understand what you do, how you deliver your product or service, and then where those people are spending their time and how to reach out to them. I think making sure that you understand that first is really important to make your next decision, and that's how do you get in front of them, right? Okay, are we just gonna pass down the line the whole time? No. No? Okay. Yeah, so showing up for your customers and in the case of, you know, the work that I do for your audience is really important. Something that we have been really focusing on, you know, as a media network who has sub brands, right, is, you know, we have sort of creator personalities or faces of each of our sub brands, and it's really important that those individuals, both on their personal channels and through the branded channels, have a presence and connect with the audience that way. But we're really investing in, sort of what we like to call our backstage talent, which are the people that are actually, you know, helping craft the stories. They're doing the research. They're leading the strategy. They're not just the face that, you know, our audience comes to recognize, but are really sort of the the special players on the back end. And so we've really started to invest in helping them build their own channels, tell their own stories, have their own opportunities to share a little bit of sort of the backstage magic and everything that goes into actually sort of bringing that content and bringing that value to life for the audience members. Then from an engagement perspective too, we, like specifically for our newsletter network, we really have focused on building sort of a direct line of feedback from our subscribers to our writers and to our team. We do this a couple of ways, right? One the easiest ways we do is we have, you know, think about the feedback buttons that you see in the bathroom at the airport, like a frowny, a middle, and a smiley. Like, we just have those buttons at the bottom of our emails. And people can give feedback that way, and then when they've selected a button, then we go to sort of more of those open response questions that Chris was mentioning earlier. And that's an amazing way for us to not only get that direct feedback, but also to start a conversation directly with our subscribers and to get to know them more and to just sort of have more of a one to one way to communicate with them. And so both by bringing the backstage talent to the front and then also just continuing to develop more avenues through our content where we can directly speak to our audience in an authentic way are two big things we're really focusing on. I'll go very similar, but to kind of different angle on this stuff, which is, I think we know that to market something, people have to see it a lot. It's almost always you cannot see something once. So you have to figure out where they're hanging out, and you have to actually be part of the conversation, and ideally create a community, and a community that has, you have some organic way of continuing the conversation with. So if it's on LinkedIn and I build up a LinkedIn profile, and then I'm sending a lot of messages out there and I'm commenting with other people, you kind of build this community. It's on someone else's platform. I don't own that audience directly. And I know that, but the benefit of being there is that they're there. And then another version of that is actually getting them to sign up by email or literally bringing them into your Slack or doing something else or doing in person events. And I think that finding the ways to have those organic connections where you can continually talk to these folks is going to be how you get the message to add up. Because you do something that sparks a conversation, you do something that sparks interest the first time, and then if you just keep doing it, now people start to remember you. And we're talking about getting that space in someone's brain, and I think that's the way I would think about doing it. And then the other thing I just want to say is we're talking a lot about trust, and I think that's never been more important. And also just to talk specifically about social, the dynamics there are just changing in a very big way. Brands don't really get organic reach anymore. And this happens almost all the time. It starts organic and it's free. And then now you see if you run a corporate LinkedIn or Twitter, you don't get organic reach anymore. Even if you have a lot of followers, subscribers, you have to pay to get the reach. And all the platforms know this and so they charge you for that reach and it makes sense. You get the reach, you're using their platform to get customers, great. But they can't do that to individuals in the same way because they would kill all the content showing up on the platform. Like if everyone made big follower lists and then no one saw your stuff, you're not going to post, right? So they literally can't or they'd lose all of the content. And I say this because this is why it's so important to have individuals that represent your brand. And so if you have individuals, you can call them often called like SMEs or subject matter experts. If you have those people who can represent your brand or represent different aspects of your brand, because they're an individual, they're much more likely to have that organic reach still there. That seems to be where the organic conversation still is today. Again, there are risks because if you do this with people on your team, they could leave. But also, you might hire someone who already has a lot of organic reach. And it turns out that anybody who has a lot of organic reach will tell you if you talk one hundred percent about your product, it doesn't work. It turns everybody off. So, just put that out there as I would also be thinking about that a lot in terms of where is the organic opportunity versus paid in all of this? Great points. I mean, your content shows up way more than Wistia's content on my LinkedIn. It does. And we noticed that we had built up a big following for Wistia, and then we're getting no organic reach. And I would post basically the same thing, but from my perspective, and we get a ton of organic reach. Like, Oh, that's funny. And we start doing that more and more. I'll post stuff that's like a product launch that's in my voice of something that just happened. And I'll get a comment like, Man, I haven't seen Wistia in forever. This is amazing. Shit. What the hell is going on out there? Eventually it was that understanding of like, No, this is just economics. Like this is the game. Like if they limit all reach for individuals, there's no content. So they have to keep some of it free and there's those risks involved. But the upside is also back to the trust piece. Like If I'm being real about it, which I am, I think that that authenticity comes through, hopefully. And then the connection's actually stronger too, is what ends up happening. Everyone, it's a good message to work on your personal brands. I will get the audience involved in a sec, but I actually just want a quick show of hands so we can know who's in the audience. Who out there actually ran marketing campaigns this year? Okay, cool. And it can be looked at a different variety of ways. How many of you are actively just selling to customers? How many of you have customers, you're scaling, you're working on it? Okay, cool, very good. I'm biased. So how many of you have used videos this year? Just very curious. Videos on Wistia, just no. I mean, also, has anyone in the room been paying for media ads this year? Okay, cool. So this is a good audit, awesome, very cool. How about one more round and then I'll come back to questions. Because I just want to get into, we're in an innovation community. Let's talk a little tech. And you can talk about your own softwares. You can talk about softwares you use. But what softwares are you using to help scale your marketing efforts? And what softwares out there would you recommend to help scale? And again, feel free to talk about your own, because you're all using and scaling great softwares. So yeah, definitely use Wistia. That's the most important thing you should take away for today. I'll go with something else that we've been using that's been really interesting. It's called Common Room. I don't if anybody knows that. But it basically allows us to take data of who is in our funnel and actually put it together with how they're interacting with things on social media. So we can make a list of people that are like, Hey, show me everyone who signed up for our recent webinars and is engaging with Chris on LinkedIn. And actually, when you go and look at that, you end up with a small group of like really, really engaged people. And so we've used that on the sales team. It's worked great. So that's a good example of something. Nice. I'm also not gonna talk about HubSpot since we're right down the road. I'm sure all of you know about HubSpot. But something that, for folks in the media space or who are looking to start a newsletter, I am such a big fan of Beehive. I know this feels illegal to say as someone who works at HubSpot, but we actually use Beehive for some of our newsletters. Yeah, you cut that out in the edit. We actually use Beehive for one of our newsletters. So the Media Network acquired our second newsletter last year. They were a UK based publisher called Mindstream. They're an AI newsletter. They were hosted on Beehive. And instead of going through the terrible task of migrating it over, we decided to have Beehive actually integrate with HubSpot. So we didn't have to move it over. But Beehive is an amazing sort of content solution that goes beyond just sort of being a newsletter hosting platform. There's a ton of growth tools that we and I, myself personally use. They also have a podcast product now. So they're really in an exciting growth stage and are differentiating themselves in the market compared to the kits and the Mailchimp's of the world who have now become more legacy email products. So if you're looking to build a great email product with great growth tools, I would highly recommend Beehive. I'll talk about HubSpot for her. So I love HubSpot. I've worked with so many businesses that don't really have a really firm grasp on their data, or once somebody engages with them, how do they action that? And HubSpot makes it really easy. So that's one of their new features that have come out. This loop marketing concept has been fantastic. It's easy to use. So that's one of the things that if currently don't have a way to continually engage with your customers who have raised their hand, you need to figure out a way to do that. There's a lot of ways to do that. Think HubSpot's the easiest and one of the best. I can talk about Wistia a little bit for Chris as well, because it's one of my favorite softwares. I think that if you haven't used Wistia, I mean we're live streaming via Wistia right now, so webinar tools. You can easily, if you don't have professional editing tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro, or even if you do, you can easily chop it all up. Oh, I think that button right there was, it's okay. Adds a little live to the mix to just push the top one. There we go, it's all good, thank you. I've done that before. So it's