Wistia has hundreds of thousands of paying customers. Probably north of a million individual users logging in every day, since these are business accounts with multiple seats each.
Right next to the login button — the actual button people click to access their account — Wistia put a banner. On it was a video of my guest, promoting a webinar he'd built with them.
That's not a sponsored Instagram post buried in a feed. That's not a 15-second pre-roll ad. That's prime digital real estate on a page a million-plus people hit constantly, handed to a creator who, by his own admission, doesn't really consider himself a creator.
Here's the thing about Jay Acunzo: he doesn't dance on TikTok. He doesn't have a viral podcast. He's a B2B consultant who gives keynote speeches to marketing teams. And he just proved that the "sponsorship is only for influencers with huge followings" myth is exactly that — a myth.
Why "Just Send Me Your Rate Card" Is the Wrong Question
Jay gets inbound all the time now. Other B2B voices, speakers, authors with a platform, all asking him the same thing once they hear he's landed sponsor deals with brands like Mailchimp and Wistia.
"Can you look at my rate card?"
His answer is always no. Not because rate cards are evil, but because leading with one puts you in a transaction mindset. You're saying: I have an audience. I have inventory. Here's what I charge to access it.
That's the "slap a logo on it" model. It's the model Jay used to run — cobbled together, reactive, always positioned as the afterthought sweetener at the end of a bigger client deal. And it's the model that, in his words, sat somewhere between a nuisance and actually detrimental to his business, despite how glossy it looked from the outside.
You want a relationship, not a transaction. That's the entire thesis of Sponsor Magnet, and it's exactly what rewired how Jay thinks about this stuff.
There's a specific line Jay used that I want you to sit with: brands aren't here for your inventory, your audience, or even a specific project idea. They're here for you. That's the dream scenario every creator says they want. Most just don't structure their pitches to actually get there.
The Mailchimp Deal: Stack What You're Already Doing
Two years ago, an agency representing Mailchimp reached out to Jay. They wanted to do the standard thing — branded posts, branded videos, native to his social feed. The stuff Jay calls "the danger area." The stuff that pulls you away from your actual business and rewards follower count instead of revenue.
He didn't want to do that. So instead of pitching the expected package, he did what I'd tell any of my Wizard's Guild clients to do: he found a way to stack sponsorship on top of work he wanted to do anyway.
The pitch became this — Mailchimp would sponsor him coaching three B2B voices on camera, people he'd have wanted to work with as clients regardless. Now it's earmarked as a branded project. It's published publicly, which is marketing his core advisory business couldn't buy on its own. And Mailchimp gets premium, decision-maker-level content that signals exactly the brand story they want to tell.
Jay laid out multiple package tiers, each tied to a specific goal. Mailchimp looked at the options and, almost casually, said: "We want that one." The biggest one.
That's not luck. That's what happens when your proposal is built around goals instead of deliverables.
Reigniting a Cold Relationship (And Then Asking for the Weird Thing)
The Wistia story is the one that actually built the sponsorship engine, and it started years before the deal that mattered.
Jay had worked with Wistia before, in the old model — low-dollar, logo-on-stuff, the kind of arrangement he no longer wanted. Three or four years passed. Then he noticed they were running a series called Fix My Setup, unbranded, where they'd go into people's home offices and fix their camera setups.
Jay didn't pitch anything financial. He just asked to be featured. Free. A chance to warm up a dormant relationship.
They said yes. Wistia came to his home office, set up new lighting and cameras, and reconnected. Three or four months later, Jay noticed Wistia wanted to own the "webinars" conversation — a topic nobody in their content library was really covering.
So he reached out to their VP of marketing with this:
"Random idea — had a great time with Fix My Setup, and it's been awesome watching you guys talk about webinars. I imagine one of the hardest parts is most webinars are so excruciatingly bad, and that's why they're not succeeding. What if we did Fix My Webinar?"
That's the pitch. Not a rate card. A specific, borrowed-from-their-own-format idea that solved a problem they clearly had.
It led to a call with their director of content, VP of brand, and marketing team. Jay came back with goal-tied packages, same as with Mailchimp, and once again they picked the biggest one — a four-webinar original series, each with a downloadable resource and promo shoots.
The Licensing Lesson That Was Worth Thousands
Here's the moment I want every one of you reading this to actually stop and absorb.
Most brands in B2B don't understand licensing. They assume if they pay a creator to make something, they own it forever and can run ad budget behind it indefinitely. Jay used to think the same way, until Sponsor Magnet rewired that too — there is no perpetuity unless it's explicitly built in, and even then, be careful.
So Jay structured his Wistia proposal with a six-month licensing fee, broken down per month.
The director of content read it, and said: "We want to go with that package, but do me a favor, Jay. Can you make that 18 months?"
Read that again. The brand asked him to extend the licensing term. On their own. Because he'd priced it as a separate line item instead of folding it into some vague "production cost" nobody questions.
That's thousands upon thousands of extra dollars Jay never would have known to ask for, if he hadn't learned that usage rights are negotiable in the first place. This is one of the exact pillars we work through inside Wizard's Guild — most creators leave that money sitting on the table because nobody ever told them it was there to take.
What Actually Happened When the Series Went Live
I could tell you the webinar series went well. But "went well" undersells it, so let's use the actual numbers Wistia handed back to Jay.
Wistia runs 55 webinars a year. Their single biggest marketing expense, hands down, is their annual State of Video report. Jay's series — after just the third of four episodes — was the second-most successful webinar of all 55, behind only that flagship report.
His webinars delivered twice the average attendee total compared to every other Wistia webinar that year. Twenty percent of registrants came directly from Jay's audience, tracked through unique URLs. The post-webinar follow-up emails hit 71% open rates and 25% click-through rates — numbers that blow past industry averages, including Wistia's own internal benchmarks.
That's the moment the banner showed up next to the login button.
What would you do with numbers like that sitting in front of you? Most creators would frame it as a nice case study and move on. Jay used it as leverage to keep the relationship going — because Wistia came back and asked what they could do next together, before the current engagement had even wrapped.
Stop Feeling Bad for Charging What You're Worth
There's a pattern Jay named that I hear constantly from creators in Wizard's Guild: we are terrible at quoting a fee that we're actually worth. We undercut ourselves because we're too close to the work. We see how the sausage gets made, so we assume everyone else can see it too.
Jay was told early in his speaking career that if the number coming out of your mouth doesn't make you slightly uncomfortable, you're not asking for enough. I'd take that a step further — you should expect a little friction at the price point. If a brand says yes instantly with zero pushback, you didn't quote high enough. Let them come back and negotiate down from a real number. That's healthier than you undercutting yourself from the jump and later realizing you left money on the table.
Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal. Send the goal-based proposal instead of the rate sheet. Ask for the licensing fee. Quote the number that makes you flinch a little.
Jay's story isn't about hitting some magic follower count or going viral. It's a B2B consultant with zero interest in being called an "influencer," using the same collaboration-first framework I teach in Sponsor Magnet, and turning it into a banner seen by over a million people. If you want the full mechanics behind proposals like the one Jay used — the goal-based packaging, the licensing structure, all of it — that's exactly what Sponsor Magnet walks you through step by step.
And if you'd rather have someone look at your actual numbers, your actual audience, and your actual pricing instead of figuring it out solo, that's what we do inside Wizard's Guild. We'll help you build the proposal that gets a brand to ask you to extend the deal, not shrink it.
So here's my question for you: are you still sending rate sheets, or are you ready to find the goal a brand actually has and build a package around it?
