Melissa wasn't so much like, I wanted to build this, I was just wishing someone else would. And I just knew this problem so well. And one day I just asked myself, like, if someone else did this first, how would I feel? And that was the day I incorporated this company.
Hello and welcome to the Metacast behind the scenes podcast where my co-host Arnab and I talk about how we build a startup. And we do this in a building public style. We talk about everything that goes into building a startup, we discuss how we make decisions, what tools we use. And also we just tend to ramble about a bunch of different stuff. Every now and then we have guests. And today on our show, we have Melissa Kwan, who is a three times bootstrapper,
start-upper, if it's the right term. She has been doing startups for 13 years. She has had an acquisition and she's currently a CEO and co-founder of eWebinar startup. Hey, Melissa, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So Melissa, would you like to introduce yourself a little bit in your own words? Like how would you describe yourself?
Yeah, so I've been in startups for 13 years. I had two previous companies, both in real estate technology. My last company I ran for five years, and that was acquired in 2019. A couple months after that, I started eWebinar to solve a problem that I personally live with for many years as a bootstrapper, which is doing the same webinar over and over again for things like demos, training, onboarding.
I do hundreds of webinars every single month without actually being in front of a camera to do that live. So this company was incorporated in 2019. The product's been live for about three years, and we just crossed a million AR. Oh, nice. Congrats.
Nice, yeah, that's awesome, yeah. Thank you.
So I wanted to go a little bit back to learn a bit about your background. What did you study and how did you get into starting a company? How did that happen?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that those two things are related. I mean, I just kind of went to university like anybody else. Never really liked school, but you know, was always good at it. But I took like the most general thing I could in university, which is, I got a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, got a minor in Commerce. But I actually think university is less, at least for me, about education and more about building on your social skills and, you know, learning about teamwork and learning about yourself and things like that. So, yeah, I actually just came out of university
and worked as a receptionist for a real estate development company. And my parents were really pissed off about that because they did not pay for my school so I could be a receptionist. But at that point, I wanted to build buildings. I wanted to be a real estate developer. That never happened. One thing led to another. The last job that I left was at SAP, where I was a large enterprise sales associate inside sales. So that's really where I learned how to sell. So even though I've had a lot of odd jobs, like my primary job,
my primary vocation is sales and business development. And I think getting into entrepreneurship was just kind of a natural progression of my career. I've always wanted to do my own thing, never really had a background. My parents are not entrepreneurs. So I was always curious about what it meant to have my own thing. And around, you know, when I was 27, I felt like it was time for me to at least try, like 100% of my time to do something. So that was the beginning of my career.
I was the first company. And that's why I kind of pieced together my experience in real estate and my experience in selling technology and just kind of put the two and two together.
Many people struggle with quitting their corporate job and starting something new because of all of the risk, all of the uncertainty, the financial ache, and stop getting a paycheck when you start a company. How did that go for you? Because you were 27, you weren't just out of college. How did that go?
Yeah, I think the people that are scared to do that are people that just aren't entrepreneurs. You can't love security and want to be a risk taker. Those two things do not mix. And that's why people in corporate can never work for startups and people in startups can never work for corporate, because what you fundamentally care about are different things. Right? If you're like, I don't want to quit my job because I love my paycheck, I love security and I love predictability,
then the things you value is security, which is totally fine. But you can't trick yourself into thinking, well, but I also want my own thing because you're going to lose all those things. You're not going to have security, you're not going to have any money, you're going to spend all of your savings like I did plus more because I also took out massive loans for my first and second company. So how did I do that? For me, it wasn't hard. I just didn't value any of those
things. Also, I was 27, I didn't have any dependents. I still don't have any dependents because I don't have children. And for me, money was important and it still is, but it's not something I put weight to in a way that someone that cares about security might. And that's kind of interesting, right? Because I think a lot of people that I see that are super successful, their relationship with money is what a third party would feel like is not there,
if that makes sense, right? These people are willing to spend on themselves and education experiences. They're not trying to save every dollar. So someone else might look at them and think, oh, that person's successful. They don't care about money. They're just spending it all. But I actually think their relationship with money is better than someone with more of a lack
mentality. So they're willing to invest, willing to spend because they know where the next paycheck is coming from, or they know how to make it back.
They're investing into themselves or into their lives basically.
Yeah, and I think that's a fundamental difference between like a lack mentality, which is like, I need to save every dollar because I don't know where it's coming from, versus I'm willing to spend even on the most lavish experiences because I believe in my ability to earn. So I think for me, of course, I like nice things. That's why I've started this company. Let's not joke around, right? And let's be honest, but I never valued, I guess, money in the sense that my peers would.
I wasn't saving up for a mortgage or like, you know, that white picket fence dream was like never really what I wanted. So I really wanted to just do something that made me happy, which was not work for a company and not have to manage up and not have to show up at 6am because I was actually living in Vancouver, but my region was on East Coast and I'm not a morning person.
So I basically had to get up at 5.30am to walk across the street and my office was as close as possible to get to work at like 5.55am. That was actually a relief for me and not so much a burden.
So how did you start that first company? Did you have co-founders? You mentioned you took a massive loan to start it. How did that come about?
Melissa Kwan, CEO of eWebinar Inc. I started with contractors. I'm a believer in contractors, not employees. And one of those contractors eventually became my co-founder for my first company and then my second. But I really thought I could just kind of do it on my own. And I was also very naive and didn't really have an idea of what coding meant. Like I thought coding was just like this one thing.
typing colorful text on the screen, that's what it is, right?