all good. Can easily So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have this whole panel. I'm gonna click one button on Wistia, and it's gonna chop it up into ten social media sound bites, and it can auto resize for me. Huge, saving time. And it can actually publish directly if you want to to those channels on top of a bunch of other cool features that are coming out, endless cool features. So just wanna plug that for them. And based in Central Square as well, and HubSpot found it here, so very local to this innovation ecosystem. I'm gonna take it one step further, because Wistia actually integrates with HubSpot. So you can use both together, make it even more powerful. I guess while we're just on this tech theme, I would love to just hear some use cases of HubSpot, Wistia, or the other softwares, because I think it's helpful for companies to hear, oh, this was a success story of how a company grew using these softwares, that's cool with you guys. I'm not gonna go first. All you, Chris. Wow, okay. I didn't expect us to talk to social Wistia. I would say the things that we see that drive lots of value is people use us to host the videos on their website. So the videos on your website, usually bottom of your funnel. And today, very important to get those people converting. And so we have a lot of functionality around that, like calls to action, data that integrates really deeply into HubSpot. So you can actually go into HubSpot and say, who are the people who care about these different topics or products or whatever and send those? Because you know they're spending time watching the videos. Unlike a lot of other stuff where you can't tell on the page what they're doing, they watch a three minute video, they probably have their full attention. And I would say that right now, our webinar product is ripping. And what people tell us they really love about it is just like, it's so much easier to make the experience look really great that you end up making this elevated thing. And then when you do that, I know you have an elevated experience, you get better responses. Better attendee engagement, better attendee conversion after the fact. But I would say in general, a lot of this is trying to make sure you have the right tools in place, the data that you do have, that you're making your decisions on, is really solid. And then hopefully, you're using things like HubSpot that's all in one, things like Wistia that are all in one that truly just save you tons of time. Getting the time back is key. And also, the Wistia LLM is searchable from AI engines. So this whole conversation is searchable now, which is Okay, you reminded me of this one. So basically, we would think that all AI search can see videos, but AI search cannot see videos. Because the tools they use to crawl the web cannot run JavaScript. And all video players are with JavaScript. So what that means is if you take a YouTube video and you put it in ChatGPT and be like, Tell me about this video. It'll take a guess based on the title. It'll take a guess if other people have written about it or it is embedded somewhere else with a transcript that it can understand what that video is. But without that information, it can't do it. And so we launched something last month, which basically is a version of the embed that you put on your website. And then if an AI crawler is coming, it actually flips out the video to a version that it can understand. So it takes the transcript and makes it available in that moment. So it's exact same experience for a human, but it's basically like an AI tailored experience. That means that the information that's in your videos is actually showing up in search. And so it's kind of a big deal because, especially long form video, we have these incredibly long form webinars, demos, anything that has the rich details of what it is your product or service does. That information, if it is only in video, is not showing up in AI search unless you make the transcripts available and other metadata available. So yeah, we're super excited about that because it's working and it's the first thing out there that doesn't. And I'm not gonna miss the opportunity to sit here. Thank you. Okay. On the HubSpot side, I will talk about it a little bit. I think one of the most underutilized parts of the HubSpot platform is just the micro apps and sort of the connectors that we have. So we now connect with Anthropic, with Claude, with ChatGPT. We connect with Canva. We connect directly with LinkedIn. There's tons of micro apps that you can download and sort of build out even more, your all in one platform and your all in one suite. Of course, we have native connectors as well, but, there's a mark literally a marketplace of over a thousand, different tools that connect directly with your CRM, including Wistia, to name another one. And it just helps your system be more connected and be all powered without you having to log in to twenty different things and be copying and pasting. And, like, the more HubSpot works best for you when you're taking advantage of connecting as many tools to it as possible and allowing there to be sort of inter tool communication and allowing to power that. And I think that's Wistia and HubSpot on the video side, because video is something that our platform doesn't do natively, is a really great example of, you know, being able to have a lot more powerful data, both about people that are watching your videos and existing customers as well. So if you're a HubSpot user, definitely encourage people to take advantage of those micro apps and and try to connect your systems as much as you can. It's only gonna help you understand more from an attribution standpoint. I'm going to take a little bit of a different position on this. Let's go. So, with what I do, with buying media and running marketing programs, I'm hyper focused on outcomes. And those outcomes have to be driven by the consumer. So these are all great tools for the businesses to use, important things for you to know. But one of my favorite tools that we have at our disposal is the ability to give the power back to our consumers, right? I say recently, earlier this year, I ran a program where we tested conversions. We used forms, we measured that against a bunch of different stuff that's pretty typical. The clear winner for us, the ones that we generated the most leads at the lowest cost that converted at the highest rate, was a self scheduler. I mean, want you to think about that, how simple that is, and that is baked into HubSpot and other tools. It was giving the power back to the consumer who was interested to be able to schedule a time. If they felt like they owned that time, they were actually defensive. When we had customers that would call and try to reschedule, people say, No, I booked this time. This is my time. Right? They actually felt like they owned it, and they were reaching out. One of the cool things about that was that they were skipping basically the top part of the funnel. So in a typical ad, when we run, we would get the standard information. Let's say it's a download, and you get the name, email, you know, maybe phone number, whatever it may be, right? So now that gets handed off to your BDR team or your sales team, and they try to work that and try to get that and turn that into a meeting. The self scheduler gives agency to the people who are ready to go right now, right? And that was just one of the things that we saw that really generated a ton of money really quick, and it was one of the simplest tools that you can use and anybody can use it. Thank you all. We can open up to questions. A couple I just want to make sure you're getting. I have a ton more for these guys, but I just want to make sure we're leveraging your mindsets as they come up. So, let's hear it. Hi, thank you, first of all. Really interesting. I am curious, if you had one dollar to spend on marketing, where would you spend it, and why? Could be a thousand dollars. Video production. Easy. No, I'm kidding. Kinda. I mean, guess it's like if you have a monthly marketing budget, what would you do with it? To a degree? Small. Small marketing budget. Where is that first investment? I would go to an event and try to buy someone like a coffee. I won't explain it. Can you buy a coffee for a dollar? No. So you can't you can't buy a coffee for a dollar. Adjusted for inflation. Yes. Like five or six. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. This should be free as long as you have access to write something down. If you have a small marketing budget, the best thing that I would recommend that you do is you build a build your distribution system. Build your content distribution engine, and build it in a way that I think is a little bit contrarian or a little bit sort of against the grain, in terms of our traditional sort of media way that we would do so, which is build a distribution first vehicle. So think about where your audience is, who they are on those channels, what type of media, or what type of formats they want to consume, and then use that to inform your long form asset that you're then going to distribute. I think, typically, we tend to think that we need to make a we get excited, we think about an idea for a long form asset, and then we're trying to squeeze it and make it fit for our audience on a bunch of different channels. And it gets really hard from a formatting and from a, just like a context perspective. And so thinking about, you know, reverse engineering and approaching it with sort of super solving for your audience first and then engineering your content backwards. And that should be free because everyone has a pen and paper. Yeah, I was actually going go free as well. You have so many access to tools, free trials. A lot of the stuff you just download, sign up and you're free to use it. It's amazing what we have actually at our fingertips right now that we didn't have five, ten years ago. It just wasn't available. You're at one of the best ways to start out if you don't have a big budget is right here. It's connecting with people, finding people who can be resources for you. I'll give you kind of guys a personal story, and this is one that I love and I'll throw a bone to the Boston startup community. We started our company in September. Think about that, September. We were in the beginning of December right now. I'm sitting here because I networked and I found people that believed in what we were doing and we connected and I found those relationships and I've cultivated those relationships. That's free, right? It's absolutely free to do that. The next thing I would do is really, really get an understanding of who your customer is. You can't do anything in marketing successfully if you don't know who your customer is, period. You have to know what drives them. You need know who your buyers are. And this is a really big thing. When I say buyers, I don't mean other companies. If you're a business that sells to businesses, if you're in B2B, right, you're not selling to a company. You're selling to an individual at that company and you're trying to help them. I mean, get into it. Spend all of your time figuring out exactly what it is that you do that can help make that job easier. Once you have that, and I would say don't put a whole lot of money into it until you have that, that's where I'd start. Take the Train to Venture Cafe as well, you know, another opportunity there. Maybe spend the one dollar on LinkedIn to boost post to get people to come to your event. Also creative ways. You can't even park here for one dollar That's true. I I mean, it comes down to you have to invest. I think people pay us to produce videos for them. They're taking a risk. They're like, hey, we're hoping that by paying you to create this cool campaign, usually we don't produce one video. Usually we're producing five to ten videos for people. That is an investment. That's gonna help our cause grow. So you do have to take an investment to usually grow. And if you trust people, you're working with softwares that you understand and you can scale with, that's really important. We can kinda go clockwise around the room. And my goal is the more efficient we get the questions out, the better, so we can get more questions, more voices. So that's my, just outside of guidance, and let's keep having fun with it. I'm gonna answer that question, just because it's one of my favorites, I'm biased because our company, we connect in person event producers with sponsors, and sponsors in front of their leads. Look, I mean, we have, like Rachel and I, we have built our company off the back of showing up here in person for the last fifteen weeks. It has been, like there are going to be the people that are your customers showing up somewhere. Likely at a free industry event. So that's my take. