How I Made My First Million Dollars (And The Steps So You Can Too)

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Most people show you the highlight reel of hitting $1 million. They make it sound like it's an overnight success. It wasn't for me. For 5 years, Webinar Ninja, the software company I founded, was stuck at $400,000. Same ceiling every single year. And I kept thinking it was a marketing problem. It wasn't. So today I'm going to give you the real story, not the highlight reel. I'm going to give you my honest version, my honest story, including the 5 years it took to get there. Listen, getting to $1 million in revenue is no easy feat and it doesn't happen by accident. By the end of the video, you're going to see why it isn't just about working harder or spending more on ads. It's about 3 essential bolts that I needed to tighten, I needed to take responsibility for so that I can finally reach that million-dollar mark in revenue in 2019. Once you apply these 3 shifts, your path to 7 figures starts to become inevitable. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Before I get into the how, I wanted to give you the honest picture of where I was starting at with Webinar Ninja. For 5 long years, from 2014 to 2019, my business was doing between $300,000 and $400,000 in revenue per year. It was doing it consistently, but I was just hitting this ceiling every year, same range, same ceiling, $400,000. And the uncomfortable truth about that number is $300,000 to $400,000 in revenue is where a lot of people get stuck. And I'm gonna tell you why. It's because when you hit that revenue, You are starting to make some pretty decent profit and it's enough for you to live very comfortably in life. It's easy for you to just get comfortable. And that comfort, that very specific level of comfort is where most entrepreneurs just get stuck. They just can't grow. The real truth is, is that they don't have a burning enough reason to. The bills are paid, the vacations are taken. Life is good. It's good. So what happens is, is that the business just plateaus. And by the way, what I learned is that business never stays the same. You're either going up or you're going down. So if you think it's plateauing, it's most likely slipping downwards. And I was right there, right in the middle of it, going up and down, up and down for 5 years with my software company, Webinar Ninja. And what changed for me was not some sort of new marketing strategy or some sort of new hack I was doing with ads. None of that. I got real about 3 fundamental things in my business that needed fixing. I can't wait to share with you what those are and what we did to fix them. Now, in 2014, we launched our software company, Webinar Ninja, and the idea was very simple. We wanted to empower creators, teachers, online entrepreneurs to sell through the power of webinars. You know, at the time, anyone who wanted to run a webinar, it was really hard. They had to stitch it together and Frankenstein it with a whole bunch of pieces of software, separate tools. And you needed like landing page software to promote it. You need the email marketing software to communicate with your audience. You needed video hosting software for your content, you know, video streaming software. You needed a replay software. There's a whole bunch of chat software. There's so much involved. It's like 7, 8 different softwares in one. And most people didn't want to do this because it was just so much can go wrong. And there was so much to kind of juggle. Now you gotta remember, this is before Zoom existed. For most business owners, our target audience, the tech stack was just overwhelming and it was super expensive and it was complicated. And if one thing broke, the whole thing fell apart. Our product, our business Webinar Ninja, saw the gap in the market. We built a platform that handled everything from them, from registration pages, confirmation pages, the webinar page itself, the streaming software, the recording. We'd send out the recording. We had pre-written emails for them, follow-up emails, replays went out. Everything was seamless. You can go from, I want to run a webinar to I'm live running the webinar in literally 10 seconds flat. Seriously, the market really needed it bad. So we had a good solution to a really painful problem. So why didn't we hit $1 million in the first year? Easy, because having a good idea is not the same thing as having a great business. Let me say that again. A good idea is not the same thing as a great business. We had the right product in the right market at the right time. The timing was perfect, and we were still leaving millions of dollars on the table every single year. Looking back, it came down to the 3 things I'm about to share with you. These 3 things changed everything, and hitting $1 million was like rolling a boulder down the hill. A lot less effort. The first thing we had to fix, the first thing we had to really focus on is product polish. Our product worked, but working and exceptional are very different things. You can go get a meal anywhere, but having an exceptional meal is a different experience, one that you can't help but tell other people about. With our software, the user interface in the beginning was a little clunky. It wasn't ugly, but it wasn't beautiful either. There