Our Webinar SaaS Is 100% Self-Funded & Grew 200% Last Year

Omar Zenhom

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Published: April 13th, 2022

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Omar Zenhom

Founder, WebinarNinja

Founders

Employees

WebinarNinja

webinarninja.com

from Sydney

started April 2014

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Omar recommends to grow your business!

customer service tool-icon

Intercom

productivity tool-icon

Basecamp

Slack

Jira

payments

Stripe

Discover what books Omar recommends to grow your business!

Shoe Dog Phil Knight

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I’m Omar Zenhom, co-founder and CEO of WebinarNinja. I’m also the host of The $100 MBA Show, a podcast with short, bite-sized lessons on entrepreneurship and small business.

Our flagship product is the WebinarNinja platform. We designed it for people who want to grow their audience (and their business) by sharing their knowledge and experience via online lessons and presentations.

Most of our customers are coaches, consultants, people who have online courses, and pretty much anyone whose business model requires them to earn trust and credibility by sharing knowledge and giving their audiences consistent wins.

We’re growing steadily; last year our growth rate was in the 200% neighborhood. That’s large because we just released the free version of WebinarNinja, so people can just get started with webinars easily.

What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

I started as an educator. I taught at the high school and university levels and eventually moved to administration. It was a great career, but obviously, it wasn’t my path — I was side hustling the entire time, building my businesses.

Never stop learning. Be insatiable for knowledge and information.

I did everything on the side, from selling sneakers on arbitrage to building websites as a freelancer. But in 2012 I finally leaped, quitting my safe, stable job to go full-time into entrepreneurship. It was terrifying, but I knew it was right.

My financial situation when I left education was…challenging. I had put away some savings, but the key to survival was slashing my expenses. No car, no dinners out; I had to live very lean and make every dollar (and every minute of my time) count. It was all about giving myself the runway to last long enough to succeed.

It was especially tough as a 32-year-old when many of my peers were established and settled. Here I was living like an 18-year old all over again, but it’s what was necessary.

It took a few tries (and some failures) but eventually, I found the flagship product that I could build a significant business around. How that happened, how I validated the product, is one of the most important things I ever learned: don’t start with the product idea. Start with the audience, learn how to serve them, and let them tell you what they need. Then build it!

The “big idea” won’t come from you alone.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

Leaving that safe, comfortable job and risking everything to build a business is scary; there’s a lot of doubt, and usually, not much proof that you can pull it off. But in my case, I had the advantage of having been side-hustled for so long.

I had built businesses — nothing super-significant, but I had built and run profitable businesses at a small scale. More importantly, I had screwed up! I had failed, I had made bad decisions and learned crucial lessons the hard way. I had the privilege of being able to get a lot of reps before I made the big transition to full-time entrepreneurship.

Giving up the safety net of a salary was terrifying, but later you realize those “sink or swim” moments are so pivotal. Being in those scary situations teaches you everything, and brings out your real strengths.

You learn quickly how to maximize your time and your budget, to think like an entrepreneur so you can keep money coming in while plotting out your future. It takes this really strange marriage of urgency and patience to navigate that life, but in the end, those skills are what empower you to build a future of your design.

I knew I wanted to serve a community of other creators and entrepreneurs, and early on I realized I had a unique advantage: my teaching experience. I watched other entrepreneurs run webinars and workshops, and sell information-based products, and they just didn’t know-how.

My years in the classroom had set me up to be a uniquely qualified “teacher” in a different context. I knew I could take big scary concepts and make them learnable and digestible — but more importantly, actionable. I could offer people abilities, not just knowledge because that’s what professional teachers do. Anyone can share information, but the real value is being able to show people how to act on it.

So I set about blogging and speaking and just doing everything I could to get in front of people, share value, and build that trust.

Then the webinar thing happened.

I was hosting my webinars and hated how much of a pain it was. At the time, webinar software was so clunky; you had to Frankenstein it together with your email software and your website, it was completely non-intuitive and just an ungodly hassle. So I built a simple software for myself, literally just to save my own time and headaches, with no intention of selling it.

But then my webinar attendees noticed. People started asking what I was using to deliver these lessons and presentations. Then they started asking if they could buy it. And there it was: the “big idea” didn’t pop out of my head; it was the result of a deep relationship with the people in my niche.

My own “big idea” about webinars had failed! I spent months creating this comprehensive guide to creating and hosting webinars with the awful tech available back then. I thought I could sell this guide and make some real money helping people who wanted to give lessons and workshops like I was. I sold exactly one copy — that was bought with a stolen credit card and had to be refunded.