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe like we'll expand into that. Like what are some of the, maybe share some stories from like in person interactions and like the power of behind that, or some unorthodox ways that you're able to close deals or clients. Any thoughts on that off the bat? I mean, we got our first customers in person at events just like this. And a lot of it was like, it didn't actually happen right away. It took time. We'd go to these events. We had a very different idea for what Wistia was going to be. It was going to be this filmmaking competition website. That was our first plan. I thought it was sick. It's going be great. Get big brands to sponsor, filmmakers to make ads. I had all these plans drawn up, but then we had no connections to the brands and no filmmakers. So it didn't work out. But going to these things and basically just sharing the story and commiserating, eventually, Hey, you guys are like the video guys. Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? We kept saying, No, no, no. Until eventually it was like, We really need to make money or I'm going to Starbucks. And that led us to actually basically doing the customer discovery and figuring out what are the problems we really could solve. And so we hired our first people at events like this. I mean, is why my answer was like the five dollars coffee is like those people are out there. They're in the room today. Potential connections here is kind of hard to fathom. So yeah, I think it's been one of the core things. And then I'll just say another example just from being at scale is that a lot of the time when you do something brand new at scale, you actually have to do the same thing again, which is one of the things that can be surprising. So like you have a big list of customers, you have a maybe wide footprint on your product, but just because you have that doesn't mean that the thing you've now we're doing is gonna work. And the way you get it to work is you go talk to individual people and you try to help solve their problem. And you work through all the same things that you worked through in the beginning. You're just working through it as like a brand that's already known. And that feels like it has its own risks. And that I think stops lots of people from doing that because there's a fear of if I do a new thing and it doesn't work at scale, will I look bad or will I look like an idiot? And the answer is like, you might, but if people actually care and give you feedback, it's totally worthwhile. And I've just seen this, and I look back, I've been doing this nineteen years. I can look back at a lot of moments when we launched new products and did things and it was like, you're so pumped and you launch it and then almost no one uses it at first. You're like, Oh my God, what's happening? And then the answer is always, always, always, you just talk to the customer. You talk to the individual person. And to double down on what you were saying before too, think one thing that people miss is like, and this is really B2B specific, but like the impact you can have on someone's life, if you help them make the right decision at work, actually is enormous. Because you make that right decision, they get that campaign working, they save tons of time, their business is doing better. And guess what happens? Usually they start growing and they get more opportunity, they get the promotion. Then that actually directly impacts their day to day life in more of a way than a lot of other things. And I think when we see huge companies doing brand ads all the time, and they're like, Why am I seeing these ads with this company? Like, I don't know. What the fuck is this thing? So enterprising, whatever, what we're often missing is like, there's a very, very small number of people that if they make that big switch to Oracle or whatever it is and they get it right, Oracle knows that's going to be great for them. It's going to have a huge revenue impact. And it all comes down to that person who was impacted in that moment. So, yeah. When I think about sort of experiential and IRL on the media side of things, I think it really comes down to a lot of what my work focuses on, which is just strategic partnerships. So we know, sort of, as the internet has become, you know, flooded with content, it's harder for people to find community and to find value online. We've really sort of course corrected. And after the pandemic, too, you know, we know that being IRL is back. It's really one of the best ways that media companies and businesses can connect and really meet their audiences where they are and give them a really special exclusive experience that is going to be very hard to give them online. And so when I think about how that comes to life and sort of how we're pushing the mold in that way, we have a brand. It's called The Hustle. It's our flagship media brand. It was what we acquired in twenty twenty one, which led to the eventual development of the media network as a whole. And we know that that core audience is founders and entrepreneurs. And we all know, I mean, we're all at an event with many founders and entrepreneurs here, and many of those events look the same, right? There's not many people that are sort of going outside of the sort of the traditional type of happy hour networking event. And so, as we're thinking about developing our strategy and being able to provide a bespoke experience, we thought about what are the other areas of interest for that ICP. And the big area, of course, that we identified was wellness. So we're like, Okay, so what does a wellness event for entrepreneurs and founders look like? And so what we ended up doing was hosting a five ks during Inbound. If anyone here has ever been to a conference before and ever been to Inbound, it's like you've never taken worse care of yourself than when you're at a conference, right? You're eating at all times of the day. You're standing on your feet. You're wearing uncomfortable clothing. You're in a weird time zone. You don't know what's going on. You bring your shoes because you think you're going to go to the gym, but you never do. So we're like, how can we have a social event where people can take the time to take care of themselves, to meet other people, and how can we bring partnerships into the mix? So what we did was we actually found a running club for founders. There's a global running club called Founders Running Club. They're all over the globe. So if you're ever anywhere and you want to go on a run, they probably have a chapter there. And for us, that was a great way to reach a new segment of our core audience for the newsletter, who probably weren't subscribers, but we knew that our content was valuable. We knew that they were local to San Francisco. They have a chapter. They're gonna be able to bring a lot of people who are gonna be new to our brand, which is great from, like, you know, reaching a new audience that's very aligned, but then also gives us a chance to invite our audience, who's going to be at Inbound, who wants to have the experience in person to be able to connect with us in that way. So then we have a big pool of people, some of whom are obsessed with the hustle, have been reading us for ten years, are very excited to be there. And they're mingling with people who are founders and entrepreneurs, but have never heard of the hustle. And so for us, it's a great way to sort of have IRL evangelism, and to get people really excited, and to be able to provide a really bespoke and sort of special experience. And it was so successful that now we're going to do run clubs, so, like, one a quarter every year going forward. And so that's just, like, a great way that I think you can identify how to sort of use a partnership to help you grow and sort of, you know, kind of co mingle both of those crowds? I don't remember the question, but I want to talk about something that Chris said, which I think is really important, he talked about the impact that you can have on an individual. Because I really do think that this is the core of what marketing should be. It is about people. And there's a flip side to the good thing, that's the bad thing. So one of the things that you can do by showing up, connecting with people, building trust is lower the risk, build trust. When we talk about that, sometimes we don't really know what it means, but building trust is incredibly important because decisions now have high consequence. It seems low in our environment with the way things are shifting. Every decision that we make, every product that we sponsor, everything that we champion, it feels like it's really high risk. I don't know if any of you have seen kind of some of the layoff news that's been recent. It feels like if you go out there and you try to solve a problem, sometimes you're exposing yourself. So if you really want your customers to take action and trust you and work with you, they need to feel that it's safe because there is the great plus side, which is awesome, where you're impacting somebody, you're helping them get that promotion, you're helping them stand out. But the opposite of that is that you're hanging them out to dry. And that's something that they have to make a decision. This is a decision. It's a buyer decision question, right? It's something that they have to overcome internally before they can take an action. And really what we're trying to do with all marketing is remove the friction, make it easier for your customers to make that decision. So that's one of the things that we really have to focus on with things like connection and building trust, that is kind of unique sometimes when you get FaceTime. But it must happen in order for your buyers to take the next step with you. I just want to give a quick shout out to Tim