were bugs. Now, there weren't catastrophic bugs, but there were some annoying bugs that still needed to be ironed out in some edge cases. What else? The user experience, the UX. It wasn't just intuitive. It wasn't just seamless. As soon as someone jumps in, they know exactly what to do. Now, remember, we were a self-funded company, no VC money. We didn't have like this humongous engineering team. We had a good solid team and we were doing our best, but our best at that stage wasn't good enough to inspire the kind of loyalty and word of mouth that drives explosive growth. Okay? You need really strong word of mouth. And where does word of mouth come from? It comes from having a remarkable product. When a product is so good, people can't help but talk about it. And this is what I learned about product polish. Cleaning up your product, whatever it is, doesn't have to be software. It could be any kind of product or any kind of experience of your product. People don't buy what the product does. They buy how it makes them feel. When a customer uses your product or uses the experience of buying your product, like on your website, and it feels smooth and it feels intuitive and it's beautiful, that feeling is the product. When it feels clunky, when it feels buggy, when it feels unreliable, the best marketing in the world will not save you because those people will leave. Hopefully they'll leave quietly without giving you some horrible review online. So we made the decision to invest aggressively. In making our product rock solid. Fewer bugs, like zero bugs, better UI and fast performance. We stopped chasing new features, which was very hard because people are asking for features. We focused on making the existing ones outstanding and the difference in customer retention after that investment was not subtle. People stopped leaving and they stayed for longer, gave us more revenue, and therefore we were able to reinvest in the business and hire exceptional talent. Listen, I didn't invent this. I learned this from Apple. Apple, if you notice, they're kind of the last people to do anything in the tech world, and they do it better than anybody else. They take their time and they focus on what's important. Their products are bug-free, you know, for the most part. When's the last time you've seen a bug using an Apple product? Rarely. Super rare, right? And one of the things that we adopted that Apple adopted is they write for the test. What does that mean? So in software, there's a little bit of geeking out here. You can create something called a unit test where you test your code to make sure that it functions properly and doesn't break the system and there's no bugs. So the best way to do this is to actually write the test first, then write the code. So we started doing that. Now the problem is, is that that takes twice as long to write code than just to write the code with no unit test. But when you ship that code and you ship your product, it's polished, it's clean, it's rock solid, it works. We hired some of the best UX/UI designers in the world to build our interface. There was so much time and thought involved about every click, about every navigation menu, about every single thing that the customer experienced throughout any touchpoint in their experience with our product. It made it faster. We made our code more efficient so it processed faster. We improved our server technology so that if at any point we need to expand the servers, it was easily done. We basically said we're going pro and we need to start acting like the pros so that we can earn pro money. Spring is a great time to reset. And if you've been putting off cleaning up the messier parts of your business, now's the time. Streamlining your communications is one of the quickest and easiest upgrades you can make. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. QWO is built for how modern teams work. That's why more than 90,000 businesses from solo operators to growing teams rely on QWO to stay connected, professional, and consistently reachable. They say the best ability is availability, so let's make sure we're always available for our customers, and that's why QWO is amazing. QWO works wherever you are, right from an app on your phone or your computer, and lets you keep your existing number. Add new numbers or teammates in minutes, sync your CRM, and rely on seamless routing and call flows as your business scales. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try QWO for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to qwo.com/mba. That's qwo.com/mba. No missed calls, no missed customers. This episode of the $100 MBA Show is brought to you by Booking.com. If you're looking to grow your vacation rental business, this is the place to be. