How Webinarninja CEO Omar Zenhom grew to $4.6M revenue and 14K customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is omar zenomi is the co-founder and ceo of webinar ninja an all-inclusive easy to use webinar platform that allows you to create a webinar in 10 seconds flat he's also the host of an itunes best of 24 podcast the 100 mba show the show has delivered 900 plus lessons and counting to over 50 000 daily listeners omar are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready man all right so it was so fun having you on last time talking everything webinar ninja i remember appreciating that you used your own channels like your podcast your list to basically grow this sas company in a bootstrapped fashion so tell everyone what's the company do and where are you at today sure so we are a webinar platform called webinar ninja and our goal is to make it easy for people to run webinars uh basically allow people that are not tech savvy be able to jump in and present and run a webinar without having to worry about things kind of crashing or having to like manage the tech so we let the tech fade in the background um we started the company in april 2014 basically scratching my own itch i was running webinars myself to grow the 100 mba community really didn't like the tools that are out there i had a hodgepodge a whole bunch of them frankenstein the whole thing um decided to create something for myself i actually just hired a freelance developer to clean up some code for me and i just ran webinars with it and the attendees were like hey what are you using for this looks pretty cool i said it's just something i slapped together they're like can i buy it and i was like oh uh give me a couple days to put up a sales page so but to be quite honest we decided to pre-sell it for 250 users to see if you get any traction people really looking for an alternative and we sold out in 48 hours so we're like okay definitely there's something going on here we have something in our hands omar real quick sorry that's a great lesson give me the verbage there so a lot of people they're worried about pre-selling because they don't know what to tell people once they've given them their money like do you tell them expect to get this in two months like how do you do that and feel good about it that's a good question so i basically told them hey this is what we're planning to do with the software i use a lot of it was just text and images basically mock-ups from psds of what we are planning to have uh we gave a rough estimate of delivery like we said by the end of the third quarter uh this when we're looking to deliver the software to you and then we said hey if for any reason um things don't work out we don't have enough people to buy you don't sell out whatever we'll refund your money so this is just a risk reversal type of situation here great way to do it and as we were building we were contacting these pre uh pre-sold buyers people that bought before they received the product and got feedback asked them what do you think of this what do you think of that um and it kind of held them on even when we had a slight delay you're like okay cool so we took it from there in two thousand keep them emotionally connected right yeah and also just feel like they're part of the actual app seeing that like hey i'm actually contributing to what it's gonna be and we still do that with our users getting feedback from them seeing what things they like sometimes we got to kill some features that they don't use which is kind of hard because you invest so much money in time so we took it from 250 users in 2014 to today um almost hitting 13 000 not here there yet but a little bit over to 12 800 users uh that's 12 000 that's 12 800 like paying customers or just free users yeah paid users yeah that's great i'm curious i'm actually i'm wondering if i have this data of my research team put this in the notes they did yeah so i mean back when you came on last time which would have been march actually yeah march of 2016. at that point you had 1900 customers 115 rpoo and i believe that what what did that put you at like 200 something grand a month in revenue so so you've scaled now to you just said about 12 800 customers is arpu still about 115 uh no so um our our so our mrr has so we did a whole bunch of things with our pricing to test how we can increase our mr as well as move people from monthly to annual to increase our ar so um we grown from that last talk i was just looking at some of my numbers over 250 percent okay um revenue or just customer count uh no revenue okay so so for us it was it was not explosive growth but for us that was a steady growth enough for us to be able to build and that's great that's great growth for a bootstrap company man yeah it's awesome for bootstrap a lot of people like they listen to some great stories with like you know airbnb and instagram they're like oh my gosh you know these guys everybody's expects like 10x growth but it's it's it's it's a very um it's a different animal like you said with self-funding but for us we're very happy with the growth that we've had yep and i think it has a lot to do with just being intimate with your customers and so today like last month what'd you do total just give us general size today uh let me just grab my numbers so i can get cool you guys by the way while he's bringing that up the first show he was on that would have been episode 252. if you go to nathan michael.com forward slash the top 252 you can listen to that and were you um my notes i had were you in san diego then was that pretty much sydney now yeah yeah yeah back then you had told me seven percent monthly logo churn three dollar cac we'll talk more about how these have changed over time do you use bare metrics uh we we use barometrics we also use profit well just to cross reference do they do they do they always equal or are there big differences uh sometimes there's some differences especially when it comes to churn i don't know some people calculate churn in a different way um so we're at 7.7 arr right now yep 77 arr which would be what does