Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:46
Well, so the messaging also kind of bleeds into use cases. So I’m wondering about the evolution of the use cases. I mean, you had your own, you were solving your own pain, right. And so maybe talk through how the use cases have evolved or been added as people started using it for different things. Maybe you didn’t even expect it, right? Because you had a specific use case. So what was yours initially? And then how did you, you know, how did that expand based on customers using it?
Melissa Kwan: 11:17
I mean, my own in the past was always first demos, right? Because if you don’t have sales, you don’t have a company. So in the past we were selling to brokerages of all sizes. So my time could only go to outreach for the top 200 brokerages, the bottom 100,000. No one ever gets to. So the problem is actually just specific to real estate, but I know it applies to other industries as well. Everybody is calling on the top 200 because they’re the biggest, right? Whether you’re selling pharmaceutical or I don’t know if you’re if you’re selling to banks, like you’re, you’re going to go after the biggest fish, of course, but everyone else is an opportunity collectively that you never get to because you just don’t have the resources to scale yourself. Right.
So my first use case was, providing demos to everybody that actually wants a demo, and then using that to filter down people that actually are ready to buy. And then after they sign up, of course, it’s the onboarding and training use case, right? Like closing a sale is just day one of the rest of your life with that customer. If that company and the people that work for them never learn your product, they don’t learn the features, they never adopt your product. You’re not going to get the subscription. So that was actually the exhaustion that I was talking about in my previous company. Basically, I was constantly doing these onboarding and training, but then nobody would show up or like 100 people would sign up and like 20 people would show up. And then by the end of it, there’d be like five people.
I think after the pandemic, the attendance rates are even lower because now everyone’s living on their own timeline. Right. And we just want to hit play and watch Netflix. So we don’t like it. We want to close it. And then maybe we want to come back to it later. Right. That’s just how we live now. So it’s almost like the entire world has gone on demand, but business hasn’t. So that’s kind of the gap that we want to fill. Like first is like sales demos, whether it’s marketing, educational webinars or onboarding and training after someone signs up. But I think the most surprising use case that our customers have found is recruiting. So whether it’s universities recruiting students into faculties or companies recruiting, whether it’s real estate agents or insurance agents or, you know, they’re just using these to do kind of orientations, right?
This is what our company is, blah, blah, blah. Right. But you can imagine if you are already working for a company, you’re not going to in person show up to a recruiting event, or maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you are, you know, someone that I don’t know. Maybe you are a top agent or like you don’t you don’t want your company to know, right? So we have a lot of customers that are seeing a lot of success in just doing these kinds of on demand recruiting orientations, and then following up privately with someone who might not be so obviously on the job market.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:24
You know, one thing that strikes me as interesting, Melissa, is I’m wondering what you’ve built in the product to make it so sticky, because I’m thinking once I sign up for this. If I put this on my home page, it’s like everywhere, like watch your demo, right? This is part of the whole call to action of the entire site, and this is probably how people are using it. Watch our demo now at the bottom there’s watch our demo. Right. It makes it very difficult to disconnect. You know, if I go to any of these pages, right. Watch our demo. If someone takes it off their site, they’re like, oh my God, what do we do with all these buttons and calls to action? So that part I could see once they put it on there, it makes it really they’re not going to want to remove it. There’s just a pain at least the way I see it. What are some other things you did to make this product sticky for people so that they’re basically going to want to keep it on forever.
Melissa Kwan: 15:25
I mean, I would love to say it’s like a single feature, but honestly, it’s not.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:30
It doesn’t really single any like just, I’m sure it’s a number of things that you. Yeah.
Melissa Kwan: 15:34
Like what? And the truth is features can be replicated. Right? Somebody that looks at this can be like, okay, I’m just going to copy this entire thing and they can do that if they want to. But what makes you special isn’t a single feature. It’s, it’s actually the love that we put into every single detail. It’s the extra mile that nobody goes right. Setup is easy. It just works.