Rowe. I know he's here at Venture Cafe tonight, but founder of CIC. He has this beautiful line that's always stuck with me, you only take risks with people you trust. So kind of doubling down, tripling down is you've got to find ways to build trust. And going on the long term partnerships avenue as well is those were the bigger deals happen. I've been a CIC member for almost a decade, and that trust building over the last decade is why we have a video studio on this floor now. That takes time. And it just takes time and getting to know each other and working together. One small project at a time builds up into those bigger opportunities. So just validating that through my own experience. And I'm gonna do a loop of questions in a sec, but I just wanna, again, taking it back to video for a sec. I'm biased, so I'm gonna get this in before I do a lap. What engaging video campaigns out there are inspiring you right now? What are memorable? I personally love animation right now, as you can hopefully see that this subtle looping background here is hopefully soothing in some degrees. But I think animated product demos, animation in any video is just such a professional way to engage and creatively educate people, especially for software products or complicated tech demos. We just finished off a robotics video that cleans the side of ships, which was really cool. But I think those videos are extremely cool and endlessly creative to me. But curious what videos out there are inspiring you guys. The first thing that came to mind was there's that betting site like Kolashi? Kolashi? Kolashi? So the AI generated videos are obviously big and controversial, but they had a really clever campaign where basically they were showing all the different things that you could bet on over time. And it was like these moments from history of like, Will Rome be overturned in seventeen seventy five? Or whatever the thing is. And it's like, whatever. But the campaign was incredibly well done because it was a nod to that clearly these are AI generated videos. You watch it, you would definitely think that. And you couldn't miss what it is that they do. So the idea, I think, of the brand came across really clearly. It was very fun, And it was also really in the moment, right? I think the stuff that is in the conversation today, I think about ten years ago, the Super Bowl would happen and it was like, wow, will the social media people respond in real time to what's happening with the ads? It'd be like, some crazy things happened to the Oreos. I'm like, oh, they all did it. It was so fun. And that was the extreme version of responding in real time. And now it's gotten, it's not the Super Bowl, it's just everyday life is like this. And so I think it's very, very hard. And I also think it rewards speed. Speed has never been rewarded more. If you are very, very fast to making something and then having it resonate and be part of the culture, the upside is really high. I'll give one whiskey example. We made an AI video that was an animation with Lenny, who's our unofficial mascot. And it's called Lenny's Big Delivery. And he's like running around with like a VHS tape in his mouth. And it was based off a video we did like ten years ago. But we put it on Twitter and we said, Hey, this is this thing we made in a week. It would have cost a million dollars otherwise, what do you think? And there was a lot of people trying to do this, but we were like, I don't know, five days after that, the most recent models that had just come out had come out that week and it just took off. It got like four and a half million views. I had multiple people mention it to me today. And I can tell you, was having this vision of this idea. We're going show the behind the scenes of what we think is good and bad about this. And then we went really hard and fast. And I think if we hadn't done that, it wouldn't have worked. And just like side note in this case, the risk of this too, is that video went incredibly viral, lots of positive comments, The most negative stuff I've ever seen on anything that we've ever made. And it's like, who are you? Death to you. This is horrific. And we're like, well, we're trying to learn from this thing. Like, if it's coming, you gotta learn. And like the nuance kind of like went away a little bit. But I will say it was like that like, it it did hit the moment in terms of the conversation, which I think is when done well is where a lot of the upside is. I don't have a specific campaign per se, but I do love the sort of that we're bringing back anticipation, and when I say anticipation, I mean just, like, trailers. And I know on the media side, we do this a lot. So for our podcast network, like, for most of our episodes now, we're we're creating custom trailers for our video episodes and, like, releasing that on the channel, and letting people know, giving them an insight into, like, this is what's coming, here's a little sneak peek about what's coming, getting them excited, getting them waiting for more. I think one of the challenges right now is everything is accessible all the time. There's no sense of anticipation. You can get basically anything that you want. And so the more, from a media perspective, that you can hook people and get people waiting and excited, and sort of bring back, you know, the feeling of being at a movie theater ten years ago, and, you know, after, or I guess pre Nicole Kidman, right? You're sitting there, you're like, see this awesome trailer, and you're just like waiting for six months for the movie to come out. Like, I think that because everything's accessible, there's something specifically exciting about getting your audience engaged and excited about something that's coming, and like waiting for it to drop on your channel. So I love the anticipatory marketing's coming back. I am not technical. I'm a marketer. And I've talked to Tom about this. One of my favorite examples of a use case for video is actually a series done by Webflow. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with the tool or have used these before, but they have a way of teaching that they inject humor in. So for somebody like myself, who's learning something that feels a little bit like a heavy lift sometimes, they've gone through and they've made it incredibly easy for me to learn and fun to watch their videos. It doesn't feel like I'm watching something that's above my head. They've brought it to my level, made it really simple to understand things that are pretty complex. And through that, I've learned a lot. So that's a really good case. Right now too, I'd be crazy not to actually mention a commercial. They've been running this two years in a row I absolutely love it. Have any of you seen the Amazon ad with the sleds? I see some heads nodding right now. The amount of joy that that brings me, I don't know what it is, but just seeing how happy they are and kind of how human those moments are. I think big brands sometimes lose that. And Amazon's done a great job with that type of commercial. And I think that there's going be a lot more of that that's going to be happening as we move away from some of the stuff that Chris talked about earlier, where you're hyper fixated on attribution and tracking every single click and getting back more into the art of storytelling and building ads that resonate and make people feel something. I think we're going see more of that, and that's a good thing. Hitting the zeitgeist of the time. I love that word. I think it's hard. There's a window for it, but if you can nail it, you know. But also, it's never one video. Chris was saying this the other day. You have to consistently be out there. Thousands of viral videos get you that one moment. I wanna make sure the audience is involved. I'm trying to figure out a democratized way to do this. I'm trying to think of who had pants first. I'm gonna go probably this way, because I went up the middle. Sagger has me hooked with the eye contact. So, we'll roll with this. And quick questions, rapid fire. Let's treat this like a rapid fire, so we can get as many questions in as possible. Hey, guys. What's your favorite mistake that you've made trying to adopt AI? Nice. I'm sorry. What was it? What's your favorite mistake you've made trying to adopt AI into your marketing campaign? There's so many mistakes with AI. My favorite mistake with AI, it's a constant battle with AI and my mistakes with AI. I try to build content. I'm a marketer. I'm building content with it. And early on, I may or may not have double checked my sources and that came back and bit me a little bit. That may be my favorite. That's a lesson you learn once and you never make that mistake again, right? So that's a mistake that I made with AI. Mistake that I made is not understanding that it's not as much about the prompt that you're giving it as much as it is about the context that you're sharing with it. So the more that you do to train it, the less that the way that you ask or what you're asking to do matters, because it just has a knowledge base that gives sort of a neat context to what you're asking. I wish I had a really funny answer to this, but I don't. I'm like, what is it? I think probably the miss, not really my favorite mistake, but something I've noticed is when I'm getting answers from the AI, any AI, I don't trust it as much as if it is from me or from a specific person who's an expert on that thing. But sometimes I've noticed that it can actually cause you to not take the answer seriously enough. So it's too easy to come up with these ideas. And so we're like a wash on them. But oftentimes, one or two of them, if they came from the person right next to me who I already trust, would be like, well, that would be enough to answer this problem and go do it. And so I'm noticing that it is like trying to accurately judge how much I should take and believe in and research an AI answer, I think is interesting. And we fortunately have not made any huge critical errors except for probably being too excited about it and not talking enough about the nuance. Knowing that there's going be a nuance, but being too excited about it with the team. And People thinking like, well, you're expecting us to do this and you're expecting us to do this. And that means that you think that it's now acceptable to have lower quality work. I don't know. Well, that's definitely not what I'm saying. So I think I made a mistake there. I think we've scared a bunch of people too with this exact thing. Which makes perfect sense. Like if you feel like AI is going to disrupt jobs, then it's like, well, really scary that the idea of that. And then as I think most of us know, when you go in and use it, it's like, well, it seems less likely that that's going to happen and more likely it's going to disrupt parts of jobs and aid on lots of things that probably we were spending a lot of time on that we didn't need to spend time I'm going add one thing. So context is really important. I think the biggest mistake that I've seen in our field, and this happened early on, it's still happening today, People were using AI and companies were using AI to try to get a grasp on attribution and figure out where they should make investments with their media. Without the right context and understanding how you've structured your campaigns