The Big Aha! 💡

I’ve been in sales for over 20 years and never learned how to do mass cold email outreach. Last month I hired an expert to teach me how to use Clay and Instantly so I could understand what it involves. This article breaks it down in layman’s terms to demystify the process, so you can learn it too.

Backstory 👩‍🏫

I’ve been selling since my first job. Every company I’ve worked for and every company I’ve owned before eWebinar sold direct to other companies, so the version of outreach I learned was always one to one.

You pick a specific company, find the owner or the executive who would care, write them something personal, follow up, get the meeting. Small batch of targets, every email written by hand. I got pretty good at it. With eWebinar, at a $99/month starting point, we’re not a sales-led company, so that outreach strategy wouldn’t work.

What I never learned is the other kind of outreach. The kind where you’re not writing to one person, you’re writing to hundreds or thousands of people a week, and the entire game is landing in an inbox instead of a spam folder.

For years, I’ve watched friends build successful businesses with that as their core growth engine. I just... never picked it up. It never occurred to me that this could be a viable marketing channel for my current company. And that’s exactly the problem. I never thought about it as “marketing”. I thought about it as “sales”, and I told myself we weren’t a sales-led company.

I started paying attention to who’s winning right now. Instantly. lemlist. ZoomInfo. retention.com. Some of the most successful companies of this moment are either the software that powers mass cold outreach, or the data layer that makes it possible.

There’s an entire industry around the thing I decided wasn’t for us.

Was this a mistake?

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Everything that used to work, stopped working 📉

Two years ago, search was our number one channel. It isn’t anymore. Traffic is down, trials are down, and now we’re all busy worrying about whether we get cited by an AI instead of ranked by Google. We’re fixing it. It’s slow.

I’ve written on LinkedIn consistently for three years, with a couple of breaks. I’ve published on Substack every week for over a year. I post on Instagram 3-4x a week. I’ve been on over 150 podcasts. I can’t attribute meaningful, direct revenue to any of it. I treat all of it as credibility and trust building, billboards on a highway type effort. It takes an incredible amount of time, and I love doing it, but should I stop and repurpose my time elsewhere? I’m not sure. I’m scared of not existing because of dark social, so I have to believe that all of this together creates an impact I can’t see.

We can’t hire salespeople. There’s a rough rule in B2B that if your contract value is under $10k a year, you can’t support a salesperson on it. The math doesn’t work. We’re well under that line, which is why we’re a product-led company and not a sales-led one.

Ads? Too expensive at our revenue level. Especially for a product very few people are searching for yet. We’re not a scroll stopper. We still need to explain what we are to most people before they get it and want to see a demo. (More on that here: The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small)

That’s the position we’re in. Search weakened, social unattributable, no sales team, ads uneconomical, and a product that needs a demonstration to make sense. 🫠

Cold outreach was the last door I hadn’t opened. Mostly because I didn’t know how.

I hired someone to teach me 🙋‍♀️

I found Bogdan Liutic through an article in : Your playbook for LinkedIn ads that work. The piece he wrote was about LinkedIn ads, not cold email. I read it, thought this guy actually knows what he’s talking about, and reached out to him.

Two weeks later, he spent two hours teaching my team and me how to use Clay and Instantly from scratch.

It was humbling to have been in sales for over 20 years and realize I didn’t know the basics of how most companies out there sell. Fifteen minutes into Bogdan’s crash course, I saw how long I’d been avoiding the one thing I should’ve and could’ve learned a decade ago.

I’ve been selling to executives since the beginning of my career, running complex sales cycles. Getting on calls, pushing to the next one, going to conferences and sitting at booths. Cold outreach is an entirely different beast.

The thing everyone looks down on 🚗

Cold outreach has a reputation for being pushy and intrusive. The “used car salesman” of the internet. We hear it and we think it’s beneath us.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Cold outreach is how an enormous amount of discovery happens. It keeps the economy moving. Somebody has a problem they haven’t named yet, and the only reason they ever hear about the thing that solves it is because someone decided to tell them.

It’s also not a standalone act. It’s one touchpoint among several. Picture this: someone reads something you wrote on LinkedIn, they go to your profile and see your company name, then you land in their inbox, then they see an ad. That’s not four random hits. That’s trust building, and cold outreach is one of the pieces.

Learning how cold outreach works was a good reminder that the learning should never stop.

What is cold outreach? 📬

Here’s the simple version I wish someone had given me.

There are three things that matter, in this order: the infrastructure, the list, and the message. That’s it. Everything else is detail.

One: the infrastructure 🏗️

You don’t send from your real company domain. You buy secondary domains that look like yours without being yours, something close enough that a human recognizes it. If one of them burns (lands emails in spam), your actual company domain is untouched. It’s not sneaky or scammy, it’s the way it works.

Once you have emails on new domains, you have to warm them up. New domains blasting out email look exactly like what spammers do, so the sales engagement software you choose sends small volumes back and forth across its own network for about two weeks to build a sending history. Is warmup required? Most experts say yes. Some say no.

After warmup you ramp. Don’t send 30 emails on day one, which is the maximum each inbox should send at full capacity. Maybe 5 to 10, increasing gradually. The ceiling is roughly 20 to 30 emails per inbox per day. If you want to reach 3k or 30k people a month, you can do the math on how many inboxes you need.

Domains also burn. Enough people mark you as spam and that domain is done, so you retire it and bring up a fresh one, then run it through the same warmup and ramp-up process. This is why the operators who do this for a living are sitting on hundreds, even thousands, of domains at various stages of age.

Two: the list 📋

You need to decide who you’re talking to.

You pull lists from a data provider. Clay is the poster child, and it’s also the one I’m using. There are plenty of others, Apollo and ZoomInfo being the obvious ones, plus services like Prospeo and Moltsets that sell the underlying data.

What makes Clay different is the waterfall method. When it’s looking for someone’s email, it asks one provider, and if that one comes up empty it asks the next, and the next, until it finds something. Then it validates the address before handing it to you. It charges credits to do this.

That validation step matters because bounced emails damage your sending reputation, and a damaged reputation lands you in spam. Your sending software will pause your campaign if it hits a ~5% bounce rate, so it’s on you to build a solid list. You’re not buying data, you’re buying data that won’t wreck the infrastructure you spent time building.

Realistically, you’ll get a match on 80 to 90% of the people you search for, depending on company size.

A few rules I picked up. Cap yourself at two or three people per company, because hitting five people in the same department looks exactly like what it is, annoying and sloppy. Your list size should be dictated by how many inboxes you have, not by ambition.

You need to find people who care, then write a message compelling enough to show you understand their pain. Thirty people with a strong reason to care right now will outperform three hundred who fit the demographic.

Three: the message ✍️

There’s a formula, and there isn’t.

Every expert I follow does it differently. Taylor Haren sends one email a month, written like a newsletter, on the logic that newsletters are the format spam filters have learned to let through.

Bogdan teaches three short emails: two carrying the value proposition, then a breakup.

Josh Braun, whose course I took, says three or four and then come back later with something new.

Sam McKenna does something different again, though she’s writing to executives, which changes the rules.

None of them are wrong. They’re playing the game differently in a way that reflects their own philosophy, driven by what has worked in their own career.

The formula everyone can agree on is: write a message that gets opened, in a way that gets them to respond.

The subject line has to earn the click before a single word of your pitch is read. Your prospect is deciding, in a few seconds, whether your email is worth their attention.

Then the offer has to be compelling, which to me means two things at once: almost no effort for them, and real value delivered immediately. Not “click here to book a 30 minute call”. Something where the value arrives in the email itself, one click away, or in a one word response.

One more thing, and I feel strongly about this because I’m on the receiving end of a hundred of these a week. Fake personalization is worse than none. When someone opens with a line that’s obviously machine generated to sound like they read my stuff, I know they didn’t, and now I trust them less than if they’d told me plainly what they sell. We’ve all gotten that email: I love what you’re doing here {quote line from website}, want to buy my stuff?

Tell me what you have. Tell me what it does. I can take it from there. That’s an example of a philosophy I follow because of how I like to receive messages. You might be different, and that’s what I mean by there’s a formula, and there isn’t.

The good news in all of this: most of what’s being sent is bad. If you’re willing to put real intention into the list and the writing, you’re competing in a very shallow pool.

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What we’re doing with cold outreach 📩

I’ve launched two campaigns so far. One two weeks ago, the other last week. My goal is to launch one campaign every week for three months to test different industries and different roles that our current customers represent. The intention is to test messaging within specific verticals and see which ones stand out.

From the campaign launched two weeks ago, 2-3 emails have gone out, 15 out of 159 companies have sent a positive reply, and all of those are now in active sales conversations. For a first try, that’s pretty good, I think?

I’ll share in next week’s newsletter how I wrote my emails after taking Josh Braun’s course, The Badass B2B Growth Guide, and Sam McKenna’s Sequence Playbook.

Why I’m running this myself 🛠️

I’d love to hand this to an expert, but not right now. Outside of not having the budget, I need to prove this is a channel that could work for us first.

I’ve learned the hard way, again and again, that you can’t hire someone to fix a pain you don’t understand. You can’t delegate a job you’ve never done yourself. You’ll either be sold something that doesn’t work, or you’ll be unable to critique a process you’re supposed to follow.

If it turns out this channel works for us, then hiring a specialist becomes an easy decision and I’ll know what to ask them. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have learned that myself rather than paying someone to tell me.

The biggest lesson I learned through all of this is:

Cold outreach is a craft and an art form, and when it’s done well it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Reflections 🪞

Like anything done well, it takes a lot of experience to do properly. The infrastructure, the list, every individual email. All of it asks for intention and effort.

It’s easy to do the job but hard to do it right. The companies winning at it are the ones willing to do it right with a human touch, instead of leaving everything up to AI.

We’re all looking for the channel, the hack, the thing that works. Meanwhile the edge is sitting in the gap between doing something and doing it properly, and that gap is wide open in almost every discipline right now because the tools and AI made it so easy to do the shallow version.

If you’re where I was a month ago, aware that cold outreach exists, vaguely (or not-so-vaguely) certain it’s not for you, or maybe fearful of it because it seems complicated... I can tell you it’s not that complicated. It’s one to one selling at scale. It’s a different way of getting in front of people who were never going to find you on their own.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

Stuff mentioned in this article 👇

• Bogdan Liutic’s playbook in , where I found him: https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/linkedin-ad-playbook

• Bogdan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgdn

• Taylor Haren: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorharen

• Sam McKenna: https://www.samsalesconsulting.com

• Josh Braun: https://joshbraun.teachable.com/p/badass-b2b-growth-guide

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Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Guests include Chris Walker, Adam Robinson, and Esben Friis-Jensen: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

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What got me thinking this month

Our numbers this month are not great. Trials are down. Traffic is down. Accounts we thought were stable and had healthy usage numbers are churning, citing “AI”. Would they really go and build eWebinar themselves?

Is this a product-market fit problem? An AI problem? A me problem? An everyone problem?

Three weeks ago I published an article about getting off HubSpot. It took five months and one person worked part-time on it. It was a massive undertaking and one that wouldn’t have been possible before AI. David had built two critical components himself to make that happen. So we’re also building things ourselves.

What we did to HubSpot is what someone out there is doing to us.

Here’s the greatest AI paradox right now: AI let us cut our costs. AI is also killing the revenue that’s making it necessary to cut our costs.

We have access to incredible tools, but so does everybody else.

The hard part of software was never building it. It was building it for public use at scale so it doesn’t break.

Building something for private use used to be expensive too. Now it isn’t. A private version only has to be good enough for the people using it.

What are people actually willing to pay for, when they can increasingly build a version of it themselves?

We don’t know how any of this plays out yet. The bar moved, the rules changed, and we’re all experiencing this for the first time.

In all this uncertainty, one thing’s for sure. Even if you don’t know where you’re headed, you can’t sit still.

It has never been more exciting to be in tech. It has also never been more terrifying. 👻(BTW, Happy Halloween!)

What got me thinking is this:

How do you create value for people who want to create their own?

Till next time,

— Melissa ✌️

Quick tidbits

1. My latest ProfitLed episode is with Adam Robinson, one of the loudest voices in bootstrapping on LinkedIn. For the longest time I found him annoying. All I’d ever seen were the posts: revenue numbers, another company launched, another thing working. He’s at $35m ARR across three companies with 32 people, running it all from Aspen. Then I got him on the show and heard what sits underneath all of it, and I came out of that hour respecting him as much as the best founders I know. You can find the episode here.
   

2. My friend Dylan O’Brien, one of the savviest and scrappiest founders I know, builds software lawyers love. His latest is an AI time tracker. He recommended The Power of Pull by Rob Snyder to me a couple of days ago. I’ve read a lot of sales books in my life, this one is worth powering through. I love what Rob says about demand existing independent of supply. We’re taught to run discovery calls to uncover pain and then sell our supply, when we should just be finding demand and channeling it. Rob was just on ’s Podcast here talking about the same thing, if you want to skip the book.

   

3. My bestie Alethea, a top agent on the Big Island in Hawaii, sent me this podcast with Rick Rubin on Diary of a CEO. I didn’t know who Rick was before this… I had been living under a rock. It’s an excellent listen with a lot of quotable bangers. I know I recommend a lot of DOACs. It’s one that’s consistently great though. Now that I have your attention, if you happen to be looking for a $9.45m mansion in Hawaii, give Alethea a ping.

This month’s articles you may have missed

• Leaving HubSpot: How we migrated to a better alternative in 5 months: Five months, one person part-time, and a lot of AI. The exact order we moved every piece off HubSpot, what we replaced it with, and what we built ourselves.

• A good cofounder vs a great one: Ilias Contreas built the leading bartending school in Italy and owned half the market. Then one morning he couldn’t log in, and after almost 18 years, he no longer controlled the company he founded.

• Life is a video game: A friend of mine passed on a coffee idea in university because he thought coffee was beneath him. That idea became a chain with over 1,000 locations.

🎙️ Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live. We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Find it on your favorite podcast app: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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Share

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• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, eWebinar’s Journey to $1M ARR

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

Update on Nov 3, 2026: Adam Robinson passed away on Sunday in a tragic plane crash in Florida, along with his wife Helen, their young children, and others on board. I’m shocked and gutted, along with the rest of the tech community. I wrote this piece last week and I’m leaving it exactly as it was, because it’s how I felt about him. I judged him by his posts, and I was wrong. The real Adam was warm, generous, and always willing to help people he’d never met. He told me again and again how good life was right now, and I’m grateful he got to tell this story. He was loud because he wanted to inspire more bootstrappers, and he did. His story and accomplishments will live on forever in our hearts. He will be missed.