There’s no bugs, right? The attendee experience, you just hit join and it’s effortless and things pop up and it’s delightful, right? We built it to be the product that you would be proud of aligning your brand with and putting in front of your customers. And so it’s, it’s the love that can’t always be explained, but it can always be felt. And I will say that that is the one thing that makes our product more sticky is it is just delightful to use on both sides. And it’s super easy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:33
I know early on, I mean, you were looking for it. You didn’t go. I want to start a software company in this space. You tried a lot of products, right? And you didn’t find one that fit. What were some of the things that were lacking?
Melissa Kwan: 16:48
Also love. You know, like, like it’s the difference between like, oh, how do I say this? It’s a difference between, do you remember like a, do you remember geocities?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:58
Yep.
Melissa Kwan: 16:59
Like imagine geocities as a product today. And then it was beside Wix. Like which one would you choose? Both are landing pages. Both are websites. But one is just significantly better. Right. So I think it’s easy to build software. Everybody can build software, especially now, but it’s extremely hard to build thoughtful software that just works where every need is already there. It’s predicted where you, you’ve, you’ve already anticipated ten steps ahead. What the customer wants. They don’t even have to ask. They’re not even requesting things.
You’re rolling out things they never even dreamed of, and it’s useful to them. And there’s a lot of software out there that kind of accomplishes the thing you want it to, but it’s clunky, right? You, you email support, nobody responds to you, right? They say they have email notifications, but it’s half baked, right? They say they have a chat, but it’s a fake chat and it’s actually an email box that just goes to an email or it just goes nowhere. So in this category, there is a lot of software that’s kind of like that. And also scammy. Like it’s pretending to be alive when it’s not.
So fake counters, fake conversations, like fake schedules, like we don’t do any of that, right? That’s not like a marketing practice that we can get behind. Integrity is really our number one priority. And this is why, like, this is what I mean when I say we build a product that people are proud of aligning their brands with because we don’t do any of those things. So in our particular category, there’s a lot of these like kind of scammy internet marketers that use these products to trick people and we actively stay away from that. And I think it’s just a trickle down effect of, you know, the product not being thoughtful.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:53
Yeah. And you could see when you click watch our demo, which by the way, I still have to do because I watch the one on your home page and I watch some interviews with you, but you can watch a replay. Watch now on Demand today, today at 6 p.m.. So there’s a lot of interesting choices here. When you first started a webinar, right. I mean, you’d come off selling your other company and you decide, okay, I’m going to start this talk about the evolution of the team.
Melissa Kwan: 19:24
That’s an interesting question. So I had two companies before this with the same co-founder and it was a tough time. Like we had fundamental issues that we never resolved. And I think when SpaceX was acquired, we mutually decided that that was like we had a great run, but that was the end of our journey together. And I had such a tough time with my co-founder and with my CTO that I wanted to start this company with no CTO.
Like, I just wanted to do what I do best, which is creating things, selling things. And I wanted to hire a dev shop to do all the product development, project management. And I will just go and do my own thing. Of course, that did not work because, well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:14
I’m looking at it right now. There is a co-founder CTO right here, but it is like a PTSD situation where like, okay, that was.
Melissa Kwan: 20:21
Very much.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:21
So that was just draining and I don’t want to do it again.
Melissa Kwan: 20:27
Yeah. And, actually, I hired a dev shop for a year. We didn’t have a product. After a year. I spent a lot of my own money on it, and David, who’s actually now my CTO, but also my life partner, he was, you know, he, he, he put money in the company as well. Like we both, we both put money in the company to get this going. But he was kind of like a consultant, right? Because he’s a, he’s a fractional CTO of his own, but I can’t afford him. So he was working for other companies. So he was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:59
The relationship at the time. Melissa, were you actually together at the time or you were.
