AI Can Build Your Product. It Can't Build Your Business.
In this episode Omar Zenhom explains that while AI can dramatically speed up product development and help founders achieve product‑market fit quickly, it cannot replace the work required to build a sustainable business. He stresses that a product is only one half of a company; the other half consists of experience, finance, marketing, sales, and leadership. Drawing on his ten‑year experience running Webinar Ninja (later acquired by ProProfs), Omar illustrates how the focus shifts after the first 100‑200 customers from engineering to operations, security, customer support, and team building. He outlines a four‑pillar framework (experience, finance, marketing, sales) that feeds into leadership, and describes the founder’s transition from a hands‑on operator to an entrepreneur who creates systems, hires talent, and delegates. Practical advice includes a hiring roadmap (technical lead, support, finance, marketing, sales), the importance of customer interviews and cancellation surveys, and the need for repeatable processes and clear job descriptions. Throughout, he warns against the illusion that AI removes all bottlenecks and urges founders to adopt an investor mindset, focusing on scalable systems, profit, and sustainable growth.
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AI can help you build a product fast, but it can also trick you into thinking that you built a business. Just because I can make a cup of coffee doesn't mean I can run a successful cafe. AI can help you build the thing, but it can't run the company for you. If you're just focused on building the product, you're ignoring the other half, the harder half of running a business, like sales, marketing, finance, leadership, recruitment, scale. Today I'm gonna show you how AI can speed up the process of creating a product, but more importantly, I'm gonna show you how to build a business around that product. Let's go and figure this out. Listen, it's no secret that AI is super powerful. It can get you started and it can get you started fast. You can get product-market fit very quickly, meaning that you can create a product and understand how to create a product for the right audience. But it's not a substitute to building a business. If you take anything out of today's episode, it's the fact that a product is not the same as a business. A business makes money. A product solves a problem. You gotta combine the two so that you actually have a successful company on your hands. A lot of founders now with AI think that by removing the engineering bottleneck, it removes all the bottlenecks. No, the creation of the software is just one part of the equation of a successful business. A lot of people, they just get obsessed with the idea, the product that they're trying to build, and they get too emotionally attached to doing everything themselves. That is not entrepreneurship. That is self-employment. People that obsess on the product lose sight on what's most important. The customer. Without customers, you have no business. So as you're getting started, as you're building your product, understand that this is just the first step. The product serves the customer and therefore it has to change with the customer's needs. But more importantly, as you start getting customers, especially once you pass the 100 customer mark, you're going to have to start building an operation that supports those customers. That operation, it's called a business. If you want long-term success with your business, you're going to need to invest in things like customer support, infrastructure, security, sales, team building, recruitment, scaling your product. How do I know this? Well, I ran a software company for 10 years before we got acquired by ProProfs. Webinar Ninja, my software company, is a great example of what changes once the product has product-market fit. Once you have a product that people want and you have your first 100, 200, 300 customers. As soon as we started to grow, We had to start focusing on different things beyond the product, like prioritizing security infrastructure so that when people run their webinars and there's 1,000 people that visit that webinar, the thing doesn't crash. The— our software scales with volume. This then changed the way we actually wrote the code, how we engineered the product. It changed how we fix bugs. It changed how we prioritize features. With more customers, you have more questions, which means you need to start building out your customer support system. Systems and team. Once you have customers, you want to make sure they're successful. So we had a customer success team to make sure that people are actually running webinars and getting a win from the product. When you make money, you got to do something with that money. How do you reinvest it? How do you make sure you're paying your bills? How do you make sure that you're paying your tax? All that stuff, right? You need a finance team. You as a leader have to find the right people to do all this stuff, which is recruitment. You got to lead these people when they join your team and make sure that they know what they're doing. They know what winning looks like in your company. The best way I can show you what I mean by all of this when it comes to your product and how you need to support your product with the business around it is through an illustration. So let me get on the whiteboard and show you exactly what I mean. Let's say this is your product. In