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Building An Effective Board For Your Startup

Building An Effective Board For Your Startup written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brad Feld

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Brad Feld. Brad has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and is also a co-founder of Techstars. He’s also an author of a number of books including — Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors.

Key Takeaway:

The first time many founders see the inside of a board room is when they step in to lead their board. But how do boards work? How should they be structured, managed, and leveraged so that startups can grow, avoid pitfalls, and get the best out of their boards? In this episode, author, investor, and entrepreneur, Brad Feld, shares his advice and guidance with CEOs, board members, investors, and anyone aspiring to serve on a board on what it takes to build and lead an effective board of directors.

Questions I ask Brad Feld:

  • [1:31] Why did you create a second edition?
  • [4:38] Could you talk a little bit about the research you’ve done on the evolution of boards?
  • [6:52] What are the mistakes people tend to make when building a board?
  • [10:38] What point do you tell someone they need a board?
  • [12:15] Are there things that need to be in place if you’re a startup company before building a board?
  • [13:45] If I’m asked to be on a board, what should be expected of me and vice versa, if I’m a founder, you know, what am I expecting a board member to ultimately contribute?
  • [16:30] How important is it that board members like and respect each other?
  • [18:46] Where can people find out more about startup boards and the work that you’re doing?

More About Brad Feld:

  • His book – Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors
  • Feld.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

    • Take the Assessment

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!



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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientists. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers, your prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brad Feld. He’s been an early stage investor in entrepreneur since 1987. Co-founder of Foundry Mo’s venture capital and tech stars, but he’s also the author of a number of books, including one we’re gonna talk about today. Startup boards, a field guide to building and leading and effective board of directors. So Brad, welcome back to the show.

Brad Feld (01:14): It’s great to be 4,000 feet below you. Can’t always, I think I’d rather be 4,000 feet higher than I am right now. I’d

John Jantsch (01:21): Rather be a little toasty out there. So I have authors back that update books quite often, and sort of the logical sort of cliche question has to be, you know, why a second edition, if I own the first edition, what am I gonna get by getting the next one?

Brad Feld (01:36): A couple of things. First, the first edition of startup boards was good, but I was not proud of it. It was a unique book. There really weren’t any books written for entrepreneurs about boards, but I wrote it during a time period that I went through a six month depressive episode. I was very function, but it was a real grind. And I wasn’t really enjoying the, the work of the book. And my co-author at the time, me Hendra did a great job, including putting up with me, but in the end, you know, when I reflected on the book and read it, you know, I usually read a book I write a year later and just sort of think about it again. Good, but it wasn’t one where I’m like, wow, I’m really proud of it. So we took the opportunity to really improve it. We added a third coauthor coauthor, Matt Bloomberg, who I’m sure we’ll talk about.

(02:19): And Matt really was extremely helpful, but I was also very motivated to turn it into a great book this time around the other big thing was that we wrote the book in 2013 and the book didn’t age. Well, in terms of yeah, temporary boards and specifically, we had a bunch of sidebars from board members and CEOs and experienced entrepreneurs and almost all of them were from men. And we had a bunch of quotes and they were also almost all for men. And so when we started talking to people about a second edition of the book, a couple of the women that we reached out to, you know, made comments like one, one of ’em said that I don’t encounter a woman until page 82 in your book. And so it doesn’t really make me feel like the books for me. And of course, you know, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last three or four years about diversity, both gender and racial on boards. And that would be an example of the book, not aging. Well, yeah. Yeah. So we took advantage of writing a second addition to really change the voices, changed the language. I discovered a pronoun dynamic called the singular, they, which is totally fascinating. And sort of, I went down a multi-hour rapid hole on the evolution of the English language. And it turns out the singular, they is a much more accessible way to write than alternating. He and she, or trying to do he and she, or he slash she. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:36): It gets a little clunky, doesn’t it?

Brad Feld (03:37): Yeah. And on top of all of it, right, you also have people who are, who don’t identify as either he or she at this point, just making the book accessible in a way where the idea of a board, uh, and being on a board is something that anyone should feel like in the context of entrepreneur ship, it talks to a handful of other things that we really improve. We make chapters a lot shorter. We refactored a lot of stuff in terms of how we organized the thinking. The first book had much too high, a wall to climb every book I’ve ever written. You know, you try to get the reader into the book in the first 50 to a hundred pages, right. Without making the wall too high. And then you can, after 50, 60, 70 pages start introducing some stuff that is a little bit harder, a little chewier, we had too much chewy stuff up front.

