Omar Zenhom (@TheOmarZenhom) is one of those few amazing founders who just can’t stop giving back to their entrepreneurial peers, no matter how much success they might have. Recently having sold WebinarNinja, Omar still shows up every single day — on Twitter, on the $100 MBA podcast, or wherever builders and makers struggle to build and make.
We talk about the exit, how to build a support network as a founder, and what Arnold Schwarzenegger has to do with the AI avalanche. Enjoy!
00:00 – Arvid (Host)
Hey, it’s Arvid and you’re listening to the Bootstrap Founder. Today I’m talking to Omar Senem, the founder of Webinar Ninja, a company that he recently sold after 10 years of growing it, and it’s a formidable competitor in an arena where players like Microsoft Teams and even Zoom are fighting for customers. So it’s quite the accomplishment. Omar shares his challenging and often perilous journey, bootstrapping a very technical business as a non-technical founder, and we get into the exit and what it meant for him, both the good and the bad. Oh, and we end up praising Arnold Schwarzenegger too, for some reason. It’s a really nice conversation and, since we are talking about heavy lifting, in a way, that is exactly what today’s sponsor could do for you and your business.
00:52
Paddlecom is a payment provider that takes care of all my business payment needs, taxes, refunds, collecting outstanding payments, having an easy API integration. They have it all, and I’m glad they do, so I can focus on building my own business instead of registering for things like sales tax in Argentina or something. I trust Paddle to do that all for me, and I think they can do it for you, too. So check out Paddlecom to learn more. Now here is Omar. Omar, in your long career as a founder, you’ve probably run into dozens of these obvious best practices that didn’t really work out in reality when you tried them. Can you tell me about a popular startup advice that you deliberately chose to ignore and that actually ended up working in your favor?
01:37 – Omar (Guest)
I love this question because I can think of many, but I’m going to choose one that maybe the jury’s still out, who knows? Because you can’t go back and change that decision. So when I started Webinar Ninja, I pre-launched it in April 2014. And then I launched this podcast my podcast, the $100 MBA Show in August of that same year so just a few months and a lot of people asked me why did you do that? I was still just trying things out. I was just seeing what’s going to work, what’s not, and they both started to gain traction at the same time.
02:17
One of the pieces of advice I got from somebody who is in software that’s all they do. They don’t do media, they don’t do podcasting, they don’t do video. They don don’t do media, they don’t do podcasting, they don’t do video. They don’t do anything. They told me it’s probably a better idea for you to create a software company without you being the brand or the face or doing any of the marketing, so that way, the product stands on its own and then, when you go to get acquired or sell the company, you don’t have to worry about you being attached to the brand, and that sounds like sound advice. That’s not a bad idea. But for me, all I had was that I’m a non-technical founder. I know a bit of PHP, I know enough so I can know that my engineers are not scamming me. But other than that, I’m non-technical and my background I was an educator. I was a teacher for 10 years at the high school, university level. So all I got is my teaching. All I got is for me to do the webinars. All I got is for me to do the video marketing and the sales. That was my contribution to the company. So it was kind of hard for me to accept that advice. So I said you know what. I’m just going to use what I got, because I don’t know if this thing has legs in the first place, if it’s going to sell, if it’s going to make it happen, if it’s going to resonate with an audience. And I did it and it helped big time.
03:38
Now, when we did get acquired, it was something that we had to talk about, was something that we had to talk about Intellectual property, how long they can use my likeness, all that kind of stuff. So there was a bit of a hurdle, but it wasn’t impossible. We were able to move around it. I firmly believe and maybe this is just confirmation bias, but I firmly believe it would be really hard for a webinar to take off if I didn’t do all the content, run the webinars.
04:01
Run the sales webinars, because I learned so much about my customer that way. I learned so much about what their pain points are and what the language they use to describe their pain points, and I was able to then bring it back to my team, my technical team, and say, hey, I think this feature would really solve these problems for our customers. How long would it take for us to build this? Two weeks later, we ship it out. Okay, great, I communicate that to my audience and show the value. So that’s one piece of advice. I would say that I guess I’m glad I ignored, but in some ways I felt like I didn’t really have much of a choice.
04:33 – Arvid (Host)
Right. Yeah, it’s kind of constrained by your reality as a founder at this point, although I think it probably made sense for businesses founded prior to 2014, like, in the nascent stages of social media and in, like, founder presence on social media too, right, because if you look at it now and you look at a SaaS business that you want to use for your own business, you look for the founder, you look for the people behind it. I’m on every single businesses about page every single time before I subscribe to it, just to see are these real people? Like that’s the first thing, right. And then, if they are, are they people that I actually would want to talk to, because I eventually will have to? So you know, like from a personal perspective, it makes perfect sense. I chose the same way and I feel now trust is so much less mediated by gatekeepers as it used to be back in the day, right before social media, that you kind of have to establish some of that as a founder with every single customer that you have out there.
05:27 – Omar (Guest)
That’s so true. I do agree with that in a lot of regard, and I felt like I was able to build trust in my audience quickly because I wasn’t afraid to put my face and put my name behind the product, which was a differentiator, and we attracted a lot of independent creators and a lot of coaches and people that resonated with my style and who I am as a teacher and all that kind of stuff, versus some of the bigger enterprise tools.
05:50 – Arvid (Host)
Was it a choice that you made consciously at that point to go for that kind of audience?
05:55 – Omar (Guest)
I knew I had to niche down. In 2014, january 2014, just maybe a few months before we launched Webinar Ninja I went to a conference called New Media Expo in Vegas. The conference doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a conference. It was kind of like the first time I met people doing what I always wanted to do. I felt like, wow, this is possible. I met people like Nathan Berry there for the first time. He was just starting ConvertKit at the time. I remember we were having breakfast at 2am. He’s having waffles next to me and we’re just chatting and he was telling me that this niching thing is working for him. He was niching down to mommy bloggers and fashion bloggers and things like that and I was like, okay, maybe I need to do that so that I don’t need to appeal to everybody. And also, I was more interested in having several customers, whether it’s 1000, 2000, 2,000, 3,000 customers, rather than three or four big clients where I have to kind of bend the software for their needs.