order for you to win in business, you're going to need to support your product with 4 major things in your business. The first thing is experience. What do I mean by experience? Well, it's the experience that your customers are having, okay? The experience that they're having. So what does this mean? This means like customer support, customer success. It also means the experience they're having with the app itself. So is it fast? Is it responsive? Does it work on mobile? Does it scale when you have a lot of customers on that platform, right? Is it reliable? That's all part of experience. The next part is finance. Okay. In order for your product to be successful, it needs money, right? You need to invest into all the things we talked about. You need to make sure that you're profitable, that you're charging the right amount so that you're actually making money. You need to make sure that you're able to charge the right amount depending on the customer and their needs. So that means add-on products and tiers and all kinds of things like that. The next thing is marketing. If people don't know you exist, you don't have anybody to sell the product to. So you need to make sure that you're marketing your business. So this means a marketing strategy, right? It means that you are creating content. That means that you're actually talking to the customer in their language. And the 4th thing is sales. Now, I separate sales and marketing because these are separate things. People could be aware of you, but they're not sure how to actually buy or if buying it's right for them. So there has to be some sort of transaction, there's gotta be some sort of process where you take 'em from just being aware of your business and being aware of your product and buying your product. Some people in software, they run a trial. Some people, they do webinars to sell their products and services. Some people sell on the phone or they sell via chat. There's gotta be some sort of sales process. Now, all of these 4 things, lead to one thing, and that is leadership. You need to make time to be the leader. You need to be able to recruit people to work on your sales team, to run your marketing, to make sure your finances are in order and your bills are paid, that you're having a great experience for your customers in your product and your service, in your customer support. How's that all going to happen? How are you going to scale the business? This is where you belong. Not in the trenches of the product, right? You're going to need to be able to graduate out of the product phase into the leadership phase so that all of this works seamlessly and you have a business that wins. So now that I showed you how to have a successful business, before you start coding or vibe coding, you need to step back for a second. You need to start shifting your thinking from being an operator and thinking like an entrepreneur, like an investor in your own business. Building with the assumption that your business will be successful and it needs to scale. Scale is just a fancy word to say that you're going to need some people to help you out. You're going to need some teammates and you're going to need some systems for those teammates to follow. Why? Because you're not supposed to be doing all the work. OK? As an entrepreneur, your job is to create a system, to create an asset that has value so that you can then hire people to do the work for you. The best way I can illustrate this is that you are the conductor Of a symphony. You're not playing every instrument. Okay? It's very hard for you to have a successful piece of music if you're jumping around and playing the violin a little bit, then going to the trombone, then you're at the triangle, then you're doing the drums. No, your job is to find the best musicians possible so that you can make beautiful music. And the same thing goes with business. If you don't have this in the back of your mind right now, from the start, bad habits will build. You will stay trapped in your business, in your operations. Everything is going to be relying on you. You will be the bottleneck. You're going to delay hiring for too long. You're going to make everything harder on yourself instead of understanding that your job is to make your life easy and finding the right people. A lot of people are saying, well, I don't have the money to do this. Well, if you have a successful product and you're able to make sure the economics work for you, then that is going to be proof. You're going to make enough money for you to make hires. Okay. This is a lot of people understand is that if you can't afford hiring somebody in your business, then the economics of your business are probably not great. OK, you're going to need to have enough margin so that you can step away from the day-to-day. When you do have an entrepreneur mindset, when you get started, you start asking the right questions like, who's going to be customer-facing? Who's going to take care of customers and run my webinars? How should I make sure that the things on my plate get less and less every single month? How do I increase revenue and make hires that are directly correlated to revenue? These are the things you're going to start thinking about because you're thinking, hey, I'm not going to do this by myself. I got to get other people to do it. It's not all on me. When you start thinking like this, you start thinking about the most important stuff. Like, hey, I need these people. Well, how do I find these