Wistia

Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz founded Wistia in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2006. While YouTube was free and ubiquitous, Wistia made a contrarian bet: professional B2B companies would pay for video hosting that didn't send viewers to competitor ads, offered custom branding, provided analytics on viewer attention (showing exactly where people dropped off), and built email capture directly into the player. The analytics were the product: for sales teams and marketers, knowing that a prospect watched 90% of your demo video versus 20% was incredibly valuable. Wistia bootstrapped to $5M+ ARR before briefly taking a $17.3M loan (not equity) to fund a media strategy, then paying it back. The company grew to serve 400,000+ companies and generate $5M+/month in revenue. Wistia expanded into Channels (a Netflix-like experience for company video content) and podcasting. A 20-year journey of a bootstrapped company that stayed independent despite enormous acquisition interest and built one of the most trusted B2B video platforms in the world.