Melissa Kwan: 21:05
We were together, but I didn’t realize that he was such a good developer because we never talked about work like he was CTOs for other companies. But the truth is, he always had time to spend with me. So I thought that he was lazy, and he once made a joke that he was just efficient because we were living in New York and he would always have time to spend with me while he was at a startup. And he was like, well, I’m just efficient. But I thought that he was just having fun. And so I never, I just never really dug into it. And so when, when this, when this dev shop was not able to give me a product after one year he started critiquing.
He was like, why did they build it this way? Why didn’t they do it this way? And one day I just got angry. I’m like, why don’t you go in and help? Like, I don’t know what they’re doing. And because it’s my friend’s dev shop, I can’t really challenge them because if they say they’re going to do this, then I have to trust them, right? This is the challenge of working with friends. And so David started helping. And the thing is, I don’t know how to build software, but I know good software from bad software because good software works and bad ones don’t. So within a week of him helping out on the sidelines, it started to take shape.
And I’m like, who are you and why am I paying these guys? And why aren’t we working out an arrangement? So that was actually the beginning of our official partnership. So he came in a year after I wanted. And I had so much PTSD from my last company. I did not want a team. I wanted everyone to be outsourced. I don’t want any employees. I know I am not good at managing people. And so and because we, we know, mattered around the world, like 11 months a year, I wanted a completely remote team.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:48
You really quickly were managing because you worked for SAP previous to your. Were you managing people then, or.
Melissa Kwan: 22:55
No, I was being managed.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:56
Okay. Got it. Okay.
Melissa Kwan: 22:57
Yeah. I would never, ever be able to manage people. But yeah, eWebinars are really based on that premise, everyone’s remote, everyone can do whatever they want as long as the customer comes first, right? There’s no meetings ever. Anyone who wants anything from anyone, they just slack them or get on a call with them individually. Everything’s on Monday so everyone can pick up a task.
And at any given time, everyone can see what everyone else is doing. So it’s a pretty efficient company. It’s as and I the things I want to have the smallest team possible, but the most productive team possible. So our team is actually quite small. Also because we have to, because we’re bootstrapped, but because of the ethos of the company, we’ve been very lucky to be able to attract people that are very self-motivated and don’t need to be micromanaged.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:47
What were some of the departments you wanted to build out? Right. Obviously, you’re like, okay, we need the tech department. David’s going to lead the charge on that. And because everyone’s, you know, remote, what are the different departments that you were building out for the company?
Melissa Kwan: 24:03
So most of our developers are in Vietnam. Even from day one. It’s because we also wanted to go to Vietnam more often. So we love that country. And so David manages that team. A lot of them have been with us since the beginning. And I would say that the most challenging team to build was support. We were doing our own support for the first three years because we, like we could not for the life of us, find someone who was a developer who could figure out like integrations, because that’s the majority of the questions that come in are like, how do I integrate this with Salesforce? How do I integrate this with HubSpot? So you actually need to, to, to know how to code to do that. But we couldn’t find someone who knew how to code, who was willing to stay in support.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:52
Yeah. Here’s the integrations page, by the way, if people want to check it out.
Melissa Kwan: 24:57
Yeah. So that took us a few years. And, actually, we hired our first kind of support superstar completely randomly while we were on a boat trip. And this guy, so he’s just like this young, motivated, ambitious guy that was working on the boat. And he really wanted to be a developer, but he didn’t have any.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:18
He was working on the boat, so it wasn’t like another person who’s on the trip.
Melissa Kwan: 25:23
He was like working on the boat. He was like a deckhand, and he taught himself how to speak English by reading the dictionary and playing games. And he taught himself how to code, but he doesn’t have any experience, so nobody will hire him. So we’re like, oh, okay, well, if you want to try this out, you know, maybe, you know, maybe you want to start in support and then maybe you can help us with some other stuff. So he’s still with us.
