A startup is like a car that you are building as you drive. Eventually, your car should grip the road as you scream around turns, give you the ability to accelerate dramatically when you see open space in front of you, and let you brake on a dime, so you can avoid the obstacles without slowing down too much. Some startups without good handling lose control when a surprise sharp corner comes up, and they hit a tree. Some mosey along so slowly that before they know it, they’ve run out of gas and they’re stranded. 
“This mentality creates a ton of stress, and it often breeds tunnel vision.”
At Wistia, we try to keep the accelerator down. When we see something nasty coming up in the road, we can ease off the pressure and give ourselves more control and maneuverability. Then we can take some time to coast, while still moving forward, and figure out the right time to ramp back up. If my co-founder Brendan and I had been behind the wheel of a VC-backed startup, I’m convinced it would have gone one of two ways. We would have been replaced in the driver’s seat, or we would have totaled the car. We didn’t know what it would take to grow a company, and there’s no way we would’ve learned how fast enough. We had to go slow and learn it over time. In the end, that was the key reason we were able to build a strong company. ### Preparing for Success As we started to build what would become Wistia, Brendan and I dreamed of becoming a $60,000/year business, guaranteeing both of us a $30,000/year salary. That sounded amazing to two fresh college grads whose #1 wish was to not have jobs, but to have freedom. I remember proudly telling my dad of our plans, and that I thought we could get there. His response stuck with us for a long time. 
There’s nothing like advice from a sage guardian. “Make sure you prepare for success,” he said. He believed in us and warned us that if this really did work out, we needed to be prepared for the consequences. We hadn’t been thinking about what would happen if we actually hit our goal. We were haphazardly barreling into the first turn of a long road trip.
“We hadn’t been thinking about what would happen if we actually hit our goal.”
You’re trained to think about what you’ll do if you fail, but you’re rarely asked what you’ll do if you succeed. Success means that you could be working on your company for the next ten years or more. Success means dealing with hard HR issues, feeling financially responsible for all employees, deciding on company strategies that will impact everyone, handling hard customer issues. You’ll have to live with the consequences (both good and bad) of your decisions for a long time. You need to prepare for it by making good decisions today. We began thinking differently about growth and how we should be driving our car. We decided that we’d drive at a speed we were comfortable with and simply try to double the size of our business every year. It ended up taking just two years to get to our original goal of $60,000/year. Three years later, we were at $1M/year. Both Brendan and I are glad we put my dad’s advice to use. ### The ten year test To make sure we were building a company that would sustain itself and succeed in the long term, we started asking ourselves a simple yet powerful question every time we were faced with a difficult choice: “What would we do if we had to make a decision that we would need to live with for the next 10 years?” 
“Where am I going?” Brendan contemplates the next decade of his life. We started out with questions like ownership—would we want to work together through the next ten years if we split the company 70/30? 60/40? 50/50? Did it really matter who had the initial idea? Did it matter who put in slightly more hours or slightly more money? We knew that while we both brought different values to the table in the short term and that an uneven split would certainly make one of us miserable over the long term. This decision-making process became a habit. We started running every significant question we had about Wistia’s business through a kind of “ten year test”: - What if our sales experiment works, and we become a sales-driven organization over the next ten years? - What if we take money from this investor, and we have to build a company with her for the next ten years? - What if we really build out this video production marketplace and then have to sustain it over the next ten years? We knew that Wistia would take a long time to grow, and some decisions you make early on can’t be reversed. This form of decision-making was our way of making sure we were always moving in the right direction and not doing something unsustainable. ### When the walls start shaking The last year and a half was the fastest period of growth in Wistia’s history. We had the pedal to the metal. As the team grew from 30 to more than 60 people, though, we started drifting over lines and riding the rumble strip.
“The last year and a half was the fastest period of growth in Wistia’s history.”
Team members were taking on more roles and doing more unfamiliar and challenging work. We were all pushing hard to hit our numbers. Combined with massive headcount growth, folks were strained. Our culture was being put to a serious stress test. When the walls started shaking, we decided to dial it back, take our foot off the accelerator, and regain control over the steering. 
