This week,
Website Planet had the opportunity to interview Omar Zenhom, CEO of WebinarNinja. We talked about the company, how it evolved, and what are his expectations in terms of the future for the industry.
Please present WebinarNinja to our audience.
WebinarNinja is a super-simple all-in-one platform for giving live online lessons, presentations, and sales or marketing events. We consider it the user-friendliest webinar platform on Earth — and so do our users.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
It’s a classic case of building something for myself, but being too dense to realize that so many other people needed the same thing!
I always used webinars to engage with my audience and promote my businesses, but at the time, all the software for webinars was awful. It was clunky, hard to use, and required about four billion other tools to actually turn webinar attendees into leads and customers. So I threw my own platform together, a very simple one with an easy interface. And next thing I knew, my webinar attendees were just as interested in the platform I was using as the products I was trying to promote! I knew we had a winner.
The funny part is, before creating WebinarNinja I tried to sell a guide to creating webinars with the tools that were out there at the time. It sold literally zero copies (unless you count someone who got a refund). It was right in front of me the whole time: people didn’t need a guide to pain-in-the-butt webinar software. They needed webinar software that’s NOT a pain in the butt. So I created it.
What services do you offer?
On WebinarNinja, you can do live events, pre-recorded automated events, and hybrids of both. It’s extremely flexible. The best part is, the platform has built-in email automations, polls, Q&A tools, handout sharing, and even in-webinar clickable sales offers. You can literally move a virtual “room” full of attendees down your marketing and sales funnel with this one tool, seamlessly and easily. You just create the webinar, promote it, and show up. The platform does the heavy lifting.
What is the mission of WebinarNinja?
We’re here to empower creators, coaches, and any online entrepreneur to connect directly with their audience and monetize what makes them valuable. A great webinar smashes through the walls that make consumers hesitate and builds massive trust, in minutes. As former educators, both myself and my cofounder Nicole wanted to give independent entrepreneurs a way to reach out and teach people something, easily.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
We get a lot of the types mentioned above: online coaches in every industry from business to fitness to meditation and beyond. The thing about these kinds of creators is that their strengths are in their niches. It’s hard enough to run your own business without having to learn complex software or Frankenstein different apps together to create your funnel. So WebinarNinja lets them just share what they’re great at, in the easiest possible way, and convert that into leads and sales with the least possible friction.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
I don’t want to sound too proud, but we created the future of our industry. There are other webinar platforms out there now, and they’re simpler and more like what I wished I could’ve used way back when I created WebinarNinja. So our job is to continue to stay ahead of this curve, making webinars even more seamless, more integrated with the rest of an independent business, more flexible and powerful. We’re actually in beta right now on a platform for full online courses, which many of our users are using webinars to promote. The future of our industry is more complete, end-to-end ways to let people who aren’t tech experts share the expertise they have in other fields.