The guy I'd written off 🙄

For the longest time, I found Adam Robinson annoying.

I didn't know him. I'd just seen the posts. Revenue numbers, another company launched, another thing working. It read like a guy who really loves talking about himself, and it made building a company look way too easy.

I thought, this stuff isn’t real.

Then a few months ago I went on his live show, Unf*ck Your Startup, and got to talk to him as a person instead of a feed. He was great to talk to, pretty chill, and nothing like the version I'd built in my head.

Around the same time I found his free LinkedIn course on YouTube and watched it to get a refresher. It was good. It’s right here if you’re interested.

I invited him on ProfitLed, of course. Who better to interview than one of the loudest voices in bootstrapping?

Then we recorded, and I got the stories behind the posts. I came out of that hour respecting him as much as the best founders I know.

My conversation with Adam on ProfitLed 🎙️

Adam grew up in suburban Houston, where the coolest dads were orthopedic surgeons. One of them had a Porsche, a nice house, and a permanent smile. What Adam wanted the most wasn’t the car. It was this thing the doctor said: I would do this even if I wasn't getting paid.

His dad was a trader who made it clear he was only in it to pay for his kids' colleges, and the second that was done, he was out. That was the model Adam grew up with.

He went to Rice, got rejected from every internship he applied for, and got in the back door at Lehman Brothers through a contact of his brother's (his words, though he says it was never confirmed). He spent years as a credit default swap trader and made millions in his 20s.

Meanwhile his roommates started Vimeo in their apartment, and he watched them build it while he put on a tie at 6am. He wanted what they had badly, because it looked like they loved it.

He left eventually, with a couple million dollars of his own money and, in his words, an enormous amount of false confidence.

Then came Robly, the email company he built with his brother. They each said they'd put in $300k. It turned into $1m each, handed over $50k at a time, with his brother having to ask his wife every month whether they could do it again. Adam said it was a terrible period.

They brute forced it to $3m ARR off a sales team running out of Adam's apartment. Revenue was stuck and he had to put 27 of his 35 people in a room and tell them they no longer had a job.

Robly was profitable after that, with seven people and flat revenue, and a customer count shrinking by a percent a month for two and a half years while he sat there thinking this thing is going to die.

What saved him was one feature inside Robly everybody kept asking for. They spun it out, it became GetEmails, which became Retention.com. He knew almost instantly that it was going to be 10x the business Robly would ever be.

Today Retention.com, RB2B and a brand new company called Moltsets all run on the same data asset. $35m ARR, 32 people, run out of Aspen while Adam’s wife gets to be a full time artist.

That doctor said he'd do the job even if nobody paid him. Thirty years later, Adam is that guy.

There's a lot more in our conversation…

Like why he spent years thinking it was all a sales game before realizing that product is everything. How badly he underestimated the work it takes to make an obvious idea function. And how for every one thing that worked, he spent long stretches on five that didn't.

"It's so hard" 😳

He said that many times in our hour together. It's just so hard.

You will not find that sentence on his LinkedIn. He’s not hiding anything, it’s just not what he talks about.

We get the wins, and we fill in the backstory ourselves. Usually with something that looks a lot like it must have been easier for them.

Earned, not given 💪

Adam said people tell him it’s disingenuous to talk about bootstrapping when he’s launching a company on top of a business with $15m a year in profit.

He only gets to have that because of everything that came before it. The work it took to get into Rice. Then onto a trading floor, where he did well enough to walk away with the money to fund a company of his own. Five things that didn’t work for every one that did. A million dollars of that money into Robly. Two mass layoffs, seven years apart. He calls those two days the worst moments of his career.

What he’s built over ten years isn’t just four companies. It’s a platform the next company gets launched from. Shared data, shared legal, shared team, an audience that already trusts him. Of course the fourth one looks easy. The first one is what paid for it.

It’s easy to say you could only do that because you have this. He only has this because he did all of that.

He says he got lucky too. I don’t know if I believe in luck as much as I believe in preparation meeting opportunity.

I wrote about luck here: Lucky people create their own opportunities

What I got wrong 🙃

I made the same mistake a lot of us make. I read the internet and believed it, and decided building a company was easier than it is.

Somewhere in the last couple of years I took my eye off my own ball, and I’m living the consequences of that now. I started measuring my company against a highlight reel and kept waiting for my version to get as easy as theirs looked. I didn’t work as hard as I should have, because I didn’t think I needed to.

I know now that none of it is easy. It wasn’t easy for Adam either, no matter how he makes it look.

Take the inspiration, because it’s real and it should motivate you. Just remember you’re looking at someone’s tenth year, not their first.

The people who make it look the easiest are usually the ones working the hardest.

To hear my full conversation with Adam, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Find Adam on LinkedIn.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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Find me here too 🔍

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• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

Last week, I was walking home from dinner with a friend. We were talking about founding companies and what it takes to be successful. How do you really know if an idea is going to work?

The conversation reminded him of a story…

Back in university, he had a friend who got really excited about coffee.

He’d worked out what it cost to make a cup and what you could sell it for. How many cups you could sell in a day. What a store would cost. After that, all you had to do was replicate the model and open a lot of stores.

He had the whole business plan in his head, and he wanted my friend to build it with him.

My friend was studying finance at the time. He had mentors who were doing really well, and he was headed for a fancy hedge fund. There was no way he was going to work at coffee shops.

He passed on the idea without a second thought.

His friend went ahead anyway. He opened a shop, then a few more. A few years later, someone came along and bought them.

The buyer kept going and grew it into a coffee chain with over 1,000 locations. You’d recognize the name.

My friend said they were still in their twenties when the deal happened. In his words, when you make a sale like that in your twenties, you never have to work again.

He wasn’t telling me this story out of regret. He’s done well for himself.

He was telling me this to prove a point.

As he put it:

“The only difference between me and him was that he believed in the idea, and I thought coffee was beneath me. That’s it.”

My friend looked at coffee and saw coffee. His friend looked at coffee and saw a massive opportunity.

Is it really as simple as, just believe in the idea? Assuming the idea has real business viability, meaning customers are willing to pay for it… I think so. Jason Fried from 37signals has always said that if some people liked what they built, then they believe others would too. They did not need to own the market to have a great business. He is living proof of his own philosophy.

Nowadays, everyone loves to tell you what’s dead. Outreach is dead. SEO is dead. Email is dead. Ads are dead. Content is dead.

If that’s what you believe, I guarantee you that nothing you do will ever work. Every failure will just be evidence of the story you chose to believe.

If you believe something will be, then the stuff between you and the end goal is just stuff. Process. Things you have to go figure out.

The path between you and where you want to go is never straight. It’s full of obstacles, twists and turns, peaks and valleys.

Life is just a fucking video game. Sometimes you die. Sometimes you pick up extra lives. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. That’s just the way it is, and that’s all there is to it.

The only way to get to the end is to stay in the game long enough to get there.

Hopefully you have fun playing too. That in itself is a win.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

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Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

Who leaves Italy? 🇮🇹

A few months ago, I was scrolling Substack and came across a founder named Ilias Contreas writing about leaving his life in Italy behind to live in Costa Rica as a “surfpreneur”.

My first thought was, who leaves Italy?!

Most people spend years figuring out how to get there, not how to leave.

I had to know the story, so I invited him on ProfitLed.

One of my favorite parts of having a podcast is getting to talk to founders from all walks of life. Everyone has a story you’d never guess from their profile.

My conversation with Ilias on ProfitLed 🎙️

Ilias grew up in Rome. His dad was a doctor, and he assumed he’d become one too, until he realized what he actually wanted was to write. He studied psychology instead, because in the end, books are about people.

At 20, he went to London to bartend on a CV he mostly made up. That summer taught him more than cocktails. The bar handed him a 200-page operations manual, and that’s when it clicked. No matter what you sell, a company is a company.

At 23, he opened a cocktail bar in Rome with three partners and a €20,000 loan from his dad. He didn’t take a single euro for the first 18 months and worked 80 to 100 hours a week.

When they couldn’t find bartenders trained the way they needed, they started teaching them. That became Mixology Academy. It started in an 85 square meter garage and grew into the leading bartending school in Italy: two locations, 10,000 students, half the Italian market, and more than €4 million a year.

No VC. Completely bootstrapped.

In 2014, he needed a reset. He’d always pictured himself writing at a wooden table by the beach, so he took a month alone in Costa Rica. He started surfing, which he calls the closest thing to meditation, because out there you can’t do anything except wait for a wave. When he went home, he missed it.

After years of trial-moving, a few months at a time, he moved for good in January 2020 with his wife. Eight days later, the first COVID headlines hit, and the schools had to close.

Then one morning, Ilias and his wife, who was also working in the company, couldn’t log in. He opened his email and found a letter. After almost 18 years, he no longer controlled the company he founded.

He sold his shares, landed on his feet, and within six months was matching his old income consulting for businesses across every kind of industry. Today he writes, surfs, and spends time with his family. The only piece missing from his ideal life, he says, is living off his writing alone.

There’s a lot more in our conversation…

What happened in his first 18 minutes behind a London bar. How he finished 2020 up 6% with every school closed. The Italian idea of ragione sociale, and why he never thought he was selling cocktail classes. And his definition of happiness:

The distance between who you want to be and who you see yourself as today.

The morning he couldn’t log in 😳

That’s the part of our conversation that got me the most

You wake up and you’re locked out of a company you spent nearly two decades building. Your face is on everything and you’re the brand.

He told me his first reaction was relief, which surprised the people around him more than it surprised him. He’d been missing the spark for a while, and part of him wanted to feel that early sense of purpose again. The anger came later, once he’d dealt with the aftermath.

I can’t even imagine.

I don’t know the people involved or the details… but listening to him, I pictured that morning happening to me, and it reminded me how much of your life the person you build a company with holds.

A cofounder isn’t as important as a life partner. They’re harder to get rid of, though. You can’t just divorce them.

Which is why it matters so much who you pick.

Good vs great 🤝

I’ve been blessed with a good cofounder and a great one in the last 15 years.

Before eWebinar, I had a good cofounder for almost a decade, across two companies. We didn’t always work well together, and there were fundamental issues between us we never resolved. What we did have was a really solid friendship and a lot of mutual respect.

I knew he’d never abandon me, and vice versa. Which was important because for years, we weren’t doing well and he could’ve left to get a job paying 2-3x what we were. We stood up for each other in rooms the other wasn’t in.

We did some great work together, and our second company was acquired which gave both of us some financial freedom. They say don’t build a business unless you can have a great cofounder, I don’t believe that. As the 0.001% is incredibly hard to find, and they have to choose you back. A good cofounder can absolutely help you build a good business. I’m proof of that.

Then there’s David, my current cofounder and CTO at eWebinar, and also my life partner.

When he joined me a year into eWebinar, we sat down to talk about equity. I told him what I’d do for the company, what I thought he’d do, and asked what he’d need to feel like he owned a fair share of it. He named a number and I said yes. The whole conversation took ten minutes, and we’ve never talked about it again.

That’s what a great cofounder feels like. Things that should be hard, aren’t.

We wanted the same life from day one: a profitable company that lets us live the way we want, from wherever we want. He never cuts corners, which is why our product doesn’t break and we get to have our evenings and weekends. He built a team that doesn’t need him in every decision.

He’s the reason we have so few support tickets, can take time off, and sleep at night.

A great cofounder will accelerate you in a lot more ways than revenue. The product gets better, you move faster, the team gets stronger. The most important thing though, peace.

A good cofounder can help you build a good business. A great one gives you peace, and that’s worth more than anything money can buy in a partnership.

To hear my full conversation with Ilias, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Find Ilias on LinkedIn.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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Article summary 📝

After years of trying to make it work, we finally completed our HubSpot migration in five months, with one person doing it part-time and a lot of help from AI. You'll see the HubSpot alternative we chose for each piece, what we built ourselves, and what it all costs now compared to before. This guide covers why we signed up for HubSpot, why we left (it wasn't the price), and the exact order we moved everything over, piece by piece.

Backstory 👩‍🏫

Five months ago, we decided to get off HubSpot. It was a painful, long, drawn-out decision. Since then, a lot of people have asked me why we're migrating away and how we plan to do it. I suspect many of them are in the same boat, wanting to leave but feeling like the task is too overwhelming.

Many assume we wanted to leave because it's expensive. That's not it. Everything in our business is an investment, and every investment has an ROI. If HubSpot had done what we needed it to do, it would've justified the investment.

We left because it’s an extremely bloated product that can’t even do the basics well. For a company like ours that ran entirely on it, that meant not doing things that would move the business forward, because making them work in HubSpot was just too painful.

I won’t go into every detail, but I’ll say this to give some context. HubSpot is a company that does everything, and nothing well. Want to edit an email? Modify a landing page? Copy and paste from a Google Doc into an email or web page? Formatting nightmares everywhere. Nothing is intuitive. It’s clunky, difficult and bug-ridden. Trying to do anything was causing too much frustration.

You might be wondering why we got on it in the first place. When we started eWebinar, HubSpot had a startup program that gave us 90% off. We wanted to be cost-efficient and were on a mission to use as few tools as possible.

So we used it for everything. Our entire business. Which is why getting off it felt impossible. I guess this is their business model? Here’s everything that ran on it:

• Our entire website. Every marketing page and landing page, built and hosted.

• Our blog, plus everything we bent the blog into. Customer story pages, podcast episode pages, anything that was "one template, lots of entries."

• Our help center. Which ironically, ran on a separate system inside HubSpot.

• Our CRM. Every contact and company, from first website visit to paying customer.

• Website tracking. Tracking code, which came bundled with the cookie banner.

• Our forms. Contact forms and a few others.

• Support. We used their chat inbox as our support system (not ticketing product).

• Every email we sent. Trial, onboarding, nurture sequences, churn win-backs, the newsletter, the podcast list.

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Why we couldn't leave ⛓️‍💥

We knew it wasn't working for a long time. We stayed anyway.

When I'd say "we need to get off HubSpot," this is what David, our CTO heard:

Rebuild the website from scratch. Find somewhere to host it. Move every blog post, podcast page, help article, and image. Replace the tracking so we don't suddenly go blind on where people come from. Build a cookie banner. Rebuild the forms. Find a new support tool. Find a new CRM. Find a new email tool and rebuild every workflow. Then make all of them talk to each other, and to every other tool that used to talk to HubSpot.

