Transcription
10 years ago, my co-founder Nicole and I, my partner in life and business, started Webinar Ninja, a webinar software to help creators and coaches run webinars easily. And when I say started, what I mean is I jumped into a hurricane with a paper umbrella screaming, "This is going to be fun, right?" And it was fun and frustrating and challenging, and rewarding.
So today I want to share with you the 10 lessons that I learned in those 10 years of building, growing, and then eventually selling our software Webinar Ninja. I want to share with you what really matters. I'm basically going to give you what I wanted 10 years ago, what I needed to hear in hopes that maybe you can avoid the mistakes I made and have a better success or have a a bigger success than I had.
So, how did we get started? How did Webinar Ninja get started? But before that, can we just please admire the long, dark, curly hair I had 10 years ago? Every business has a cost; for me, it was my hair.
But we actually started in a conference just like this one. It was a conference back in 2014 called New Media Expo. It doesn't exist anymore. It was in Las Vegas. But we met some really inspiring people. And what I did at that conference is I tried my best to make friends with everybody I met. I wanted to get to know them, understand what they do. And I got their email addresses. Okay? I went home with like 50 email addresses.
And what I did is when I started to work on Webinar Ninja, I decided to pre-sell it. I put a landing page together and I said, "Hey, this is something I'm looking to put together." I put together some mockups with some, you know, horrible looking Photoshop images. And I then emailed the people that I met at the conference saying, "Hey, I know you have an audience. Would your audience be interested in something like this, an easier solution to run webinars? If you think so, would you mind sharing it with them?"
And guess what? Many of them ignored me. Some of them replied and just flat out said no. But many of them actually replied and said, "Hey, I'll include it in my newsletter. I'll include it in my next podcast episode. I'll uh, you know, tweet it out." And that's how we got our first 250 members. We released the product to them four months later. We cleaned it up and got a real engineer to fix it up. And then we pre-sold it. And then we iterated on that software over and over and over. And the rest was history. And got a lot of feedback from our users. I know those 250 members by name.
But more importantly, Nicole and I, we stayed poor, like literally for 10 years. So every time we ran payroll, I remember I still know that feeling. I ran payroll every single month. And at the bottom of the list was Nicole and I's salaries. We had engineers getting paid four, five times more than I was. And I was like, "Oh." But I wanted to do that because I'm a poker player. I love poker, and I had a gray hand and I wanted to go all in on this. But the truth is I could have lost my hand. I could have lost my pot. Luckily, I didn't. But that's what I did. This is what worked for me. And I decided to sacrifice and just put everything I can to reinvest into the business so that eventually I can have uh a great exit.
So today I want to share with you the 10 lessons I learned along the way. And it starts with the f uh first one that I'm going to share with you. But before that, I want to show you how this all panned out. Okay. So, at the end of the day, when before we sold, we had 30,000 paid users. 3 million people attended a webinar on Webinar Ninja. 10 million leads were collected for our users, and millions and millions of revenue. I would love to share with you the numbers, but we sold to a private company, NDA.
But in my personal opinion, the most gratifying thing is that I did it bootstrapped with Nicole. We didn't get any investors. Not even our parents helped us out. Um, and it was rough. I got to be honest with you. But I'm really proud that we're able to do it on our own. Uh, and be able to be in a position where, you know, I don't need to work anymore. But it's been fantastic to go through that journey because of the lessons I've learned. And it starts with lesson number one.
This is a tough one. Make it personal. My parents immigrated from Egypt to New York in the late '60s. Me and my sisters were born in uh New York and were raised in the US. And as far back as I can remember, about the age of five, which is when this picture was taken, my parents struggled financially. They had to learn a new language. They had to get their degrees all over. They worked very hard, but they just couldn't get ahead. And my parents are going to kill me that I'm sharing this story. I'm like breaking the immigrant code here, okay? You're not supposed to share these things. But this lesson is so important, I have to share it.
Around 7 years old, my parents were going through a particularly rough financial time. We were living in a furnished rented garage, and my parents would work long hours. So my parents would tell us when we'd go home from school, we'd be alone. If the phone rang, don't pick it up because we don't want you to talk to strangers. And we listened to them, but they said, "Hey, if the phone rings once and stops and then rings again, that means it's us. You can pick up." Said, "Okay, you know, we're kids. We just listen to it. We followed orders." Later, I realized that wasn't to protect us from strangers. It was to stop us from picking up calls from debt collectors that are trying to reach my parents.
