Honestly, I used to think webinars were a waste of time. An old-school move, where even just the word webinar makes me feel like you're selling in the days of Skype and Nokia. Yet still run by lots of companies fishing for leads.

Turns out I was wrong. Or more so, I was right about 90% of webinars and wrong about the 10% that kill it.

I came across this guy named Cameron who quit his job, moved in with his parents, and did some crazy revenue numbers with his content writing product, Kleo, in 90 days running this exact play. No ads. No real audience leverage at the start. No moonshot or gimmick.

Him and his team merged the idea of a webinar with a demo with a sales call with a product interview. And he sold the demo with a real offer before the product existed.

His webinars were not boring.

That's the move I want to break down today, because it's clever the way he did it, it’s easy to steal and test out yourself whether you’re working on something small or established, and doing it builds your audience, brings you close to your customer, generates ideas, creates fans and referrals, saves you time, and leads to sales.

The 4 case studies we’ll look at show not just evidence the strategy works, but also that the rooms can be rented (no audience), how it can be a core part of the sales motion as you grow up, and that room can even be run async.

Let's get into it.
—Jaryd

p.s if you know me you know I like branding. Meet the new logo for The-Diff!

^{Before we get to today’s idea…}

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Rezonant launched publicly ~2 weeks ago, I was on beta before, and my favorite feature is their Chrome extension that’s become a co-pilot product note taker.

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Rezonant is aiming to be the layer between what you want to build and what gets deployed. Connected to your product content, repo, and more.

They’re live, give it a try. I’m using it to go from messy inspiration to shaped, ready work in moments. Try Rezonant.

^{The idea / What this move is}

Here's the move in one line: pre-sell the demo, not the product.

Most founders treat the launch as the first real sales event. Build on the couch for several weeks/months, post on Product Hunt, post some content, pray the wave starts. I literally am this guy I’ve done that.

Cameron did the opposite. He sold a live demo of a product that barely existed, took the money on the call, and shipped the receipt after.

The TL;DR, if you stop reading here…

Stitch those together and you have a flywheel: every call produces the raw material that fuels the next one. The audience builds itself out of the sales motion instead of being a thing you go build first.

The reframe that makes it click: the demo is the sales call, the product is the receipt. Not the other way around.

That's the what. Here's why each piece works as well as it does.

^{Why the idea works / A deeper review}

Ok, let’s go a bit deeper, because the surface-level read ("do webinars") misses the actual machine. That’s not what I want you to walk away with. There are three parts, and they only really work together to avoid the 90% of crappy webinars convention.

Cameron's calls weren't "top 5 LinkedIn growth tips" content marketing webinars. They were structured like a B2B sales call, just one-to-many.

The flow seems to have been:

The Q&A is where the close happens. Because when one person asks "does it do X?" and you say yes and show it live, every other person on the call just got their objection answered without having to ask. The chat fills up with "oh that's exactly what I needed" and the social proof is happening in front of everyone in real time.

A landing page is your TED Talk monologue to the customer. Whereas a webinar run this way is a conversation with leverage.

The second part is the close mechanic. Closing is always tough and what I’m worst at because selling your stuff and asking people for money is hard. None the less, you can’t just expect people to buy, and this part helps the close.

They offered a discount that genuinely expired at the end of the call. Not "this week only" fake urgency. Tonight. If you didn't buy on the call, the price went back up at midnight. He honored that which is the only reason it kept working call after call. Otherwise the market just sniffs out the fake stuff.

This is the lever that turns a webinar from a marketing event into a sales event. Without it, you're doing free consulting and leaving money on the table.

Webinars tend to index heavily on lots of premade content for the call. Frame the thinking—webinars should give you content for other surfaces.

Every call led to new raw material: the questions asked, the objections raised, the moments of "oh wow" when the product clicked, the testimonials people gave unprompted in the chat. Cameron clipped those and posted them across LinkedIn the next morning.

Those posts fed the waitlist for the next call.

Proper community-first building.

The content playbook they had, as best I can read it from the outside: one new piece of content per day, and most of it came from yesterday's call. Not "think of a clever post." Just clip the moment from yesterday where the product landed really well, slap a hook on it, ship it.

This is the flywheel:

Every output of one loop is the input to the next.

There isn’t a necessary "build an audience first" step that exists separately from the sales motion. The audience builds itself out of the artifacts of the sales motion. Of course building a waitlist alongside this works great too, but the idea doesn’t live or die by you having one first.

The team shipped roughly one user-requested feature per day during this stretch. And when he shipped one, he didn't just quietly push it, he'd email or DM the person who asked for it with a Loom of the new feature working.

Almost always the post announcing the feature would tag or reference the original request ("someone on Tuesday's call asked for X — here it is").

They made the attribution loop real and that gets people excited to champion for you and keep using you even if your product is buggy. The person who asked got a personal note when the thing shipped, and that personal note often became its own piece of content.

Allision is upgraded. Allison told two friends. Allision’s testimonial showed up on the next call's landing page.

That's the how-to of the live video machine. Three main parts

a) demo x sales call structure,

b) real limited offer,

c) content-from-the-call,

d) + the named-feature loop riding underneath.

And an extra point here, you’ll have a growing list as more people join your video sessions. Nurture it! Don’t just build it. I tend to suck at this part. Quite frankly I have about 90 people on my Little Moments list who downloaded the app and I’m bad at ongoing coms there. Regular updates, regular emails, keep them warm before/while you launch your thing.

