A good business can still trap you 🪤 Melissa Kwan

Businesses will always continue to grow if you do a good job. Okay. That is not true because there are so many forces around you that you cannot control and you have to constantly be solving problems. I thought, okay, if we crack this business, we start growing, people start using it, people always come. That's not true. I think business is so hard because it's like a Rubik's cube of problems, right? The moment you think something works, it doesn't work anymore. LinkedIn used to work, stuff that worked, now it doesn't work. Podcasts work, now it doesn't work. SEO work, now it doesn't work. My messaging was working, the company was growing, and then all of a sudden it stops growing. I thought it was my burnout. I thought I caused it, but now I realize it would've hit a ceiling anyway because we were only swimming in the 2%. The biggest unlock in a purple ocean business is not finding more innovators in the 2%, right? It's figuring out how do I position my product So the 98% of people understand and open this up to everyone who should be using it. People don't see revenue not gained as revenue lost.

This week's Millennial Master is Melissa Kwan, founder of eWebinar. She has built, sold, and started again. By the time she launched eWebinar, she knew exactly what she didn't want to go back to. Then growth slowed. Old habits crept back in, and she realized the problem was not just effort. It was how the business was positioned from the start. In this episode, we talk about why a good business can still trap you, why some markets still need educating first, and the cost of staying too long in a business that no longer fits. Melissa, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

I am currently in Amsterdam.

Melissa, I know you've built, sold, and then started again, but before that, you spent years in the corporate machine. So I'm wondering, at what point did you know you wanted to do your own thing?

Before the biggest company I was in and the last company I was in, which was an SAP, which was like a real, like, corporate machine, I was in smaller companies and within those smaller companies, I was still kind of being, I was still able to be my own person, which was important, it turns out, but I was in my 20s. I didn't really know. And I went into SAP because I wanted to be part of a big company. And I think part of me feels like everyone should have that experience, but I think within a few months of being there, I knew that I wasn't made for a big company. It just, like, you're kind of a gear in the machine at that point. And I left just after 1 year, and I knew that I didn't wanna be part of something again. I think I was always creative. I was always trying to do something on the side, maybe with friends or on my own, but I never had the focus or the time or the capital to just like kind of do my own thing. So, when I quit SAP at 27, I had some money saved up, and that was when I just wanted to kind of try my hand at something. Something that was mine.

And that's when you started your first business as well. Run me through that, because once you've been a cog in a machine and having to start everything from scratch without having any experience in it, or how did you go about it? You had to find an idea. How did you find the idea for it first?

I mean, I had like 10 different ideas before one of them started making money. I think it took probably a year and a half. Maybe 2 years before I came up with like one product, like the first person would pay for. Before that, I just went to meetups at restaurants. I was living in Vancouver at the time. There wasn't really accelerators or anything like that. There was just like meetup.com and you would go to restaurants like once a month to like meet with other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. And I just hired, like with the money that I had saved, I would hire designers, contractors, anyone I could find to build these ideas that I would have. And Each product that came with the idea, I would try to transform it into something else, like iterate it into something else. So after a while, um, I thought the money that I had would last like 2 years. I think it lasted like 9 months. And so I tried to get like government grants or, you know, in Canada there's, there's a lot of those, or like bank loans.

They used to be in the UK as well.

Yeah. Um, you know, there were grants, you had to pay them back. Or no, the grants you didn't have to pay back. There was like some like small business loans made for startups you had to pay back, but they were like really good terms. And I was able to stretch that one runway. And I think one day I had like 2 months of runway left. And this was just my own savings, right? Like paying my own rent.

So, and you were doing all that and using your savings while you were trying to settle on a business idea that would—

yeah.

So which one did you settle on? Let's say.

All these things in front of me and I ended up picking like this iPad magazine thing. And the iPad was brand new at the time. And previous to SAP, I was working with, for a bunch of real estate companies. So I was like, okay, we have this kind of this framework of an iPad magazine. I need to sell something in 2 months. Why don't I just replace it with like a presale building? Like in, you know, when you I guess in, in Vancouver when you buy a unit, there's a lot of these buildings that get built and there's like showrooms where you sell the building. When you walk into showroom, there's like a coffee table style book. So I was like, why don't we just pick a building, replace this magazine with all the photos, the floor plans, and I'll try to sell it to the developer as like an interactive sales tool and, you know, a marketing brochure. And that was the first sale. So that company lasted about 4 years. It was called Flat World Apps, and we built interactive marketing apps for real estate developers that were selling buildings. And that's how I got into, I guess, my first company.

So what happened to your first company then?

Well, we wanted it to be a product, but everybody wanted to customize, so we were bootstrapped.

So high, high costs. Yes.

Yeah, so everything was custom in like, we had a framework, but everybody wants something, wanted something to be different because of course when you sell real estate, you're selling a dream. So before you knew it, we were a custom apps company. So we wanted it to be a product, but it turned into an agency. And anyone that's run an agency before knows that that's a really, really tough gig because you're selling the, you're trying to sell a product and then you're trying to chase the invoice and that never really stops. If you have more contracts and you have to hire more people, but then you can't keep those people. Right? So after 4 years of that, I realized I wanted to have, like, I wanted to build a product, like a true product, a SaaS product that we owned. Like, I'd rather get $10 from everyone instead of begging one person to give us $10,000, which is kind of what we were, we were doing. So that first company transitioned into Spacio, which was my second company, and it was an open house check-in system for, like, for real estate as well. So in Canada and the US, when you walk into an open house on the weekend, you have to sign in on a piece of paper. So we were the iPad version of that. That, and all that automatically fed into your CRM, automatic follow-up, and we sold it to brokerages, agencies, and franchises.

And that became basically your first hit product as well that you were able to fully monetize.

Well, the short answer is yes. The long answer is it took 2.5 years before we made the first $10. So I didn't really know how to build a real product. Like I knew how to sell a contract. But that's very different than building a product somebody would wanna go sign up for and have multiple people wanna sign up for that. So I knew it was gonna be an open house product, but I didn't know exactly what it was gonna be. So the super long story very short is we overbuilt it cuz we thought the more features we have—

so easy to, to build too many features and try to compete or outcompete everybody for every single feature by feature instead of focusing on something more specific?

Yeah, we just overbuilt it. Uh, I mean, the problem was we weren't competing with everybody, so it was very blue ocean. There wasn't another product, so we didn't really have a mold to copy. So we just built everything that we thought somebody would wanna use, and the least someone wanted to use it, the more we added on. And in the end, how we made our first $10 was we removed 95% of features that we had and made it only the sign-in form, which I thought would be too simple. But in the end, it was the thing that people understood. And so the biggest lesson I learned from that was you have to keep it super simple cuz everybody talks about innovation like it should be really bleeding edge, but innovation is changing the way someone does something forever. And sometimes that's—

and usually simplifying as well.

