MBA985 Q&A Wednesday: What would you do differently if you started your software company all over again?

Hey O. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show, your free ticket to a better business 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 the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. If you're thinking about starting a business, one of the first things you have to do is validate your business idea. Make sure that you're actually building something that people want. Well, you're in luck because we have a seven part video course and workbook that will show you exactly how to do that. And best of all, it's free. Just go to 100- MBA-NET to enroll for free. Today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode where I answer a question from one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar100- MBA. Today's question is from Patrick and Patrick asks, what would you do differently if you started your software company all over again? Oh, what a big question. Of course, hindsight is 20 20, so I'd love to share what I would do differently if I were to do it all over again. Some things are quite subtle, some things are a little bit bigger, and it's important to reflect on questions like these because you might have to do it all over again at some point. A new project, a new business doesn't mean the old one failed, just means maybe another one. So in today's episode, I'll be answering Patrick's question and sharing exactly what I would do differently if I were to start our software company, Webinar Ninja, all over again. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by the Running Remote Conference. When we started our business, we chose to make our team a remote team. We wanted access to the best talent around the world. So if you're thinking about building a team without borders, without walls, then you need to attend the Running Remote conference. You're going to hear from experts from big companies that run their teams remotely. And I'll be there to speak about how to motivate your remote team beyond compensation. Head on over to runningremote.com to buy a ticket today. It's gonna be in beautiful Bali and you can save 15% off by using my coupon code, 100 NBA 15. Okay, a bit of context here. If you're unfamiliar with our software company. We have a software company called Webinar Ninja, it's a webinar platform. We started it back in 2014. It was a very small product and small company back then, but now we have a team of 30 that work on it. We're at version 5 now of the software with over 13,000 active users. And in today's episode, I'll be answering Patrick's question, what I would do differently if I started this company all over again today. Now I must say this hindsight is 2020 and you learn so much in the process. So I'm grateful for that. It's not like I feel bad that I didn't do this stuff. You gotta learn, you gotta try things, and experience is the best teacher. So I'm not like spiteful or feel bad that I didn't do these things that I'm about to mention. Now, having said that, the first thing I'd probably do differently is when we launched Webinar Ninja, our first version, we launched it as simplified as possible. A very simplified version of the software. What we call an mvp minimal viable product. And we pre sold it to our customers and then obviously we released it to our users or early users, our founding users, and they got access to it and they gave us more feedback so we can iterate and improve it. Now back then I really thought that this is a minimal viable product. This is like the least it needs to be. But in fact, it could have been even simpler. For example, Webinar Ninja software at the start did live webinars and automated webinars, or what's called evergreen webinars, hybrid webinars, and all these different kinds of webinars. Really I should have just launched just live webinars. I could have easily done that. So it's a lot easier to iterate on a simpler piece of software with less features. So if I had to do it all over again, I'd definitely get it to be more minimal viable, as simple as possible. I'd probably just go with live webinars, you know, cut out many of the features that I had when I launched. You know, I launched a little bit late because I wanted these features in, but it would have been better if I went really minimal with the features. Maybe the customers would have been like, oh, we want this, this and this. It would be easier to add specifically those features what they wanted instead of just guessing what they wanted. And then what we had to do in the process is we added features, but we had to remove features. So we worked hard on features that people really didn't like or use. So how to go even minimal, it's so much easier to add than to spend time, cost and all that stuff on things that people don't like and then have to remove. And that's like a sunk cost that we have to kind of just scra. Because with software, you know, you don't want to have your software bloated with code with things that people don't use. So how would even go even more minimal with our first iteration? See, when you start out with so many features and such a robust kind of software, there's so many things you have to improve and fix instead of just a few things. So it'll take you longer to get stable and to kind of iron out all the kinks than if it was a simpler software. What else would I do? I'd probably increase my prices sooner. I waited a little bit too long at a lower price point. Now you might be thinking, oh, that's great, you were less expensive than the competition. Well, we also offered a whole lot more than the competition. Our value was high, but our price was low. That's never good in business. But I was so busy with improving the product and getting the next version out, you know, the pricing kind of took a backseat. It should have kind of raised the prices probably six months earlier than I did. It would have made a huge difference, not only with our profitability, but also perception. We can't help but feel like something is worth its price when we see a price point. You know, people buy MacBooks over PCs even though it's more expensive. Maybe it's their preferred operating system, all that stuff. But there's a perception it's better quality. And the same thing goes with software, whether it's a cloud based software like ours or otherwise. The point here is, is that, you know, you have to match the price with its value. If you're offering more than your competition and you're cheaper, there's something wrong here. You got to make sure that your price is at least the same and you're offering more value so therefore they'll choose you over the competition. Or a little bit more expensive and rightfully so, because you're giving them more value. And value can come in many forms. It can come in your presentation, in your design, in your feature sets, in your reliability, in your customer service. When it comes to software, customer service is the backbone of the experience. And that's one thing I'm really happy we invested in early on in having a great customer service team. We have a fantastic team today and it's because we made that investment early. So that's one thing I wouldn't change, but I would increase my prices earlier than I did. What else would I do differently? Well, design is something that I believe adds a lot of value to software. If you have great design and a great user experience, that's all part of design. So people can easily use your software. They can easily find and do what they have to do on your platform. This adds a tremendous amount of value to your software. And we introduced great design to Webinar Ninja a little bit late now. It wasn't horrible design. It was pretty good design. People liked it and they found it easy to use, but it wasn't exceptional. It wasn't miles ahead of anything else. And we really wanted to do that. And I made that investment in the last couple years. We hired a fantastic UX UI designer, Irina. She's fantastic, we love her to death. And she adds so much value to the product because of her insight on user experience as well as just making it look nice. Now, you have to remember with