MBA1464 Are You Willing to Redo It All?
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
Podcast episode (The $100 MBA Show) hosted by Omar Zenhom discussing the value of redoing and iterating products based on customer feedback. Uses examples: Sonic the Hedgehog (animation redesign after negative audience response) and Omar's own transition from a failed 'DIY webinar guide' to creating Webinar Ninja. Includes practical advice to review products regularly, ask customers for feedback, and dedicate time for iterative improvements. Interspersed with multiple sponsor ad reads.
Questions this episode answers
$65 million
$35 million
April 2014
Two sales (one chargeback, one friend purchase)
Chapters
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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show.
Because your business doesn't grow by accident.
That'S why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a company business training and community online. And in today's lesson we discuss are you willing to redo it all? Sometimes you build a business, you build a product and you put it out in the world and it just fails. It doesn't resonate with the audience. Many of us just give up on this business idea rather than saying hey, I need to redo this, I need to implement it in a different way based on the feedback I got. One of the best things about failure is that you hear from people, you get a reaction, you find out what's not working. This is your blueprint to make it work. In today's episode I'm going to share with you real life examples in media as well as examples from my own business where when things fail, what you can learn and how you can redo it and be successful on the second go round. So much to learn in this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start with a prime example. When you decide to redo things in your business, redo your project. How it could pay off. In the recent motion picture release of Sonic the Hedgehog, a movie that cost $65 million to produce, it features a Lister, Jim Carrey, and millions more has been spent on marketing. But about six months ago, they screened the film to a live audience. They want to get some feedback. They want to find out how well this is going to do in the box office. A couple things happened. Number one, the film absolutely bombed. And it wasn't because of the story or the acting. It was. It was because of the animation. In fact, somebody actually filmed clips and got screenshots of this film when they screened it and spread it all over social media and the Twittersphere and the blogosphere blew up, there was outrage to how Sonic the Hedgehog, the character was designed. People were saying, it's too lifelike, it doesn't look like the original Sonic. And what a waste of an opportunity. Now, remember, they invested $95 million to make this movie. And in the screening, they find out. People are outraged. They get out of the screening and they see that the Internet is turned against them. People can't stand the way Sonic looks. At this point, the producers of the film had to make a choice. Ignore the critics and roll with the movie as is, or say, hey, we need to rethink this. We need to kind of make sure this film is a success and take the criticism seriously. In fact, it cost Paramount, who produced the film, $35 million to make these corrections, to make these edits to the animations and Sonic. This was a huge risk they took to listen to the feedback and say, hey, we're going to dump another $35 million to get this right. But it paid off. The movie just got released last week, and it's breaking all kinds of records. So why do I share this story? Well, there's a pivotal time in your business or in the development of your product where you need to decide, do I reinvest and improve the product based on feedback? Do I redo things, even though it's going to cost me a whole bunch of money, a whole bunch of time? What Paramount did is they decided, hey, instead of trying to double down or dig our heels on a product that didn't get rave reviews, let's take this opportunity. We have six months to get it right. Yes, we're going to invest more money, but we're probably going to lose more money if we just insist on rolling with the movie as is. But more importantly, when asked, the director, Jeff Fowler, Said we would be doing a injustice to the fan base of Sonic the Hedgehog if we got this wrong. We have one shot to get this right, and we got to do what's right for the fans. This is somebody who's putting the customer first, understanding that the customer is the person that pays the bills. They're the ones that are going to make or break your business. So you got to please them. You got to make sure you're delivering something that they actually want and need. Also, I want to share a story from my own business where I had to redo things altogether. I actually had to do this a few times before we started our webinar software company back in 2014, webinar ninja, we actually released a course called the DIY webinar guide. And this was a course on how to put together your own webinar using various tools like Google Hangouts at the time and email marketing software and video hosting software and landing page software and how to put it all together and Frankenstein it together to run a webinar. We thought, hey, that's what we do every day, right? To run a webinar. How can we make it easy on other people? Well, let's create a guide to show them how to put it together. We put this guide out in the world and it totally flopped. We got two sales, and one of the sales was