Well, and usually that's, yes. And, and what we did was we just moved from paper to digital paper. So it was something that people understood.

So when you transitioned to the new business, spoiler, you, you were acquired later on. Did you think about it in that particular way, or that developed over time as you were trying to grow the business?

You mean the acquisition?

Yes.

No, I actually didn't really realize that tech companies were built to sell until I went to New York to grow that business. So I only wanted to start a business because I didn't want to work for every— like anybody. And I didn't wanna wake up in the morning.

Most entrepreneurs do that. They, they, or we have a bit of an issue with authority or control, and we like to be in control or pretend that we are.

Yeah, I just didn't wanna wake up in the morning. That was like really my driving force. And, um, I just wanted to build a business, but I learned that startups were built to sell because everybody around me was doing it that way. 'Cause at that point I was living in New York.

Mm-hmm.

And so while the thought was, you know, had crossed my mind that one day we would sell, it never crossed my mind that we would sell that quickly because we weren't super high revenue. We were an okay business. We were super niche. Like it wasn't anything that a VC would invest in. Right. That's really why I was forced to sell.

And you also still bootstrapped through—

Well, I didn't really have a choice because nobody would invest in us. Like when, when we were doing super poorly and I was in so much debt, I was trying to raise money, but it wasn't, a venture-scalable product. It wasn't a product that people could reasonably invest in, right? Because it didn't have a big market. And, um, and, and so I was, I was trying to raise money, but at the same time I was trying to make money and I became profitable instead. And then I realized how much freedom you would have when you're profitable. Whereas all my friends that were raising money were constantly raising money. So that's when I realized I didn't want to raise money.

Once you open the first round, then you're already thinking about the next one.

Yeah, so, um, I actually ended up selling because I just wasn't having fun anymore. And I was actually complaining to a friend in the industry wondering if I could just get rid of this thing, like maybe even sell my shares. So like my co-founder will let me move on. Like I was just seeing so much opportunity cost and not doing something else. And he was the one that was like, well, if you're serious about that, maybe we can buy you. But you have to stay on for 2 years. And that was actually how the conversation started.

So what, when you look back, what drained you and what took the fun out of it? Was it as you grew your staff and you had to manage more people? Which, which part do you think was the last straw?

I mean, it's true that I don't like managing people. That's why I'm a bit of a lone wolf. And luckily, like, we didn't have a big team. Everyone else was on product, so my, my CTO co-founder was managing them and he, he loved that. He was like the opposite of me. So that part's true, but I'd never really had that many people to manage outside of my co-founder. I think I just realized that there wasn't potential in the company. Like it was, it was a good company, it was a good business, but it was never gonna be a great business. I never paid myself more than like $4,000 US a month. And nobody on my team ever got a real market salary. And like, it was just, it was always struggling, right? It was like just a super niche product and I could've kept pushing it, but every sale was hard. Like it was a vitamin, not a painkiller. It's when I really like, I guess, came face to face with that truth. It just sucks the fun out of it because I realize I could be working just as hard or less hard in another industry with a higher potential product, be making more money, have a better life and a better exit. Because within real estate, there's only so many buyers. So the multiple is very low within the real estate industry. It's like 2 to 3 times on a good day. The highest multiple, the best company that Zillow buys is probably like 6 to 8 times. And anywhere outside of the industry, if it's industry agnostic SaaS, right? If it, if it's not bounded by geography or language, you're getting 50 to 100 times, like 50 to 100% of that multiple, right? So, and you're probably working less hard because the market is bigger. So it was just coming to the realities of like the business that I had was just not that interesting.

And because of the acquisition arrangement, you stayed on for a further 2 years, which gave you enough time to think which industry you're gonna go into next?

Well, I think I had, by the time I sold, I was already an entrepreneur for 9 years. So I really think that business is like a series of deductions. And, and I mean, so is life, right? It's like, what do you look for in a friend, right? It's like, what do you look for in the next business, right? It, it's just by doing a lot of things that you don't like. So by the time I'd sold Spacio, I already knew the type of business that I wanted to build. And the kind of lifestyle I wanted to have. And it wasn't like this was the product I wanted. It was more like, these are the things that would make me happy as a person, and I needed to find a business and a product that would fit that. So I think a lot of people do it reversed, right? They're like, this is my education, I become a lawyer, and then in the end they end up living for weekends and evenings. But how can we expect that? What we chose at 19 years old is gonna be the thing that we're gonna do.

Or even before that.

Yeah. Or even before that.

Some people didn't even choose.

Yeah. And so I wanted to kind of flip that model around because I was like, well, you know, I was in real estate, I was in technology, maybe I should just combine the two. But I hated being in real estate. Like if you've ever tried to sell something to a real estate agent or support them technologically.

Yes, actually, actually I have. Yes. So I, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Well, yeah. And try to support them. It's like, it's an industry that are just typical laggers of technology. So when you try to support them using your product, that was the, another thing that kind of sucked the fun outta my job was like, we were working so hard to build this incredible product, but when you live in support, especially as a founder, like nobody appreciates you. So then you feel like, what am I doing this for? Right. And, and so, um, Basically when I, when I sold Spaceo, I already knew that I needed to find a product that could serve the lifestyle that I wanted and, and not the other way around.

So what sort of lifestyle are we talking about? Maybe a lot of people will resonate with that. I mean, I think at the time, I know it might have changed since, so.

Yeah, I mean, I think after 2020, like everybody has a similar aspiration, right? So fully remote team. I don't wanna manage anybody. So every, like everyone has to be a contractor, no employees. I want everyone. I want everyone to be there because they want to, not because they have to. And I wanna be able to have that honest conversation and say, hey, you know what, if you're not having fun, you should go and find something else, right? 'Cause we have a very, very small team and everything you do and everything you don't do is very visible, right? So I want to build a company. When I say a lifestyle company, it means I want everybody involved to have a great life, not just myself and my co-founder, but everybody involved. Right. So I also want a product that's not bounded by geography or language or industry because I was so bounded before. And when things weren't good, I couldn't just change the product and go sell it to car dealerships. I had to be in real estate.

I feel that I was, I was locked to a geographic region, which was also relatively small.

Yeah. And, and so just too limiting, right? And so I wanted to be able to you know, build a company with friends. I wanted to be able to share my successes, you know, things like that. I wa— I wanted a product that could be sold 100% through the internet. I didn't wanna go to any conferences, live events. I didn't wanna do any live demos, no one-on-one calls, like none of that. So just by having those like 10 non-negotiables, I probably eliminated 95% of ideas that I had because ideas are dime a dozen. Everything makes money. But as you start digging, you realize, oh, that idea's actually not for me. Or like, I don't know it as much as that other guy, or this is, you know, this has been tried and, and tested and it doesn't work because of these reasons I didn't think about. So I think idea is the easiest part. It's actually finding something that fits your lifestyle, that gives you happiness, that aligns with your values, and that keeps you interested long enough that on those really tough days, you still wanna do it.