That's the trap with an all-in-one. HubSpot is ten tools in one. Maybe you only use four of them. But to leave, you need four new tools plus a way to connect them, and you don't get to pause your business while you do it.

For a small, bootstrapped team like ours that’s always resource strapped, that wasn't just a project. That was a hire we didn't have, on top of all the other things we’re doing. So we kept living with it.

P.S. Are you also hoping to get off HubSpot? What’s stopping you?

Let me know on this survey. 👇👇👇

Take the Survey

Then AI changed everything 🤖

One day, something magical happened. AI arrived, and David could suddenly picture building, on his own, the pieces he couldn't have imagined tackling before.

With Claude and Cursor, he could describe a web page and have it built in a few prompts, copied from what we already had. All of a sudden, building a page outside HubSpot was easier than building one inside it. That was just one small example.

The things we'd always assumed we'd need to buy or hire for, David could now build himself. A CMS. A system to move data between tools. Workflows rebuilt automatically instead of by hand. Better yet, he’d have fun doing it, testing what AI could really do and applying it to eWebinar.

That's when getting off HubSpot went from a wishlist project to an actual plan. 💪

How we migrated off, piece by piece 🧩

Because everything had to keep running, we couldn’t do it in one go. It had to be moved one piece at time.

Here's the order we did it in.

Step 1: Support chat → Crisp

We started replacing support chat because it was the easiest win. We wanted so much more from our support conversations than HubSpot's chat could give us. We moved to Crisp and swapped out the chat bubble on our site and inside the app. Customers were delighted, because they now got instant responses from an AI chatbot built right into Crisp.

We picked Crisp because it's lightweight, has a chatbot we can train, and is very open to being connected to and customized. We're building our own chatbot internally (for eWebinar's chat), so David liked that we could swap pieces of Crisp for our own over time.

Step 2: The website, blog, podcast pages and help center → our own CMS

This was a huge one, because it was our entire web presence.

David's first instinct was to have Claude rebuild every page we had. That would've worked for web pages, but not for articles. Blog posts, podcast pages and help articles need to be written by someone non-technical like me, pasting from a Google Doc into a simple editor. They need version history, so if someone breaks something, you can compare and roll back. They need an image library, so when you update a screenshot, it updates everywhere it's used.

So David built our own CMS (the system that stores and serves all those articles and images). It started basic and has turned out to be really, really good. It’s the best CMS I’ve ever used, so good that I wonder if there’s a market for productizing it. It just works. Now, inputting and publishing a blog takes only minutes. We just copy from a Google Doc, including the images, paste it in the CMS, it does its thing, and keeps all the formatting. Everything comes out perfectly. It even saves the image into our image library, AI names it, and also creates a blog image that matches our content. We can regenerate it with one button if we want. Previously, we had a designer create an image per blog and sometimes it would take 2-3 weeks if we forgot to chase. Another magical thing that it does, is comparing versions side by side with highlights to show the differences. 🤯

The trick that made it possible to do gradually:

Early on, David pointed our domain at our new site and turned it into a proxy. That means our site can fetch a page from another site and serve it as its own. If someone visited a page we'd already rebuilt, our site served it. If they visited a page we hadn't moved yet, our site fetched it from HubSpot and served that. Visitors never knew the difference.

There was no big launch day. We moved pages over as they were ready, until there was nothing left on HubSpot to fetch.

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Step 3: Tracking → PostHog

We were already using PostHog for product analytics, so we expanded it to cover the website and replace HubSpot's tracking. David also built our own cookie banner, so nothing gets tracked before someone gives consent where that's required.

Step 4: Contacts and companies → Attio

For the CRM, we went with Attio. It has good APIs, some enrichment built in, a clean interface for anyone who wants to work in a CRM, and it's not expensive. We were already building a lot ourselves, so this was one piece we didn't need to reinvent.

The jury is still out on whether a CRM will provide much value when we're increasingly working with agents to accomplish specific tasks. Last week, I tried to rebuild a list in Attio and gave up because it was so hard. I haven't tried their MCP yet, but I wonder why I couldn't just pull the same list from our database using Grokbot or something similar. I'm not sure we'll live in our CRMs anymore, given how complicated they've always been to learn and use.

Step 5: The glue → Relay, which we built

This is the piece that made the whole thing work, and I’m guessing it’s the piece that turns most people off from switching CRMs.

When everything lived in HubSpot, the data was all in one place. Now it lives across PostHog, Attio, our own product, Crisp, our email tool, and ChartMogul (business analytics). Something has to move information between them and decide which tool gets what.

So David built Relay, an internal product he named. If you know Segment, it's a bit like that. If you don't, think of it as a post office for information about people and companies. Everything gets sent to Relay, and Relay knows where each piece needs to go next. The official name for it is Customer Data Platform.

Here's what that looks like for one contact:

• Someone lands on our blog. PostHog notes the visit but doesn't know who they are yet.

• Three weeks later, they register for an eWebinar demo. Now PostHog has their email and connects it to everything they did before, including that first blog post.

• PostHog sends that to Relay. Relay sees this is someone new, pulls their first page, where they came from, and their campaign details, and sends it all to Attio.

• Their answers on the demo form registration also goes through Relay into Attio.

• When Attio updates, it tells Relay, and Relay sends the right slice to each tool. Our email tool gets what it needs to personalize their emails. Crisp gets enough that our support team knows who they're talking to. ChartMogul gets what it needs for reporting.

• If someone is missing details, Relay sends them to our enrichment service and brings the results back into Attio.

What matters most is that Relay has rules for every single field. Take "first page they landed on." You only ever want to keep the very first one, never overwrite it with the latest. Multiply that kind of rule across every field and every tool, and you can see why moving data is so easy to get wrong.

Relay also made the migration itself safe. HubSpot was just one more source. All our existing contacts went from HubSpot through Relay into Attio, and we ran both systems side by side for a while. If something landed wrong, David could fix the rule and rerun the import without breaking anything else.

In David's words, before Relay, it felt onerous and he didn't know how he was going to do it. After Relay, it was mostly finding mistakes and rerunning.

Step 6: Emails and workflows → Customer.io

The last piece was all our automated emails and newsletters, which moved to Customer.io.

Customer.io has its own AI assistant. David found it okay, but it made a lot of mistakes. What did the work was Claude, connected to everything through their MCP.

David could point Claude at our old HubSpot workflows, point it at Customer.io, and give it access to Relay, which knows every field we have, and to our codebase, which knows where each field comes from. Then he'd say: grab this workflow and make it work over there.

The hard part was people already halfway through a sequence. Some of our sequences run twelve months, so on the day you switch, someone is always on month six. A normal workflow starts at email one, which means a straight copy would have sent that person the welcome email again.

The fix was to base each sequence on a date, like the day someone became a customer, and check that date before every step. If you became a customer six months ago, skip the first six emails. Not complicated logic, but a nightmare to build by hand across every sequence. With Claude, it was fairly painless.

Then David ran Customer.io in test mode, which sends every email to him instead of to customers. He pushed real customer data through Relay and had Claude compare what Customer.io would have sent against what HubSpot actually sent. It's never a perfect one-to-one, but it showed whether the two lined up before we switched over.

David's take is that workflows are exactly where AI belongs. They're usually built by hand, by non-engineers, and they're some of the hardest things in a business to get right.

By the way, if you're setting up Customer.io from scratch, you need to warm up your sending domain. Customer.io has features that let you batch your sends and ramp up gradually, but we didn’t know we needed to do this. If you're switching email services, plan for it from the start.

Where everything lives now 🗺️

• Website, blog, podcast pages, help center: our own CMS, hosted on Amazon, pages built with Claude and Cursor

• Support chat: Crisp

• Website tracking: PostHog, plus our own cookie banner

• Contacts and companies: Attio

• Moving data between all of it: Relay, built in-house

• Emails and workflows: Customer.io

• Business analytics: ChartMogul, now fed through Relay

Did we save any money? 💸

We were paying HubSpot $2,381.12 a month.

Here's what we pay now:

• Amazon hosting for the website, plus Relay: $660

• Crisp: $242

• Attio: $184

• Customer.io: free for the first year up to 30k contacts on their startup plan, $425 after that + overages

• PostHog: probably a bit more than before, since it's doing more

That's $1,086 a month right now, about 54% less. Once the Customer.io startup year ends, it's $1,511, which is still about 37% less, minus whatever PostHog went up.

So yes, we save some money. Not nothing, but not life-changing either. I took five months of David's time, part-time, to get here.

If saving money had been the goal, this would have been a hard project to justify. It wasn't the goal, the savings are a side effect.

What we bought back was every hour we spent fighting the tool, and every idea we never tried or abandoned because of the pain.

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What it actually took ⏳

About five months, and not someone working on it full time. David was working on it whenever he could, alongside running our product.

What made it possible for one person was that David wasn't hand-coding every piece. He built Relay and the CMS so that Claude could plug into them, and every tool we picked plugs into Claude too. He was building, configuring and fixing all of it, scenario by scenario, through Claude.

When I asked him what the hardest part was, he didn't name anything he built. He said it was knowing you got it right. Data was coming from everywhere and going everywhere, and every field had to land in the right place without overwriting something it shouldn't.

What we have now 🚀

I asked David how the reality compared to the pain he'd imagined. He said it was complex and intense. But in the end, it was also kind of fun to see how much AI has enabled him. 🤩

The bigger thing is what we didn't know we were missing. When you've used one tool for everything for years, you get used to its rough edges and assume that's just how software is. Then you switch to tools actually built for each job, and you realize how boxed in you were. David called it night and day. In his words, the tools we use now are ten times better than what we had before.

This project also forced us to look hard at our data. Where it comes from, what we actually care about, how it connects. That's how we ended up with proper enrichment. Because everything flows through Relay, plugging in a new tool now is easy peasy.

Reflections 🪞

The all-in-one was the right decision when we made it. We were new and needed one place for everything, and 90% off is significant.

What I wish I'd seen sooner is that the cost of a tool was never the number on the invoice. It was the hours spent working around it, the developer time spent fixing what should have been simple, and the things we didn't do because the tool made them too hard.

For years, leaving felt like a project we didn't have the people for. AI changed that math. The work that would have needed a team is now something one person can do on the side.

If I could go back in time, I would've pushed for best-in-class products that talk to each other, so we could swap one piece out without it becoming a whole thing.

The biggest lesson I learned through all of this is:

Don't judge a tool by what it costs. Judge it by what it costs you.

I'm curious... If you feel stuck in HubSpot jail like we were for years, what's the main thing (or things) stopping you from getting off?

Take the Survey

I'm collecting feedback to see if we can productize some of what we built to help you break free.

Got questions? Ask me in the comments.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

Stuff mentioned in this article 👇

• Claude

• Cursor

• Crisp

• PostHog

• Attio

• Customer.io

• ChartMogul

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Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Guests include Chris Walker, Adam Robinson, and Esben Friis-Jensen: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

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Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

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Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

What got me thinking this month

Last weekend, we flew to Ibiza to celebrate David’s birthday with some friends.

On one of the nights, we ended up at a villa that was just outrageous. It had a lagoon pool, a dome for meditations and ceremonies (with the same frequency as The Great Pyramid of Giza apparently), an outdoor sauna in a garden, a main house plus a five-bedroom casita on the side, and a bunker built for parties.

I don’t know much about the owner. I was just a guest of a guest. He’s a tech founder who exited some years ago, bought the property, and recently renovated it so he could use it as a community house.

At midnight, when it officially became David’s birthday, I asked him how he was feeling.

He said, unaccomplished.

Birthdays are a time for reflection. They’re also when we tend to measure ourselves against the goals and dreams we had way back when. I think I can speak for a lot of us when I say we’re never as far as we want to be.

That’s very true for David. He left Microsoft 12 years ago to join a startup in New York, which is how we met. They raised $10M from VCs and hopes were high, but after a few years it didn’t work out. He consulted as a fractional CTO for a while, then joined me at eWebinar shortly after I started the company. He’s never seen the success he’s always dreamed of. Frankly, neither have I.

He told me he was standing in this stranger’s house thinking, this is the experience I should be giving my friends. And he felt nowhere near it.

I didn’t respond. I just listened. I knew exactly what he meant. As his cofounder, I felt responsible even though I shouldn’t.

The next day, we went for one of those quintessential four-hour Ibiza lunches by the ocean with 12 of our friends. It was so much fun, so easy, and full of love. At the end, David told everyone that they make life worth living.

As we drove away from the restaurant, I told him what I’d been thinking since midnight…

We’re just two ordinary people trying to make it work, who learned everything from scratch. We had no advantages. We didn’t go to Ivy League schools, we didn’t have access to a network.

We may not have everything we set out to achieve today, but our lives are already so full. We have 100% control over our time. We have an abundance of love, friendship, and community. How many people can say that?

If I had to choose between all the money in the world, or this life, where our friends make time for us because they want to be there and not because of what’s in our bank account, I’d choose this life every time.

That’s not to say the things we want don’t matter. They do. Wanting them is the fuel for the fire, and we’re working towards them. They’ll come.

Right now, we are free. That is a huge achievement. Let’s not build our own prison out of the things we don’t have yet.

David agreed.

Comparison is really the thief of joy. Everyone is on their own journey, we have no idea how they got to where they are. We can’t compare our start to someone else’s middle, or our middle to someone else’s end.

Louis C.K. once said: The only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as them.

Another friend recently told me a story he’d read in a book, about a man who had something a billionaire never would. I went looking for where it came from and found a short poem Kurt Vonnegut wrote for The New Yorker. He and his friend Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, were at a billionaire’s party on Shelter Island. Vonnegut asked Heller how it felt knowing their host might have earned more in one day than Catch-22 ever had.

Heller said he had something their host could never have. Knowing that he had enough.

My friend loved that story so much he got enough tattooed on him, to remind himself that he has enough, and that he is enough.

What got me thinking is this:

How much of what we already have do we miss while measuring what we don’t?

P.S. How is it October already?! January was yesterday!

Till next time,

— Melissa ✌️

Quick tidbits

1. I’m terrible at making conversations with strangers, and even worse at getting out of them. I just listened to this DOAC episode where Vanessa Van Edwards, a conversation expert, gets into how to eliminate awkward small talk and forge deeper connections.

2. If you’re not following yet who writes “The Unstuck Entrepreneur”, you should. He’s one of the most real founders I’ve ever met and one of my favorites. He gives really grounded advice around how to navigate your business and life at the same time. Peter has had 4 exits, two of them back to back, 8 and 9 figures. I interviewed him on ProfitLed a few months ago. You can find the episode here.