06:50 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, that’s always the thing, right, you don’t really want whales. As a person just getting started, you want a nice diverse variety of customers because you also get way more feedback that you may actually quantify instead of just having to look for the big ones and what they want. Because that’s the thing that I personally experienced a lot in my founder journey Sometimes you have to say no to feature requests to things that people want from you. Was that also a thing on your journey with Webinar Ninja? Did you say no to a customer feature request that they had for you?
07:20 – Omar (Guest)
All the time. All the time and a lot of the things we had to say no to were just like nice to haves. We resisted to have virtual backgrounds for a very long time just because for us the most important thing for us was reliability. Because we’re live, we needed to make sure that the software had a lot of redundancy, that people wouldn’t get embarrassed in front of their audience if things crashed, the replay recorded properly so that if somebody had a paid webinar the replay was just as valuable as the live. So for us, the quality of the software, the experience itself, was super high priority and it became more of a priority as our user base grew because more chances for things to happen, more loads on servers. We had to really work on our infrastructure. So that was kind of our priority. But then there were features that really didn’t move the needle that differentiated us.
08:14
I would say there was one feature that surprised the hell out of me that I didn’t know that would be such a game changer, and it was email notifications. So we built in email notifications so once somebody registers for a webinar they would get automatic email sent to the registrants to remind them of the webinar and to tell them about the replay and any kind of offers and they can add notifications before or after. But I think the way we implemented it was great for our audience because what we did is we actually just wrote all the emails with just default copy with variables that changed for the webinar, time and date and title and all that kind of stuff, and a lot of people never changed the default. They’re just like this is fine. And it was so funny because people were like that was the number one feature. They voted for features. That was the number one feature people loved.
09:02 – Arvid (Host)
They actually liked that better than the actual webinar, yeah, but you see where the value is right, like because a webinar is a thing in time that happens in a moment. This is kind of this emergent thing. Hopefully, if it’s really good, right, people feel like that. This was something that I was part of, but the relationship between the people hosting and the people coming to the webinar, that is an ongoing thing. Hopefully, right, that is something you can strengthen and bolster, and for that, notifications are extremely valuable. I can see this being almost a core feature of a platform like yours. That makes perfect sense to me. So how did you prioritize these things? Because I bet, even though this may have been the biggest thing that people wanted, there was like 20 different things they wanted as well.
09:44 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, this is a tough question. I’m going to be honest with you, arvid. There was a good chunk of five years in my 10-year journey where it was really hard to project manage. It was really hard to have a calm kind of sense of like okay, this is the priority, this is the roadmap. We were just trying to keep up with the market. Keep up with the market, keep up with the demand. You know, recruiting was like a full-time job for me, trying to find the right people. Great engineers are seeked out and poached all the time. Poaching is happening all the time in our industry. It’s ridiculous. I mean, I had great players on my team get poached from friends. I know people that are in my mastermind group, yikes.
10:21 – Arvid (Host)
Oh, that’s rough, that is rough.
10:22 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, in my mastermind group.
10:23 – Arvid (Host)
Yikes, oh, that’s rough.
10:24 – Omar (Guest)
That is rough, yeah. So that was kind of my main concern of like, how can I keep a strong team, one to maintain the software and keep up the standard, but two keep evolving, keep growing? But mainly, I think what really helped me the most was that I ran every webinar to sell the software. So when I was selling the software I asked a lot of questions about why they’re not running webinars now, why they’ve stopped doing webinars, what they don’t like about their current software. And I learned this technique actually from my father.
10:55
My father was a car salesman. He’s an engineer by trade but in a depression during the 80s my dad switched careers and became a salesperson, just fell in love with it and became a car salesman and my first job at 13 was washing cars at the wash bay. So they would trade cars and I would have to wash and I loved it because I was 13, so I could drive cars on a private lot and it was a lot of fun. But my job ended at three and my dad continued to sell cars from three to nine and I would wait for him because he’s my ride home, so I would watch him sell cars and one of the things that he would do that the other salesman didn’t do. As soon as somebody walked into the dealership, he would ask them what’s wrong with your car? It looks fine, why are you looking for a new car? And they would say I really don’t love the radio and there’s no trunk space and I really don’t love the seats and I really don’t love the seats not very comfortable. So he was asking these questions so that he can address those concerns in the right car for them. There’s no reason for him to tell them about the horsepower or the suspension. They don’t really care about that. They care about these things is the reason why they’re changing their car.
11:58
So I use that technique in webinars, where I would ask questions at the top of the webinar and say like why are you struggling? Why haven’t you done webinars? What were some of the disasters you’ve had? What are the things you don’t like about your software? And through those questions and getting those answers, I was able to show how our product solved those problems. And sometimes I wasn’t able to solve those problems with my product and those things were like red alert in my head. Took note of it.
12:23
My next meeting, my next stand up with my team, I said okay, guys, this is something that is really coming up with all my webinars. I think we can come up with a nice solution. We have some of the infrastructure ready for it. We can borrow from this feature to do this, and that really helped me understand how to solve problems without surveys. Surveys are great we ran surveys but sometimes the customer it’s not their job to figure it out, like it’s not their job to like rack their brain and figure out okay, this is what I want. Build this software. Here are the specs, go ahead. You know, like we need to find out through inferences, through questions, through figuring out what they’re struggling with, to come up with the right solution. Also, you got to come up with a solution that you can actually pull off, like something that you can actually do with the resources you have. So I think that’s kind of really how we built our roadmap.
13:08 – Arvid (Host)
Man, this is founder-led sales, which is great. Maybe founder-instigated sales. That probably was more than just your sales webinar there, but I love that you are still very much in there and you’re kind of the conduit between customers and their needs and what the feature priority list is. I really like this, and what I like most particularly with the story that you told about your dad asking people what’s wrong with their car. It’s perfectly fine. This is a very respectful way of engaging a customer. I think better. There are so many desperate ways to go for a customer. But saying hey, what you have is okay, but tell me what do you think is wrong, maybe. But saying, hey, what you have is okay, but tell me what do you think is wrong, maybe I can help. That alone already sets you apart from all these people trying to snake oil, sell you on things that they make you fear or whatever.
