MBA2418 Why I Sold WebinarNinja and What I Learned Along The Way + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. Powerful business insights you can count on with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today is Free Ride Friday, where we give away a free ride to the$100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. Want to win a free ride? Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Fridays just like today to see if you won. It's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson, you will learn why I sold Webinar Ninja and what I learned along the way.

0:46Yep, after bootstrapping, building, and growing our live video software for over nine years with over two million using the platform, Nicole and I sold Webinar Ninja. Why? How? To who? And what now? Well, I get into all of that and more in today's episode, but more importantly, I want to be brutally honest and share with you the top 10 lessons I learned growing and selling Webinar Ninja. This has It's basically nine years of knowledge, skills, insights that I've learned along the way condensed into one episode. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Nicole and I started WebinarNasia back in 2014.

1:26I was running webinars to sell the$100 MBA program, and I hated all the other live video solutions out there. They were really built for meetings and not teaching. It would take me like two hours each week to set up a webinar. I put together my landing page, my signup form, the email automations and notifications. I'd have to embed the video into the page. I'd have to add chat and offers. And then I would have to find a way to record this video and then send it out to the registrants after the webinar was over. And I'm only scratching the surface here. There were so many other challenges like time zone conversions and making sure it's easy for the registrants to add the event on their calendar.

2:04You got to remember, this is 2014. So I decided to save myself some time and headaches and created something for myself that then turned into something for everyone online just like me. Business owners that wanted to teach and present live online without all the hassles of tech. And Webinar Ninja was born. Each month for nine years, we made it better and better and offered more than just live webinars. We started adding automated webinars and hybrid webinars, paid webinars, interactive replays, and most recently, live courses too. I wish I could tell you that the last nine years were filled with joy and laughter and fun.

2:41But the truth is, it was the most challenging nine years of my life. What I found is that the bigger your vision is, the more that vision will test you if you really want it. Despite the long days and the gut-wrenching moments along the way, I'm so grateful for the experience. It made me who I am today, and I wouldn't change a thing. Nicole and I built one of the world's best tools for online learning, marketing, and sales. That will never change. That's a part of history now. So why did we sell? Well, simply put, our baby was ready to leave the nest. Nicole and I created and nurtured and developed Webinar Ninja to empower independent entrepreneurs.

3:21And it worked. But the job of evolving a product is never over. And we knew it was time for someone else in a better position to take our creation to its full potential. As I often say on this podcast, what gets you here won't get you there. Webinar Ninja has taken us on an incredible journey. We've taken Webinar Ninja from an idea to a startup to a successful company with a global reach. Now we're ready for what's next. So, who did we sell it to? We sold Webinar Ninja to ProProfs, a game-changing company that offers teaching and training tools for businesses. ProProfs has the scale and the resources to make Webinar Ninja an even more powerful, indispensable, life-changing tool for business owners.

4:06That's why we're so happy ProProfs is Webinar Ninja's new home. Now, don't get me wrong. This was not an easy decision. But when all the thinking and agonizing was done, we knew that saying yes to ProProfs was the best thing for Webinar Ninja and everyone who uses it. And for us too. I'll explain in the best way I know how. By sharing 10 lessons we learned over the last 9 years building, growing, and selling Webinar Ninja. It was really hard for me to choose only 10, but I think I got it right. I think these are the 10 most important lessons I've learned along the way. and let's start with lesson number one.

4:44Market momentum is everything. I always advise to start businesses that allow you to push a boulder down the hill, not up the hill. When we launched Webinar Ninja, we pre-sold it on the promise that we will deliver a solution to a problem that many business owners had, a hassle-free webinar experience. We sold out all our beta spots in 72 hours. We discovered that this is a real big pain in the market that has not been solved. We didn't have to convince anyone to buy. Our sales page was super lame, super ugly, with a bunch of simple Photoshop mock-ups of the software. But because we were solving a big pain in the marketplace, this made getting started and growing much easier.

5:29It wasn't the idea or the branding. We simply chose a painful problem to solve. When you don't do this, you make starting and growing a business a whole lot harder. Lesson number two, constraints are the best thing for your business. We started Webinar Ninja with no funding, no savings, no team, no experience in software. Most people would consider these constraints, but those constraints forced us to become better, to be innovative, to think outside the box when it comes to sales and marketing. We were forced to be creative when it came to starting and scaling and growing. And in my opinion, it's actually easier to create something great with less options than having unlimited options.

6:14When you have less options, it forces you to focus and not be paralyzed by choice. This is why over 30 % of funded businesses don't succeed long enough to get another round of funding past their series A. Embrace the struggle, embrace the constraints, and use it to your advantage. Lesson number three, hire slowly, fire quickly. When you're building a business bigger than yourself, you need to build a great team. Your team is really what allows you to compete and beat the competition because your team is what allows you to execute better than others. But the wrong hire can not only stop your progress, it can reverse your progress.

6:55I learned this the hard way. It's better for you to take your time to find the best person for the job, not the person who's good enough, the best person. That might take longer than you'd like, and it might seem costly in both time and money. But you know what's really costly? Making the wrong hire. We've made two to three wrong hires over the years, and I actually went through the painful process to estimate the total cost of those wrong hires. And the rough estimate was over half a million dollars. If you make a mistake and make the wrong higher, cut them loose as soon as you can. Don't spend good money after bad money.