a chargeback. That means somebody called their credit card company and said, I want a refund. The other sale was actually from a friend and a friend of the show, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire, who just basically bought it to support our work. We quickly had to make a decision. Hey, this is obviously not something that people want. How can we redo this so we can make sure we deliver what people want? So we learned from the experience and said, hey, people actually don't want to do the work. They want a tool that does it for them. Enter Webinar Ninja, our webinar software. We started with a very small beta version and we released it in April 2014. And the rest is history. Well, technically it is, but throughout the history, we had to reiterate the software and get better and better and improve upon it based on customer feedback. We still do this today. All our customer feedback is what informs our roadmap for webinar ninja in 2020 and beyond. So listening to your customers, finding out what they want, and improving your product based on that, iterating and improving, this is essential in today's marketplace. You can't live in a vacuum. Even Apple, who's known for just kind of doing its own thing and saying, hey, you're going to love whatever we put out there. They listen to feedback and they their keyboard on the MacBook Pros and used the old keyboards back in 2015 with the butterfly mechanism because their customers said, hey, we want the old keyboard. This new one we don't love so much. But the question is, are you willing to go back to the drawing board and redo things? A lot of us don't make that decision. We say, hey, let's just keep on selling it. Let me lower the price, let me add some bonuses and not owning up to the fact that, hey, the product is not what it needs to be. I need to redo things. The problem is, is that often we have this feeling of sunk costs or what's called the sunk cost fallacy where we put in so much into something. We feel like, hey, I put in all this stuff. I put all this time, effort, money, let me just keep going in this direction because I put in so much into that investment not understanding that, okay, that investment's great, but it's time to reinvest now and redo things. And don't deny the actual criticism, the actual feedback you're getting from customers.
Okay? Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.
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I want you to take a few minutes today and think about the products or services that you offer. When's the last time you have improved those products iterated on those products? Have you improved that online course? You put out a couple years ago? Have you added some new downloadables or reshot a couple of videos so they're all are up to date? What about a service? Are you improving the process your customer goes through to get their end result? Have you improved your website? Whether it's design or the content that's on it, or even just the sales copy on your homepage, iteration allows your company to grow because you're not stagnant. You're improving. You're trying new things. And guess what? Your audiences notice people that visit your website. They'll notice when there's something new. They'll see that you're actually trying and innovating and you're not stagnant. Your customers that bought that product and are getting updates, they're going to say, hey, this person actually cares and is investing in the product they already bought and therefore I'm going to be interested in buying more from you. Business is ever evolving. You got to keep on improving. I'm a true believer that in business and in life you're either growing or you're dying. There's no Stacy, there's no staying the same. So make sure you're always improving and are willing to go back and redo some things. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter MBA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you like to use to listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode as soon as it releases. It also gives you access to over 1400 episodes in our archives and the only way to get access to those is to hit subscribe to do that right now. Also, if you're interested in growing your business, getting more leads, getting more sales via webinars, I'm running a live workshop that I personally will be teaching on over at Webinar Ninja. Check it out. Webinar ninja.com workshop. Register for free and I'll see you there. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes we feel there's so much on our plate, there's so much to do with our business. We're trying to get more sales, trying to get more customers that there's no time to really revisit and improve. You can simply just dedicate one day a month and not even the whole day, just a few hours, three or four hours, and you can just make it a day. You can make it a Wednesday and call it Redo Wednesdays and maybe you'll redo some things, maybe you'll improve things and maybe not. But the point is that you have to review them to review your products and services and see if there's places where you can make some incremental changes and improvements. Don't know what to improve? Ask your customers. Look at your exit surveys. Give them a survey. Look at your reviews online, look at your reviews on social. Find out how you can improve and do it. Your customers will thank you for it. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything even though I ordered the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.
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