The 5 Secrets To A Successful Software Business

Building a software product is hard. Building one that customers stick with for years is even harder. Plenty of businesses have impressive features and talented developers, yet still struggle to grow because success in software comes down to more than what's inside the product.

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  Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Incorporated brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. This episode is sponsored by Whisperflow. Why spend so much time typing when you can just talk? Meet Whisperflow, the voice-to-text tool that makes writing faster and easier. I'm just gonna say this flat out, I use Whisperflow more than any app I use in my life. I use it on my desktop, I use it on my laptop, I use it on my iPad, I use it on my phone. I don't type anymore. All you gotta do is speak naturally, and Whisperflow turns your words into clear text.

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  It automatically removes filler words like "um" and "ah," and cleans up your false starts, fixes typos, and even gets names and industry jargon right. Plus, it's about four times faster than typing, helping you get more done in less time. Let me tell you, it's way better than the native dictation tool that you have on your phone. I rarely have to edit what Whisperflow puts out there because it's always pretty perfect. Whether you're drafting emails, sending messages, or capturing ideas, Whisperflow works across the apps you already use on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. I love using Whisperflow for prompting with AI. I am able to just churn through all my AI tasks so much faster because I just talk, and then hit Enter, and let the AI do its magic.

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  In fact, I built a fully functioning, commercial-ready app in seven days, and one of the major reasons why I was able to pull it off so fast is because of Whisperflow. Whisperflow is free. Download it at whisperflow.ai. That's W-I-S-P-R-flow.ai. When he sign up and asks you how you heard about Whisperflow, pick Podcast and type the $100 MBA show so they know we sent you. Successful software businesses are built on more than just great technology. They go beyond that. They solve real problems for customers, they earn trust, and they make it easier for customers to get an actual result. I know this because I ran a software company called Webinar Ninja for over 10 years,

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  and I learned that it's gonna take more than great tech to be a successful business. Your software business wins when you invest in the right people and the right systems to help your customers win too. In this episode, I'm gonna break down the five secrets to helping you turn your software company into a lasting business with real impact. So you're not only competing with the competition, but you're beating them.

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  Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.

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  What I've learned is that most software businesses, they don't struggle because of a lack of ideas. They got plenty of ideas. They struggle because they focus on the wrong things. It's easy to get distracted by features, growth hacks, constantly trying new things to keep up with their competition. But none of that really matters if your customers aren't getting the real value they're paying you for. With software, because you have a reoccurring subscription with your customers, you don't only need to give them real value when they buy, you need to keep giving them amazing value so they can stick around. When I started my software company, Webinar Ninja, I had no idea how hard running a software company really was. I'm actually thankful I didn't know, because otherwise, I probably wouldn't have tried it. And when you have a software company that's actually working,

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  it can grow more quickly than you expect. That's what happened to us. We started to grow and get a lot of customers, and we had to support these customers, and we had to build new features and fix bugs, and we had to really think on our feet in the early days. My only regret at the start of our journey was we didn't think big enough. At the beginning, we're just like, we wanna build a company that could sustain our lifestyle so we could live a good life, but we realized that this could be bigger than that. This company can actually serve hundreds of people, thousands of people. It ended up, we had over 30,000 customers. The point here is that you have to also plan for success. A lot of people plan for failure, what happens when this happens, but what happens when this is wildly successful? Are you able to support that type of business?

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  And that has nothing to do with the tech behind your software, okay? Has a lot to do with you as a manager, as a recruiter, as somebody who builds systems, as somebody who knows how to build an actual successful company. But it's also about how do you make the complicated simple for your customers? Listen, I'm sure your software is very sophisticated in whatever software business you do, but your customer doesn't really care about how it's done. They just wanna get it done. Whatever problem you solve, they just want that problem to be solved. So you need to make it so simple, they understand that, hey, this product does XYZ. They don't really care about the how, they just wanna make sure it does it every single time. I've seen so many great software products that weren't successful as a business because there's too much in the weeds.

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  The founder, who is maybe very technical, would really explain a lot of the technicalities on the sales page and on the website of that product. And as a customer, I don't know all that. I don't really actually care. All I really care about is, can you solve the problem that I have? Let me give you an example, like ebay.com. You know, eBay is a place where you could sell your used products or the things you have around the house, and a place that you could buy things that might be interesting to you. At the end of the day, they're building an easy-to-use marketplace, somewhere I could sell something easily and receive money and be able to sell that product and deliver it to the customer, and somewhere I could buy something. How that's done in the background, the technicalities of all that,

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  the code, the security, the login, all that kinda stuff, it doesn't really matter to the customer. They really actually wanna know. Actually, it's a deterrent if they knew that. So keep things simple on your website. So I wanna share with you five secrets that I discovered by building and growing and selling my software company over a decade. These secrets will allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition and make your life a whole lot easier as you're growing your business. Secret number one is you wanna solve a painful enough problem. I start with this one because this is the most prevalent problem that I see in companies that don't grow. The software solves a problem people have, but it's not a real painful problem. Let me give you an example.