So does that mean that it has to be a problem or you're solving a problem that you're running into as well.

Ideally.

So you have a, you have a passion for it.

I don't think it has to be a problem you've personally experienced. Like, I just happen to build a product that, that I personally experience. I don't think it's a requirement. I think it helps a lot, but I do think it has to be a problem you're passionate about.

The best problems and the people I've been speaking to, a lot of them have had that problem and they've been trying to solve it, especially when we are talking about software.

Yeah, I think it has to be something that like, that you're uncomfortable with, right? It's like, it's like you have to do something where you can't stand the status quo. Like you literally cannot understand why things are the way they are today and why no one has solved that. And you have to think if someone else solved this before me, I would feel, I would feel bad. Like I would feel like I didn't start early enough. And that was kind of how I felt about this particular idea with, with eWebinar. It's, yeah, I mean, ideally you, you have, you have some strong passion against like the status quo.

So your eWebinar platform, did it tick all your 10 commandments in terms of what type of new business you would want to be involved in?

It did. It did. And that's, that's the reason why I started it. I mean, recently I had to kind of go back on those things a little bit, but it was a good check-in because immediately when I went back on those things, I immediately started hating my life again. And that's a, it's a familiar feeling that I had in the past. Like I was working for my business instead of trying to make my business work for me. And, and so that's, it was a, it was a good It was a good, like, kind of 5-year check.

So you, after 5 years, you've rechecked your status and the business, and you realize that there were some things that were breaking your initial rules. What kind of stuff are we talking about?

In the last year, year and a half, I hit this burnout, hit a wall. I took a year off and I didn't take a year off, like I didn't do anything. I just kind of maintained it. I wasn't like actively building the business cuz I I like actually mentally and physically could not do it. And in the last few months as I'm trying to get back and, you know, get the business back into growth mode, I was like, okay, how can I do that? I know I'll go back into sales 'cause sales is my background, but I built this product to have a low price point because it was self-serve, because I wanted it to be self-serve. Every, everybody comes in, they sign up, 14-day trial, they convert on their own. Everything is self-serve. That's the, that's the magical business I wanted to build. But when I didn't know how to get the company into growth mode, I was like, I know, I'll just do something I know. Like it's that security blanket. I'll just go and talk to people. I'll just go and sell this thing. But the reality is nobody picks up the phone for $100 products. That's just not how it's built. Or like, that's just not, that's just not how it's designed to sell, right? Like people pick up the phone for a $10,000 product, $100,000 product. And so I found myself. Having all these calls, doing demos for people where my product does the demo. That is the product. So I was getting on these calls to prove to myself that I could be productive and that I could do something, but it wasn't yielding the results because that's just not how this product is sold. It's a one-to-many marketing product. It's a marketing, marketing-led, product-led product. So I did that for a few months and I realized I'm really going against what I wanted to do in the first place.

So were you trying to approach new potential customers? Were you sending out cold emails in an attempt to book meetings or what was your strategy? Because founder-led sales are typically the main thing that drives a business in the early days and sometimes later on if the founder needs to step back in and push it.

Yeah, I mean, I did that for the first 9 months. Um, just kind of made a Rolodex of people and, and asked for referrals and their friends. And that's how I got this company off the ground. Because I've been, I've been in business for a long time, like 15 years, so I have a fairly large warm network that I can reach out to if, if I really wanted to. And just even in the real estate industry, like there's within the real estate industry, there are hundreds of like prop tech companies, property tech companies, and a lot of them are like friends of mine or like friends of friends. So naturally that's like the place that I could go very quickly. We have, you know, almost 1,000 customers within, within eWebinar. So I could just pick an industry and just call companies within that and say, hey, we work with companies in, in your industry. And that would be like a warm call. So reaching out is not a problem. It's, um, it's finding the right channel. To sell this product. Like even if you have a company, a company can't even hire salespeople if they're, you know, the annual value of a customer is like $1,500. Like you can't, you can't pay for your salesperson. So sales-led is just not, it's not an effective channel for this type of company.

So for a product that you would sell online, one-to-many, What are your learnings then? What works in, in terms of selling it?

I mean, I wish I knew what worked today because a lot of things that used to work before AI no longer works for us. Like we haven't cracked it.

So what doesn't work anymore then? Let's break it down like that.

Yeah. So before SEO was like 50% of our demo traffic, you know, all our articles were converting super well. We've lost rank for all the keywords we used to rank for. We don't know why. We have people that are actively working on it, trying new things. It's, you know, we're, we're still not seeing those results. I had a pretty good streak on LinkedIn for like a year and a half, um, like viral streak after viral streak. And you know, that got a lot of— having said that, I can't actually attribute virality and like increase in followers to influencers.

I was about to say that. Everything that I've read and what people have mentioned, you get exposure, people hear about you, but it does— something that is viral rarely leads to conversions in terms of selling a product.

Attribution is extremely hard. So I think that for sure it built the brand image because I do have people sign up and say, oh, I've been waiting to sign up for something like this. I didn't even look at anything else because I see you on LinkedIn. So Yes, for that. But it's not like, oh, people see you and like droves of people come to sign up. It's more of like a billboard on a highway, right? But I write because I love to do it. It's my creative outlet. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to keep up. But I don't spend a lot of time writing on LinkedIn anymore because I don't have that ROI. Like at my peak, I was spending 10 hours minimum a week writing on LinkedIn, like 4 or 5 posts a week. Like, you know, not Fridays, but once on the weekend and like 4 days on the weekday. And it was like super, super consistent. But when you're getting maybe 2% of the engagement versus before for the same amount of time, it just doesn't make sense. And you're not getting those emails, right? And that's why I shifted to, to Substack. I also—

so LinkedIn doesn't work anymore in terms of A, going viral, or B—

yeah, not for me.

Hasn't worked for you.

Yeah. Yeah. For other people.

What sort of industry has it worked for you think, for us?

I don't, I don't really think it's an industry. I think it's just a type of content. I don't write any like AI content. I don't post my Stripe screenshots, right? I don't, I don't talk about like really kind of tech bro-y things, right? Like, and, and especially because in the last year, my, my focus and the things that I care about has really shifted from like business strategy to what's the human journey of building a startup. And people don't really seem to care about that. Like, I think the majority doesn't really seem to care about that. They care about like, how much money have you raised? Or how much money are you making? And what are the growth hacks? And what can I do? Like, like those kind of things, right? And, and I don't really write about that stuff anymore.

