Hey - Marc here.
Happy Saturday morning Motivated B2B SaaS Founders.
Here's at least one tip to keep in mind as you grow your B2B SaaS company
Today's issue takes about 5 minutes to read.
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Today, I’ll be sharing with you amazing points from the interview between Nathan Latka, the host of Daily interviews with SaaS Founders and Melissa Kwan, Co-founder and CEO of eWebinar where they discussed about how Melissa became a one person bootstrapped founder with $500k in Annual Recurring Revenue, and how she did it.
Melissa Kwan is a Co-Founder and CEO of eWebinar, an automated webinar platform that saves people from doing the same webinar over and over again. She is a 3rd time Bootstrapper and digital nomad whose previous company Spacio was acquired in 2019.
How Melissa Started:
Melissa had a company ‘’Spacio’’ which was acquired in 2019. While growing the previous startup (Spacio) targeted at real-estate brokers, she performed series of webinars for agents who frequently failed to show up. This made her realize that while webinars were a necessary part of some businesses, they were a tremendous time drain for lean startups run by small core teams. They didn’t need to be done live and in person anymore (just like movies).
After successfully selling the company, she launched a new business called eWebinar in July 2020 which creates perfect asynchronous webinars and a brand new system for more effective webinars. After two years without taking a paycheck, today she makes $500,000 in annual recurring revenue with a remote, global team of contractors.
Challenges:
1. Starting up the company, Melissa had no intention to hire employees as she doesn’t like to manage people. This made her hire a dev shop and outsourced her entire team to them. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. She believed the dev shop could be her CTO and manage her product well while she focused on what she does best, but the dev shop ended up underestimating what it takes to build a product which resulted in Melissa spending over 350,000 dollars while working with them. It wasn't a waste, as some of the product was salvageable but it turned out to not be the most efficient or cost effective path to building her product.
2. Working with a friend was another challenge Melissa faced while building up her company. The dev shop she hired belongs to her friend but because she wasn’t technical enough and had no reason to doubt her friend, she found it difficult to tell him he wasn’t delivering accordingly losing money in the process. Maintaining a relationship and having the hard conversations with friends sometimes can delay you from making a decision that is in your best interest.
3. Changing the preconceived notion of clients about getting suckered into someone else’s marketing that was selling a live webinar to building a Netflix of webinars (when the webinar wasn’t live). It leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths when they think they are joining a live webinar, and it is actually recorded.
Advice to Other Founders:
1. Focus on making the right hires. Founders shouldn’t be afraid to hire other people to pitch in, at any point in their business. You don’t have to try and do everything yourself-and you shouldn’t. However, founders who want to make use of contractors should ensure they hire only those who think about their products daily and are sold on helping your company grow. They need to have skin in the game if they don’t deliver results. This is not simply paying a retainer for services if the services aren’t being delivered well.
2. Another thing that founders should take note of is investing in high quality content and SEO. Melissa currently has 3 to 4 content writers from LinkedIn that are working with her regularly to draft out amazing content which has drastically increased her website traffic and conversion.
3. Understand your customers, not only who they are but what tools they use and where they were looking for help.
Bonuses:
1. A business book Melissa read called “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” reveals the operating system behind any great presentation and provides a quick-start guide to design your own passionate interfaces with your audiences.
2. Melissa is currently following - Justin Welsh
3. Melissa's favourite online tool (at the time of this interview) is Slack
TL:DR:
eWebinar is the solution Melissa has always wanted for herself and she was able to get it built successfully. It’s easy to use, beautiful to look at, and delivers an exceptional customer experience. What is most gratifying to her now is that eWebinar’s customers, with businesses both large and small, feel the same way too
Link to the full Episode on Youtube: She's a 1 person bootstrapped founder with $500k in ARR, here's how she did it
Link to the eWebinar website: Automated Webinar Platform, Engaging, Interactive, Scalable | eWebinar
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See you again next week.
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