John Jantsch (04:21): Yeah. That’s interesting. My last book, my editor said, we need to take this stuff in the back and put it in the front. I mean, it was the first time I’ve really, and that was really the idea. It’s like, you really give the value of the book here, you know, say it in the first paragraph, you know, so people get in right away. You also did a lot of research between 2013 and 2022, wherever we are today on kind of the evolution of boards in general, haven’t you?

Brad Feld (04:47): Yeah. Although I would say most of my research has been living it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been on boards, you know, going back to 1994 was my first board shortly after I sold my first company. I guess I was on the board of my first company, but we didn’t really, we didn’t have a board. We had three founders and it was myself, my partner and my dad and we were the board, but I joined a private company board in 94. That was incredibly enlightening experience. And it was a lot of fun. There was some definite challenges and in the end, the company got acquired and it was a good outcome. And so I felt like I participated in contributed meaningfully, but then since then both private company boards and public company boards, I’ve been on a large number of them. And I don’t have any idea what the number is.

(05:26): It’s, you know, the wide range would be greater than a hundred, less than a thousand. And I’ve been on some spectacular boards. I’ve been on some tragically, awful boards, the vast majority of boards I’ve been on have been somewhere in the middle, right. They’ve been, you know, adequate, and I’ve spent a lot of time as a board member individually, but also as a participant in a board, reflecting on what makes both a good board member, but also makes a good board. Yeah. Or the board as a team. And I’ve tried to weave a lot of that experience into this book. And this is another place where Matt, Matt Bloomberg was really helpful for two reasons. One is, um, he’s been a multi-time CEO. So he’s had several boards. I was on his board of his prior company return path, which he ran for 19 years or 20 years.

(06:16): I was on it for 19 years. Huh. So a very long experience with him. And that was his first company. His company that he runs now is a company called bolster, which is an executive marketplace for both full-time and fractional execs, including board members. And so he spent a lot of time thinking hard about not just what makes a good board member, but how somebody becomes board ready. And so all of that kind of experiential research was what came into the book versus a bunch of academic research. You know, that says, this is, you know, we did a statistical study in blah or qualitative assertions, not based off of lots of experience.

John Jantsch (06:52): So the book is mostly about what you should do, but I find that people, you can get leverage. If you actually talk about the problem with most boards, like the mistakes they’re making. So, so, you know, what are the problems that, that if somebody buys this idea, oh yeah, I need a board because people say, I should, what are the mistakes they make?

Brad Feld (07:13): Yeah. Well, we have a fair amount of that in the book too, because we’ve tried to balance it between positive and negative. And we also tried not to be in the language of you should, you know, in terms of it more giving people a framing of how to think about it. But to the specific question, there’s some very simple things that people make mistakes around. When they think about the board, including reasons why early stage entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs don’t create boards. One of the mistakes is this sort of desire need for control. And his view is that I want to control my company and therefore I wanna control my board and sort of the implications of that. Another example of a mistake is to not think of the board as a team, but to think of them as individuals and Jeff Lawson, who we quote in the book had a great quote for this, which is as I get to build two teams, my leadership team.

(08:01): Yeah. And my board and yeah, my board can fire me. So I need to just sort of deal with that reality, but that’s fine. You know, until they fire me, I have an opportunity to build a second team that can really help me and the company be successful. Another mistake people make is, and this is sort of a cliche, it’s become cliche. You say to an entrepreneur, well, who do you wanna add to your board? And they say, well, I wanna make sure that I get, you know, I want diversity on my board, but I want to get someone who’s been on a bunch of boards and has been a CEO multiple times. I’m like, all right. So, you know, you’re already starting with a pool. That’s smaller because you’re trying to get a of non-white men, for example. And you know, all the people that have those characteristics are already on too many boards, cuz there’s a lot of demand for them.

(08:42): And so you’re not really sort of thinking about it from the standpoint of what functional value do you want to get out of the board member versus the, you know, the sort of reputational value. And I could keep going the last ID end with though here, which I think is really interesting. It was interesting when it came up, Matt came up with an idea that he calls the rule of one and or the rules of one and fundamentally boards become very imbalanced. Uh, a lot of times founders try to control the boards at the beginning and then you start raising money from VCs and with each round and other VC ends up on the board. And all of a sudden you got founders on the boards and VC’s on the board and it’s just not a healthy board. You’re not building a team, that’s a board.

(09:21): And so Matt’s rule of one includes the idea that for every VC that you add to the board, you had an independent director and his idea of a balance board is the CEO who could also be the founder and then an independent director and a VC director. And for every VC director, you add an independent director. Now there are definitely, I don’t necessarily agree with him that there should only be the CEO on the board, especially the, CEO’s not the founder. A lot of times there’s a lot of value to have a second founder on the board or if the CEO is not a founder, but his framework was really helpful, like in clarifying this idea that even at the very beginning, you’re trying to build this team of highly effective participants rather than create a controlled dynamic or defend against a control dynamic.