Yeah, I just thought that if you give someone a project, then it would come back exactly as you specced it. So all of those things were just kind of learned over time. But I was lucky enough that one of those contractors became my friend and then eventually became my co-founder. But I actually have a different co-founder to eWebinar, who is also my life partner.
Did you learn coding along the way by yourself? No.
I have a huge respect for what coders do. I am not a coder myself. I'm a salesperson. So I'm everything except for code. I wish I could understand it a bit more, but I guess you can't win them all. But I did, and I still continue to try to have an understanding for why things have to be built a certain way or why things take a long time. Because in the beginning, you just have no idea. So when you're like, okay, I want to move a button from here to here. Oh,
it's going to take a week. It's like, why is it going to take a week? Why can't you just move?
Just drag and drop it.
Yeah, why does this thing not work? Like what happened? It was working yesterday, right? So I'm continuing to try to have more understanding and respect for that. Also, because I do most of our own customer support. Like not stuff that's too technical, but I have to understand those conversations in order to pass it to a developer. So I'm not dragging them away from their work. It's just a process of improvement and learning.
So am I right to assume that basically from the very early days, because you didn't code yourself, and it was a technology product, you had to rely on other people to actually build the product. So like you wouldn't be able to bring it to the market just by yourself. You had to have people and you had to pay them because they were contractors. Yeah. Did you pay them equity or pure cash? How did you think about that?
I just paid them with cash. I think equity is like toothpaste, right? Once you get it out of the tube, you can't put it back. I had experiences in the past where we traded DevWork for equity, and it ended up just biting me in the ass when we were selling the company. So I think when people think, oh, it's just 0.2%, or it's just 2%, or whatever, right? Like, nothing matters until you need documents signed, and your company needs to be sold. Because everybody is a shareholder.
Every shareholder needs to sign off. I don't care if you have a drag-along clause. You have to take someone to court, usually depending on your country, unless they give you power of attorney right off the gate. But usually you don't think about those things when you're just passing out equity here and there. You don't realize that anything your company needs needs to be signed off by every shareholder. And that is the thing that kind of came back to bite me in the ass. And that's why I'm like, I will never ever trade Work for Equity, especially
if you believe your company's going to go somewhere. Like, if you believe that your company is going to be worth $5 million, why would you give away 1%? Why wouldn't you just pay them? Which is probably why I spent all that cash and then I had to take out a loan. But in the end, it was for the better. Because I learned those lessons, everyone that has any equity and options today in eWebinar are people I know are on my side, people who have contributed, people who have earned that equity and
those options or is a family and friend that actually put in money and not just traded three months of work, which is kind of what happened in the past.
So basically what you're saying, if it's a transactional relationship, like you need three months of their work, you wouldn't give away equity, right? But if it's somebody who will be along with you for a ride for many years, and you know this person very well, then you would consider giving equity.
Yeah, I mean, if it's a co-founder, then you obviously have some sort of equity split. Everybody has a vesting schedule, right? Like everything has to be documented as if you are a venture funded company. Those documents are there to protect the business, to protect you and your co-founder. And even though I'm a bootstrapper, and I don't have any institutional investors, we still structure our company for that option. Right? I'm not going to have any like messy cap table or no shareholder agreements or things like that, right? Everything is done through a lawyer.
In case we ever want to sell very quickly, or if we change our mind, and we want a significant investment, we don't want to go back and fix things, right? Those things are very awkward conversations. I wouldn't say like, okay, we give equity if we only like trust that person, like number one, they have to have put in money in the company. Like we don't have any institutional investors, but like we have family and friends investors, and myself and my co-founder, who's my life partner, both wrote the first check, right? So all of that is documented as if we are an accredited company.
We are an accredited investor. And the only person who has options in our company is someone who was with me from day one. And just to give you an idea of contribution, it's not like I'm a great coder or I'm a great PM, so I deserve this. And you need to give me equity so that I will work for you. That doesn't work with me. I think with other companies, maybe it does. But even if I was going to join a startup, it doesn't matter if you give me 5%, zero dollars or 5% is still zero.
Right? So that's kind of how I advise my friends to like evaluate startup opportunities as well. When they're like, oh, this startup wants me to join them and they'll give me 1%. It's like, well, is that dilutable? Because all equity is dilutable. Also, like, do you actually believe that in five to 10 years that this 1%, which is probably going to end up being like 0.75 or whatnot, is going to yield you something, right? So in a lot of cases, it's better to take salary and demand that salary in
instead of saying, oh, give me this X percent and then I'll take a 75% hit on my salary. So the only person who actually has options is someone who was with me from day one, who worked for us on weekends and evenings while having a full-time job elsewhere, and then took a 50% pay cut to join us two years ago because he really believed that he can make a contribution. He's shown that he can make a contribution and we literally cannot live without him. And I know he's not leaving. So that's the only person that has options in our company right now.
And everyone else, we just pay them what they're worth.
In that early phase, what motivates these people to work for this startup? Without the equity, you're probably not paying them. Or what are you paying them?
I pay them market rate. I pay them market rate where they are. And that's important because we outsource our entire team. Like I can't compete in North America or Europe because we just were bootstrapped. But we hire people in Vietnam, in Ukraine, that's where our dev team is. And we pay them market rate for where they are. And we even give them bonuses at the end of the year, way above what their other clients give them. And we also motivate them with the project.
