Are you in the lonely middle?
The two moments of clarity in business…
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
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 Peter Hwang’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 ✌️
What did you think of this article? Let me know!
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.
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.
I am extremely grateful that we met and appreciate not only the kind words but the honesty in the way you write. Founders and entrepreneurs are a rare breed that are willing to sacrifice a lot without a lot of certainty of what will come out on the other side. It’s what makes us special but it’s also what feeds into the loneliness and isolation that we sometimes struggle with.
Thanks again for the share Melissa 🙏🏼
I definitely remember when I was struggling to make my company survive.
I wished I could just have to deal with getting a bit better, but I needed what looked like a miracle, at that time.
Then, I found some of the best solutions to my "unsolvable" problems by getting fisically out of the box. A new point of view helped me understand things I couldn't see from the inside, while fighting and running all the time trying to keep everything under control.