13:53 – Omar (Guest)
And we were in that market, arvid. One of the things that we had to do is differentiate ourselves. We’re not high-pressure sales. We’re not trying to say you’re one click away from being a million dollars. We really had to show them. Hey, our whole theme and our whole mantra was like webinars are a great trust-building tool, and if I wasn’t trying to build trust in my audience then it would be very hypocritical. And the best lesson I learned from my dad was sales is not about saying the right words or convincing somebody to buy something. It’s being an advisor, helping them make a decision. And that was the best thing I ever heard in my life, because it alleviated the pressure for me to be trying to like oh, they’re going to slip through my fingers, more like hey, maybe the best decision for you is to wait six months and then come back to me. Or maybe this product is too much for you. You don’t need this. You actually need, maybe a video marketing software instead of webinars.
14:46 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that’s something I hear a lot from founders who have this kind of more personable, more honest approach let’s just call it what it is right when it comes to communicating with their prospects. If they find a prospect that doesn’t work, they don’t have a problem recommending an alternative solution, maybe even a direct competitor, if they know that that act of connecting with the client is leaving a better impression than trying to push something on them. I really like that. That must have been hard, I think. Webinars or anything like video communication that must be a hyper competitive space. Why, why did you go for a space like?
15:22 – Omar (Guest)
that. The short answer is ignorance is bliss. I was really ignorant about how hard it is Like I just loved webinars because I used to run a lot, because I was a teacher and it was a great way for me to leverage the skills I already have en masse to teach a lot of people at once and be able to sell my products and services. I was selling the $100 MBA program at the time. That’s how I fell in love with webinars. But I hated how long it took to put it all together the landing page and the thank you pages and the automations and the replay and all that kind of stuff. That’s kind of how Webinar Ninja was born and I didn’t really understand how hard it was. Again, non-technical founder, I just kind of learned along the way. I was like how hard it could be. It’s not hard. I know my way around landing pages, wordpress, blah blah. I need just the video element. I know a buddy of mine, matthew Kimberly. He asked me the same question. This is probably the most difficult software you could build. It’s actually like five softwares in one, which is true. I had email marketing. I had video marketing, video recording, landing page software, chat software, because it has the chat and all the notifications aside during the webinar and I kind of just fell into it and I didn’t realize how difficult it was, as I was still building it.
16:32
And once I kind of built it, it’s funny. Once you get the ball rolling it’s like becoming a bodybuilder. You don’t just become a bodybuilder overnight, you just go to the gym. Once you start lifting some weights, all of a sudden you think, okay, why don’t I start doing some squats? It just starts to build upon each other. I’m actually glad I didn’t know, and that’s the problem. I have now Arvid. I know how hard building a software is. I’m very tentative to start another SaaS because I’m not sure I can pull it off. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know if I can do it again. You know probably if I made, if I chose the right product, right audience, things like that, and there’s a good chance I can use my experience. But you know, I was a lot more confident with as little as I knew back then than I am now.
17:15 – Arvid (Host)
Does that make sense? Oh, I can relate to that so much because I felt the same way like a year ago, before I started my new SaaS after having sold it a couple of years.
17:22
Yeah, well, it is great, but it’s not yet profitable. So I’m still on the path and that is like now, almost like what, seven, eight months in. So for somebody who had a successful exit, who had then the opportunity to, like you, teach and build a media business, to then get back to the drawing board, start building a business and seeing just how hard it is to get it off the ground, man, I don’t think it ever is any different for anybody, no matter how much you’ve done in the past. Every single new project is a new project. It may fail, it may win big Somewhere in between, who knows?
17:56
But personally, what I told myself is hey, if I get a mildly interesting story out of this, it’s going to be worth it anyway. Right. And if it keeps me interested, if it keeps me busy looking at new technologies and figuring out how to integrate this, so I can maybe just tell other people to also try it. And then one of them is successful, that is enough. So if that in any way helps you, try your next thing. Just look at what Tim Ferriss does with his fear setting. What’s the worst outcome?
18:21 – Omar (Guest)
The worst outcome is you’re still okay you learn something new and you have a new story to share. I think that’s all right, right. Yeah, I mean, let me ask you this, arvid Like when you exited 2019, you started writing books you’re into the media business Before you started PodScan did you have like this feeling where you’re like you couldn’t help but roll your eyes and be like I don’t know if I could be bothered? I know how hard it is.
18:46 – Arvid (Host)
Oh for sure, 100%. Because now that I’m building a SaaS again, particularly as a technical founder which is taking care of everything, I need to make sure operations are running, servers are not going up in flames and all that, and I need to add people’s European VAT numbers to their invoices as well that kind of stuff. In addition to that, I need to do like all the marketing, all the sales, all the presence right, the social media stuff and all that. It is so much compared to maybe a year and a half ago when all I did was my podcast. I was talking to one person a week having a chat and then I did like a solo episode talking about one thing that was on my mind.
19:24
So I wrote a script and I recorded it and I had a couple of questions and I had a nice conversation and I sometimes edited, sometimes had somebody help me do it. It was so little work compared to running a SaaS and totally under control too 100%, and I could spend hours thinking about the perfect question to ask or the perfect editing move to make it interesting or these little tiny things, because the outcomes were so clearly defined. But with a SaaS, every day is potentially the best and the worst day you could possibly have in the journey. So I don’t want to warn people not to do it, because I think it’s extremely rewarding, but it is also extremely challenging. Right, it goes both ways.
20:07 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, I grew tremendously in those 10 years. I don’t even recognize who I was back then. But yeah, that was an interesting journey and I think I don’t regret because of who I become. But now that I am in a more comfortable position, I’m thinking okay, no-transcript, like like. A part of me is just like should I just do something completely different? Should I just like start learning the piano or something? Why not? I mean, you can right, nobody’s going to stop you.