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world, and for good reason. Since 2010, they've helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. But here's the thing, most vacation rental hosts don't even realize they can list their properties on Booking.com. And if you're not on the platform, your rental is basically invisible to millions of Booking.com travelers worldwide. After all, they can't book what they can't see, right? I book all my travel, personal and business, through Booking.com, and it's for good reason. I love their Genius program. So because I'm loyal and I use Booking.com, I'm a Genius Level 3. Yeah, I say it with pride because it gets me the best prices. I also love the fact that they give you all the details about all the hotels or the apartments that you're booking, so I know exactly what I'm getting before I check in. Does the place have a gym? Does it have a hair dryer? Does it have a fridge? What about a washing machine? I know because the listing is always accurate, and their app is easy to use. So when I'm dead tired after a long flight and I'm trying to check into my accommodation, it's super simple. Just pull up my booking and show it to the host. So if your vacation rental isn't listed on Booking.com, it could be invisible to millions of travelers searching the platform. Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to Booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen, get booked on Booking.com. All right. Second thing we fixed in our business that propelled us to $1 million in revenue is something a lot of people forget about, and that's customer service. Customer service. Is your competitive weapon. It's the thing that really differentiated us from our competition. Most companies, they treat customer service as a cost that they need to minimize. It's an afterthought. We treated customer service as our biggest competitive advantage, like I mentioned, and as a feature of our product. We would be maniacal when it came to training our customer service agents. We need to make sure that they're highly trained, that they're able to give unique answers to every customer. We had a rule: no scripted answers, because every customer is unique and they want to be heard. And that decision to focus on customer service and make sure it's remarkable is what differentiated us from our competition. I can't tell you how many customers we had that left us because maybe they felt our service was a little bit too expensive, which is a problem I don't think is a problem because were just not for you. They would go to the competition and about a month or two later, they would come back to us. They would experience our customer support. They would ask questions and they would get answers 48 hours later. Uh, something like sometimes 3, 4, 5 days later. That's ridiculous. They came back to us because they were spoiled with us. We had a response time of under 60 seconds. All right. Sometimes we would answer in less than 30 seconds. Whether it's chat or email. And by the way, customer service is not just when something goes wrong, right? It's the reason why people sign up in the first place. You know, a lot of people, they ask questions and they chat with a representative, they send an email about the product, about their pricing, about something, right? And how they're treated in that conversation is the reason why they buy. It's the reason why they trust you. I used to tell our customer support team every time we met every single week, I said, Guys, you are at the front lines of our business. Whatever the customer experiences with you is our brand, is their impression of us. So you are basically our biggest marketers. And I'm telling you right now, in our space, the customer service was horrible. Horrible. I'm talking about cookie-cutter scripted responses, some boring ticket system where if you don't have the ticket number, we don't know who you are. No, I know who you are. I got your email. We had a sophisticated system where you knew exactly who they are. We knew exactly what the conversation they had. Many people can work on the same ticket. And one of the things that we did is that even when the ticket was resolved, even when the customer got the solution they're looking for and they're happy, we would follow up with them a day or two later and say, hey, how's everything going? We just want to make sure that everything is good and you're happy. They would be so surprised that we actually sent them an email or sent them a message. Uh, just checking up on them. We decided to just go the opposite direction of what everybody else was doing, giving you a lame experience, a half-ass experience when it comes to customer service. So if you want to level up your customer service, you can just steal the 3 rules that we applied in our team. Here they are. Now, this is if you want to go absolutely pro and be known for your customer service. Rule number 1, we were 24/7, 365. Never off. Our customers always got a response. So you gotta remember, we had live webinar software. So if something was, you know, hard for them to do, or they didn't understand how to do a feature while they're on the webinar, they need to speak to somebody any time of the day, any day of the week, doesn't matter. Listen, it's not Easter for everybody in the world. Okay? It's not, you know, whatever holiday you observe in your country, everywhere else in the world. So we knew this and needed to make sure our customers knew we had their back. Second thing we did is we had no bots, no canned responses. You spoke to a person. You can't imagine how rare this is when it comes to software companies. Customers were genuinely shocked the first time they reached out to us at 11 PM on a Sunday in a chat on the website and got a real person. A real— people ask, are you a real person? Like, yeah, my name is