Find something worth suffering for

You don’t need to do what you love, but find something worth suffering for.

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.

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When my little cousin told me he wasn’t good at math because he hated it, I said to him, “Everyone can be great at what they love. Successful people can be good at what they don’t love too. That’s what separates them from the rest.”

I believed that. So I lived by it. I forced myself to learn the things I wasn’t naturally good at. I told myself that suffering was an ingredient of success and glorified it as a rite of passage. (I’ve since learned that suffering is not an ingredient of success and it’s not glorious. Suffering is just suffering.)

For the first nine years of my career across two companies, I built businesses I didn’t enjoy. I started in real estate out of university, so I stuck with real estate because it felt like my only option. I believe a lot of people fall into that trap. They follow the path of their education, end up in the same industry they chose at 18 years old, and spend their evenings and weekends searching for happiness they couldn’t find during the day.

Back then, our customers were real estate agents notorious for being slow to adopt new technology, and most of them didn’t even choose to buy our product. Their company did. I spent years doing demos, trainings, and onboardings every week. I attended conferences and in-person events because that’s how real estate software gets sold.

My schedule on a typical week.

The more customers we got, the more hostage my calendar became to theirs. Eventually, I woke up hating my life, hating my customers, and hating the business I had built. I left my 9-5 so I would never be beholden to someone else’s schedule. And yet, I had created something worse because there was no “getting off work”.

After that company was acquired, I finally had the space and experience to think about what I actually wanted. I wrote a list of ten non-negotiables for my next venture. The very first one: must be able to sell 100% over the internet. No more conferences. No more booths. No more being at the mercy of someone else’s calendar. I wrote about that list in detail here.

eWebinar was built entirely around that vision. A product and marketing-led business, $99/month, two-week trial, completely self-served. The first few years were everything I dreamed of. I was doing things I loved: creating content, writing, guesting on podcasts, working alongside our product team. I had 100% time-freedom for the first time in my life. I was living the life I left my job to design.

Then, about a year ago, I hit a wall and got burned out. Not because of the work, but because the crushing weight of self-doubt I carried my whole life caught up with me which unknowingly bled into every part of my life. I wrote about that here and here. After two self-development retreats and a lot of reflection, I had to ask myself whether I wanted to keep going as an entrepreneur and what I was even doing it for.

While I was away working on myself, my business reflected that and plateaued.

When I came back and started thinking about how to get my company back into growth mode, the answer felt obvious: sell. It’s all I ever knew how to do. Before eWebinar, I had spent years in sales across multiple industries. So for the last few months, I’ve been reaching out to companies, booking Zoom demos, doing one-on-one calls. Exactly what I swore I would never do again.

The problem is, when your product has a low ACV (annual contract value), sales-led doesn’t work. It’s why companies like Mailchimp and Calendly don’t have sales teams. The math simply doesn’t make sense. You invest enormous time for a customer who might pay $99 a month and cancel at any point. Beyond the economics, I found myself dreading my days again. A few calls a day scattered throughout the week kills any chance of focused, deep work. I was giving up the thing I love most about my work, complete freedom, to do the thing I built this company to escape.

I started telling myself the same stories to keep doing it anyway. You don’t just do what you love. You do what is required. This is the necessary path. The suffering is temporary.

It all sounded very familiar.

A couple of days ago, I came across Alex Hormozi‘s The Game podcast episode, Find Something Worth Suffering For. Hormozi’s take on passion is that it isn’t about doing what you love. It’s about finding something you believe is worth suffering for. He says suffering is a fixed cost, so pick the thing that pays well while suffering.

That was a lightbulb moment for me.

The majority of things you do in business suck. You don’t get to only do the things you like, unless you’re at the level where you can delegate away the things you don’t enjoy. Even if you love your product, your team, and your company… you need to do a lot of heavy lifting to get yourself to that eventual outcome.

But there’s a difference between doing things you don’t love for progress and doing things that drain you for little return. That difference is what you deem meaningful enough or not.

I started eWebinar because I wanted ultimate freedom. That has always been my number one motivator. The lack of it is why I quit every job I ever had. The fear of losing it is what kept me going when everything else pointed toward failure. My very first non-negotiable was a product that could sell itself over the internet so I would never have to get on another sales call again.

Yet here I was, on sales calls again. What the heck am I doing?! Not because it made strategic sense. Because it felt safe. Because it was the familiar thing to reach for when I got scared.

The truth is, I’ve been avoiding what I actually need to do: fix our SEO and learn digital marketing properly. In 15 years across three companies, I’ve never dedicated myself to learning this. I’ve hired agencies, been one of many clients, and gotten mediocre results. I’ve always known this was a gap, and I’ve always found a way around it instead of through it.

Doing sales calls wasn’t a strategy. It was avoidance dressed up as busy work.

When I think about finally mastering digital marketing ourselves and waking up to that empty schedule again, I feel energized. Not dependent on someone else's competence for our growth and in control of our own destiny.

Forcing myself back into a way of working I deliberately walked away from, and starting to resent it all over again is misalignment. Misalignment between my values and where I’ve wanted to take this company. I want to build something I love working for. Anything less than that is not acceptable.

Every yes to something that won’t move the needle is a no to something that might.

When you catch yourself doing what you don’t love instead of working toward what you could, it’s worth pausing to ask why. More often than not, distraction is avoidance in disguise. In my case, I’ve been running from the fear of learning something unfamiliar and failing at it. It’s that self-doubt again creeping in.

Sometimes, the only way out is through.

Till next time,

— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️

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