[Top SaaS Series] From Rock Bottom to $3 Billion With Patrick Stiles

Patrick Stiles is the CEO of Vidalytics, a video hosting and analytics platform that helps marketers convert cold clicks into paying customers through conversion-optimized tools and world-class analytics. Under his leadership, Vidalytics has powered videos responsible for over $3 billion in sales and is trusted by top direct response marketers and eight-, nine-, and even 10-figure brands, such as Primal Labs, V Shred, iClosed, and Frank Kern. 

Patrick’s entrepreneurial journey is anything but conventional — overcoming expulsion from school, addiction, and time in jail before building multiple eight-figure businesses. With a unique perspective shaped by both adversity and success, he brings a data-driven and innovative approach to video marketing and business growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:20] Patrick Stiles shares an overview of Vidalytics’ video hosting and marketing features
• [6:34] How analytics sparked the initial idea for Vidalytics
• [7:54] Benchmark findings from billions of video plays
• [11:15] Best practices for hooks, leads, and engagement in videos
• [16:23] Patrick discusses common mistakes marketers make in video funnels
• [19:26] Smart autoplay feature and its impact on conversions
• [23:06] Early struggles and perseverance before gaining traction
• [27:48] How COVID-19 boosted Vidalytics’ growth
• [33:45] Using Vidalytics to diagnose funnel performance issues
• [45:25] Interactive video features to increase engagement
• [50:46] Patrick’s journey overcoming addiction and its influence on entrepreneurship

In this episode…

Many businesses struggle to convert cold traffic into paying customers, often losing potential buyers due to poor video engagement, weak calls to action, or a lack of actionable data. Without clear insights into audience behavior, marketers risk wasting ad spend on underperforming creatives. How can companies use video more effectively to drive measurable sales and long-term customer relationships?

Patrick Stiles, an expert in video marketing and direct response strategy, shares how to address these challenges by leveraging detailed viewer data from Vidalytics, optimizing hooks and leads, and strategically placing calls to action. He explains how segmenting data by device, traffic source, and engagement patterns can reveal high-converting behaviors. Patrick also recommends testing multiple video versions, adding interactive elements, and aligning messaging closely with audience pain points to improve conversion rates and customer acquisition efficiency.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Jeremy Weisz interviews Patrick Stiles, Founder and CEO of Vidalytics, about mastering video marketing for conversions. Patrick discusses using Vidalytics to identify drop-off points, designing engaging video openings, and tailoring calls to action for different audiences. He also shares insights on overcoming early business struggles, creating interactive features, and building resilience through personal challenges.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Patrick Stiles on LinkedIn
• Vidalytics
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia MD
• Profasee

Special Mention(s):

• Chad Rubin on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Tips To Thrive in the SaaS Space With Sujan Patel” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “If somebody pauses your video, it means they’re about to bounce, so try to save the sale.”
• “Only 3% of people make it to the very end of a video, on average, for video.”
• “A little hinge can swing a big door in these types of things.”
• “People overindex for being engaging and funny instead of actually calling out their real target audience.”
• “The number one thing I did right, maybe the only thing, was not give up.”

Action Steps:

1. Optimize your video hook and lead: The first few seconds determine whether viewers stay or leave, and a strong opening builds curiosity and trust, leading to higher engagement and conversions.
2. Analyze viewer drop-off points: Use Vidalytics to see where audiences stop watching, helping refine content flow, improve messaging, and reduce wasted ad spend.
3. Segment your audience data: Break down performance by device, traffic source, and engagement level to reveal which segments convert best and where to focus resources.
4. Test call-to-action placement: Experiment with positioning CTAs earlier or later in your video to capture more leads before viewers disengage.
5. Incorporate interactive video features: Adding clickable choices or prompts keeps viewers engaged and invested, increasing emotional connection and likelihood of purchase.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Wise.

Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Doctor Jeremy Weiss here Founder of Inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Patrick Stiles of Vidalytics. And Patrick, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast.