We slowed down hiring, decreased spending in certain areas, helped people grow into roles, reshuffled some teams, and made transparency a team priority. Interestingly, from what we’ve observed since then, it’s not necessarily the speed that causes stress at startups. Stress can be caused by: - Not knowing why you’re doing the work - Not believing that it’s possible to achieve your goals It’s not about how fast you’re driving the car—it’s about building a car that can turn around obstacles, stop on a dime, and accelerate when you have an open road. Startups need growth to survive, but to do it without burning out, you have to focus on the integrity of your car. With forethought and frequent communication with your team, you can build a dependable Ford. ### Culture is the governor of growth Culture has to be your governor of growth because it’s difficult to make hard and fast rules. Sometimes the market is moving super quickly, and you have to hustle, or you’ll miss a huge opportunity. Sometimes you push too hard, realize the consequences, and have to be willing to slow down. You can’t just rely on numbers to dictate when to do what. You have to check in with the people that you hope to play this crazy game with in ten years time. 
If you push your team out of an obsession with the numbers, it makes every other value you hold suddenly appear irrelevant. If you can’t preserve your values, you’ll fail. You always have to make the decisions that will set you up for growth in the future, even if that means pumping the brakes now.
The beautiful thing about growth is that it always makes you stronger. The doors shake, things get hard, and you may even feel like you have to relearn your entire role in the company, but that experience will always leave you changed for the better. It can be hard while it’s happening, but eventually the walls do stop shaking. Everyone can take a breath and reflect on the incredible things they’ve accomplished. The exhilaration and adrenaline slowly fade away. The car’s still moving.
from Wistia Blog http://ift.tt/298hW8O via production studio
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According to data we pulled from across all Wistia-hosted videos using calls to action, the click-through rate for calls to action that include the word “click” is the highest, at just over 15%, and “click here” comes in second, at around 11%. The average click-through rate for CTAs not using any form of “click” was just under 10%.
The difference is even more pronounced when using annotation links. Annotation links that included “click here” were about 4 times as effective as annotation links that didn’t include the word “click.” Using “click” was about 3 times as effective as not using the word at all. As with any data finding, it’s important to consider your context and your audience before making changes. In other words, don’t revise all of your CTAs and annotation links solely because of this data. At Wistia, we’re proponents of 
Either option brings new users into their account, so they can start exploring all that Wistia has to offer. Though, if we’re being honest, we’d much rather have them upload their own videos to get up and running right away. But, we realized that some people might not have a video file handy. We wanted them to be able to see Wistia’s features in action, so we created a loaner video that they could use. Exploring Wistia’s features with our loaner video is like viewing an open house with staged furniture. New users can begin to visualize what the place could look like with their own stuff. They can match the video player color to their company’s branding, add 
The actual video they used to borrow was a cute video of Lenny (our office dog and unofficial mascot) running around with a VCR tape in his mouth. Everyone loves cute. Everyone loves Lenny. So that’s the video we chose. We’ve embedded it below so you can watch for yourself.
### 1. Establish the lines of communication Pre-production often gets overlooked, but it’s the first interaction between you and your client and one of the most crucial time periods in your relationship. A little care in this early stage of the process can lead to big payoffs down the road. Similarly, missteps here can lead to missed opportunities. During the discovery phase, you should not only learn about your client, but you should brief the client on who you are and how your team works. Clearly establishing who will be doing what clues the client into your process and brings them in as a collaborator, rather than an outsider. First, 
Establish a clear goal and key metrics for measuring your video’s success. Who is the video intended for? What marketing goal will it help hit? Where will it live, and how will it be promoted? Don’t forget to review the budget and timeline to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. Next, establish a single point of contact between the client and you. Typically, this is a project manager, production coordinator, or some other manager who has a good high-level understanding of what’s going on. While it can seem restrictive to limit communication in this way, having one person on each side ensures that what is communicated is clear, concise, and consistent. Down the road, it can also streamline post-production. Your client point of contact should be responsible for organizing approvals, so that you’re not wrangling feedback from all sides. ### 2. Check in regularly before production begins At this stage in the process, it’s important to have regular check-ins so everyone knows what’s going on. Internally, this should happen in weekly or even daily status meetings. With clients, the frequency can be less long, as you’re meeting any deadlines set up in advance. Do set up quick calls or emails whenever you hit specific milestones, like completing a creative brief, drawing up storyboards, or setting a schedule. Use tools like Google Docs for script revisions and shared Trello boards for glanceable status updates. They reduce the urge to schedule excessive meetings.