But that's why I do Millennial Masters, because I want to, I want to understand the human cost behind it. I've lived it and just writing myself about it is different than hearing stories from people having a variety of experiences. But also I like to keep it practical, which is why I'm pressing on what works and what doesn't work. So Substack is the new growth platform. Join Substack as well with my Millennial Masters project because it's appears to be the only platform right now that is in an organic growth mode, and you tend to get the first wave of users. That's the advantage, isn't it? When people's— when LinkedIn was— when you could get high virality and traffic from LinkedIn, it was at a time when it was just turning from this professional network into a social network, and people were spending more and more time there rather than just building up a CV and hoping that somebody will find them for a job. SEO, like you said, it's a very different beast and definitely AI has something to do with it in terms of how keywords are ranked for different pages. If I don't think I've read or seen a clear answer about that either. What else stopped working, Melissa?

I mean, I think the biggest regret that I have is not building my mailing list when I was having that virality. Like every creator was like, you need to start a newsletter right now. 'Cause you need people to like, you need to get their emails. You need to funnel those people somewhere. And I'm like, I'll just do it later. Like I was just too busy. And it turns out it's really hard to get those followers and emails. Yeah.

And you don't, you never think that the good streak is going to end when you were able to hit it week after week with the posts.

Well, you can't build your business on rented land. That's for sure.

That's the later learning. I've done that with Facebook before.

Yeah. Um, what else is not working? So right now I'm, I'm having this kind of next epiphany and, and coming to Jesus moment with, with a company where I realize we have a, a, a huge positioning problem. And I'm not from marketing, so I think that that's one of the biggest drawbacks of, of our team is nobody came from marketing. So even like learning SEO and all that, we had to hire a firm to teach us how to do that and learning it from scratch. Like I'm a, I'm a sales background. Nobody else has a, has a go-to-market background. And so I realized that, how do I say this? I, I realized that a small percentage of people come to us or hear about us and they love the product. Majority of people come to us and they don't understand it. And before I was like, well, they'll catch up. If we wait long enough, they'll catch up. It's just a, it's just a timing thing because if a group of people get it, then more people must get it, right? That's why I built this business. I wanted to build a purple ocean business. I didn't want another blue ocean business cuz my, my previous two companies were blue ocean. We didn't have any competitors. It was super hard to educate. We're fighting for budget. Nobody really understood. Every sale was hard. So I know the pains of blue ocean super well. So I wanted to take an existing product in the market and make it 10 times better and, and start making money right away, which we did. And the biggest epiphany that I've had in the last 2 weeks, and this is the new stuff I'm gonna write about, is I thought that purple ocean meant that people understood it a little bit because blue ocean means nobody gets it. There's nothing out there. Red ocean means it's a CRM. Everyone understands it. It's a household name. It's like Visa. But purple ocean, I thought, was in the middle. Like some pe— like, like people kind of get it. It turns out. That purple ocean means you have a bit of a red ocean, which is your 2% innovators. If you look at the adoption graph, and then you've got the 98% blue ocean. And that was a huge light bulb. And why is that? Because our website, every single piece of content, our emails, our SEO, my posts, everything. Are written for people who already believe they have the pain of running a webinar. But most people don't know they have that pain. For most people, it's normal, right? A 30% attendance rate is good because everyone else has it. Well, it's terrible because that means 70% of your people that say they want your content don't get it, and you're leaving that money on the table. So they don't understand they have pain, right?

And so, 'cause you look at an industry benchmark and you just accept it as gospel.

But the thing is, I was misled by my own narrative of what I wanted to be true. So I've been thinking a lot about identity, right? So for example, if I say I'm an anxious person, when I react to something and I became, and I become anxious, I'll be like, oh, see, I'm an anxious person. Right? So there's this like vicious cycle, right?

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah. So then I'm like, where, where else am I doing that in my business? And that's when I had this epiphany where I'm like, I keep thinking that my business is a purple ocean business where people will eventually understand what this is, but what if it's not? What if it's a blue ocean business? And that's why most people don't understand the value props. How would I approach it differently? And then I realized these guys don't even know they have pain. So the way I would market it differently is I would have to start from 0 to 1 to 2, not from 1 to 2. I can't sell benefits if they don't understand the pain. I first have to educate them that they have pain to begin with, have them identify with that pain, and then bring in the solution to say, this is how you can solve that. And it made so much more sense.

And that still comes from your sales background. It's just going a step back into the process, right?

Well, I just didn't realize that because I had approached my previous two companies, I knew there were no competitors, right? But for this one, like we have, there are similar, there, there's similar software out there. They just don't sell to our market. So for our market, it's blue ocean. For another market, it's not. But in any market, there are innovators who will try. So we have enough revenue, enough business for me to think we're onto something and enough to give me this false positive. But I didn't wanna see that it wasn't a good business. I wanted to see that it's a good business. So I only paid attention to the signs that are working. I did not pay attention to the signs that it's not working, which is 8 out of 10 people come here and they don't understand what we sell. And instead of trying to understand that and trying to solve that, I just think, well, they just, they just don't understand, but someone else will because there's this other group of people that will.

There's more fish in the sea. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's, but the biggest unlock in a purple ocean business is not finding more innovators in the 2%. It's figuring out how do I position my product so the 98% of people understand and open this up to everyone who should be using it. 'Cause I could have two similar companies in the same industry doing the same thing, and one company would love this product. They have 100 webinars running every day, right? They cannot, they cannot imagine their life without this. There is no team of humans they could hire to replace this. And then I could have another company exactly like them. Who won't even touch it, who won't even try it because they think that doing their live Zoom webinars today is enough, cuz no one's complaining. So people don't see revenue not gained as revenue lost, if that makes sense. Right? They just didn't make that deal, but they, it's not on the books. Right? So this is the, the biggest thing I'm trying to figure out now. And, and when you say what's not working is I think business is so hard because it's like a Rubik's cube of problems. Right? The moment you think something works, it doesn't work anymore. LinkedIn used to work, it doesn't work. Substack worked, now it doesn't work. Podcast worked, now it doesn't work. SEO worked, now it doesn't work. My messaging was working, the company was growing, and then all of a sudden it stops growing. I thought it was my burnout. I thought I caused it, but now I realize it would've hit a ceiling anyway because we were only swimming in the 2%. My, my burnout didn't cause it. But it was because I was in my burnout that I wasn't in the mental space to get ourselves out of it. But now that I'm back in it, I'm seeing it so clear, like so clearly, so that this is the first thing I'm doing now.

So now you've spotted what the problem is and you're looking for a solution to it.

Correct. Yeah. So now I'm in the process of like figuring out the marketing repositioning and how we can talk about our product, how, how we can educate our product, how we can approach all the articles we write, all the emails, every single like webpage. It's a huge project, but I basically have to, I'm seeing the business in a completely different lens because I gave it a new identity.