We're mission driven. So they love what we're doing. They're invested in what we're doing. They love the product. They love seeing it grow. And I guess, I don't know, I've never been a developer, but I'm thinking that developers are like artists. So when someone comes in and uses the product and thinks it's amazing, they feel successful and fulfilled. So we have a mentions channel in our Slack. We always take screenshots of people saying how great the software is, how much it's helped them. And everyone can see that.
So the people on the back end are not cut off from what happens on the front lines. And that's how we let them know, like, hey, you're actually making an impact. And then for a lot of our other contractors, we hire them only on an as needed basis. Like our developers are the only people who are full time. And of course, myself, our COO and my co-founder. But everyone else like that helps in marketing. It could be content writing. Right. It could be designers. We don't need these people full time. So we hire them on an as needed basis.
But because we only need them for a certain set of hours, we're able to pay them market rate. Like our designer is a thousand bucks a day, but he doesn't just work for us. And he works for many other clients that pays him a thousand bucks a day. So we never negotiate on what someone believed their worth because we're willing to pay them what they're worth. Or we just go somewhere else. Or maybe we work on an arrangement where they don't work for us full time and they contribute a certain amount.
But that allows us the flexibility of working with talent anywhere in the world and not have to worry about people looking for a job back at Amazon or Facebook or some other cool startup that just got a big raise.
Let's say when you work with people in Ukraine, for example, because it's kind of closer to home for me. Do you work with companies who give you basically people like a team? Or do you work with individuals and hire them specifically as contractors? Like is there a proxy in between?
We always work with a development shop when it comes to developers specifically. Everyone else we hire direct, but I feel like with developers, like even though we're a remote environment, we're a remote team, it's really difficult for a single developer that is not that experienced to motivate themselves. I feel like developers like want to be challenged. They want to be in a group. They want to exchange ideas. That's one thing just for retention. But the other thing is we have to be very, very careful.
We are not good with hiring and managing emotions and having hard conversations. We love building products, but we're not people managers. And having a proxy in between allows us to switch people out when it doesn't work. And with our Vietnam team, we probably trial and tested multiple people here and there before we found the team that we loved for the first year.
Within that agency, within the people from the top.
Within that agency. Yeah. And also there's cultural differences where we don't understand. Like we come from a culture where everything's communicated, but that's not the same elsewhere. So all these companies come with like maybe a PM, for example, and they are the ones that we have the relationship with. And they're the ones that are able to communicate certain things to their team in person, in their language, which I feel like for developers, it's more important than like other roles.
How do you go about finding these agencies?
Well, we only work through referrals, you know, because it's just talented so hard. And like every day I'm getting like 20 in-mails from LinkedIn on how their development shop has the best developers. If every development shop has the best developers, nobody would be hiring. So for Vietnam, I just got a bunch of referrals from friends who have worked with dev shops in Vietnam. And we actually flew to Ho Chi Minh and met with these development shop owners in person. And we picked one that we felt like was the most effective way to do it.
And we got a lot of people from the market that somehow started recruiting from Ukraine like years ago. And that's where all their developers are. And they have an office there. And of course, because of the current situation, we want to support them as much as we can. And that's also through a referral as well. But I feel like if you're working with Eastern European developers or Ukrainian developers, the process is much easier because people are actually senior. If you're hiring from Asia, it's much easier.
Their idea of senior is not the same as like our idea of senior. So that takes a lot more trial and error. But like I said, there are definitely some gems in there.
So when you work with those shops on projects, do they become more like an extension of your team and you pretty much manage things in a very agile fashion? Or do you have to give them specs and then they code against the specs? What's your process there?
They don't work on projects, right? So we only work with development shops where they are an extension of our team. So you would say like, I'm looking for someone with five years experience or 10 years experience. This is the expertise I'm looking for. And they are part of our team full time. A lot of these shops actually don't really do part time work because it's not beneficial for them. And it's like context switching is fairly hard, unless it's like basic tech support. Maybe they'll do like part time, but even then it doesn't really work.
But we prefer working that way because then we can have a team we can grow with that really understands the product, not just from a technological perspective, but from a business perspective. I'm a believer that you have to understand why you're building what you're building in order for you to build something intentionally. Right. It's not like, oh, here's a spec, do it. Like I want to be able to. And that's why we have that mentions channel to show our team on the back end how people are benefiting from the software so they can
think beyond the code that they're writing. And by working with them as an extension of our team, they work with our process instead of the other way around. And that's actually the only type of shop that we look for.
So let's go back to the first company and then the second one. Take us through briefly that journey and how that led you into eWebinar.