and how you've structured your plan, you can make some pretty bad decisions. To give you an example, ran with a client. We ran the numbers through AI, asked some basic questions, tried to provide some context to it, and AI came back and read it and made a recommendation that we shift budget from one channel to another, right? One part of the customer journey to the next. Well, without the right context, the AI didn't understand how much of a lift that that was actually providing. Not everything, again, we go back, is easy to measure the impact of it. So when AI doesn't understand how to weight the value of the data and kind of normalizes it across, it can make some really bad decisions. So we've seen companies that come in say, Oh, we can help you optimize your ad spend. And we look at it like, That's a terrible idea, right? You're completely ignoring how humans behave because you're only tracking or you're putting disproportionate weight on what you're able to track as last touch. And really, we need to touch these customers across multiple channels, multiple times, I mean, seven, twelve, whatever you see the numbers as. So AI can make some recommendations without the right context, and it takes a skilled hand to give it that. So I think that's one of the big mistakes, is not that AI is wrong, but that the humans that are using it don't really understand how to ask the question or give AI what it needs to give us back the right answers. I think AI animations can be absolutely terrible. I think the character design of them are just like, they drive me crazy. I want to get this Boston Bruins contract, because they have these AI characters that come up when you're at the garden that I'm like, oh my gosh, this is really, but that's just me. Anybody have a contact at the Bruins? Yeah, there we go. That's manifesting. Also, while I'm walking back here, scanning that QR code definitely helps get us in our atmosphere of posts and all that stuff. So, by all means, before everyone leaves, please scan, helps. Here we go. Thank you. Hi, I'm Megan Raman. So, we're a product company, a based product company, about to launch. What are some of the dos and don'ts that you would recommend for a company that's about to launch their product? First product? First product. First product. I would say my dos would be, I think the anticipation thing is actually really valuable right now. And I would be trying to build anticipation and trying to be building an audience leading up to this. It's very easy to think that the day you put something out there, everyone's going to see it. And that's not usually how it works. Or if it does work, usually you get that spike and then it disappears. So the thing you're going to want is try to figure out, how can I have a consistent way of communicating with any of these people who are trying this? The other thing I would say is what you can really hope for at the beginning is any feedback at all. Any feedback. Like really negative feedback is usually actually a good sign. The problem is if you get nothing. Because then it means that people just don't care. But if you're getting feedback and people are actually trying something, is like feedback is a gift. A small percentage of people who try your product are going to give you feedback. The only people who are going do it are people who actually care. And it can be pretty jarring. Like if you launch something and you look at the email and it's like, I hate your thing. It lost this. It broke. It doesn't work. That often like feels really dejecting, but as someone who's seen a lot of that, I can tell you that behind that as a person who actually cares. And so like I crave all feedback now and have learned that is like the first positive sign you can get is feedback, even if it's all negative. And so I would say that. And then I would think the other thing that's key is like, in today's world, we get one first impression. And unfortunately for all of us, there's infinite competition and infinite other products and solutions. And so one of the great challenges we have is trying to get the balance right between having a minimum viable product, something you're going to get feedback on, but also having something that actually delivers. Because if you get in there, it doesn't deliver, most people just leave and never think of you again. And so I think about that a lot. What's the thing that you can put out there that's small enough, but valuable enough on its own that it really has its shot of delivering? And yeah, I'm not even sure MVPs work the way that they used to. So that would be the things I'd be thinking about if I was in your shoes. Thank you. Yeah, first, congratulations. That's a really big step. Taking something to market, it almost feels like you're sending out a kid into world for the first time. So that's amazing. You guys should be commended for that. It's a big deal. Even taking the gamble to build something so that it can be judged is huge. I like where Chris was going with this. I would recommend focusing on just one thing. So right now it can be a busy market. There's a lot of noise out there. I would find that one thing that your product does really, really, really, really well and make that everything. Find the people that really care about that one thing. And then once you get them on board and get them into a trial, however you go to market with it, focus on delivering a really fantastic experience. Don't let those early adopters, the ones that buy into it early, don't let them down. And even if it negative, find a way to fix it quick because they're going to remember the experience that they have with you, not just what the product does. So I would say that would be my number one thing is I would try to build a customer base early on that really, really, really respects the way that we work. And you can solve one problem. That's it. They'll buy one problem if it's big enough problem. I'm just going to bring it to the back. Hi. So how do you guys do you, like, handle, like, your SOPs? SOPs? SOPs? SOPs? What do you mean? Standardized operators. What do you guys Oh, how do we operate? What do we do with it? I'm not sure you're saying this seems like a big question. Elaborate more. Tell me exactly what you wanna know about. Let's say have like an SOP of a company that you wanna work with. What do you guys do with that? Do you guys give it to everyone and they have it read it? Like, let's say it's like a really like big, like a PDF of the entire company and you make them read that. How do you guys handle that? Make sure you're as accurate as possible. Don't like mess anything up. Oh, you're talking okay. You're talking about if we are trying to I'm just making sure I've answered the right question. Making sure that we have our team aligned on how they're gonna go after and talk to a specific customer in a specific way. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. We got there. Yeah, I mean, we have a product marketing team that's constantly working on what are all the things we're putting into market? Who is the ICP? And how does what we're building match with what we believe the ICP is going to care about? So if it's our editor, we could talk about the editor in a million different ways. We could talk about it as the thing that can be used to edit internal videos. We could talk about it as the thing that is going to aid existing editors. We could talk about it as a thing for repurposing and remixing existing videos or webinars. And we get closer and closer and closer to who is that marketer and what are the actual problems that they have day to day. And then it's translated to, the enablement team basically translates that so that the sales reps are working off of, and the success team is working off of the same procedure, which is what you're talking about, which is basically saying, based on what we've learned last month, what we've learned last week, what we've learned over the last year that works consistently, These are things we need to make sure that we mention. These are the things we need to make sure we don't mention. And then we're constantly iterating on this. So that's why I think I was a little thrown off with the question. Not that standard. It changes all the time based on how strong we believe the products are and what's resonating in market. How often do you get updated? It's being updated at least every month, but some parts are being updated week by week, day by day. I mean, this is honestly, it is a huge challenge. We've shipped over one hundred and fifty product updates this year, and that is a lot. And it's funny, it's like the things that are happening right now, right? Our product team is more productive. Like our engineers are more productive now than they used to be. And so the result is this barrage of useful things that customers have asked for, but it's hard to keep up with internally and it's incredibly hard to keep up with externally. So there's basically people whose jobs used to be like, Hey, we're going have this one feature launch this year, this major feature. Now it's like, Oh, okay. This new version of our channels product just came out last week. We've changed the hero carousel. We've changed this other thing. Like, how do we fit this into this? And then enablement's constantly trying to take that and piece it into the message that's going to the customer. Are we manually? Yes. Yeah. Just gonna swing in here. Yeah. Hi. I'm Jean. And thank you so much for all your insights that you shared. Really great insights. I have three questions for you. And I'll start with Chris because you said earlier about you've gathered enough data to know what's working and what's not working. And I'm curious to know what have you found of what's working before, and that still continues to work up to these days. Yeah. So what I'm talking about a lot there is like, we basically can only see the very bottom of the funnel. So like we can see once someone hits our website and they sign up, we have like first party data. So they tell us who they are. We can see the other things that they've navigated through. But we'll see whatever is the website they came from and referred them to Wistia. So we saw, for example, in our data about a year ago, it said that forty percent of our signups, I think was the number, was coming from Google. Seems normal. We've had this data for years. It's what Google Analytics says. It doesn't seem like it's that crazy. But then we started to realize that actually a lot of people were seeing us on social media. A lot of people were getting referred to us as lot of word-of-mouth, but that was all showing up as Google traffic. So we added a very, very simple, very old school form that says, Where did you hear about us? And so when people are signing up, it says, Where did you hear about us? And they get to select from a randomized list of things they can put in other. And it turns out that Google was sending us ten percent. And actually, word-of-mouth was much stronger than we realized. And also, there's some other stuff in there I can't get into that was working way better than we thought. And if we had never had the Google analytics data, we would have asked people what they heard about us. They would have told us and we would have known the right answer. But by having