3. My friend Kyle Racki, Cofounder of Proposify, recommended this book to me - No Bullsh*t Strategy: A Founder’s Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage with a Strategy That Actually Works by Alex M.H. Smith. In a world where we’re inundated with strategies and nothing seems to really move the needle, this book cuts to the chase and makes you wonder whether things have to be that complicated.

   

This month’s articles you may have missed

• The growth ceiling most businesses don’t see: Why I started eWebinar, and how I spent 6 years looking for people who had the same pain, only to find out they were in front of me the whole time.

• Is comfort a disadvantage?: Matt Watson grew up in a trailer park and sold his first company for $150M at 29. He learned how to make money at a young age, but it has never been a motivator for him.

• How to break down the wall in front of you: It’s not whether something works, it’s how long until it works for you.

🎙️ Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live. We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Find it on your favorite podcast app: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

Share

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, eWebinar’s Journey to $1M ARR

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

I’ve been struggling with how to grow my company and find things that move the needle meaningfully. It’s been going on for a while now.

We’ve been at this for six years. We have customers who love eWebinar, who’ve built us into how their company runs, who would be very upset if we disappeared. I don’t take that lightly.

What we don’t have is the growth trajectory that my cofounder and I have been working so hard for. Our version of the hockey stick growth. Or, is that a myth?

Social media doesn’t help. Every day there’s another company hitting $10M in a year, or even $100M in a year doing something AI related. You read enough of those and it’s inevitable to feel behind, and wonder… What’s wrong with what I’m doing?

Last week I sent a long, honest update to my friend Andrew Flachner, Cofounder and CEO of RealScout.

We met over ten years ago at a charging station at a real estate conference. He’s one of the hardest working and most strategic people I know. I’ve watched him bring his company back from the dead through intense focus and grit. Today, RealScout is one of the most celebrated companies in the real estate industry. In the years I’ve known him, he has hit result after result after result.

In my update, I shared that I was feeling demotivated because nothing we do seems to be working well. I’m about to try some other things, with a lot of doubt about whether any of them will land. I’m also unsure I’m putting effort into the right business, or if there’s an opportunity cost in not trying something else given how fast everything is moving.

People love to say XYZ doesn’t work. Outreach is dead. SEO is dead. LinkedIn is dead. I don’t think asking if something is going to work is the right question. It’s not whether something will work. It’s how it’ll work for you. The moment you decide something doesn’t work, you’ve already decided its fate. Then you stop trying.

I see this in my own business constantly. Someone tries our software, doesn’t see results right away, and goes straight back to what they were doing before believing, this doesn’t work for my business. They never ask why it works for a thousand other companies and question their own setup, their pitch, their video. It’s easier to blame the method or channel than to look at the execution.

Then I looked at my own strategies. SEO, outreach, social... none of it given enough time or depth. I question the channels, moving on before asking what I’d have to change to make it work.

In his response, Andrew said he’d flip the question slightly. Not how it will work for you. How long until it works for you.

He said, imagine a wall in front of you. You can take a sledgehammer and swing at random spots, a bit of SEO, then a podcast, then outreach, then something else. Or you can hit the same spot over and over and over. He said that’s just how he thinks about success. Sure, you might find out that part of the wall is lined with lead and it’s never going to open. Then you move to another spot. But you have to chip away at it long enough to find out.

I love this wall analogy. In real life, we seldom get a wrecking ball to destroy the wall in front of us, as much as we’d like one. We don’t go from point A to point B on a rocket ship. We walk, or we drive, or we catch a train, and all of it happens at different speeds.

What we have are tools and time. The strategy becomes which tools you’re going to commit to, which part of the wall you’ll be chipping at, and how long you’ll be at it for.

I want to be clear that I’m not an advocate for never giving up. Sometimes you have to say no to one thing to say yes to another. The hard part is knowing when. Maybe the answer is in the wall too. If you hit lead enough times, then you’ll know it’s time to move on. How do you know? I think when the time comes, you just do.

My conversation with Andrew reminded me of a fable I learned in grade one. Li Bai was a boy who kept running away from his studies because they were too hard. One day he passed an old woman by a stream, grinding a thick iron rod against a stone. He asked what she was doing. She said she was making a needle. He laughed and said it’s not possible given how thick the iron was. She said if she worked at it everyday, it would eventually become a needle. Inspired by her work ethic and patience, he went back to his studies and grew up to be one of China’s greatest poets.

Yes, there’s a part of me that’s scared that none of what we’re doing works. However, the opposite perspective is just as available. What if it does work? If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I do?

Maybe one day, I’ll look back at where I am today and see how close I was. I can’t wait to write that piece.

For now, I’m picking up my tools to chip away at the wall.

Patience has never been my virtue, but that doesn’t matter. The wall doesn’t care how fast I want this.

So, how do you break down that wall in front of you?

Pick a tool, pick a spot, and stay there long enough to earn your conclusion. If that part turns out to be lined with lead, find another spot and try again. What you shouldn’t do is swing a sledgehammer and decide the wall is unbreakable.

If you’re building something too, pick up your tools this week and pick a spot.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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The Big Aha! 💡

This is the story of how I spent five years at my last startup presenting to mostly empty rooms, watching customers I couldn’t reach turn into revenue I couldn’t keep, stuck under a ceiling I couldn’t do anything about. Then I built the fix, and spent six more years looking for the companies living under that same ceiling, only to realize they were in front of me the entire time.

Backstory 👩‍🏫

For 3 out of 5 years, I ran my last company while traveling full time. I had a startup before that for a few years too, and worked hard to finally get to profitability. I hadn’t traveled much as a kid so being able to work from anywhere was the reward. That was the dream and I was living it.

But I remember landing in Kyoto and the first thing I did was test the wifi in the lobby, because I had a video call at 4am and if the connection wasn’t good enough I’d have to go find a local SIM card or rent a portable hotspot.

I remember sitting at dinner, doing math in my head about whether I could have another drink or not because I had a call in a couple hours and I didn’t want to show up on camera looking flushed in front of customers.

In theory, that was freedom… I guess?

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What my job was 👩🏻‍💼

My last company was Spacio, an open house sign-in solution we sold to real estate brokerages and franchises. The buyer was the brokerage. The user was the agent.

We were bootstrapped, which meant I was everything except code. Sales, marketing, customer success, accounting, operations, you name it. When a new brokerage came on board, I was the one running the first kickoff, then the ongoing trainings required to get agent adoption. There was nobody else.

The way you drive adoption in that world (probably in most worlds too) is through hosting live sessions. Whatever you want to call it, a webinar, an onboarding call, a training session, it’s the same thing: a live broadcast over GoToWebinar or Zoom or whatever the tool was, presented to whoever signed up and showed up.

It was never just one session per customer. The customer journey started with multiple demos to win over decision makers. A launch session, often called a kickoff when they signed to drive hype within the company. An onboarding session for agents to show them how to get access and start using the basic features. Another one for the agents who missed that. A session for more advanced users. A session for every major feature release. Then the same sequence again and again and again, because in this industry agents are always coming and going, so there’s a fresh group of brand new users every single week who need exactly what the last group got.

That’s why it was never one session per customer. It was a permanent, rolling obligation per customer, that never finishes and gets heavier with every account you win.

Multiply that by 20 customers. Then by 100.

Often the room was small. Sometimes very small. I have done sessions where one person showed up, and then that person dropped off halfway through, and I had to keep going anyway because everyone who registered was expecting that day’s replay recording in their inbox. Which most of them never watched anyway. Our inboxes are replay graveyards. A 45 minute video with 20 minutes of housekeeping and someone else’s questions, with no way to ask your own. Even if you hit play, you’re gone in two minutes.

The lift was the same whether there were a hundred people on the other side or one. Same preparation, same energy, same 45 minutes. Different customers, same content, same jokes, same five questions at the end.

To be clear, the work was never the problem. That was the service we promised. That’s what customers were paying for, and I would’ve done it happily if it worked.

The problem was the return. I’d look at who attended the session, and know I hadn’t made a dent. Everyone who needed to be there wasn’t in the room, and I was going to do the whole thing again next week and get the same result.

The part that wears you down is not the effort. It’s the effort with nothing on the other end of it.

If you look up attendance rates for a live session, most sources will tell you somewhere between 30 and 40%. Having hosted and attended so many of these, I think that number is generous and overreported, but let’s take it at face value.

Now, put real estate agents in the room.

Agents are independent contractors. Nobody tells them where to be. Their daylight hours are sacred and spent on revenue generating activities, which means showing homes, meeting clients, and being at the office. Doing basically anything other than attending a software training their manager told them mattered. That’s not laziness. That’s the nature of their job.

I once launched a brokerage with 6,000 agents. 200 signed up, around 20% showed, and half of those dropped before the end.

That was considered normal.

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The real cost of going live 📺

The reach was small. Minuscule. Too small for the cost it takes to produce it.

Ask anyone who runs these regularly and they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s draining in a way that shows up beyond the calendar. You have to be on. You prep beforehand, and not just the material but mentally prepare your mind. Then you decompress afterwards because somehow, it’s always a lot. You can’t go straight from performing and public speaking to anything that requires energy.

A one-hour session ends up taking half a day.

By the way, that’s when it goes well. When something goes wrong, the tech fails or the demo breaks or you lose the room, it takes so much out of you that the day is a wash.

At bigger companies with larger audiences, they assign multiple people to do the job. There’s someone presenting, sometimes two, and another person working the chat so questions get answered while the presenter keeps talking. So that hour costs three half-days, not one. When this amount of investment goes in, the ROI should reflect it, but it seldom does.

The cost of going live isn’t the hour on the call. It’s everything that hour touches.

It’s the day before, when you can’t book anything meaningful because you know you’ve got two sessions and each one needs you present and sharp. It’s the day of, when you come out the other side depleted. Once, I did eight back-to-back sessions while traveling in Paris, saying the same words to a different customer each time, and at the end of that day I had zero energy and zero mindshare for anything else. Not for sales, not for strategy, and definitely not for Paris.

It’s the evening you leave early. My partner got very used to us walking home from dinner at a specific time because I had a call at 11pm, or 3am, or 4am. He got used to me going back to sleep at 5am and surfacing at noon, which meant half the day was gone. I’d built the whole remote work-life intentionally, and then handed control of it to whoever booked time with me.

This is the life I worked for. Why does it feel like I’m always on calls?

The nomading made it louder, but it wasn’t the cause. Anyone who has ever moved a family dinner for a 7pm demo knows exactly what I’m describing. The timezone thing is something many companies deal with if their customers are global, nomad or not.

Somewhere in the middle of that ridiculously packed Paris day, I remember thinking:

This cannot be my life.

I tried to find solutions after that. I went looking for software that could take the repetition off my hands and ended up using what I’d describe as the best of a bad set of options. I never fully solved this problem at that company.

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The obvious growth ceiling that’s invisible to most 👻

This growth ceiling has always been very painful and obvious to me, which is why it eventually turned into a company. Low attendance doesn’t stay a low attendance problem. It turns into a revenue problem.

Adoption is the vendor’s job. If a brokerage buys your software and their agents don’t use it, that’s not their failure to attend, it’s your failure to train. You’re the one who gets the call. So you keep running sessions, not because they work, but because running them is how you keep the customer happy and the revenue attached to them.

Customers paid us every month and they saw the same numbers I did. What did they ask for? Another session. And another one. And could we also do one for the new agents joining next month?

Meanwhile, I still had to sell more deals. Because my time was finite, I could only ever prospect the top 200 brokerages out of the roughly 100,000 in the US. Those same 200 got pitched by everyone, all day, every day because the companies targeting them had the same constraints. Therefore, the response rate was low. Which meant the other 99,800 never heard from me. Not because they didn’t deserve to, but because the only way to show them the product was to get them on a call with me, and there was only one of me.

(By the way, forcing buyers on a call was something I never fully understood. As a buyer, I don’t want to get on a call. I want to see the thing and see the price, and if I have questions then I’ll reach out.)

Back then, I tried sending videos instead.

It didn’t work. Not because the videos were bad, but because static video is the wrong medium for this kind of thing. I had no idea if anyone watched it, there was no lead capture or analytics, and there was no way for viewers to ask questions while they were watching, which is the entire point when you’re showing someone a product they’ve never used before.

Training doesn’t work in one pass. You need to hear it, try it, get stuck, ask, and hear it again. Live gives you only one pass, at a time you picked, and then it’s gone.

Sometimes one pass is all you get. That brokerage has other vendors lined up behind you, all competing for the same calendar slots, and the vendor who shows up the most wins. This is why companies end up hiring an army of customer success managers.

💡 Here’s the thing. Doing more of the same live sessions would never have fixed the issues I’m talking about. When you deliver live, you need two sides to show up at the same moment, and you only control one of them. That isn’t a work ethic problem. This is a limitation baked into the live format. You cannot outwork it or outhire it, because there isn’t a number of people you could hire that would put a human in front of every single customer at the exact moment that customer is free.

I could see this clearly because it was limiting my business so much. I couldn’t sell to as many prospects as I wanted to. I couldn’t drive adoption for our product to make it exciting for both sides. The more customers we got, the worse that problem got.

The effort was enormous and the reach was tiny. I knew I was the bottleneck, and I knew that working harder was just going to produce more of the same result. I watched my company sit under a ceiling for five years and the only lever I had was more of me, and there wasn’t more of me.

What’s strange to me is that six years into eWebinar, the company I built to solve all of this, most people still don’t see these limits the way I do.

That’s the most frustrating thing about running this company. The thing we fix is invisible to the people living inside it, which means we’re not selling a better option to somebody weighing options. We’re trying to get somebody to see a ceiling they’ve been standing under for years, and accepted.

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Why almost nobody sees it, so nobody fixes it 🙈

Before you can fix something, you have to be able to see it. I’ve met hundreds of people living under this exact ceiling and most of them don’t call it one.

I think it’s a few things stacked on top of each other.

People don’t see revenue not gained as revenue lost. Everyone measures attendance as a percentage of people who registered. 40 of 200 showed, that’s 20%, they talk themselves into believing it’s not terrible. But registration is already the filtered group. It’s the people who believed they could make that Tuesday at 2pm. Everyone who wanted the information and knew they couldn’t be there never registered at all, so they never entered the calculation. In my previous example, out of 6,000 agents, 40 showed up. Those other 5,960 aren’t a loss on anyone’s books. The majority didn’t register and that number didn’t appear anywhere.