And also, wasn't the fact that you basically took a year's break that allowed you a bit of distance from it in order to see this clearly? Because when you're in the thick of it, it's very hard to zoom out and see this.

I mean, I think the time that I took off was necessary for me to continue to build the business. Like I would not have been able to continue pushing in this way if I didn't just take a step back and work on myself. Like I, like I didn't just sit there, right? Like I, I really had to go back and ask myself like, what am I doing this for? Do I still wanna do this? What's the point? I already have the life that I want, right? And I went to two different self-development retreats, like really had to look inward and really felt reborn kind of like midway half year and had to kind of rediscover and rekindle a passion that I had lost and then come back and say, okay, where do we begin again? So I think you can only solve problems in a business when you are in a healthy like mental and physical space to do that. And that's just not where I was before, but I am here now.

Talk to me then, Melissa, a bit about this inner work. When, again, when you're in the thick of it, you don't see it. I remember myself being agitated, being irritable all the time, but also being or feeling that I was super focused on the problem. And not, if the business is not performing to a certain level, then it's very hard for you to take a step back and look at it. And where, with the two experiences you've had, where do you start this inner work?

So through a friend's recommendation, I went to something called the Hoffman Process in the UK, actually, which is, I mean, it's worldwide, but I went to the one in the UK because in the US there's like a 9-month waiting list. But it's a 7-day self-development retreat. No devices, no internet, no books, nothing. It's just you and your thoughts.

Okay. And, uh, that's scary already.

Yeah. And the core of it is it helps connect who you are and why you are the way you are to your childhood and your parents. And I never understood that to matter. Like I was just never in a subpar mental space for me to even dig into that stuff. And it turns out it's like common knowledge for a lot of people, but, um, I had just learned about it for the first time last year. So when my friend recommended it, I was like, well, who cares about that? I don't even have a relationship with my parents. And she was like, well, that's exactly why you need to go. And so I was like, okay, well, at that point I was so desperate for something to change because at that point in my life I was waking up feeling mediocre, but then also feeling guilty for not appreciating the things that I have in my life. So then I was in this vicious cycle of like, self-loathing and not knowing how to get out of it. And so I went to just change something up. And a lot of people who, who have gone will tell you this, it's the best thing they've ever done. And within the first few hours, I already knew it was a first thing I will ever— like, it was the best thing that I would, that I would ever do in my life, because it helped me understand why I have so much self-doubt, fear, why I procrastinate, like, why I am the way I am. And the biggest thing that it did for me was it pulled me out from being a participant in my life to an observer. And it gave me a choice.

So zooming out.

Yeah. It gave me a choice to make different choices every day in my friendships, my relationships, and also in my business. And it also helped me identify, you know, things that I would think or do in my business that would otherwise hold me back. So for example, things are not me. Like if I'm like, I can't do this. Well, It's not adult Melissa speaking, it's child Melissa saying she can't do this. And it's a way to procrastinate and it's not reasonable. So it's like things like that.

I can't, or I'm not good at that. It's typically something that holds back many founders and businesses, and I've experienced it myself as well. One of the biggest ones, which obviously you haven't experienced, is you see a lot of founders who say they're not good at sales. You've excelled at the founder-led sales. But that's, that's one of the things that a lot of people get hung up on. What would you say to somebody who would share that with you and say, I'm not good at sales. I can't do it like you, Belissa.

Well, before I answer that question, I, on the same track, have told myself I can't do marketing. I'm not a marketer. And that was my identity, right? The identity we give ourselves, the identity we give our friends, the identity we give our partners and our company is the same thing, entire narratives. Go to support that identity, right? And that's why what you believe is true becomes true. And not knowing marketing has followed me for 15 years. And what's the result of that? I keep hiring agencies to do the work that I— to do the hard work that I didn't wanna do and then have subpar result because I don't even know how to do the basics of marketing. And I never took that on because I thought I can't do it. It's not for me. And in turn, I put the most important revenue-generating role in someone else's hands. And that is something that I'm currently changing now. Like I'm taking over all the repositioning, all the SEO, like learning all that stuff, which I never even touched before. I just like had someone else do it. But with sales, it's much more scientific. It doesn't change. Marketing changes, right? It's like what works for SEO today doesn't work next year. And then you have to like research all that stuff and, and stay current. But sales is not a born skill. It's an earned, learned skill. It's, it's—

See, that's what other people would say, would say the other way around, but it's, it's interesting to, to hear that from your side.

Well, nobody is born like as a baby who can sell, you know, it just doesn't even make sense, right? You get exposed to things, right? And for me, like I didn't choose to be in a sales job. It just kind of fell on my lap cuz it's like, there was a first company that would hire me. Like my, my first job I sold life insurance. And then because I had that job, then I fell into another job that was in sales and I was in real estate sales and then I became a CEO and then I was selling for myself. But in each, in each part of that, in each of those roles, I was surrounded by other salespeople. So what happens, right? We take, you know, they bring in sales trainers and you get trained, you read sales books. You talk to other salespeople and then you get better at handling objections.

You absorb their knowledge. Yeah.

And you just start somewhere. And, and the thing is, the way I like to think about it is like sales is a science and it's good news because it means anyone can learn it. And yes, of course some people are more natural. It just means they have a more outgoing personality and they're more charming, whatever. Right. But people don't buy charm, if that makes sense. Right? Like people buy knowledge and you don't have to charm them if they respect you. You just, I guess you just can't—

so you establish that, that trust.

Yeah. I mean, you can't be, you can't be an ass, right? You can't be a bad person, but you don't have to be the best person at sales in order to make a sale. You just have to start trying. You just have to understand the science behind why someone buys and how to convince someone. The book that I would recommend for this and I recommend it to everyone.

I was just kind of about to ask. Yeah.

It is The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, and it is not a typical sales book. It is a communication strategy because a lot of times what you're saying is not what's being heard. And that happens in personal relationships as well. And the best salesperson knows how to align the two. I just have to pick the right words to say what I want you to hear. And especially when it comes to selling a product, there's a science behind convincing someone why they need your product. And that book is just like a 5-step process and it's, it's my business Bible and it's how I write every sales pitch. It's even how I write every web page, like every web page, every landing page that we have.

I will make sure that's linked in the show notes for this episode. So we, we have a starting point. If you're not confident about your sales skills and techniques, this is the book to start. What else did you realize from selling yourself and now doing the marketing strategy yourself versus outsourcing it?

I mean, what else have I learned about that is I realized that all these years when I had to outsource, like, revenue, like, that sounds insane, right? Like a founder outsourcing revenue, I always felt like I was at the mercy of someone else. And no one—

and that's not a great feeling.

