I Went From 0 to 14,000 Customers with SaaS (ALL Bootstrapped!)

0:00[Music] [Music] I'm Omar Zen home and it's great to be here in Las Vegas for micro comm 2019 I am the co-founder and CEO of webinar ninja I run this business with my co-founder my best friend my wife Nicole Baldino say hi Nicole and together we run a team of sixteen remote team members to run our company whether our ninja team love you keep working hard so yeah so I'm gonna share my story today how we went from 0 to 14 thousand customers in the past five years of growing webinar ninja along the way I want to share some tips that I wish somebody told me when I got started

0:54I call these survival tips Nicole I bootstrapped self-funded whoever you want to call it webinar ninja with zero cash we were really poor okay and we we made it today we're here I still have closed I had a great meal I'm so good so I want to share that story with you and share that story I got to go back five years and in fact almost to the day five years ago Nicole and I were here in Vegas for a conference it was a conference called New Media Expo not a great conference but the point is is that's when it all got started and that's me and Nicole

1:29five years ago I mean look at that beautiful dark rich hair I had okay this is what I gotta look forward to no I'm just kidding I've earned every gray hair and every hair that I've lost but that was us green happy beautiful right but the truth is is that that event was incredible for us because it was a pivotal moment we we met some very interesting people I'm sure you're having these experiences today at the conference at the time we just launched our own online program called the hundred dollar MBA which is exactly what it sounds like a hundred dollar MBA education but we weren't ballers or

2:06anything we had less than 50 customers less than 300 people on our email list we had a you know virtually no audience no traffic and like I said we were flat broke and when I say flat broke like we were trying to figure out how we're gonna make rent okay and somehow we scrapped together enough money to buy to like super super duper early bird tickets for the event got a couple tickets to Las Vegas got into a fleabag room into the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street like one of the oldest places on in Vegas but we got here and the interesting is interesting thing is that

2:43when we got here we met all these interesting people that were doing interesting things things that we wanted to do living the lives that we wanted to live and I realized something like even though I was side hustling for about ten years before this point I left that conference with an interesting feeling I felt absolutely stupid right I started to feel like wow I don't know anything like I thought I knew it all and I need to reevaluate Who I am like it was an incredibly humbling feeling but we also left really feeling inspired again we were seeing people doing things we thought wow this is possible that

3:21person's normal just like me and I can I can build a business like that I can be able to live a life like that and it was just really really inspiring but the biggest takeaway that we got from the event was every single person that I met that conference that was successful that had a great business had one thing in common and that leads me to my first survival tip okay and that's if you have no audience you have no business every single person at that conference at a successful business had an audience had a successful blog a great YouTube channel something going on a great email

3:58list that they can reach out to if the Kardashians have taught us anything is that if you don't have an audience you don't have a business okay so that really resonated with us like man I gotta get myself an audience I gotta have somebody some people to talk to like you can work on a great app you can work on a great product but you have nobody to talk to to sell to it's really hard to get any kind of velocity and it just became really apparent to me that like maybe the audiences more important than actually having the business or the product so we left that

4:32conferencing okay we're gonna do this we're could commit to building our audience so we decided to do two things we started a podcast and we started doing webinars let's start with a podcast so the first thing we did is we started this podcast the cause okay we're gonna start this podcast we're gonna kill it it's gonna be amazing we started this podcast called people who know their it's a great name right unfortunately the show is absolute okay and it was you know we really tried hard we it was an interview podcast we interviewed people and great entrepreneurs 46 episodes we really put a lot of effort into it but it didn't

5:10really move the needle like we really would didn't have a great audience we built it for the audience and on a good day we'd have like 400 downloads on the episode and and that really wasn't enough for us to feel successful not enough for it to really be significant so Nicole I really thought hey what's going on why are we not successful like should we just give up this podcasting thing like no podcasting is an interesting medium because you could build a relationship with people people who start to trust you people start to understand why you built your business and if they resonate with your why

5:40they'll want to get to know your products and services so we thought hey both Nicole and I have over thirteen years of experience in education I was a teacher for thirteen years so is Nicole why are we interviewing people maybe we should be teaching on this podcast so we retooled and we said okay let's start a new podcast and we called it the hundred dollar MBA show which is daily short 10-minute lessons five days a week we would deliver a new business lesson and we just put our heads down we worked really hard on this podcast we launched it in April I'm sorry August of 2014 and we got an