20:55 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I get the feeling too. It’s weird because, like I think, as humans we have this narrative in our mind that our life needs to have this story right, this background theme, this arc, this big thing where you start somewhere and then you grow, grow, grow, grow and then the biggest thing happens at the end. I don’t know if that’s the case and I don’t know if that’s necessary to feel fulfilled in what you do. Like, I started this business, like the PodScan thing, because I had built a very unsuccessful SaaS business just in between, just to try new things Again. I was just giddy to do tech stuff and I needed a way to market it and I didn’t find it. So I built my own marketing tool that’s kind of where this came from and then it blew up all of a sudden.
21:36
So I never expected this little marketing tool to actually turn into the business that I’m really focusing my attention on. So you never know. And anything that keeps you interested, I think is a benefit, Because with everything you do, you personally bring your whole experience, like all, 10 years plus of your experience and, in your case, the 10 years of your own experience plus the 10 years of your podcast guests and listeners and audience experience all together in one. The only thing that would be, I think, a net loss for humanity if you were to stop teaching in some capacity.
22:09 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, that’s kind of in the through line. For me. That’s where I feel like I can add the most value and that’s kind of. You know, when we sold Orbiter Ninja, you know, nicole and I were Nicole’s, my wife and my business partner and what we were discussing is like, okay, everybody was asking what’s next, what’s next? And it’s just like, can I just chill for a moment? But it was a valid question and for me, I just wanted to focus on the $100 MBA show and build the $100 MBA community.
22:34
I wanted to be able to and, honestly, the podcast. I maintained it during the webinar, ninja days and growing the software. But the community really took a backseat and I really wanted to reinvest myself because I feel like again, I’m a different person than I was when I started it. So there’s so much more I can offer and I can really actually distill a lot of the stuff that matters and my goal really with $100B is just to provide timeless information. There’s so much strategy and tactics that you can get from Twitter or get from X or anywhere else, and I’m really interested in the stuff that doesn’t change. So, regardless of what you’re building, it will work.
23:16 – Arvid (Host)
I think that’s the ultimate long-term play. I don’t think I would ever give up this podcast. I might stop the SaaS business, give up this podcast. I might stop the SaaS business some of the ones that I run but the podcast, the media business, that’s also my personal brand. We kind of talked about this earlier.
23:31
Right, that’s the thing that, throughout every other thing that I do, this is the constant thing. I have access to an email list of people. They gave me their email. They trust me to send them stuff that they might find valuable and hopefully will find valuable. They allow me in their ears while they walk their dogs, which is, I think, one of the greatest compliments you can give a person is to allow them in in such a delicate moment.
23:56
That is such a big part of your life. That, to me, is the long-term cumulative. That, to me, is the long-term cumulative, self-reinforcing value generator of my life. So I do completely understand that you want to keep that going in particular. I mean you’re two and a half thousand episodes and I think you should just keep it going to see if you can get to five figures. It might take a couple decades, but hey, I mean we got the time right, longevity is a thing, so you can do this until you’re like 95. That’s great. I think that is the true value of what entrepreneurs today can start from the very first day they start being a founder, like you did it. And that I love about your show in particular is that it started in tandem with the SaaS right, even though it was a bit later, but, like, 2014 is 2014. It doesn’t matter exactly when right, it happened at the same time. I do wonder, like do you think your life would look very different had you not started the podcast? A?
24:53 – Omar (Guest)
thousand percent, a thousand percent. The podcast has changed my life in so many ways, opened so many doors. I speak on stage just because of Webinar Ninja at SaaS conferences, but I speak three times as much when it comes to the podcast, because the show really allowed me to give honest advice to people. One of the things the reason why I started the podcast, which is mostly me teaching three days a week and then we have an interview once a month with somebody I can’t really have their perspective. We had Laura Roeder. I don’t have a female perspective, being a founder of a SaaS company that I need somebody else for. But the reason why I started is because I felt like there was a lack of just straight up, real advice, real lessons that people can just implement right away. So often when you listen to an episode, it’s something I struggled with maybe for years, maybe six months ago, and I just recovered from the pain. Now I’m ready to teach it and that is something that I really love about the podcast. This is why I do it and I think that’s why it was successful honestly is because I’m able to provide a new kind of dynamic to podcasting and that show has just yeah, it changed my life big time and a lot of people ask me like, wow, how do you have a successful podcast? If I wasn’t successful after 10 years, it would be a problem. There’s got to be something wrong with me at this point and really honestly, it’s the consistency. I just allowed enough reps for me to get better. I invested in it.
26:29
A lot of people, especially in the business world, see podcasting as a marketing tool, as a way to get leads, and I think that’s a mistake. I think you’re going to spend the time building a podcast and recording a podcast, editing it. You might as well go all in and realize that you are part of the media. Now You’re competing with people that are trained actors and show hosts, like Stephen Colbert, so why don’t you level up your game? Get voice lessons? I got voice lessons, I took public speaking lessons, I upped my technology and all that kind of stuff when I could afford it, but the point is is that if you don’t take it seriously, unfortunately it’s too competitive to stand out, and that’s something that I was just trying to do is like, every time I got by the mic, how can I get better this time? How can I improve my intonation? How can I improve my pauses? How can I do better when it comes to the edit with my team, and that’s kind of how the show got better over time.
27:26 – Arvid (Host)
I love the attention to detail. I can tell you’re a crafts person in that regard and other regards obviously as well. But to want to become better at speaking not every person knows that that’s even an option, right? It’s like that you can have a voice teacher, that you can have a vocal coach. It’s not just for singing, that’s also for just communicating, and maybe I should get a vocal coach.
27:47 – Omar (Guest)
I’m going to give people a gift here. Here’s a gift, super amazing gift you’re going to love. It’s going to be a two-pronged gift. The first prong is there’s a great public speaking course for like less than $100 that you can buy a creative live. It’s called Heroic Public Speaking. It’s by Michael Port and Amy Port. These guys are my coaches as public speakers. Amy Port is my voice coach and they ran a creative live when they were launching their public speaking program. This is like maybe 2014. That’s how, and they still have it on creative live, but it’s a great course. It’s worth its weight in gold, incredible. Right, I’m there live and I’m on the stage being coached.
