The power of reframing your business
How redefining our business changed the problem we're solving.
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.
Last Friday, I interviewed Chris Walker, founder of ENCODED.ai and Refine Labs (recently exited), for Season Three of my podcast ProfitLed, where we’re exploring the intersection of passion, profit, and purpose, and how those evolve as founders come into financial success. (This season launches in a couple weeks. Stay tuned.)
During our conversation, we talked about something that has been stuck in my head ever since: the power of reframing who you believe you are.
Most of us walk through life accepting our behaviors as fixed parts of our personality. “I’m a reactive person.” “I’m bad with confrontation.” “I’m not a morning person.” We say these things so often that they stop being descriptions and start becoming definitions. They become who we are.
Chris broke down how this works in a way that resonated with me. When I say “I am reactive,” that’s an identity statement. Underneath that identity lives a whole chain reaction: beliefs about the world (”if someone criticizes me, it means I’m not good enough”), intentions (”I need to protect and defend myself so people don’t leave”), emotions (anxiety, frustration, fear), and then the reactive behavior itself. That behavior then confirms the original belief, and the negative loop keeps going. Over time, it becomes so automatic that it just feels like me.
Here’s what can change…
What if instead of “I’m a reactive person,” I said, “I’m a person who has been expressing reactively”? That’s a small shift in language, but the first version is an identity. It’s permanent. The second is a pattern (bad behavior). And patterns can be broken.
When something is baked into your identity, you’re stuck with it. When you see it as a response you’ve been choosing, sometimes without even realizing it, you can start choosing differently. You’re no longer defined by the behavior. You’re separated from it, and that separation is where growth lives.
I’ve been doing a lot of personal work on this over the past year, and that part of the conversation felt deeply familiar. I kept thinking about it for hours after we hung up. Where else in my life have I locked something into a frame and refused to see it differently?
That’s when it hit me: I’ve been doing the same thing with my business.
For context, I started eWebinar to turn pre-recorded videos into automated, interactive webinars so that companies could reach 100% of their audience without being tied to a live schedule. My first two startups were blue ocean companies, meaning we were first to market with something people hadn’t seen before. I know the pain of educating an entire market from scratch too well. I wrote about those 10 painful lessons here. Before I started eWebinar, I deliberately chose a “purple ocean” strategy: take a concept that already exists, build a better version of it, and introduce it to a different audience than existing solutions.
That idea shaped everything. Our website, our messaging, our content. All of it assumed that the people coming to us already understood what an automated webinar was and were looking for a better one.
The problem we kept encountering was most people who find us have no idea what this is. They were kind of problem aware, not fully solution aware, and they weren’t sure how our solution could take away their pain because they didn’t fully understand the pain they were living with. Doing live webinars has been the norm for so long that most people haven’t thought to solve it.
I’ve spent the past year stuck on what every expert and advisor has called a “positioning problem.” I’ve been so frustrated by it because I couldn’t figure out the answer. What else could an automated webinar be, if not an automated webinar?!
Right after that conversation with Chris about how our identity statements create self-reinforcing loops, I saw it.
I was so focused on not wanting eWebinar to be a blue ocean product that I locked it into a purple ocean frame and never questioned it. That frame determined every piece of content, every landing page, every conversation. We were only speaking to people who already had context. Then I’d get frustrated when people without context didn’t understand us.
But introducing an existing concept to an audience who has never heard of it is still blue ocean. For them! My refusal to accept that was the thing keeping me stuck.
Then I asked myself: if I reframe eWebinar as a blue ocean product, how would I approach it differently?
In that moment, everything shifted.
Instead of leading with all the benefits of our product, I would first help people understand the limitations of what they’re doing today. Instead of assuming they see the problem, I would prove the problem exists. Show them how relying on live webinars to sell, train/onboard, and educate their audience limits the growth of their business in ways they may have never considered. Let them arrive at the pain on their own. Then, once they agree that’s a real problem worth solving, introduce how our solution addresses it.
Same product. Same value. Completely different starting point.
It turns out, reframing doesn’t just work on who you are as a person. It works on your business, your product, and your strategy. Once you define something as one thing, everything you build goes on to support that definition. Your messaging supports it. Your content supports it. Your decisions support it. Just like the identity loop Chris described, it becomes self-reinforcing. If it’s working, great. If it’s not, the frame itself might be the problem.
If you feel stuck and you can’t figure out why, try questioning the thing you’ve accepted as fact. The label you put on yourself. The category you put your business in. The assumption you’ve never challenged because you decided it was true a long time ago.
Your identity is not your behavior. Your product is not its label. The thing keeping you stuck might just be the frame you put around it. It could be that simple.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
ProfitLed is a podcast for founders who are brave (or crazy) enough to grow their businesses to profitability without venture capital. Find Season Two here, Our Journey to $1M at eWebinar, where we dive into one particular topic per episode on lessons learned, successes, and failures. Season Three is coming to you soon. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to make sure you don’t miss it.
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This is the positioning version of what I see founders do with their own public presence. They lock into a frame early — "I'm the technical founder" or "I'm the operational CEO" — and that identity determines what they say publicly, how they pitch, and who they think they're talking to. Then they wonder why the market doesn't fully get what they're building.
Your reframe, leading with the problem before introducing the solution, is exactly how the best founder narratives work too. The founders who start by showing they understand the problem better than anyone else earn the right to introduce their solution. The ones who lead with features and benefits are doing the equivalent of your purple ocean messaging: talking to people who already have context, and losing everyone else.
"The thing keeping you stuck might just be the frame you put around it", that's true for products, and it's just as true for how founders show up publicly.