John Jantsch (10:04): Yeah. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush that’s Semush.com/go to try it free for seven days. So at what point do you tell people they need one? I mean, should somebody have an idea for a business and start thinking a board’s gonna be an aspect of it?

Brad Feld (10:45): Well, from a purely legal perspective, once you create your company formally, whether it’s a, you know, incorporated or it’s an LLC or even an S Corp by definition, your company has a legal thing called a board that might have one person. Yeah. You, my general view is if your intention is to grow your business beyond just you having a board from the early stages is very helpful. Um, at the minimum, it gives you a group of people other than you and your founder or founders to engage with you. As your thinking through the business, it also creates some accountability for communication and some rigor around stepping back and thinking about what’s going on with your business. There are plenty of people who think that, you know, creating a board at the earliest stages is too early. I just don’t, I’ve never, I’ve seen the opposite happen so many more times, which is delaying creating a board results in the company going off the rails.

(11:40): Yeah. I very rarely there, I can think of a few cases where a board was not, you know, as harmful to a very young company for some reason, but very few, most of the time, if the board members know that their job is to help the founders be successful, their job is not to torture the founders. Their job is not a purely governance one, cuz there’s just not a lot of governance stuff that needs to happen at the very early stages. If you have the right mindset as a board member, which is you have some formal responsibilities, but really your job here is to help the entrepreneurs be successful. Early board can be very powerful.

John Jantsch (12:15): So a little bit of the flip side of that, are there things that need to be in place if you’re a startup company? I mean, rather than saying, yeah, let’s just go get a board. I mean, are there some things that you need to have worked out first?

Brad Feld (12:28): I mean it sure, but not in a, again, other than the legal creation of a formal company. Yeah, not really. I mean, most of the time when you create a board, even if it’s relatively early in your life, you’re gonna create some structure around that board. You’re gonna create indemnification agreement. So the directors liabilities are covered by the company. You’re probably gonna have some rules of engagement for how the board members and the company interact. Whether even if they’re informal, you know, you’re gonna wanna be in a position where you can grant equity, uh, to board members for service. Because generally speaking for private boards, you know, you should compensate your board members with, you know, a non-zero but modest amount of equity for their board service. So, but you know, it’s very variable. I mean, I think about situations where a lot of times at the very early stages, somebody says, well, I’m gonna just create a bunch of advisors or an advisory. Right. And that’s fine. And we talk about that in the book. Like that’s a useful sort of way to wander into creating a formal board with the nuance that if you create something like an advisory board, be serious about it. Yeah. Versus just having lists of advisors that you can put on your website, you know, to give you social, social benefit, but nothing else.

John Jantsch (13:45): So what should a board, I guess this could go either way, what should a board member expect to bring? So like if I’m asked to be on a board, what should be expected of me vice versa. If I’m a founder, you know, what am I expecting a board member to ultimately contribute?

Brad Feld (14:00): I think there’s two different, two different things to ponder. One is, uh, what your role and your own expectation and your philosophy of how you’re gonna show up as a board member. So I’ll just describe mine. I think everybody can define their own, but here’s how I define mine. When I’m on a board, I really only wanna make one decision. And that decision is whether or not I support the CEO. Huh? If I support her, my job is to work for her. If for some reason I stop supporting her because of whatever’s going on. My job is to try to get back to a place where I support her and that doesn’t always happen. I mean the one decision that I wanna make as a board member is do I support CEO? And if I ultimately, don’t the one tool I generally have as a board member, not unilaterally, but as a member of a group of people would be to replace a CEO. So I bring that mindset because every CEO I’ve ever worked with needs different things. And the idea that I’m showing up with the generic playbook of

John Jantsch (15:02): Right,

Brad Feld (15:08): Just not EEO should look at, look at their board from the frame of reference of, I want to get different things from different board members. And ultimately I want that board to be a functioning team. So for example, if you add people to your board and every single person on your board is a deal, chunky, loves to do transactions, loves to buy and sell. Companies loves to do deals. Guess what? Your board’s always gonna be pushing you to do deals. Yeah. And you’re always gonna be spending too much time talking about doing deals. If your board is full of people who are finance, financial oriented, either investor or CFO types, you’re gonna spend an awful lot of time on your financials. Yeah. Having a blend of people that have product experience, go to market experience, finance experience, deal, legal, whatever. And having that spread across the board so that the board really can bring different things is powerful. And I think this then comes to the other piece of this, which is a lot of people add board members because they want help with networking or they want help with financing or raising money. And most good board members can be helpful with that. But if that’s a primary reason, you want that person on the board and there’s nothing else that is causing you to want to add that person to the board, it’s worth rethinking whether that’s the best person for the board relative to the other things that somebody could be bringing.

