"Staying lean is not a thing you do, it's a philosophy of how you build your company every day, and how that trickles down to your team."

Melissa Kwan, Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, ProfitLed Podcast

Guest

Melissa Kwan, Cofounder and CEO

Company

eWebinar, ProfitLed Podcast

Location

Digital Nomad

Website

melissakwan.com

Industry

SaaS

Topics

Bootstrapping, Operations

About Melissa Kwan

Melissa Kwan is the Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, an on-demand video platform with chat that helps run demos, onboarding, and training sessions 24/7, on autopilot. The idea was born from the soul-crushing experience of living on Zoom while selling to prospects and training customers at her previous SaaS company. She founded eWebinar to help people grow their business without growing their workload, while reclaiming their time.

Melissa is a three-time bootstrapped founder with 15 years of startup experience. As a revenue-driven founder specializing in B2B sales and business development, she has learned how to build companies with very few resources by automating what she could, outsourcing wherever possible, and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm.

Her previous company, Spacio, was the leading open house lead generation software in real estate, acquired by HomeSpotter in 2019 after four years. Before Spacio, she founded Flat World Apps, which built marketing apps for real estate developers selling residential pre-sales. She left her job as an inside sales executive at SAP in Vancouver at 27 to start her first company.

Before tech, Melissa worked in international trade at a commercial and hotel furniture manufacturer in Hong Kong and then at a hospitality furniture company in Vancouver. That unconventional path through real estate, manufacturing, enterprise sales, and SaaS is part of what shapes her perspective on building businesses. Over the last decade, she has come to believe that happiness should be the foundation of one's career, not the other way around, and that the way to achieve this is by intentionally designing your life.

Melissa writes extensively about bootstrapping with limited resources, life design, pursuing freedom, automated webinars, product-led growth, and the founder journey. Her writing has appeared in Forbes and Business Insider. She is the host of the ProfitLed Podcast and writes a weekly Substack newsletter called "your founder next door", where she documents her journey building eWebinar toward $5M ARR with no outside funding.

She's a digital nomad who travels 10 months of the year and calls Amsterdam and Hong Kong home.

Staying Super Duper Lean

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About this episode

Melissa and Todd talks about how they stay super lead as a bootstrapped startup, how they decide what to and what not to spend money on, and how to avoid money mistakes they've made in the last few years.

Takeaways:
• What "lean" means especially for bootstrapped startups
• The importance of optimizing cost versus being cheap
• What to spend money on (software, people, operations)
• What not to spend money on until absolutely necessary
• Money mistakes they made and how to avoid them

Connect with Melissa

Follow Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn where she share stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
Find her on @themelissakwan on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

About ProfitLed

On Season Two of ProfitLed, Melissa (CEO and Cofounder of eWebinar) and Todd (COO) goes in-depth on one topic per episode on their "Journey to $1M" at eWebinar.

They share war stories, mistakes, and lessons learned as they grew the company to a million in ARR over 36 months. Their goal is to demystify bootstrapping by sharing their experience of it, and tell you what it's really like to figure things out as you go.

ProfitLed is a podcast by and for founders brave (and crazy) enough to grow their startups to profitability without venture capital.

Learn more about the ProfitLed Podcast and tweet us at @profitledfm.

Learn more about eWebinar.