that come out to about 641 000 a month 41. yeah that's that's really healthy so so if we take that 641 divided by 12 800 paying customers that means each one's paying you about 50 bucks per month so an smb or any of you listening right now can afford this platform right now omar yeah where's the growth come from i mean your show obviously has a lot of reach with 50 000 daily listeners so you've driven a lot of your own earned customers but where where's the growth come from mostly it comes with content marketing i'm a big believer in content marketing so we do a lot of content marketing comes to how to present and how to create your webinars so we have an online course that i i mean to be honest with you um i've seen a lot of paid courses that are not as good that are two thousand dollars so we offer this course absolutely for free it's seven part video course with workbooks and things like that and that leads to our live workshop so i have different live workshops i do when it comes to creating and presenting your presentation skills on the webinar as well as sales skills as well as how to grow your business with webinars how to do joint webinars all that kind of stuff that's a link for the latimar so people can look at that look at it definitely so they can go to webinarninja.com course that's the online course and then if you ever want to hop on our next workshop you can just go to webinarninja.com workshop and i run all our workshops live we have other people that run some of our onboarding workshops but any workshops that are pre uh becoming a member you know uh sales webinars i like to be there just because i enjoy it so much i enjoy teaching i've been a teacher all my life um and uh i just feel like it gives me a pulse as the leader of the company to know what people need and look are looking for that's right and what it was what's the pattern there you do it once per month or once a week or what i do once a week and then i do every two weeks i do a a webinar as well for our members which is just open q a as well as exploring and showing them the new features that released that last month um it also helps reduce churn is to get people to understand that hey by the way you may not know because you've been on this platform for a year or something that we have all these new things that you you wish you could have had we have them now what is churn today so it turns at 4.1 which is nothing but and that's logo churn monthly yeah yeah that's i mean that's really healthy it was about seven about two years ago when we last spoke so that's really healthy did you do anything really hard on that i was gonna say did you do anything intentional to drive that down and give us the top two most effective um top two is the live webinars when so they we have a 14 day trial we do a live webinar during that trial to make sure that you know to reduce that churn in the cancellation of trial but we also do one once once they're a month in um and this is more of an intensive one which kind of shows them all the different kind of features they may not be aware of as well as just like what's best practices you know how you can save some time when creating webinars how you can save things as defaults you don't have to rewrite your email notifications all that kind of stuff um those really helped the other thing that really helped is just solid content we created a lot of great in-depth tutorials and we drip feed them through our email notification through our email um marketing sequence so basically when they become a member they get relative information we have a starter guide that gets them going and then some uh just quick tips on how to use the technology as you're going through the tool do you use omar for that is that built into your what our ninja are you someone else no we use active campaign to package the campaign okay got it so good it's okay so those two things the live stuff and the drip onboarding drove turned down to 4.1 percent which is significant when you start looking at lifetime value yeah yeah okay what about cac i mean what do you spell are you doing any direct paid stuff what's it cost you to acquire a customer that's a good question nathan last year we did a lot of paid uh through facebook ads we used to do a lot of paid through to get to the course to get them on our email list and then get them on the webinar um we rarely did straight to a webinar but we actually have stopped doing paid ads for the last six months uh and it was just an experiment for me i wanted to see if i can up my seo game and try to get people through our blog so we really worked hard on redoing our whole blog i actually got a lot of great consulting advice from brian dean from backlinko.com uh brian is a good friend of mine and he's really helped me uh reshape the way i think of seo and this basically was just an experiment to say hey let me try three months of no ads but really like go super hard on really great content on our blog and maximize our seo to see can i get these people via search versus versus ad through paid um basically investing my time and money into the content rather than the ads and it actually panned out much better and less stressful to be honest with you it's really stressful when you constantly have to change your ads and change your your audiences and all that stuff and i mean we have somebody who works on that but you know they have targets to hit and all that stuff so we're really gonna spend the rest of 2018 maximizing social and we we do some paid stuff but maybe just for like promotions certain launches certain jv things we do um but we've we've kind of turned away from our paid advertising and what's your total team size today omar 30. so we have 30 full-time employees we have a couple freelancers in addition to that but we have 30 full-time so do you ever look at i mean maybe not because you don't have to but i mean do you ever take all your marketers and onboarding people the 30 add up the salaries and then divide by number of new customers they're driving per month to get like a fully weighted cac or no that's not an important