people? Well, I gotta find them on these sites or in these groups. And then once I find them, what do I do with them? Well, I gotta show them what their job is. Well, how do I do that? Well, I gotta create a job description. I gotta make sure that they have a system to follow when they join the first day. They have a procedure that they go through, and you start thinking about how do I actually put the right pieces of the puzzles together to make sure my business runs? A lot of people when they Think of this, they get kind of overwhelmed. And I'm here to tell you that, listen, you just take it step by step, one hire at a time. You don't need to hire a million people at once. You can just hire one person at a time and then wait so you can afford the next one and the next one and the next one. The point is, is that you are in the mindset that this is the process you're going through. It's not just you do everything forever. To sum up this point, you want to shift from, how do I do it all? To how can I build something that can outgrow me, that doesn't require me anymore? Step 2, let's build a product, then validate if it works for our customers. A lot of people think that sales proves demand, and that could be partially true, but AI helps us speed up things and helps us test things very quickly, very fast. So I can put out a product and then get a response and then change that product to see if I get a different response. Now, this whole process is a lot easier if you understand who you're serving and what problem you think you're solving. Because that will allow you to build a product around that idea. OK? But you have to understand that you not only have to solve a problem, you got to solve the whole problem so that customers don't feel like your solution is a waste of money. They want to make sure that your product, your app, your whatever actually is going to solve the problem enough for them to part ways with their money. That point I just made is only done when you speak to real customers. That means When you get your first customers using your product, paying for your product, it's imperative that you go and speak to them, whether on a Zoom call, a phone call. You gotta communicate with customers to find out what they like about your product, what they don't like about your product, so that you can iterate and improve quickly. This is incredibly important, especially with your paid customers who actually were willing to pay for your product. They're people that are actually the ones that you wanna understand the most, 'cause you wanna find more people just like them. 'Cause they're the ones who are gonna allow your business to grow. Now, one of the things that we learned at Webinar Ninja is we not only learned it when they bought the product, we bought it, we reached out to them, we talked to them on a Zoom call, we documented the whole call, and we learned who they are and what they do so we could find more people like that. We also did this when they canceled. So when they canceled our software, they did a cancellation survey. It was a very quick and easy survey, and they were able to do it themselves right inside of the app. But this was imperative so that you can understand why people are canceling. Are they canceling because they don't have a feature? that they're looking for? We don't have a feature that they need in the product? The funny thing is that sometimes they would say that, but we had the feature, which told us something else, which means that that feature is not obvious, that we didn't make it easy for them to find it in the app. Are they canceling because of price? Are they canceling because the customer support was not what they expected? Whatever it might be, you need to understand so that you know what to shore up, what to improve in your product, in your business, so that your customer has a better experience, whether that customer comes back to you or the next customer that buys from you. The whole point of these validation loops is that the reality of life and business is that you have a limited amount of time. You have a limited amount of resources. So you want to make sure that you're using your time and resources on the right things, right? That you're not wasting your time building things that people don't want. You're not fixing problems that don't exist. You're not, you know, trying to impress your customers with features that they never even asked for. So you need to understand exactly where to put your time and money and effort. And the best way to do that is to talk to your customers. And a lot of people try to avoid this, but there's no way around this. You need to do this. And if you need some help with this, there's a great book that you can follow. It has scripts for you for these conversations. It's called Deploy Empathy. Michelle Hansen, the author of this book, is the expert when it comes to customer interviews. So if you want the cheat sheet, go ahead and buy that book. I'm hoping that this episode's been helpful so far. I want you to subscribe to the show because we have an upcoming episode that we're working on that I don't want you to miss. It's the 5 books that will make you more sales. These are my 5 recommended books that I've read That changed the trajectory of my ability to sell more of my product or service. Subscribe so you don't miss that very important episode. Step 3 is to shift from building a product to building a business. Once you start getting traction, once you have product-market