MBA2453 Q&A Wednesday: Would you do anything differently if you started WebinarNinja today?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, helping you build a business you love with practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Lloyd, and Lloyd asks, Love your journey and story growing and selling Webinar Ninja. I know building a software company is not easy, but I got a question for you. Would you do anything different if you started Webinar Ninja today?

0:44Thanks, Lloyd. Of course, Lloyd. Hindsight is 20-20. There's a lot of things I would do differently, knowing what I know now after nine and a half years. But having said that, a lot of the missteps or the mistakes that I made along the way taught me incredible lessons. Things I learned that I'm so grateful for. It helped me actually become a better entrepreneur as well as build a better product with Webinar Ninja. you. Sometimes making all the right choices doesn't actually help you. I know that sounds strange, but having said that, there are a few key things I would do differently that I actually feel compelled to share with others starting a business, whether it's a software business or any other kind of business.

1:28Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you're new to the show, I ran a software company called Webinar Ninja, which helped creators, authors, speakers, small business owners, create and run webinars. This is a bootstrap self-funded software company that I started with my partner, Nicole, that started with just 250 users. And over the course of nine years, over 30 ,000 people were using the platform and over 3 million people attended a webinar on Webinar Ninja. I'm super proud of the impact that this product had on so many businesses, especially the impact it made on me, the things I learned along the way.

2:06Recently, a few months ago, Webinar Ninja was acquired by ProProfs, and a lot of people have been asking me questions about the journey leading up to the exit. This one in particular caught my eye, and it got me thinking. Would I do anything differently if I started Webinar Ninja today? And three things came to mind, and I want to share them with you. The first thing has to do with product. When you launch a new business or a new offering in the marketplace, you put it out there in the world, people give you feedback, and the natural reaction is to iterate and improve and create a better version and put it out there in the world.

2:38Sometimes the understanding of better version gets blurred. What do I mean by that? Well, in my case with software, a better version can mean more features, more functionality, an updated design. All these things can be seen as a better product. But really in the beginning, what I advise is to focus on making the product flawless, reliable, perfect for the customer before you start adding new things, especially when it comes to software, because the more you add, the more complicated it becomes, the less easy it is to use. One of the things that was the hallmark of Webinar Ninja was that it's an easy webinar software.

3:16It's an easy software to use. You get in, you get out, you can pull off what you need without any confusion. So as you add more features, you have that challenge of how do I make sure this doesn't bloat the software. This is to make things more difficult for the user. But it's natural to want to do that because you're competing in a marketplace. Your competitors are adding new features. The customers are asking for these features and you have to resist. You have to say, hey, I got to first make sure everything I currently have works really well at a high level. Once it's perfect to some degree, you know, nothing's perfect, but is really shored up, Everything that your product offers does it at a very high level.

3:56Then you can start thinking about adding to it. When I think of examples of companies that do this really well, the one that comes to mind is the people behind Basecamp, 37 Signals, Jason Fried, David Hanemeier Hansen. These guys don't really innovate their product very rapidly. It's actually quite slow when they release features. I've been a user of Basecamp, their project management software, for so many years, five, six, seven years. and I barely notice when they release a new feature. Like it happens once, I don't know, every 18 months. And to be honest with you, I don't really use the new feature that often.

4:32It doesn't really matter to me because the real reason why I'm using it is that it's easy to use and it works reliably. And it's just great value for the team. They just nailed the fundamentals really, really well. And that's super important in the beginning because you wanna make sure not only you recruit new customers, you bring in new customers, but you keep them. And the way you keep your customers is you don't let them down. You make sure that it works really, really well. Retention is the name of the game, especially in the beginning, because you spend so much time and energy and money to get customers.

5:03You don't want a leaky bucket to lose customers. So I was on that hamster wheel of building new features and improving the product beyond what I'm talking about here and just kind of competing with the marketplace for the first, I would say six to 12 months, and then I kind of course corrected. So I would do that differently for sure. The second thing has to do with managing the business as the owner of the business. We were a self-funded company. That means we put up all the cash to build this business, to put this product out in the market. And every time we did well, we made a profit, we dumped the money right back into the business so it can grow faster.

5:42Myself and Nicole, my partner, we sacrificed a lot on a personal level. A lot of people don't know this, but we were paying ourselves the bare minimum to just get by and taking the difference of what we normally would get paid, a salary of founders of a business like this, and put it right back into the business. Because we just saw that this would be a great investment. We really believed in the product. We believed in ourselves. We believed in the growth of the business. We saw that the upside and the exponential returns we would get would be huge. And it was true. But it became really a habit where every time we did well, every time we made profit, we would just dump it right back into the business.

6:22And that can get really old very quick. And it's very risky, especially when you go one year down, two year downs, four, five, six, seven years doing that. All your eggs are in one basket. All your eggs are in the business. You don't have any other personal assets if this is the only business you're running. and this causes a little bit of resentment with your business because if it doesn't perform well one year or one quarter, it feels very high stakes. One of the things I would do differently is take some money off the table as soon as we made some decent profit. Even if it's just taking a chunk of money and putting aside as a safety net, as something is like, okay, this is outside the business, just in case things don't go well, I feel like, okay, I have a little bit of distribution of my assets.

