MBA1783 Q&A Monday: Does Online Event Sponsorship Work?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business lessons you can count on every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today I am very excited to present to you a very special episode brought to you by Dell Technologies. Today you will learn how to build a software that scales. We teamed up with Dell Technologies to bring you this incredible episode. This is part of Dell Technologies Small Business podfrends. More about that later. I'm going to share with you in today's lesson how to set up a software for long term success Long we'll discuss how to build a scalable infrastructure and team from minimal viable product to 1000 plus users and beyond. I'll be sharing my own experiences from my own software company, Webinar Ninja. What I did right, what I did wrong, and my $30,000 mistake that cost me $100 to fix. We'll talk about the important steps to set up your software for long term success as well as how not to spend so much money at the start but also be ready to grow as well as how the hardware you use in your business can make all the difference and so much more. We got a lot to cover in today's episode, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I started my software company, Webinar Ninja, back in April 2014. I just celebrated seven years of business and one of the most important steps I had to take when I got started is how to set up my software business for success, for the future, for growth, for scale. I didn't have much money to get started with. We were and are still a self funded software company. So I want to give you some really clear steps when it comes to building a software infrastructure that works for you now and later. These steps are going to help you save money, time, headaches, and it's going to get rid of the roadblocks for you to grow quickly. One of the worst things that you could do as a software founder is build something that can't scale quickly as soon as demand starts coming in. If customers are liking what you've built, you want to be able to serve them as fast as possible, whether that's 10 customers a day or 10,000 customers a day. So how do we do this? Well, there are three important steps when setting up your software. Step one is talent. A lot of people think it's technology. No, actually the number one thing you need to do is find great talent. This is not where you go cheap. We're going to talk about how you can save money later, but right now this is actually going to save you money by spending a little bit right now. And what I mean by talent is that you need experts on your team and you're going to start with one expert that's going to help you set up your software for success. For us. That expert was Taylor. Taylor set up our software and our infrastructure with aws, Amazon Web Services, but you can use any kind of cloud computing services like Microsoft Azure or DigitalOcean. Choose one that works for you and then find an engineer, a highly qualified engineer that can set you up. I'm going to walk you through what I did with Taylor so Basically, I found Taylor on upwork. He was really expensive. He was $120 an hour. And he was expensive for a reason. He was highly qualified. He was a CTO in another company and helped scale other businesses in the past. But what I got for that expensive hourly rate was expertise and speed. When somebody knows what they're doing, they're able to get the job done quickly. We had our software set up and ready to kind of deploy in less than a week. So I may have spent a couple thousand dollars that week. But I'm pretty sure if I try to shop around and find somebody who's not as much as an expert and maybe had a lower hourly rate, it would take them longer and probably more money and I would have more problems down the line because they're just not as good. So my advice is sit down with this expert. This could be a phone call, this could be a video call. The point here is, is that this is just the initial conversation where you explain to them, hey, this is where my company is at right now. This is how many customers I plan to have at launch. I want to be able to scale at this rate. Tell them your projections, they're going to ask you some questions like what technology you're using, what is your software written in, what kind of code is it written in, what's your budget, A little bit about how you're deploying this code. Like, are you the only engineer or are there other people that are going to be committing to the code and pushing it to production, pushing it to the live server? They might ask you some qa, do you want some server set up so that you have like a staging server, then a develop server, then a production server, so you have a few steps before it goes live so that you make sure you clean out any bugs before your users see the code or use the software. If all this is kind of going over your head, that's okay. This is what the experts are there for. The experts there to tell you. This is what I recommend. This is what you should set up. This is how long it's going to take. Here are the trade offs. This is why we start with talent. And I'll be honest with you, there are a lot of questions I couldn't answer that Taylor was asking me and I just said, I don't know, what do you recommend? I basically tell him what my business goals are and he's the technical expert and he says, hey, we can accomplish those goals by doing xyz. Here are your options. So not only is this expert setting up your infrastructure, but they're also a technical advisor. Taylor eventually became our full time CTO and it's a big part of our software and business today. The second step is code. Now, even if you're not a technical founder, it's important to know before you talk about infrastructure, how to make sure your software is lean and clean. There are a few tips I want to share with you. Building a practice in your software company that encourages people to be minimalists when it comes to code. If one line of code can replace three, that's better. Even if it takes twice as long to write that one line of code to figure out how to make it one line of code versus three, that's better. Because as your software starts expanding, you're adding new features, new functionality. It can easily get bloated and what you want to do is keep things simple. So your job as the leader of the company is to make sure you are brutal about what gets into the code. Meaning do we really need this feature? Do we really need this functionality? Is it essential to the results our customers are looking for with this software? Simplicity is key when it comes to software. Keeping things simple, keeping things clean. Two other tips when it comes to the code of your software, it's important for your engineers. If you're hiring engineers, freelancers, whatever, that they comment on the code, it's called commenting code. And this means that they write in the code or alongside the code why they wrote it this way. What is the rationale? Why is this important? You need to have well competent code because if you ever need somebody else to come and collaborate, help you out or replace that engineer, they know the logic behind what they wrote. In fact, when it comes to our engineers, they are actually evaluated based on how they comment the code just as much as the code itself. Lastly, testing the code. There's only so much user testing you could do. Whether you have your support team doing quality assurance before the actual software goes into your customer's hands, or you have a dedicated QA