People should check out since this is part of the series. Okay. Some good ones are. I had one of the co-founders of Zapier, Wade Foster, on. He talked about growing the company.

 That was a good one. One of the founders of Pipedrive, I think at the time they were 10,000 customers. Now they’re over 100,000 customers. So it was a crazy journey. We were talking before we hit record.

 It’s like hashtag entrepreneur. Life Just stuff happens. And that was a crazy journey. He actually had a brain tumor. And may he rest in peace.

 He passed away. But you know, it was kind of a crazy journey with everything throughout. Also, one of the founders of of Mailshake, they do cold email and many more on inspiredinsider.com. Right. Real founder stories and the journey.

 So check it out. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

 You know, we do the strategy, accountability and the full execution of production. Number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your best clients partners, prospects simple and affordable. You give us the address list and we’ll do everything else. And we kind of send a Patrick like a campaign of gifts.

 So it’s not like one gift. It’s like we will go, okay, let’s send them a gift every 3 to 4 months. For four years. Okay. And so, you know, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free for companies to build amazing relationships.

 You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past decade to one profile that people and companies I admire, and to send them sweet treats in the mail. So if you have questions, go to Rise25.com or email us at. [email protected] super excited to introduce Patrick Stiles.

 He’s the Founder of Vidalytics, one of the top video hosting and marketing platforms for direct response marketers. Patrick, I don’t know if you know this. I geek out on direct response. I think the fundamental thing that’s made me to where I am is two things relationships and direct response. Okay.

 Direct response bleeds into everything. It bleeds into conversations. It bleeds into videos. We’re going to talk about you. It bleeds into email.

 I want my kids to just read about direct response. And I think it’s one of the best things they could do. So his path was not typical. Okay. He was expelled twice early on.

 He was, believe it or not. You know, when I met Patrick the first time, I was shocked by some of these things. In and out of jail, he battled addiction and he hit rock bottom before finally turning his life around. We’ll talk a little bit about that. And since then, he’s built multiple eight figure businesses, and the videos on Vidalytics have driven over $2.5 billion in sales.

 And some of the top marketers and businesses have used this to increase their sales. Some companies, like Primal Labs and V Shred and Enclosed IO and Frank Kern and many more. So first of all, Patrick, thanks for joining me.

Patrick Stiles: 03:55

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Jeremy Weisz: 03:57

I’m gonna.

Patrick Stiles: 03:58

Be here. That’s a great intro.

Jeremy Weisz: 04:01

It’s all. It’s all factual. I’m going to share my screen. And I just want you to start off and talk about politics and what you do, and we can poke around as as you’re doing that.

Patrick Stiles: 04:14

Sure. Let’s do it.

Jeremy Weisz: 04:16

So go ahead. What’s talk about Vidalytics okay.

Patrick Stiles: 04:20

So Vidalytics is a video hosting platform. Which means if you want a video on your website, you would upload it to Vidalytics. You get a little snippet that you drop onto your website, and then we stream your videos for you. And we do that to make sure that they’re super fast. But that’s really just where things get started, because we also, you know, have dozens of features on top of the players, such as, you know, this one that we’re looking at right here.

This is a video on kind of the top right right there where it says welcome back. You’ve already started watching this video. That’s our resume play feature. So Jeremy’s already been on our website. And because of that it’s giving him the option to start off where he or start where he left off, or to start the video over entirely.

 And there there’s our now exit play gate. That’s another one. This is like a great demo. It’s showing all our stuff.

Jeremy Weisz: 05:07

Perfect.

Patrick Stiles: 05:08

So yeah, this is really cool. So this is one of my favorite features because if somebody pauses your video, it means they’re about to bounce. And if that’s the case, you want to try to like, you know, save the sale. Right. And capture a lead or something like that.