Yeah, so my first company was supposed to be a product, but because we needed the money and everyone wanted to customize, we said yes to everybody. And we very quickly became an agency. So it was like a real estate building marketing product. So we were like the iPad interactive brochure for a new build building. And instead of like the coffee table book, we were like the iPad downloadable app. But everybody wanted their app to be customized, because
when you're selling a building, you're selling a dream and every dream needs to be unique. So very quickly, we were building one-off apps for everyone. And that was just a tough, like anyone that's built an agency before knows that's a very, very tough journey. You're constantly making sales, chasing invoices, you give them the app, and then they don't want to pay you. So that was basically like four years of my life. But I got to know real estate tech and going to real estate conferences and traveling more to New York. That's where like a lot of real estate developers are. And I just wanted to build
a product that we sold to everyone instead of like one-off apps. So that company kind of bridged into the second one, which became an open house check-in product. So when you walk into an open house, instead of signing in on a piece of paper, we were the iPad check-in. And we sold that as an enterprise product to brokerages and franchises. And that company was why I needed to do all these repetitive demos, training, onboarding. As soon as you sign up a company, you need to make sure that their agents
adopt your product. Otherwise they're not going to continue paying you. So I was this person that was doing like sometimes eight back-to-back trainings that were exactly the same for different companies and their agents who never showed up. Right. So a hundred people sign up, but like 10 people would show up and they would drop off before the training ends and they would want you to do it again and again and again. So I always wondered why there wasn't a product that would turn a video into a webinar that was engaging and interactive that didn't lose
that two-way communication. Like that didn't deliver a worse experience. In fact, would deliver even a better experience because it's asynchronous to replace a person. So that's kind of exactly what eWebinar does. And after I sold that company, I didn't sell for retirement level money. It was okay. Everybody made money and it was life-changing, but it wasn't an amount that I could just live with without moving to Thailand. So I started the eWebinar two months after that company was acquired to solve that specific
problem that I knew other companies were also living with. So either you had a huge support team, which most companies can't have, or you're making concessions, right? You're putting a training video on a knowledge base or on YouTube and then nobody watches it. Because especially when it comes to like demoing something, people want to join a webinar, right? It's more interactive. There's communication. So that's what eWebinar is. We help people scale themselves so they can grow their business without being there 24 seven. And we deliver an
automated webinar experience that is actually even better than live because the video quality is higher. You can get it at any time. And we've got a chat system where you can hop into Respond in real time or Respond later by email, just like a Zendesk or an Intercom.
So basically the video stream is from the recording, so it's sort of non-interactive in the sense that you can't ask the presenter a question in real time. You can through chat. But like if it's a recording, the recording will just go on.
Well, you can't ask them through voice, but you can text, which is how people like to communicate anyway. And we've got interactive elements that you can build in, so you can put in clickable hotspots, quizzes, questions, deliver help articles. So it feels more like two-way interactive TV and not like hopping into a Zoom where someone's just talking at you. So in many ways, it's actually more engaging, more interactive than a live webinar, which people don't actually show up for.
The average attendance rate for all of our customers is 65%. Anyone that's run a webinar before knows that that's exceptionally high. We have some companies that offer only on-demand and their attendance rate is 95%.
So when did you decide that this is after you sold the second company is when you decided that this is a like viable product that you want to work on? Or was this already brewing and were you already thinking about building this?
I guess I wasn't really thinking about building it. I wish someone else would build it so it could solve my pain. So for a few years when I was doing those repetitive webinars, I would say like, I think every quarter I would just Google evergreen webinar, automated webinar, on-demand webinar to see what else is out there. And there were certainly things that were out there that were just never built to the extent that I wanted.
There were a lot of solutions out there, but they were like GeoCities to WordPress kind of thing. It was just like a little software that was used to trick people into thinking it was live when it's not like, I didn't want software that tricks people. I wanted like the Netflix of webinars that any company would be proud of using. And automated webinars before us were just not that way. So the engagement was low also.
I mean, it just looked bad. I used one of those before, but I don't want to look like a scammy software. We spend so much time building an incredible software for our real estate customers. I don't want them to come in and in their training to look poor. So I guess it wasn't so much like I wanted to build this. I was just wishing someone else would. And I guess after my last company was sold, I needed to get into something else.
And this was just one thing that kept bubbling at the top of my head. And I just knew this problem so well. I knew all the features that I wanted that were missing from existing solutions. And one day I just asked myself, if someone else did this first, before me, in the way that I envisioned, how would I feel? And that was the day I incorporated this company. Because I couldn't stand the idea that I was thinking about this for so long. And maybe someone else would do it first.
I mean, I had a bunch of different ideas, but this was the one that kept coming up. And I would say, kept me up at night.
And this time you had your co-founder like immediately ready to jump on at the same time.
No, I was actually so sick of managing developers, I didn't want a co-founder. So I wanted to hire a dev shop and not have a co-founder and have them do all the tech and product-related stuff so I could just focus on the business. It turns out that a tech company without a tech lead does not work. So I spent a lot of money on a development shop that I shouldn't have in hindsight, but this is also how you learn.
And actually, David, who's my life partner, started to help code as a volunteer because nothing was working about a year into the business. And as he started coding, everything started working. So I was like, well, I've been with you for so many years, didn't know you could code. So why don't I just end that relationship with a dev shop? Because it wasn't working for both of us, right? Because they wanted to get paid on the milestone.
They didn't have the capacity to finish the project, but they were trying. Meanwhile, I wasn't getting the product that I wanted. I was spending more money. The time to market was getting delayed and delayed and delayed. So nobody was winning. And then David was coding for free. So there was three people that was losing in this equation. So I'm like, well, we need to cut off that relationship, do the right thing.
And then we need to work out an agreement, an arrangement where you have a fair equity split where you feel like you're invested, but also understanding that you're the CTO, not the CEO, and you're coming in a year later. So we had that conversation as much as we could in a non-awkward manner. And we figured out something that worked. So David has been my co-founder ever since.
We just had a conversation like this with Arnab and I, we are co-founders, we know each other for like almost a decade at this point. We just have a 50-50 split, but we almost hired someone, so we're just waiting for the paperwork to be signed.