so-and-so, right? Every single response, our customer team members had to be written specifically for the customer. They had to read exactly what they said and they had to acknowledge it and they had to answer it as a real person. Nicole, my co-founder, was the head of operations. So she looked after— we used to do QA for all our customer service conversations. We used to do spot checks and make sure, hey, you're trying to answer a question they didn't ask. Answer the question they asked. We would train our team members to make sure they understood Hey, do you understand what they're asking here? Ask them if you fully understand, repeat the question back to them. I know that sounds basic, but it's not common. Most customer service, even today, even today, is a search and a copy and paste from a help article. We refuse to let that happen. Third rule that we had to implement superior customer service is response time needed to be quick. Slow customer service is not customer service. We had a response time under a minute, like I mentioned, under 60 seconds. Our average response time sometimes were under 30 seconds. When a customer opened up a chat on our website or emailed us, they heard back before they had time to get frustrated, before it started to fester. That speed changes the entire emotional experience for the customer. Instead of feeling like a burden, they felt like a priority. They felt like, hey, they are special because guess what? They were. Customers are very special to a business. One of the things I used to tell my whole team, and I said a little bit, you know, tongue in cheek, but I was serious and they understood I was serious, is that if we don't have customers, we all don't have jobs, including myself, you know? And that's just the truth. The truth is, is that your customers are your biggest stakeholders. And in our case, they were our only stakeholders because we didn't have any investors. And the result was customers stayed for longer. We had longer retention. We had people upgrading to other plans and giving us more LTV, lifetime value per customer. Customers again, they would— that left us came back because they realized why the cheaper option is cheaper. Because once you experience business class, economy is hard to go back to. Okay, so make sure your customer service is business class for your customers. If you're finding this episode valuable in any way, I highly encourage you to subscribe to the show because I got an upcoming episode that I'm working on that I got to tell you about. It's titled, Can You Run Two Businesses at Once Successfully? I did this for over a decade. I ran two businesses at the same time. I'm going to give you the truth. I'm going to give you the trade-offs, the things that you have to look out for when you're trying to run two businesses, and can you actually do it successfully? You'll be pretty surprised what I have to say. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode when it drops. Now, the third fix we did to our business, the third bolt we tightened so that we can hit $1 million in revenue is getting our economics right. One of the things that people don't talk about enough is that business is math. Business is finance. If you are telling yourself, I'm not a math person, I'm not a finance person, you better become one, or you got to find somebody who's really good at it. And pay them well so they take care of you. But in my heart of hearts, I'm telling you, become one because it's so critical. The money and the numbers are so critical that you should have an understanding of how to make sure your business is economically viable. And if you do this right, it might be one of the biggest upsides that you can do to your business. When we launched Webinar Ninja, our pricing, our pricing was frankly not really thought out. I was trying to be cute and simple and, you know, kind of startup-y, and I oversimplified it. We had two plans, two plans, and there was a big gap between them, a gap not only in price but in what you get in those plans, which meant customers either paid the low amount and we were undercharging them, or the jump to the next tier felt too steep and they just stayed where they were. They never upgraded. And we were leaving a lot of money on the table, not because of bad marketing, not because of bad sales, but because of bad packaging. Now, I didn't know anything about this word packaging and what it meant, but luckily we brought in one of the best SaaS pricing experts in the world, Patrick Campbell. Patrick Campbell is the founder of ProfitWell, which is a company that later sold for over $200 million, which was all about pricing and business metrics and all that stuff. But we literally just brought him on as a consultant and he introduced us to a concept I'm going to share with you for free. Right after I pay the money, I'm going to just give it to you for free. He shared a concept that really changed how I really think about pricing forever. Right. And it's just changed my mind and fixed my brain when it came to pricing. And it's a term that I learned called customer willingness to buy. The idea is that there are different types of people in the world, different types of customers, and they have different needs and they have different budgets and they have different levels