Two College Friends Created A $600K/Year Video Conferencing Platform
Hey there, we’re Christopher Milkowski and Lucas Kosikowski from LiveWebinar, a webinar and video conferencing platform. Our platform came about a few years ago when we realized that there wasn’t a webinar platform that solved the most common complaints of users. Since our launch at the beginning of 2018, we now have over 160,000 LiveWebinar users.
LiveWebinar is a highly versatile platform – just because ‘webinar’ is in our name doesn’t mean our platform can only host webinars. Our clients use our platform for all sorts of events – from sales meetings to webinars, to piano lessons, LiveWebinar can do all that and more. We work with clients like Kaplan, who works in the educational sector, pracuj.pl, a Polish job hunting and recruiting platform, and InfoShare, which host the largest tech conference in Central Europe. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, we worked with Infoshare to move their annual conference from the real world, to online, building a virtual conference center within our platform.
LiveWebinar is also highly customizable – letting clients personalize the look of their meeting room, add their logo, and more. Over 50 interactive features form part of our platform, letting you interact with your attendees via the whiteboard, play videos from YouTube or Vimeo, share documents, or run polls and tests. Since 2019, our client’s database has grown 7x reaching several 160k users currently.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
The idea for LiveWebinar came about many years ago before the product was introduced to the market in 2019. It was when we were students. I recall the conversation with my friend, Lucas - the co-founder of LiveWebinar, held in a car next to our university dorms. This was a conversation that would alter our paths, and lead to the creation of a platform that would help change experiences in the virtual world.
Designing LiveWebinar was no easy feat, it took many sleepless nights and almost three years to get from our initial idea to a final product. With 15 years of experience in working with video conferencing and webinar platforms, we had a pretty good idea of what works and doesn’t, any problem that you may have had with a webinar platform we’ve probably encountered. It was this that drove us to design a platform that would be intuitive, full of features, and that gave users the best webinar experience imaginable.
Often users had to work with a platform that was as-is, meaning that there wasn’t much opportunity to customize it, from the package you received to the look of your meeting room, most of these options were predetermined for the user, and not by the user.
Don’t be afraid of mistakes or hard work. Building your product, platform, or service just doesn’t happen overnight.
For this reason, we wanted to give our users the option of flexibility when it comes to selecting the features they want in their platform - either by purchasing a custom plan or with the help of add-ons. We also designed our meeting rooms in such a way that users can customize the colors of the windows and fonts, and upload their logos.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
We wanted to provide a solution that gives users a sense of freedom from external cloud technology providers. This also includes creating a seamless integration with a client’s ecosystem, thanks to the low-code approach we take when implementing the solution into our client’s current ecosystem.
When ideas for a platform like LiveWebinar first began to surface, the concept for the platform was created by two people who had previous experience in similar products. Developing LiveWebinar became like a full-time job, and from the start, we wanted to create something that could be used in many different sectors and have multiple applications thanks to its highly customizable nature. Beyond providing standard features like screen sharing, chat, the whiteboard, custom
branding was to be one of the calling cards of the platform, letting that be a feature that allowed LiveWebinar to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
We also chose to create a platform that could be customizable, in any way that our client might want. For that reason, we offer SaaS plans (plus a plan that lets users select the features and room capacity that works for them), along with add-ons that can be purchased with any plan to get the features or room capacity the client might want. We also have an Enterprise option for clients who want to create a bespoke platform.
Not only that, but thanks to the parametrization of the solution, our clients can tap into nearly unlimited possibilities for the configuration of the platform. This parametrization then allows us to adapt to new technological opportunities as they come along and transform the market (think AR, VR, or 360 videos, for example).
Finally, having such parameterization available makes the platform more agile, and it's easier for LiveWebinar to react to changes and can function stably even when there’s heavy traffic.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching LiveWebinar was a long and intense process that took us some 800 days (give or take) from creating the first blueprint of the platform to launch. In terms of costs, around $920,000 were invested in the platform to get it ready. Beyond that, it took many late nights and early mornings, along with a million lines of code.
Even though the platform was fully bootstrapped from the beginning, our numbers these days speak for themselves - we have over 150K registered users with over 1 million meeting rooms that have been created on our platform.
One of the main events that propelled our success was AppSumo - a sort of baptism by fire for us. Our platform formally launch in March of 2019, and we joined AppSumo in September of the same year. We weren’t ready for what the event would bring us, and over a few weeks we became the best selling product on the platform, and received the “Deal of the Year Award”.
This gave LiveWebinar a huge boost in terms of visibility on the international market. When we first joined AppSumo we had just over 41,000 users, by the beginning of 2020 we had about 50,000 users. It was our first big breakthrough and the first main channel that helped us gain notice and expand our client base significantly. AppSumo was also a great way to test the waters in terms of product readability, and whether LiveWebinar would be successful in the United States which is our target market.