When it’s the norm, there’s nothing to fix. If you were hired into a role where this is how the work gets done, by someone who did it that way before you, at a company where every competitor does it that way too, there’s no contrast in your field of vision. There’s no other way to do the thing. When everyone is sick, nobody calls it a disease.

A full calendar looks like the job is going well. If you’re hired to run onboarding, a packed week is evidence you’re doing what you were hired to do. Nobody sends you a report at the end of the month listing the people you didn’t reach. The 40 who showed up are on your calendar. The 5,960 who didn’t aren’t anywhere. Same thing in sales. You’re measured on the five demos you did this week, not the 50 buyers who wanted to see the product and never booked a call.

Doing more of it feels like the fix. When reach is low, the intuitive response is another session. More sessions, more chances to catch people. It works a little, which is the trap. Enough to feel like progress, never enough to close the gap, and every one you add costs you a day you can’t spend on anything else.

Even once you see it, there’s the question of what you’d do instead.

I was on a call recently with a company getting ready to roll a product out to 15,000 customers. They’re going to use eWebinar for it. I asked what they would’ve done if they weren’t referred to us, and the answer was a mix of live Zoom calls, recordings, emails, and eventually maybe a YouTube library.

That’s not a good plan. That’s four partial solutions piled on top of each other, which wouldn’t have delivered content to their customers in a way they would enjoy and interact with. They weren’t being lazy or unimaginative. That genuinely is what’s available when you think the only options are live or a recording.

Meanwhile the gap keeps widening. One of our customers used to run everything live, doing a few webinars per week himself. He told me that since the pandemic he’s watched attendance rates drop as low as 5%. Not 30 or 40%. 5%. Nothing about his sessions got worse. The people on the other end just stopped organizing their week around anybody else’s calendar.

The way you’ve always done something registers as a habit, not as a limit. You don’t experience it as the ceiling, you experience it as the work. And you don’t go looking for a better way until you’ve asked whether one exists, and until the pain of staying where you are exceeds changing.

Maybe I felt it as sharply as I did because I was the founder. Every agent I didn’t reach was adoption I couldn’t drive and revenue I couldn’t keep, and that number had my name on it. Other companies hire somebody for this work, and that person is measured on whether the sessions happened and how they went, not on the people who were never going to be there.

But the ceiling doesn’t care who’s standing under it. Whether it’s your company or your job, whether you’re one person or a team of ten, the reach is capped at the same place, because the cap was never about how hard anyone was working. You can hire more people and run more sessions and you will still only ever reach the ones whose calendars happen to line up with yours.

Most people aren’t in pain about this. They’re just quietly reaching fewer people than they could, and nobody has ever held them accountable for changing the norm.

The world moved on demand and business didn’t get the memo 📺

That customer watching attendance fall to 5% isn’t an outlier, by the way.

The first livestream happened about 30 years ago and it felt like the future, because it was. For the first time, one person could reach thousands of people from their desk.

Then over the last 15 years, everything changed.

Netflix replaced scheduled TV. Spotify replaced waiting for your song to come on the radio. News apps replaced the morning paper. We stopped arranging our lives around somebody else’s broadcast schedule and we have never once looked back. Why would we?

Business is the only place that didn’t get the memo.

We still ask people to show up on a Zoom at 2pm on a Tuesday to hear something one person could have recorded once and delivered perfectly, every time.

Your customers already decided how they want to receive things. On their own time, when they’re ready, the way they do with everything else in their lives. Your demos, your onboarding and your training are the last things in their week still asking them to be somewhere at a fixed hour.

Starting eWebinar after daydreaming for five years 🕰️

None of this was as clear to me back then as it is now. I didn’t have the reasoning and full picture, I just had the problem, and a wish.

For five years at my last startup, I daydreamed about a product that would do that job for me.

Not a static video recording. Something closer to a clone of a live session, but better. My best version of that session, running whenever somebody wanted it. No connection problems, no interruptions, no version of me that’s tired because it’s the eighth one that day. The same quality at 11pm on a Sunday as at 10am on a Tuesday.

The part everyone assumes you give up is the part that mattered most to me. People need to be able to ask questions, so it has to have a chat system that works whether or not I’m sitting there. Real time response if I’m around, by email if I’m not, the way a chat bubble works on any website.

What I wanted was an on-demand video software with chat and interactions like polls, questions, CTAs built in to keep people engaged until the very end. Nobody had built this product the way I had envisioned.

Put yourself on the receiving end for a second. Would you rather block out a Tuesday afternoon, or watch it at the moment you need it and ask your question right there? That isn’t a hypothetical anymore. On-demand sessions on eWebinar average 83% attendance. Live sits between 30 and 40% on a good day.

Back then, there were products that were close. There’s a whole category of webinar automation solutions out there, and a lot of it was built by internet marketers for internet marketers, with fake attendee counters and fake chat to create fake scarcity, all engineered to trick consumers into thinking the session was happening live so they’d buy something. I didn’t want to be anywhere near that practice, and I still don’t. Other solutions were live-first tools where automation was a bolted on feature, so you could upload a recording and there’d be a chat box, but unless you happened to be sitting there while it played, nothing you typed went anywhere.

Then Spacio was acquired. Two months later I asked myself a question:

How would I feel if someone else built this tomorrow, exactly the way I’ve been imagining it for five years, and it wasn’t me?

That would really suck.

I incorporated the next day and started mapping the product out on paper for the first time.

How we got it off the ground, and how it grew until it didn’t 🚀

Before I started, I wrote down ten non-negotiables for the new company. I wrote about that list in: The only way to live the life you want is to design it. I wanted something that was industry, language, and geography-agnostic.

So I set out to build a general tool that can be used by all types of businesses serving all types of customers. A way to deliver repetitive video to anyone, in any industry, anywhere in the world.

To get the first 100 customers, I made a list of every single person I knew who might need this.

To start, a lot of them were proptech vendors and brokerages, because I spent 10 years in the real estate industry. They were my previous customers, partners and friends.

I personally onboarded our first 100 customers. After that, eWebinar grew on its own, through customers referring customers, content, and people finding us and signing up without ever talking to me, which was the entire point.

Six years later, growth has been flat for about two of them.

What I saw when I dug into the business 🔍

To get back to growth mode, I pulled our top accounts to see who they are and where I should be spending my time.

I wasn’t sure what I’d find, but what I found was comical…

I had spent so long in proptech, by the time Spacio was acquired, I was done with it. I wanted to learn something new, meet different people, and build something that wasn’t tied to one regional industry, because that’s what real estate is. The transaction values are big but the market is regional. A product built for the US and Canada won’t work in the UK.

The agnostic non-negotiables weren’t a strategy. They were an escape plan.

I saw that 75% of our best accounts are in real estate: proptech, MLSs, brokerages.

Ten years in the industry, an exit, a list of non-negotiables written specifically to get me out, and a product I built to be industry-agnostic. And I’m back in it.

Once I thought about it, it was obvious. I designed this product for one specific person: me. Someone trying to train and demo to people who don’t have a fixed schedule and don’t know where they’ll be in two hours. Every feature was designed for that person, because I was that person for years. Real estate was the blueprint.

Here are our top industries, and what they use eWebinar for:

1. Professional services. Consultancies, agencies, law firms. Marketing and lead generation.

2. E-learning and education. Course creators and educators. Thought leadership, marketing, lead generation.

3. Real estate. Proptech, MLSs, brokerages. Sales demos, onboarding, training, recruiting.

4. Financial services. Insurance and personal finance. Marketing and lead generation, onboarding and training.

5. Healthcare. Hardware, software, non-profits. Onboarding and training, sales and marketing.

Who’s on the receiving end in every one of those?

Real estate agents, insurance agents, financial advisors, doctors and nurses and dentists, lawyers, students.

Not one of those people works 9 to 5.

They’re independent contractors, business owners, and commission earners. They set their own schedule, and usually that’s why they took the job. Almost none of them are paid to show up, they’re paid for what they produce, so every hour has a price attached to it. People who want somebody else deciding their week don’t choose that trade. They chose it precisely because nobody gets to tell them where to be.

In the last six years of building this company, I assumed everyone felt this ceiling the way I did. But they don’t. Everyone who does live sessions experiences a version of it, because it’s baked into the format, but the intensity varies depending on who you’re trying to reach.

If your audience sits at a desk from 9 to 5, and attending is part of their job, the ceiling is there but it’s low-grade. You get decent attendance. You can schedule a session and expect people at work hours. It’s a limit, but it doesn’t hurt.

If your audience is independent contractors and business owners who don’t know where they’ll be in two hours, it’s a different experience entirely. You can do everything right and still present to an empty room, over and over.

Same limit. A completely different amount of pain.

There’s a second thing stacked on top of that, and it’s the one that hurts the most.

When you’re training employees, attention is expected. The training happens and people need to be there.

When you’re trying to reach independent contractors, their attention is the revenue. If agents don’t turn up and don’t learn the product, they don’t use it. If they don’t use it, the brokerage doesn’t renew. There’s a straight line from the empty seat to the cancelled contract.

That’s why I ran the same session over and over knowing it wasn’t working. Not because someone made me. Because the alternative was doing nothing while accounts drifted away.

These industries are full of complex products, regulation, and compliance. The information keeps changing, so the training never ends. It’s a hamster wheel by design.

The pain is what makes somebody go looking for something else. That’s why these are the top five industries for us. The product works better for them because a missed session is money.

Here’s what it looks like when the ceiling comes off.

Our customer, Inside Real Estate, has 50 eWebinars running concurrently, every single day, with two people answering questions in chat as they come in, in real time or by email. That’s hundreds of hours of content delivered per month. There is no version of a calendar where two people can deliver that live.

Proposify uses eWebinar as the destination for their LinkedIn ads, so a prospect can see the product without booking a call, and to train their 20,000 users.

Cloze delivers training, feature rollouts, and demos to customers in more than 70 countries, 24/7.

💡 Here’s the irony: I conceptualized every feature of this product while I was selling to real estate agents. The chat that works whether or not I’m there. The ability to watch at 11pm on a Sunday. The analytics that tell me who showed up. Every one of those decisions was made for that exact audience, because I was the one being crushed by them.

I built it for me. Then I spent six years trying to not sell it to people like me because I wanted to experience another type of business.

That’s where my head is right now. Figuring out how to get in front of more of these companies, the ones training and selling to people who don’t work 9 to 5, because they’re the ones who feel the problem we’re solving the most, and they’re the ones we’re built for.

What my travels look like now 🛫

By the way, this is what my trips look like these days.

Between March and August this year we delivered 505 hours of demos to 1,065 prospects, all of them watching whenever they wanted. I didn’t do a single one live. We don’t have a salesperson. It’s me and the product, and nothing I could say on a call demos this thing better than the thing demoing itself.

I still get on calls, but only the ones worth having, and the person has almost always been through our on-demand demo first. We spend the hour on their situation instead of me repeating the 30 minutes they could have watched at their own time.

Nobody tests hotel wifi anymore. If I’m in Kyoto, I’m enjoying where I am.

The biggest lesson I learned through all of this is:

Delivering the same thing live, over and over, doesn’t just cost you your calendar. It costs your business the reach, it costs you your life outside of work, and it costs your customers the thing they wanted to see. Everyone loses.

Reflections 🪞

People told me for years that the riches are in the niches. I didn’t want to hear it. We were bootstrapped, we needed revenue, and picking one industry felt like turning money away. More than that, I didn’t want the niche to be real estate. I already did my time.

What I understand now is that the niche was never an industry.

The niche is companies whose job is to reach people who don’t sit at a desk waiting to be reached. People with their own schedules, their own priorities, and no obligation to show up for you at a fixed time, on a fixed date.

That’s real estate, and it’s also insurance, healthcare, education, legal, every consultancy trying to fill a room.

For the past five months we’ve rebuilt the entire company around that understanding. Every page of the website and every piece of positioning. I’ll write about how we did that separately. The methodology deserves its own piece.

Connecting with people live is a beautiful thing. I’m not against it. The whole reason it’s worth protecting is that there’s only so much time we can devote to it.

Live isn’t the problem. Spending it on things that didn’t need to be live is.

If this sounded like your week 👋

If you sell, train, or deliver information by video or livestream to people who don’t work 9 to 5, leave a comment here or DM me. I’d love to hear how you’re doing it today.

If you want to see how eWebinar can help, here it is in one minute:

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Guests include Chris Walker, Adam Robinson, and Esben Friis-Jensen. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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Find me here too 🔍

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• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

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The most successful person you’ve never heard of 🤫

I’ve always thought my disadvantage as an entrepreneur was where I came from.

Not an entrepreneurial family. Didn’t go to an Ivy League school. Didn’t have access to the communities my peers in New York and San Francisco walked into by default. Everything I know I had to learn from scratch, and I couldn’t raise a dollar to save my life. That’s the reason I became a bootstrapper. I wrote about that here, How I went from chasing unicorns to bootstrapping.

But I’ve watched Harvard and Stanford friends start companies that go nowhere. They had the network, education, access, capital, the whole nine yards, and it still doesn’t go. I’ve also watched friends with none of that come into eight and nine figure exits in their thirties and forties.

Pedigree definitely isn’t a predictor of success. Not saying it doesn’t help with a head start, but it’s not a determinate nor a requirement.

Matt Watson is in a founders’ WhatsApp group I curate. He’s been in my sphere for a couple years now. He’s usually the first to answer when someone has a question. Always helpful with advice and resources. He shares regularly on LinkedIn, writes a newsletter called Product Driven, and has a podcast with the same name. He never posts revenue screenshots. He doesn’t gloat. Just a normal, chill, helpful guy.

It wasn’t until he interviewed me on his own podcast that I looked at his profile.

He bootstrapped his company to a nine-figure exit at 29.

Who better to invite on my own podcast, ProfitLed, than someone like that.

My conversation with Matt on ProfitLed 🎙️

Matt opens our conversation by telling me he was the product of a one-night stand in a trailer park in Oklahoma. He didn’t meet his father until he was 40. Another man raised him. From the age of five he was out at flea markets, making money from selling whatever they’d bought that week.

He didn’t share that for sympathy. It was just facts about where he started.

I asked him what that was like growing up, fully expecting a sob story about a hard life.

He said it made him more driven. That he was never scared of work. And that growing up that way gave him the entrepreneurial spirit before he had a word for it.

For a moment, I felt embarrassed for the assumption I walked in with.

Here’s what I hadn’t thought about… When your livelihood comes from selling things at a flea market, and your uncle buys your clothes in high school, you don’t just learn the value of a dollar. You pick up all the skills you need to be a great entrepreneur. How to make money, talk to strangers, and handle objections. How to be your own boss. How to hustle.

