Her Failed Startup Led to a $40K/Month Business

Cecilia RazakFounder of Slides With Friends $40,000 monthly recurring revenue Published June 6, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Cecilia Razak is the founder of Slides With Friends, which she describes as…

… an interactive presentation builder. We enable teams to come together in groups to learn, connect, and communicate.

Think slide-style quiz and trivia games but you can join in like it’s a Zoom call

Cecilia reveals in a recent interview, that the business does $40K in monthly revenue with a team of 4.

Slides WIth Friends was actually born from the ashes of Cecilia’s first startup, “a tech platform that connected pet care providers with pet owners.”

She explains…

I remember, we had a week-long on-site meeting in March of 2020… we wondered if we should discuss this “COVID 19 thing”…

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

That was the beginning of the end for that business…

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

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… As we grew, communication started to break down and the service itself suffered.

That realization led to the idea for Slides With Friends…

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

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.

To test the waters…

We initially used PPC [paid ads, eg. Google ads] 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.

Their pricing model helps with marketing…

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.

But…

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.

I love stories like this, where entrepreneurs turn defeat into triumph

A good reminder that your tough times may well contain the seeds of success.

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