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.
What got me thinking this month
We’re three months into repositioning our company… I started in March thinking we just had to redo the homepage.
I couldn’t be more wrong.
Turns out, your marketing message touches every single part of your business. The website. Onboarding emails, nurture sequences, churn emails, the way you talk to customers, the way you respond to them. It’s like pulling one loose thread on a sweater and watching the whole thing unravel in your hands.
What started as a simple exercise is now a six month project. We’re not doing it all at once. We’re going piece by piece, changing whatever language we can on the site and anywhere else as it’s ready. Everything is taking twice as long as anticipated.
I wasn’t sure how to tell if any of it was working. How do you know if your new message is actually landing? Then I noticed something. On sales calls and on podcasts, I’ve been talking about us completely differently. I used to sell the exhaustion of doing the same Zoom call over and over. Now I sell the limitations of live:
Live is great. But if you do everything live, you can only ever reach so many people. That’s limiting your growth
Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 15 years: Nothing sells more than revenue. You can sell people productivity. You can sell them time saved. None of it matters the way a measurable dollar outcome does.
Last week, we closed our first enterprise deal at $3,500 a month. For a product like eWebinar that starts at $99 a month, self-serve, with a 14 day trial, that’s a huge win. The wild part is they sold themselves.
This company is in the middle of a training modernization project and an AI initiative this year, we’re part of that. From the first conversation to the close, it couldn’t have been easier. I usually have to explain our value because most people don’t realize they even have the pain (I talked about that extensively here: The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small).
Not this time…
We talked about their growth ceiling, asked what they’re doing today and what it’s costing them. Helped them visualize the ‘cost of inaction’ of staying exactly where they are. They nodded along and said yes the whole way through. It’s an awesome feeling when people get exactly what you’re selling.
I don’t know where this positioning will take us. But this feels like the beginning of unlocking the blue ocean audience I’ve been talking about for months.
The biggest opportunity of “purple ocean strategy” is to get profitable serving your red ocean audience, then take your time to unlock the blue ocean audience your competitors couldn’t, or wouldn’t, touch.
How much will this change our business? I guess we’ll find out in the next several months.
Till next time,
— Melissa ✌️
Quick tidbits
If you only read one thing I wrote this month (other than this newsletter!), let it be this. People don’t think about this enough. Funding is not a financial decision, it’s a lifestyle choice. I broke it down for you here: Why funding is a lifestyle choice
I’m a huge fan of Dr. Julie Gurner. She’s one of the 3 newsletters I pay for. Here, she shares her perspective on money based on the ultra rich clients she’s worked with, and how our relationship with it determines our financial success.
Product marketing and positioning has been top of mind lately. Great read if you’re into this too - Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products
This month’s articles you may have missed
Can money buy happiness?: Simon Swords bootstrapped for 20 years and sold for 8 figures. The exit wasn’t the finish line, it was a different starting line.
Are you building the business you want?: Jason Fried doesn’t look at his competitors. A reminder to stop following everyone else’s footsteps and build your own way.
Every founder has a war story: I thought Chris Erler had lucked out. Turns out he’d been to war too, he’d just made it to the other side.
🎙️ 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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Love the monthly “Good Stuff” format! The sweater-unraveling line about repositioning is so real. Projects like that one never stay as small as they look on day one.
Well done, Melissa! Starting from the benefit, instead of the product qualities, is a huge change of selling what you do in order to make it "more interesting" to your prospects, no matter if they are single professionals or enterprises.
As I wrote in the past in a comment to one of your articles, I believe the red/purple/blue ocean just need different strategy and copy each, because the background context of these people is just different, and so should be the way you sell them your solution - starting from a problem that's painful to them.
I believe you're on the right way to make things work differently (better) for your company.