How losing purpose led me to rediscovering it
What happened after my “year of YES” in personal life turned into my “year of NO” in work life.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome to “your founder next door”, a bi-weekly column with relatable stories of my 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.
In this newsletter, I’m going to tell you how my “year of YES” in personal life turned into my “year of NO” in work life, and how losing and rediscovering purpose reignited a much-needed entrepreneur fire for my push in 2025.
How it started 👩🏫
In 2019, after 3 years of nomading, David and I decided to set up a base in Amsterdam. We were tired of bouncing around and felt ready to travel less.
We chose Amsterdam for a number of reasons – friendly people, great nightlife, high quality of life, access to a major airport and train hub…the list goes on. Through a music-based community there, we met so many friends that Amsterdam felt like a place we could potentially call home.
As luck would have it, when “the event we no longer speak” of hit in 2020 – starts with a “p” and ends with “ick” – we left Amsterdam to chase places with less restrictions. As a result, we ended up on the road again for 1.5 years to the Big Island (Hawaii), Vancouver, and Hong Kong. 2020 was the year we launched eWebinar, it was the perfect distraction and David (also my Cofounder and CTO) and I channeled all our time and energy into it given there wasn’t much else to do.
Nothing was the same again after “the event we no longer speak of” was over. Event companies were the hardest hit and their businesses had shut down. The music community we were once a part of no longer had a gathering place so connections weakened and were lost. People went different ways, formed new groups of friends, and even moved away. The city that once felt like home had lost its allure.
At the end of 2023, after a year of trying to rebuild our social circle in Amsterdam and failing, I suddenly felt like we didn’t have any friends. I was putting in effort that felt unreciprocated, and I had never felt less supported and more alone. For anyone who knows me, this may sound absurd. From the outside, especially on social media, it may have looked like we were constantly visiting fun places and surrounded by friends. While it was true that we had a lot of people around us, it didn’t feel like we had real friends; people who actively wanted to include and see us.
Growing up, I was the kid who had to find some other family to “adopt” me every holiday. I lived with my older brother while my parents lived in Hong Kong, and he always had his girlfriend’s family to go to.
As I got older, I hosted events and parties to make sure I had somewhere to go. My chosen family has been my only family for as long as I can remember. I have always been a relationship builder. But as you know, as life happens, friendships become harder to keep and maintain as people choose different life paths and places to live.
Friends have been my place of belonging, and without strong connections in my life, my well-being started to slip. Around this time last year (October 2023), I was waking up unsettled with a sadness in my heart. I wasn’t in a good mental state and that bled into my work life. It prevented me from showing up for my company as my best self, and the best Cofounder and CEO I should’ve been.
That’s when David and I decided to switch things up and break the cycle. An opportunity came up to rent a cool apartment in Bangkok so we took that as a sign and moved there for the winter to see if we could make that a second home. Every year, we’d spend winter somewhere warm so this wasn’t out of the ordinary.
We decided to make 2024 our “year of YES”. The year that we’d say “yes” to things we wouldn’t normally do so we could meet more people like us; people in a similar life stage, with some schedule and financial freedom to share our life and experiences with.
This catalyst sparked the biggest and most unpredictable changes I have ever experienced in my life, both personally and professionally.💥
My year of YES in personal life 🤩
The first 4 months of 2024 were spent in Bangkok where we tried our best to integrate ourselves into the local and expat community. Thailand is one of our favorite countries in the world, but Bangkok just didn’t feel like home. When that started to become clear in April, a friend of ours invited us to Summit at Sea, a 3-day business conference (with parties) for creative minds and changemakers, hosted on a Virgin cruise ship. Naturally, we said yes, and took that as a cue to end our Bangkok experiment and move onto the next adventure.
From that point on, a series of fortunate events followed as we continued to say “yes” to things that came our way. We ended up at a 40th birthday celebration in Cartagena, festivals in South Africa, Spain, Croatia, Portugal, ended our summer with Burning Man, spent a month in New York, and took over 150 people to Thailand to attend Wonderfruit Festival mid-December to wrap up the year with a bang. We met new friends who felt like old friends, people who would be in our lives for a very, very long time.
We left Amsterdam with the sole intention of finding more people like us, and our social network exploded as a result. I went from feeling unsupported and alone to never feeling more supported and loved.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of life you can control if you just focus on it.
Year of NO in work-life 🙅♀️
My personal life was at its peak, but I was overwhelmed with the number of social engagements, including events I committed to co-organizing along the way. My work life started to take a toll around mid-year. Inspiration stopped coming, and I couldn’t find the motivation to keep showing up. Consistency has never been a problem for me. In fact, being able to do mundane tasks every day (despite not feeling it) was my superpower. But I just couldn’t anymore.
I was doing what I was supposed to, but seeing very little return on effort spent. I spent over 10 hours a week writing content with only 10% of the engagement I used to get. The double-digit MoM growth we saw in the early days of eWebinar was a thing of the past; everything seemed much harder. It's been 5 years since the founding of this startup, and finally, our burn is less than our revenue, and I no longer feel the desperation to get creative. The stuff that used to get me excited wasn’t doing the trick anymore.