So this is an opt in that pops up only when your video is paused. So they don’t see it at any other time. So yeah. So we have dozens of features just like this. And they’re all designed to do one thing, and that is to turn a cold click into a paying customer on the very first day.

 And that’s what our users do. That’s kind of like what we specialize in. But of course, like, you know, any kind of DTC or, you know, kind of company that’s having marketing videos out there is going to be able to benefit from the stuff that video does. And then, you know, true to our name, of course, we have killer Vidalytics behind the scenes, bar none. The best video marketing Vidalytics in the world.

 Where you have like segmentation and a lot of kind of drill down so that you can understand how people are engaging with your videos and ultimately, you know, watching them and then purchasing as a result of them.

Jeremy Weisz: 06:08

Paid clicks to paying customers. I like that headline, actually.

Patrick Stiles: 06:12

Yeah, thanks.

Jeremy Weisz: 06:14

You talked about some of the features, and I always like to know from like a software perspective, you know, what the evolution looked like. Okay. When you first started with politics again, you can’t boil the ocean. You know, a lot of times people have limited team. Where did you start?

With Vidalytics.

Patrick Stiles: 06:34

You know, we started with Vidalytics. And that’s like one reason why we’re called Vidalytics. But, you know, many years ago I was running a online health company selling supplements and my funnels had stopped working. So I had like multiple videos. One of them was new.

One of them had ran for a while but was no longer profitable. And I was like looking at the limited stats that I had in this other video player, and I was toggling between tabs trying to compare the two, and it was just really hard to do that. So as a result, I like suddenly it was like a eureka moment where I was like, oh my gosh, like, they should put these two graphs on the same page and I should be able to change the date range. And why aren’t they tracking conversions of how far somebody watches into the video before they actually purchase? There was lots of things like that that I was like, wow.

 Like I knew enough about tech because I’ve been building some custom kind of tech in my business just for like internal purposes. But I knew enough about it that I was like, this wouldn’t be terribly hard to do. Like, this is very feasible. I understand, like how like it would kind of work at a high level. So that was kind of the initial idea for politics.

Jeremy Weisz: 07:38

You can see here, like if you’re if you’re listening to the audio, there’s a video here and you can kind of see actually on this page I’m on the Vidalytics page where when you scroll over this, it shows which part of the video, how many people are watching the conversions, the rewinds, the skips? Right.

Patrick Stiles: 07:54

Yeah. Pretty cool. Absolutely. Yeah. And then, like, where it really shines is that one where the only video platform that tracks conversions, where you can see where somebody buys, like, based on how far they watched into your video.

But then like, you can also segment it by all these different kind of metrics. So you can have things like you can look at viewers that bots or didn’t if they’re first time viewers or returning viewers if they muted or unmuted where it’s embedded on your website. If you have the same video on multiple pages, they triggered a tag, which is something that you would fire over to your CRM to have, like a marketing automation when they hit a certain point in your video. Devices, browsers. Geography.

 Time of day. Day of week. But also we ingest URL parameters. What that means is that if you’re running something like Facebook ads or any kind of ad platform, you have the tracking in the URL, we’re going to grab that, and then you’re going to be able to segment your stats based off of those parameters so that you can see like which ads are kind of driving the greatest engagement or the highest conversions in your videos. It allows you to really kind of prune ads a lot faster so that you’re not kind of like, you know, bleeding into a test budget, trying to figure out, like, you know, you know, which ads are going to turn into conversions on the back end, because if they’re not watching your video, they’re not going to ultimately buy.

 This is something else. We’ve done this report, Jeremy. We didn’t even talk about this previously, but it’s state of VSL, state of video sales letters, which is what a lot of people on Vidalytics run. And so the stat you shared at the beginning of this podcast is actually already dated. It’s going up by hundreds of millions of dollars every single month.

 But right now, we estimate it’s over $3 billion that videos have generated for our users. And we’ve studied all of those videos, the billions of plays that generated that. And we figured out like the best practices, the benchmarks and stuff like that. So, for instance, we found that engagement has a 28% correlation with conversions. So it’s not a super strong correlation, but it is statistically significant.