And that was our, that was our first hire and that was able. And then he was able to take all the stuff off of our plate. So you can imagine how disruptive it is for two co-founders and their COO to just try to do their own task, but also manage support inbox like it’s virtually impossible. Like you’re constantly getting distracted.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:10
So you wanted someone who was technical enough to answer these questions because they weren’t just like simple questions, but be able to kind of dedicate to the support piece. What’s the tech stack look like? Like, do you have a universal inbox? Like what kind of obviously use Slack? What are some of the tools you use as a company?
Melissa Kwan: 26:32
Yeah, we try to use as little things as possible. So Slack for sure. Monday, we basically have like Monday spreadsheets everywhere. Like instead of having like Monday, Asana, like all that, like everything is on Monday. And then we’ve got HubSpot, which I have a very love-hate relationship with right now. It’s more hate than love. And, my next task is to actively get off of them. Talk about software not built with love. That is maybe, maybe what.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:04
Are the alternatives that you’re thinking about?
Melissa Kwan: 27:08
So we really shot ourselves in the foot with HubSpot when we first started, we were like, how do we use as little things as possible? So what happened was not only did we use HubSpot as a kind of our main CRM contacts repository, we also used them for our website, all of our landing pages, and our support tickets.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:32
Talk about stickiness, right?
Melissa Kwan: 27:33
Yeah. Talk about stickiness. And then every two months, you’re like, oh, you have too many contacts. Now you have to pay us like 300 bucks more. And so yeah, so what we’re doing is we’ve now built our own CMS to handle all of our own blogs. David is slowly moving off like sections of our web website one by one, and it has to be done in pieces. And we never thought in a million years that we would build our own. Never in a million years. But now with Cursor, we’re able to build our own. And I gotta tell you, when all this AI stuff first came out, I thought, oh, all the simple software companies, they’re all dead.
But that’s actually not true. Because if you think about it, if you’re paying, you know, 50 bucks here, 100 bucks or even maybe a few hundred dollars, and the thing just works as intended and it’s perfect. Why would you rebuild that thing? The thing that you’re going to rebuild is the thing you’re paying 30 to 50 K for. Plus, that doesn’t really work. That’s super clunky and that you’re really frustrated with. So we’re actually on that path now where we’re like, okay, do we buy or do we build?
So we’ve moved to Crisp for ticketing because we realized we were using HubSpot for ticketing, but we didn’t have any of the analytics. And then we couldn’t use all the conversations that we had to train the chatbot that we wanted to use. Because now everyone’s moving on to their support chatbot. For the CRM, I’m not sure yet, but everyone is talking about Attio and Day.ai. So these are the two that we’re looking at. But I don’t think day.ai is actually a theorem. I think it’s more like an agent layer. But I haven’t. I haven’t looked into that yet.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:30
Yeah. It’s no thanks for talking that through because I’m sure whatever this is, you know, people are experiencing similar things with whatever they’re using, whether it’s HubSpot or something else. So I, I like to hear your thought process through it. From an AI perspective, it sounds like you’re heavily using a Cursor. What other tools have you been playing with?
Melissa Kwan: 29:54
So for code, we primarily use Cursor for myself. I mean, I started off using ChatGPT because it was like, how does this thing exist? Like, it’s absolutely crazy. But a few months into that, somebody introduced me to Claude and said it was really good for content. And I was sitting on an email project for at least two years. So rewriting all of our onboarding emails, nurture emails, churn emails, like, you know, those things like take months, right? And I tried ChatGPT and it actually wasn’t very good for content. So when I tried Claude, I thought it was pretty exceptional, kind of out of the box, even without any prompting, because now I’ve also written a lot of stuff online so I can use all of my own content, my voice to train, you know, my, my own cloud project.
So I’m, I’m probably in Claude like 90% of the time. And now when I write, like I’m rewriting our whole website, there’s about 20 pages. I’m using Claude for that. With our SEO agency, I created a Claude project for them. So whatever they write is going to be accurate and has my unique insight in it. While I have to make sure they kind of change, you know, they change. They need to change a bit because not like everything sounds the same. But now we’re able to have a way more consistent voice across the board, no matter who’s creating content because of Claude.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:30
When you were mentioning the ticketing piece, was the site Crisp? You said, is it Crisp?