fit, which means your product is actually serving a market, it's serving customers. And I always say this is probably around the 100 to 200 customer mark. Once you hit that level, your job changes. You're no longer the product creator. You are not in charge of the day-to-day. Your priority becomes the operation of the business, making sure your business is going to run smoothly to serve your customers. You're almost like the number one fan of the customer. You're the ambassador, you're the evangelist of the customer. You need to make sure that you have the right people to serve the people that matter most, your customers. So you're transitioning from, can I build this product, to can I run a successful business? This is where a lot of founders get stuck. They get stuck in the creation phase. They just stay creators and never become entrepreneurs. When your business grows, the needs of the business changes. And you need to understand that because at this stage, your business needs you to show up in a different way. You need to start thinking about prioritization, operations, customers and understanding your customers very well. Scale, growth, recruitment, marketing, sales. You start looking a little bit bigger beyond the product itself. And if you want to be really successful in business, you can't continue to wear all the hats. You need to start giving up some hats to some other people that are really good at that thing, at wearing that hat. And it's kind of tough in the beginning because you think that you're great at everything. But I'm gonna tell you a little secret. I learned the hard way that I'm actually not as good as I thought I was. I was just better than the people that I could afford to hire. Once I started to make some revenue and make some profit and the business started to grow, I started opening my budget up to hiring people that are a little bit more expensive, but are way better at whatever I thought I was good at. And of course, there's things that you're not good at and you know you're not good at it and you need experts to come and shore up those parts of your business. Let me give a prime example. When I was running Webinar Ninja, our software company, When customers started to use our product and start running live webinars and they had, you know, hundreds and thousands of people showing up to this webinar, I had to start prioritizing other things like uptime and security and reliability and hackers and all that kind of stuff, right? Why? Because the software is meant to serve the customer and their needs. What do they need? They need the software to work. They need the live webinar to continue to run despite of how many people are on the webinar. And if I don't serve them in that moment, they're going to lose trust with me, right? I have done a disservice with my customer because maybe I prioritize a feature rather than making sure that this is a secure platform that can scale with the volume of people that are going to the webinar. You see what I mean? The needs are changing now, and I need to make sure that I serve those needs as a leader. And that's where that experience piece I talked about on the whiteboard. Once the product is working, my job is to make sure that it can continue to work and I can prove that this business can deliver consistently To the customer. And what I found is, as you're starting to go past the product phase and start building a business, your number one job as the founder of the company is recruitment. You need to find top talent and people with a great attitude that fit in your culture to be able to fulfill the needs of your customers and to continue to grow your business. I gave this analogy before, but it's worth sharing again. At the start, you are scoring all the points on the team, on a basketball team, for example, right? You're, you're the main scorer. You're the reason why they're winning. But then And then you start becoming the coach of the team, where you coordinate these players and you give them a strategy. But then you go beyond that and you become the manager of the team. And then you go beyond that and become the owner of the team, where you start making decisions based on the success of the whole team. So this might be things like the stadium, might be the food that you serve so the fans are happy. It could be ticket sales, all kinds of things that have nothing to do with putting the ball in the basket. OK? In the beginning, you're creating the product, you're creating the features, but to have a successful business, you're going to also have to think about how do I deal with refunds? Right? How do I make sure that customers are leaving positive reviews on Google? All these kinds of things are important for the product to be successful, but not only just the product, your whole business, so that you're able to continue to serve your customers. So to help you with this process, here are my tips when it comes to the first hires you need to make. So if you're running a software company, you're going to need somebody technical, like a CTO or somebody who's like the head of engineering or somebody that can make sure your code is clean. So that's the most critical thing, because without that, the product doesn't exist and therefore you're not able to serve your customers. That's all in the experience bucket we talked about on the whiteboard. What else is in the experience bucket? Well, customer support. Customer support is a great way to make sure your customers are being