He was doing at five what I didn’t start until my late twenties.

At 22, someone came to him with a problem and asked Matt to solve it. He was the technical cofounder, and by his own description, a smart nerd who looked about 13.

That company became VinSolutions, a CRM for car dealerships. Eight years later, it was sold to Autotrader for $150 million. He was the largest shareholder, and he was 29 years old.

He said money has never been a big motivator for him, and that he was driven more by the problem and the challenge. I would’ve never expected to hear that from someone who didn’t come from money.

After VinSolutions, he founded another company and tried to do it again. Stackify took nine years, competed against companies that raised hundreds of millions, and exited at a fraction of the first one. His read on his own biggest mistake is that writing his own checks to keep it going was easier than facing the fact that it wasn’t growing the way it should.

He learned that success is not repeatable, and having one doesn’t buy you the next one.

Today he runs Fullscale, a 350-person development company in the Philippines that started by accident. He points out that those 350 well-paid jobs probably create a thousand more in the local economy.

He had supercars and big houses. He even once owned part of a private jet with two business partners. He’s spent the last few years getting rid of all of it to simplify his life. His favorite vehicle right now is a yellow-green Volkswagen ID. Buzz, covered in flower magnets that he drives his five kids around in.

There’s a lot more in our conversation…

Why friends won’t invite him to their house. What he thinks the real key to happiness is. And why, at 45, he’s asking himself why he’s still doing any of this.

How I grew up 🪞

My parents weren’t around much, so I always had an outsized allowance in school, all the way until 6 months post university graduation. My parents gave me everything I wanted and more. I was told to study hard, but that was the only assignment. They just wanted me to be comfortable and not have to worry about paying tuition. I wasn’t even allowed to get a part time job. They thought that was a favor.

After graduating, I always had good jobs that covered my standard of living. I didn’t know what desperation was until I started my first company at 27.

Looking back, I’m not sure that comfort helped me become the founder I needed to be. The hunger showed up eventually, but it showed up late, and it showed up as a byproduct of not knowing what I was doing.

I spent a lot of years building good businesses instead of great ones, and I wonder how much of that is because nothing in my early life required me to figure out how to make money.

Comfort was a wonderful thing that was given to me. But maybe it was also the thing that delayed me.

How do you teach it? 🤷‍♀️

This is an ongoing conversation in my house.

David has two kids with his ex. How do you teach grit to someone who has never needed it? How do you teach hunger when needs are all met, by design, because you worked hard specifically so they’d be met?

If the environment builds the entrepreneur, how do you manufacture one that enables a person to thrive on their own?

I don’t have an answer. I would love to hear yours if you have one.

To hear our full conversation, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Find Matt on LinkedIn.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Share

Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

Subscribe now

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

What got me thinking this month

A couple weeks ago, my best friend told me she asked the Universe for a gift, and shortly after, she landed a huge real estate deal.

Her executive coach had her read this out loud:

I invite you to send me a positive gift within the next 24 hours. You choose what it is. When it arrives, let it bring me a deep sense of joy, trust, and knowing that it was meant for me.

I have a daily practice where I write two pages of stream of consciousness, along with a few statements of clarity and a thing or two I ask to be done for me. (It’s part of ENCODED, Chris Walker’s program.) Last Friday morning, I decided to do what my friend did. I asked for a gift.

Here’s a bit of backstory…

Earlier this year we decided to put a lot of our focus at eWebinar into real estate, specifically proptech, where I spent 10 years across my first two startups. Those companies are our perfect ICP (ideal customer profile). Brokerages are constantly onboarding and training new agents, agents are always coming in, the products are complex, there’s always new information to teach, and most of these companies already have dedicated trainers and educators on staff because adoption and retention are tied directly to revenue.

We’ve spent six months repositioning the company since March. New website, new language, new everything, internal and external. The last four months of this year, from here on, are essentially a relaunch, most of my time will go into that industry. Last week, I’d been asking myself the question: how do I get to all of these proptech companies? How do I find them?

That Friday night, I was in bed scrolling LinkedIn, which I rarely do, because who wants to do that before sleep?

Out of nowhere, I see a post from someone I don’t remember following, who isn’t active on the platform. He’d spent the last few years compiling every proptech company on earth. There’s now 3,818 of them on his list. He’s shutting the project down and giving the data away to anyone who wants it.

That’s my gift!

I went to message him and saw we already had a thread. He’d written to me three years ago, in the middle of building that list, telling me he’d flagged which companies had a request-demo button and which had pricing on their site, and that they’d probably all make great customers for me. He offered to send it over.

I never replied because I didn’t see it. Or maybe I did, but it didn’t register.

Three years ago, I was actively running away from real estate. I had so much PTSD from spending a decade in that industry that I was doing everything I could to not be in it again. It’s taken me until now to come back around and admit the obvious, which is that I conceptualized eWebinar while I was in that industry. I built it for people exactly like me, delivering the same demos and training over and over to people who don’t show up because they don’t have fixed schedules.

This same gift landed in my inbox three years ago. I didn’t even have to go find it. It found me and I couldn’t see it, because I wasn’t ready to receive it.

The thing about “gifts from the Universe”...or life…or whatever you call it, is that there’s a peace that comes with being given something at the exact moment you desire it. It feels like magic. As an entrepreneur, when everything feels chaotic and nothing seems to be moving, that feeling is worth more than the thing itself. It tells you something is looking out for you.

What got me thinking is this: are the gifts always there, and we’re just not looking out for them?

In order to be given a gift, you have to be open to receiving it.

Till next time,

— Melissa ✌️

Quick tidbits

1. A friend of mine who I would describe as one of the “chillest people I know” is a fan of Stoicism. I first learned of this philosophy through him. I recently came across this podcast, Is Stoicism the Secret to a Good Life?, where Stoicism expert Ryan Holiday breaks down what it is and how to practice it. A few things that resonated with me: Things are not the problem, it’s our perception of it. Having the emotion is different than acting on the emotion. It’s not about shutting down emotion, it’s pausing after the emotion.

2. I might be late to the party but I just discovered Wispr Flow for AI-voice dictation on mobile and desktop. Total life changing product. Siri was fine, but it was never great.

3. I’m at an Airbnb right now with a shelf full of books. One of them, an oldie but goodie, had a huge impact on my life, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This book is a class, and set the stage for how I interact with people in my work-life, and my social life. I just recommended it to my stepson who just graduated from university and is heading into his first job. A solid read for anyone who hasn’t come across it yet.

   

This month’s articles you may have missed

• Are you in the lonely middle?: Peter Hwang, 6x founder, says there are only two moments of clarity in business, and everything in between is the part nobody talks about.

• What even is risk?: A friend asked how I endured so much risk. I’ve never really felt like I was taking any.

• The most positive person I’ve ever met: Alejandro Perez sold his floral ERP after 18 years, 6 months and 18 days. What I learned from him was what positivity buys you.

• The 1.5% that almost killed my exit: The one signature I couldn’t get the day before closing, and what it cost me to trade work for equity early on.

🎙️ Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live. We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Find it on your favorite podcast app: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

Share

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video software with chat that lets companies deliver their demos, onboarding, and training to their entire audience without anyone having to be there live.

• ProfitLed Podcast, eWebinar’s Journey to $1M ARR

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

Yesterday, I was interviewed for a book is writing about bootstrapping.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I told a story I hadn’t thought about in years. When I finished telling it, I thought, wait, that was actually insane.

When you’re in the middle of it, you’re just going and every crazy thing gets normalized. You file it away, then years later someone asks you a question and the whole thing comes out of your mouth and you hear it properly for the first time.

Let me tell you…

This was the beginning of Spacio, my last startup. It was me, my CTO, and maybe one other person. I can’t remember exactly. We were trying to get a product built fast and everything was moving too slowly. My CTO wasn’t really delivering, and I was starting to panic because runway was dwindling.

I had a friend who’d come from Silicon Valley and moved to Vancouver, where I was living. He started a dev shop and talked constantly about his Silicon Valley clients. He talked himself up a lot, and offered to help us build our product.

We didn’t have much cash. So he proposed we split it, half in cash, half converting into equity on a convertible note. He said he wanted us to be invested too, so the cash portion was important to show dedication. It sounded fair, and sounded like a partnership.

The cash half was still a stretch for us. I wanted the product built so badly that I found the money anyway. I was excited to have a “Silicon Valley” quality development partner.

The deliverables we got back were bad. Things were taking far longer than promised, and it barely worked as intended.

Then a friend who worked at that dev shop called me. He told me not to say anything because he didn’t want to get in trouble, but they were putting all their new junior hires on our project because it was the smallest one they had. We were the practice run to test new people. We weren’t getting the real deal. My friend knew we were frustrated and couldn’t withhold that information from us any longer because it was unfair.

I never called my “friend” (the dev shop founder) out on it, because I didn’t want the person who told me to get fired. I just said this isn’t working, we need to end it. We took whatever they’d built and rebuilt all of it ourselves in the end.

I never spoke to that friend again. I felt cheated, and I was.

A few years later, that trade converted into 1.5%.

I didn’t think about it. Nobody thinks about 1.5% in the beginning. It looks like a rounding error especially when you’re bootstrapped and own the majority of the equity.

At some point, I asked if he’d sell it back to me. That’s when he told me he’d sold his company to a publicly traded company, and our shares went with it. He didn’t have a relationship with them anymore, and it wasn’t his problem. I asked why he didn’t give me back the equity, he didn’t respond. Our equity mattered so little to him that he didn’t even bother keeping it when he sold. It was annoying and heartbreaking because that equity meant everything to my cofounder and I, and it was the company we woke up everyday fighting for.

So our shares now belonged to a billion-dollar public company I had never spoken to in my life. Because of how our shareholders’ agreement was written, a transfer didn’t need our approval if the entity holding the equity got acquired. This is normal, but I’ve since changed that for eWebinar.

I tried tracking down this billion-dollar company’s CFO to ask about buying our shares back. He had no idea the equity existed. He didn’t know it came along with the acquisition. He asked me how much I’d offer for it.

Just think about this for a second… A billion-dollar company, negotiating over a tiny stake they didn’t know they owned, with a founder who obviously couldn’t afford to buy it back. We had no cash. We couldn’t offer anything real. They never replied.

A couple of years later, Spacio was getting acquired. Every shareholder has to sign the closing documents.

I emailed the CFO. No response. I went through his executive assistant. Also no response. Weeks went by… complete silence.

I wasn’t that worried, because we had a drag-along clause. That’s what it’s for.

The day before closing, I told my lawyer to just drag them along. He said, “What do you mean drag them along??”

Apparently, we couldn’t just do it. There was a process to bring the case to court. A judge had to determine that every shareholder is being treated equally before we could force the sale. It would’ve taken two to three months, minimum.

Our shareholders agreement didn’t give me power of attorney to sign on their behalf. Most founders assume a drag-along clause is automatic. It isn’t always the case. At least not in Canada, which is where we were. (It might be good to check in with your lawyer how your drag-along clause can be executed, if needed.)

The deal was closing the next day and there was one signature I didn’t know how to get.

I couldn’t tell the buyer. If they knew, they’d freak out and I’d be put on the spot as to why I didn’t say something earlier.

I can’t remember if I told my cofounder. I’m not sure I did. I didn’t want him to freak out either, and some part of my brain just zeroed in on solving this myself.

Through what I can only describe as an act of God, I found the CFO’s mobile number on some document on the internet.

I texted this stranger a sob story. That this sale was going to change my life, and that I really, really needed him to sign.

He texted back.

He didn’t know the deal was happening. His assistant had never passed a single email along. Maybe she thought it was a scam? That’s how little it mattered to them. And it was everything to us. In the end, he signed it, and the rest is history.

💡 Here’s what I learned: it doesn’t matter how small the stake is. Equity is equity, a shareholder is a shareholder, and a shareholder is a business partner. Every business partner should be evaluated like one.

When you hand out advisor shares, you trade equity for work, you give a little here and a little there. Those people are almost never with you for the duration of your journey. But their signature will be.

I will never trade work for equity and invite a business partner in that way again. The goals between a startup and a dev shop are very rarely aligned. A startup wants the best thing, a dev shop wants to finish the thing in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of hours invested. Besides, the math doesn’t even work.

Say you trade 1.5% for $50,000 of work. Feels cheap today. Now ask what you want to sell the company for. If that 1.5% becomes $500,000 at exit, what would you have done to find the $50,000 instead? Would you have borrowed it? Stretched? Built a worse version yourself and fixed it later?

My exit wasn’t a windfall like that. But that 1.5% still turned out to be a Porsche.

Equity is like toothpaste. Once it’s out of the tube, you can’t put it back in.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Share

Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

Subscribe now

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Automate your demos, onboarding, and training sessions in a way that feels personal to every attendee.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

The guy with the champagne he wasn’t drinking 🍾

I met Alejandro Perez two years ago at a music festival our best friends threw in Portugal.

We were in adjacent communities. We had fun and danced the week away. I didn’t think much more of him. He was quiet and reserved. Friendly and cheerful. Seemed like a normal guy.

One of the things I love most about our social communities is that nobody talks about work. That’s the complete opposite of how it was when I lived in New York, where “what do you do?” was the conversation opener and the scoring system.

Last summer, David and I were in Sardinia, where friends of ours own a small beach club and were throwing a party. I saw on Alejandro’s Instagram story that he and his wife happened to be there too, so I invited them to come.

That night, Alejandro was standing beside a table with a couple bottles of champagne on it, offering them around. He wasn’t drinking any.

He told me he was recovering from a heart attack, so the bottles were just for us.

I thought, that’s thoughtful and generous.

That’s when we started connecting properly.

He told me he’d pulled his son out of school for a year so the family could travel and experience the world. I got curious and asked what his story was.

Turns out, he’d bootstrapped a company in the floral industry for almost two decades, sold it to private equity, then did a deep dive into Bitcoin and put most of the proceeds in when it was near its lows.

I had to ask him the obvious question, “You never have to work again?”

“Absolutely not.” He said. “But I will.”

The quiet guy disappeared the moment we started talking about his company. He lit up. He couldn’t get the stories out fast enough and he was excited about every question I threw at him.

I knew I’d be recording Season 3 of ProfitLed eventually, so I told him to save it so we can do this properly, on the record.

A few weeks ago, we finally did.