Melissa Kwan: 31:36
Yeah, it Crisp is what we use now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:38
Crisp.ai or something else. For some reason I was popping up Krisp.ai, which is a variety of chat. Oh, gotcha. Okay. Yeah.
Melissa Kwan: 31:53
And we chose them because they have the most APIs. And we were thinking that if we wanted to use our own chatbot or something else in the future, we didn’t want to be so tied to that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:06
Yeah. I mean, I like on your site how when you have. I don’t know if it’s the case for other people, but I’m going to just pull up really quickly. You kind of have an inherent branding, obviously, because it says powered by eWebinar when that’s on someone else’s site, do they. Is it still there or does it say it does? Okay.
Melissa Kwan: 32:33
I mean, they can pay to remove it, but most people don’t.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:35
But I’m saying that it seems like it kind of has a viral effect, right? Someone’s I see it, I’m like, oh, this is cool. I’m going to go check out a webinar because it’s powered by them.
Melissa Kwan: 32:47
That’s the goal. But let me tell you, it’s not viral enough. It needs to be more viral.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:56
We’ll talk. I want to talk about how you got initial customers. But one thing I thought was interesting when you started the company, you had a list of non-negotiables. Can you talk through some of that?
Melissa Kwan: 33:13
Yes. So. Where do I start? Okay. So I think that a lot of people. They go to school for a certain thing, right? Say you go to school to be a lawyer, and then you become a lawyer because you think you have no choice because that’s what you chose. But you chose that when you were 18. And then you become a lawyer and if you like it, that’s awesome. But if you hate it now, you’re living for evenings and weekends because you feel like you’re stuck, right? So the whole idea that we build a career on top of our education, and then we try to find happiness after is kind of reversed. And it’s a trap that I fell into because I worked for real estate companies and then I worked for SAP.
So I thought, well, if I start a technology company, it should be in real estate. But then I actually didn’t really like the industry that much. And then that was like ten years of my life. Like, let me tell you that nobody enjoys selling software to real estate agents. It’s the hardest thing that anyone can do because they will spend $300 on a glass, on a bottle of wine for their client, but they will not spend $20 on software. That’s just a universal truth of real estate. And so when I came out of Spacio and the thing is, I sold that company because I was no longer having fun. And that’s the truth, right? It was doing okay. It was borderline profitable.
I wasn’t paying myself that much, but I was waking up every day just feeling like there was an opportunity cost to get to where I was. And so I really got some time to think about, okay, if I could do this again, what would I do? And how would I do it differently? And what I came up with is instead of building my career on top of my education and my experience, I would first find what makes me happy. And like, so for example, like, what are the things that I need to have in my life in order to have a happy lifestyle? And then I would find the company that would fit that. And then I would go and acquire the skills and the education to make that successful. Because it turns out skills are the easiest part. Happiness is the hardest part. So I came up with a list of ten non-negotiables that I needed to be happy.
And then by doing that, I eliminated like 95% of ideas that I had. So some of those things are sold 100% through the internet because of space. I was always at a conference like the first quarter. I’m always at a conference or at a booth or like in a lobby trying to network. Right. And Another thing is it can’t be limited by geography or language or industry, because space was so hard to get off the ground that when it wasn’t doing well, I couldn’t just go and sell this to a car dealership. It was so specific to the real estate open house use case that I couldn’t expand it. And the other thing is it has to have a fully remote team, no employees, because I realized I was actually really, really bad at managing people. And it has to be a business or a product that’s a reflection of who I am.