6:18audience it was different people usually are accustomed to interview podcasts at the time they thought it was interesting because it was short we were fortunate enough that iTunes awarded us best of IT interest is like the one of the best podcasts of the year which gave us a lot of traction and we've had over 1200 episodes over 90 million downloads 90 now we had over a hundred and twenty thousand daily listeners so it's a lot easier for me to speak to somebody that is already that already has a relationship with me knows who I am knows my story and say hey by the way I also have these products or services

6:56that may be of interest if you're interested in this content so that was a huge taken for you takeaway for us if I'm being completely honest I would not have webinar ninja if it wasn't for the podcast if it wasn't for my audience I would not be on stage say like I would be a nobody right so I really believe that whatever you're working on think about how you're going to build an audience whether it's blogging whether it's a you know a YouTube channel whether it's a podcast whatever medium you choose the second thing we did is we started doing webinars now like I said my email list was pretty weak it was

7:30like less than 300 people so webinars were like fascinating to me I was like what you just teach on video and then you maybe give an offer and then people buy your stuff like are you serious I could teach I've been to over 13 years it seems pretty cool and I ran my first webinar I had ten registrants right and five attendees but at the time 10 people signing up it took me like two weeks ago ten people on my mailing list back then so I was like this is great I love webinars so I started doing webinars week after week I started get comfortable with it I really enjoyed it

8:02but unfortunately its 2014 webinars are still early and this is kind of what I had to do every single week I would have to first create a landing page so I can promote the webinar then I would have to put my opt-in form for my email marketing software into the page and then I have to you know create the webinar page and make sure my streaming software was in the page and it's streamed properly then I have to create all the email notifications and then make sure that you email marketing software fired them properly and then from there I'd have to embed a chat software on my webinar page and make

8:32sure that worked and then after that I had to Grum the actual webinar and make sure the attendees are seeing this and it's actually working then what's all over it's not over yet I gotta have to have a replay page and embed the replay in there and I did this every single week and I was just like this is insane but it's working so let me just keep on doing it and I said well maybe people are struggling with this maybe people want to learn how to do this maybe I should create a course maybe even a book on how to do this all how to

9:01put us all together so we launched the DIY webinar guide Nicole's a New York Film Academy graduate we shot these amazing courses great video a great course we were like this thing's is gonna be amazing we launched it and we got to sales wait four guys one of them was a chargeback I wish I was joking I wish I was joking but the funny thing is is that we were like okay people don't want to learn how to do this okay and it was just really a blow in the gut at the time you know we could have used a couple more sales right so I just kept

9:41on truckin I just kept on keep it kept on going but the one thing you're gonna learn along the way is this tip is that sometimes you have to create a bad product to create a good one and this is from Ben horts Horowitz book the hard thing about hard things great book love that book and its really true and sometimes you're not gonna understand what that good one is until a little bit later you'll realize oh man I created this failed this it tanked completely and then later on maybe not immediately you realize okay this is what people really want but I say this to you

10:16because I wish somebody told me that at the time because you just feel like a loser you're like oh this thing failed I got two sales or one of us a chargeback this is ridiculous right what am i doing right you have to realize that hey this might happen I might have a few things that won't work out so I just kept on going I kept on truckin I kept on doing my webinars I was getting some traction with it but I was getting frustrated with that whole procedure of creating all those things so I said okay what if I just like put a software together just

10:46for me to make it easier for myself you know I don't consider myself a professional developer I'm I know a bit of PHP HTML CSS enough just to hack something together and use it for myself so I started using this software to run my webinars and as I was running the webinars you know I started scratching my itch I was like okay this is cool this feels good this is interesting but as I was running it the attendees on the webinar started asking me like hey what are you using for this webinar and I said just a soft way slap together and they're like well can I buy it and I was

11:21just like hmm give me a minute to put a landing page together but uh but the point was is that I learned my lesson from the DI webinar guy that like there's a difference between somebody saying hey that's a great idea yeah I would buy that wonderful idea and actually putting money down you know as they say money talks but often when we have business ideas we like to share with our friends and family and things like that and it's just it's an easy thing to say yes to because there's no commitment so Nicole I because we were broke and because we knew this decided to pre-sell

