How eWebinar CEO Melissa Kwan grew 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 don't like hiring i don't like firing like i don't like those emotions i love building businesses i love sales i love innovation but i came into this this business actually thinking i do not need any employees including a co-founder so i actually hired a dev shop to start with unfortunately you use uh well because it didn't work out um i don't yeah i didn't actually want to say yeah i don't want to share it um and tell me why what was a lesson can you tell me the lesson there why didn't it where was it your fault or their fault i mean i don't think it was anyone's fault right i think a lot of devshop starts with hey i can do this i can take the contract because it's a big contract and then you also and then you go into a product realizing if you don't have a person thinking about this product every single day every living moment that's as invested as you it's like having a restaurant without a chef so i came in thinking hey this this dev shop can be my cto and all my product things and i can just go do you know what i do best which is build the business but it just doesn't work out like that so i think they hugely underestimated what it took to build a product because they'd never built a product before um and it turns out like my my life partner david i did not know that he could cope as well so he was here yeah so he was actually fixing things for me because he was like criticizing this course i'm not and i'm like why don't you go fix it i can't fix it and so he was he started coding for us and i was like wait a second you're actually like the one percent of the one percent coder so i was like why am i paying these people why don't i just end my relationship with them and we work at an arrangement for you to be my co-founder so he actually came in about a year into the business and we worked in an arrangement that that works based on that um and now he's my he's my co-founder so we built that for a year and a half before we put um e webinar out on the market about two years ago let me break that down for a second so tell me the painful number how much money did you sink into this step shop that didn't work before you cut it off uh 350 000. oh god but it would have been more if i kept going yeah okay fair wow okay 350k amy could you not tell earlier why did it take you 300k why couldn't you cut off at 35k well okay so here's the number right so we sunk a lot of money into like branding and design like i am not a founder that's like okay let's do this one cheap i'm all about roi so what is the maximum output that i can get for the minimum minimum input and that doesn't mean paying the least right that means finding the the pareto efficiency so what we did you have a beautiful website so it pays off so we hired the best person we thought we could get to do all the branding the design um and and that cost a lot of money i mean that in itself was probably 65 000. right and i'm saying like every single page of the website every single page of the first version of the app and the branding and all that back and forth right and then you've got like dev shops charge in phases so it was broken down into four phases right so we basically went through three phases before i was like okay i actually don't think continuing this makes sense because another mistake was my friend owned the step shop uh so tricky okay difficult for me to say hey you're not delivering because there was no reason for me to doubt him because i am not technical so it wasn't really until david was looking through the code because he was always going to be the bridge between this dev shop and us moving our quote-unquote in-house team to vietnam so we actually all our developers are from uh are from vietnam and david is our cto who still codes but actually manages the team over there so as he was looking at the code he was like wait a second like this isn't the way it should be done and that's when he stepped in and that's when i had to have that heart conversation with my friend and say hey i actually don't think this is going to end well and you are actually thinking too many resources to try to make this happen so it was a no-win situation for both of us smart move okay so you bring in david now negotiating with a life partner for equity in business is not easy so are we talking like 10 20 here or was it like a 50 50 split um so another thing i learned in my previous business um is while i i have no doubt that there are some ctos out there that can also build the business but i am a firm believer that a cto is a great product technology partner but the business is built by the ceo so in my previous business it was a 50 50 spit split but coming to this one um and because david had been there for my previous life i was like hey based on my previous experience what do you think is a fair number for you to feel invested and for you to feel like a co-founder but also know that i'm going to be building the business around the product so the split between us is 35 65 um and it was something that that melissa hold into her guns i love that story that's right he he yeah i mean he put out that number it was something that he felt was fair and frankly higher i think it's fair i love that okay talk a little bit more there's people watching this right now here on youtube on itunes going man i want to use contractors too i don't like full-time employees so you learned what not to do but you still how many contractors you pay at least a dollar last month so our burn right now so i don't pay myself david and i don't pay ourselves um because i appreciate that previous exit we were able to kind of write off that so we're lucky in that way our birthday melissa was that like