 And it basically means that somebody doesn’t watch your video, then they’re not going to buy. Which maybe sounds obvious, but that’s kind of some of the stuff that we do.

Jeremy Weisz: 09:57

I guess at first it sounds obvious, but I’m thinking, well, you know, typically the pages have, you know, obviously there’s a video, but there’s a lot of text as well. So they could still read it. But it seems like the engagement with the if they’re watching the video, there’s a higher conversion that they’re just going through and reading it. Is that yeah.

Patrick Stiles: 10:15

That would be the case. Yeah, that would be the case on those hybrid pages, which, you know, for transparency sake, we didn’t separate that out in our benchmarking just because, you know, of the limited nature of our analysis, which that is kind of like a future kind of 2.0 version of things that we might add, we’re constantly refining these benchmarks as well. Like every single week, we’re coming up with new questions and then handing it over to our director of business intelligence. That’s a statistician. So yeah.

Jeremy Weisz: 10:42

Talk about best Practices because I’ve heard you speak Before and you’re a wealth of knowledge on. We talked about direct response and what are some of the like kind of the format like from best practices because we’re looking here at the video. Right. There’s yeah.

Where is it converting? But there’s a certain format or things that people are missing or you have found that when they do include it, it helps. So like from the beginning, middle and end, what are some of the best practices of what to include?

Patrick Stiles: 11:15

Yeah, I mean like look, every single video needs to have a strong hook, you know, like a strong kind of opener. And that’s going to be the very, very beginning of the video. Like the first maybe like 10s plus or minus. And you know, from there it kind of relates to the lead, which, you know, is going to vary more widely, but it would be the first several minutes of the video, depending on how long it ultimately is. Right.

So we deal with some long form content in a lot of cases. So that would be like a few minutes of like kind of opening arguments. Obviously some videos out there are just a few minutes long in their entirety, so it’s just going to kind of scale down proportionally there. But having a strong hook, a strong lead, kind of the opener of the video is going to make or break everything. So we have stats on, you know, hundreds of thousands of videos.

 And we consistently find that like they just have a lot of drop off in the beginning of them. And, you know, video does convert better. People do prefer videos, but people don’t always have time for video. They don’t have time or the rather the environment to turn on the sound, you know, those types of things. So they’re not necessarily always going to engage with it.

 So you want to hook them. And it’s the same kind of, you know, marketing principles that, you know, relate to ads or anything else. So some other things that we found is that videos that have their controls on convert better. We found that Europe converts better than the United States by about 30%. A really fun kind of factoid is that Africa Converts are much less than than North America.

 The United States and Canada. But what? But their engagement is the same. So, like the the Africans that are watching videos on the politics are engaging with them at the same rates as like North Americans, but obviously they’re not purchasing at the same rate because these are North American companies marketing to North Americans in a lot of cases. So it’s it’s like that sort of thing is like very interesting kind of similar stuff with tablets that if you’re driving leads with your business, a mobile device actually converts better than desktop.

 But if you’re driving a sale like a direct to consumer into your credit card and checkout type of thing, desktop is going to convert better. The thing that never converts better is tablets. Tablets convert worse significantly. I think by about 27%. So that’s something that, you know, I found kind of interesting when I think about it.

 I think it’s because those people are ultimately not set up to purchase, you know, either like circumstantially or like literally on their device to purchase on on that. Like they don’t have their credit card information saved in their tablet browser, you know, or they’re on the couch scrolling Facebook and they didn’t really mean to kind of like, you know, engage with anything like that. So we we have some benchmarks of how far somebody or how much like engagement you should have so far into a video, for instance. Two minutes into the video, you should have at least 33% engagement, which sounds like a big drop off, and it is, but that 33% can make or break the difference in basically it being a profitable funnel or not. So, you know, when we found that, we I found it very interesting.