11:56webinar ninja we decided to pre-sell it and that's where we lead to the next tip which is always be profitable if you're bootstrapping your company you need to find a way to make sure that whatever move you make at the start how can I be profitable at the start how can I make sure I can pay all my bills and pay whoever I'm hiring or pay myself right so it was really important for Anna : I'd be like hey okay we got this hundred dollar ba thing going it's paying our bills but if we're gonna start something new we can't afford to lose money we got

12:26to find a way to be profitable from the start and so we pre-sold webinar ninja when I say pre-sold we literally just had one landing page this landing page is so hideous I don't want you want to like hurt your eyes and put it on a slide okay it literally just had like some Photoshop file screenshots and just like this is the problem we're trying to solve this is my story if you're interested in a better way to do webinars easier way to do webinars click on this PayPal button and buy you know a spot we sold it for $300 and we opened up a hundred and fifty beta spots

13:05at the time my list was starting to gross had about 3,000 people my email list I emailed everybody that I knew like personally on gmail like hey I emailed you last week I want to tell you about something I'm launching social media whatever small presence we had and in 48 hours we sold our first 150 spots so big difference between two sales one of them is a chargeback right and we realize okay we hit a nerve here there's so much pain in this area of doing webinars that people are willing to just pay $300 with the hopes that you can solve something in six months when

13:41they get the software so we're like okay that's great we hit a nerve here we know this is gonna work at some capacity if we actually can deliver everything is on the line here by the way and we said we can use a little bit more money so we opened up another hundred spots at a net sold out in 24 hours so we had 250 beta spots we gave them a lifetime access for $300 so we had $75,000 in funding to create a commercial wall like a commercial commercially viable product where I can actually give something that looks decent to these users now we purposely made this lifetime some people

14:17don't agree with me with this move but we made the first 250 spots a lifetime because I want him to feel invested in the product I want him to feel like hey I have lifetime access I want to give feedback I want to be able to improve this product in some way so it was our way to say hey we're gonna give you access to this as long as we live as long as you like just fund us at the start to make this happen so from there I hired a freelance developer that knew what they're doing and they cleaned up the software and then the moment of truth came September

14:5121st 2014 we launched it and it was full bugs it was ugly it was a disaster right so that's just the truth that's just what happened right and what happened next was I got on email I got on skype I got on the phone I spoke to people in person those first 250 members asking them for feedback asking what went wrong asked him how to fix it begging them not to ask for a refund because we asked them you know you have 60 days to make a decision after we deliver it so because I didn't have the money to go back to them so I really was on the line here I

15:31really had to make sure that I sold the of my company so I didn't have investors but I had data members I had to convince hey this thing's gonna be amazing just you know trust in me I'm gonna improve these things and we made improvements and we we iterated and we took all that feedback and we went out of beta one subversion one which when we became an actual SAS and charged monthly and annual for our product and those 250 members I know by name right like these people you know are amazing to us they're like our biggest fans our biggest advocates even though we didn't

16:05deliver with to them a great product at the start it was functional at work but it had his hiccups so a lot of people ask me this question great you know story at the start how did you get to 14,000 users how did you get to over a million people attending your webinar and the answer I always give people just don't like it they're like really that's your answer right and it's just the truth and I'm gonna explain that in tip number four relationships are your biggest asset those first 250 members that we had half of those came from that conference I told you about in in Vegas five years

16:44ago I literally met as many people as I could I got to know them I took down their emails I took down their Twitter handles whatever and when we came to launch or pre-launch this thing I emailed them and say hey I'm working on a new project if you could spread the word or if you're interested you know here's the link you know they they all like hey I'll support you sure let's it's not that much money let's go ahead another example is that at that conference I met a gentleman named John Corcoran who is a great business mind has a great podcast and he introduced me to a whole bunch of people

17:17just because he said he's a good guy and we're became friends and he introduced me to a guy named Michael port Michael poore is a New York Times best seller he has a huge audience of like over half a million people in his email list and I heard that hey Michael port is going to be in LA I was living in San Diego at the time and we went to dinner together and I we we had like a two-hour dinner we're talking about everything other than business and at the end he was like hey I really like you man what's going on in your world I said I just launched

17:45this new software it's called webinar ninja this is what a dude does and like my whole thing was like it would be awesome if this guy just used my product right there just like hey man you know would you like to try it out would you like to be a user and he was like well why don't I do a webinar with you and for my audience and that way you can be exposed to my audience I was like what are you serious that's amazing I would love to like give you an affiliate link is like no no no I don't want any money just just go ahead and do it you