of value they're trying to pull out of your product. Some people are willing to buy certain features and some people are not depending on their needs. And your pricing should reflect that. Not one size fits all. Now listen, of course you don't want to overcomplicate. A confused mind never buys, but you want to make sure that you're serving your customers with the right pricing model. A thoughtful structure on your pricing page with tiers, with features, with add-ons that allow each customer to pay exactly what they want and what they need. And no more than that. That's you serving the customer. So we rebuilt our entire pricing model with more tiers, with smarter add-ons for people that value those add-ons and those, those features. We pulled some of those things out of some of the tiers and just have people pay for them if they need it. We had clear logical steps to upgrade. So it made sense and the pricing made sense for people as they upgrade. And guess what happened? Revenue per customer went up. Retention— how long the customer stayed with us— went up. But the glitches— they both happened at the same time. That's not common, where customers are spending more and staying with you longer. Usually when you raise prices, you lose some customers. But when you structure pricing so that customers feel like they're only paying for exactly what they use and value, they feel like they're being treated fairly. They feel like you're not trying to pull the rug from under them and scam them. And when people feel like they're being treated fairly, they stay longer. They don't mind paying every single month or year because they feel like it's fair. Let me show you some math because this is where it gets really powerful. Say you have 100 customers paying you $100 a month. That's $10,000 in monthly revenue. Now imagine your smarter pricing structure raises the average spend to $230 per customer. Now customers are buying more, but only the things that they need. Same 100 customers. Now you're making $23,000 a month, more than double without a single new customer. And as you grow your customer base on top of that high average, the compounding is extraordinary. This is how you grow with less headache. And by the way, it makes it easier for you to invest in other parts of your business when you're making more revenue and more profit. You, are not on razor-thin margins anymore. You have a little bit of room to run some ads. You have a little bit of room to hire somebody who can write you better copy or improve your product or be a, you know, a ninja customer service agent. Now you're building a viable, scalable business. Here's the thing I want you to sit with. Honestly, notice what I didn't mention. What did I not mention today? What was not in the 3 things that you should really focus on and improve your business to hit $1 million. I didn't say marketing. I didn't say sales. I didn't say ads. I didn't say funnels. Because when you have product-market fit, when you've already proven that your business has traction, you're making a few hundred thousand dollars in sales and you're plateauing. You don't have a marketing problem. You don't have a sales problem. What I found is that you most likely have a product, service, and pricing problem. People ignore these things because they seem too simple or they seem like it's not going to make a difference, but it makes a world of a difference. And the reason why you are stuck is that by some miracle you have gotten traction because you're solving a big enough pain for people to pay you for it, but your foundation underneath is kind of cracked, right? Your product, your service, your pricing. These are foundational things that you really need to just go next level with. And the reason why marketing's not your problem is because it's actually a waste of money if you send more traffic to a leaky bucket, right? Your foundation is not strong enough so that you can retain these customers. Fix the bucket first. And when you fix all three, the business doesn't just grow, it compounds. Word of mouth accelerates, churn drops to the floor, lifetime value went up. Listen, I can't tell you how fast our churn dropped when we fixed these 3 problems. Churn, by the way, is the percentage of customers leaving you every single month. So for example, if your churn is in double digits, like 10%, that's a serious problem. 10, 11, 12, 13%, which is not uncommon for a lot of businesses, which means that every time you bring in customers, 13, 14, 15, whatever your churn is, 15%, let's say leave. You gotta work super hard to just replace those people and get more people. The first month we started to implement these things, we went from double-digit churn to single-digit churn in one month. And then when they all were kicking into gear, we got down to very low single-digit churn, 2-3%. Crazy. Now I wanna tell you something about hitting that number, that million-dollar mark that really surprised me. I thought it was gonna feel like some sort of arrival. I made it. I'm a real entrepreneur. Like, I finally did it. It didn't feel like that. It actually felt like a door opened, like, welcome to the next level. Because once you cross $1 million, your whole relationship of what's possible changes. You stop asking, can I do this? Can I do that? And you start