John Jantsch (16:30): So you mentioned the idea of, of this being a team, a board, how important is it that they like each other, that they, you know, that they respect each other? Is that important?

Brad Feld (16:38): Really? I’m gonna separate respect and like you

John Jantsch (16:41): Sure.

Brad Feld (16:42): I think that’s the key nuance. I think respect is critical if you don’t respect each other as board members, who’ve got a fundamental problem. And I have definitely been on boards where there were people who didn’t respect each other and you know, that created a lot of dissonance. And in a lot of cases, just fundamental dysfunction when you ran into situations that were challenging and difficult, right? That’s in the context of respect, I’ve also been on boards where people, you know, people lied, people were disingenuous. People, you know, did things behind other people’s backs, whether it was the CEO or board members that were very destructive and very hurtful to the company, not just emotionally hurtful, but fundamentally problematic. Those things are, I mean, those things exist. Those are problems. And the tone of the board and the tone set by the, whether it’s the chair or the CEO or the lead director, whoever is responsible for driving the board behavior that, that has to be paid attention to.

(17:38): I’ll separate that from like, I definitely have been on lots of boards of people who I would consider them business associates, but they’re not friends. Yeah. And they probably consider me a business associate, not a friend or they’re people who you get along with, but you know, you don’t wanna spend time with them. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is people who you have just real genuine affection for. Yeah. And you know, you’re emotionally engaged with and, you know, in alike kind of way. So I, I think it’s critical that every board member respect every other board member, I don’t think it’s necessary that every board member, like every other board member, but it sure does help when in a team like any team. Right. If even if you don’t necessarily quote like the person, if you don’t at the same time, don’t hate the person right. It doesn’t have to be the opposite of it. You can, you know, all right, this person’s fine. And I, but I respect them and I respect what they’re bringing here that works. Yeah,

John Jantsch (18:36): Absolutely. So Brad tell people where they can find more about startup boards and really the work you’re doing. I think you’re doing work with bolster with Matt as, as well is

Brad Feld (18:45): Yeah. I’m an investor. I’m an investor in Matt’s company bolster. Yeah. The books available, you know, online at any online bookstore that you happen to, like it’s called startup boards. And if you just do startup boards Feld as the search, I’m sure it’ll show up. The Google will deliver you. Lots of choices. We, uh, we also@feld.com, which is my blog. I’ve got links to all the books I’ve written. So it’s got a link to startup boards there with a bunch of additional content. And then Matt’s company bolster, it’s, uh, bolster.com. He’s got various again, links there and he’s written two other books, one called startup CEO, and one called startup CXO. And they’re both really effective books if you’re a startup CEO or you’re an executive at a startup for helping sort of process through and think through different ways, uh, to approach your job and the role and responsibility that they have in these three books, startup, CEO, CXO, and startup boards are kind of a trilogy makes me think of token I wouldn’t put myself in that category, but it’s sort of a trilogy of things for any CEO or executive to really absorb.

(19:48): Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49): Awesome. Well again, thanks for taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out in the mountains,

Brad Feld (19:56): John, it’s always a pleasure.

John Jantsch (19:59): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co. check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop-shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

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Automating Your Webinars The Engaging And Delightful Way

Automating Your Webinars The Engaging And Delightful Way written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Melissa Kwan

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Melissa Kwan. Melissa is the CEO and Co-founder of Webinar. She has spent twelve years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing. Her previous startup, a real estate tech company, was acquired in 2019. As a revenue-driven founder specializing in sales and business development, Melissa has learned how to build companies with very few resources — by automating what she could, outsourcing wherever possible, and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm.

Key Takeaway:

Webinars in the various formats they exist in have been around for years. The rise of the on-demand webinar has happened over the last ten years. Many of the webinar platforms aren’t created with the customer in mind first. Melissa Kwan set out to solve a problem in the market she was facing herself. eWebinar was created to deliver a professional, authentic experience that helps engage and delight viewers. In this episode, I talk with Melissa about her entrepreneurial journey and the problems that eWebinar set out to solve.

Questions I ask Melissa Kwan:

  • [1:38] How has your entrepreneurial journey led you here?
  • [2:32] What is Webinar?
  • [3:35] How is this platform different from the other options out there?
  • [6:11] Did you make a decision in the very beginning that you wanted to steer clear of being scammy?
  • [16:42] Are you an engineer or programmer yourself?
  • [17:06] What’s been the hardest part from a tech perspective?
  • [18:37] What’s your most requested new feature?
  • [19:47] What’s the vision for the company three years from now?
  • [22:06] Where can more people learn about eWebinar and connect with you?