metric for you uh we don't actually do that because you're gonna be surprised to hear this but i do a lot of that um just because i enjoy a lot of the salesmanship of it i love trying to craft these pieces of content i write the whole blog i shoot the like i'm in the videos um but we do have a full-time editor for our like uh blog for the content as well as our video editor um we haven't actually done that calculation recently uh we did it maybe at the start just to see because we were kind of again we're bootstrapped every dollar counts today a lot of what we do is just um trying to go back to basics i think a lot of us a lot of new businesses bootstrap businesses they try to dump money on marketing and don't realize that some of the stuff that worked uh but is a lot of hard work works you know like a good i'll give you a good example one of our number one drive drives of traffic the last two months that i've kind of linked back through my google analytics and some of the other tools that we've used is a blog post that i wrote now it wasn't a 300 word blog post it was a 8 000 word blog post called the ultimate guide the definitive guide to webinars and it just got so many shares and so many backlinks and so many things it was i took me it took me six seven weeks seven weeks to write to this thing it's got videos it's got you know infographics got images but it was just it drives so many sales and i calculated how many sales we got just from that blog post and we got over a thousand sales off two months of just a blog post and i was like okay this is definitely something and this is uh i gotta give brian dean credit he told me you gotta just go full steam ahead on great content and be the authority when it comes to these things when people search like how to run a webinar you show up and you just gobble up all that yeah i mean a thousand sales at 50 bucks pop that's 50 grand an mrr not bad for just one person two months work yeah assuming and i probably you probably weren't just writing that full-time either but that's that's it would take you forever to get that kind of return on ads yeah and i got to give credit to our team who helped us you know we have a connor our great editor who edited the content we have video editing going on we have a lot of people changing our images sourcing images getting all that stuff cleaned up and obviously populating it in wordpress so i wrote the bare bones of the content but they made it look gorgeous that's great now in terms of lifetime value if you do one divided by your turn you're getting 24 or 25 months on average out of these folks at 50 bucks a pop it's like a thousand 1200 bucks in ltv um are you doing anything i mean you have a healthy base are you looking at buying other companies to upsell like like similar related webinar products or no uh right now we're not looking to uh purchase any companies just because right now we're just looking to uh build our own growth but i would um we're really heavily invested in trying to team up with companies to have better integrations to do cross promotions with each other we're working with aweber to do that as well yeah because you know they have similar audiences as well we also try to step out of the tech market a little bit into the soft skills to see if we have a good marriage with other companies one company that we would have uh here's a good example one company we teamed up with is heroic public speaking by michael port uh and amy port so they they specialize in public speaking um training um and i was actually trained by them so all my public speaking skills came from them and uh so a lot of people that go to their courses go to their website go to their workshops go to their you know their center they are author speakers they're a perfect fit for our software they need public speaking skills and it's a good practice to do it on webinars so it's a good marriage so we've kind of we teamed up with them so they can be able to uh you know present webinar ninja to their crowd and be like the official webinar platform for that company and we're going to do the same with other types of businesses that's really fascinating um last question before we wrap up growth what are you growing at year over year i know you said over the past three years it's been like 250 but over the past 12 months what's it been it's been a hundred and eighty percent this last year that's amazing i mean so yeah and 640 today that means you would have been doing call it like 210 220 about it 13 months ago yeah that's incredible uh i mean that's omar i mean that's really incredible especially for a bootstrapped company uh i don't think i've ever heard any other bootstrap company but besides maybe acuity scheduling growing at that rate yeah they're gavin's a a monster yeah he's he's great you guys actually you guys should i'm sure you're already connected but i imagine you have the same kind of user bases yeah he's been a sponsor on our podcast a couple times he's we did some fun stuff together uh great company uh and great growth and i i think one thing i want to just add is i think one of the things that really has helped us with the growth is obviously you know the marketing and the seo all that stuff is great but we we've been really careful with costs and and how much we spend and how much money goes out it's so easy when you're doing well and you're growing and you're selling be like let's you know have a big slide in our office or whatever it is you know anything wrong with fun i'm just kidding yeah no it's it's all fun it's all fun to have that kind of stuff and have great camaraderie with your team but you got to really take a look at your cost how much are you spending is there any way i can save money here save money there um you know and negotiate you know like we negotiate our rates with all our you know with aws we talk to them say hey this is our growth this is going on we need a better rate you know and some people don't even pick up the phone and try to negotiate better rates with their service providers so definitely could do that and it helped us cut our costs a