like are you super rich or was that like a million dollar eggs and you have you know it was it was so i'm not allowed to say the number based on our our previous contract but it was um my personal exit was like in the low seven figures okay so plenty of flexibility yeah some flexibility but like for people hearing this like don't forget that i sunk a decade into that so if you take that exit like absolutely life-changing but if you divide it by 10 yeah like that's like having like an amazing sales job at sap yeah right yeah having all the benefits and all that stuff but you know it could have gone the other way as well yep so what do you can i ask what are your total expenses now per month yeah so i'm sorry i lost my shirt and i thought um it it's about 60 000 as our booker so for where we are and if you've seen the product like that is extremely efficient like we do not hire that's total expenses or your net burn uh my total expense okay god and so are you making you're making more than 60k and mrr yet or no um no so my the only thing that matters to me right now is profitability so we just crossed 500k ar so congrats thank you but i'm still not paying myself so lots of people out there it really takes a lot um but yeah so we're about um 20k right now from that i think we'll see it this year yeah so just to be clear you're doing about 40 000 a month in recurring revenue 60k expenses you're burning 20k a month but growing night i mean so if you're at 45k from 40k per month right now in revenue where were you exactly a year ago so i have that number i um i think it was like i want to say it's like 10k or something okay so you've grown so where's the growth coming from but tell us real quick last two minutes here how are you signing up new customers so truth be told we have not fully figured that out yet marketing is is not something that i know well um but our biggest user acquisition channel is word of mouth um for our price point of product one-on-one sales does not work like outreach doesn't make doesn't make sense so we are investing heavily in seo and content so our website traffic is going up significantly every month but our number of demos is kind of staying stagnant and our conversion rate by the way we only do demos through eu webinar i do not do live demos which is kind of amazing our conversion rate from demo to trial is 25 and all that converts on its own and our trial to pay conversion rate is actually close to 70 percent every single month hmm okay those numbers work and how many customers paying today think we just crossed 550. 550 you're getting some momentum here this is great love this story and just to be clear to see everyone here's it again bootstrapped right no capital raised except your own um yeah no friend friends and family as well and also our own and of course time yeah fair enough and you really are two people on the team and then everyone else's contractors right two ft's well i mean dave is also a contractor so like literally everybody is a contractor so our partnerships person our dev team we have multiple content writers i mean i think everybody should choose what where they want to spend their time mm-hmm and that that debt shops what dev shop do you use now do you want to share them yeah um it's hd websoft from vietnam in ho chi minh we chose it because number one we love vietnam um and we love going there number two i had a lot of i have a lot of friends that tried them and said they were the best however i do not recommend it if you do not have a senior dev senior engineer or cto that actually manages the team yep yep and real quick on the content what dev shopper or how do you start not dev shop but where did you find your writers man that is so hard um our ceo actually turns out to be like he's a great writer he went to school as a playwright so he actually heads most of our content um and then a lot of the writers that help us i just find through like referrals through linkedin but we we've tried a lot of them we probably have tried over 20 writers wow and we now have like three or four that we work with regularly yeah very cool melissa this is a great story let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your last business book you read uh i would say presentation seekers of steve jobs highly recommend it yeah that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying wow it doesn't come off from the top of my head that's okay just that no you know what justin welsh i am following him religiously number three what's your favorite online tool for building your own business besides webinar definitely slack number four how many hours of sleep you get every night nine or ten like a baby and what's your situation well since i gave a life partner david right any kids no uh me webinars my kid yeah and um i think that's enough okay and you might be asking melissa how old are you i am turning 39 39 happy early birthday uh last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. start your own business early guys there you have it really great story here ewebinar launched back in 2020 she burned 350 count on mvp before she learned that dev shop just wasn't going to work she ended up bringing in her life partner giving him 20 35 you know i think 35 percent is what is what she said but guess what she's really the only full-time employee here and they're now doing 42 43 000 a month from revenue 550 customers to help you run automated webinars with asynchronous live chat or asynchronous chat next to the webinar that's the secret sauce they're up again from 10 000 a month just a year ago so healthy growth all bootstrap she's a one woman wrecking machine melissa thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to 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