This founder used parts of her failed first business as building blocks for a product now making $40k MRR

Cecilia Razak's first startup grew to a team of 100 people before COVID hit and the company went under. But during the death knells of that business, a new idea emerged.

Now, her team of two is bringing in $40k MRR — and it's becoming a team of four.

That expansion has not been easy to handle, and it's bringing back memories of crashing and burning. But this time, she's doing it right. 👇

How to figure it out as you go

I quit my job at an advertising agency over ten years ago to launch a tech startup.

I had no formal business education, which was both a blessing and a curse; I had no bad habits to unlearn, but there was a lot of, "How the heck do people do that?"

I had to figure a lot of it out. My cofounder and also now-husband Mason Hipp, who has been running tech startups for years, helped me learn so much and taught me a great deal about business. I also read a lot — and I still do.

I also meditate, which I have found incredibly helpful.

Taking the leap ended up going really well, despite not knowing what I was doing. By the time we closed the company, we had a team of almost 100 people and we were operating in a couple of cities. But the pandemic changed everything.

Getting shut down by COVID

That first startup was a tech platform that connected pet care providers with pet owners.

I remember, we had a week-long on-site meeting in March of 2020. On Monday, during our planning process for the week, we wondered if we should discuss this "COVID 19 thing". We decided that maybe we'd mention it at some point.

By Friday, the trains were shut down and we struggled to even get our team members home.

Within a matter of months, our revenue decreased by almost 70%.

Why a lack of communication led to their demise

It wasn't just a lack of demand that killed our startup. With such a large and (suddenly) remote team, it was urgent that everyone was aligned with our mission. They needed to understand the "why" of what we were doing — that understanding spoke directly to their quality of work.

As we grew, communication started to break down and the service itself suffered. It was so bad that we actually stopped everything at one point and did a concerted push on company mission, communication, alignment. Then we changed our orientation process to speak to all those things and — believe it or not — re-onboarded everyone.

We learned so much about team alignment, training, and communicating, that it played into the founding of our current product, Slides With Friends.

How to pivot in hard times

Slides With Friends was born out of need, as well as circumstance, as that startup went silent,

We needed it so that we could continue running onboardings and orientation trainings that had suddenly gone remote. And we also wanted to enable social fun and gathering — we used it with friends during quarantine to run fun trivia nights.

And the upside of our startup troubles was that we suddenly had time to work on something else. So we built Slides With Friends for ourselves and it turned out to be valuable.

We initially used PPC to help validate the idea. It started making money and we were like, "Oh, this has legs and value: We can run with this." So we started focusing on it full time.

Hitting $40k MRR

Slides With Friends is an interactive presentation builder. We enable teams to come together in groups to learn, connect, and communicate, which is exactly what we needed when our first startup was breaking down.

Users can make a slide deck, launch a presentation, and let their audiences join in by sending responses and playing along. So we're in the event management / audience response / group experience SaaS industry.

And we just hit $40k MRR.

My cofounder and I also have a few other businesses running and bringing in a range of revenues. Medialoot.com is one. And there are a few pet care content sites. They are in the mid/low thousands in passive monthly revenue.

When to opt for a freemium model

We're running a freemium model. It was the right choice for us because the product is inherently self-marketing — customers are launching events with our brand on them for their audiences. Upgrades are available to free users for larger use cases, in the form of annual subscriptions.

A pricing model is a deeply product-personal discussion. The equation is basically:

What am I getting - what am I spending = value of freemium offering

So, don’t just go with a freemium model blindly. Look at what you’re getting out of offering a free account. This could be:

• Brand awareness

• Virality

• Getting users to that "aha" moment

• Reducing friction

• Etc.

And then look at how much you’re spending:

• Server costs

• Customer service costs

• Your time

• Etc.

Based on this, see if it makes sense for your product. Calculate it carefully. And test it!

How to find the right SEO keywords

Our main conversion driver is content marketing — SEO has paid off a great deal. Word of mouth is important for us too, which is another reason that freemium makes sense for us. I'd say it's about 70/30, respectively.

Our SEO process took a few years to set up. We currently have a team of writers. We do in-house keyword research that is tightly targeted at our ideal customer profiles (ICPs). And we're careful to aim low down on the search funnel.

In other words, we avoid keywords like "what is an all-hands meeting" because people who are asking that question are still too far away from purchasing. Instead, we go with something like “the best all-hands meeting software”.

Selecting the right keywords is probably the most important part of the SEO process, and it comes from a deep understanding of our audience. So get to know your target market! And better yet, be a part of it.

SEO itself is such a big topic that I wouldn't suggest attempting to learn how to go about it from a single answer in an interview, though. If you want to tackle content marketing, here's a resource that helped me.

How to evaluate growth experiments

We're in the process of adding different and additional funnels as we scale and expand. We need to diversify.

It’s another equation. The more additional channels we invest in, the more people we get to the site, and the more conversions we get. But we have to subtract the cost of our time and resources to truly understand the value.

We’ve tried many things over the years and few have proven to be worthwhile. For example, doing live events and talks. These got us some traction, but the amount of work was more than the value of the traction, so we moved on.

Entrepreneurship is picking what looks best out of a sea of options, trying, iterating based on new data from the trying, and then trying again.

Our likely next channels to invest in are webinars and microsites. And we’re considering a retry of PPC — we stopped using it after validating the product because it’s expensive and easy to burn money if you don't do it well.

When and why to expand your team

The biggest — and most challenging — thing we're working on right now is transitioning from a team of two to hiring full-time workers and scaling.

We don’t have to do it. I wouldn't say it's "necessary" for businesses to bring on employees at any one point. It's about goals.

Our goal is to double in size in the next few years, and we know that the two of us simply don't have the throughput to perform all tasks that this will require. So it makes sense for us. We just brought on a full-time developer and a customer success rep.

Helming that transition is a lot of unspoken work that many founders take for granted.

The planning. The culture-creating. The keeping-the-ship-pointed-in-a-direction-ing. I learned the hard way with my last company that this mission orientation is integral — without it the company doesn't run.

Entrepreneurship is a whole-picture job

Being a founder is one of the only true whole-picture jobs.

We live in a capitalist society so, for better or worse, our successes are often measured in units of money. Since most of us have to operate within this capitalist social setup, understanding how money and business work ends up being a lens for understanding how society works as a whole.

Business, with its clear, unadulterated, and unwavering end goal of profit, is a microcosm of a capitalist system from start to end. Understanding the whole system of a business is like getting a holistic understanding of how the world works.

Follow along

You can find Cecilia in X and check out Slides With Friends.

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