This is a tough story to share because, you know, I was a kid. I didn't realize what was going on. But I can't imagine how hard that was for my parents to have to tell their kids that. To be behind on your bills, to be behind on your promises to your family. And for me, that's the driving force for everything I do. It's the reason why I started Webinar Ninja because I wanted to empower people to build a business to make them financially free so they never have to feel what my parents had to go through so that they can live a great life and not have to worry about money. And it's the reason why I I do what I do now with $100 MBA, which we've been running for 10 years and helping entrepreneurs build their businesses that, you know, money doesn't solve all your problems, but it gives you an opportunity to change things and that makes all the difference.
So, whatever you're doing in your business right now, find a personal reason to do it because you're going to need it. It's going to get tough. It's going to get rough. And you're going to have to tap into something that's going to spring you into action to say, "I can't not do this. I have to make it happen." So, that's my personal advice because it's going to fuel you when things get a little challenging. You need something that will spring you out of your bed in the morning when things get tough.
Lesson number two, embrace constraints. We're all going to have constraints. My constraint at Webinar Ninja is I had a small team. I had a team of 30 people running a webinar software. My competitors had 500, 600, a thousand employees. I was competing with giants. Okay? But I would get on a webinar every week to speak to my audience and I would say to them, "Hey, uh, what's going on? How do you like my software? What's challenging about it? What's your what are the other problems you have in your business? How can I solve them?" And I would get feedback. I'd bring it to my team later. We'd have a team meeting. We'd mock something up in Balsamiq and then we would show it to them in the webinar and say, "Hey, what do you think?" And they say, "Okay, change this. Tweak this." We'd go back. We develop it. It's in staging. It's in production. Few weeks later, feature out. My competitors were in a meeting discussing who's going to be on the committee for the focus group, how are they going to roll out the survey, and who's going to come up with it? Is it going to be in Q4? What about next year? We were able to iterate and move quickly. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a designer. I was a school teacher for 10 years, right? But I used it to my advantage. It's a constraint in the tech world, but I used it to my advantage because I had the skill of communication. And that's why I got into webinars because I can show off that skill by demoing my product using webinars. So, whatever your constraint is, flip it. Use it to your advantage and use it often.
Lesson number three, hire slowly, fire quickly. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar. You got a bit of money. I didn't say anything yet. What are you raising your hand? These guys are eager to take action. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar. You ra You have a bit of money. Like, I got a bit of money. You got a bit of money and you have a position you want to fill. You have a job that you want done maybe because you're eager to get more leads or more sales or somebody to write you more lines of code or to develop a better product. Raise your hand if that sounds familiar. Okay. The problem with that rushing is that that's not the way to do it. You got to take your time because you're about to invest a lot of time, money, effort into training this person and getting them up to speed, understanding how you work as a company, and then if you make a mistake, it's going to cost you a lot. How much I made a bad hire that cost me half a million dollars. It's serious.
Once you do realize you have a bad hire, my advice is to fire quickly as fast as possible. Of course, you want to, you know, verify that you've given them a chance to improve. This is off the record, but in my opinion, 95% they never improve. But you want to give them a chance. If they don't improve, fire as quickly as possible because the longer you have them in your team, the more damage they're going to do, the more opportunity cost it's going to cost you. Okay? And I have another rule when it comes to this. If you hire them, you must fire them. So if you hire them, you must fire them. If your co-founder hires them, they must fire them. If a manager in your team hires them, they must fire them. Why? It's really important for them to feel the burn. They need to go through that uncomfortable conversation of talking to them and having that really horrible pit in their stomach when they're having to fire somebody. It never gets easy, by the way. Why? Because when they do another hiring later, they remember that feeling. I don't want to feel that again. I better make a better hire. So, take your time. Hire the right person. And when you find out they're not right, fire quickly.
Evolve or get crushed. Lesson number four. I want you to repeat after me. My. Repeat after me, guys. My product doesn't matter. My product doesn't matter. I got this great idea, guys. I'm going to sell this to retail uh stores. It's this machine that makes a carbon copy of a credit card, and then after that, they got to call the bank to verify if the the client actually has money so they can give them the product. Great idea, right? It was a great idea in 1979. Okay. But today the customers want something else. They want Apple Pay. So if you think your product is what your customers will want and need in three years and 5 years and 10 years, you are going to make your life much much harder. You're going to go out of business really quickly. So you got to evolve.