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  When we started Webinar Ninja, our software company, there were not a lot of webinar solutions out there. There were meeting softwares where you can have a meeting online, like a video conference, like GoToMeeting at the time. This is even prior to Zoom. But there was no way to run a sales webinar with all the marketing materials, like a landing page so you can get registrations, where you can have automated emails, where you can be able to do the live webinar and make offers, and a built-in chat that allows people to like, you know, you poll the audience, all kinds of stuff like that. And the follow-up sequences later on. The whole thing was built so that a solopreneur, even a small team of five, can run a live sales webinar easily. If you sold products and services online, this was a real painful problem

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  when we started Webinar Ninja, because they would have to Frankenstein four, five, six, seven different pieces of software together, hope, make sure that everything works together. And if anything didn't work, it would be incredibly embarrassing if the webinar just like conked out, and they were not able to serve their customers or sell their products or services. It was high stakes. So to have like an all-in-one solution was a real good solution to the problem that they were experiencing, which was, hey, I don't know how to run this highly technical thing that's really imperative, is really important to my business, the sales process. So when we launched Webinar Ninja, it wasn't hard for us to sell it, because it solved a real pain point. Too many people are selling products that are nice to haves.

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  And products that are nice to haves are not things that you will pay for month after month, year after year. It's easy to cancel because there's a good chance you might be not using it all the time. The bigger the pain point you remove, the bigger the value your customers perceive from your product. They feel like they're getting their money's worth. A good example of this is that our customers, if they ran just one webinar using our software, they're able to make as much money in sales as it would cost them for a year membership of Webinar Ninja. So it paid for itself after just one webinar. So this is compelling value. That means that they would actually be all in the black. They would make more and more money every single time they ran a webinar. So we're gonna talk about why it's important to know, what is that thing?

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  What is the thing that's gonna make them feel like this is an amazing value? What is that winning moment? Because that's gonna be important for you to keep your customers on your software for as long as possible. We'll talk about that in a moment. Be honest, as a business owner, how much of your day is actual work? And how much is it just getting ready to do the work? Answering emails, tweaking presentations, hunting for numbers? That stuff adds up fast, which is why upgrading to the premium tier of Google Workspace with Gemini is a game changer. One subscription gets you Google's AI right into all your apps, like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet, so it can handle all the heavy lifting across your day. Need a reply drafted in your exact voice? Gemini handles it in Gmail.

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  Secret number two, it's a no-brainer. Fulfill your promise. Every software makes a promise it has to deliver and it has to deliver that promise every single time. Because when you break that promise, you not only lose that customer, that customer's going to tell everybody else about the bad experience they had. And with online reviews now, it becomes even louder, that experience. People will hear about it easily. The first thing that people do when they search for a new product or a new tool is they search, what would people say about this? What does Reddit forums say about this? What is, are there Google reviews about this? Are there Capterra reviews? In the software world, there's this website called Capterra that reviews software. So, broken promises really destroy trust fast, but it really destroys your reputation

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  and it's really hard to recover from that. Because even though you might have improved your product or service over the years, those reviews are still out there. So, the key here is, don't over-promise to get a sale across. Always under-promise, over-deliver. This is the key, so that people have expectations and then you exceed those expectations when they use your product. One of the examples that's easy to kind of point out because it's so prevalent is that if your product says it's easy to use and it's not easy to use, that's a problem, right? It's actually better for you to say that this is a very sophisticated software and then if it's hard to use, they're like, well, because it's sophisticated, I understand why it's hard, okay? But don't claim it's easy to use if it's not easy to use.

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  If the average customer can't easily navigate your software. The test for us, because we would say with Webinar Ninja that it's intuitive, it's easy to use, is user-friendly, is do they know how to use the software? Are they able to run a webinar, create and run a webinar without reading anything, without reading any instructions, or asking support, or looking at the help articles? If they can do that, and the average customer could do that easily, that means we are actually easy to use. Otherwise, then it's a false claim and we're breaking promises. By the way, this goes beyond than just the product itself. Like, if you promise that you have a 14-day money-back guarantee and then somebody asks for a refund within the 14 days and you don't give it to them, they are going to say, this

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  person is not trustworthy, this company is a fraud, this company doesn't keep its promises. If you do a sales webinar, a sales call, and the title of this webinar is, you know, I'm going to show you how this tool is going to be able to double your revenue, and you don't actually show that on that demo, on that webinar, then you're breaking a promise. They're expecting something and if you don't deliver on that expectation, they're going to lose trust.