More About Melissa Kwan:

  • Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn
  • eWebinar.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

  • Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!



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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Melissa Kwan. She is the co-founder and CEO of E webinar. She’s also spent 12 years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing her previous startup a real estate tech company was acquired in 2019 as a revenue driven founder, specializing in sales and business development. She has learned how to build companies with very few resources, something a lot of folks listening can appreciate by automating what she could outsourcing whenever possible and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm. So Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Kwan (01:29): Thanks John, for having me.

John Jantsch (01:31): So I feel like I gave a little taste of it there, but I feel like we should just have you kind of say here’s been my entrepreneur journey. We’re gonna talk about your most current undertaking, but where have you been to get you to here?

Melissa Kwan (01:45): yeah. Great question. So I spent over 12 years in, in startups. UL runs my third company. My first two was in real estate tech. The last job that I quit was at SAP and then previous to that was in real estate. So I kind of just like put the two and two together and created software for real estate. First company was a product company towards agency and then the second company was a SAS product. It was like an open house sign in software. So having done so many live webinars, demos, onboarding trainings for a consistent five years, sometimes five back to back for my previous company, I had just dreamt of a product, a magical product that would do my job for me. Yeah. While I go and have fun. And that became E webinar after that company was sold in 2019.

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so let’s, I guess let’s ask the, you know, what is E webinar? Just give us the like really quick, you know, view of that so we can kind of break it down then a little from there.

Melissa Kwan (02:41): Yeah. So E webinar, the concept is simple. We save people from doing repetitive, boring webinars over and over again. So you can imagine sales, demos, pitches, onboarding, training, product updates, customer interviews, you know, things like that. Right? So you might be running them on zoom right now, or you might not be doing them because you don’t have a person to run them. We turn any video into an interactive webinar that you could set on a recurring schedule or join on demand. So people can consume that content whenever they want.

John Jantsch (03:09): Yeah. So webinars have certainly been around for, you know, ages, internet ages, I guess, you know, 15, 20 years peop marketers have been using them, certainly live, but recently eight, 10 years ago, it seems like this platform of going and signing up and sort of watching a live , but it’s recorded. You know, that, that technology, there are half a dozen, at least you probably know ’em all, you know, people that are doing that. What’s when people say, oh, how is this different than blah, blah, blah.

Melissa Kwan (03:40): Yeah. I mean, so first of all, we don’t do any live webinars. Yeah. Right. We don’t, there is no live audio. There’s no live video. Like enough people are solving this. Yeah. Like down to like Facebook live Instagram live, like everyone in the world is trying to solve this and it really solving it and doing a great job. So what we wanted to solve was the next phase of that. How do you scale a live webinar or a presentation that, you know, works for you? Yeah. Like if you’re doing, you know, a lead gen kinda customer interview type webinar, once a quarter, how, what kind of impact would that have on your business if you made that available every single day. So that’s really, that’s the space that we’re focusing on. And if you, if anyone that’s listening to this right now thinks to themselves, Hey, I’ve seen those before.

Melissa Kwan (04:25): Right. But it’s a little bit scammy. You’re right. And that’s why we exist. I was also in my previous life looking for something that would do this particular thing and everything I found was almost like designed to deceive consumers, to trick them into buying something or create false scarcity, which isn’t what sales and marketing is about. It’s not what branding is about. Right? It’s about delivering a beautiful professional, authentic experience that reflects your brand, but also an experience that allows your customer, your prospect, your attendee, to connect with you. It’s not a video on YouTube. A webinar is where you can go and engage and ask questions and get a response back. So what E webinar does differently is we made the investment to build an asynchronous chat system. Just like your Intercom, your Zend desk, any chat bubble that pops up on a website. When people ask you questions through chat, you can, if you’re there hop into respond live, but if you’re not there, it’s totally fine. Cuz when you respond later, they still get your response on email. And I would say no other automated webinar company had actually made that investment to build up that system.

John Jantsch (05:33): Yeah. I mean, there, there’s certainly a place for on demand because you know, you and I are talking it’s 10 o’clock at night for you when you’re talking. It’s uh, dunno what time it is here. Two o’clock for me. I mean, so the, there is a, you know, there is a need in the customer journey to allow people to get the information they want when they want it. So I think the case for having those makes a lot of sense, but the point that you also made is that so many of ’em are trying to fake their live and that there’s pre-canned chat and it says there’s 27 people on right now. and I think everybody realizes that’s all just a scam, but I think we put up with it because it’s like, well, everybody does it. So how did you take on that idea? Or did you just make a decision in the very beginning? We’re not going to be, you know, spammy or scammy like that.

