Hey guys, it's your host Blaine here. And today we've got some great news. We're launching a brand new private community for uploading and it's all about building your personal brand the right way. The community will feature access to some of the world's best content creators, some of who you've heard on uploading and more to come. The best news, this community is absolutely free to join, but there will be a vetting process to make sure that you're serious about your content and personal brand and you're ready to support others. So if you want to scale your content, boost focus, stay consistent, grow your personal brand and connect with other top creators, make sure to apply at castmagic IO/pledging community. We'll drop the link in the show notes and hope to see you there. All right, it looks like we're live.

So, Chris, super excited for this. Like we said, this is our first live podcast of uploading and the reason I'm super excited for this is because in the show we bring on some of the best content creators and the biggest figures in content in the world. We kind of break down content strategy and, you know, trends, everything that's going on with them. And we'd been doing it in the podcast, which we send out as a newsletter. But today, the live, the live recording, super exciting because now we can actually open it up to, you know, to a live audience. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a quick little interview, we're going to chat through a lot of different things. We've got the chat. I can already see Ashley, Ramon, Nick, Shin and Kim, you know, saying what's up in the chat? But, you know, as you guys have questions throughout the conversation, you'll be able to drop those in the chat and we'll also be able to open this up towards the end for kind of a private little Q and A.

So without further ado, let's, let's go ahead and kick it off. So today we are chatting with Chris Savage, who is the co founder and CEO of Wistia, a video marketing application that makes it really easy to host, customize, promote and track your videos. If you guys haven't noticed that, we're watching this recording in Wistia right now. And Chris has been a key figure in the video content space and an expert in building authentic personal brands in the era of infinite content. So in today's episode, we're going to cover why text based platforms like LinkedIn and X are shifting focus towards Video content. How creators can maximize their impact with both long form and short form videos. Secrets behind crafting a successful personal brand that stands out in a world of AI generated content. And where Chris sees the future of content creation headed from AI to AR to podcasts and beyond.

So we're going to cover a lot. But Chris, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you first tell us a little bit about your background in the creative space and how you got started building Wistia. Yeah.

So first of all, thank you for having me excited to be here. Um, and yeah, I've been in this space for a long time. So when I went to college I focused on film and video. Um, and that was the first time I really admitted to myself that that's what I wanted to do, which was like to tell stories. Um, and that looked at the time like making short films and working on documentaries and stuff like that. And then my co founder and I, my best friend from, from Brown, his name is Brendan Schwartz. Brendan and I, we're always scheming on ideas and we're just like, man, it would be so cool if we had this business that did like XYZ thing. I remember being jealous because there was some, we'd heard a story of some other guy who had patented a shark proof scuba suit and this kid had like come with this idea and like sold it for like $300,000 or like, see, here's a coffee.

Why can't he do, why does he get to do that? We can't do it. And this like passion for building stuff turned into Wistia about a year after we graduated. And it was really just seeing this huge shift in how people are using online video. It's like the earliest days of YouTube. YouTube launched in 2005, we graduated in 2005. We saw it, clocked it and said this is the beginning of something new. And when we dug into it, they were using a lot of the open source tools to do encoding the video, which meant that basically you didn't have to be an expert anymore. So we started in 2006 thinking that we would do this for six months and we had no money.

And we thought that within six months we would sell the business and be rich or we thought we would just fail in obscurity. That was kind of our strategy and that's not what happened at all. It turns out things took much longer than we thought. And along the way we became a video marketing platform and do this huge broad set of things to try to make it easy for marketers to use video. But as a company, we really built a brand around making video, teaching people how to make video, educating and enabling how to make video. And that's been at the heart of. Of what we do.