webinar software, not only does it have to look nice for the user who's creating these softwares, but also the attendees that are attending the software. It makes the user look great, makes them look professional when their attendees see their webinars are professional, looking easy to use. So this is a classic case. When our users win, we win. So design should be a priority for you even early on. And getting a great designer may take some time, may take some trial and error, but designers are definitely worth their price. So it's a good investment to make as early as possible, as early as you can afford it. I can completely understand. Maybe you can't afford great design at the start. And that was our case. We had some pretty average design, good design, nothing earth shattering, but people liked it and people used it. It wasn't ugly by any stretch of the means, but it wasn't exceptional. It wasn't like it didn't wow anybody. And we wanted to wow people. And that's what we do now. So we're really happy with that switch of priority and making sure we invested in design. Now, one of the last ones I want to share with you is really just a tool that we started using about two years ago and it's called Basecamp. And it's a a tool to project manage a software company like Webinar Ninja. Now, you have many people on your team working on different things. Design developers, testers, server admin, customer service management. There's a whole bunch of Things, sales, marketing, all these things are going on, and everybody's going to be able to communicate with each other at some level. And you need to communicate with them as leaders or the leader of your company. And before Basecamp, we were doing that with email and Slack and Trello and other software and Google Sheets and all this other stuff. And everything was spread everywhere and it wasn't centralized. Basecamp allows you to centralize everything in one place. It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing I've seen to having a virtual office, especially when you have a remote team like ours, where we have teammates all around the world working remotely, and we need to be able to collaborate and communicate easily. They have these great to do lists that people can mark off when they finish tasks and you can follow up with them. This is fantastic for customer service and bug reports and all that stuff. So customer service knows when something is fixed so they can follow up with users. So I would definitely start with Basecamp. It's actually really affordable. It's $100 a month. I know that may sound like a lot, but it's $100 a month no matter how many people are on your team. You can have a thousand people or five people or one person. So it's what you're going to pay for the long run. And it's just a fantastic tool. And they have a mobile app that goes with it. So definitely check out Basecamp if you're starting a software company. I got more on today's Q and A Wednesday, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork in Office365. Here at the $100 MBA, we run a remote team, so we have teammates all across the world. And sometimes communicating can be quite hectic. Organizing everything from chats and emails and files, it can get chaotic. With so much to look after, it would be great just to have everything in one place. And that's what Microsoft Teams does. Teams is a single workplace where you can work, share and connect with the people in your work life. Teams brings together chat, meetings, files and apps all in one place. Take Teamwork, where you work with apps for mobile and desktop. So whether you're sprinting towards a deadline or sharing your next big idea, Teams can help you and your team achieve more. I recently used Teams and I found the user experience to be so simple and clean, I found it like stress reducing. So I tip my hat to Microsoft Teams for building Such a easy to use app. Microsoft Teams in Office365 visit office.comteams to learn more. So there's one final thing I want to share with you when it comes to what I would do differently if I started my software company all over again. And that's documentation. We started doing more documentation, internal documentation for the software about three years ago, if you do the math. 2014 till today. Yep. The first year we didn't do documentation, which is not really a good idea. It's one of those things that people don't want to do, they put off when they do software. But it's really important to actually write down what everything does in the software. You should be able to read the book of the software, meaning that like every piece of the puzzle, how should everything function, how should they look, how should it interface with the user, all the rules, all the exceptions. You should have some sort of documentation for your software. Why? Because if anybody comes on board, a developer, a designer, anybody who's going to work on this project, they have to be able to read this documentation and understand how everything works. And this is going to happen with your software company where you're going to have, you know, new hires and some people are going to leave and some people are going to join and you need some sort of manual of what this software actually does. You can't just ask them to use the software and figure it out. That's just too much time wasted. Documentation is a great way to dump ideas and reevaluate them before you start coding too. So if you don't document, do it now. It's something that I regretted. We don't have any documentation for that first year development and we had to redevelop the whole software based on new documentation so everybody can be on the same page. And that's pretty much it. Yeah, we made some mistakes along the way and some tough times, but that's just par for the course when you build any kind of business, let alone a software business. So I hope that answers your question, Patrick, of what I would do differently if I started Webinar Intro all over again. I wish you all the best if you're starting a software company, it's a fun journey. It's a lot of fun dealing with the technology and the innovation. It's a lot of work as well. But it's really rewarding when you see users using your software and being able to accomplish their goals with it. Thank you for listening to the $100 NBA show. We love your reviews, so make sure. You drop us a review on itunes. Everybody who leaves us a rating review enters our weekly random draw to win one of our courses. This month we're giving away Easy course. It's a $500 course on how to build a course in 30 days. Every Friday we call it Free Ride. Friday, we do a weekly random draw with Friday Easy. Everybody who's left us itunes ratings and reviews. So all you gotta do is leave us a review so you can enter to win. Alright, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Looking back at all the things I would do differently when answering today's question kind of made me feel tired. Wow, this takes a lot of work and it makes me feel kind of gracious that I didn't know how much work it took at the start. Ignorance is bliss in some ways. But seriously, it's a lot of work, but it's rewarding. And even today when we're working on new innovations and new things and new updates and there's a lot of pressure and you're trying to impress your users and make them happy and all that stuff, I look back and say, this is great. We're able to help people with Webinar Ninja. For us, we directly impact people's income. You know, people run webinars to sell their products and services and with our software they're able to do that and be able to put food on the table, which is amazing. And yes, also pay their employees and run a business and fulfill their dream. So indirectly we're helping people in a major way. So it's all worth it. So keep that in mind when you're starting your software business. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where I share with you four ways to improve your customer service today. These are four quick tips that you can implement right away that are going to make your customer service go to the next level. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Until then, take care. Of.