 It’s something that I look at all the time when I look at videos, you know, if I’m looking at somebody’s stats for them. However, what we also found on the other end of the kind of, you know, graph, if you will, the end of the video is that only 3% of people make it to the very end of a video, on average, for video 3%. Not a lot, but those that 3% accounts for 47% of all conversions. And this is kind of the thing. Like, you know, we deal with like conversion rates, I want to say around like 1.5 to 1.7 5 in 2025.

 That’s about the average for a video on which is more than enough to.

Jeremy Weisz: 15:01

Most of these people. Are, I assume, running cold traffic. So yeah. Yeah, cold.

Patrick Stiles: 15:07

Traffic, affiliate traffic, some warm traffic like marketing automations, in-house email list, stuff like that.

Jeremy Weisz: 15:13

So yeah, I’ve heard like, I don’t know if you know, Bryan Kurtz, you know, I think he sent billions of direct mail and he says the same from like a direct mail perspective. It’s like if it’s a 1%, it’s fantastic. So it sounds like The Same similar to the video. Yeah.

Patrick Stiles: 15:30

Yeah, I think 1% would crush. So it’s just like, you know, a little hinge can swing a big door in, in these types of things. And I think that people overindex for being engaging and funny or like kind of trying to like appeal to the masses with their videos instead of actually like calling out like, hey, you know, this is for you if XYZ is true kind of stuff. Like, are you spending $10,000 a month on your advertising? If so, keep watching.

And you know, people kind of overindex for that because they think because they kind of overly worship engagement. But it’s actually, you know, maybe like a little bit of a misnomer because if you’re talking to everybody, you’re talking to nobody.

Jeremy Weisz: 16:09

Any other parts that you find, people make mistakes, like maybe they make mistakes. You mentioned the strong hook, the lead, and then maybe towards the middle and end. What are some of the mistakes people you’ve seen people make or or they modified to increase conversions?

Patrick Stiles: 16:23

Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting is that videos, you know, there’s a lot of sentiment that videos are getting shorter. And actually we’re not seeing that in our data. There’s like like gurus that I’m friends with that you know, are very, very respectable. And they’re saying that like, just like, you know, longer form content is dead and people don’t want to watch that.

But we’re not seeing that in our data. I do think that folks that are either trying to get to, to, into the pitch, like too fast, so they’re kind of skipping the like emotional rapport and indoctrination, that kind of stuff. I think that can be a major mistake. Or on the other side of it, if they’re just, you know, maybe kind of going into that stuff too much. So, you know, ultimately kind of like, so what’s the answer there?

 Well, you got to test and it’s going to depend on your audience. And that’s really kind of like the crux of this is that, you know, people are probably not testing enough. They’re not paying attention to the things as much. And so many people are like, oh, yeah, I tried this, I tried that, it didn’t work. And it’s like, okay.

 Like, how many tests did you run? How many variations, how many iterations? Like, you know, every time you spent a dollar where you did, you have a hypothesis that you were setting out to test and validate?

Jeremy Weisz: 17:31

Yeah. I mean, I don’t remember who said this to me, but they said there’s no such thing as long copy, just boring copy. And you’ve talked about this in a video, too. Which is it? Just because I think I don’t remember who was interviewing you, but they kind of said, wait, you know, is someone really going to watch an hour video?

And you kind of make the point of, well, if you’re solving a real pain for someone. Yeah, they’ll watch the video. And I think you use the, I don’t know, the example of menopause, even though probably neither of us, at least I don’t know that much about it. But it’s a pain, a huge pain point for people. So it is, though, and they want information.

 They’ll watch the whole thing.