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  Secret number three is the secret weapon that we use at Webinar Ninja, and that's prioritizing customer support and customer success. These are two separate things, customer support and customer success. Let me just define what that means in a moment. So, customer support is when you support customers that are either not customers yet, like they're asking questions about your product or services through email, or through chat, or even through phone, and they're trying to figure out if your product is right for them. It's also when they're getting started and buying the product and they are asking questions like, do you take Amex? You know, what's the difference between this plan and this plan? Right? They're in the buying mode right now, that's customer support. It's also like when they just ask a random question after they become a customer, like, hey, how do I use this feature?

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  How do I upgrade to the next plan? Whatever it might be. Customer success, on the other hand, is a whole different role. This role, its goal is to make sure that your customers are successful with your product. For us at Webinar Ninja, what that looked like is when somebody signed up and became a customer, we wanted to make sure that this customer got the most out of the software, so that we scheduled a call with each customer, with our customer success manager, and she sat with them and set up their first webinar on this call, so that they have no excuse to get started. Why did we do this? Because we knew statistically that when a customer creates and runs one webinar, their

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  likelihood of staying with us is far greater than if they didn't create a webinar in that first couple of weeks, in that first 14-day window which they were on trial. And it was actually like, the difference was like, average customer that didn't do that was like, three months would stay with us. The customer that did do that, they'd stay with us on average eight months. So, it's like more than double, almost triple the lifetime value of that customer. So, we made sure that customers are successful with the product. They felt supported, they felt like we had their back. We made sure that even when they had trouble on the actual webinar, maybe they needed someone to man the chat because they're overwhelmed, one of our customer success members or our customer support team members would jump on the webinar with them and help them manage that chat.

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  We did everything possible to make sure that they felt they got a win off that first webinar. Now, I mentioned something really important. You need to understand, what is that critical activation step? What I mean by activation is like, what is that thing that every customer, if they do this, they get a win out of your product? They actually stay longer, a loyal customer that stays with you months, even years, using your software. So, one way you could do this is that you have to look at your customers, which group of customers are staying a long time, you know, above average than the rest of the customers? You speak to them and ask them, what did they do when they started? When did they run their, you know, do the first thing or first action on whatever you do in your product or your service? So, you can understand like what it takes.

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  Now, there's actually software that you can build in, like Heat Maps, and you can figure out what the customer actually did, like you have evidence, you can know like, okay, in the first day they signed up, they activated their software, they set up this onboarding sequence, they created this email, whatever your product does. The point here is that you can look at the data behind the scenes and see like, what are winning customers doing? Customers that are loyal to your software, that are getting the most out of your software, what are the actions they're taking? And then you just make sure that every customer that joins you is encouraged to do those actions. So, you could see this as part of their onboarding sequence. Why is this so important? Why is customer success so important as well as customer support?

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  Because you don't want to run a business with a leaky bucket. You want to keep as many customers as you have. Why? Because it costs you so much money, time, effort to get a customer. You know, maybe your cost per acquisition per customer is like $100, right? And maybe your customer pays you $50 a month. So, if they don't stay with you for at least three months, you're not making a profit. So, you're actually losing money every single time somebody signs up and cancels after a month. So, what you want to do is make sure that you shore up those leaky buckets and you make sure your customers are actually becoming successful with your product and using it so they could see the win, they could see the value of what you offer.

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  Really quick, I hope you're getting value from today's episode. If you are, I encourage you to hit subscribe because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's called the five people that will sabotage your success. Yep, these are a motley crew of characters you want to avoid like the plague. And it's going to be incredibly important to do so if you want to move forward in your business, in your career as an entrepreneur. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Secret number four, let's go deep, and that is, your team is your competitive advantage. The thing about software companies is that your features can be copied, your benefits can be copied, your whole sales page can be copied, okay? I know this because it happened to us repeatedly by many of our competitors. We'd come out with a feature and they would copy it about a month later.

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  We would actually change how we do our headlines and how we sell our product or service on the sales pages, and they would copy it word for word. It was incredibly frustrating. But that's just how a competitive landscape operates. This is what happens. But you know what they can't copy? They can't copy the team that you built behind the business. Your ability to build an incredible team to help you create a great product, to market that product, to sell that product, to support that product, all comes down to the people that you hire. What I realized when I was building Webinar Ninja was that after the first year or two, when I was just making sure the business was running and we were growing and we had our first

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  customers and we're kind of finding our identity, I started to realize that my main job as a leader of this company is to be the best recruiter as possible. I had to hire the best talent that I could afford. I had to look at big companies that maybe hired customer support agents like Netflix, at Tesla and SpaceX and Apple and Uber, right? And we actually hired people that worked for these companies in other roles like customer support, just so that we can learn about what kind of systems, what kind of cultures did they build? What was their systems when somebody asked for a refund? What is the language that they used? I was trying to find talent and hire people that came from companies that was teaching them how to service customers at a world-class level.

