The 10 non-negotiables that led me to start eWebinar
I’ve talked a lot about “designing the life you want to lead” and the importance of setting boundaries around your non-negotiables if you want to make that a goal.
Having a list of non-negotiables isn’t just important for your happiness and lifestyle, it can also help you determine your next startup idea — the one product that you’ll devote the next 5+ years to.
I had two startups before eWebinar which together stretched over nine years of my life (both were in real estate tech and the first one morphed into the second). My experience with them taught me so much about what I wanted and didn’t want to do in a business, and what kind of product would allow me to prioritize my happiness over being constantly tied to my startup.
My last startup, Spacio, was acquired in 2019. While it was a life changing outcome, it sadly did not allow me to retire. I knew I needed to start something new right away because I didn’t want to work forever, and whatever I chose would take at least 5 years to meaningfully take shape.
I was playing with a bunch of different ideas, but coming up with ideas was the easy part.
Deciding on the one idea you’ll finally take the leap for is extremely hard. As you dig into an idea, you may find you are not the best person to make it a reality. Or maybe someone else is already doing it 10x better than you could ever imagine.
Here are the 10 non-negotiables I came up with that helped me decide to found eWebinar — through a process of elimination.
The Product
- Must be able to be sold 100% through the internet (No more conferences and booths)
2. Cannot be limited by geography, language, industries, and lines of business (Spacio served a really niche market)
3. 100% web based, no apps
4. Has to have a proven market (No blue ocean)
5. Potential for high financial ROI (Relatively low/predictable investment vs. potential revenue)
6. Super easy for anyone to understand (Including a 12 year old)
The Team
7. Fully remote team, no employees
Me
8. Create something I can be excited about every day (something that makes a difference)
9. Build a business/product that is a reflection of me
10. Be able to share our successes with friends
Having this list in front of me helped me eliminate 95% of the ideas I had.
An awesome automated webinar platform was the one idea that kept me up at night, and that’s how I ended up deciding to take the leap to start eWebinar.
I couldn’t believe that something better didn’t already exist, and I was no longer okay with the status quo.
I had spent years delivering live demos, onboarding, and training webinars and personally lived the pain of doing them over and over again, so it was a problem that I knew intimately well.
After a few weeks of research to make sure I wasn’t missing something that was already on the market, I asked myself, “How would you feel if someone else did this before you?”
That was when I knew — with total clarity — that I needed to be the one to solve the problem of scaling repetitive webinars.
If you’re curious to learn more about my origin, it’s a story I tell at the beginning of the eWebinar demo which you can find on our website.
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