My conversation with Alejandro on ProfitLed 🎙️

He built Komet Sales, an ERP and e-commerce platform for the flower industry, from his parents’ house to a private equity exit in 18 years, 6 months and 18 days. But who’s counting!

Before that, he ran a dev shop for six years chasing money and making almost none. His words: when your only goal is to make money, money becomes elusive. The switch flipped when he stopped asking how to make money and started asking how to add value.

He started Komet at the lowest point of his life. Newly divorced, young kid, back living with his parents in Medellín after ten years in Miami, spending as little as humanly possible. He had no plan B, because if you have a plan B you’ll take it the second things get hard.

There’s a moment in the episode where he describes those years as hanging onto a log in the middle of the ocean. No land in sight. Every so often a wave pushes you under and you don’t know if you’re getting another breath.

When people ask him for the trick, he tells them the trick was eating shit for eight years.

There’s a lot more color in our conversation. Why not paying himself made his company less valuable. Why he hired a banker when he didn’t need to. The magic mushrooms in the Amazon.

Two heart attacks 🫀

Alejandro had two heart attacks, a few weeks apart.

Here’s someone who worked hard, got the exit, made the right call on Bitcoin, has a great family and a thriving social life, and is young enough to enjoy all of it. Then his body nearly took it away.

His take on it is that option one is to sit down and cry about how life isn’t fair. Option two is to take the experience and turn it into rocket fuel.

He said he always picks the second one. It’s easier, and it’s more fun. So why not?

I’ve met a lot of founders who perform positivity. He wasn’t that. He’d describe genuinely terrible stretches of his life and you could hear that he was wired to receive it.

If life is going to happen to you either way, why wouldn’t you choose to have a great time while it does?

Where I am right now 😳

I’m writing this as someone who is not wired that way.

If you’ve been following my content, you know everything at eWebinar is up in the air right now. And my inner monologue is a nightmare. My anxiety dreams every night reflect it too.

What if this doesn’t work? What if I picked the wrong idea? What if we’ve hit our growth ceiling? What if this is the wrong path? What if I need to sell this and nobody wants to buy it? What if the value in our product is made up? What if everybody cancels? What if I run out of money to float this? What if AI changes something overnight and takes the whole thing out?

Then the other voice shows up and says: if you don’t believe in this, nobody will.

I spend my days bouncing between those two. Managing the negative thoughts, knowing I’m supposed to stay positive.

Knowing you need to be positive isn’t the problem. The hard part is believing it, because your mind is everything and whatever you decide is true becomes true. You design your future by having everything you do serve that story.

The most valuable thing I took from Alejandro’s conversation was the importance of positivity and an undefeatable attitude.

You can trick yourself 🪞

If you’re not naturally positive, I don’t believe you get there by waiting to feel it. You can trick yourself into it first, then let your actions follow.

It’s similar to rituals founders have used to hype themselves up forever. Smile when you feel sad. Look in the mirror before the big meeting and tell yourself you’ve got this. Ten jumping jacks to get your blood moving. Journal every morning to slowly reprogram what your brain reaches for first.

These are exercises and you can train for this the way you’d train for anything else.

It’s not about feeling better. It’s about what positivity buys you, which is more rocket fuel.

There’s no version of this that’s easy. Someone else’s story only looks tidy because you already know how it ends. Every founder I know has had moments where quitting would have been completely reasonable and nobody would have blamed them.

What kept them in it wasn’t a better strategy. It was the voice that said it’s going to work.

That’s the voice I’m training right now.

I’ve come this far. Why not keep going?

To hear our full conversation, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Share

Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

Subscribe now

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Run your demos, onboarding, and training sessions on autopilot without needing to be there.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

A friend said something to me a few days ago, “I really respect the amount of risk and uncertainty you were able to endure (in your last startups). What was your main motivation? Freedom?”

It got me thinking about that thing we call “risk”.

Dictionary.com says it’s the exposure to the chance of injury or loss; a hazard or dangerous chance.

I looked back at my career and pinpointed the audacious, unreasonable things I did. The things people standing on the sidelines would call “risk.”. I never thought of any of it as danger. Risk never felt like risk to me.

In my early twenties, almost right out of university, I was a real estate agent making over $100k a year, which at that age was real money. I hated the job, so I quit. I moved to Hong Kong, and fell into international trade, manufacturing furniture in China and shipping it around the world.

My parents were furious. I finally had a job paying me enough and I’d pulled the plug because I didn’t like it. Why can’t you just be happy and settle down?

I lasted a year and a half. I didn’t like living in Hong Kong as I was at my parents’ house. Pulled the plug again and moved back to Vancouver.

Later, I was in large enterprise sales at SAP. Good company, good position, a clear corporate ladder to climb. I quit that too, and friends asked me the same question. Why would you leave a job like that?

I left SAP and started my first company. Commission jobs in my early twenties meant I’d saved what I thought was two years of runway at the time.

I burned through almost all of it in six months.

Then came the small business loans and the government grants. Then I maxed out all my credit cards. It took closer to two years after quitting SAP before I made my first sale. For the first time in my life I was living paycheck to paycheck.

It was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t scary.

I spent every dollar without second guessing, because there was no doubt in my mind I wouldn’t make it back. I’d never been an entrepreneur. I had no idea how hard it was going to be. I thought you made a product and someone bought it, because I came from sales and selling had always been easy for me.

I was so naive. That naivety is probably the reason I didn’t see risk.

Then I moved to New York with nothing. (I wrote about that move and Founder-Geography Fit here: Where you wake up determines your success)

A friend once told me the best decision he ever made for his career was moving to New York with $600 in his pocket. I remember thinking, well, I have more than $600. I can move there too!

I was between my first and second company, burning a loan I’d taken out against my first company’s revenue, trying to build my first SaaS product. I was spending close to 90% of what I made on rent every month. I ate one meal a day. (I wrote about all of this in My Founder Story.)

I knew no one. I had no community, no network, no plan. Anything could have gone sideways and there was no floor underneath me.

That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I was scared and I did it anyway, because something in that city was calling me and I’d stopped being able to ignore it.

Here’s what that one decision gave me…

I met David within weeks of landing. My partner, my husband, my cofounder. I had the best years of my life in the best city in the world. That’s where my greatest hustle story happened, the one where I invited a CEO over for dinner. That’s where I met the person who eventually acquired my last company.

Every single thing that matters in my life traces back to a decision that looked reckless from the outside.

💡 Here’s the thing: When you take enough of these leaps and collect enough rewards on the other side, you stop seeing the leap as the dangerous part. You start seeing standing still as the dangerous part.

Had I not quit SAP, maybe I’d still be there, or somewhere just like it. Had I not started that first company, I’d never have known what freedom felt like, and I wouldn’t have kept trying. At the time, freedom only looked like time. No alarm clock and sleeping in. Watching TV until 2am because no one could tell me not to.

Freedom has always been my number one priority. I’ve written about it, built a company around it, and it’s the reason behind every major decision I’ve made.

“Freedom” is the answer to my friend’s question. She guessed right.

Once I tasted it, going back was unthinkable. In my darkest years, the thing that pushed me to do the next hard thing was the image of myself back on a train at 8am, heading to someone else’s meeting.

That image was scarier than any leap.

What is the greatest pain in the world? It’s the pain of regret. The pain of knowing you could’ve done something when you had the chance. The pain of realizing you can never go back.

So take the leap. Make the awkward cold call. Knock on the door. Rejection stings, I know.

But I can think of a lot of things that sting more than trying to go after your dreams.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

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The founder story I found at 2am 📱

A few months ago I was lying in bed, wide awake, scrolling Substack. As someone with an expertise in not sleeping, I know my phone is my worst enemy at that hour…

That’s when I came across ’s founder story.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a sucker for a good founder story, like this other one I wrote before about a founder who bootstrapped 13 years to exit.

Peter caught my attention because he built six companies over 28 years across six completely different industries. A pita shop, equipment leasing, energy, donor acquisition, cannabis, and now groceries and supply chain.

That’s so rare. It’s the first time I’ve come across it.

Most founders pick a lane and stay in it. If you’re in consumer goods, you stay in consumer goods. If you’re in tech, you stay in tech. Very few people bounce between worlds and make it work over and over again.

I was in the middle of planning Season 3 of ProfitLed at the time, so I reached out and asked him to come on the show. Selfishly, I just wanted to talk to him. That’s one of the major benefits of having a podcast, you get to have an hour long, uninterrupted discussion with interesting people and ask them anything you want.

My conversation with Peter on ProfitLed 🎙️

This turned out to be one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever recorded.

Peter was easy to talk to. He was curious and empathetic. He took the time to ask about me, what I’m working on, and how I’m feeling about it. He was authentic and down to earth in a way that only another founder can be with you.

I felt like we started as strangers and ended as friends. He told me to reach out any time I wanted to throw ideas around or just talk about how things are going. A lot of people say that. With Peter, I believed he meant it.

There’s too much in this episode for me to write here. He talks about how each company started, the one that collapsed and left him buried in debt while his wife was six months pregnant, who showed up for him when it fell apart and who disappeared, and the arrival fallacy of two life-changing exits in 14 months that didn’t feel remotely the way he thought they would. By life-changing, I mean 8 and 9-figures, back to back. 🤯💰

One thing he said that stayed with me…

Only two moments of clarity 💡

Peter said there are only two moments of clarity when you build a business.

The beginning, when you have a great idea and people around you are excited and you’re too stupid to know better, so you just go.

And the end, when you sell it or shut it down.

Everything in between is uncertainty. That in between is 80 to 90% of the journey.

He calls it the lonely middle. (Or the quiet middle, as he writes it.)

I found it uncomfortably accurate, because that is precisely where I’m sitting right now.

Where I am in my journey 😳

eWebinar hasn’t grown in two years. In the last few months, revenue started to shrink for the first time.

We’ve been deep in a repositioning project for six months because I realized the strategy that got us to profitability also kept us small. We needed to change course and redo all of our marketing language, who we sell to, and how we sell to them. We’re close to the end of it, but not quite there. We don’t know if we made the right bets, or if any of this work is going to move the needle.

Everything feels like a holding pattern. SEO stopped working a while ago. We’re not a product people naturally search for, which is what happens when you’re blue ocean, so we’re only now building content around jobs-to-be-done instead of keywords.

I’ve said this before: revenue solves everything. Your stress, your conflicts, your disagreements. The absence of it does the opposite. It manufactures confusion, misalignment, and frustration.

We’ve been here a while.

I only figured out at the start of this year which direction this company needs to go. The path feels lonely, because as founder and CEO, I’m the one making every major call.

Everything that works is a bit of me and mostly my team getting behind the decision. Everything that doesn’t work is 100% me. I’m the one with veto power. I’m the one who decides which way the ship turns.

That’s not a feeling you can explain to someone who’s never sat in this chair. I wish I could fast forward to see my future, and come back to where I am now.

Companies don’t fail, founders just get tired 🪫

That’s another Peter line.

Companies don’t fail, founders just get tired.

I love it and hate it in equal measure.

Love it, because it means the outcome is in your control. Hate it, because it means sometimes the reason your company stalls is because you just ran out of gas. You simply don’t want to do it anymore. It’s why I sold my last startup, Spacio. (I wrote about that in: Why I didn’t sell our startup to the highest bidder)

Peter’s been on both sides of it. He held onto a company longer than he should have, pouring himself into saving something he’d have been better off letting go.

When you’re in the middle, you can’t tell if you just haven’t gone far enough yet, or if you’ve already stayed too long.

You just don’t know, but you have to keep choosing anyway.

The middle is where the founder gets built. Everything before it was just the idea, and everything after it is just the result.

If you’re a sucker for a great founder story like I am, here’s Peter’s.

Find him on LinkedIn, and follow him here on The Unstuck Entrepreneur. He writes some of the best content for founders I’ve ever read.

To hear our full conversation, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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What got me thinking this month

I was catching up with one of my favorite founders in the world this week. Someone I’ve seen build multiple (consumer goods) companies from $0 to 8-figures in revenue in a few years.

We got to talking about real paydays. The kind of big exit wealth that feels surreal and completely out of reach.

I told him I couldn’t even imagine what that feels like, and joked that I wouldn’t mind finding out.

He said it’ll be fun for me, because I have hobbies and real friends. He said he’s seen people get ultra wealthy and end up miserable, because they’ve spent their life building wealth and none of it building life. They end up surrounded by people who show up for the money because they pay for all the experiences, and they never know who their real friends are. They have things, but no tight circle of friends they trust.

“Just have to be content. You never know when it’s your turn. As long as you’re in the game.” He said.

Truer words have never been said. It’s the best thing I heard this month.

You don’t get to pick your moment. You just have to keep showing up, keep building, and stay content and be happy with where you are.

If you’re doing well right now, making a good living, controlling your schedule, you’re probably already in the top 1%.

The number one rule of the game is you first gotta be in the game.

Till next time,

— Melissa ✌️

Quick tidbits

1. Im a huge fan of Alex Hormozi, everything he says hits and feels hard earned. I’m also a huge fan of Diary of a CEO. This month, the two came together on this podcast: The Man Who Made $100M Before 32

2. I had been following the story of Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 23 year old wiz kid who founded the hedge fund, Situational Awareness, and grew it to $45 billion in less than two years by betting on AI. This week was his fall from grace, which wrote an interesting deep dive about:

   AI Supremacy

   The Genius of Leopold Aschenbrenner

   👋 Hey there, I’m Mike. Each week I share AI articles at the intersection of tech, business, society and the future. If you want to support the c…

   Read more

   3 months ago · 73 likes · 3 comments · Michael Spencer

3. I just reread one of my favorite pieces ever written, Reconsider, by Basecamp cofounder, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), which is an ode to bootstrapping. It’s just as good today as it was 10 years ago. Find it here.

This month’s articles you may have missed

• Why great agencies can still suck: An agency’s output is only ever as good as your input. Three times I learned that the hard way.

• Most of our problems aren’t real problems: A reminder I already knew, but needed anyway.

• 3 people bootstrapped to a $60m exit: The impressive story of Esben Friis-Jensen’s story of building and selling with two cofounders.

• 3 lessons I’m carrying into 43: What I’m taking with me into my next year, on future, surrender, and relationships.

🎙️ Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live. We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success.

Find it on your favorite podcast app: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

Share

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - Pre-recorded webinars with chat

• ProfitLed Podcast, eWebinar’s Journey to $1M ARR

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

Last weekend was my 43rd birthday, which got me thinking about the past 12 months and what I want to take with me into the next year.