7:07What I learned was that this is actually a common problem with a lot of bootstrap businesses is that as the owners of the business, you just reinvest back in the business. It becomes a habit, becomes something that you really believe in. And it's true and everything, but it's quite risky, especially as time goes on. At the very least, I recommend raising your salaries a little bit each year so that you feel like you are in some way taking some money off the table. This is not a dividend. This is just you increasing your normal salary because willpower has limits. You can't just sacrifice day in, day out, year after year and think that you can just do that forever.

7:45Because eventually what's going to happen is that you're going to be like, I'm working my tail off to make this business happen. And my life hasn't improved at all from a personal point of view. Is this worth it? You start to second guess your efforts. Not a good place to be in. The third thing I would do differently would be investing in paid acquisition earlier on. I was on the organic traffic, you know, content marketing train for a very long time. I'm still a big fan of content marketing. Most of our marketing is in that fashion and a lot of our sales is driven through content. But paid acquisition, running ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, these things work.

8:26And the reason why they're so powerful is that it's a repeatable process. You know that when you dump X amount of dollars into this campaign, you're going to get X amount of customers, which will make X amount of money. And it's great to have a repeatable process in business and sales where you know you can tap into that revenue whenever you need to. The thing about paid acquisition people don't talk about is that it actually takes time to really do well. You need really years of paid acquisition experience with your business, with your content, with your ads, with your copy, with your creative, with the audience you're targeting.

9:00You need a lot of that happening over and over and over and over to get really good at it. And this is true regardless if you're using an agency or if you're doing this in-house or you're doing it yourself. But the point here is that it takes time to kind of fine-tune your paid acquisition strategy and really get it down to what is really effective for your business, your product, your market. And a lot of bootstrap businesses, a lot of businesses that get started, they dip their toe in and out of paid acquisition and they're not consistent. They'll run ads for three or four months and then they'll stop for six and then they'll go back to it for another two months and then they'll stop.

9:38It's better for you to actually spend less money every month, but be consistent. It's better for you to spend$1 ,000 each month, month over month, then spend$6 ,000 on ads one month and then another month, like two months in a row, and then never do it again for the rest of the year. No, it's actually better to do that because you're gonna mitigate your risk, mitigate how much money you lose, and you're gonna learn a lot in the process. And those learnings compound over time. You take those learnings, you take what works, and you build upon it month over month. And what I found is that there's this weird thing that happens, especially with Facebook, Instagram ads, meta ads, that they reward consistency.

10:16The more you're running ads, the more consistent you are in their platform, the more they reward you with just better reach. When we've dipped our toe in and out of paid marketing, it's like we're starting all over again. It's like Meta's like penalizing us for like, hey, you don't wanna show up consistently? Well, we're not gonna give you great audiences. I know that sounds strange, but that's been my experience over the years. The other thing I love about paid ads is that it forces you to constantly think about the customer and the mindset they're in and how to create great messaging that targets them and speaks directly to them.

10:50It keeps your finger on the pulse to understand who you really are serving. Because when you're running ads, you're creating creative for that. You're creating copy, you're creating images, you're creating all kinds of assets to make sure that you're able to target these people, talk to them, and attract them to your product or service. This is a great exercise to not only discover new markets and learn about the current ones, but also to be consistent with your messaging and be known for something in your space. If you notice the best companies that run ads, they run ads kind of similar to each other because they want to have consistent messaging and branding.

11:27So when you see an ad over and over and over, you kind of associate it with a brand and a business and that brand awareness starts to perpetuate and you start to see this business or brand as a household name. So it's really a great exercise to do consistently. And of course, there's hundreds of little things I probably would have done differently. But, you know, I'm actually quite happy with failing. I'm happy with the learnings. I've always said that most of my successes in life start with failure. And I'm OK with that because I understand that you can learn a ton through failure. And unfortunately, when you win, when you learn through winning, you don't learn much.

12:02Unfortunately, you don't even recognize the lesson sometimes because you just keep moving on. But when something stings a little bit, you stop and you think and you're like, OK, hey, maybe I need to learn something here. What did I do wrong here? How can I do better? Let's make sure we don't do this again. So sometimes regrets are not such a bad thing. Lloyd, thanks so much for the great question on Q &A Wednesday. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer right here on Q &A Wednesday. Before we wrap up today's lesson, quick favor I want to ask you.

12:32If you love this podcast and you want to show your support, the best thing you can do is to subscribe, to follow this podcast. Go ahead and open up whatever app you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and hit follow. That sends a signal to the algorithm and supports the show in a big way. And the bigger the show gets, the more we can reach more listeners, the better the show becomes. Thanks in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best practices I've picked up over the years is journaling. Journaling regularly every morning or at least a few times a week.

13:06writing down your thoughts in the morning, what's going on in your life, in work, in business, the decisions you made. And I love reading back old journal entries because it allows me to really observe growth, observe how much I've grown and changed and improved, as well as see patterns of what I'm saying over and over again. And maybe there's a habitual problem I need to fix. But journaling really allows you to be reflective and really learn from your experiences. So I I highly recommend you pick it up if you don't, even if it's just two minutes a day. This is the thing that I wasn't a good journaler, but then I just told myself, I'm just going to write anything, anything.

13:44Literally, I wrote, you know, today I'm having this for breakfast. This is what I got to do today. And I would doodle something and have fun. And then tomorrow I'll write something else. There's no rules here. You could do whatever you want. But the consistency of the practice is actually the most important thing. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

14:05Thank you.