Patrick Stiles: 18:09

Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly it. Yeah. If you’re talking to somebody whose hopes, dreams, desires, their pains, their fears, the things that wake them up in the middle of the night, the thing that is like, you know, an intrusive thought repetitively inside of their skull that they just need to solve the one thing they’re focused on, then, yeah, you’re going to have their attention as long as you continue to talk to that and you do it in a way that resonates, you know, and that can be like kind of just getting things in order or like being different enough where they’re not like, oh, I’ve heard this or this doesn’t make sense or, you know, whatever. So yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Weisz: 18:42

And I feel like, Patrick, when I look at some of those and we mentioned mistakes people make or what increased conversion, some of those things you’ve kind of baked into the features themselves. So when I took a look here, you know, obviously we you started with the Vidalytics going back to the evolution of the features. Right. But you also have okay, there’s a smart autoplay option. Right.

Because you probably found that well someone hits the page I’m making this up I’ll let you talk about it. But like someone hits the page and making someone actually do something, they don’t do it. They don’t click it. So if it autoplay. So talk about maybe that feature as well and what you’ve seen.

Patrick Stiles: 19:26

Yeah absolutely. This is actually one that’s really fun because it was like the first thing we did that got us traction. So we launched the Vidalytics and just lots of things didn’t like kind of like work out just like from like a startup kind of story. Right. We didn’t get traction in the marketplace.

And, you know, then it was about a year later, I want to say it was around the beginning of 2018. The browsers blocked autoplay with sound. And that’s the key distinction there. So they blocked autoplay with sound. So we were like the first people with like, you know, a kind of autoplay that defaulted to mute if the browser was going to block it.

 And that’s why we call it smart, because it’s not just like, oh hey, you have muted autoplay, but it actually is going to detect the browser is going to block the video from playing with sound. And if it does then it’s going to fall back to playing on mute. And if it doesn’t then it’s going to play with sound. At least if you want that feature turned on and you have all this granular control, like under the hood with Vidalytics, that’s like kind of like our, our mantra is that we give like a lot of control, like with like colors and copy and everything like that. So nothing’s really kind of like Inflexible from our features.

 So yeah. And then we tested different messages on top of the video player, Steve Weatherford, a big kind of guru in the health space. He came over to us as a user and he was like, hey, like we developed this kind of design for our smart autoplay, and it’s the thing that’s on your screen right there. Second ago. Yeah.

 And this kind of looping video, that right there. Yeah. That square, that’s something that they developed and they’re like, we tested this and it works. You know it works better. Like so if we move over will you build.

 And we’re like yeah of course. So so we and we have like different message styles. And again you can change the copy and the color that’s like inside of those. So that was smart autoplay. What’s really interesting about this feature today is something that we know from our benchmarking that we do.

 And by the way like I will kind of talk about the future of our benchmarking and how we’re building that into AI. And I actually might even be able to show something if we have a moment. But what we found is that 6.4% of the time, autoplay is going to be blocked by the browser, and that could be a browser extension. It could be like JavaScript disabled, it could be the phone on low power mode or data saving mode, something like that. It doesn’t matter.

 But whatever. You know the reason 6.4% of the time a video is not going to play with autoplay. And this is true for probably any video player out there. Their actual percent of the time that it happens to them is just going to vary with a kind of like, you know, audience that, you know, ends up on their videos. But what we tell people and like, we’ve developed features around this where it’s like, hey, you don’t want to have just an autoplay turned on and like some randomly generated thumbnail from our system.

 Sometimes we get it right, but it’s randomly generated. So what you want to do is you want to get like a real juicy thumbnail that’s going to drive that click because, you know, over 6% of the time people are not actually going to see the autoplay. And we’ve seen people with a white thumbnail on a white page with autoplay getting blocked by like, you know, something like no fault of our own. And it’s the thing that like, we had no idea a video was there because they also had like controls and stuff like that turned off, which we also recommend turning on all the controls so people know it’s a video player, they can click it and stuff like that.

Jeremy Weisz: 22:41

I’ll have you share some of those stats in a minute, but I want to know, Patrick, why’d you keep going like early on? You know, it’s like, are you just a glutton for punishment? You know, it’s it’s not easy. What made you keep going when. And you said it was like a year before you saw some, like, significant traction.