Yeah. No, no one is going to do a better job than you. How can an agency that works for you a few hours a month, or no matter how good they are, do a better job than you who's thinking about it 24/7? I even dream about it. So just from taking all this work over and, and I'm just starting that process, I'm relieved and scared that I'm not gonna do a good job, but it comes with the territory, right? It comes with the self-doubt and doing something you don't know and all the unknowns, but also reminding myself that like I have to stop giving myself these limited identities. I have to stop telling myself I can't do this. I am not a marketer. I'm a salesperson. Because if I tell myself that, I'm going to have those self-fulfilling prophecies. Something goes wrong and I'll be like, see, I'm not a marketer. And then I'm going to give up.

And you also don't outsource this responsibility. Like you just said, if the marketing doesn't work or the sales process doesn't work, you can say marketing is at fault, but now you're taking all this responsibility onto to you? Does it feel like a burden or a big cloud over you? Because you can't say the agency didn't—

Honestly, it feels freeing and liberating because there's control. When you outsource something, you don't have control. When you say, I am in control of all my mess-ups, but also all my successes, that's you. Right? And the best thing about screwing something up is you can fix it and then you don't do that again. And of course I'm not doing this on my own. Like we still hire people alongside. And when I hire people, I will be like, I, I have been very upfront with them and say, I wanna learn this. So I will only work with people who show me everything that they do and explain everything to me. And it's not that I want to do your job. I don't wanna do your job if you do a good job, but I wanna be able to critique it. The problem with not knowing anything is if someone says, Daniel, this is a strategy, this is what we're gonna do this month. What are you gonna do? You're just gonna let them do it.

You can't challenge it if you don't have any, any knowledge, or you don't understand the process.

And you cannot hire someone to do a good job if you don't even know how to interview for them, which is the biggest problem. It's not that they're not good, it's that I don't know how to hire them.

I was gonna ask you about that because you said managing people, and I know you've shared in other podcasts and on your newsletter about some of your hiring mistakes and learnings from it. What is, for example, one or two key questions that you ask somebody now in an interview before you hire them?

So, if it's, so all of our team members are contracted because they're in different countries. So like accounting-wise, they're contracted, but like for all of our developers, for example, they're still full-time. Like a lot of people are still full-time, they're just spread out.

Yes, because you used to work with a development agency and I believe you got burnt.

I had, I started with a development agency that I got burnt with, and then I actually now work with a developer, a development agency in Vietnam where we, it's not by project. We work directly with like, it's like a hiring agency. So we in theory own that person's time. But they are in the middle for communication, which, and, and like payroll, which actually is, is a lot better. But the one question that I ask, and, and I don't mean like a marketing agency, but the one question that I ask everybody that comes on full-time is if you could have any job right now, what would it be? Like anything, right? Because if it's, for example, like what I'm hearing for is I don't wanna be a stepping stone. We're a tiny company, so everything is felt. So if you're using me as a stepping stone, my training cost is super high. If one person leaves, we feel the gap. So we will do whatever we can to make sure you're happy there, but we can't hire someone with the intention of leaving. So we also, we also share that.

From the start. Yeah. And the training process until you bring somebody up to speed can be—

Oh, it's months.

What's your experience? We're talking about at least 3 to 6 months.

Yeah. And so what I'm hearing for is, do they wanna work for another type of company? So for example, like if they're like, oh, I really wanted to get into gaming, but you know, I don't have the experience, then I would just refer them to a friend of mine because life's too short to work on something that doesn't bring you closer to your ultimate goal. I don't wanna be the person that stops you from that. I wanna be that lifestyle business that takes you closer to the lifestyle that you want. So, if I'm gonna be the one that is standing in the way of you and your dream job, then I wanna help you get to your dream job. But then once we have that conversation, then, then I think people really understand like what our culture is.

I want to ask you a bit more about your model now, because you are basically hiring people's time and there's always this dilemma. If you hire their time, they're gonna or per hour or per day, whichever way you do it, you're all— something is always going to get dragged in the interest of getting more money. While there's the other half of people which argue that you should do it by project, but then you might not get everything you want delivered in that project. How are you striking the balance? Why did you settle on this latter model since you've tried both?

Well, when I worked with the first firm, I didn't have a CTO. So my CTO co-founder, who is also my husband now, he came in a year later. So my, my dream idea, because I was so sick of having a co-founder managing engineers, I wanted to do this company on my own with a bunch of contractors. So I hired a dev shop who in theory would be like the PM, developer, CTO. They told me they could build what I wanted them to build. I believe them. Uh, but I didn't have a person on my side who was managing all that. So even after 10 years of being in startups, I knew so little about code that I thought I could do a startup without a CTO, which I would not recommend. And so because nothing was working, David started helping me kind of pro bono. And as soon as he started helping, things started working. So even though I don't know how to build software, I know good software from bad software because bad software doesn't work and good software works. And then I was like, well, why would I pay these guys like hundreds of thousands, mm-hmm, for devel— for delivering nothing while you, you're actually a really good coder. I didn't know that. I've been with him for 7 years up to that point. Why don't you become my CTO? Like, we redirect that capital, we figure out an equity structure that works, and then you oversee hiring a team for Vietnam, which was always the case. We were always gonna hire a team from Vietnam because they were like, we love Vietnam. We wanted more reasons to go there. They have like a hospitality culture. They really like, they work super hard. They're young. We'd already found like a couple dev shops that we would try, but I just wanted to get the first version out. But even that first version was like stuck. And so the first time I worked with a dev shop was like by milestones. It was like, this is the project and we would pay you in 4 milestones. But as anyone—

which you would think is a safe way of doing it.

Yeah. But they just, it was just dragging on for so long because they couldn't get it working. Like the product just wasn't working. So they were just burning time and then they wanted me to pay, but we hadn't reached that milestone because they already burned the money that I had given them before.

I've experienced something similar, which is why I asked the change of mind and how this new system that you're working on, because then I also worked on the J or dev shop basis and the results were mixed at best.

But I realized that, I only realized that we had to own somebody 100% because a product will continue to break, especially in the beginning. Like we had no users and as soon as we had users, like holes are everywhere. So it was a—

the moment it gets into real people's hands and fingers or clicks, the more issues appear.

Yeah. A dev shop will never be able to fix that. They'll be like, yeah, maybe next week. We have a webinar now and the system is crashing, right? So David had had experience before managing remote teams. So it's because of him that we were able to switch to that model pretty quickly.

And I know another bugbear, but also specialty of yours, Melissa, is pricing and figuring out the right price point and how it can sink you.

I have had lots of experience in that.

And also when you launch with a price, it's very hard to increase it significantly.

Yes.

You, you can typically only go down and the discount route I know from my experience is not where you want to go. So how do you find a balance?

Well, I don't believe you have to decrease your pricing. I think you always have to increase your pricing because your value goes up as your product grows. Pricing is something that's very top of mind right now.

Mm-hmm. And you wrote about it recently.