Melissa Kwan (06:22): The thing is John, like the last thing I would want is to build a business that facilitates a behavior. Yeah. That’s the bottom line. Yeah. So very early on, we looked at all these players and we thought, okay, like there’s a reason why they have that because people ask for it, the customers ask for it. Yeah. But what I care about and what gives my business longevity is if your customer likes you, not, if you like me. Right. So in a sense, we’re building for the, a attendee, like that’s the first experience we’re building for. And it’s almost like kind of what Steve jobs does, right? He’s like, well, you can’t have this. It has to look like this. Even if you ask for this is the better experience you have to update your OS. And I think like when you’re specing a business or a product like this, you have to make those decisions to think what is the audience you wanna attract?

Melissa Kwan (07:09): Because the market’s big enough. Yeah. So we wanted to deliver a product with integrity first, which means we had to constantly not put in features and not build features that create that kind of fake scarcity. Right. So we have no simulated chat, no fake sales notifications, no fake counter. Everything is real. You can put in sales notification, but it’s based on your conversion pixel, there is a counter, but you could choose live or accumulative, but it’s real. Like everything’s real. And our chat is one on one between the attendee and the moderator, like none of that fake stuff. Right. So we just made a decision early on to say like, this is just not a business that like, we wanna track those kind of people. And we said like, we came to terms with the fact that it would take us longer to get off the ground. Cause we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be able to win people that already on the other platforms, but that’s okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59): Well I, let me push back there a little bit because I was on the other platform and I saw this as a, uh, you know, I was on those platforms because I wanted on demand and I just put up with the other stuff. Right? Yeah. But what I want to have with my customers is a long term relationship. Not a short time, I sold you something, uh, relationship. And I think that’s maybe why people put up with those is because they do work in a certain way, but not for the long term. And I think that what you’ve built is for somebody, in my opinion, is for somebody who views their relationship with their customers as a long term relationship, as opposed to I sold you something.

Melissa Kwan (08:38): Well, I would say because we delivered the product in this way. Yeah. Like it is, we mimicked our branding and how we want people to feel to MailChimp. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We wanna be fun. We wanna be a startup, but we wanna be established. Yeah. Right. We want to feel like this is a company they can trust. And that goes down to, you know, the product and integrity. Right. And the features that you have. So I would say like before this year, maybe last year, cuz we, the product’s been line for two years, you would not see companies like Zillow on automated webinars yeah. Or fresh works or catalyst. Right. Like none of those like real established companies would be on there. The people that have been leveraging, those are like a lot of solo entrepreneurs, a of coaches, a lot of like internet cash marketers, but like real companies have never automated what their webinars for this reason. Like they might have a gated landing page or they might have a video with CR YouTube, but that’s not a webinar experience.

John Jantsch (09:36): Yeah. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media SEMrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get SEMrush, visit SEMrush.com that’s SEM rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (10:17): I, I tell you that one of the features that, that I really love is because one of the things we really want is somebody not just sitting there mindlessly watching, or maybe like having your webinar in a different, you know, different screen while they’re working. And they’re just listening to it is the amount of engagement.

John Jantsch (10:32): One of the things that’s very built in is you have a lot of built in features and templates for getting people engaged, for finding out who they are for creating, you know, a reason for them to say more about the who they are and what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish. And I think that maybe some of the other platforms have that, but I think you’ve really cracked that part. And to me, not only getting rid of the stuff we’ve been calling kind of scammy, I think that to me is probably your best feature.

Melissa Kwan (11:00): Yeah. So we call them interactions, right? Yeah. Um, and I was, when I was coming out with this product, I was also thinking like, okay, let’s face it. Webinars are boring. Yeah. Right. It depends on like how fun it is and how engaging it is. A lot of times if depends on the speaker. Sure. And let’s face it like topic obviously. Yeah. And not, everyone’s a great speaker. And then during live webinar, there’s lots of interruptions. People ask questions, there’s housekeeping. Maybe your connection is bad. Like none of that happens on an automated webinar cause it’s based on a video. But I was thinking like, what is it that you could deliver then put out there that can get your, a attendee to stay till the end so they can take that action. Yeah. If they don’t stay till the end, even if you deliver your CTA, they’re never gonna see it.