person, you should have a step before that, which is called automated tests, where the engineers actually write a automated unit test for each part of the code. So they actually write a test to make sure that this code won't break the software, that it won't cause an error. Full transparency with Webinar Engineer we didn't write unit tests in the beginning because I didn't know this was a practice that we needed to implement. And it was kind of something we put in the back burner because we just wanted to, you know, hit the ground running. But halfway through our time as a software company, we realized this is starting to really affect our ability to release new products, new features, because we constantly are spending so much time manually testing. So now we write unit tests for everything that we write. So actually the test is written first and then the code is written again. If this is something that you're not sure about, ask that technical advisor that you just hired, that talent, how you can make sure your team is implementing these practices. Lastly is your infrastructure. Step 3 and your infrastructure will heavily depend on the type of software you're running, the amount of traffic you'll have on the app, the users, and of course, the technologies you're using within the app. And there are a lot of solutions out there that will auto scale your infrastructure, the servers that are running your code. That means no matter how much traffic you get, your system will spin up a new server. So as long as you have some auto scale technology, you should be okay. And in these technologies you can even dictate, hey, when my servers are at X percentage of usage, like 60% or 70%, then spin up another server. So even if it takes a minute or two for that to happen, you are doing it before you hit your limit. I mentioned before, you're going to want some layers of deployment. When we first started out, we only had two layers, develop and production. The production server is where your actual live software lives. This is where your customers actually interact with your software. Develop is where you deploy the code before it hits the customer's accounts so that you can test things before it goes into a live environment. Today we even have another layer called staging. And this allows us as a product team to test out things, tweak things, change things way before we get to the develop stage. Because for us, when it hits develop, everything's got to be perfect because it's going to mirror what's going into production soon. Understand that when you have these layers, it's a little bit more costs because you have to have different servers for each layer. But I highly recommend you have at least two layers of develop and production to give yourself some sort of safety net between your code and how it interacts on the web as well as your customers. So you want to make sure that there's a buffer. The funny thing about software is that it can behave differently. Everything can look perfect when you're actually just testing it on your local computer versus up in the cloud on a server. That's why we have these layers. So three steps. Number one, Talent. Get a talented engineer that can be your technical advisor and set up your infrastructure code. Make sure that you're writing clean, minimalist code that's tested with unit tests. And number three, infrastructure, having a scalable infrastructure, regardless of what technology you use, that will grow as your software grows. Now, with webinar software, there is so many different pieces of technology, different kinds of servers that we use for different things that we do. One of the things that we do is replays. So when somebody runs a live webinar, for example, there is a replay that gets recorded with all the streams, all the different hosts, the slides, the share screen stream, the chat, everything. And we render that and we kind of do a live edit using some fancy technology to render a great replay file. A few months back, we did an update that, that affected this replay system and we got a surge of customers. And because the way our infrastructure was built, it was skyrocketing. Our bill and it cost us $30,000 in one month. And it was all due because the way we designed the infrastructure to support the replay system, it wasn't designed for this kind of volume that we were getting. We got an expert that knows this technology and was able to fix our problem with an hour's worth of work. This Expert charged us $100 and fixed the problem. So a $30,000 problem got fixed with $100. That shows you the power of great talent. Now, when it comes to scaling your software, it's also scaling your team and scaling how you communicate with your team. One of the things I highly recommend is make sure that your team has great hardware, has great computers to work off. They're on their computer every single day. They're working towards a better software. They're communicating with each other. If you have a remote team or even a physical team in the same place with team collaboration software like Microsoft, teams, they're writing code. They're serving your customers with customer support. Make sure they have great hardware, because it's going to speed things up. It's going to make sure that everybody's working efficiently. This is incredibly important. Hey, Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month?

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Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC to wrap up today's episode, I want to give you some closing advice and your first steps One of the best ways to be able to give the right information to this expert you're going to hire that's going to set things up for you is to start with documentation. This literally means opening up a Google Doc and writing down what your app does, what your software does for your customers. How does it function? The more you can describe the problem you're solving, the more the solution will be clear to whoever works with you. So start with documentation. Then go out and find highly qualified engineers. Start with that first. Hire that technical advisor or an infrastructure expert. They can get you set up within a week. This is not where you go cheap. You get what you pay for. It's better for you to find somebody who's highly qualified. A bit expensive, but they're setting up your business for success. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show and a big thanks to Dell for putting together this podfrence event. For the complete lineup of episodes, visit Dell Technologies podfrence Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A little planning goes a long way, especially when you're trying to build a long term business, something that's going to be around for years to come. I hope today's episode shed a little light on that as well as gave you those first steps to get moving. Thanks again to Dell Technologies for putting together today's episode and having us a part of the podfrence event. I know I'll be checking out other great podcasts that are getting involved and partaking in the podfrence over at Delltechnologies. Podfrence.com I'll see you tomorrow. Until then, take care. Of. Building a portfolio with Fidelity Basket Portfolios is kind of like making a sandwich. It's as simple as picking your stocks and ETFs, sort of like your meats and other topics, and managing it as one big juicy investment. Mmm. Now that's pretty good. Learn more@fidelity.com baskets Investing involves risks, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member nyse, SIPC.