Because let me tell you that building software to make real estate agents’ lives marginally better is not a reflection of who I am. So with eWebinar, we’re not really selling on demand videos with chat or automated webinars. We’re selling time. We’re giving people their time back, you know, every single month There’s over 400 people that go into the webinar demo. I don’t do a single one of them live. I am able to have the life that I have because I don’t do any of this. And I know that our customers out there are also experiencing something on that spectrum, right? Whether it’s doing something once a month that they hate doing or wanting to do hundreds of them, but not being able to, and that’s limiting their growth. So what we’re really selling is time and freedom. And that’s who I am. And I love that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:39
One thing, you know, with the space journey that I love is you got some advice. I think it was from a VC and they basically had told you to strip everything away except for one thing. And you were like, well, why would someone pay for that? And it turns out to be a big turning point in the journey of stripping everything away.
Melissa Kwan: 38:02
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:03
What was there something with eWebinar because that you were thinking of, okay, here’s only the few things we want to start with to strip everything away. Or was it a totally different kind of journey and product?
Melissa Kwan: 38:17
Well, with eWebinar is a very different journey, right? Because I lived with this problem that I’m solving for five years in a row. So I was already kind of imagining if I could have this wonderful thing that could do my job for me and relieve me of these duties, what would it be? Right? It would be this thing that could turn a video into an interactive experience that’s better than live, but it would have all these interactions and questions and polls and quizzes that would help me capture data about the person watching so I could follow up effectively and trigger different campaigns. It would have to have an asynchronous chat, you know, so they could type in there any time.
And I could respond on my phone if I’m at dinner or I can respond later because they join this. You know why I’m sleeping and when I wake up, I’m going to have all these messages. So I had already kind of envisioned this perfect thing and I just had to build it. And the thing that actually got me to build a webinar as, as the idea and as the product, because I had, and I had so much PTSD from like, oh, if I build something, do I really want to spend another five years? Is it going to be so hard again? What’s the easiest thing I can do? Like, I was so scared of taking that first step.
But the thing that made me take the first step with this one outside of the non-negotiables, was I asked myself, how would I feel if someone else did this tomorrow the way I imagined it, right? So because I’ve been thinking about it for so many years, I’m like, if someone built this exactly the way I imagined I would be kicking myself. So that was kind of the thing that got me going. And I think the hardest thing with the webinar was, was also like having a wish list of items and then being like, okay, what are the top 20 things that we must have in order for someone to pay for this? And then we would like to slowly add those things back in as people start requesting them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:21
Some of you, I mentioned the VC, some of your mentors that helped you on the business journey and maybe a lesson, and it could be someone you knew personally, or it could be some a distant mentor, it could be someone who’s been on the podcast, who’s been when you think back on your business journey, who’s been influential for you?
Melissa Kwan: 40:44
You know, I think there’s a lot of I mean, I have a lot of friends, a lot of founder friends that have been like influential for my journey, not so much in the product, but just kind of helping me, just helping me on this human journey of, of growing a startup on like how to, whether it’s how to have hard conversations or managing people or how to keep going. Lloyed Lobo is one of those people. And sometimes like, you just want to be like, sometimes you just want to complain to someone, you know, like you just want to let it out, right? Like you just want to like a trauma bond with someone. And like in the past, like Lloyd has been very good for that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:26
Let’s say Lloyed. But like, if you’re complaining about him, then you can’t go to him. But yeah.
Melissa Kwan: 41:31
True.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:31
Yeah.
Melissa Kwan: 41:32
Yeah. But sometimes you just want to be like, what the heck is wrong with this industry? Like all this content on LinkedIn? Just bullshit. But I would say the person that I, who I don’t know, who has had the most influence on me and continues to and I just wrote something about him yesterday is Jason Fried from 37signals.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:55
It’s funny, you know. They’re also, I think I mean, at least they were based in Chicago, where I am. And it’s funny, I was working out this morning, Melissa. And for some reason they popped in my mind because, you know, years ago, I mean, all their stuff was prolific. And I’m like, maybe I just haven’t been following it. I’m like, I’m wondering what they’re doing lately. Right? Base camp, where everyone was using it. So they actually popped in my head today and thinking, I haven’t really sorted out what they’re working on lately.