18:08have a great product I support you boom and people are like what are you serious people actually do that yeah there are people actually just want to help you out they see themselves in you they see themselves in you in a way and they and this has happened to me several times where I get an opportunity to grow my audience and get sales through just the people I know and the people I've met so what's my secret well my secret is I encourage you to channel your internal Mister Rogers I grew up on Mister Rogers if you don't love Mister Rogers get out of this room

18:42right now mr. Rogers is the epitome in my in my book of somebody who's selfless helpful kind wants to help people out has helped a generation out right and I don't want to be cheesy or corny but like when when we go to conferences when you email and you tweet I think this is a good approach you're being like I just want to help this person I want to be a good person and just be a nice friend like mr. Rogers was my friend as a child like I said go home watch mr. Rogers he was my buddy and I just look at I want to make friends with people in this

19:13space and I don't really care if it comes back to me or if we do a joint venture or we do something yeah I don't care about that I just I'm interested in these people I I like them I want to be their friend and I want to help them in any way so there's a technique that I want to share with you that is super easy to do and it's not sales E or marketing because again you're just staying in touch with friends so I want to make what I want you to make a list of 60 people and these people could be people that you've met at this

19:40conference people that you you want to get to know people that you've been meaning to get in touch with and you can just put it in a Google XI or Excel file or whatever and every week on tieu to message five people okay and this message doesn't have to be like hey what you're working on maybe we can partner up know like how would you message a friend I would say like hey I saw that you had a baby on Facebook relations or how was the flight back home from from Micro Kampf you know that was crazy weather when we left hope you're doing well go Celtics whatever

20:11like you don't have to be something you're not just be a friend I do this all the time and it could be a message it could be whatsapp it could be a tweet just stay in touch with five people a week once a week I want you to make one intro to somebody else so if you met somebody at this conference that was interesting that was doing cool things and you know somebody else like hey do you know John I met him at micro Kampf he creates mobile apps amazing guy I'll let you guys take it from here and what that does is that allows other

20:40people to feel like wow you know on where's the connector next time I meet somebody interesting I'm gonna introduce him to you you know introduces him to Omar right so I want you to try this for 12 weeks 12 weeks of doing this that means at the end of the 12 weeks you'll have contacted all 60 people it's only three months and what happens is that that you're constantly in touch with the people that you want to be in touch with so it's not like I haven't spoken to you in years and it builds that relationship in that rapport and to me this is my like the

21:14secret of growing a business is your relationships and it's amazing how it comes back to you I don't know the exact data I don't have a chart for you but this works I also want to say that I still make mistakes and I want to see that to you because you know I've been doing this for five years I've been I built businesses for over 15 years side hustling how to e-commerce business for a very long time podcasts all this stuff right till this day I still make mistakes the fun thing about mistakes is that the more you make the better you get at course correcting and saying okay

21:49that was a mistake let's move here now of course you want to learn from your mistakes but what I want to say is don't beat yourself up every time you make a mistake why because there's gonna be more and you're just not gonna make it if you keep beating yourself up so I still make mistakes I've made mistakes just this month you know I've learned I moved on it's all good okay and that leads me to my fifth tip is this is supposed to be hard I wish somebody told me this you know you hear cast like oh if I knew is this hard I would never tried haha no no I want to

22:21know how hard it is cuz the whole time when I was struggling I was like am i stupid am I an idiot am I like weak why is this so hard for me right but the truth is after like getting to know other entrepreneurs reading their hearing their stories talking to people here at micro Kampf you know reading autobiographies of great entrepreneurs it's a struggle it's supposed to be hard okay so if it's hard for you at the start if it's hard for you while you're building it's okay that's the rite of passage that's how it's supposed to be that's just you're on cue it's all good right so to

22:55illustrate this I I want to give you this image here okay and I didn't make this up I took this from Zig Ziglar which is he was talking about like personal development but I applied it to business and in SAS business in particular so at the start when you're in the idea phase or when you're about to launch you're like at the base of the mountain right with the guy with the sunglasses all right the smiley faces and you're having a great time the sun's in your face you're just taking a walk really right and it's a good good feeling you feel inspired and it's great you see

23:23this beautiful Vista beautiful mountain amazing as you start trekking up the mountain here you know you're walking up you're still hiking right you're starting to sweat it's a little bit tiring you know but you're still having a good time you're having a bit struggles you know you make a few mistakes sales are not as good as you think it is but it's it's fine you're still you're still living the dream right as you start moving up the mountain around phase three your quads are killing you you're like whoa this is hard you know like i'm kind of plateauing I can't really move up that fast anymore with hiking and all that