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  Now, this gets a little bit difficult with highly technical, highly skilled positions like engineers, like managers, like creatives, because these people are quite expensive. But you can learn a lot even just from the people that you hire that are doing more administrative tasks, whether it's executive assistants or customer support team members or customer success team members, or people that do QA, like quality assurance in your company. There's a lot you can learn. And if you want to understand how important this point is, like talent is everything. And when you're trying to compete in a business, if you really want to see what I mean, I want you to just find like the chief technical officer of any company. Go and find out who the chief

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  technical officer is at Tesla, or Apple, or at Google, and go and look at their job history. You're going to notice that they all worked at the same companies, right? They're just basically trading employees because they understand there's a limited talent pool at that level of business. So like you'll see somebody who is like the chief technical officer, he was at Netflix, and then he went to Tesla, and then he was now he's at Google. They're basically just like one upping each other and trading talents and experiences. And that's not by accident. They actually understand that, hey, we need a great talent to shore up this part of our company. Maybe it's technical, maybe it's creative, maybe it's sales. And they just basically borrow each other's

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  talents for a period of time. And then it's almost like they repeat itself, the cycle repeats itself, and they find themselves back in the same place again. The point I'm trying to make here is that as a growing company, yes, you're not Tesla, yes, you're not SpaceX, yes, you're not Netflix, but as a growing company that's trying to compete with other software companies, you have to understand that it's actually your secret weapon to find the best people that you can afford. And when I say that, it means it's better to hire one really talented person than three mediocre people that just makes you feel like you have a big team. No, actually, pool all your resources to get the best talent possible. Secret number five is a secret that most people forget about as their company starts to grow, and that is you've got to put your customers first. The best

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  software companies don't just listen to their customers. They use their feedback to make better decisions, right? They understand that without their customers, they have no business. I literally would say this every stand-up with all our team at Webinar Ninja is that, hey, at the end of the day, we don't exist without our customers. Okay? We all don't have jobs. We all have no salary. We have no product. We have nothing. Okay? So at the end of the day, it's not only like customer comes first, and we got to please the customers, the customer's always right. Yeah, that's fine. But you have to understand that your customers' needs change, your product has to change, your attitude towards your business has to change, who you need to hire is going to change, because you're going to need something else to be able to fill those needs for your customers. Listen,

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  your customers are not going to tell you exactly what they want. So you need to understand what their problems are, what issues they're facing. That means you have to survey them, you have to talk to them, you email them, you have to have conversations with them. Why? So that you can understand how to create a proper solution to those problems. The solution part, the creative solution part, is your job. That's why you are in this business in the first place. You're in the problem-solving business. That's how you get paid. And the better you solve this problem, the better you get paid. So to wrap up today's episode, building a powerful, successful software company has a lot to do with everything but tech. Okay? Yeah, the tech is important. It's got to do what it says it's going to do. It's got to be reliable. Of course, that's just table stakes.

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  But if you want to be exceptional, you got to solve a painful problem. You got to make sure that you keep your promises to your customers. You got to make sure that you go the extra mile when it comes to customer support and customer success. You need to build a team that is going to allow you to do all these things, and you need to put your customer first so that you can pivot and change with the market. This is really, these are the five things that really will differentiate you from everybody else. If you just focus on these five things and not worry about everything else, all the other distractions, all the other tech, whether it's AI or whatever it might be, you know, if AI serves your customers, great. But if it doesn't, don't get distracted, right? Just focus on what's important. And I just gave it to you on a silver platter. Thanks so much for checking out today's episode. If you want to learn how to build a software business with AI

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  this weekend, then we have an episode on that topic. You could just scroll back. It was episode 2790, I believe, and it was called How to Build a Software Business with AI This Weekend with Zero Coding Skills Required. I walk you through step by step. I share my screen. I use all the tools that I use to build software. I break out the iPad. It's our drawing grass for you so you understand every step of the way. So it's a little bit of a longer episode. It's about 40 minutes because I want to make sure I covered everything, but it gives you all the nitty-gritty details on how to actually make this happen, literally in two days. So go ahead and check that episode out.

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  If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start, grow, and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you got to do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode.

• 26:07Speaker 01

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