28:25
You could see how horrible I am. You could laugh at my misery and how bad I am. He’s stopping me every three seconds, correcting my speech and my opening and my gestures and my eye contact and my voice, and I’m like this is a disaster. I’m horrible, but the fact that I’m if I don’t have cringeworthy work, I would say, if there’s no, if you don’t have cringeworthy work, you’ve started too late. You need to really just start putting in the reps and realizing it’s okay to be bad at the first, in the beginning, which is a blessing, because you don’t have much of an audience at the beginning, but as you get better and you start growing, you know, I I laugh because uh, because I was in my car one day and I don’t know what happened, but it looped into the first episode of the podcast.
29:07
Yes, I listened to my own podcast to see if I’m getting better or not, but I couldn’t even bear it. I was like how do we mute this? How do I shut off the volume? This thing is atrocious. But that’s where you start. You got to start somewhere.
29:20 – Arvid (Host)
It’s so funny because you’re mirroring exactly my experience with my own show. I used to edit it myself. I used to record it through what could only have been a potato or something. It was really, really, really bad and just listening to I mean, obviously I have help now, right, I found people who are really good at the particular jobs that are needed for these particular things audio, engineering and even like it’s a, it is a team effort at some point and just like a SaaS business too. Right, Like you always have to find the right people to do these jobs. Well, Like you said yourself, you’re not a technical person. You needed to find and hire technical people to get this going. How big was Webinar Ninja when you sold it?
29:59 – Omar (Guest)
We had a team of 30. It was not a huge team. We were very heavy on customer support. We were just like, because it’s webinars and if anything they need to help they’re not sure how to work something in the studio. Our response time was, I believe, like average was 90 seconds. So we were there chat right. They were the only ones actually doing that. A lot of people were just doing email or ticket software and we just wanted to be known for great support and so we had a good team of about seven people in support and customer success who helped people as they get started, things like that, and ran our member webinars as well. We had a members area and we did coffee hours to get people to learn from each other and things like that, and lots of engineers.
30:47
A lot of people don’t know this. I share this often in speeches now that post exit but, like Nicole and I didn’t pay ourselves very much at all like a minimum for the longevity of the business, because we wanted to reinvest back into the business as much as possible and grow it. I felt like a raise or a hire. I’ll just go with a hire and I’m not saying that’s the right way to do it. That’s what I did.
31:10
One of my favorite hobbies is poker and I just had pocket aces. I had a good hand. I felt like I want to go all in and that’s the choice I made. Not saying that’s the choice for everybody, but I had engineers getting paid five times as much as me. I had to run that payroll every month and be like this is what’s best for the company. This is what I got to do, and maybe I enjoy being a martyr or something like that. But if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably try to figure a way to take some cash off the table to feel a little bit more comfortable.
31:41 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, sacrifice only a way to take some cash off the table, to feel a little bit more comfortable. Yeah, sacrifice only goes so far, right, like I think there’s also kind of a mental health aspect to this, because if you’re constantly underpaying yourself because you think the business needs it, this creates this. I think I feel this myself in obviously having a not yet profitable business. I can’t really pay myself anything. So the feeling always is there’s something wrong, right, like there’s always this little bit of anxiety, just even from understanding it, to be lacking something, and I think a lot of founders probably feel this. Right, I can’t pay myself. This has to be bigger, be better, and that creates a lot of internal I don’t know resentment maybe, or at least pressure. Oh yeah, that you need to be able to deal with. How did you?
32:21 – Omar (Guest)
deal with that kind of stuff. It’s a tough question because it’s hard for me to separate that experience of building that company and that software and myself, my value, my identity was definitely wrapped up into it because I really wanted it to be the most successful thing I built. I wanted to make sure that it was valuable. We had 30,000 users, so it was a the most successful thing I built. I wanted to make sure that it was valuable. There was a lot. We had 30,000 users, so it was a lot of people relying on us and I wanted to make sure that we built a great product and all that.
32:50
But at the same time, I was not happy with my life in terms of my quality of life. When you’re not paying yourself well as the founder, you can’t afford getting a cleaner in your house, so you got to clean on the weekend. You can’t afford getting ready-made meals or you can’t afford to hire a trainer to help you get healthy and feel better about yourself, so you got pressure at home, you got pressure at work. It’s not sustainable, like you said, and I feel like I just bought into a narrative that maybe wasn’t the best for me. I came up where our heroes were like the Basecamp guys 47signals, jason Freed, mailchimp and what I realized after all my experience is that these guys are a rare occasion, that this is not the norm. Normal businesses don’t run this way and for me to base my whole business based on the exception to the rule is not really a smart thing to do. All power to them. These guys are still my heroes, love them.
33:52
But the honest thing was I should have sacrificed growth to make sure that Nicole and I were healthy and doing well and made the business work with those constraints, instead of me saying, you know, hey, instead of me making another $20,000 this year, let me dump that on marketing, which helped.
34:14
It helped growth and it did well. But it’s a real gamble. You know we had competitors popping every single month with you know, stealing our sales copy, taking our features, all that kind of stuff, and at any moment you can find yourself not where you are today. So my advice to anybody who’s building a SaaS that is maybe reinvesting in the business it’s a good practice in the beginning to get some traction, I would say the first 18 months, but from there you need to say okay, in order for this to be a real business, I need to start making sure at least my needs are met and figure out why this is not working. Maybe I need to raise my prices, Maybe I need to change my market, maybe I have to go upmarket, whatever it is to make this work for me, rather than the other way around.
34:59 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, it’s like the saying of product market fit is obvious when you hit it, because then all of those things are not problems anymore. Right, but leading up to it, there’s still something. You need to turn, some kind of knob, some configuration that needs to change for you to be able to pay yourself first, which is also an important concept. Right, pay yourself first, make sure your needs are met, and then you can take care of others. It’s kind of the oxygen mask in the airplane logic there.