Not almost about to hire!
Yeah, so I think the awkward part of the conversation is just like how much less equity they get compared to the founder who was there from day one.
Like, it's been a year.
For us, it's been almost a year. So I wonder if you could share any insight or any specifics about how that conversation went, how you were thinking, did you have any framework as to how to calculate the equity and what was the awkwardness in those difficult parts?
The awkwardness is he's also my life partner.
So was he your life partner before you had this conversation?
Yeah, like five years in. I've been with them for like eight years now. So I mean, I think anytime you talk about money, right, it's always awkward. And especially like when you talk about equity split, it's like, well, how much are you going to contribute? Everyone thinks they're going to contribute differently than they actually do, I think. And I've had 10 years of co-founding businesses with another person or other people. And the biggest thing that I regret is splitting
it down the middle, right? Like I am the CEO, the other person is the CTO. We have very different positions. I built the business and they built the product. Those two are not the same thing. So luckily, David had been with me for enough years to see what I was able to contribute for my previous companies and why I am so against splitting equity down the middle. Businesses are not democracies. You can't make decisions when you own half, like how are you going to vote?
So just to give you any idea of perspective, I came up with the idea. I hired every person. I put in the first financial investment. I raised all the family and friends funding. I made all of our first sales, probably all our second sales. I decide which features go into the product based on how much money I think we can make. I build all the relationships. That's the difference. If we run out of money, I'm going to be the one to go get it. So I do most of the
marketing. So that's kind of the conversation that I had also with David is, but he already knew that. But I think it's really important when you have those conversations to say, here are the things I'm going to do. What are you going to do? And how much equity do you need in order for you to feel invested? I always throw that conversation out to the other person and then see how far our expectations are. But he threw a number out there. I thought it was fair.
That was that. So it was awkward in the beginning, but also it made it very easy.
So if you and David were to start a brand new company from the very beginning and let's say, you know, you were just talking about ideas and sort of riffing off each other. So it's like, it's not even clear whose idea it was. And nothing has been done yet. And everybody puts equal amount of money and effort. Everybody's going to work full time. How do you have this conversation about equity? Same. Would you still not want it to be split in the middle? Yeah. How would you justify this for something that doesn't exist yet?
An idea is worth nothing. Somebody can come to me with an idea and just because you have an idea doesn't mean you're worth equity. I can tell you 10 ideas right now, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to make it successful.
I think that goes counter to what Ilya is asking, right? Like, how are you justifying that the person who's building it is not going to, or execute on the idea, is not going to be splitting it down the middle because nothing has been built yet.
Yeah, but a company is not its product only. A product is a percentage of the company. You can have the best product in the world and if it never sees the light of day, you're going to get zero revenue. What I'm good at is getting a product to market all the messaging, making all the connections, getting it to market, making all the sales, and also iterating it and deciding how to
iterate it so that we can make more money. So unless a co-founder that I have can build it and do at least 25% of what I do, they're not going to be worth 50% of my company. And if they're like, okay, I want to split it down the middle, then they're going to need to find another co-founder. So I think every person, every founder needs to be aware of their contribution in the company before they can have that conversation. I am extremely confident that
I can go out and get something to market in a way that a developer just can't. And that's how I'm going to justify it.
So in your eWebinar, or the one before too, right? Is the CTO a person who is involved in the product as well? Because they have...
of eWebinar.com. Back to you, Melissa.
So right now, how big is the team?
We've got, I would say, 10 full-time. I mean, everyone's a contractor, but still full-time. And then we've got, at any given time, any given month, like two to four part-time, like as-needed people that we work with.
And of these, are you the only person talking to customers? Or how is it working? Yeah, that's correct. Oh wow, okay. Basically you're figuring out where it needs to go, what are the next steps there, and kind of like laying out the roadmap and iterations, and then the team is executing on that.
Like because we're such a low cost product, we don't oftentimes talk to customers, right? Like I can request calls to my customers and they never get back to me. Right. It's very different than like selling an enterprise product. Like our product starts at 100 bucks. So the people I want to talk to don't want to give me their time, unfortunately. And the people who want to give me their time aren't paying enough for that conversation to be interesting. So we actually listen to our customers a lot through like surveys, support tickets, we can squeeze as much as we can.
When they come into our inbox, the cool thing is like everyone does support, right? So myself, my co-founder, my CEO, like we're on different time zones. So everybody hops in when they can. And so everyone has a pretty good understanding of where the product needs to go. But I think our product at this point has grown beyond our customers' imagination. If you compare us to other things that were out there before us, like we're so far beyond what they have, that everything we come up with now is new for them.
We all have ideas of where we want the product to go based on what people are asking for, their support questions and things like that. But at the end of the day, I'm the person that sets the priorities for every quarter, a lot of times based on where I think can contribute to the most revenue.
So I'm assuming that the first customers that you had were from the real estate network and connections that you had. How did you go from there? How did you go beyond the real estate market?
