SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1442 Webinar Platform Breaks $2.5m in ARR, But Churn Too High
06 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My new book, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital, is out. You can get it at capitalistbook.com. Here's what Nicholas said on March 6th on Amazon. Incredibly incisive, useful, and sensible. The author is not greedy and is in fact extremely generous and does not hold back on the knowledge he imparts.
I've barely made it halfway to the book, and I'm already gushing over the book because it's an absolute gem. Nathan gets to the point quick, shows proof, and best of all, shows you not just what to do, but how to do it in explicit detail. To say the book is actionable is an understatement.
Now, you guys that listen to the podcast know I'm detail-oriented, so that review might not surprise you, but I hope you grab the book. It's now a Wall Street Journal Instant National Bestseller. Grab it at capitalistbook.com. Audible version is available too. Launched EasyWebinar in 2013. Now 12 people building out the platform, doing about 200 grand a month in revenue.
That's about double from last year. Serving about 3,000 paying customers, paying, again, between 50 and 100 bucks per month. Bootstrapped, which is great. 30% revenue churn per year on their annual plans. Churn is much, much higher than on their monthly plans. He's trying to figure out how to bring that down.
Working on that this year, looking for a launch later this year, hoping to clear the year with about $3 million in revenue, maybe $4 million in revenue, spending up to $75, $100 to acquire a new customer, which that obviously pays back in the first month if they're paying $50 to $100 per month for the platform.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello everyone, my guest today is Casey Zeman. He's the founder of EasyWebinar.com.
He's consulted such companies as HarperCollins, Estee Lauder, and Dell on video webinar strategies and has helped built multimillion-dollar software businesses. His mission is to help a million experts spread their message, sell their program, and leverage their time through automation and engagement using his tools. Casey, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, sir, I am.
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Chapter 2: What is EasyWebinar and how did it start?
It is a difficult space in the sense that, you know, there's a lot of webinar platforms out there. What we're trying to do right now is just carve our sort of, you know, sort of draw our line in the sand, carve what we are and get real clear on that, because we are a webinar marketing tool. We do live, we do automated. But I think there is, you know, we're hitting a
We're hitting some friction because there's so many platforms out there that we're doing some really cool stuff coming in the new year as we as we grow into a kind of a different beast, if you will, you know, than just a webinar platform.
And walk me through what you make money. Is it a pure SaaS company?
It's a, it's pure SaaS company. We do have, we have coaching as well, um, as, and then we do service, but most of it is, it's, it's basically all SaaS.
Okay. And so what is, I don't want to go on every kind of pricing plan or cohort, but what's the average customer pay you per month?
Average customer per month is we get the middle package. We're at about a hundred bucks a month.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does EasyWebinar face with customer churn?
Okay. So pretty good. And, and give me the backstory here. You said you'd been in this space a while. When did you launch? What year?
Oh, well, okay. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a nasty, you know, like story, but like not nasty, but it's like 2000, I think 2013, we built out a webinar plugin that was for WordPress and it was only automated webinars. So that's basically how we started off. We started off selling it as a one-off product, not SaaS-based at that time.
And that's how it lived probably for the first two years, two and a half years, until we always had the knowledge we wanted to get into the SaaS element of it. We wanted to just evolve the product. So it went from being a plugin in WordPress, going into becoming a completely hosted live stream platform, All the pages, all the emails, everything is within our system now. So so that was it.
But we had to kind of move through that model and and get to that point. But it was you know, so we we had a we after when we were just a plug in, we we would have a launch model. That's how we did it. Launch model almost like two launches a year. And that's how we were doing it. And we did great. But we knew we wanted to get into SaaS.
So we actually I made the decision to stop going for affiliate support. I don't know. That was the goal is like, you know, I just want to see what we can do to build this up on our own, pull back on the affiliate support. So After two years and, you know, having seven figure years, we pulled it down, turned it SaaS to be able to reshift.
And then so we had a dip, but then we rose beyond what we were doing, you know, when we had first started out. So it was it was interesting growth.
And so, Casey, real quick, tell us, close that story out with how many customers you're at today.
So we're pushing almost 3,000 customers now. Okay. And, you know, we're looking to do more. Obviously, we have customers that have had lifetime access. So we've had, you know, I mean... Well, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
In the SaaS world, when someone tells me lifetime, those two things don't go together because it's all about recurring.
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Chapter 4: How does EasyWebinar generate revenue?
All these things are contradicting each other. So how can you have a three and a half month LTV on a year long contract paid up front? Are the people asking for refunds?
Well, no, I mean, you can't have a refund after 30 days. So, um, okay.
So how is there a three and a half month lifetime value on a year contract?
Right? No, we started doing the, we, we started looking at, sorry, we started looking at the, the, the, the monthly. Um, and we, I think what we were doing is, is I'm trying to remember how we were doing it, but I think we were, I think basically we were looking at the monthly at the beginning of the first half of this year and looking at what the lifetime value of the customer was.
And so based on that, we calculated about three and a half months was basically where that window was coming into play.
Based off data this year, which are only monthly plans.
Right, but there was something we were doing for last year that we were sort of assessing this. I'm not sure how we were doing it, but we were doing something.
It's very critical. So the number you just told me of 30% revenue churn per year, that would put average lifetime value in terms of months at 36 months. You churn your whole user base in about three years. What you just told me is very different, which is they're only lasting three to four months, not 36 months. That's a very different lifetime value.
Yeah. OK. So that's right. That's right. That's right. So the yearly was that the yearly was calculated at three years. Right. That's that's what that's what my CEO sent over. And then right now we've been looking at the monthly the monthly churn is about three and a half months. Right.
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