When we got started, we only did live webinars back in 2014. And I started running webinars for my audience. Started talking to them, figuring out every week we ran a webinar because I wanted to understand uh what is their flow, what they do in their business, how they make their money, and I realized, oh, they want to run webinars that are automated. So we were one of the first to create automated webinars. And then people wanted to pay for admission to their webinars. So we created a Stripe integration and had paid webinars. And we did this over and over and over. And the only reason why I did this is because I knew my competition will. So, if you stay complacent, if you don't start talking to your customers, and I challenge you, I ask you right now, you can even take out your phone, put in your calendar, next week, talk to a customer on a Zoom call, on a webinar, through an email, talk to your customers as much as possible. Uh, if you want some help with that, uh, Michelle Hansen, who's in the room, Michelle, raise your hand. She's got a book called Deploy Empathy that is like the playbook of learning about your customers. Okay, so you got to keep evolving. And at the end of the day, the only thing that matters in your business is your customers. If you have your customers, you can listen to them. You can solve more problems for them, right? Good example of this is the iPod Nano, right? Got crushed by its own product, iPhone, right?
Lesson number five. That's back. Lesson number five, no one does it alone. I was lucky enough to uh work with my wife who's also my partner in business, and we had a great team. We built a great team of incredibly talented, hardworking, ambitious people. But it's not only that. It was the people that we met at conferences like this. You can't do this alone. You need partners. You need affiliates. You need vendors. You need people to cheer you on. You need somebody to pick you up when you're down. Right? I'm tired of ex-people beating on their chest and being proud, "I got a million-dollar business as a solopreneur. Look at me." That's just stupid. I'm sorry. That's buying yourself a job. That's not entrepreneurship. And that's doing business on hard mode. Like, why are you doing this? Right? So, as much as possible, incorporate like a great community like Micro. Build a team. Find that network that's going to help you. I've had so much help from other people that I've met at conferences like this, people that were a few steps ahead of me, people that saw themselves in me and wanted to help me out. So, as much as possible, remember, no one does this alone.
Lesson number six, cash flow is oxygen. Cash flow is one of the most important things. No, it's the only thing. Five out of six businesses die because of lack of cash flow. And this is why I recommend every single one of you to monitor your cash flow as much as possible. You do not delegate this as the founder of your company. This is going to sound insane, but I believe in it. Okay, ready for this? I have a P&L sheet that I look at every single day because if I run out of money in any of my businesses, it doesn't exist, right? I can't invest in anything. And how do I know I have money to make a hire, to uh invest in ads, to take my team on a retreat? How do I know? I have to know my cash flow. I got to see what's going on. And if you're sitting right now, it's like, I don't have a P&L sheet. Don't worry, I got your back. At the end of this talk, I'm going to give you my template with all the formulas and everything so you know exactly where your cash flow is. And when I started doing this, my cash flow was negative. It was scary, but it woke me up because as Peter Drucker says, "What gets measured gets managed." So your cash flow is so important because if you have cash, you can pivot, you can change, you can improve your product, you can make a hire, you can change marketing strategies. If you don't have cash, you really don't have nothing. You really can't do anything. So just remember that.
Lesson number seven, choose your sacrifices. Listen, I don't know any way any other way to do this. If you do know, please see me after this talk. But when we started Webinar Ninja, Nicole and I sat down and said, "Okay, in this season of life, what's important?" Listen, you can have it all. You just can't have it all at once. So, we said we got to prioritize a few things. The things that we prioritized, this was important to us, was the business. We're going to just focus on the business. Number two was our family, immediate family, each other, our parents, our siblings. And number three for us was our health and wellness because if you don't have yourself, you can't be at your best. You can't really perform for your team, for your customers. So really prioritize that. Everything else got sacrificed. Time with friends, video games, Netflix. I'm not saying you can't do these ever. When your business starts growing and you start have you have a bit of slack and you can start delegating things, you know, I get to enjoy these things uh now, but at the time I had to sacrifice them because if you don't make room, you don't have room to do the things you need to do to grow your business. If you don't remove things, it's very hard for you to have room to be able to focus on your business and the things that are important to your life. So my advice is, it's better for you to choose your sacrifices. Why? So you can communicate them to your family and your friends so you can sit down with maybe your friends and say, "Hey guys, thanks for coming for dinner. I'm starting a new pie-in-the-sky idea, but I really believe in it. I want to be look like this for me. This means I'm going to say no to a lot of invites. This means I might be able not to go on long vacations or whatever it might be for you." Get them on side. It's not good for you not to communicate that.