It’s been a significant one because I spent it recovering from my burnout the year prior and integrating everything I’d learned about myself. I rediscovered my passion for building startups and decided to (re)commit to my company. Somewhere along the way, I rekindled my purpose, drive, and ambition.

Only recently do I feel fully submerged back in eWebinar, after almost giving up on it entirely.

As birthdays have always been a time for reflection for me, here are the 3 lessons that mattered most…

1. We can design our future. 🎨

Whatever we decide to become, every choice we make moves us toward making it real. In that way, we can design our future.

The most important thing I learned during my burnout was that I’d carried a belief my whole life that I wasn’t good enough. That belief became the foundation for how I saw myself and the decisions I made.

Subconsciously, I had decided I wasn’t smart enough, capable enough, or connected enough to build a successful company. I didn’t believe I deserved the success I had always dreamt of, so everything became a hard problem I wasn’t equipped to solve. Deep inside, I never thought I could get there.

When that’s your starting point, it doesn’t matter how hard you try or how much you work. Every failure becomes evidence, so you stop short, and the whole thing turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can decide the opposite just as easily. That you are smart enough. Capable enough. That you deserve everything you’ve ever wanted, and that everything you want, you already have.

From there, an obstacle is just a task to figure out. A failure is just another thing to get through. Everything gets lighter because you’re on a course you’re going to finish someday instead of a race you’re not sure you’ll complete.

The shift sounds simple, but it takes an enormous amount of self awareness, inner work, and self love to execute. It’s not an on/off switch. It’s a daily practice of reprogramming.

2. We cannot control the outcome. 🌊

And yet, no matter how badly you want something to happen, you don’t control the outcome. You can only do your best. The rest isn’t up to you.

I can count the times I’ve tried to force something, and every time, life eventually reminded me why I shouldn’t have. Whether it’s an investment I pushed through, or a customer I fought too hard for. If something doesn’t happen in your favor, it’s because not happening was the favor. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

The key is that you have to leave no stone unturned first. The greatest pain in this life is the pain of regret. If you’ve tried everything and the outcome still isn’t what you hoped for, then you have to accept there’s a different path for you.

If it’s meant to be, it’s not supposed to feel unnaturally hard.

As Steve Jobs famously said, the dots only connect backwards. Not controlling the outcome doesn’t mean you don’t try. It means you stop forcing what refuses to move.

It sounds so cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason. What’s meant for you will find you.

3. The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life. 💜

Friendships aren’t measured by time, but by depth and connection.

Choosing to build better relationships, and letting go of the ones that weren’t serving me, was something I intentionally focused on this year.

It goes back to not feeling good enough. When you don’t believe you’re deserving of great things, you let yourself be surrounded by people who take from you and drain you. You don’t set boundaries because you’re afraid of losing people. You say yes when you mean no, you put yourself behind everyone else, and that’s how resentment builds. It cuts both ways. You resent them for taking, and you resent yourself for letting them.

There are people who lift you up. Who let you be unapologetically yourself without judgement. Who makes you feel bigger after every conversation. Those are the ones you gravitate towards because they’re easy to be around. You don’t have to be a different version of yourself to exist. Those people are true gems. Life is too short to accommodate anyone who makes you feel the opposite.

Letting go of friendships that were once important is hard. But sometimes, your stories in each other’s lives are just over. It doesn’t make the time you spent any less meaningful, it means you’re walking different paths now.

Many successful people will tell you the partner you choose will determine your success, and I share that sentiment. Your life partner can be your greatest source of joy or misery, success or failure. I’ve watched companies get made or broken by the support, or lack of it, from a partner.

Friends don’t have that same magnitude of impact, but collectively, your community can’t be underestimated. It shapes how supported you feel, the kinds of experiences you have, and how much fun you are while you’re having them.

Together, your life partner and your friends make up your happiness. Your happiness is the quality of your life.

I have the best life in the world, and it has nothing to do with the professional life I’ve designed for myself. That part is just the cherry on top.

It’s because I have the best friends, the best community, and the best partner anyone could ask for. They’re the ones who carried me through my darkest time, guided me toward a light I couldn’t see, and created the space for me to find myself again. In fact, I would credit everything I’ve built to the people around me. They’re the ones who have made me possible, and they’re the ones I do this for.

If I had all the money in the world and no one around me, I’d trade every dollar of it for the life I have today.

What is success if you have no one to share it with?

I remember backpacking alone in my mid 20s, thinking none of these memories are going to last, because I have no one to talk about them with. An adventure alone is easily forgotten. An adventure with friends lasts a lifetime.

The greatest measure of success is the number of people you love, who love you back.

This last year was spectacular. Full of growth, gratitude, and love. I’ve never felt more ready for what’s next.

Here’s to another year of who knows what. 🥂

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

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Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

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Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Run your demos, onboarding, and training sessions on autopilot without needing to be there.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

I just found out my friend’s partner lost her battle with cancer.

I haven’t lost someone this close to me before and it shook me in a way I didn’t think it would.

I want to tell you about my friend. He was one of the first people to take a chance on me. Years ago, when I was building my last company, we signed a deal with one of the leading real estate franchises in the US. As one of the leaders of that company, he was my champion.

What nobody knew at the time was that we were struggling. Badly. Revenue was thin, sales were slow, and to have a brand that well-known say yes, we believe in you was more than a deal. It was a lifeline. It gave us credibility when we needed it most.

That’s how I met him. He started as my business associate and became a friend. He’s one of the few people from that chapter of my life I’ve actively kept in touch with.

Before launching eWebinar, he was one of the first people I called. I respect him, I trust his feedback, and I knew he’d support me. That’s how his company became one of our first ten customers. There was never a question that if he saw the value in what I was doing, and it was in his power to help, it was already done.

That’s just who he is. I can only imagine he’s like that for many others.

He’s the kind of person who makes you walk away feeling better about yourself. Always upbeat. Always sees a way out, no matter how dark it looks. He sees the best in everyone and everything.

Just over a year ago, his partner was diagnosed. Every single time I checked in with him, he was positive. Not once did he give up hope.

What most people didn’t know was what else he was holding up at the same time. His daughter was going through her own health issues and needed surgery. His company was quietly going through an acquisition. He was carrying all of it, and he carried it with a grace I still can’t fully wrap my head around. He never felt sorry for himself. Somehow, in the middle of his own hardest year, our conversations left me stronger.

Both of them fought with so much courage and hope, right up until the end. She was his warrior. His Athena.

It’s a reminder that every founder we meet is a whole person. We cross paths at conferences, networking events, on calls, and we see the business version of each other. The pitch, the metrics, the stories. But every one of them is living an entire life behind that, holding things up that we know nothing about.

We spend so much of our lives inside our companies that our business network starts to feel like our social life, sometimes even like family. It’s a good reminder to ask someone how they’re really doing. And if you know something is happening in their world, even a short text goes a long way. It matters more than you think to know someone is thinking of you.

I keep thinking about how my friend showed up, for her, for his daughter, for me, while the ground was falling out from under him. And it’s put a lot of things back into perspective. A perspective I already had, but one I clearly still needed reminding of.

I’m someone who outsizes my own problems. I worry about whether my business is growing fast enough. Whether my website will get out on time. Whether my demo is perfect. Whether a customer is going to cancel, or whether I’m going to land the new deal. Whether it’s going to be a green month or a red month. This is the stuff I lose sleep over.

But deep down I know none of it really matters in the grand scheme of things. There are many things I can’t control, even inside my own business. I can only do my best.

If I zoom out, so much of what we pour ourselves into as founders just... doesn’t matter. Not really. A lot of our problems aren’t real problems. Yet, we let them rule us, let them swallow entire days, as if they’re the most important thing in the world.

It’s not.

Time is the most finite resource we have. Time isn’t just what you spend your hours doing. It’s what you spend your mind thinking about. Every second you spend anxious about a number is a second gone.

We delay gratification like our time is unlimited. We treat sacrifice like a badge of honor. We trade adventures, shared meals, and late night talks with family and friends for money, and then when we have the money, we’d give all of it back for exactly those things.

The things we give up now are almost always the things we’ll want to buy back later.

If your company doesn’t grow 50-100% this year, if you lose a customer, if you miss a milestone, who cares. Do your best, then go be with the people you love.

Doing your best is literally the best you can do, and that is enough.

This piece is dedicated to my friend. For his strength, his tenacity, and his fight. For the beautiful life they shared, the memories they created, and their enormous love that will continue to live on forever.

I know he’s hurting. My heart is breaking for him right now. I also know he’s going to come out the other side of this stronger. A stronger father, a stronger leader, and a stronger pillar for everyone around him.

Because that’s just who he is.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Share

Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

Subscribe now

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Run your demos, onboarding, and training sessions on autopilot without needing to be there.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

I’ve been vocal about how I’ve failed to work with agencies over the last 15 years. Great agencies. Best-in-class agencies. Agencies that worked wonders for everyone else but somehow not for me.

Only recently did I figure out why.

Most founders, myself included, see agencies as the solution to a problem they don’t know how to solve. Outside experts who will figure it out for you. That’s only half true.

Agencies don’t work with you full-time. They’re not thinking about your business 24/7 like a team member would. They can only solve the parts of the problem you’re able to see and articulate to them.

💡 Here’s the thing: an agency can only do what you’re able to tell them to do.

When you hire one to do something you have no idea how to do yourself, you don’t even know how to interview for the right fit. You can’t validate someone’s skills if you don’t know what questions to ask.

Let me give you three examples of how we got this wrong.

1. Six months after launching eWebinar, we hired a sales and marketing agency to rewrite our website and messaging, then sell the product for us with guaranteed revenue in 12 months. The messaging work was great. But the selling? Obstacle after obstacle. The engagement fell apart because we were too early. We hadn’t figured out how to sell our own product yet, so how could an outside team create a repeatable pitch for us? You can’t outsource selling until you’ve figured out how to sell it yourself.

2. Three years ago, we hired Fletch to rewrite our homepage. They’re the absolute best in the industry at what they do. They told us upfront: no customer research, we’ll take everything you give us as truth. Completely fair. They did a great job for that point in time. But six months ago, I realized our entire approach to selling was wrong. We assumed we were selling to people who already knew they had the pain (a red ocean audience) when our biggest opportunity was people who don’t know they have the pain at all (a blue ocean audience). Now we’re rewriting everything Fletch wrote. Not because they failed. Because our input was wrong. (See: The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small)

3. Same story with Grow & Convert, who I think is regarded as one of the best SEO agencies out there. We worked with them for a year with no increase in traffic. They wrote content based on what we told them we were selling, competing for existing keywords with barely any volume. What we actually needed was jobs-to-be-done content that goes beyond what’s already out there. That wasn’t their strategy to figure out. It was ours.

Looking back, it’s easy to point at an agency and say you didn’t get us the results we wanted! But in all three cases, it wasn’t that they were bad at their jobs. It was garbage in, garbage out. Our knowledge was limited, so their output was limited to what we gave them.

That’s one of the hardest things about a startup. Nothing is set in stone. What worked three months ago doesn’t work anymore. Experimentation is expensive, which means it rarely makes sense to hire an expensive agency to experiment for you. It makes sense to hire one to scale what you’ve already figured out.

What I’m doing differently now is getting personally involved by educating myself on the thing I’m hiring for.

We engaged T360 to grow our footprint in the real estate industry, their specialty. I’ve personally reached out to our top real estate customers, dug into every account, and I get on calls with them every two weeks. I make sure they have what they need to do their job. I’m treating this as a partnership, not a project I hand off and wait for revenue.

We’re now working with Breaking B2B on SEO. I’m getting involved by learning keyword research, reading and editing every article, asking why they chose certain topics, and making sure they know exactly who we’re trying to reach and what not to do.

I spent so many years frustrated at hiring great agencies that worked for everyone but me…

Learn from my mistakes. Don’t hire someone to do a task you have zero idea how to do yourself. Get a basic understanding first, so you can hire the best people and know how to direct them.

When something’s not working, sure, re-evaluate the agency. But also re-evaluate yourself, and whether there’s something else you need to feed into the machine.

An agency’s output will only ever be as good as your input.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

What did you think of this article? Let me know!

Leave a comment

Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is now live.

We’re exploring the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shifts as founders come into financial success. Find it on: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

👋 If you enjoyed this read, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience?

This spreads the word and keeps me writing content that will inspire founders to keep doing what they’re doing, knowing they’re not alone.

Share

Thank you 💜 The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.

Subscribe now

Find me here too 🔍

• LinkedIn

• eWebinar - On-demand video with chat. Run your demos, onboarding, and training sessions on autopilot without needing to be there.

• ProfitLed Podcast, The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose

• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube @themelissakwan

In 2018 and 2019, two of his companies sold within 14 months of each other, an 8-figure and a 9-figure exit. He was 45. Technically retired, but then everything stopped.

In this episode, Peter and I get into what was  driving him through 28 years of building, the fear, the proving, the  scarcity model he carried his whole life without naming it. We talk about what it felt like when the emails stopped and the urgency disappeared, why achieving everything he worked for left him feeling lonely and depressed, and how he eventually found his way back to building for a completely different reason.

We also get into what separates founders who make it from those who get stuck, how his passion and purpose shifted across three distinct chapters of his life, and what his dad said when Peter finally gave him the one thing he actually wanted.

This is a conversation about what happens when the outcome arrives and it doesn't feel the way you thought it would. If you've ever felt like you were chasing an external feeling of success and needed to rediscover your internal purpose, this one's for you.

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(01:25) Growing up watching his parents' Baskin-Robbins
(04:47) Why he knew he had to work for himself
(06:07) What actually drove his early ambition
(07:42) Starting Extreme Pita and his first exit at 24
(10:43) Why he keeps building in completely different industries
(12:53) Enwise: the near-IPO that collapsed in 2008
(15:03) The email that changed everything
(16:22) Who showed up when things fell apart
(18:28) What Cindy said when he told her
(20:32) What kept him going through two years of rebuilding
(23:37) How Enwise led directly to Globalfaces
(24:09) Running two companies simultaneously for seven years
(32:01) What separates founders who make it from those who get stuck
(37:07) Two exits in 14 months and the arrival fallacy
(39:53) From 100 emails a day to three
(41:52) How he found his way back to purpose
(45:07) How passion and purpose shifted across three chapters
(46:18) What his dad actually wanted
(47:40) How building businesses built him as a person
(53:47) What he hopes his kids take from watching him

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.

• Connect with Melissa at melissakwan.com and subscribe to  'your founder next door', Melissa's weekly newsletter on what it's like to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.

• Follow @themelissakwan on Instagram and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

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