Melissa Kwan: 42:26
You know, and the, and the thing that I love about their philosophy and just their outlook on, on building business and life is Jason and his co-founder, they just don’t care about what anyone else does. They don’t care about their competitors. They don’t look to them for inspiration. They care about their customers and they care about solving their problem their own way. And that’s it. Like I listened to a recent podcast with Jason Fried and I think David was interviewing him. So it was a nice refresher. Of course, I already knew all this stuff, but it was a nice refresher to, to this philosophy, which is he’s like, I want to look at the sun and like, go for a walk. I don’t want to look at other people’s software. I already look at software all day long and I solve problems like, he’s like, my product is different because I solve problems in a different way.
I solve problems in the way I want to solve them, which is why it’s different. So I believe that if I do it this way, then there will be more people that want to do it this way. And if they don’t want to do it this way, it’s totally fine. So he’s a really good reminder that you can build a company any way you want. And there isn’t this one way, right? If you’re on Substack, if you’re on LinkedIn, right, you’re looking for playbooks and shortcuts and all these people who have done something and then you try to copy them. But if you try to copy them in the process, you also kind of lose yourself. You lose the company that you want to build.
So I guess the message that I got from that is don’t be afraid to be yourself, because it is good enough and there are enough people out there, and the pie is big enough for everyone to have a slice, right? Like the media just makes us think there isn’t. But the world is huge. And I think I need to like, there’s a lot of stress that I have from feeling behind compared to someone else, but you’re only ever behind if you’re compared to someone else. You’re not behind if you’re just competing with yourself, right? So these are really good reminders that I just need to chill out a bit and just understand that I can only do my best today and that’s okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:43
Yeah, social media sometimes makes that difficult because then like people sometimes put all their stuff on there and I don’t know, I find it, even though I know it.
Melissa Kwan: 44:55
Like this is how much money I made this month. It’s like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:57
Even though I know it, it’s like, oh, I wish I was, you know, in Hawaii right now. But one of the things we were talking about before we hit record is you were saying we tend to limit ourselves in our self-talk. And I’m wondering how you combat that yourself.
Melissa Kwan: 45:20
Well, I’ve just learned that in the last few months, which is something I’m trying to be more aware of. So we put ourselves, we have these, we have these narratives about ourselves, who we are, what we can do, and what we can’t do. For example, I’m a salesperson. I’m not a marketer. And then for the last 15 years, because I’m not a marketer, I never went to learn marketing and all the marketing content that I try to absorb becomes very difficult because my starting point is this is really difficult for me. And so you can imagine a bootstrap founder who outsources revenue because she doesn’t think she’s good enough to find revenue is absurd. So what’s happened in the last 15, 15 years is I constantly try to hire different agencies, but because I’m not a marketer, I don’t know how to hire a good agency.
I don’t know how to direct them. If they give me something, I just publish it whether it works or not. I don’t even care. I don’t even know where to start. And so I’m getting these mediocre results, and I hate that. But I’m not solving it because I’m not a marketer. And in the same way I’ve done that with my own company, I’ve been telling myself that eWebinar is not a Blue Ocean company because there are categories like us out there. What I’m realizing is we are a blue ocean to the majority of the market who’ve never heard about us. There’s a subset of people who use automated webinars, which are like course creators or like life coaches. They use it to sell their course. Like this is something that they actively seek out. In fact, our competitors were designed for this particular audience, but we want to sell our software to real companies, SaaS companies who are doing demos, onboarding, training, but they’ve never heard of it.
So I’m now using the language that I would use to sell to someone who knows about this category, to someone who doesn’t know about this category. So it doesn’t work. And that’s actually why our companies plateaued, because we’ve maxed out on who we can sell to and the people we want to sell to their problem aware they’re not fully problem aware, but we’re also not educating them because we assume that they know the problem, but they don’t. And it’s because we frame them as well. You should know this because something else is out there. How could you not know this? So I’m kind of going through this whole, this repositioning thing that I’m talking about is not just repositioning my company as if this was a blue ocean company.