Melissa Kwan (11:42): So we, we have these thing called interactions, which are like programmable polls, questions, resources, sales, alerts, you know, things that allow the, a attendee to participate right. In the experience with you. So it’s not like I come in and you’re talking at me for 45 minutes and I’m playing on my phone and you’re losing me to Instagram. Like when you ask me a question, something pops up and I’m actually able to engage with it. Maybe I can see the results and things like that. But on the host side, we actually gather all that data and we deliver it to you in a beautiful, actionable and understandable report. So you can actually see like where are people hitting a thumbs up? Because within any webinar you can hit a thumbs up. It’s more of a consumer experience. Where are people dropping off? Are they answering this question?

Melissa Kwan (12:26): So you can imagine in the past six months I’ve ran my demo. I don’t do live demos. It’s all in new webinar. Of course. All right. I ran it 1500 times. And my first question is, how did you hear about us? Yeah. And about 60 PE like 60% of people will answer that question. So from a marketing perspective, that is such valuable information. Yeah. And the more I run it, the better data I’m getting to, whether it’s helping my business or helping me make a better presentation. Next time, all of that is, is very useful.

John Jantsch (12:55): And I can say, this is not exactly scientific, but we have run this same webinar for many years. And you know, we’re always tweaking a little bit. I will say that our completion rate has significantly increased since moving to ewe R now I will give one caveat because of all the interaction we’ve actually changed how we’re presenting this information BA you know, because we’re, we feel like we have all these engagement tools now. that? Yeah. So, so it’s changed a little bit about how we’ve presented the information, but I can tell you that, you know, 35 ish percent higher rate of completion than using another platform.

Melissa Kwan (13:35): I mean, we have a customer that took the exact same video. Yeah. And put it into E webinar and their engagement and completion rate went up by 50%. Like they did nothing at all. So that’s why, like, we, we encourage people to just give it a try. I think that one of the biggest pushback we have is like, well, if it’s a video, then why don’t I just use YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just the mindset of it, isn’t it? Yeah. Like, yeah, you get a registration page, you choose it time. There’s reminders, there’s follow ups. And then it starts at a certain time. Or you can watch it on demand. Like, I, I know earlier you said like there’s a place for, on demand for webinars particularly, but like, it’s so interesting how in our everyday lives, like as consumers we expect on demand video content.

Melissa Kwan (14:18): Yeah. Like when was the last time you didn’t watch something on apple TV or Netflix or Amazon, like I expect to go there and press play and watch it at my own time. However, for some reason, for B2B content, you have to come to my show right next Tuesday at 11, my time zone. So there’s a bit of a disconnect, right. So I think it’s not only like there’s a place for on demand and B2B content. I think it’s already here. And the people that understand that will be able to use that as a differentiator in their business.

John Jantsch (14:50): Yeah. That’s such a great point. I think again, it’s one of those things where we just get used to it. It’s like, well, that’s the way we get to, you know, consume this content. But a lot of behaviors, especially buying behaviors and things really do get influenced by the way that we behave every day in life. And just your example of the streaming, you know, programming, I mean like TV guide, what’s that right? I mean, I just go and I, yeah. You know, I watch the program when I feel like watching it. And I think that kind of behavior or habit that gets developed really should be something that we’re looking at and saying, that’s how everybody wants to shop now. Or that’s how everybody wants to get their content. Now.

Melissa Kwan (15:28): I mean, another great example is like texting, like who calls now? Like maybe your family member, you’re like, Hey, I’m outside or I’m downstairs. Or, you know, if you’re in your car, like maybe you’ll call on a headphone. And we have some people that are looking at E webinar. Maybe they’re moving from zoom, cuz they’re like just absolutely exhausted from running these live webinars and they just have to scale. But one of the questions they have for us is, well, if you don’t, if I can’t answer people right away or using my voice, are they gonna be mad at me? Like, does that mean worse? Does that mean worse customer service? Because I’m used to doing this live thing and I’m used to making people feel, feel special by calling out their name or answering the question. But my response is always just give it a try because I think your customers, like you’d be surprised at how your customers would prefer tech space and how much more manageable all that Q and a is. If it is text space

John Jantsch (16:28): To, to totally agree. And just going back to E webinar, another thing that I think people will enjoy, you talked about trying to make it fun. I think the interface itself is actually, um, easier to set up and easier to, to operate, uh, and get a webinar going than a lot of the other platforms as well. So you’ve think you’ve conquered a number of the things that competitors aren’t doing. I do wanna talk a little bit about just the business of building this as well. You know, from a text import first, I should have asked you in the beginning, are you an engineer or programmer yourself or

Melissa Kwan (16:57): No, I wish I, I wish, yeah. I wish I was an engineer cuz otherwise it would be feature complete by now. so nothing would be ever wrong with it.

John Jantsch (17:06): So, so what’s been the hardest part from a tech sample.