35:26 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, Arvid, that’s a tough one for people to understand if you’ve never experienced it. The best way I could put it is that if you have product-market fit, it’s almost hard not to make money. Like it’s so easy for your business to make money that it’s like you’re swimming in. Think Google, think Facebook ads, think about these products that we use every day Like it’s so easy. It’s such a great product. People will absolutely love it and want it, and the boulder’s rolling down the hill instead of up the hill, and that is really where you want to go and that’s what the business want to run. I mean, in a lot of ways I think you can resonate. With a media company, it’s much easier to make money. There’s so many avenues for you to make money, whether it’s sponsorship or products or services. Or I bought your Twitter course back when it was Twitter.
36:12 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, back in the day.
36:14 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, and it was really helpful. But the point is that you have different options to make revenue and it’s just easier and that’s how it should be. That’s what a good business is.
36:24 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I appreciate. First off, I appreciate you buying my tour course, that is highly appreciated.
36:28 – Omar (Guest)
I love it.
36:29 – Arvid (Host)
I also like the visual of, like you know, pushing the boulder up the hill. That, to me, fits well with what you said just prior to this about this, like loading up a burden onto yourself by not paying yourself, by putting all these anxieties, like that makes it even harder to go uphill. To begin with, you don’t even have to think about pushing a boulder. It’s just harder to go uphill with all these burdens on you, right? So that’s also what breaks, founders, is all the internal pressure plus the external pressure of not yet being at the top of the mountain where it starts going down like an avalanche. Yeah, that’s the tough part, man. How long did it take for you to feel comfortable enough in the business in Webinar Ninja to say, well, the hard days are over? How many years did that take?
37:11 – Omar (Guest)
I hit a plateau. We hit a plateau with the revenue for a while and the catalyst that changed it was hiring a coach. I wasn’t really a person that invested in coaching. I took courses. I didn’t really have I’m talking about high-level, $3,000 a month coaching and we hired Dan Martell. He was our coach in SaaS Academy and we caught him in a sweet spot.
37:38
Dan now is kind of a big shot. Now I say that with love. He’s busy and he’s famous and he’s got a lot of things on his calendar. He just recently started SaaS Academy. He was still able to be approached, get on calls, things like that so we caught him when he was really still needing all the case studies and all that kind of stuff. But he held us accountable and he gave us some good systems from his exits that worked in terms of SOPs, building our assistant, recruitment, understanding how to evaluate talent, understanding how to build the systems that will allow the business to be easier for us so that we can focus on the things that matter.
38:23
That’s really what helped us a lot and that was the moment where we started to see a change. I would say that was around 2018. So it was four years and then we plateaued. And then we, and that moment we went past seven figures in revenue and started to really grow. And I didn’t see that coming, but went past seven figures in revenue and started to really grow. And you know, I didn’t see that coming, but it was helpful.
38:45 – Arvid (Host)
I don’t hear that very often. Like coaching, I think, is still highly undervalued in entrepreneurship. There’s mentorship and that kind of stuff, but I think that that has more of a power dynamic that doesn’t necessarily exist with a coach. So that is really cool. Where would you go look for a coach if you were to find one today?
39:09 – Omar (Guest)
Great question. One of my favorite hacks in life is I like to become friends with people who are where I want to be in a few years. So I became friends with a guy named Rob Rawson. He lives here in Sydney. He’s the founder of Time Doctor, which is a time tracking app which obviously blew up after COVID and um it it’s. It’s a huge SaaS and um.
39:26
I met him at a birthday party mutual friend birthday party but when I got to know who he was, we started to see each other and then he called me one day because he’s old school, is a little older than me. He called me. He said uh, you should, you should, um, check out Dan Martell. I’m in SaaS Academy. I don’t go to all the events and things like that, but you might benefit from this where you are right now, in your company. And I looked into it. We got on a call with Dan. It was a good fit and basically Rob was a few steps ahead of me. He’s already been where I was. So he was able to say, kind of like a Sherpa moving up a mountain, don’t go here, go here. This is where to go. And he’s still one of my closest friends.
40:06
Love Rob to death, and that’s a great hack in life is just try to make friends with people. You don’t have to be friends with Tony Robbins or Richard Branson. You could just be friends with people that are just maybe a few years ahead of you. I actually love to go on holiday with people that are a little bit higher in their financial status than me, because it allows you to understand what your life might be soon. What worries them? What are they talking about?
40:32
Everybody has problems. They just have different problems. Now they’re like I don’t know where to invest my money. I don’t want to screw this up, I don’t want to. They have different, I have different. I know that sounds very like privileged and it’s true, but you know it’s funny as people make more money, they have more problems, but they also have other things in their life that they maybe start to creep up Health, family’s, getting older and need to care. You know they’re having some relationship issues and they’re just it’s a good to be around people that are you know, maybe where you want to go to understand like is this the reality that you imagine? No, it’s actually a different reality.
41:06 – Arvid (Host)
Be prepared yeah, that’s the stuff that hit me after we sold our company. Like this, you know we elevate your life and certain things are no problem at all anymore. Like you don’t even think about it. But all of a sudden, what you just said, like you need to protect where you’re at you, to start investing money and if you come from a background of people who had no money whatsoever, you don’t even know like how to spell investing at this point. Right, like there’s. There’s such, a, such a lack. I’m with you.
41:29 – Omar (Guest)
Arvid, I’m with you, right. Yeah, my parents are immigrants. We didn’t, we didn’t, and that’s bad advice for me right now, you know, yeah.
41:43 – Arvid (Host)
So how did you flip that switch? Are you still working on that, like, how is that going for you?
41:47 – Omar (Guest)
100%, 100%. Like I have a. Really I’m gonna be honest with you, like it’s very hard. I’m very uncomfortable being comfortable. I’m very uncomfortable not struggling and working all my life and hustling and that kind of gives me meaning in some way, and sometimes I have to hold myself back and say am I working just for the sake of work? Am I just doing this so I can validate my existence or whatever.
