The startup success story behind Vidyard - Small Empires Ep. 5

This Waterloo company started out creating videos, but realized they were better at analyzing other people's clips.

Before there was Vidyard, there was Redwoods Media, a small Canadian startup making marketing videos. Slowly but surely, the company, like so many startups, had to learn two lessons and has come to embrace them over time: being creative is difficult to scale, and they'e actually much better engineers than they are artists.

A lot of Redwood's clients were looking for ways to understand how their videos were performing and why. They wanted to be able to measure the ROI, return on investment, so they could justify the money being spent on these videos, and craft subsequent videos that would have more impact with their customers.

So Redwood began offering its clients a sort of guarantee. We'll help you track how people are watching, and if a certain number of people don't watch through to the end, we'll make your next video for free. As the company got better at helping their clients distribute and analyze what was happening with their videos, they realized the demand for that service was far outstripping demand for them to make new videos.

Instagram began as a way to check in to locations, before pivoting to photos and filters. Fab was a gay social network that became an e-commerce giant. Vidyard went on attend the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator and has been on a tear ever since. It even went through another milestone in the life of a successful startup, turning down acquisition offers from some of the biggest video platforms in the world. "I've learned so much, and we've had so much fun building this business that I don't think we would have had if we took that acquisition offer," said founder and CEO Michael Litt.

[bernardobonanca]

All the guys over at The Verge are putting out such amazing content. Great episode Alexis Ohanian !

[timothyzc]

This piece proves that the Verge can produce quality content.

[nihilgeist]

I really like this Small Empires series! I'd love to hear more about hardware startups please.

[Jcrdesign]

Loved this so much!! Thanks the team at The Verge for making this. :D

[Corer]

Was anyone else here guilt tripped in not clicking on another video?

[mikemcgookey]

Seeing all the shots of projects at the University of Waterloo reminds me so much of the University of Michigan. We seem to have all the same project teams.

[derekonlinenow]

So basically, this company opened iVerge's eyes and made them realize that we disliked their paid videos.

[justinlee]

Dayum video analytics. This is so smart

[imericc]

I am loving this Canadian series #uwaterloo !

[mohamedzaki]

Really great series. Can we see businesses that are in the food and beverage industry?

[MANUELBAEZ]

Awesome episode, really inspiring!! Love Small Empires!!!

[GuillaumeVerdonA]

Looking forward to Small Empires season 30: Waterloo Quantum Computing startups

[SimonPierreTremblay]

This is an awesome tech business in Canada.

[MonkeyKong]

Engineering 5 is like a jedi temple of engineering

[IamsuperSam]

Fun fact: kitchener, ON used to be called Berlin! Then the world wars happened and... you get the idea...

[Cameron]

what's the song at the beginning?

[jnas]

Heard about SLUSH? You should join next year 2015!

[fmikael]

The University of Waterloo rejected my application into computer science

[Joeable]

Hey Alexis, too much jargon! I don't know about the entrepreneurship biz, watch your language!