Melissa Kwan (17:10): Oh my gosh. Like I, it is a constant battle every day, but what is the hardest? I would say the one thing, I mean, of course the first thing is just scaling. Cuz as you build a business as like, you know, people start having a thousand people in a webinar. Yeah, yeah. Or you have two of those and now there’s 2000 people and everyone’s sending a chat. Right. And then, but you can’t test for that scenario until you get there. right. So the first six months was like acquiring these customers, but then what do you do? Yeah. What do you do when everyone has it on Wednesday or everyone has it on Tuesday. Right? So we’ve kind of solved that. But believe it or not, one of the most difficult things to solve is just the flexibility, like offering complete flexibility and scheduling and also the ability to track all of those things in a report, right?

Melissa Kwan (18:04): Like all the chat and all the interactivity, like we’ve worked that kind of stuff out. But right now, give, give you an example. People are asking for the ability to pause. So say I’m running a workshop. I wanna say, okay, I’m gonna let you pause for five minutes. You can finish this worksheet and then you can press play or it’s gonna start on its own. I still don’t understand this, but apparently it messes with the timeline of the video and then it messes with all the analytics. Yeah. so it’s just little things like that, that like me and you may never think about that. We’re very happy that they’re engineers for.

John Jantsch (18:36): So, so I was gonna ask you what your most requested feature is. New feature is, and that maybe you just revealed it.

Melissa Kwan (18:44): We have an ongoing wishlist of features, but definitely what you’re gonna see next is a full facelift of our attendee experience. So what we have right now is I think it’s two, three times better than what’s out there. But what you’re about to see is something that will be 10 times, 20 times better than what’s out there because we wanna really deliver an experience that’s less businessy, like less zoom and way more consumers. So what we’re taking inspiration from is not the webinar solutions that are out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re taking inspiration from like Twitch or gaming companies or you know, apple TV, like those kind of things and see like how people actually wanna consume interactive video because this is what it is, right. Call it in a webinar automation software, but it is interactive video. So how do people wanna engage and consume that content and feel like, you know, they learn something and that and feel delighted. Right. I think delighted is the word.

John Jantsch (19:47): So are you one of those people that I could say, you know, what’s the vision for this company three years from now? Or are you really still trying to, you know, wrestle with the momentum of the moment?

Melissa Kwan (19:58): The only thing I care about right now is getting to profitability. so as a business owner, you probably understand that. Yeah, absolutely. So I would love to not be, you know, burning money, but I just want, I wanna see maybe not even the three years, like, like next year, I really wanna see people’s mind shift away from like Mo moving away from doing repetitive live webinars and just understanding that there’s a better way. Yeah. Cause all it takes is a flip, right. Cause right now this is what, you know, you’ve been doing it for 10 years. Webinars is have actually been around for 20 years. Yeah. But there is a new way of doing things that is not just better for you. Right. Freeing up your time. So you can, you know, spend more with your friends and family, but it’s actually better for your customer. Yeah. To have access to that information when they can consume it. Like the average attendance rate for all of our customers is 65%. Yeah. And that is outrageous. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:00): Well, and I think I love about it and I think people need to, you know, customer journey, we can design the most perfect customer journey. People are gonna go through ’em the way that they’re gonna go through them. And I think that’s what, you know, a lot of times, if they can go through three or four stages of the customer journey one night, because that’s what they were really , you know, amped up about. I think that, I think we, as marketers have to realize that we just have to offer that flexibility.

Melissa Kwan (21:24): Um, yeah. I mean, I’ll leave you with one stat that I love from trust radius. 87% of buyers prefer to do their own research sure. Through their buying journey. Yeah. And 57% already make a purchase without talking to a salesperson. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually make transparency and access to content your differentiator. If your competitor is gating everything, making people book a call, not making their webinars on demand and making it just difficult for people to get the information they need to make a decision, then they’re gonna go somewhere else.

John Jantsch (22:02): Absolutely. Melissa advi tell us where people can find out more about the product and connect with you.

Melissa Kwan (22:11): Yeah. If you wanna connect with me, LinkedIn is best. So my name is Melissa K w a N. And check out E webinar. If you’re curious how it works, there is, uh, an on-demand demo of course, delivered through E webinar in a very meta way. And it’s exactly as it sounds, ewe.com.

John Jantsch (22:25): Awesome. Well, Melissa, it was great. You know, I’m a fan. I, you know, love the product itself and answered something we were looking for. So we were happy to find it. And hopefully we’ll appreciate you stopping by the, take some time on the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road one of these days.

Melissa Kwan (22:42): Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (22:43): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessmentdotco.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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