How eWebinar CEO Melissa Kwan grew eWebinar to $1.1M revenue and 550 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is melissa kwan she's the co-founder and ceo of e-webinar an automated webinar platform that saves people from doing the same webinar over and over again she's a third time founder bootstrapper and digital nomad her previous company spaceyo was acquired in 2019. melissa you're ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely that previous company did you bootstrap that one as well it did nice i was gonna say so have you had do you have the yin and the yang have you raised on one and then bootstrapped the other can you compare well we have never raised venture capital i mean we had some like family and friends um so i mean do you consider that bootstrapping um i mean i consider bootstrapping someone to me is bootstrapped if they're very capital efficient which means the way i measure that is you've raised less than 1x your arr yeah absolutely so um i've never raised venture capital um i actually my linkedin post today um the title of that is i once took money from an investor and it's private investor he invested about 250k and that made me realize the only person who needs to give you money is your customers this isn't spaceo um yes it was okay come on give us a quick detail what happened what did you like not like about it not nothing against this person maybe personally but just in general yeah i mean it turns out nathan that there is no free money and so um it turns out that when you take someone else's money you are responsible for reporting to them um and all these things that you didn't have to do when you were truly your own boss and i don't think people realize what that means i didn't even take venture capital i had nobody on my board and it was still an added layer of pressure that i didn't have and while bootstrapping is extremely difficult because i'm i'm also doing it now um i just would never give up the freedom that it comes with guys if you're sitting there watching this on youtube going amen give melissa some love here hit that like button comment below melissa tell us about ewebinar what's the product do so it's uh as exactly as you say it's um it saves people from doing the exact same webinar over and over again so you can imagine demos onboarding trainings especially for sas companies um you are probably constantly doing those things maybe live on zoom or something else or putting it on youtube which isn't as interactive so this product was actually designed for bootstrappers because this was a problem that i personally live with with spacio for five years and a product that i dreamt of having every single day so you can imagine like how much more efficient you can be if someone else is running all of your demos your onboarding trainings and you never have to do them live yep so i want to talk about strategy and then get into your growth and how you've added customers on the strategy side i imagine there's people listening right now going i've thought about automated webinars but it feels weird inviting my list to an automated webinar it feels like i'm tricking my users i'm sure you hear this all the time how do you get around that well i think it's only tricking your users when you start by telling them it's live when it's not because authenticity especially when you are bootstrapping is your currency you can it spends you can spend years building your credibility and just seconds to destroy it so we are advocates of please do not trick your customers do not tell them it's live when it's not you should be open and honest to tell them hey this webinar is recorded but i imagine the chat which is exactly what we allow you to do oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview ah so that's the trick right because that's my problem is if i say it's a recorded webinar people are gonna well then i'm not gonna click through the email on a 10 because it's just recorded that's boring but you say and i'm live managing the chat that's what you say that's the trick yeah i mean it is a it is a trick and it's not because the chat is asynchronous right it's it's like intercom it's like zenda so we interact with asynchronous chat every single day on websites on our support why can't we have that on an automated webinar this is actually the feature that allows you to fully automate your webinars 24 7 and never miss an opportunity to communicate your customer your prospect that was actually the missing thing that i had in my previous company and i think nathan anyone who even says like oh i feel like tricking my customers they've probably looked at other solutions before and thought oh this is super scammy and i was one of those people or they got suckered into someone else's marketing that was selling a live webinar they spent time they showed up and they realized it wasn't then they just hated those automated webinars for everyone well yeah exactly i think this is actually one of the biggest hurdles that we have to get through is how do we change that preconceived notion and build truly the netflix of webinars not the scammy automated webinars that people might know of previously so melissa what do you charge for this what are customers pay per month on average so it starts at 49 a month we charge by number of published webinars so not once you publish it you can set a recurring schedule so you can run it 100 times 200 times per month um and then it kind of goes up from there so we do not charge by number of users or number of attendees like most other people do interesting and so obviously some people pay 50 what is the bit can you tell me if they don't name the customer what's the biggest customer pay you per month so we max out at ten dollars per webinar per month and our biggest customers has about right now two hundred and ten uh 210 webinars and counting per month per month so it's like just like two to two grand a month then from your biggest customer yeah and you can imagine the manpower that actually substitutes to run 200 webinars concurrently every single month crazy huge yeah i totally get it that's it's amazing we do webinars and they're a lot of freaking work so it makes sense to me um all right so you start at 50 bucks a month and then put all this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business what year july 2020 so it's been two years since the product has seen the light of day um we built it for about a year and a half before it was actually like so myself my co-founder we had a dev team so one thing i learned coming into this business is i do not like managing people so our entire team is outsourced i love you melissa i love you so much you know how you know how long it took me to admit that publicly you know people i'm like you know what everyone talks about a big team and 300 people and these team retreats and celebrating birthdays in the office and i'm going i don't want to do any of this i don't want full-time people no i i don't i...