23:53stuff you know I'm maybe at 7 or 6 or maybe 8 mr are 8,000 mr are and you're not growing as fast as you used to yeah I'm moving up as fast as you used to a lot of businesses stopped here and it just becomes like a side project a hobby something like that right and they fail here why because they don't realize that you know the hiking the same thing they were doing to get to that point is not going to take them to the top you've got to start doing other things like you have to start climbing vertically like you got to start actually vertically

24:24climbing with tools there's a different different atmosphere up there different weather there might be different people up there you have to understand how they work you might need a Sherpa to show you up the way somebody's been up that mountain a few times and knows you know what to look out for and this is a phase I got stuck on for a bit and it's because I was I was too proud I was I said to myself all getting a coach we're getting somebody who can help me out that's where people are like not intelligent enough to figure it out on their own or somebody who's weak or not motivated but

24:53you do you do need somebody to help you along the way that has done it before you know Nicole and I have hired Dan Martell which is agree he's a great coach for us and he's done this a few times and advise companies so like it's okay to ask for help it's okay to say all right I got this far on my own wits I need help I need to know how to get up there vertically whether it's an advisor or whether it's somebody who's gonna you know come on board to your company and and and give you some you know some tips but as you get closer to face you know

25:25for and up to the top you know you're climbing you learn how to climb you have a roadmap you have a bit of guidance you have a mentor and you start to realize that every move counts every decision counts you know you you see a lot of companies maybe make a mistake and the blowback is huge because they're so big and the drop is pretty steep now because you've gone up this far so you're working hard still right you're putting in the hours but you're you're putting a little bit more thought you can't afford just to you know make mistakes and quit and fail quickly and we and

25:58course-correct then of course when you get to the top of the mountain the part that we all dream about phase 5 you're on the top of the mountain that's that's the best right rocky time rocky 4 right at the top but the funny thing is is when you do get to the top you have a completely different perspective you see all the different other mountaintops there are other vistas the other things you can do the other things you can improve in your business other challenges other mountains to climb so the point of this whole of the illustration and these interesting emojis is that it's hard it's

26:31challenging all along the way it's just different challenges and what I love about this and this is I'm not trying to like put you down here what I'm trying to say what's great about this is that because there's so many different kinds of it forces you to become something else one of the things I learned is that like if I want to get somewhere I can't be the same person I got a change to get there right I have to become something else I have to become somebody who knows how to climb vertically right and and that's what's beautiful about starting a business and entrepreneurship is that

27:03that growth of feeling like wow I can I can really become something better than I am yesterday so you're climbing this mountain we all know that it's very competitive in SAS in business so how do you stand out and in a crazy world we've seen this slide over and over in growth and people have mentioned you know how much competition it is in the marketplace how do you stand out from the crowd and that it leads me to my final tip tip number six your difference is your power okay I struggled with this for a while you know my parents migrated to from America from Egypt to America in

27:42the 60s I grew up just feeling different feeling not I don't fit in I look different my name is Omar Zen home no one's ever heard of it I would go to Egypt in the summer for summer vacation or to come back they'd be like Oh like how was the camel ride oh that's up a thing you know house King Tut that type of thing so I grew up feeling different right and I thought that was a weakness I thought that you know maybe I can't make it you know my name is Omar Zen home right if you google my name it takes you about five pages to find a

28:14different Omar Zen home so I use it to my advantage that is my power poor Justin Jackson he's got like five pro athletes ahead of him right the poor guy you know I never built a SAS company for I never built the software business before but I was a teacher for 13 years I didn't neglect my pass and it's a no you know I'm not a teacher anymore I'm a businessperson now I'm a software person screw teaching know that was my advantage when our marketing is all education based we teach people how to run businesses or how to run webinars how to be able to prou when I was with

28:49education of mine and people love it because it's not as hyped up in sales here's our competition they're like oh I could teach but sales is kind of timid but I could t ting sounds something I can do and that became our advantage our difference became our advantage I was totally broke Nicole I didn't have any money so we were forced to think creatively about how we can fund this project you know I really believe constraint really you know breeds creativity forces you to be creative and have creative solutions I'm not a pro developer everybody in this room is probably better developer than I am right nor am i a great designer I the