Lesson number eight, when to sell. This is 10 years apart. This is actually like when we went to that conference I talked about, New Media Expo, again, the hair, right? But Nicole looks exactly the same. Um, and that's 10 years. That's actually like the day after we signed and sold Webinar Ninja. And when I used to ask other founders, hey, how do you know it's time to sell? How did you know that you were ready to say goodbye to your baby? And they gave me this cheesy answer that I absolutely hated. And it was like, "Omar, you'll know when it's time." So, I want to give you a little bit more detail. For me, I knew it was time to sell Webinar Ninja when I was just getting honest with myself that I can't take this further. What I'm able to do, when I'm able to contribute to my team, to the customers, to the product, I've given it all. And if I keep digging my heels and being stubborn, I'll be doing a disservice to my products, to my services. It's really humbling. It's not easy to admit that you are not enough, but it was the right choice. We were lucky enough to meet uh um Samir, who's the founder of Propos, and he really aligned with what we were trying to do, and they have a massive team, and they've taken care of the business, and it's really actually strange to see somebody else run your business and do it well. Like, damn, that's that's really good what they just did. I didn't do that, and it's okay. But that's when I knew it was time to sell. I knew it was time to sell when I said, "If I want my company to reach its full potential, it has to go to in somebody else's hands." That may not be right now your your vibe or what's happening for you, but you might get there uh in a few years or or down the line. And that leads me to you are not your business.
Lesson number nine, I was the webinar guy for 10 years. I was all over the website. I was on every single webinar, every single week. I was all on the campaigns. I was on the ads on Facebook. My face was synonymous with the brand. And then overnight, I wasn't. And I realized in that moment, I'm not really the business. I built the business to serve my customers and ultimately to serve myself and my wife, right? To so that we can work together and be able to build something amazing. And what's great about when you sell your company, you realize what's not included in the sale is the experiences and who you become along the way. And you could take those things with you and start something new or help other people like I'm trying to do today. So just remember, you are building something that is great, that's amazing, and you're putting everything into it, but you are not your business.
Lesson number 10, my favorite lesson. Every day in business is a gift. If you are transacting, if you have customers, if you're making sales, if you're in business right now, you are winning. It's a gift. Wake up every morning and know that you are lucky. A lot of people don't make it, okay? And every day you're grinding, it's tough, you're solving problems, you're putting out fires, but you're adding value to the world. It's an incredible gift that in a lot of ways I took for granted. And I want you to just realize that for a moment. I know it's tough, especially if you're trying to get traction right now, but it's a real gift. And the best way I can communicate this to you is through a quote from one of my favorite books. Uh, it's called Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. And in the book, he says, "The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. That leaves us."
So, let's recap the 10 lessons real quick. Lesson number one, make it personal. Lesson number two, embrace constraints. Three, hire slowly, fire quickly. Four, evolve or get crushed. Five, no one does it alone. Six, cash flow is oxygen. Seven, choose your sacrifices. Eight, when to sell. Nine, you are not your business. And 10, every day in business is a gift.
Raise your hand if you got something from today's session. All right, for those who are not raising their hand, I got a bonus lesson for you. Okay, this is something I learned from one of my favorite books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And on in the book, he says, "It's all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or or do, ultimately you're at the end." The sooner you realize it's all your fault, the sooner you will succeed. Take extreme ownership. Somebody's not doing their job in their business, it's your fault. The product is not selling, it's your fault. Ads are not converting, it's your fault. I used to be somebody with a long blameless why I'm not succeeding. I I grew up in an immigrant family. I don't have enough money. Uh, the market changed on me. My idea is great. No one understands it. Guess what? The common denominator of all that is me, right? When I changed, then my business changed. When I changed my mentality, when I changed what I did every day, and here's the reality. If you have a business and you want to, let's say you're doing a million ARR and you want to get to 10 million, right? In order to get to 10 million, you have to be somebody completely different. The person that's pulling off a 10 million business is not you. Otherwise, you'd be making 10 million. Right? So realizing that that you take ownership, it's my fault things are not working out. I got to get better. I got to improve. I got to figure it out. I got to ask some for help. I got to join a community like Microcom. I got to just fess up and say maybe I'm not good enough and I need some I need a co-founder to help me with with something like the technical side or the marketing side. So the sooner you just make this your mantra, whatever happens, it's my fault and take ownership, the sooner you will succeed.
So, I like uh to help as much as possible. So, I I wanted to include some templates that have really helped me along the way. That P&L sheet that I uh mentioned, it's a it's a Google sheet. It's pretty simple. Uh, another template that I wanted to share as well is UTM link generator. If you want to track uh your leads and your links and where people are coming from, this is a great little tool that I created. And then if you guys don't have any leads and you're looking to build an opt-in, like say for example, a checklist or a guide or a cheat sheet or something like that, I've created actual templates that you can just copy and paste and then change your branding and your and your information. And they're absolutely free. Uh, everything on our website right now is completely free. We have over 2500 business lessons. If you're interested, just go to 100MBA.net/templates. Thank you very much, guys.