asking, how far can I go? If I made $1 million in revenue this year, why not $3 million? And then you're like, well, $3 million is possible. Why not $10 million? Let's go 8 figures. And you start seeing business like a video game. You're not trying to beat anyone. You're just trying to see how many levels you can go. And it's actually not about money anymore. It becomes a challenge in itself. It becomes this challenge of like, how many more people I can serve? How many more people can I impact? You start thinking, maybe I can be a little bit more profitable. In software and digital products, margins could be like 60%, 70%, 80%, even 90%. You know, even if it's just 70% margins, $1 million is $700,000 in profit. That is a level of reinvestment capital that changes everything. You can reinvest in your business and double your business easily when you have that kind of profit. Why? Because like I said, you can hire the best people. You don't have to nickel and dime and try to find a diamond in the rough that doesn't exist. You can invest in real marketing that actually has longevity. I'm talking about creating media. And creating content, you can build a product that always is working perfectly and actually fulfills the outcome the customer's looking for every single time. In my experience, going from $1 million to $3 million in revenue is 10 times easier than going from $300,000 to $1 million. Not because it just gets magically easier. It's because you finally have enough profit, enough fuel to do it properly. To make the right hires, to make the right investments in your business. So let's go. It's time for you to roll up your sleeves. Let's get an action plan going. What does this mean for your business right now? How do you approach it? Don't try to fix all 3 at once. Start, start one of them this quarter. This quarter, audit your product, whatever you sell— software, physical product, a service, a coaching program. The product experience includes everything, by the way, from the moment they discover you and your website to the moment they get the result. To the moment they buy from you again, over and over. I'm talking about the website, the checkout, the onboarding, the core experience of your product, all of it. Walk through your own product as a customer and ask yourself honestly, is this delightful? Is it genuinely delightful to experience your product? Not adequate, not good enough. Is it actually delightful? Does it put a smile on their face? Does it compel them to tell other people? Because delightful is what gets talked about. The next quarter, start rebuilding your customer service. Think about what's the absolute best customer service experience you had and try to replicate that in your own business. Next quarter, fix your economics. Most business owners think that pricing is like once and done. No, pricing is an ongoing experiment. You're doing a lot of experiments to find out what works for your customer and your business. Now I want to be clear about something. I hinted about this, but I want to make sure I'm super clear about it so you don't misunderstand. A million dollars in revenue is not a million dollars in profit. Your margins matter enormously in business. I talk about this all the time. Margins are not the most important thing in your business. It's the only thing. It's the only thing that matters. How much money you keep. A business doing $1 million in revenue with 20% margins is a very different business that's doing 70% margins. Okay. The number on the top line is not the whole story, meaning how much revenue they make. It's really about how much money they keep. So make sure that your economics make sense and that you are keeping as much cash as possible with every transaction. Before I go, I want to leave you with this: 5 years. That's how long it took me to go from launch to $1 million in revenue. And looking back, I don't regret a single year of it because I learned a ton in those hardships. It taught me what is important and what's not so important when it comes to scaling your business. And again, those 3 things: the product, the service, the pricing. Once you get all 3 right, the business doesn't just hit 7 figures, it just accelerates past it. And that's just been my experience. If you have good product-market fit, which you should have if you're making a few hundred thousand dollars already, and even if you're not making a few hundred thousand dollars, even if you're just making ends meet right now, you have some traction, you're making some sales, Build a solid foundation by focusing on those 3 things so you don't make the mistakes I did and you don't take 5 years. You do it in a year. If this episode gave you a clear picture about what's holding you back and what to do about it, I really recommend an episode that we just published recently called The Beginner's Guide for Building a Digital Product That Actually Sells. If you want to build a product for your business that lives on the internet, that gives you high margins, then this is the episode for you. Just find it on whatever app you're using right now. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. Hey Fidelity! What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs. Hmm. That's music to my ears. 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