Yeah, but there's different phases of pricing, right? When you start, you're nothing. You have no integrations, nothing, no customers. So you have to pick a price point. Everybody was like, oh, you can test this, test that. You cannot test the price. I don't care what anyone says because all your subscriptions are tied into Stripe, all of your emails, like you can't test price 1 and 2 unless you're selling a bottle, like a one-time transaction, right? So I think a lot of people kind of fly blind, but they talk about testing pricing. So that's something I think needs to be demystified.

And in a, in a recurring payment or subscription basis, then you just can't swap.

You can't just pull the rug under someone. You can't have two versions. Right. And so in the beginning we picked something that we thought was fair. It wasn't the cheapest, it wasn't the most expensive, but it reflected the quality of product that we wanted to put out there. We ended up maybe a year and a half into that, getting a lot of people sign up because they thought we were cheap. They would say, we signed up because we were, because you were the cheapest, but we weren't the cheapest. It was just, we were the cheapest relative to the value we were offering. We were the best product in our category. And so what ended up happening was we ended up seeing a lot of this, what I call dumb support. People who didn't have businesses that needed, someone told them to sign up, they don't know how to do everything, and then they churn within 2 weeks. They churn, they want everything, and then they, can't afford $49. And that's a really, really low price point, right? For, for somebody that has a real business. So it was drowning our support actually, because for a long time we couldn't hire support. Like me, David, and our COO was doing support and it was like a, a huge distraction for David because then he couldn't code. And so we doubled our price in '99 and it cut out immediately all like the dumb support. Which was amazing.

And, and the people who were wasting time and churning, basically.

But we also didn't have limits on our free trials. We thought, well, how much could someone use, right? It's 2 weeks. But it turns out if you don't have any guardrails, people will find ways to misuse your product in ways that— it's not misusing because we didn't know it was a misuse. Like they were, they were able to use it. But for example, like our biggest cost is streaming. Because it's a video. We pay Vimeo for that. Anyone who streams a video has to pay them for that.

Ooh, they increased their prices a lot in last few years, haven't they?

So what ends up happening is somebody, if they can run unlimited webinars with unlimited attendees for 2 weeks, what are they gonna do? They're gonna sign up multiple accounts, buy all these ads, not pay their own Vimeo account, and burn my credits. So there was once within, I think, 8 days we lost like $8,000. 'Cause Vimeo was like, oh, you guys are running outta credits. I'm like, what do you mean? And it was like this one, how to make money online for $500, right? It was just like this one class.

Mm-hmm.

And we immediately had to cut that off. And the guy was like, yeah, yeah, I love your product. I'll pay for it. Of course he never paid for it. Right. And so it was through learning those things that we ended up putting limits. There was a first time we looked at what our costs were per attendee, and then we started putting limits in our trials. 'Cause then we asked ourselves, why do you need unlimited everything to get val— to, to determine if you can get value from a product? We're actually leaving money on the table. So that's when we put in like attendee limits and all that stuff. Like people think we're trying to nickel and dime, but the, the truth is we're paying for the bandwidth that they're not paying for. Right. And so this is also—

and most people will not understand the bandwidth situation because it's free for them. Yeah. Whether it's Netflix, whether it's YouTube, or whether it's any other streaming platform.

But we don't sell ads, right? So they don't really think about that. Like they are the product, but now I'm thinking about e-webinar kind of in a different way because now we're way more mature. We're, our starting point is still $99. But there are big companies that look at us and think we're not serious enough.

Because you're too cheap.

We're too cheap. And so I'm now thinking, okay, well our product is quite overbuilt. Like it's, it's every feature you've ever imagined plus more. But people look at the pricing and they think we're a tiny company. So there's, it doesn't inspire confidence, right? It's like we're not an expensive bottle of wine. So now we're running into that problem. Right. And so I heard a podcast recently. It's Lenny's podcast with Jason Cohen, who started, uh, WordPress.

Mm-hmm.

And he, he mentioned the same thing. He said that for big companies, buying something at $100,000 to $140,000 a year is easy cuz they're used to that. But anything under that is hard. You make it hard for them. A perfect example of that. The bigger the company, the less likely they are to have a credit card. But we require a credit card to sign up, not because we wanna just make money from you.

Yeah, because they have a procurement process. They have to go through invoicing, purchase orders. Exactly.

Our software is tied to credit card. Every time you publish, we charge, right? When you, it's how you create the account. It's how the product works. We can't just create a different path for that.

And I'm assuming you did that because you didn't wanna deal with late payments or—

Well, of course.

Which, what does that mean?

With the self-serve product.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like we don't invoice for, for that amount. So a big company will come and say, can you invoice me? I'm like, well, first of all, we can't because it's automatic payments automatically goes up and down levels. But I also can't invoice for a few hundred dollars a month and then I'm chasing you. So now we, we kind of have to figure that out.

The bigger the company, the slower they are.

Yeah. It's their strategy. So now I'm also kind of rethinking, okay, well first we have to figure out this repositioning problem. But if we can actually unlock the 98% I'm talking to you about, like if we're not swimming in the 2%, if we become like, like a widely adopted product, then our pricing model also has to change to reflect the product that we are today.

And besides doubling your price in the early days, once you discovered the trials issue, you haven't moved it. How, how long have you been able to keep the same price? Well, obviously salaries, cost of living, and all the other things around your product and your business. Have increased in cost?

Yeah, I mean, everybody's increasing their cost, right? Like Loom just sent out something yesterday that said, I'm changing my price to $10 to $18 per seat. I mean, that's, that's an 80% increase, right? I mean, it's, it's, everyone's scared. There's not a lot of cash. Inflation's going up, right? Everything's going up. We, outside of—

And it has been for a few years.

Yeah. And outside of our pricing, like we have put in limits in our product, but we also have add-ons because of those limits. And we have add-ons for power users. So like if you want SSO, if you want custom domain, if you want more registrants. So there are other ways to increase revenue within the same account if you are a power user, but most people don't. We make sure it's as fair as possible, like for the majority of our users. So there's that, but that's why we need to figure out marketing because your way to increase revenue can't be increasing prices. It has to be expanding your user base. And, and that's what we're trying to figure out.

I wanna move a little bit now back into the lifestyle business part, Melissa, because You said that happiness matters more than just pushing revenue or making more money. What is there a particular, and you don't need to name the sum, but is there a particular sum that would give you happiness and the freedom? Have you ever achieved it and has that goal moved?

Like a salary, you mean, or like a—

Yeah, because every founder will know that typically they tend to be the worst paid person in the business.

You know, I used to think that founders should get paid last and the least. And after 10 years of pain and not being in a good mental state to build my companies, I now believe that founders should get paid first, at least something, and then in the end, the most to support their lifestyle. Because you are the company, the biggest variable to success is the founder. So the founder should not put themselves in a painful position to build their company.