How would my language be different? Instead of selling the benefit, I would be selling the pain of where they are today and the education of why you need to go on demand versus doing things live. And then I would go and sell the benefit of the product because if they don’t even know they have pain, they wouldn’t even go and look for it. And they wouldn’t even care about the benefit. Right? And I’m also repositioning myself every day I wake up and I write two pages to myself. I say, I am, I am a marketer who comes up with one to many marketing strategies for a webinar and grows through on demand demos. I’m trying to retrain my brain to think I am a marketer. So. And in this way, like I’ve. I’ve decided that marketing is what I’m going to own.
And I’m actually like, I’m now the one that’s managing all of our SEO articles, our SEO agency. I’m now writing because of the help of AI, I’m able to write SEO optimized articles on my own. Like I’ve been able to learn, like all the keyword research, what matters, what doesn’t. And now, because I’ve reframed myself when I read any sort of educational content on marketing, because I’m learning it, I actually understand it versus before, I’m just actively rejecting it. It’s like someone saying, I’m not good at Excel. And then they look at a spreadsheet and it’s completely blank. So I just find it really interesting how the story we tell ourselves determines our future. and in turn determines the success of ourselves and our company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:47
I mean, sometimes it’s just tough to recognize that stuff, right? Because we’ve been telling ourselves certain things for so long, and it’s not even in my conscious sometimes to think differently. Melissa, I want one last quick question. I know we’re at time here. I do want to point people to eWebinar.com to learn more. My last question is just some of the fan favorite episodes you’ve had on the podcast. We’re here eWebinar.com. You can click on the podcast and there’s a number of episodes I have to listen to season two because I think it’s you walking through your journey. I’ve listened to other episodes on the podcast, but I think I may have to binge watch through season two. But what are some of the fan favorite episodes? Maybe it’s your thought leadership or guest wise?
Melissa Kwan: 50:35
I would say I just started, so every season has a different theme. And actually I got advice on that because one of my friends who runs a pretty successful podcast, he was like, if you do seasons, you can have a break.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:49
That’s what I tell people. I go, you know, the only reason people put season on a, B to B side is they just don’t want to do it for a little bit. So.
Melissa Kwan: 50:59
Well, yeah. And it also kind of switches things up. So actually you mentioned season two. I would say like the whole season two is interesting because it’s our Journey to 1M at eWebinar. So every episode we go deep into like one strategy or one thing we learned that worked or didn’t work while we were building our company to, to, to a million. So I would say that the whole thing is almost like a startup course, but I would say. A fan favorite episode, which is kind of shocking, is season two, episode 16, where I talk about how I made a $130,000 mistake in affiliate marketing right here. And it talks about how it’s part of outsourcing revenue.
This is part of thinking, oh, if someone else can just make money for me, then I will be fine. I think in a bigger company that works, but if you’re in a small company, you’re still trying to figure out what your channels are. You’re still trying to figure out product messaging fit. You cannot hire someone to go make money for you because what they are regurgitating doesn’t sell. And that’s what that episode is about. And I think the other one is season two, episode 24, which is the five pricing decisions that turned out to be costly mistakes. So things like not raising prices when you’re supposed to, not having annual plans, grandfathering people for integrity, things that we do when we try to be too honest. But yeah, things like that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:38
I’ll check that out. Melissa. And people can check that out. And I see you have some other great guests too. I’ve had a V band on you both. Share the real estate world. I know he had Contactually sold it and they had mostly real estate professionals, but we used it at the time when they had it because it was a good CRM. So too bad you can’t use that anymore as opposed to what you’re using now. But Melissa, thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your lessons with everyone. Everyone can check out eWebinar.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see you next time. Melissa, thanks so much.
Melissa Kwan: 53:18
Thanks so much.