lot and obviously increase profitability well guys i encourage if you want other little ninja tips like that go listen to omar's podcast the hundred dollar mba it's a good one i appreciate it because it gives you those quick popcorn like bites that you can chomp on digest and execute immediately that omar tactic you just articulated is one of my favorites as well i just will send an email to all i'll go in in our pnl every month i'll get the emails of everything under software subscriptions i'll email them all and say i need to cancel my account you'd be shocked how many of them have automated processes to reply back to say we'll give you a discount i'm like okay good i'll take the discount and here's a little another ninja tip if you don't want to do all that work if you don't want to do this stuff contact get human you don't get human no you get yeah so get human they're a website that help you get like a human on the phone to any company but they have if you email them they have a service that they don't advertise they have a service well they'll do all that leg work for you and negotiate all your rates and those and they basically charge i think 15 or something of the savings you get so it's a no-brainer even you have no time those guys will do it for you now do you are you plugged into patrick you mentioned do you use profit well patrick obviously runs that he was just on the show have you tied into their retain tool yet and did it drive your turn down to be honest i i looked at the return their their churn tool it's it's really good it's not bad at all um but i really fell in love with stunning stunning.com so stunning is a small startup and uh and i i really enjoyed i saw i did their trial but they have a lot of great features that when it comes to dunning emails that i didn't see in the other kind of tools especially like customizing who exactly gets well what so for example i want to send a reminder email that you're going to be renewed only for annual plans i don't want it for all plans right and i only want for specific annual plans that they're going to get a reminder and i want to change the copy and change the variables and a lot of stuff so it's really good for that it's also good if you're delivering bonuses for people that buy and you say hey when they buy at this day this filter it's really really great and it does a lot of the work that some of the email uh automation stuff doesn't do fast so i like stunning okay good stunning.com is that the url uh dot co i believe dot co stunning dot co very good all right omar let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's the last business book that you read oh wow that's a good one uh last business book i read was uh so i'm reading this right now is how to worry less and enjoy life more i think that's the title by uh by uh uh my gosh um i'll i'll put in the show notes i'll look it up sorry just drawing a blank that's okay um how to worry lesson enjoy life more yeah it's um it's a very it's a it's the same guy that wrote uh dale carnegie dale carnegie sorry all right uh so jail carnegie wrote that book great book it's really giving me a fresh perspective um before that i read disturbed which is a book about the startup culture um a fun uh book uh what's yeah so those two books are great i also love autobiographies so i actually love listening to any kind of autobiography or biography from any kind of successful person even if they're a musician like you know uh or stand-up comedian or anything like that i just bored standing up um was a great book that i read it was a great autobiography just finished so i love biographies number two who's your favorite big thinker in sydney to get dinner with wow big thinker it's got to go with elon elon musk that guy just doesn't he has no limits the dude has no his inspiration really i think regardless if you think you agree with him disagree with him he lets you dream he allows you to dream with the way how big he thinks so i love i love you along besides webinar ninja what is your favorite tool for growing your business base camp base camp without a doubt because it allows me to control to really manage and have control over a remote team in a very constructive easy way with to-do lists and notifications and all that stuff and number four mr how many hours of sleep are getting every night i gotta get eight if i don't get eight i'm not somebody you to speak to what's your situation married single you have kids married uh me and nicole here we're uh we got a bunny ninjas a little baby that's your little baby right now and how old are you i am uh going to turn 38 next month exciting all right take us home here what do you wish your 20 year old self knew 20's ralph knew you're what teaching at this point right or about to be a teacher yeah i wish i wish i invested in facebook i wish i knew that the only way to learn is to try you know in the beginning you just have to keep trying you don't know anything yet you don't know what you don't know and that's kind of a blessing in disguise but i think in the beginning you think oh i gotta read i gotta know every single thing before i even take the first step that's the worst way to do it you gotta just jump in the only way to learn is to try from omar he has a hit podcast 100 mba and then you know it was scratching his own inch back in 2013 with a webinar platform he edited before he knew he had 250 pre-sales and he said okay we're going to deliver this thing we're going to build it well fast forward in december 2016 he was doing about 210 grand in monthly recurring revenue now they've grown over 180 year-over-year they're doing 640 grand and monthly recurring revenue 7.7 million annually that's from their 12 800 customers paying on average 50 bucks a month he's taking churn from seven percent down to four point four four percent logo churn monthly super healthy and he's doing this all in a really content marketing driven way so very low if almost zero cac with his team of uh of 30 folks down there in sydney and spread throughout the world omar thank you for taking us to the top thank you nathan