It took eWebinar 16 months to go from idea to product launch, then another 36 months to hit $1M ARR; this is the core theme of this season. That's a total of 52 months from incorporation date.

You might have read about companies that get to $1M in a year, much less now with AI startups and the world riding that wave. Those are outliers and not the norm. 36 months to $1M is actually the median, even for funded companies.

“Normal” is not newsworthy and doesn’t get the media spotlight it deserves so you might feel like you’re moving too slow even when you’re in the right place.

On this season finale episode, Melissa and Todd dive into the 12 most shocking surprises on their way to $1M ARR after everything they tried, learned, and failed, which formed the foundation by which they continued to iterate on the business and product.

Thank you for tuning into Season 2 of ProfitLed!! Your support is deeply appreciated.

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Takeaways:
• Things they thought would have a huge impact, but didn’t
• Assumptions that made them think they’d get to $1M faster
• Things that took a lot more effort and time than anticipated
• Why you don’t need fancy metrics to prioritize roadmap
• Why $1M is not the magic number even though it seems like it is

Contact ProfitLed

• Tweet us at @profitledfm.
• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm.

Connect with our host

• Follow Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn where she share stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• Subscribe to 'your founder next door', Melissa's bi-monthly newsletter on how to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.
• Follow @themelissakwan on Instagram and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

This podcast was brought to you by eWebinar.

Learn more at ewebinar.com and find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into automated webinars that perform better than a live webinar.

Thanks for listening!

When Melissa cofounded eWebinar, she had no idea it was going to be “product-led”. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she had always been in B2B sales and biz dev roles. She was always a sales-led founder as both her previous startups were enterprise SaaS. The word “product-led growth” didn’t even exist in her vocabulary!

When she ran out of leads to sell to in her network 9 months after launching eWebinar, she asked other founders for help. You can imagine her surprise when she learned that low cost, self-serve SaaS products were sold in a completely different way. Turns out, people don’t pick up the phone for $99/month products; they prefer to do their own research and sign up at their own pace.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd dive into the 9 most important PLG (product-led growth) lessons learned as they powered through and figured things out by trying everything under the sun from playbooks, experts, and friends.

Takeaways:
• Marketing strategies that worked, and ones that didn’t
• Why you should invest in high quality, engaging content
• Why customers aren’t always your greatest source of info
• Hardships and beauty of making a self-serve SaaS startup work

Contact ProfitLed

• Tweet us at @profitledfm.
• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm.

Connect with our host

• Follow Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn where she share stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• Subscribe to 'your founder next door', Melissa's bi-monthly newsletter on how to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.
• Follow @themelissakwan on Instagram and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

This podcast was brought to you by eWebinar.
Learn more at ewebinar.com and find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into automated webinars that perform better than a live webinar.

Thanks for listening!

“This is fine as a lifestyle business.” Says every VC with a slight look of disdain after you pitch them your brilliant idea they don’t want to invest in.

The industry has given “lifestyle business” such a bad reputation by commonly using it to describe non-venture scalable businesses with less ambitious founders. Only 1% of startups are venture funded, which means the other 99% are bootstrapped and by industry standard, lifestyle businesses. If anything between zero and unicorn is “lifestyle”, I’d happily take it.

eWebinar was founded intentionally as a lifestyle business, and that means choosing happiness over revenue for all decisions as it relates to the wellbeing of every team member, product, pricing, customer support, operations…

On this episode, Melissa and Todd discuss what a “lifestyle business” is for them, and the things they do to achieve the dream company that gives everyone involved (not just the founders) a great lifestyle.

Takeaways:
• How the industry and VCs (negatively) perceive lifestyle businesses
• Melissa’s 10 non-negotiables to happiness that led her to found eWebinar
• Intentional decisions we make to achieve our dream lifestyle business
• How choosing happiness over revenue impact product, operations and team
• The culture we try to create at eWebinar and what it’s like to work here

Contact ProfitLed

• Tweet us at @profitledfm.
• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm.

Connect with our host

• Follow Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn where she share stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• Subscribe to 'your founder next door', Melissa's bi-monthly newsletter on how to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.
• Follow @themelissakwan on Instagram and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

This podcast was brought to you by eWebinar.

Learn more at ewebinar.com and find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into automated webinars that perform better than a live webinar.

Thanks for listening!