7:33Lesson number four, if you don't evolve, you will get crushed. Nothing stays the same. The market and its audience changes over time. Once you have product market fit, you need to keep product market fit. It's not a once and done thing because the needs of your customers will change and you will need to change with them. Lesson number five, no one does it alone. Your network is everything. To have real success on your hands, you need the collaboration of others. Michael Jordan had Tim Grover, his personal trainer. Poker champion Maria Konnikova enlisted the help of nine-time poker champion Eric Seidel as her mentor.

8:12Michael Jackson worked with Quincy Jones to create the best-selling album of all time, Thriller. I have a co-founder, Nicole. I had an amazing team of dedicated players. I had so many friends in business that had my back and supported me when I needed it. They gave me warm introductions when I needed one. They were my joint venture partners and helped me promote. They allowed me to be a guest on their podcast. They gave me honest feedback. They even gave me moral support when I was down and having a tough time. I can keep going on and on, but the point is, I was able to lean on so many people along the way to get tiny wins that build upon each other each day.

8:51That results in a successful product that impacts millions. Work on who you know as much as what you know. Lesson number six, cashflow is oxygen in a business. No cashflow, you die. It's that simple. I see too many business owners obsessing about their product, their service, their branding more than they obsess about their numbers. Those things are important. Don't get me wrong, but they're not more important than being profitable and having steady cashflow. If you're profitable, but your branding is not great, guess what? You get to live another month to fix your branding. But if you have more month at the end of your money, you are toast.

9:33Game over. It's as simple as that. You have to obsess about your product and service, but you have to obsess just as much, if not more, about your numbers. Have a simple P &L sheet and review it daily, weekly at the very least. Your business's survival depends on you doing so. Lesson number seven, there will be sacrifices. So choose your sacrifices wisely. If you're going to build something special, something significant in this world, you're going to have to make some sacrifices. And that's just how life works. Why? To quote Jim Rohn, I wasn't in on those early decisions, so I don't know. Just accept it.

10:14Just accept that in life, if you want to create something great, you have to sacrifice. And because of that, you should choose what's most important in your life. In my opinion, it's your physical, mental, and spiritual health, your family, and that's pretty much it. Everything else is up for sacrifice. Fancy holidays, nice cars, nice clothes, even fun outings with friends. When you're working on something exceptional, you will need to make some tough choices. But I always reminded myself that pain is temporary, but achieving my goal will last forever. Lesson number eight, when to sell. Now, everybody told me beforehand that you'll just know when it's time.

10:53And you know what? They were right. But at the time, I wish they were more specific. So I'm going to be specific. I find that you go through three stages in your business when it comes to selling. The first stage, you are not even thinking about selling. And this is most of my nine years with Webinar Ninja. I thought to myself, I will never sell this business. I love it too much. The potential is too good. Stage two is you start racking your brain about how to break through to the next level. You ask questions like, should I raise capital? Should I hire a new general manager? Should I hire a bunch of new A players and put them in an office together and see if magic happens?

11:26You're scrambling for answers to push your business beyond where it is. And stage three is that stage where you realize, hey, my mission is actually complete. I did everything I needed to do. And for us, we knew it was time to do what's best for our customers and Webinar Ninja itself. Hand it over to someone who will make us proud. We love Webinar Ninja. We put so much into it. But sometimes you get to a point where you're like, the best thing I can do is to give it to somebody else to take it to the next level. Lesson number nine, you are not your business. A business is a means to an end, not the end itself.

12:03This is important because for us, the goal is to be successful entrepreneurs. And a business is a means to get there. just like a job as a means to achieving a successful career. This separates you from the business. This allows you not to take blows to the business personally. It allows you to be a bit more objective when it comes to coming up with solutions to problems or challenges. Then when the time comes to sell something you created and grown for years, you can remind yourself that it's not you. It's something you created. And what you became through the process is what makes you who you are.

12:36Sell the business. Keep the experience. You'll always have that. And finally, lesson 10. Every day in business is a gift. If you're in business, serving customers, making more than you're spending, you are winning. You are successful. Stop for a moment right now and really listen to what I'm saying to you. You are doing something remarkable. You are doing something 95 % of the world's population don't even attempt to do. Yes, only 5 % of the world's population are business owners. You are creating value for the world in your own way. That is no little thing. This is a gift we should cherish every day when we get up to go to work on our business.

13:20As Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, says in his memoir, Shoe Dog, the cowards never started. The weak died along the way. That leaves us. Well, there you have it. You might be wondering what's next for Omar and Nicole after selling Webinar Ninja on making sure Webinar Ninja is successful in its new home. Beyond that, all our energy and focus will be working for you, helping you become the entrepreneur you want to be through this podcast and the$100 MBA. We have some big things in the works for 2024, so make sure you get on our email list on our website. You can just download one of our many free templates at 100mba.net slash template, and by doing so, you get on our email list.

14:02Now, as promised, today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's hear who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Robert Fukui. Robert says, highly practical, five stars. I love the shorter format that cuts to the fluff and gets right to the me. Highly practical and takeaways you can implement today. Thank you, Robert, for your review. Your mission is to email me over at Omar at 100mba.net so we can hook you up with the free ride to the $100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw.

14:35Listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. It's that simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. With any big change in life, you have that bittersweet feeling. And to be honest, it starts to feel uncomfortable because you're going to start doing things that you don't normally do. Your life changes drastically in terms of what you do every day. But change equals growth. And if you're not growing, you're dying. So if you have to embrace change in your life, understand it's always a great chance for you to grow, to learn, to become something new. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you on Monday's episode.

15:09I'll see you then. Take care.

15:28Thank you.