In my experience, I mean, but that pain tends to be what, something that people expect.

Yeah, but it doesn't have to be your reality. You can change that. Like sacrifice and pain doesn't mean success. It's just sacrifice and pain. You need to think about it.

And it doesn't get you in a better place to think clearer, zoom out.

You need, if you are constantly in survival mode, which I have been in for years, you cannot make good decisions. For your company. You just can't. You'd rather find different ways to manage your burn, like outsource. Don't— like, don't— that's a benefit that we have to the society that we have today. Everybody's remote, right? Outsource, hire fractional people, do everything yourself until you can, like, find ways to make sales and, and market before— like, build revenue before you hire more people, before you spend more money. And I think personally, I think probably at, like— I mean, ironically, I started a company to be rich, and then nobody told me that starting a company would be the quickest way to lose all your money. And through bootstrapping and many failures, I actually learned to live with— learn to live large with very little. And I'm definitely not frugal, and I spend money on the things that I like, like experiences and things like that. I don't buy things. I travel and I see friends and, you know, I eat well. I think probably at like $15K. $20K a month, you're pretty happy. I don't have everything that I want, but I don't feel I'm lacking. Of course I want more things, but I'm very grateful for the thing, the things that I have. So I think that if you're able to pay yourself like $15K, $20K a month, which is probably less than what senior people would get paid in a big company, if you were to work for a big company, you would be living pretty well. If you're not in like New York or London or anything like that. And you could have the, you know, be in a good space to continue building.

So you also said you have a big circle of friendships and a network of founders. Is there a particular mistake that you see them repeating every day? Because it seems harmless at first and you think, or you say, stop doing that or this is not going to go well?

It's probably hiring marketing agencies. Yeah, I mean, I think it's—

That's a good enough answer, Melissa.

I think it's always hiring for the role you don't fully understand. And a lot of it happens to be marketing, but it's definitely hiring for something you don't fully understand.

And what do you believe about building now that you didn't believe the first time or the second time around?

That is such a good question. That businesses will always continue to grow if you do a good job. And that is not true because there are so many forces around you that you cannot control. And you have to constantly be solving problems. Like I thought, okay, if we crack this business, we start growing, people start using it, people always come. That's not true. Like—

and are you referring here to say the dilemma that many people have, including yourself, and me say how the social networks changed the game of distribution, which then has a follow-on effect on your lead generation, on your income, and so forth downstream. You don't control the game when it comes to that, and you think that you cracked the system, and then a few months later, maximum a year later, the rug gets pulled.

Yeah, and I think what I learned from that is Well, first, you can't build your business on rented land. Second, you just have to have more of your eggs in more baskets. Like you just have to diversify more and not take a single channel too much for granted and know that if something is really good today, like just be grateful for that, take advantage of it, but it's, you know, it, it won't be around in a few months.

But that's the conventional wisdom of you find something that works and you double down on it.

For now. Yeah, for now. But don't be surprised if it like magically stops working.

So besides repositioning and thinking at where your business is not convincing people or not reaching the right people, and you, people are going on Substack now because the selling point is that you own your emails list, but a lot of the growth that comes on Substack now is coming through the social side, which I'm sure you experienced yourself as well with the notes. So would you be able to confidently recommend to other founders and businesses to push more on content and put it on Substack or any other similar platform?

Honestly, I have no idea if my time spent on social media is net positive or negative. I really don't know because all the most successful people I know in real life They don't even log onto LinkedIn. They don't write anything. They're just executing without noise and doing a great job. And people have been growing their businesses without social media for years. In fact, that's pretty new. So, I don't know.

Yeah, social media in the terms of business use, only like 2010 onwards, pretty much.

I mean, I think it's quite toxic actually. I think LinkedIn is quite toxic, so I try to limit my time on there. I don't really need to be the boss.

Which part is it? Is it the bravado? Is it the fake leadership? What's, uh, what, what part of it is toxic? All of it.

It's all of that. It's everyone's like, look at me, look at me, look at me. Like, look at my Stripe screenshot and how many millions I made. And what does that do? What does that do? Does it get customers or does that boost your ego? Does it make you feel good? Dopamine hit. And then it just makes someone else feel bad about where they're at. Like, I don't understand how it used to be, you know, like if you like it, like 2, 3 years ago when I was on it, it was like a lot of strategies, a lot of like really good content. And now it's just like a lot of ego boosting content, humble bragging, quote unquote.

Right. Personal branding, I would say.

Yeah.

Some would call it.

Yeah. It's, it's a bit nauseating. Right. So I, I moved to Substack where, you know, there's a few people that I follow that I really like, but like I said earlier, I only write because I love it. It's not because I think I'm getting business from it, because if I did think that, I would write content that would get me business. But the stuff that I write is not aligned with my customers. Like I write about the entrepreneur stuff, but I sell an automated webinar system. So these are, these are kind of two things, right? So would I recommend it? I think it's a huge time suck. I'm not sure anyone starting now, it would be very easy for them to to build an audience. I think a lot of the bigger creators will say like, that's where they get a lot of their revenue and, you know, but I, I'm not sure. But they have a, they already have a really good business. That's not their only channel, right? They have a lot of different channels. Like they have a sales team, they have marketing, they have, you know, people doing SEO, like people are searching for them. They have product market fit. Like I would say that if you don't have strong product market fit, Like, I don't have strong product-market fit. Just focus your time on finding that. Like, LinkedIn will get you like 2 people, but if you have strong product-market fit, you can literally do anything. You can find customers the traditional ways and, and they still work and don't suck up all your time and then make you feel bad about your business. I would say that a lot of the luxuries that I have in my life right now, like the freedom, the friends, the community, being able to travel. Work remotely. These are all earned privileges. But before eWebinar, I had almost 10 years of pure suffering working on products that weren't great, that didn't have potential to be great. You know, really tiny industries, fighting for every sale, living very frugally, being in a house with 5 other people, right? Paying myself $2,000 a month and then $3,000 a month and $4,000 a month. Until I was 36, right? Like going to a restaurant and, and picking the cheapest thing or meeting my friends after they eat and making up an excuse as to why I couldn't go for dinner. Missing all the weddings that I was supposed to go to, you know, not going to all the, any of the bachelorette parties, losing friends over it because I, I was choosing a business trip over, you know, going on, going on a fun trip, you know, just life stuff, right? But I gained so much more on the other side, right? I gained my freedom and my financial freedom. I met David, my co-founder and my husband, my, my life partner on the way, right? I discovered music and community in Amsterdam and I got to travel because I met him. So I gained a lot more. Of course, during those sacrifices, it didn't feel like, you know, it's like hindsight 20/20. Didn't feel like I was going anywhere, but I think a lot of the sacrifices businesses that I made were before I sold my company. So before I was 37.

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