only the data at the bottom of the funnel we had, we didn't have the full picture. And I would say the thing that doesn't change is like brand matters. It actually matters more than ever. Brand is like the representation of what you represent in your customer's mind, how they think about you, how easy it is to reference you. And having a brand is a collection of like every interaction that somebody has. So if they're an existing customer, it's like they write into support and your support sucks. Like they're going to say you have crappy support. And if your support's amazing, they're going say it's amazing. It's all the interactions with the product. It's all the interactions with the content, with ads, with social, all these things add up into this feeling. And it's a very hard thing to measure, but it is something that is like basically more important, right? Like Attention is the hard thing to get. So it's like leaving an impression when you get any attention is what's important. And I think it ultimately comes down to taste and story. It's just kind of where we started with this whole thing. And so my suggestion on this is to spend time crafting the story that you do want to tell and trying to craft a story that you feel is like actually differentiated for your target customer. And if you can do that and you can enable that story really well, that's the type of thing that can resonate and actually lift your brand. And it's going to be hard to see in all of the data, but you'll see it at the end. Thank you. And I have another question real quick for you, Nathan, because you said a lot about human connections and building trust. And for digital marketing, how do you approach that to build that trust and connections online when you don't actually see the people face to face? I love this question. Thank you. So I do think that we can do this through digital media and through a digital channel. I think part of what we can do and how we can build trust is actually by understanding what their problem is in a deep way and then framing it out is that we have empathy. That's a huge thing. We talk about customization and there's been a lot of noise about customization and using data points to customize. And some of it can feel kind of creepy. Some of you have seen probably received customized ads that don't feel like they're all that great, and you don't really want to get those ads. It would be different though if we really knew what they were going through and you knew the intent of what they were searching for. So like with digital media, usually it starts with a query or search. Doesn't matter if they're using an AI engine or if they're using a engine, traditional search engine like Google, right? They're asking a question and they're looking for answers. So if you can answer the question that they're asking and not just trying to push product or push what you care about, you can actually build trust because you're focusing on them. That can happen digitally. And then you can build from that. Becomes part of what the brand that Chris was just talking about. That becomes a touch point and experience that they have, because now you're the brand or the person, whomever it is, that actually took the time to answer the question and understood it. And if you could do it from a point of empathy as a brand, that's really important. Because now the next step, and maybe some of you have heard StoryBrand and you know where I'm going with this, now you can position yourself as an authority. The thing that sparks for me is get those reviews online. I feel like that's my Q1 goal is like, you need those reviews to come up on search. So the people you've helped, ask them to help you. So anyone out there have helped them, coming to you for a review soon. I think we're almost on time, so I just kind of want to wrap up the questions here. Sorry, I'll be super quick. What Tom and Chris said, I just want to make sure the audience really resonates with it, because it's such an important sentiment. Say one thing one hundred times, instead of one hundred things one time? And to answer that question, building trust is all about what you said. I'm sorry, I can't see your name. Nathan. Nathan, thank you. It's stop talking about yourselves, right? And start talking with and engaging with your audience. And then third, super quick, I think this gentleman had such a really good question. And if you have a really limited marketing budget, you're always gonna network. You're always gonna wanna evoke your customers emotionally. But what stage of growth are you in is really the question. Right? Are you building a brand? Are you doing investor pitching? What what stage of, like, product are you in? And then what are your business goals and objectives? And then you work backwards in your marketing plan from there. Thank you. Of course. You have a question too. One last thing. From the perspective of someone who is just a teacher and a community organizer, Nathan, with your background in Polysci, I'm very curious about how do you find your customer base when you don't see them in person with the data that you do have? And then two, Chris and Carly, how do you verify that the data that you have is accurate and reflects the reality of what's going on on the ground? Yeah. So I guess I'll go first. So I understand, so how do I kind of get a read on my audience? Yeah. How do you find your customer base when you don't know where they are in real life? So a lot of times we think about our audience base and we talk about a title or we talk about, depending on what you do, I mean, can change from industry to industry. But you talk about a title and you kind of create this archetype of who the customer should be, right? Human beings, when they go and they look for answers, they're asking specific answers. One of my favorite little memes that I see all the time is a comparison between the King of England and Ozzy Osbourne, born in the same year, in the same place, with the same You look at everything and it's the same. They're two very different people, right? So I like to use the data to tell me what the customer cares about. And it's really interesting because when we analyze, let's say, a search campaign, we're able to see the questions that they're asking. We can get really deep. Mean, when go in and analyze a Google search campaign, I can see every single query for every single click that my campaign drove. I can actually rank those, and can we, one of the things we really do is we try to look at what the intent is and what the need of our customer is throughout the whole process. We try to map out how they're buying. We want to know, okay, are they asking us questions about discovery? Are they asking us questions about purchases? Are they asking us questions that are leading to a purchase? We're actually able to do that. AI helps a lot with that, trying to map intent behind search queries. But that gives me a really good image of who my customer is and what they're looking from us based on the questions that they're asking. If you know the questions they're asking, you just respond to the questions. So I don't look at a lot of those other factors. I leave it up to the person looking for the answer, I try to answer the questions. Would you mind just repeating the second question? You can just Validating? Yeah. Do you the trust that you have and the data that you do have, and how is it reflective of the results that you want to see on the ground while actually purchasing the products that you're creating? I think this ties in a little bit to sort of what Chris was sharing about, you know, forty percent of traffic coming from Google, and then that actually kind of wasn't the case. And I think the reality is is that there's actually very limited amount of data that's actually truly verifiable. If you think about, you know, even going on someone's YouTube channel and seeing views, like, you can buy a lot of things. You can buy views. You can buy a lot of engagements. And so I think it's hard from a data perspective to tell what's, you know, a genuine interaction versus what's a purchased or an influenced interaction. And so, I think the unfortunate answer is that there's probably very limited amount of data that we can actually verify. I think probably revenue generation, or, you know, sort of more of those bottom of the funnel activities are probably the most verifiable. I think that there's some, you know, sort of search glasses you can put on to sort of investigate if data looks fishy, and if it doesn't look fishy, sort of some backdoor engineering. But, I think it's hard to say that there's kind of specific methodologies that you could use across the board to sort of validate data sort of as a whole. At least that's my perspective. I completely disagree. I'm just kidding. I think that the way I think about this is when you're starting, it's pretty easy, because you just talk to them. And so that is going to be how you get your clear signal. Because you're going to do some marketing, and it might mean you went to this event, and this is your marketing, and you talked to a bunch of people. Or maybe you spent fifty dollars on Google Ads or something. And then you see, did I get any customers? You talked to the customers. Are they the right customer? Are these people resonating with the thing that I have? And the hard thing is as you scale and things get much bigger, that's when the data issue becomes an issue. And again, this answer is the same. You need data from all the different points. You need to look at like, Oh, I brought this traffic source, and it's been converting historically at some percentage. Is it the same percentage when I bring more of it? Is it dropping? Ultimately, you're gonna go and look at the sales team. You're gonna look at the support and be like, is this flowing through the funnel? And that becomes one of someone's job, is basically making sure that things are scaling the way you would expect them to as you put more leads through it. So I think that's the only way to really do it, which is actually agreeing with you, which is basically you have to see bottom of the funnel stuff at some point. The thing I will say that's not exactly the question you asked, but is what I think about a lot with this is like, Basically, your job is to constantly search for what are the inputs that actually drive the outcomes you want. Because the outcomes usually take too long. So sales cycles take time. Even self-service sales cycle takes time. People have to hear about the thing. They have to come back multiple times. They have to suss around and be like, oh, is this really for me? And then eventually they close. So the question is like, what are the best inputs you can come up with that actually do consistently get you an outcome? And then sometimes those inputs change. So I'll give you an example with LinkedIn where about a year ago, I post on LinkedIn a lot. It's the biggest organic channel that we found. It's like all the stuff we talked about earlier. We found that about a year ago, I was posting one text based post a day. And then I posted a vertical video. And the vertical videos were getting ridiculous views. It was right when they launched vertical videos on LinkedIn. So I was getting like one hundred thousand views per video. So