42:09
The other thing is that, growing up, my parents came from Egypt. They migrated to the US. Me and my sisters were born and raised in the US and they tried their best. They worked really hard. They had to learn a new language. They had to get their degrees all over because it was a recognized in the US and it was. It was really tough for them, you know, and they tried their best. But the bottom line is is that they never kind of got ahead financially? They never. You know, I see my friends now and their parents were homeowners and they had investments and they know it had stocks and they know what the S&P 500 is. That was never even uttered in our house, because we’re just trying to make ends meet and trying to stay out of trouble and make sure that we keep our heads down.
42:50
As immigrants, you’re just kind of paranoid that you’re doing something wrong because you’re not used to the culture. So for me, I had to educate myself, and there’s a lot of information out there a lot of books, a lot of courses you could take in terms of financial information but there’s a lot of stuff that can misguide you, especially today with the internet and people with advice. And one of the things I’ve just made a rule for myself is I don’t really invest or spend money on things I don’t understand. If I don’t understand NFTs, if I don’t understand, like if I don’t understand you know NFTs I’m not going to throw some money on it because I just don’t understand how it works. So then that’s not a good idea. If I’m that interested in it, I should educate myself and figure it out. You know whether it’s crypto or anything else. So one of the best things I’ve done is that, because I don’t invest in things I don’t understand, I just invest in myself. I have an unlimited budget. This is a rule that I got from Ramit Sethi, a good friend of mine good guy, really smart guy. To follow when it comes to financial advice or financial education, I should say is have an unlimited budget when it comes to investing in yourself.
43:56
So if you ever want to go to a conference or a course or buy a book, this should not be even a concern. Obviously, you got to make sure that it’s legit, and it’s a good thing. But especially books. Books should be buy now, right away, and I’ve learned so much from books. Books have been the best mentors of my life. They’re most bang for your buck and one of the reasons I was going to ask you because I know you wrote a book as soon as you sold your company One of the reasons I haven’t written a book yet is because I’m really intimidated by it. I’m really intimidated because I read so many great books and every time I read a book I’m like, if I write a book one day, it’s got to be just as good as this and that’s holding me back. But that’s really where I try to invest and try to get me better so I can add more value to others.
44:39 – Arvid (Host)
Paul, try to invest and try to get me better so I can add more value to others. Paul, that sounds like you just need an editor, somebody who can look at it and say, hey, this sucks. Get an editor that is comfortable with making you uncomfortable, and if that’s something you can already handle pretty well, writing a book is going to be fun. Honestly, to me, my journey with writing the book was I started with a newsletter because I just wanted to build an audience, like keep reaching people, and I built this asset of having the list. That was from the start. I wanted to be able to reach people where they’re at, which is in their email inbox. And then people told me hey, I am dyslexic, I can’t read. Can you just make an AI-based audio? And I said, nah, I’m just going to record it. So I started the podcast from that. That was just people didn’t want to read my thing, so I also started narrating it and that started my solo podcast.
45:30
And then people were saying, hmm, all of this feels like it kind of belongs together. Shouldn’t this be a book? It was like oh yeah, sure. So like the first book I wrote wasn’t even intentionally a book, it was just kind of a selection of articles that I’ve written for my blog slash recorded as podcast episodes. That started to kind of fit into a bigger, fully cohesive thing. So when I look at your work and your work is, you know, four figures worth of podcast episodes I know that the book already exists. The book is in all of this. What you now need to do and that is just my personal, very humble opinion is to pull it together, and you have something already. You might even ask an AI agent to just pull it all together because you created the content, might do the editing and let the AI do the editing at this point, but I think you’ve already written a book. It’s just not in the form of a book.
46:18 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, that’s good advice. I think I need to get out of my own limitations of thinking that it has to be a certain way, yeah, and I think maybe the process would be enjoyable to do it.
46:32 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I think you don’t need to reinvent anything Like. You already have all your experience codified, and that’s the thing in the journey itself, like throughout the last 10 years. Now you have all the stages of your own experiential approach to entrepreneurship. They’re all there. So you have an infinite, almost infinite amount of referenceable quotes from yourself in the past. Right, that’s awesome. So all you need to be able to do now is to actually access that in a form that is conducive to writing. But, hey, I think you will be great at writing a book. You’re already a wonderful teacher. You’re very capable of explaining things. You already have the tenacity to do a thing for 10 years. You can write a book, man.
47:14 – Omar (Guest)
It’s really really clear. Okay, okay, I got to get on it. I got to put on my priority list A quick story about your newsletter story. It’s funny. One of my favorite examples of what you just shared is Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t know if you know Arnold Schwarzenegger’s podcast. Yes, I think it’s called Pump Club the podcast and it’s basically AI reading his newsletter and he’s upfront about it and it sounds exactly like him. He’s got an AI to you know he?
47:43 – Arvid (Host)
sounds like a robot anyway, but you know.
47:44 – Omar (Guest)
the point is is that he got an AI that sounds like him, his particular robot and he. It’s a brilliant idea, and I just love the fact that he’s leveraged his kind of quote, unquote, weakness, his accent, to make it work for AI.
48:03 – Arvid (Host)
That’s a brand too right, Like your brand is. You’re comfortable with how weird you speak. Might as well use AI, because then you can be weird on purpose, right? Just kind of judoing the whole thing from weakness to strength.
48:15 – Omar (Guest)
I love it.
48:17 – Arvid (Host)
I love that in particular, arnie, being such an inspiration for people who want to do something about their physical health right, and many, many things beyond that.
48:26 – Omar (Guest)
Be the positive corner of the internet is what he calls it. I love that.
48:29 – Arvid (Host)
And he truly is. I’ve been consuming a lot of his life advice because the journey that he went through in terms of the bodybuilding experience, plus the whole government thing as well right, like there’s just so much of tenacity and like straightforwardness in that person. Yeah, I highly recommend the newsletter. I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I probably should, because I would probably really enjoy it and that is so cool. But, yeah, that’s the story, right, that is a story of just doing the best you can with what you have.
48:57 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, he doesn’t overthink it either. That’s what I love about him. He’s just like just have a vision and just do it.
