Editor:
Today’s guest is Stefan Ciancio, the CEO and co-founder of WebinarKit, a platform engineered to help business owners turn webinars into automated sales machines. Stefan’s deep passion for webinars led him to create a tool that builds slides, scripts, funnels, AI chat, follow-ups, and more all inside one system. And beyond the tech, he’s a speaker, an investor, and an entrepreneur who embraces innovation and remote work.
Stefan, really nice to meet you.
Stefan Ciancio:
Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
Editor:
Can I ask what started you in the world of webinars? What drew you to that world? And what motivated you to build WebinarKit?
Stefan Ciancio:
Yeah. So, I used to be a mechanical engineer when I was out of school, and I worked in that field for three years, but the whole time I was always interested in doing something more, working for myself.
And basically, more or less, I wanted to find a way to get out of my day job and make money for myself.
And more or less, one of the first things I did was eBay sales.
That eventually led me towards appreciating selling digital products.
So, I got into the space of selling courses, coaching, agency services. And the way in which I was able to sell all of those successfully was with a sales webinar.
So, webinars became the backbone for success in any business that I started. And more or less, that led me to seeing the problems with the existing webinar software out there and their limitations and wanting to build something better. So, in 2019, I partnered with someone who was on the software side. And we were like, “Let’s create something that’s actually built for marketers to get better success with webinars.”
So, we started down that path. And more or less now, we’ve built a software that’s had over 20,000 users, has fixed a lot of the problems with existing webinar software, and has allowed multiple businesses to actually succeed in areas where other software fell flat for them.
Editor:
I know WebinarKit has been really well adopted by the industry, but also people may have experienced WebinarKit without actually knowing it because of the white labelling that you offer. Maybe you could talk us through that a little bit, how that idea came to life.
Stefan Ciancio:
Yeah. Well, believe it or not, it came through, I believe a user had reached out to us and say, “Hey, why don’t you guys do white label?” And we just thought about it and we’re like, “Sure.” So, we like to listen to our users. And my goal is to build something that people actually want. I think that works out better for them and of course it works out better for us. So, it’s a win-win.
And more or less, we built in the feature. It wasn’t too popular in the very beginning, but it became more popular over time. Initially, it was a separate offering. And we’ve integrated it in now to be one of our main offers. And rather than selling it as the feature itself, it’s become a supporting feature. So, it’s like, “Hey, you’re getting the best webinar software.” We believe in selling the whole solution. So, not just giving people a piece of the puzzle, but the whole puzzle in general, rather.
So, for example, now they get software, we give courses, we give community, but not only that, one of our plans does include the white label. So, rather than it being the whole sell, it’s more like, “Hey, you’re getting everything you need to scale your business. And if you don’t have a product, we let you white-label and sell ours.” And for the people who do have products, it becomes another lever in their business where it’s like you can sell our product, white-label it, and get continuity in your business.
So, if you don’t have continuity, you can use ours. If you don’t have a product, you could sell ours. So, just we go from being literally, again, most of the solution to being the complete package, where I have never seen anyone else offer that exact solution before.
Editor:
Yeah, makes absolute sense. Maybe you could walk us through how WebinarKit works and maybe what makes it so unique.
Stefan Ciancio:
So, one of the first reasons we started it was with autoplay. So, for example, all these other automated webinar solutions, because we were doing an automated webinar for a while. And they didn’t autoplay. So, what that means is, basically, people still have to go into the watch room and still press play. So, it defeats the purpose of this feeling an event where you’re just along for the ride, you have to press play like you would on a normal video, just kills the feeling.
So, we fixed that. That was the first thing we fixed. And then what we did was we made it much easier to use, much more modern. A lot of these tools had been around forever.
They were legacy. They were not adapted to the modern times. So, we built in better templates. We built in a modern page builder that’s drag-and-drop. We built in the ability to embed the entire webinar on your own website, as opposed to hosting it directly with ours. We built in an AI webinar builder that will build your entire webinar presentation for you in minutes, as opposed to having to go out and spend $10,000 to get an agency to do it.
That’s been huge because anyone who has wanted to take advantage of webinars to grow their business now is able to. Whereas, in the past, it was almost like gate-kept. You either needed to put months of time in or $10,000-plus. And now, you could just go into WebinarKit up, put your site link in, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a webinar ready to go. And there’s nothing like that out there. So, we really take pride. And then on top of that, the white label. And so, we really take pride on building something that is really the easiest way for anyone to get in there and start getting sales and succeeding with webinars.
Editor:
And that journey’s taken you from 2019 through to now. There must have been, I guess, some challenges along the way, as well as there are many successes, but many challenges along the way.
Stefan Ciancio:
That’s a good question. We deal with new challenges every day as business owners. Even now, there’s challenges. But I would say that, honestly, every time we’ve dealt with a significant challenge in business, it always comes back down to the core fundamentals. What’s your messaging? What’s your offer? Is it resonating with your audience? Is it resonating with what the market wants?
Stefan Ciancio:
And if you could focus there, majority of your issues will go away. And markets change, right? For example, if we had not adopted our business into the world of AI by building an AI webinar builder, we would not be ahead of all the other webinar software like we are now. But we also would probably have seen a really big sales drop. Whereas, right now, we’re seeing sales increases. People want AI now. And so, we had to respond to that and we had to build it in and we had to keep up with the other tools that were doing AI.
Note from the editor:
Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow. Enjoy!
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