Not saying you weren’t getting traction, but.

Patrick Stiles: 23:06

It it it was worse than that. It was it was like over a year after launch. So it was almost two years since we started building. And for some reason, I think it was the beginning of the year. So maybe it was a year and a half or two years.

I’m not exactly sure from the time that we started building, but it was like it was brutal. So first of all, I had a supplement company that I mentioned earlier and three months into building, and this thing was profitable and paying all the bills, it crashed. We got like a really bad ad account banned from Google. That was like all of our traffic. And I didn’t have the bandwidth, like mental, kind of like space to really kind of like unfuck it, excuse my language, but yeah.

 So that happened. Then we launched like, you know, six months late and we didn’t get immediate traction in the marketplace. So that was really rough. You know, I had a lot of money put into this thing. But what I like so like, you know, there was definitely like a sunk cost.

 But also I just I just believed in it. And I remember like around this time or even after that, like when I was like, so like when I had revenue like tens of thousands of dollars of revenue, that I had a friend who had like a very successful SaaS, and he was like, you should sell this. You should pack it up. You should, you know, mail it in. And it was just like, man, I don’t want to do that.

 Like I’m just not ready to give up. But I actually started another business with investors and took that company public. It was in the CBD space, and I did that about a year after we started, right. So right after launch, we didn’t get traction. And long story short is that I was running this public company and, you know, I was like making money from that, not a lot or anything.

 And I was trying to make that thing work and it was taking up all my time. But as a result of that, I was able to funnel some money into politics because I had racked up a bunch of debts. You know, the supplement company had crashed. I’d gone through savings. There’s a pic on my Instagram, and it’s a huge stack of credit cards.

 I should bring it to to interviews like this, right? Because it’s like several inches thick of just credit cards. It’s like the most American thing you’re ever going to see. And it’s basically like, this is what I’m going to show people when they ask, how did I bootstrap politics? But I did a lot of things wrong as an entrepreneur.

 But one of the things that I did right, maybe the only thing I did right was not give up.

Jeremy Weisz: 25:22

You know, I could see the path I could see, you know, you have a supplement company and you built this for your supplement company, which was profitable until, you know, when the traffic source shut down. But so I get that. And so you’re building this for yourself and and then at what point was a turning point of Vidalytics or like, you know, I’m finally getting traction here.

Patrick Stiles: 25:49

Yeah. I mean, so. I guess, like, actually when I started that other company that I brought public that was another supplement company, it was a CBD company. I joined a marketing mastermind with my co-founder. And so I was going to two events like that.

So, you know, I was also like talking about the Olympics. And I remember I gave John Benson, who invented the video sales letter, a, you know, super savvy marketer. I gave him a free account of Vidalytics. And then I went to like events like this. And I was like, John Benson is one of our users.

 And now now, like he’s on a paid plan and stuff like that, you know, like, so we sorted that out. But in the early days, like he didn’t pay for like I think a few years, but I was just happy to have him using us. And you know, when I was able to say that, that got us some initial traction where some other people were like, okay, I’m going to test you. And then we converted better than other video players. And then we did that smart autoplay thing shortly after that.

 And then like, you know, we got some traction and we continued to grow. And then we really just kind of grew through product, product led growth for for a long while. And but we were still very much in what I would describe as the stress zone. Right. I was I still had six figures of debt.

 We basically did not have any profit. Like, you know, we might make five grand a profit in a month. And I’d be like, great, let’s go hire somebody else, you know, or the next month it’d be like, you know, less than that because we had some volatility in our numbers. So, you know, it was just constantly hovering around that. And it was very much like, you know, we needed to do so many things to grow the business and to turn it into a real business with like, you know, the teams and departments and department heads, executives that processes all that stuff, the stuff that like, we’ve really kind of dialed in to a large degree today, but we couldn’t do it because we didn’t have the money, you know, because we’re just stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 Then Covid happened. And it’s really funny because I run the politics with my ex-wife Erica. And yeah, so interesting.