Yeah, so that's a good question. I wouldn't say my first customers were specifically for real estate market. I basically made a list of everybody I knew. I just went down my phone, went through my emails, made a list of everybody I knew that could potentially use this product. Yes, a lot of them were from real estate because I spent 10 years in that industry, but a lot of them were also not. So I just found every type of company, every person I've ever spoken to, ever had an email exchange,
and I just reached out to them. I did one-on-one sales outreach probably for a year, before nine months to a year, I would say, before that network ran dry. Then I also asked for referrals as well from that network. But we needed to expand beyond that just through SEO content, co-marketing, integrations, collaborations. So we're still figuring that out. I think that's the thing that keeps us all up at night. But we really just expanded through writing a lot
of content and creating content like the conversation we're having now. But we don't focus on industries. We focus on roles. So there are two very distinct roles that use our product. Either you're in sales and marketing and you're using this for lead gen, or it's post-sales customer success and you're using this for training and onboarding. It doesn't really go
beyond that. That's the two paths that we focus on. But I would say leveraging other people's audiences through integrating with their system and getting into app stores and getting other software companies to announce us as a partner, just kind of like everything builds over time, is how we initially branch out of our immediate sphere of influence.
Yeah, this is actually a good segue into the social media side of things. So I discovered you through LinkedIn. I think you have 24, 23,000 followers. I think that's last time I looked. How did you build that audience? And also, what's your strategy there for like your personal brand and what kind of role your personal brand plays into bringing customers to the company?
How did I build that? I built it very slowly. I mean, just out of luck, I had six viral posts six times in a row, once every week in the summer. So I think just that added like 12 or 13,000 followers in like a month's time, which I guess is fairly rare. But I realized that a lot of companies that are selling products in my price range had to do inbound, right? Figure out a way to get your name out there and attract people.
While SEO and content is one way that we do it, and then podcast marketing is another way we do it, I realized a lot of creators and a lot of executives and founders were actually creating a personal brand, whether it's through Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram. And I was just watching what they were doing. And I was also learning a lot from logging into LinkedIn for the first time, probably a year and a half ago. So it became this kind of microblogging website from this resume site that I used to know.
And I started following Justin Welsh. He had a $200 course on LinkedIn algorithms or LinkedIn operating systems. So I just took that and then started writing on LinkedIn about my experience bootstrapping three companies daily. So I probably wrote like four to six posts a week for, I don't know, it's been like a little under a year and a half. I've had some good success there, but it was just slowly, right? And then people start looking at what you're doing. I started also on top of that creating
resources that people were asking for. So if somebody was like, how do you project your revenue? I basically turn my projections into a template that on Google Sheets that they can duplicate, but on one of those tabs is me. And then I've got a Notion page with all my resources that I've created. And then the header and footer is me. So just trying to create value as much as possible for a group that I care about, which is Bootstrap founders. And coincidentally, Bootstrap founders are also
resource strapped, which means they're the best customers for us. So it's an indirect way of marketing the company. And I think nowadays, people care just as much about who's behind the company as the product itself. It's like, I don't want to buy that LV bag anymore. I want to buy this mission-driven, sustainable, pleather, vegan bag because these founders are behind it and there's a story. So I think we've already gone there for consumer goods. And we're also there now.
For software. And I think people care about relationships. They buy from people that they feel like they have access to. And I do the same thing. When we make a decision on software, I'm going to buy the software where I feel like the founder or the executive behind that company is accessible in case something goes wrong. I feel like I know them, even though I've only talked to them on LinkedIn comments. So that's an interesting phenomenon I'm seeing, especially in the past couple of years. And that's kind of
my goal with sharing my knowledge in social media. Number one is really wanting to share my knowledge out there. But number two is I think when you have a personal brand and when you have a personal audience, you can do anything in your life and you can have a headstart. And I'm seeing this from other creators. I don't know how they get to half a million followers, but if you get there, you can launch anything to your network, have a hundred people buy it, and that still be a pretty good business.
That's probably the last thing I ever do. But if it's not, I want to make sure that there's a built-in audience that I can also share something to in the future.
So you said there were six posts that sort of were hits, right? Have you been able to identify what kind of some patterns or characteristics of those posts that made them more successful than your other posts that you were writing?
I know for my audience, personal stories is what they engage with. I can't go out and scream some motivational quote like other people can and get like 5,000 reactions. I have to put something out there, like an idea out there or an advice out there and back it up with how I got there. So I knew this from testing different posts over the last year. The difference, I think, between
the viral ones that I've had and the previous ones is they're much longer. So I listened to a podcast about how LinkedIn does not want you to go viral because they want your content to appeal to a specific audience and that they were giving more weight to educational posts that were longer. So I actually just tried that. I maximize every single word because it's actually also very hard to write a short post. So what I do is I write what I want to write and then I spend probably
five hours cutting it down. So every one of those posts took 10 to 15 hours. I basically just write a list of things I've learned or list of ideas towards a bigger topic. I just list them out like a listicle and then I have a short story to back up every single point. I've just followed the same format over and over and it seems to work. So I think I'm going to do that until it doesn't anymore.
So when you say viral, how many impressions did it get? Do you remember?
The biggest one was a million, or like a little over a million, which is a lot of impressions that I don't have to buy ads for. But I think generally they fall around $500,000.
So how does this social media presence go back like grow back into your company and how do you track that?
I mean, I don't know. And I'm a believer that if you only do things you can measure, that you won't be doing anything at all. I think it's like having a billboard, like on the highway. I think everything is like brand building, credibility, trust building, because I'm also doing other things, right? I'm also doing like SEO content, partnership content, getting into newsletters, getting on podcasts. Eventually, people see you everywhere. And then they start to trust you. And when they want to buy something, you are at the top of mind. So that's kind of like how I think about it.