^{The evidence / Who’s growing with this move}

Let’s do a quick double click on some companies that have done this well.

The numbers, as Cameron has shared them publicly: $30K in the first 4 days of selling, and roughly $62K MRR by the end of his ~90-day push. He'd quit his job, moved back in with his parents to cut burn to near-zero, and shipped two LinkedIn-adjacent tools into a market everyone said was saturated.

I honestly think the market is crazy saturated and Kleo is just a wrapper, so it’s a good +1 to the idea that getting people on a live demo to show why they need you and giving them a timely offer works.

The loop they ran in their first 90 days:

This is the version of the play for everyone who says "but I don't have an audience." Neither did ConvertKit, really. Nathan Barry had a small email tool stuck around $80K/month, creeping along on word of mouth, nobody driving growth.

Then he brought on Darrell Vesterfelt to do exactly one thing: webinars. Not ConvertKit's webinars to ConvertKit's list, but partner webinars to other people's lists. The strategy was to find a creator who already owns the audience they wanted, co-hosted a live session teaching their people something useful, demoing ConvertKit live as the way to do it, dropping the offer at the end.

The creator host vouched, the demo closed, the trust transfered.

They ran 150+ of these in a single year. MRR went from under $100K to $625K — about a 6x jump. One affiliate webinar with Pat Flynn did 1,000 signups in 24 hours. Bootstrapped the whole way, never raised a nickel.

The takeaway from there is a big one: the room doesn't have to be yours. Kleo filled their own room with daily content. ConvertKit rented rooms other people had already built and paid rent in affiliate commissions.

If you've got zero list today, go borrow a warm one and demo live inside it.

Clay Collins bootstrapped Leadpages with no sales team. His thesis was that for a modern SaaS, hire content marketers instead of salespeople. He built webinars as the entire sales org and staffed his team to operate this way.

He ran webinars himself (always good to do as a founder, it makes your product human), noticed affiliate webinars were converting as high as 30% of attendees into buyers which is actually an absurd number, and decided to scale the anomaly instead of treating it as a fluke.

He hired someone to do nothing but webinars after he understood the motion himself. They ran something like 10 a week at the peak of the strategy. Every one built the same way: teach something real, demo Leadpages live as the tool that does it, make the offer.

They hit 40,000 customers in under two years and crossed $25M/year — with no traditional sales team, because the webinar was the sales team.

The takeaway from this case study is: this isn't just a one-off launch trick that burns out, it's an engine with lots of fuel you can staff.

A landing page converts at a couple percent. A live demo with real-time objection handling and an offer at the end converted at 30% for Leadpages. That gap is the entire argument.

Tally is the no-code form builder that quietly grew to seven figures with a team of two and zero paid acquisition. Marie Martens runs the marketing side, and the pattern she's described publicly is the same machine as Kleo’s, just played out asynchronously on Twitter and inside Tally's community instead of live on Zoom.

The mechanism: someone tweets a feature request or DMs Marie. Marie replies in the thread. The feature ships, sometimes within hours, often within days. Marie replies again in the same thread with a clip of it working, tagging the requester. That thread becomes the post. That post drives signups. The signups drive more requests.

It's the named-feature loop without the live call. Same compounding, slower clock speed, asymmetrically powerful because the receipts live publicly on Twitter forever.

The lesson from then: the surface (Zoom vs. Twitter) doesn't matter as much. The abstracted mechanism of show the product live, in front of the audience, while they are in the room is what compounds.

^{Action / What you can do with this now}

Simple, and I’m going to do it too…Book one call.

Pick something you're working on, shipped or not. If you don’t have a an audience already, find one person who already has 50+ of your buyers on a list—a creator, a community, a Slack group, etc. Offer to run a free 30-minute session for their people next week. Demo it live, make one offer at the end, put a real deadline on it.

That's the entry point. The flywheel is what shows up around call three, once you've got clips and objections to reuse. You don't need it on day one. You need one borrowed room and a date on the calendar.

If you can't name the room by Friday, that's the real problem and it was never the right product to work on anyway.

What I love about this newsletter is I get to test these ideas out in public with you, vs just sharing an analysis. For this one…I’m bringing up DataDonkey

DataDonkey (datadonkey.ai) is one of my tools I made for myself as a Staff PM which I think has some legs — think of it as Granola, but if Granola was a data scientist that's wired into your analytics, sending you high-signal follow-ups and findings after every meeting. v1 is built for PMs who live in PostHog, sit in too many meetings, and end up Slacking "can someone pull X" or opening 14 tabs to answer a question someone asked in standup.

It's B2B, the buying decision is fast for an individual PM (under their tool budget), and the demo is the magic moment — when DataDonkey surfaces the exact funnel drop-off someone was about to spend an hour looking up, the reaction is the close. Perfect fit for the play.

So, you guys are my room! If you're a PM who uses PostHog and you want a demo like the one I'm describing today, reply to this email. I'll send you a calendar invite for the first session on Monday 15th June.

There are 10 design partner spots I am giving away for free for now. You get to use it and I cover the costs. I’ll give this offer in the webinar but stating it here too.

^{Closing notes / Check this out before you go}

Today’s featured apps are…