served, whether they have a question as a customer or even before they become a customer so that they can actually buy. Sometimes there's simple questions that just need a quick answer so they can make a buying decision. Literally, like, do you take American Express or something instead of just Visa and MasterCard? That could be stopping somebody from buying, and then they just forget about you because things get busy. I've talked about this before. Business is about money, right? So do you have an eye on the finances, your profits, your expenses, making sure your bills are paid, making sure that you're, uh, you have the budget to know, hey, can I afford my next hire? Can I afford to buy them computers? Can I afford a marketing campaign? You have to have visibility in all that. You might need an expert for that. Maybe a fractional CFO, or maybe you need— Just an account that you can call on call or a bookkeeper to make sure everything is in order. My next hire would be in marketing, making sure that the product is being marketed and that people understand who you are. And if you have really good marketing, it's going to help you sell easier because people are already convinced of the solution. And then lastly, sales. You got to make sure that you can convert them from a prospect, from somebody who's interested to an actual buyer. You need to be able to have a sales process and somebody to go through that process with the customer. If you're a little bit murky on this, let me give you an example. When we ran Webinar Ninja, we had a process where people would be marketed to, to sign up for trial. Then once they're on trial, they're now having to become a customer. How do we make sure that they become a customer during that trial period? They had 14 days. Well, we ran a webinar with them so they can see all the best features of the product. We understood their needs and show them how the product served those needs. We also had a customer success person which set up their first webinar because we saw statistically when somebody created and ran their first webinar, they saw the value of the product and stuck around or were more likely to convert into a customer past trial. This is a system and it requires people to fulfill that system to make sure that the sale actually happens. This is what a successful business beyond a product looks like at scale. I can't do this all myself. So you got to start building and start hiring based on those needs I just mentioned. So to wrap up, AI can help you build and iterate fast, especially in the early days, so you can build the product that people actually want. But it can't help you with things like decision-making, priorities, liability, growth, reputation. All that stuff is on your shoulders. You need to be the leader and you need to be the person that's in charge of making sure that gets done, whether by you or somebody else, obviously somebody else as you're scaling. From the start, make sure you have that founder mindset. Understand that you cannot do everything at scale. So you need to start building a team. And even the first step of building a team is building the systems around that team. So when somebody joins your team, you can give them a system and say, hey, this is how you do this part of the business. This is how you do marketing. This is how you do sales. This is how finance is done. So that way you can easily hand it over to them and train them. Talk to your customers, understand what their needs are so that you can build based on that. Understand that your job is not only to create a great product, but a great experience for your customers. And that means building a great business. Creating a product with AI is just the start. That's the beginning. That's the first step. But then you need to start building that business around it to serve the customers, to serve the product, and to make you some money. My job here on the podcast is to make sure that you're successful. And this is why I'm giving you the truth. The truth is, is that Businesses are about making a profit so that you can, one, invest back into the product and make a better product, but also so that you can put some money back in your pocket so it's worth your while. So it's sustainable. So you can continue to do this business. So it doesn't feel like a chore and feel like slavery, right? It feels like, hey, I can actually have an enjoyable life because the benefits outweigh the work I have to do. If this episode showed you that building a product isn't the same as building a business, Awesome. We have another episode I want you to check out. It's in our back catalog. You could just scroll up on whatever app you're using, and it's all about how to build a profitable SaaS in 7 days using AI. So that first step we're talking about, if you're wondering how do you actually do this, how do you build a product with AI? Well, I show you step by step. I had an experiment where I locked myself in a hotel room and built a fully fledged competitive app that was ready to take on customers. In just 7 days. Go ahead and check it out if you want to continue learning. Thanks so much for being part of the show and being here at the end of the episode. You're my kind of person. Keep moving forward, keep building, and understand your job is not to do everything. Your job is to be the leader, to, to see yourself as an investor in your own business. How can you make the right investments so that you are successful? I'll check you in the next one.