Self-reported, I think like 15% of our demos come from social media, but that's just self-reported.
Okay, that's still pretty big, yeah!
Cool. So I read your post about getting on other people's podcasts, because I think you've been a guest on like 60 podcasts or so, which is a very large number. How do you get on the people's shows? And do you still do outreach yourself? Or it's mostly inbound for you right now?
Right now it's mostly inbound. I think there's only so many podcasts you can do before you're really socially drained from it. But in the beginning, I mean, there was a customer that told me that podcast marketing really worked for them. And they hired an agency to place them in the podcast. So I tried that. And these are like agencies that charge you like 500 bucks to get placed onto a single podcast. But they all sucked. Their whole shtick was like they would place you in like top 20% of podcasts, but there are so many podcasts, the top 20% actually covers a wide
range. And when I say they were not good, they were like hosts that didn't know how to carry a conversation, or hosts that cancel last minute, or like that didn't show up, but they still charge you. And once they place you, you can't reject it. So the business model just didn't really work for me. They weren't placing me into a podcast that I liked. And I was like, well, why am I getting them to place me when I can just try to place myself? So I think I took a course. It's a course, but it's like a five page PDF on a
strategy on how to get onto podcasts that you actually like, that you actually fit into. And then I just started doing outreach. And that's how I got most of them. But now we've got people that either see me on LinkedIn or friends that have been on other podcasts that would refer me and then I would do the same. So I would say now I probably get on like 10 to 15 a month. I want to say that's like the top, like upper echelon of how much I can do.
You spend like 10 to 15 hours recording per month or outreaches per month.
No, I'm now on 10 to 15 podcasts every month.
Wow, that's a very large number.
Yeah, and if I do outreach, like now because I have like kind of a resume of podcasts as well. And by the way, it's a super easy strategy. People just don't do it. I wrote about like how to do this step by step. I have it as a featured article on my LinkedIn. My founder friends asked me how to do it. I send them the article and then nobody does it. So that's why when people are like, oh, I don't want to share my strategy. It's like, you should share it as much as possible because
you can actually look helpful and then nobody actually copies you. If I do outreach now because I have a speaker profile and I have a resume of podcasts that I've been on, I probably get seven out of 10 podcasts that I reach out to. So because I already have inbound now, I don't actually do a
lot of outreach. But I know I can if I ever wanted to. But I think any Bootstrap founders that want to figure out how to market themselves on a very low cost or like zero cost base, they should look into this podcast marketing.
How much do you repeat yourself when you are on so many podcasts? Are there any conversations that feel sort of unique versus others? I just like they ask you the same questions and just the blur of like...
It's always the same questions. I mean, there are some that are more unique, usually more like lifestyle podcasts, not like business-driven podcasts. But that's also why I don't do prep calls. When I get into a podcast and people are like, oh, let's do a 15-minute prep call, I'm like, I don't want to offend you and I want to respect your process. But here's my speaker
profile. I've done 100 of them. I just don't feel like I need a prep call. And we can do prep, like, asynchronously, but I'm not going to spend 10 to 15 minutes doing prep and then another hour on the podcast. But I also don't want to be offensive. And if they don't feel comfortable moving forward, I just reject it. I just don't have the time for that.
You mentioned how product marketing or podcast marketing is very effective, right? Can you tell us what's the kind of impact that you're seeing?
Yeah, so also self-reported, I think on any given month, 10 to 15% of our demos come from podcasts. Like they might not tell me which one, but like they get to choose. Like my first question is, how did you learn about us or how did you learn about this demo or our website? Then they get to choose an option and 10 to 15% choose podcasts every month. And those are only people who self-report, right? So I think like 50% of people we ask the question to actually respond. And also like, this is the
best and easiest way to market yourself. If you only had to talk for an hour and this thing lives forever, and some people also chop things up into snippets and then put it on YouTube, you never know when someone's going to discover this. I actually think this is one of the best assets that both sides can create, right? Not just for the attendee or the guest, but also for the host.
Right. So this is a good segue into hopefully a unique question that you didn't get asked before. You just came back from Burning Man, right? I heard about Burning Man before, but I just know that some people get into the desert and they do something there, kind of hippie stuff. I never really bothered to read about it because I'm not a big fan of events where there are more than 20 people. So I would probably never go to this kind of event myself. When you replied back
to me and said, Hey, sorry for late response. I was in the Burning Man. I'm like, okay, let me not read anything about Burning Man. So I can ask you a question from a completely outsider sort of position, right? Can you tell us what Burning Man is and why people go there and why did you go there?
I mean, that's like a massive question. I don't even know where to start. It's probably like the biggest arts and culture event that anyone in the world can go to. It's very hard to explain. That's why you should have read upon it, I think. I think most people see it as like a giant party and a lot of news reports basically frame it as a festival, but it's actually not a festival. How many people go there?
I think like 70 to 80,000. There is no money exchange. Everything is a barter system. Everything is gifted and you bring everything that you need for the week. There are certainly parties, but people bring their kids. One of the biggest camps there is Kidsville. A lot of people there don't party and they go completely sober. So to frame it as a festival is actually not fair for the event. It's got hundreds of art cars, like art installations that are just
placed throughout the desert, like just outside Reno, like in Nevada. It is the most fascinating place for nine days. A city gets built up with infrastructure, with roads, with services, and then it all comes down again. I think it's happened for probably like 30 years now. It started in someone's backyard kind of thing and it became what it is today. This year, the special thing that happened was that it rained for two days and in theory, everybody
was trapped, but they weren't really trapped. I think trapped means you want to leave and can't. Nobody was trapped. We were planning to be there for the whole week. Certain things were not operational. It was unfortunate that it rained, but I think we made the best out of it and it was still the best. Live Live
So basically just roam around randomly doing stuff.