AppSumo also opened our eyes to how much we needed to build up our customer service team - we had many questions and comments come in, but needed a bigger team to keep up with all of the queries we’d received. The pandemic brought another influx of customers - in 2020 we had over 80,000 new accounts. To keep up, we doubled our team and created two customer support teams, one for our SaaS clients, and the other for our Enterprise clients.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Since we released our platform a few years ago, we’ve taken the approach of actively listening to our customers and keeping a close eye on the latest trends in webinars and webinar software.
Whether it’s about major software changes, or updating our list of features, we take into account what our users say and what the latest trends are and plan accordingly.
Just this year we’ve introduced a slew of new features and updates. We’ve added the option of paid events, users can now use virtual backgrounds during meetings, communicate during the event with reactions, and more.
LiveWebinar has two main business models when it comes to acquisition: our SaaS product and our Enterprise product. In terms of our SaaS product, we generally follow a "freemium" model, and some of the main acquisition channels we use are social media and email marketing, affiliate, and influencer marketing, along with PPC and webinar/content marketing. SEO is one of our main drivers in terms of gaining organic traffic, our company blog has been especially successful in gaining plenty of organic clicks. We’re putting a lot of effort into educating users on how to incorporate webinars into their marketing strategy and successfully grow their businesses with the use of webinars. Based on our statistics users readily read the following articles:
- Best time of day and week to host webinars
- The best webinar titles: 8 tips for creating catchy webinar names
- Best time of day and week to host webinars
We’ve recently been working on creating a series of webinars all about hosting and creating your online events for strengthening our content marketing.
When it comes to our Enterprise product we mostly implement word of mouth marketing (our first Enterprise clients helped us gain more), social selling, and content marketing. Our webinar series and blog are quite helpful in terms of gaining Enterprise clients.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We offer two paths for our clients, one is our SaaS “off the shelf” option, and the Enterprise option. The latter is our white label plan – we meet with our clients, discuss their needs and vision, and build for them a customized platform based on LiveWebinar.
As the pandemic forced people to move their lives online, it gave our company a chance to grow and develop further. Online and hybrid solutions for work and education are more popular, and necessary now than ever. Throughout 2020, our team increased from just 6 people to over 35. In 2021 we’ve seen even more growth, not just in the size of our team, but in the number of clients we have.
An increase in climate change awareness and sustainable development also gives online and hybrid solutions a new perspective. They’ve become a more eco-friendly and eco-aware way to meet with clients, host onboarding events, conferences, and more, than traditional in-person meetings and events that would have people traveling long distances.
In terms of the future growth of our platform, we plan to expand LiveWebinar to Asia, Africa, and South America in the coming years.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Over the years that LiveWebinar has been active, we’ve learned that taking any available opportunity and running with it is key to success. Entering 2020 we couldn’t imagine what the coming year would bring. A global pandemic isn’t exactly something you can plan for, but as the world transitioned to online education and working from home, our platform took off.
As companies and educators looked for online alternatives, we found ourselves in the unique position of having a product that catered to their needs. In mid-2020 we worked with the InfoShare conference to help them move their conference from the real world to online as the key technology provider.
AppSumo has been great for increasing our reach and customer list. When we first listed our platform in 2019 there was so much interest in LiveWebinar that we quickly realized we needed to increase our team from about 6 to over 35 people to keep up with our growing client base. When we re-joined the AppSumo offer in 2021 we came prepared to meet and interact with our clients' needs and requests head-on.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
One of the tools we rely on the most is our platform. Seeing as our company is fully remote (with headquarters in Gdansk, Poland), LiveWebinar is the best way to connect with all our employees. When it comes to organizing onboarding for new employees, holding team meetings, or meetings with current or potential clients, we fully rely on our platform for all company communication needs.
At LiveWebinar we currently use MailChimp for our email marketing needs, we utilize ChartMogulfor keeping an eye on our subscriptions, and rely on Jira for task management and keeping our to-do list under control. We also love Ahrefs for keeping our SEO and website up to date.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Though it’s a pretty common recommendation, Dale Carnegie’s writings are a place to start when beginning your entrepreneurship journey (they’re classics for a reason!). One of our favorite quotes has to be "Flaming enthusiasm backed up by horse sense and persistence is the quality that most frequently makes for success."
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Don’t be afraid of mistakes or hard work. Building your product, platform, or service just doesn’t happen overnight - it takes plenty of trial and error, quite a few long nights with little to no sleep (all compensated by liters and liters of coffee). Moments, when you might feel discouraged by the process, do happen, but if you stick to your path, they’re nothing but a small roadblock.
We know from experience what it’s like to work and rework the same small details day in and day out, and sure, it’s not a great part of the process, but such determination and persistence will take you a long way.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re constantly looking for passionate developers specialized in front-end technologies as well as currently we’re looking for a performance specialist to join our marketing ranks.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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