Jeremy Weisz: 27:46

Interesting dynamic.

Patrick Stiles: 27:48

Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, it’s it’s fantastic. I love working with her. So, yeah, we’ve worked together for ten and a half years. We met when I was a digital nomad. I was living in Buenos Aires and yeah, we met.

We started dating and like, you know, like within a month or two, I convinced her to come and work with me because she’s super smart and she was very affordable at the time. Now she now she makes the big bucks, but and I just I was drowning and stuff. So we were running this thing. In fact, like the early days of Vidalytics, we were living in like an apartment that was probably 500ft² of one bedroom apartment, and we were literally in the same room, like 23, 24 hours every single day. So the fact that she didn’t kill me is really kind of a testament of how well we work together.

 So. Yeah. But so what the reason I brought her up with Covid and just like kind of the final, like big kind of breakthrough for us was that she dumped me at like, around, like the very end of January 2020. And then like, it was funny. We had a trip planned to New Orleans like two weeks later, and I was like, do you still want me to go?

 And she was like, sure. So we went as friends like.

Jeremy Weisz: 28:55

Wow, this is like an amicable dump.

Patrick Stiles: 28:58

Yeah.

Jeremy Weisz: 28:59

Yeah. I’d be I feel like it’d be traumatizing, but.

Patrick Stiles: 29:03

It could have been. I mean, there was one time that I got drunk and I took a bunch of LSD, and I kind of had a meltdown, and she kind of had to, like, talk me like, down. Like she was taking an Italian lesson, like in the other room, and she, like, came and found me screaming in the shower. But aside from that, the whole thing was very smooth. It wasn’t very traumatic or anything like that.

But yeah, we went to New Orleans and like Covid was just like happening. And I mean, like we’re probably like one of the last like flights and like kind of trips before everything shut down. And we quarantined together for three months and that was fine. But what was funny is that she dumped me. And then the business literally took off, and we went from that stress zone of like zero profit to then suddenly, like, just like growing by leaps and bounds because so many advertisers pulled their ads, like the world got scared.

 And so all the institutional money kind of left advertising, like, you know, Facebook and Google those ones. So then the people that use us, the people that are these savvy direct to consumer brands that really understand their numbers, they went all in because they saw the opportunities. So they were scaling hard. So we kind of rode that wave. So we have a lot of advertisers on our platform.

 And normally in January we have a bump, but this year we had a bump and then February bump and March a bump. And we just kept growing and it like never kind of pulled back. Or oftentimes it can spike in January and then kind of pull back a little bit. But in 2020, that wasn’t the case. So we covered our, you know, our fixed costs and we just hit variable cost.

 And I had $140,000 of debt at the beginning of 2020. And by August, I’d paid it all off.

Jeremy Weisz: 30:30

Wow.

Patrick Stiles: 30:31

Yeah.

Jeremy Weisz: 30:31

That’s incredible. A couple of things I just want to point out, which I think are interesting, is, you know, the guerrilla marketing tactics of gaining influencers. And I think this is instructive for any company, whether it’s software or service, like you approach some influencers in the space, gave them the product, you know, and it it gained street cred, right. It’s like any any company could do that with an influencer and help boost. And that was like an early on, you know kind of win.

It sounds like for you. So I really I wrote that one down. I was like, okay, that’s a big takeaway for me anyways on that. And then, you know, the other piece is you, you mentioned the the stats early on. So if you want to show that and then talk a little bit about we’ll talk about some use cases here because and we’ll get specific because there’s a lot of different companies that we talked about from direct response.

 And I think showing some of these stats and then talking some use cases will be instructive. So I’ll let you share your screen if you want to pull up some of those things and we can talk through them.

Patrick Stiles: 31:43

Yeah.

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