Talk to people.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good way of describing any new experience. But yeah, I mean, it's really hard to explain. But if you're like, okay, what do you do there? Well, I don't know what don't you do there. So what
When did you first go there? What got you hooked into it? Do you go every year now?
The first and last time I went was 2019. And then we had tickets for 2020, but then the pandemic happened and then we never really got to go back. So it was interesting to go back again this year to see how things have changed, at least for us. Since 2019, we've kind of gotten more into the music community and met more people that were kind of that vibe. And since then, we also moved to Amsterdam, where the type of people that would go to Burning Man live. So it's not so much like getting hooked on the event. It's very expensive to do that.
To get there, it's definitely a journey and a trek. And just the process of getting tickets is extremely difficult. But it's one of those places where you just can't get an experience like that anywhere in the world for a week. So having seen it again, now with friends, like when we went in 2019, we didn't know anybody. It was just David and I. So it was a very different experience. And this year when we went, we had a very close group of friends around us and that completely changed the experience. And even though the weather was
bad and it was tough for a couple days, we definitely feel like we can't wait to go back. And it's something that we want to do every year.
Actually, what made you move to Amsterdam? From Canada, right?
So the last place I lived was in New York. We left New York to travel full time for three years. And we discovered Amsterdam while we were traveling, mostly because the parties were really good. So we kept going back for the parties. And eventually we're like, why do we keep going back to party when we could just live in the party? And we started meeting friends that we would consider family now. And it feels very much like home, where previous we were just kind of bouncing around. And it felt like it was the two of us.
And after we met in Amsterdam, it felt like we had a real community.
What kind of visa do you need to leave there?
I mean, David has a European passport, so he doesn't need a visa. I'm never really there for more than 90 days. So I have a Canadian passport. So I'm there as a visitor every time. But because we still mostly nomad, we still travel like nine months of the year. So we're never really anywhere for like, more than a month at a time.
Cool, so we are coming close on time and so I guess before we disband, do you have any parting thoughts or I guess any parting advice for actually people like us, right? Like we are about a year into our journey, we haven't shipped yet. Are there any things your 27 year old wish you knew when you were starting a business?
I mean, I think the biggest thing I knew, or I wish I knew what you're already doing, is I wish I started with a tech co-founder from day one. I just didn't have a concept of what it meant to build a product and how hard it would be. I think most agencies can build parts of a product and go from one to two, but not from zero to one. Building a product from zero to one takes a lot of time and trial and error. And agencies work on time and project. So you're kind of misaligned on that front, which was the reason why I
spent a lot of money that I shouldn't have in the beginning. So I would advise anyone to not go that route unless they have a strong tech lead. But other than that, I mean, I would say I do this already because I'm a profit driven founder, but most people are not, especially engineers are not. Don't spend your time building anything that you don't think is going to yield revenue from day one, especially if you're bootstrapped. You can have a great product that's really cool that you think is really cool, but nobody will pay for it.
It's better to have a product that people will pay for that's not unique, that actually replaces something that they already have, but is 10 times better. That's not blue ocean. That's like purple ocean. You'd rather be in that position than to come up with something that is blue ocean and you have to convince someone to buy it because they've never bought this thing before. So I think that's the biggest advice I can give. Especially if you're bootstrapped, never spend any time on something unless you know someone that's not going to be able to buy it.
Someone's going to pay for it from day one.
Cool. So can you recommend a book or a podcast, something that influenced you in a major way to our listeners?
Yeah, I would say read the presentation Secrets of Thieves Jobs. He didn't write it, Carmine Gallo did, but it's a book on not so much how to sell, like it is a sales book, but how to craft a presentation. It's a communication book on how to craft your presentation in a way that will close any deal. So I think a lot of times what you're saying is not what's being heard. And this is the biggest challenge with developers is they don't know how to sell. So, I mean, I guess not even
developers, like most people don't know how to sell. I was fortunate to be in a position where my first job was in sales and every job I've had since that has been in sales. But even then, reading that changed the way I structure how I sell. So every website I've built, every presentation, every pitch, every demo that I've crafted is actually according to the philosophy of that book. So if you were to not read any book ever again in your life, like business book,
you should read that one. And I think it can help you make a sale.
It's actually so interesting because some of the best books I've read in my life were about Apple. I mean business books. Insanely Simple is one of the books that just talks about building simple products. And the Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, I think it came out around 2008-2009. I think I read it, actually, back then, like almost 15 years ago. It's a great book. So where can people find you if they want to follow you, if they want to listen to what you have to say and to buy one of your products?
Yeah, so the best way to connect with me is through LinkedIn. I post daily about my experience bootstrapping three companies. So my last name is about Kwan, Melissa Kwan, K-W-A-N. And if you're curious about eWebinar, how it can help your business or yourself to get your time back, it's just ewebinar.com. There's a demo that you can join on our site where I manage the chat as well.
Melissa, it has been a great discussion. It was kind of intense. It's actually one of our more intense episodes. Great vibe, really appreciate it.
Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah, it was awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.