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.
After months of preparation, Season 3 of my podcast, ProfitLed, is officially out.
If you’re unfamiliar, ProfitLed is a podcast by and for bootstrapped founders who are brave (or crazy) enough to grow a business to profitability without venture capital. If only 1% of startups get venture capital, then 99% are ProfitLed. To me, these are the unsung heroes. Those are the stories I want to tell.
What this season is about
The first episode lays out the theme of Season 3: the intersection of passion, profit, and purpose, and how those three things shift as founders come into financial success. This is something very personal to me right now.
The second episode is my conversation with Chris Walker, who bootstrapped Refine Labs from $3,000 to over $20 million in revenue in three years. He became one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing, and then walked away from all of it because the success he’d built wasn’t giving him what he thought it would.
In this episode, Chris and I get into what success meant to him at every stage, how the thing he built to give him freedom ended up taking it away, and why he sold his companies for a fraction of what they were worth to buy back his life.
It’s a great episode to tune into if you’ve ever felt the gap between achievement and fulfillment.
Chris’ current venture, ENCODED, is a frequency training system designed to upgrade an individual’s identity, beliefs, and intentions to enhance personal performance.
It would mean the world to me if you can give these a listen and share any feedback you have. You can find ProfitLed on your favorite podcast app (Spotify, Apple, YouTube), and head to profitled.fm for show notes.
The backstory on ProfitLed 🎙️
If you’re curious why I started ProfitLed in the first place, the truth is, three years ago I was trying to figure out how to market eWebinar. Part of that strategy was personal branding, and one of the tactics I tried was guesting on other people’s podcasts. After doing a few, I started wondering how hard it would be to launch my own. So I decided to do a season where I interviewed other bootstrapped founders about the growth strategies that worked for them. That became Season 1.
If you’ve never listened to the very first episode, this one (Why bootstrapping is better than raising venture capital), it captures exactly why I care so much about bootstrapping and why I think more founders need to hear that there’s another way.
I figured it would be more fun to change the format every season so for Season 2, my COO Todd and I documented our entire journey bootstrapping eWebinar from $0 to $1M ARR. That 27-episode season is our full playbook, the good, the bad, and the embarrassing.
Why Season 3 is different 😎
I’ve been a founder for 15 years. About a year and a half ago, I hit a wall.
I lost the inspiration to create. My relationships suffered. My company plateaued. My friends didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t recognize me either.
That led me to The Hoffman Process, a 7-day self-development retreat, and the start of what I now call my healing journey. I learned the wall I hit wasn’t from working too hard. It was from a lifetime of self-doubt finally catching up with me.
That experience showed me how tied together the human journey and the startup journey really are.
We focus so much on growth strategies, marketing hacks, and the metrics that matter. But the most important determinant of success in a company is you. The founder. If you’re not at the top of your game, nothing else can be. That’s the side of building startups we don’t talk about enough, and it’s what Season 3 is for.
What’s coming this season 👀
You’ll hear from founders like:
Chris Walker, who had a major mental shift at the peak of his career and left a $20m company to pursue something more meaningful
A founder who bootstrapped for 20 years to a life-changing exit, only to realize the money didn’t make him “not sad”
A founder who had two back-to-back exits, one 8-figure and one 9-figure then fell into 18 months of anxiety and depression
My goal with ProfitLed, and with this newsletter, is to show founders out there that it can be done without venture capital. That you can build the life you’ve always wanted. That there isn’t one path, one playbook, or one definition of success. Every story is different, there are no shortcuts, but we can absolutely learn from each other and find the quickest way forward.
Thank you for being here and supporting my work. Whether you’re reading this article, listening to an episode, or a customer of eWebinar. I appreciate you. 🎉
New episodes drop every other Wednesday at 10am ET.
One more thing: is there a founder in your world whose story fits this season’s theme? I’m always on the lookout for great guests with a unique story. Let me know.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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Didn't realize you had a podcast! Now a new subscriber :)