Some of the most durable products are not designed for a market at all. They are built to solve a problem the founder is living through right now.
Cecilia Razak started in academia, then worked at branding and marketing agencies, before spending roughly a decade running her own tech startups. In that time she has brought companies from an initial idea to about $60k MRR more than once.
Her current company, built with her cofounder, is Slides With Friends, an interactive presentation tool launched in 2020. She does not share exact revenue publicly anymore, but the company crossed $40k MRR in 2024.
She is also recently postpartum and raising two young kids, and she is candid that life is busy and full right now in every direction at once.
Here is how the company came out of a completely different business's pandemic problem, and how she is recalibrating growth now that AI search has changed the terrain underneath her.
Winning Startups Aren't Bigger. They're Leaner.
Founders deploying AI agents across sales, marketing, and customer service are closing more with smaller teams. 65% more sales leads. Less headcount.
Download the free Practical Guide to Agentic GTM for Startups and start building the stack your competitors dream of.
Built for a Different Business Entirely
Slides With Friends launched during the pandemic, a period of profound disconnection, and like most genuinely useful tools, it arose from a need Cecilia's own business had at the time. They needed a way to facilitate connective teamwork, running meetings, reviewing material, assessing progress, and simply playing together as a team.
Specifically, they needed a tool that made gathering and engaging large groups easy, fun, and accessible for everyone regardless of location, and a workable way to onboard and train new team members remotely. Slides With Friends grew directly out of a different business's experience navigating quarantine, not out of a market opportunity spotted from the outside.
Three Things That Made the Build Fast
Building an initial product that led to paying users was possible, and relatively quick, because of three things working together:
A clearly defined need. One they could fulfill not just for themselves but for other users and businesses: running meetings with employee feedback and assessment built in.
SaaS experience. Both Cecilia and her cofounder had already run companies and built software before this one.
Time. The pandemic slowed their other business considerably, which freed up the space to actually focus on the build.
She and her cofounder spent long hours talking through what would perfect the experience, what people actually wanted, why they wanted it, and how to make the whole thing genuinely salable rather than just useful to the two of them.
A Product Built to Market Itself
Slides With Friends runs on a subscription model priced by seat. Most users are self serve individuals, and larger ACV contracts with organizations and enterprises come through higher touch sales. Margins are typical excellent SaaS margins, with payroll and servers as the main costs.
They started charging once they had an MVP and a sales website. The first paying user they did not personally know, always an exciting moment for any founder, paid $48 for unlimited annual access. That happened a couple of months after the tool went live, once friends and early users they had reached out to were already using and paying for it, and once a few strong blog posts were already up.
The product lends itself unusually well to freemium, because it is an interactive presentation tool by nature. Users market it to their own group simply by using it, since the whole group experiences the aha moment together during a live event. That is why they offer a robust freemium tier letting people host unlimited live events. The more events people run, the more marketing they do for the product without being asked.
Finding the ICP Before Anything Else Worked
There was real wheel spinning before the team honed in on effective growth strategies. Product Hunt launches, for instance, did not take off the way they hoped. Growth only genuinely accelerated after two specific things happened.
First, they had to understand their Ideal Customer Profile in extreme detail: what problems they actually solved, and who was genuinely willing to pay for that solution. Then, they had to target that ICP specifically with bottom of funnel, buying intent blog content, and lean into word of mouth, which worked especially well given that the tool is inherently a group event platform.
In the beginning, organic search was their strongest channel, and since it was also one of Cecilia's own areas of expertise, it produced fast growth early on. They still get enough traffic today for good leads, but recent shifts in the AI search landscape have caused revenue to fall.
"We are moving the needle back up again by focusing on higher LTV sales to inbound, qualified ICPs. We iterate and adapt as we go."
The current adaptation uses AI to sort inbound leads and determine their potential value based on parameters like email address, onboarding details provided, and product qualifying activities, letting the team focus sales energy where it is most likely to pay off.
Novelty Bias, Churn, and Repositioning Toward Tool Over Toy
One structural aspect of the industry is that it is novelty biased, meaning the company sees some churn after annual subscriptions expire, once the initial excitement of a new tool has worn off for some users.
In response, they expanded into more business use cases, which offer longer staying power than the original event and games framing. If Cecilia were starting over, she says she might position the company this way from the very start: less toy, more tool.
Time is her other real challenge. It is the actual golden resource, and she has so little of it right now that she is hypervigilant about where it goes. Looking back, she thinks it might have been wiser to pause more fully while having babies, since trying to do both fully at once has been genuinely hard.
The Help That Made It Possible
Cecilia is candid that she would not be here today without a considerable amount of help, luck, and perseverance. Her cofounder, who is also her husband, drives ideas and brings genuine business and technical talent to the company. His dedication to learning, adapting, and finding paths forward is, in her words, their special sauce.
Past funding launched them to where they are now, and she is direct that she could not be doing this as she currently does without the people who provided it. Childcare and family help matter just as much. She could not do this without that support, especially with young kids at this stage of her life, and she is genuinely impressed by anyone managing something similar without it.
On reading, she gravitates toward Buddhist and Stoic thinking along with systems thinkers. The last book she genuinely enjoyed was A Swim in a Pond in a Lake. Her main personal quality, as she describes it, is simply a drive to keep going. You can just do things.
Think About Others Before Yourself
Cecilia's core advice starts with reframing the founder question entirely. Thinking about others before yourself helps you understand a need well enough to actually create a custom solution and sell it. Starting from I want to be an entrepreneur leaves you without direction. Starting from here is a problem I understand that other people also have, what do they need, how can I help them, gives you real business direction instead.
She is also direct about a boundary many founders are less willing to state plainly: do not use AI to generate your ideas or strategy. In her view it makes thinking muddy, and can only recycle patterns from its training data, which is not a good recipe for genuine novelty or real sparks of insight. Where AI shines is research and task completion. She compares it to having a very dedicated intern who has never worked there before and does not understand the big picture. Useful, but not a substitute for doing your own thinking.
What Comes Next
From here, Cecilia wants to grow the company to around $1M ARR, then sell, start something new, and spend more time with her kids. She plans to get there by increasing ACV contract sales, and by hiring a salesperson once that process is fully solidified.
She does not maintain any social media accounts anymore. In her view they eat time and mindshare, and you have to tend and cultivate whatever gets your attention. You can check out the product directly at slideswith.com.