When it comes time to do the shoot, a call sheet is an extremely handy tool to make sure that everyone’s on the same page. A big budget shoot will often have a dense sheet with a ton of detail, but a call sheet doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful.
Take the time to gather qualitative data, like feedback from viewers in comments, shares, tweets, and posts. Take screenshots of these throughout the campaign and include them in reports and follow-up meetings. These may not have the elegance of numerical data, but are great ways to probe how your audience engaged with your content. As far as reporting frequency, it often depends on the speed of the platform you’re delivering on. For social, daily internal updates are not overkill. Weekly client calls can be very helpful, in addition to larger monthly reports. For a larger evergreen web video, a monthly update might be all you need. Experiment and choose the frequency that lets you react quickly and nimbly, without being forced to act on noise and not signal.
The data suggests that most people are using videos to promote a specific product or feature rather than to build an email list. And for good reason: Wistia Calls to Action have an average conversion rate of 11.04%. 
Turnstiles (7.2%) and annotation links (3.4%) appear not to convert as well, but the data is somewhat misleading. Remember that Turnstiles have higher stakes, since they ask for an email address as opposed to a click, and annotation links don’t stop the video when they appear. In general, the lower the stakes, the easier it is to promote action, so comparing conversion rates between all three isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Also, note that a 3.4% click rate for a non-obtrusive link is pretty high regardless of the platform and medium. ### How Fleetio uses all three Timeline Actions Can you use all three at once? Certainly! 
### Shooting and editing your video #### Using your built-in camera As you may have seen in our 
### Production and aesthetic #### Think “no sound” Instagram was the first social platform to initiate silent, auto-playing video. When they launched this back in 2013, Facebook and Twitter followed suit and adopted this as the norm. Silent videos on social media are less intrusive and optimal for skimming. But how do you grab someone’s attention in just a few seconds? How do you get them to fully commit and tap the screen for sound? There are a few important things to keep in mind when producing a video for Instagram: - Since users have to tap the video for audio to play, any audio before the person taps won’t be heard. It sounds obvious, but you might consider starting off the video with an introduction that doesn’t need audio. When and if the user taps for audio, they won’t have missed much. - Talking head videos work well on websites and landing pages, but on social you want to be more creative. Dialogue-based videos probably won’t drive the same amount of engagement as more visually stimulating ones. Cater to the silent autoplay! - If you don’t have awesome visuals to work with, and your Instagram caption doesn’t convey everything you want it to, try to integrate text or include captions in your video so that viewers can follow along. Here’s one example of an Instagram video that performed really well for us—the angle of the shot was interesting enough to hold viewers’ attention, the text explained what the content was, and the calls to action were clear.
Video in a user’s feed will autoplay as you scroll through, so your thumbnail will only be seen for a split second (without audio). Make sure the beginning of your video is as attention-grabbing as possible so viewers are tempted to turn audio on. It’s also important to note that if you’re editing your video from inside the app, you’ll have to choose a still from within the footage you’ve shot. Instagram doesn’t let you upload a separate thumbnail. This means you should edit your video outside of the app if you want more control over the cover image. #### Filters and reach Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be an inverse relationship between camera phone quality and Instagram filters—the better the camera, the fewer filtered photos we see in our feeds. When your image is already crisp and beautiful, filters tend to make them look a little overproduced. However, if filters are your thing, definitely use the same one throughout the entire length of the video; don’t switch between filters for different clips. Now that you have your video looking great and ready to go, it’s time to add some relevant hashtags to your post. Hashtags and location tags make it easier for Instagram users to find your content if they aren’t already following you. Add hashtags that relate to the content in your post and that also have the most reach. You can find out which tags are most popular by typing them into the search bar and selecting 'Tags’ before you add them to your caption. It should look something like this, for example: 
Hit share, and you’re in business! Watch those views roll in. But remember, some services that automatically share Instagram posts to Twitter, like 