29:24you know the first few years I was doing my own designs in PSD and they were really ugly you know today we're so lucky to have arena or great UX UI designer she's fantastic but I'm neither of those but I am a user like I have run over 500 webinars I know what people want I am very in touch with what a host of a webinar would really love so I can really inform the product when we have our team meetings and lastly I am not like any other entrepreneur I know when I got on this journey of entrepreneurship I honestly wasn't sure I can actually do it mainly because I've

29:59never seen an example of me I've never seen an arab-american successful entrepreneur and I thought maybe it's not possible maybe it's just how it is but then I thought maybe I could be that person maybe I can just embrace that and in that bracing that kind of understanding I could be more memorable on a podcast on on a you know an interview on stage at a conference people will remember me more because I'm not like everybody else or I'm an example they have seen over and over again so I encourage you no matter how different you are your quirks you're a huge fan of Michael Bolton use them in

30:36your in your emails you know instead of just writing you know why you unsubscribing write how could we be lovers if we can't be friends right so just embrace however weird you are because that's your advantage that's how you're gonna stand out by being yourself thank you very much guys I really appreciate it I'm curious about your transition going from the DIY webinar content to the software did you was it just that the first one failed and the second one succeeded because it was more turnkey for customers or and and how did you sort of go through that thought process what were the signal that you're following to

31:14realize that you that the problem was to a meaningful one but that you had the wrong solution that's a great question because you know obviously a failure will will well let you know okay this didn't work and it'll force you to ask the question why like why didn't this work well I asked myself well if I may if I'm somebody doing webinars what is my biggest pain and it's like well all that work well I'm still doing all that work and I was like okay maybe they don't wanna do all the work so I still kind of never you know I still kind of created the software for myself first

31:48and I really didn't consider starting a software business it wasn't you on top of mine but it started to cement when I started to use it I was like wow this is super easy and then people started asking about it and asking like hey can we buy it and things like that so I was like maybe I should consider this you know that's kind of the transition thanks for sharing I wanted to ask so for your initial free initial spots that you sold you mentioned that half of them came from that conference of Vegas yeah and then I'm assuming the rest came from maybe like your audience or something but I

32:17wonder if you could talk about how you procure the rest of those slot how you filled the rest of those slots I like this question because it forces me to be honest to be honest I did things people are not willing to do not anything illegal or anything bad but I was willing to email people that I knew that I meant and just actually sell them on an email and it wasn't sales it was just like hey by the old my story like you know I launched this new software I'm still kind of building it this is what it does you know I literally emailed people that have emailed me once or I've

32:55heard of them or I would get on a Skype call via like a DM on Twitter I was you know a part of a community called fizzle which was like an online education for business and I had a chat with there I got his feedback corporate bar at the time so it was literally like one person at a time emailing calling kind of door-to-door sales until I actually got there I know that sounds like a lot of time but I had no other choice like I what else am I gonna do like I don't have an audience that the time was still growing so that's that's really

33:29what I did over here hey thank you so going back guys to that same question or similar I really like the idea of lifetime sales I want understand your mentality at a time how they go about you know understanding why are you making the right choice of giving them lifetime access and without charging them anything else afterwards right I think it's a cool idea I like that I think anyone starting up can use and I think it gives enough incentive for people signing up to just come and purchase it knowing that and for long term they'll gain gain value so I understand like how did you decide that and what was the

34:16process like I'm gonna be honest again like a big part of that decision was I need money like I'm just being honest like this I was like I'm gonna build this I need money and I need to make this as promising as lucrative as possible you know as advantageous as possible to the user but on top of that I also you know what any feel like was a huge risk because there's only 250 people it wasn't like a lot of people and you know those people have like lifetime access to like our best plan right till did till today we've run other lifetime we've ran an app sumo

34:48deal but it was like a custom deal which really it would allow them to jump to a new plan because they need more attendees or things like that and we had a ways to kind of grandfather and not grant for them but you know upsell them into a better plan as they grew their business I wanted to build a relationship with them I wanted to say hey this is my commitment to you can you commit to me and that was my mentality at the time I'm not saying that's like the decision everybody should make best decision I made in my situation and I felt it was the right decision just

35:21because I can get the feedback I needed I can get them to you know commit to the to the to the the program and the software until this day they're our most active users they're on my webinars they're our biggest she leaders so the ones that really helped us out with again no no incentive no affiliate link don't