then the input was like one text post a day. And they're like, Maybe it's one text post a day and a vertical video. And then I was like, Maybe it's a vertical video every day, and then text posts every other day. And then it got to three vertical videos a day for a while. I was making three videos a day. What was in them? I don't know. But I did it. And we were getting over, think it was like three to four million organic views a week. And then the algorithm changed and it went to basically zero. So these exact videos that I was doing before, same type of thing, it was like a thousand views. It's like shit, what's going on? And then we discovered that it was actually, Oh, now video still did well, but vertical videos didn't do as well. Horizontal videos did better if there was a good text You had to write a good text post that would actually get someone to read the whole thing. And you'd have to have a clip of something that was actually engaging. And that was the best input to get the organic use. And we didn't actually get the organic use to the same level as we did before, but we got them up tremendously more. So my point in saying this is like, if you waited till the month's data was done, you tried to figure out what was going on, it was like, yeah, that's the outcome. Or even later, like how many of those people came the site, converted. We have to trust at some point that's going to happen. But it really was about like, what is the right input that's driving this result? And in marketing today, unfortunately, a lot of the rules are changing under our feet all the time. And so it is this game of searching for what is the current best input. But if you can find that and you're willing to like question the things you're already doing that are working, that is ultimately where I think you can get to the place where you can get the stuff that really works. Thank you. Beautiful. I am going to kind of bring you to our rapid fire conclusion here just so we get some quick insights. But thank you all for participating. Thank you for all asking these questions. That's the point of a forum. We're stronger and smarter, honestly, by asking thought provoking questions together. So, who's inspiring you guys right now? Who do you think we should follow? Who do you want on your shows? Anybody that you think that these people should learn from? From a business perspective, and from a branding perspective, I've loved Clay, which is a go to market tool. I interviewed Varun, the co founder at Inbound, a couple of months ago, and one of the things I think that's most exciting and most interesting about them as a company is their commitment to unconventional hiring. And I think you can really see that sort of in the way that they're approaching IRL and their marketing strategies as a whole. They really champion hiring people that have literally zero related experience to the role that they're applying for, and they really try to, you know, kind of craft things from the ground up or from unique skill sets. And I think for me personally, as someone who has a unique skill set, I really value that. And you can really tell that they're unique in the way that they go to market and the way that they talk to their customers because of that. So definitely, from a content and business perspective, keep your eyes on Clay. Nice. So this is one that we actually talked about earlier. If you're not following this podcast, I highly recommend that you do it. It's called Nudge. It's behavioral science. So when I talk about humans and connecting with humans, there's some really cool stuff going on that they cover on that podcast. Single Is it weekly? Yeah, weekly. Every single week they really share some incredible information on what makes human beings make decisions and how to influence people. So if you've never followed that and you want to figure out how to talk about your business in a better way, I would recommend following Nudge almost religiously. It's amazing. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say, it's a proud member of the HubSpot Media Congratulations. I'm give you my little plug. I'll go with a brand and product, Granola, which is like the AI meeting notes product. And the reason I'm going with it is because it is an example of AI that actually delivers. And it's funny, if you look at a lot of the enterprise, where does AI actually work? It's basically meeting notes. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but actually when you really think about it, it is a big deal. I've been in a lot of meetings where it's like, who's going to record the notes? Is it going to be this woman who is suggesting that she's going to do it, which is pretty unfair in how things were for a very long time. That's often, it was like this dynamic of like, hey, we need to have good meeting notes because what's the point of the meeting? If we don't actually document decisions and how we got there and stuff like that. And I think that product just works unbelievably well, is very, very simple. And they also have done something interesting with their free plan, which is it's just ridiculously free, which basically makes it incredibly easy to recommend. There's no hesitation at all when recommending it. And then they also just did this, they did their own version of Spotify wrapped. And man, that thing called me out. It was ridiculous. They basically was like, what's your toxic trait with people you work with closely, who is the superhero that helps or whatever. And it was all like crazy accurate. And I share and there's specific people mentioned in it and I'm like sharing with them. They're like, they know this much about me. Like, this is crazy. This is awesome. And so I think it's just like a really good example of a bunch of things. Like great example of using AI product, really solid brand, really good business model that's caused them to go viral. And this marketing moment, I think was like kind of genius because if you, I don't know if you use it, like definitely haven't seen it, but like you should definitely check this out. But basically what they know is that like, I have meetings with individuals. I'm not going to share my granola wrapped on social media. What I'm going to do is share it with the specific people that I've had meetings with, and then I'm just virally sharing their product. So it matches it all beautifully. The political science communications major in me would be remiss to not give credit to New York City muralect for his videos and engaging and inspiring a bunch of New Yorkers to participate in the campaign process. So those videos, I think, are super authentic daily, just getting out there, talking to people, learning from his customer, I think. It was brilliantly done. Next question, marketing channel that will matter more in twenty twenty six. IRL. There's no other answer. Being in person, that's it. Yeah, I'll say the only other answer is things that you can tell are live. So things where you know the thing you're engaging with, like it is imperfect in some way, it is verifiable in some way, it's the closest thing to IRL. But it's like in the world of infinite content, we're going to look for the scarce things. Yeah, that's only one answer. It's events. You want to get in front of people. The more human connection, the better. And bringing it all together, what is one experiment that our audience should try for marketing in Q1 of twenty twenty six? I would try sharing behind the scenes content of things that you're actually doing in your business. And yeah, it could be almost anything, as long as it's something that you think is either telling a story around your product that your customer will care about, selling a story about the business that the customer will care about, but kind of in the authentic stuff is what works. And also getting comfortable even making it. I've seen some people sharing clips of actual internal meetings. And I know it sounds funny, but you see that like, well, what is actually going on in that company? It's intriguing just off the bat. And so that's the thing I would suggest. Well, I'm going to be waiting for Wistia internal meetings. So you better add that to your three videos a day. You've to bring them back. Just all from your videos, all of your granola notes. We need it all. I'm going answer a different question, which is what should we leave behind in twenty twenty five? And what we should leave behind is the notion that you have to be marketing on every channel. Marketing on every channel is not something that is something that anyone should ever do ever. You will create a lot of unnecessary content for an audience that's not on a lot of channels that you think they might be on. So focus on a couple of channels, go very deeply, and be where your audience is. So I like that part. I like to leave behind. I'm going to leave behind trying to attribute every single dollar to revenue. You don't have to track that. And going forward, though, one of the things that I think you really need to do and get comfortable with, and Chris mentioned this with the video thing, get on video. I think you have to get it's one of the easiest ways to show up authentically and connect with people. They can see your expressions. They can hear you the tone of your voice. There's a lot more that comes through with video than we can do with text or in static ads. Get comfortable using video. Get uncomfortable first, because it's not going be good when you first start out. In fact, it's probably going be really bad. But practice. Get yourself comfortable showing up, because that's going to be one of the things that is going be distinguishable from AI, is you. I have to call out Chris because he has a trademark term, which is fear of making video. It's like FOMO, but fear of making video, and it's real. It's a real thing. So thank you, Chris, for putting a name on that. What a unexpected way to end on video. I'm a huge fan of that. So our video studio's back there. You know, we can help you out. I think, like, embracing long form. Like, find someone you wanna have a conversation with. I think that's a good Q1 experiment. Find someone that you trust, that relates to your audience, that you want to have a thought leadership conversation with. Get that on video. At minimum, get it on audio. But I think getting it on video, you can see how you do. You can see how things you can improve. Every time you do video, you're gonna get better at it. And I keep telling myself that. But at the same time, this type of program, I think, is what we need. And I'm grateful for you all participating in it. I think we all learned a lot. I learned a lot. If you scan that QR code, you can get the video afterwards. I mean, it's also available on LinkedIn, but the QR code, again, gonna push towards that as an action item. So just winding it all down. Appreciate you all for coming to Venture Cafe. Super grateful for Venture Cafe for sponsoring this program and bringing this community together. Thank you, Chris, Carly, Nathan, for bringing your expertise, your humanness, and your leadership in the marketing community. So everyone, get out there and network for the next thirty or so minutes until Venture Cafe winds down, and look forward to talking to you all more. So thank you.</p></div></div></wistia-player>