I was drowning in founder guilt while having fun because I wasn’t spending enough time on work, but at the same time, I was unable to get myself to perform. I was neither here nor there, and it wasn’t a great place to be. That’s when my friend, another founder who had been down this path, said to me, "You'll have these periods where you just need to let yourself take a break. Even if it's for a couple of months. But when you have the energy to come back again, you need to focus and work hard. You do what you must do -- because if you push this further, you'll never have to work again."
With that advice, I allowed myself to take a step back in my business, have fun without holding back, and ride this out...whatever "this" is.
At the end of the summer, I had a moment of revelation where I felt ready to return. This was the reset I didn't know I needed. In September, I started reintroducing routine into my life.
Consistency beats motivation any day.
Motivation comes and goes, but consistency only requires discipline. I created a 30-day to-do list to visualize my deliverables and promised myself to check off items daily to get myself back on track.
Losing purpose and rediscovering it 🤩
A month later, I found myself at work, but still without the drive I felt since I became an entrepreneur in 2011. That’s when I suddenly had the most profound epiphany I’ve ever had in my professional life:
💡 It was hard to show up at work because I no longer had a reason to.
When I started eWebinar in 2019, my only intention was to build a company that could pay me “a real salary” of $20k/month – something peers my age, with my experience, would be making in corporate. I was 36 and had only ever made $50k/year at most in my first two startups because we never did that well. I was tired of living frugally and wanted a “normal” life like my friends. It’s true that I sold my second startup for a lump sum, but I also invested a good chunk of that into eWebinar as starting capital and lived off the proceeds until everyone on my team got paid.
Once we broke even in year 4, I started paying myself $5k/month and added to that every quarter as revenue increased. Finally, in early 2024, I hit my goal of $20k. My lifestyle didn’t change much as bootstrapping taught me how to live well on a budget, but I felt relieved for the first time in my adult life. I was making more than I was spending and putting aside savings, something I hadn’t done since I stopped working for someone else.
Upon reflection in hindsight, once I hit my financial goal, I just stopped trying. I had been chasing bills for over a decade and didn’t want to do that anymore. The problem was that my financial goal was my only intention and purpose in starting this company…once that was achieved, I no longer had a reason to get up in the morning.
My number was hit. I was living comfortably. My drive dissipated. I stopped feeling the hustle and started feeling the exhaustion.
As all this bubbled up for me, another lightbulb went off: It’s time for a new purpose.
Steve Jobs famously said you can only connect the dots by looking backwards. But what if you could connect the dots forward?! If you're exactly where you're supposed to be, then why am I right here, right now?
This has been a special year. I'm at the peak of my professional (in terms of revenue) and personal life. My social community exploded, becoming the most important thing in my life. It is the thing that gives me the most joy and excitement.
I asked myself, “Why am I in this unique position to be the cofounder of a growing tech company and the curator of a thriving community?” What if the two are supposed to come together, and one is supposed to feed the other? What if I’m supposed to make eWebinar as big as possible so I can channel everything into my community?
In a community, not everyone can generate resources, but that doesn’t mean everyone is not deserving of having a great life. What if, in a true community, a few people are responsible for creating enough for the collective to prosper because “those who can, should”? This is not a new concept; what I am describing parallels that of ancient tribes.
I dream of a life that we can share with our friends so none of us will have to grow old and die alone. This is what I want the most at the end of my life. After eWebinar, “community” is where I want to invest my energy. Is it going to be a new philosophy of how we live? Or a physical space designed for co-living? I don’t know yet. That will come. What I do know is that to turn that dream into reality, we will need significant capital. eWebinar will be the thing that makes this possible.
I started eWebinar to give myself a good life but didn't need much to live large. The idea that David and I could channel eWebinar's success into a community project next time around reignited the fire I lost. We are no longer doing this for our own comfort. We are doing this for our friends.
I rediscovered purpose by imagining a life of impact that goes far beyond my own enjoyment.
Our legacy 📖
Someone asked me in my early 20s to think about what I want my legacy to be. I had never thought about that until then. This is what I wrote down:
My legacy will not be defined by what I do, but by the lives I change along the way, the impact I create in the world, and the love I share with those around me.
Hopefully, the next project will be the mark I leave in this world. They say you can never do it just for the money -- they were right.
What is the thing that gets you out of bed and charges your soul?
What is your legacy going to be?
Reflections 🪞
I started this year with no expectations, yet it turned out to be a year of massive change.
My social and support network exploded, and instead of having friends, I now live amongst a community of global citizens who intentionally make the effort to gather multiple times a year.
I took a much-needed break from the hustle, rediscovered my purpose after losing it, and now feel ready to navigate this next year with much more clarity, enthusiasm, and meaning.
The 3 most important things I learned in 2024:
Beautiful things happen when you say “Yes!” to things you wouldn’t normally.
Work-life imbalance can be caused by “too much life”.
A goal unreached can be the fuel to your fire.
Some stuff you might find interesting 👇
I hit "bored-out". Inspiration stopped coming and I didn't have the motivation to keep showing up.
6 simple tactics I used to overcome getting bored-out of my business
That’s it for 2024. Thank you for reading!
— Melissa ✌️
PS. HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎉
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The only way this grows is by word of mouth, so I’d really appreciate all the help you’re willing to give.
The idea of deriving higher meaning from giving to the collective is so inspiring, noble and beautiful! Thanks for sharing your story and struggle so openly. I was captivated throughout your whole writing!
Absolutely loved it. Thanks for the inspiration ❤️