This month's good stuff
Becoming the next hottest AI startup.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
What got me thinking this month
We just had our first all-hands meeting in six years.
We’ve built eWebinar to be remote and asynchronous since day one. No meetings. Everyone is self-motivated, anyone can see what everyone else is doing in Monday, and we communicate through Slack. The idea of zero meetings might sound crazy. To us, it’s how we’ve stayed efficient for so long.
So why did we have this call? Because for the first time, my cofounder/CTO David and I feel the future of this company pressing against us with urgency. We needed everyone on the same page about where we are, what AI means for our business (the good and the bad), and how we’re thinking about building into what comes next.
I heard Keith Rabois on Lenny’s podcast recently talk about how founders are leaving high growth companies to start AI startups. They want to be part of the gold rush. His take was that the best business is the one you already have, especially if it’s working. If you’re not chasing something new, then the question you need to ask yourself is:
What do I need to do to be the next hottest AI startup with what I have today?
A lot of companies are jamming half-baked AI features into their products and slapping “AI powered” or “AI driven” on their homepages. Few have actually built AI features that are usable and awesome.
Being the next hottest AI startup isn’t just about slapping AI on top. It’s about understanding how consumers interact with tools today, and rebuilding your product so it fits into that behavior.
We don’t build landing pages anymore. We tell Claude or Lovable what we want and it just happens. That’s one example of how the entire experience of using software has changed, and one that yields a better outcome. People expect things to be that frictionless now. If your product still feels like work to use, you’re going to have a hard time keeping customers. We’re guilty of this.
The challenge for us isn’t how do we use AI to write better notification emails inside eWebinar? It’s how can we make it so customers interact with our product the way they interact with everything else in their lives?
For our team to come along on this, everyone needs to understand where we’re headed and step up. That means actively educating yourselves on what’s happening in the world, playing with the new tools, and bringing ideas back into how we work and what we build. It means making yourself more efficient so you can free up time for the product and the business. Nobody on our team should be spending 5 hours on a manual task that AI can do in 5 minutes. Non-developers can now be developers using Cursor and contribute in ways they couldn’t before. Everyone has to move faster.
The chill attitude that’s gotten us this far is not going to fly for where the world is today. The urgency that David and I have been feeling needed to be communicated to the team, because none of our jobs are safe. The thing we built to give ourselves the lifestyle we love could be taken away tomorrow if we’re not alert.
On the flip side, this is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate our competency. We’re a tiny team that’s gotten very good at building product. If we do this right, we can become the only obvious choice for anyone who wants to automate their demos, onboarding, and training sessions with on-demand video. Not because we have AI bolted on, but because we’ve built something so good and so easy to use that interacting with our product feels like a breeze.
Good enough is no longer enough. Excellence is the new baseline.
Quick tidbits
If you only read one thing I wrote this month (other than this newsletter!), let it be this.
Easy read for your next flight: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. I found about 75% of it inspiring and useful. Take what you need and leave the rest.
You know I’m a sucker for a great entrepreneur story. Here’s Peter Hwang’s. I loved every part of it.
This month’s articles you may have missed
The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small: I built my company around a “purple ocean” strategy thinking it was the holy grail of bootstrapping. Turns out I had been getting it wrong the whole time.
When experience becomes the enemy: What if what you know is what’s holding you back from progress?
Stop giving your pain a voice: The words you speak matter, whether you say them out loud or not.
How reputation gets built: In a hundred small, non-asked deliverables.
Till next time,
— Melissa ✌️
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This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.
Just downloaded Naval’s book. Your review that 25% of the book is neither inspiring nor helpful is refreshingly honest and hooked me in. And now I must know which 25%!
In my experience there has to be some time to deliver, and some time to think about strategy - in order to deliver better.
We can do and run a lot every single day, but if the direction is not the best to reach the peak we choose, we'll find ourselves far from where we really wanted to be.
Strategic thinking means deciding which direction to follow.
Deciding means cutting off what's not needed or just the best to get what we desire.
And this determines how we use our limited time to get the best of it.
So, even after you'll figure out how to transform your company, if I could give a honest opinion, I'd say "don't stop meeting". It doesn't have to be all the day, neither every day, but a company who wants to move forward needs a founder indicating the direction to follow - and eventually, the corrections needed along the path.
This is my modest opinion, of course. :)