Fortunately, my audience led me to a better idea. They didn’t want to be taught how to navigate the webinar thing — they wanted to not have to do it.

So I put up a landing page and offered people the chance to buy into the beta version of my upcoming webinar software. I took that money and hired a freelance developer to flesh the platform out. WebinarNinja was born.

Since then, we’ve followed the same process: we upgrade and improve the software, get more customers, and reinvest revenue into making it even better. We’re on our 6th version now, and there seems to be no ceiling to how much better the software can get, or how much we can grow as a company.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We’re doing great, hitting our stride and expanding our reach. As I mentioned, we just released a Free Plan for WebinarNinja, just a basic freemium version of the platform so people can stop thinking and start doing, start taking action — without any risk.

We’re profitable, and we’ve always been profitable because we don’t believe in operating in debt. We’ve never taken on investors or loans or anything like that; WebinarNinja is 100% self-funded. It’s a smart business model, but it’s also reflective of our connection to our niche: independent, creative entrepreneurs who don’t want to be pulled around by someone else’s purse strings. They get it.

Right now we have a global remote team of 25 and growing. We were always remote, years before the pandemic — for the exact reasons everyone is now realizing, now that the advantages of remote work are apparent to more people.

Our next step is a new sister product to WebinarNinja, which we’re calling CourseNinja. It’s a logical next step for us, a complete, user-friendly platform for creating online courses. We were halfway there with WebinarNinja’s “Series” feature, which lets people sign up for multi-session webinars, so we’re very excited to give people a full-on virtual course space, whether it’s for live or automated courses.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Business is 95% in your head. You are your own biggest obstacle. I think the toughest part of starting a real business is getting over the feelings of inadequacy, the nagging thought that you’re not capable of this. People aim too low or create goals that are too modest. But you have to have that belief to give yourself the best chance of success.

It’s counterintuitive because you have to think big and be wildly ambitious, but also practical and realistic. So you have to merge those opposing impulses — to shoot for the moon but also be honest about how you plan to get there. You need big, 10-year goals, but also be able to ask yourself, “What do I have to do this year to get one year closer to the big goal?”

People always ask me how I stay motivated, especially through the hard or scary times, when success is far from guaranteed. I say that — as harsh as it sounds — if you have to ask yourself how to stay motivated, entrepreneurship might not be for you.

Every successful entrepreneur I know just…loves it. We’re self-starters, and we live for our “why,” whatever that may be: making money, traveling, just being independent, adding an incredible solution to the world — whatever your “why” is. No external motivation is necessary.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

For team communication and project management, we use Basecamp and Slack. We use Shopify for all things e-commerce, like our WebinarNinja swag store. For payment processing, we use Stripe. For Customer Support, we use Intercom. We also use Jira.

But more important than any of those apps is our procedures; the SOPs and our team’s ability to execute them are what make our engine run smoothly.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I try to read 50 books a year, so it’s hard to pick one or two. But for me, the most empowering books are biographies. I love Shoe Dog, the autobiography of Phil Knight, who founded Nike. I loved Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk. I even find inspiration in non-business biographies, like Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall.

Outside of biographies, nothing beats a good mindset book. My favorites include Anything You Want by Derek Sivers and Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

For podcasts, I love Business Wars and How I Built This, but I’m also fascinated by comedic podcasts, the kind that explores how those kinds of minds work. I particularly love Kevin Hart and his podcast.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Everyone has a different path in business, so we should be skeptical of one-size-fits-all advice. But if I had to share the most important thing, I’d say this: learn. Never stop learning. Be insatiable for knowledge and information. Keep reading and reading, take courses, go to conferences, and join mastermind groups. Just keep the fire of your intellect fed, so that you can be a more flexible, adaptive entrepreneur.

When it comes to the actual brass tacks of starting and running your business, just remember to prioritize action. The number one thing that kills new businesses is “analysis paralysis.” I see would-be entrepreneurs think and plan themselves to death when they should be building that Minimum Viable Product, getting that feedback, getting those reps in.

That’s how you succeed — by doing. You’ll make it because of that process, not because of a magic product.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Yes, we are! We’re looking for a backend engineer and a UX/UI designer. As WebinarNinja and CourseNinja grow, we’ll need to deepen our talent pool even further.

Fortunately, our team is some of the easiest, most fun people to work with. You can see our open positions at webinarninja.com/jobs.

Where can we go to learn more?

Head to Website.

We have loads of blog posts, guides, videos, and more for anyone who wants to learn how to monetize their unique knowledge and expertise — even if they’re not ready to try our software yet. And of course, you can subscribe to The $100 MBA Show on your favorite podcast app.