49:03 – Arvid (Host)
And maybe that’s exactly what you should do at this point. Don’t overthink the book, because the book also and that’s my experience, particularly with the second one I wrote. I wrote that in public, in the sense that I wrote a draft and then I invited like 50 people to read that the 50. I did that like 10 times until the book became the book. It was, at the end, almost indistinguishable from what it was in the first draft. So the first book you write is never going to see the light of day anyway. So you might as well write it now. Right, you might as well do whatever, or write it just in your bullet points, or write it just in little quotes, or whatever.
49:35 – Omar (Guest)
Get out of your system.
49:37 – Arvid (Host)
Get it out like, put it in a system that you can then expand on. A book is never a static thing, and it doesn’t have to be in this modern day and age where everything is digital anyway. So you can conceptualize it as more like a web of interconnected data than paper with text on it. That will make it easier to research and start forming it into the ultimate shape, and then you can talk to your friends hopefully have also published a couple of books in the past who can then help you, you know, find the right way to publish it and find the right way to find the right editor and the right proofreaders and that kind of stuff.
50:12
I’d love this. By the way, in what you said, like surrounding yourself with people who are ahead of you, I think that, to me, is probably the most valuable lesson in all of this. It’s like, if you don’t know how to do it, find people who know how to do it and become their friend. Obviously, this is a simplification, but surround yourself with people who are where you want to go. I think that is advice that is just spot on.
50:32 – Omar (Guest)
Totally, and it’s a small world. One of the things I realized is that, basically, if you stay in touch with 30 to 50 people, they know somebody that you need to know. Everybody Stay in touch with like 30 to 50 people, they know somebody that you need to know, like everybody knows everybody.
50:43 – Arvid (Host)
Now, yes, it’s all about the network that you’re building by just reinforcing existing relationships over time. And I mean this brings me to my question that I have for you. If people want to start staying in touch with you, if they want to follow you, if they want to figure out, like, what you’re doing, what you’re working on next, or how long the break is going to take, and what if you’re going to learn to play the piano in the meantime, or whatever, like where do you want people to go to follow you on your continued journey?
51:11 – Omar (Guest)
Yeah, there’s two places. First one is my podcast, the $100 MBA Show. If you’re looking to build, grow or scale your business, this is where we teach people, through my own experiences, how to do that, how to do it efficiently, how to do it without killing yourself, and just one of our goals is that every episode allows you to just take an action item and just implement and come back the next day so you could check us out anywhere you get podcasts $100 MBA or YouTube. We’re on YouTube now since August. If you want to go a little deeper with me, I’m going to share a little story.
51:49
A good friend of mine I mentioned him earlier Matthew Kimberly. He is a great copywriter and one of the things he taught me is you need to really invest in your newsletter, make your newsletter as valuable as any product you have, and the way he described it is. You know, when you get a text message from somebody that you absolutely love a friend, maybe your loved one, your mom, your significant other you just see the notification. You’re just like, oh, I got to open that and your heart kind of skips a beat. That’s what you want to have your readers experience when they see the subject line and it’s from you. It’s like they just want to see you as somebody of value, because every time they open your newsletter they get something out of it and it’s incredible. So I took on that advice about six months ago and we revamped our newsletter and it became like a really big focus inside the $100 MBA. So if you want to join our newsletter and it became like a really big focus inside the $100 MBA so if you want to join our newsletter, you could just go to 100mbanet. We have some freebies, we have templates, we have great guides you can check out and once you’re on our list, you’ll get our newsletter. But our newsletter focuses on three things every single week and the three things is something to think about, something to do and something to learn, and I really wanted to create a valuable newsletter and I felt like these are the three things. That really helped me along the way is to work on those three things every day.
53:08
So, surprisingly, the think about is actually quite important. It’s like I give a thought experiment. I give something for them to ponder, something to be grateful for, something to think about. One of my favorite quotes is we would be jealous of who we are today, 10 years ago, things like that, or just some ideas of think about what would your business look like if you had to do X, y, z, and it just is a chance for you to just reflect. I think thinking is very underrated. I think we’re in a culture of production and doing and shipping things quickly, and I’m all for that, but sometimes thinking has a lot of value, especially when it comes to knowing what to build, knowing what to do next and allowing your mind to really cultivate.
53:51
The second thing is something to do, which is I give them an exercise to do. That has helped me in the past, and this is usually like a five-minute exercise to do in their notebook. And then lastly, lastly, something to learn, and these are some lessons that we share throughout the week. So that’s the newsletter. If you guys are interested, just go to 100mbanet to sign up.
54:12 – Arvid (Host)
Well, you certainly taught me something, made me think about something today, and I will probably do a lot of these things as well so if this is an extended version of the newsletter, then it’s been very effective for me.
54:26
Thank you so much for sharing all these wonderful things with me today and talking about your journey. I know it’s weird to talk about this whole from start to exit and beyond journey, because you live so many different lives along the way, so thank you for sharing a glimpse into each of these lives. I really appreciate it.
54:44 – Omar (Guest)
Arvid, I had a great time and I’m so glad we got to meet. I know this is virtual on Riverside, but I really admire you from afar. I love the way you put out your work and how earnest you are. I have a huge amount of respect for people that are kind, that people that are doing good work are kind to people that reply to people. You remind me of Chris Brogan when I was coming up. Chris Brogan was a hero of mine because I saw how kind he was with people when he came off stages and they would ask questions and I think that’s super underrated. There’s so many successful people that I know that I came up with that. Don’t reply to messages that don’t show people the time of day. I know people are busy but you know, common courtesy is something that I really value and I just want to say that I recognize that and I I love that about you.
55:33 – Arvid (Host)
No, wow, man. Thank you so much. My heart is full with joy at this. I was really really glad to hear it. Thank you so much. That was wonderful, and that’s it for today. Thank you for listening to the Boots of Founder. You can find me on Twitter at arvidkahl A-R-V-I-D-K-A-H-L. You find my books on my Twitter course too, and if you want to support me on this show, please tell everyone you know about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review for this podcast by going to ratethispodcastcom slash. Founder, it makes a massive difference if you show up there, because then the podcast will show up in other people’s feeds and that will truly help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.