Authenticity Over Perfection

One of the strongest themes from the marketing panel takeaways was the power of authenticity. Speakers emphasized that interview based storytelling and unscripted content resonate more than overly polished ads. Chris Savage, Co-Founder and CEO of Wistia, shared how founder video content that feels natural and comfortable on camera builds stronger connections than scripted commercials.

Carly Baker, Head of Creative Partnerships at HubSpot Media Network, emphasized that audiences today crave realness. They want to see the human side of brands — including imperfections and genuine, unscripted moments. This mindset fuels stronger organic reach by encouraging creators to show up as themselves, rather than chasing perfection or over-curated content.

Data Isn’t Everything Anymore

The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly due to AI advancements and increased privacy restrictions. Carly Baker, Head of Creative Partnerships at HubSpot Media Network, noted that today’s marketers need to combine quantitative data with qualitative feedback to better understand their audience.

For example, simply asking customers “Where did you hear about us?” can reveal insights that metrics alone often miss. This blend of data and human input allows brands to craft messaging that resonates — moving beyond just clicks and impressions to build real connection.

Trust is the Currency of Modern Marketing

Trust in marketing emerged as a central theme. Nathan Pichette, Co‑Founder of Reticle Digital, pointed out that today’s audiences aren’t chasing viral content — they’re looking for credibility and truth-telling. Building trust leads to long-term relationships that drive sustained brand growth.

Tom Dodge, CEO of NewView.Media and host of the event, added that trust is earned when brands consistently deliver honest stories and avoid empty hype. This perspective aligns with 2026 marketing trends, where transparency and authenticity are foundational to effective audience engagement.

Create for an Audience You Actually Understand

The panelists agreed that successful marketing begins with deeply understanding where your audience lives online. Carly shared how her team researches platforms and digital communities to tailor content that reflects the audience’s story — not just the brand’s.

This approach ensures content resonates with real experiences and challenges. For founders and startups in the CIC ecosystem, it’s a strategy that builds authentic connections and drives engagement that goes far beyond surface-level interactions.

Be Consistent, Not Confusing

A simple but powerful takeaway was the advice to “say one thing 100 times, not 100 things once.” Repetition builds brand trust and clarity. Chris Savage explained that consistent messaging across video and other channels helps audiences remember and relate to your brand.

This principle supports LinkedIn personal branding and other platforms where founders and marketers aim to establish a clear, recognizable voice.

Why Video Still Wins

Video remains one of the most powerful tools for storytelling. Facial expressions, emotion, and narrative flow humanize a brand in ways that text alone can’t. Carly Baker, Head of Creative Partnerships at HubSpot Media Network, emphasized that consistent, authentic video content drives stronger engagement and builds deeper connections with audiences.

The panelists shared actionable video marketing tips — including focusing on short, unscripted clips and using interview formats to highlight real voices. These tactics align with organic reach strategies that prioritize genuine interaction over high-gloss production.

Use Tools Strategically, Not Blindly

Several marketing tools were mentioned during the event, including

• Wistia

• HubSpot

• Common Room

• Beehiiv.

The key message was to choose tools that fit your audience and goals rather than adopting every new platform.

Tom advised founders and marketers to evaluate tools based on how they support community engagement marketing and content distribution. This approach ensures resources are used effectively to build lasting relationships.

Start With Distribution, Not Production

Finally, the panel stressed the importance of planning distribution before creating content. Aligning messaging and content format with where your audience spends time maximizes impact.

For example, if your audience prefers LinkedIn, focus on personal branding and short video clips tailored for that platform. This mindset helps avoid wasted effort and improves overall marketing effectiveness.

The NewViews Episode 11 marketing event recap offers valuable lessons for anyone looking to improve their marketing in 2026.

Real marketing lessons from industry leaders show that authenticity, trust, and understanding your audience are more important than ever. By focusing on interview based storytelling, combining data with qualitative feedback marketing, and using tools like Wistia and HubSpot strategically, founders and marketers can build stronger brands and deeper connections.