How Easywebinar CEO Gagan Murghai grew Easywebinar to $3.8M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is casey zeeman he's the founder of easy webinar he's consulted such companies as harper collins estee lauder and dell on video webinar strategies and has helped build uh multi-million dollar software businesses his mission is to help a million experts spread their message sell their program and leverage their time through automation and engagement using his tools casey are you ready to take us to the top yes sir i am all right webinars are a tricky business from a technology side of things related to video and all that jazz why get into this space and and give us a quick overview on what the company does sure well we've been in the space for for a little bit um you know at first we started off as uh what's known as an automated webinar platform where we were just a sort of a webinar marketing tool that would stream video in real time with the experience of webinars but then we knew we wanted to grow into something more so we added the ability to do live streaming zoom quality style live stream video um it is a difficult space in the sense that you know there's a lot of webinar platforms out there uh what we're trying to do right now is just carve our sort of uh you know sort of draw our line in the sand carve what we are and get real clear on that because we are um a webinar marketing tool we do live we do automated but i think there is you know we're hitting we're hitting some uh friction because there's so many platforms out there that we're doing some really cool stuff coming in the new year um as we uh as we grow into a kind of a different beast if you will you know than just a webinar platform and walk me through the way you make money is it a pure sas company it's a it's pure sas company we do have we have coaching as well um as and then we do service but most of it is it's it's basically all sas okay and so what is i don't go on every kind of pricing plan or cohort but what's the average customer pay you per month average customer per month is we get the middle package we're at about a hundred bucks a month okay so pretty good and and give me the back story here you said you've been in this space a while when did you launch what year oh well okay i mean it it's a it's a it's a nasty you know like story but like uh not nasty but it's like 2000 i think 2013 we built out a webinar plug-in that was for wordpress and it was only automated webinar so that's basically how we started off we started off selling it as a one-off product not sas based at that time and uh and that's how it lived probably for the first two years two two and a half years until we we always had the knowledge we wanted to get into the sas uh you know sas element of it we wanted to uh just evolve the product so it went from being a plugin in wordpress being going into becoming completely hosted uh live stream platform all the pages all the emails everything is within our system now so um so that was it but we had to kind of move through that model um and uh and and get to that point but it was you know so we we had a we after when we were just a plug-in we we would have a launch model that's how we did it launch model almost like two launches a year and that's how we were doing it and we did great but we knew we wanted to get into sas so we actually i made the decision to stop going for affiliate support i don't know that was the goal is like you know i just want to see what we can do to build this up on our own pull back on the affiliate support so after two years and you know having seven figure years we pulled it down turned it sass to be able to reshift and then so we had a dip but then we rose beyond what we were doing you know when we had first started out so um it was it was interesting growth and so casey real quick tell us close that story out with how many customers you're at today so we're we're we're pushing almost uh 3 000 customers now okay um and you know we're we're looking to do more obviously we we have customers that have had lifetime access so we've had you know i mean well hold on hold on hold on hold on in the sas world when someone tells me lifetime those two things don't go together because it's all about working yeah yeah i mean i'm talking about yeah yeah back in the day give me the sass number though so it's not 3 000. no no that's what i'm telling you 9 000 is probably like the the number of of customers oh yeah 3 000 is the pure sound just yeah yeah yourself was what we had to come through the platform i see i see i see okay so so i mean i can take 3 000 times that average price when you give me i mean that would put you at about 300 grand per month right now in revenue is that generally accurate that's mostly accurate yeah okay and walk me through growth so a year ago what were you doing per month ah a year ago um a year ago we were uh we were a yearly based platform so only doing uh yearly we were probably at at 1500 customers last year um but the uh the customer base was basically paying a yearly of like 497 or or 577 a year so it yeah we we adjusted that um in january basically so so just because like like 1500 customers paying 550 for the year you can still obviously get to a actually deferred basis monthly right so that would put you at deferred base about 60 grand per month a year ago yeah yeah yeah i mean it was yeah we but then we also did launches uh at the end of the previous year where it was lifetime stuff i know you don't want to talk about that but yeah that was so we were we're earning more but sas was at that point we made the real strong decision to switch it over to uh monthly at the beginning of uh this last year and the 2018 yeah so that we've had so the growth we've just been trying to keep up that growth to keep up that growth yeah um but just being here so today you have about 300 000 bucks and that's true monthly recurring revenue folks paying you on monthly basis on average 100 bucks a month yeah i mean that is is including uh the people that are at the yearly from you know the previous years right so the five five hundred dollars and 577 right so that's including that revenue as well yeah 500 divided by 12 right that whatever that number is that's included in the 300 grand not the not the full 500 bucks in the 300 grand the the 300 grand is including um yeah because well so our our price point at that time if you looked at the monthly on that that would that was at you know what 40 50 yeah 40 50 bucks a month right so so yeah so it's so basically you're we've we're adding in that additional revenue it's yeah i'd say it's about you know i said roughly right so it's like we're at 3 000 customers some of those people pay the 500 uh so i mean we're at about 1500 customers this year at the new monthly price point and then of a hundred yeah yeah and then the previous is still at about 500 to 57. so so that's where the numbers which was about which was about half the price half the price if you were to take the monthly yeah if you were to take it divided by 12. yeah so you're doing more like 225 per month on a fully diluted basis yeah but then we also have we do service and stuff like that too yeah i'm just i'm just talking just sass yeah yeah sure sure yeah okay great that's that's really helpful so 220 that was difficult to get to okay 225 per month that's okay uh and grow from a growth rate perspective it sounds like you about doubled year over year it's a combination of pricing changes and a change in your revenue model yeah so i mean the revenue model was a much needed thing uh to do so yeah that was and the price change as well absolutely got it and we are still bringing in like the good news is like people are are happy to pay the new pricing like it's it was something we should have done years ago but we didn't still bootstrap today yeah still bootstrap that's great so bootstrapped and how many folks total on the team uh we have about uh we are probably 12 12 people um like remote yeah everybody's remote um most of it i'd say we have about nine full time and then probably you know like three that are you know more of like freelancers who are doing some marketing stuff or content marketing and things like that for us churn is obviously critical in a sas business and i've interviewed a lot of webinar players and churn is always an issue because it's very seasonal someone has one webinar then they cancel what is your churn today and how are you trying to drive that down so let's see i think our our churn uh last time i looked at our numbers which i haven't looked at our numbers in a while but some of the things we're doing to counter balance the the churn rate uh well give me a range first of what it would what do you think it is sure um actually i probably could pull up my numbers to say you're pulling something up i'm curious what do you use for all these numbers do you have a tool you use...