In the last 13 years, Melissa has worked with over 10 marketing agencies/contractors to execute a content strategy. Most couldn't deliver on their promise. It was incredibly frustrating. You may have experienced something similar.
The vicious cycle went something like this: → Hire company experienced in digital marketing for min 3-6 months → Get proposal of new content strategy because old one was bad → Technical and content audit, keyword research → Receive mediocre pieces of content → Realize company is not a good fit → Start over after spending $10k+
Most writers wrote for the sake of generating more clicks without a deep understanding of our business and customers. As a result, their content was basic and boring. Most pieces were not written for the advanced business users they wanted to attract.
Melissa and Todd finally decided to take back control and learn SEO and content writing from the ground up.
Takeaways: • Why marketing agencies suck • The importance of owning your SEO when it's a primary revenue source • Benefits of knowing how SEO and content works • How to own your SEO, and skills required • Companies that can help you on this journey
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 Melissa Kwan
Melissa Kwan is the Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, an on-demand video software with chat that lets companies run their demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions without anyone having to be there live. The idea came from her previous SaaS company, where she delivered the same sessions live for years and could only ever reach a fraction of her prospects and customers. She founded eWebinar to help people grow their business without growing their workload.
Melissa is a three-time bootstrapped founder with 15 years of startup experience. Specializing in B2B sales and business development, she has built companies with very few resources by automating what she could, outsourcing wherever possible, and inspiring talented people to join her 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 started her career selling real estate in Vancouver, then spent time in international trade in Hong Kong before moving into enterprise software. At 27, she left her job as an inside sales executive at SAP to start her first company.
That path through manufacturing, real estate, enterprise sales, and SaaS shapes how she thinks about building businesses. Over the last decade she has come to believe that happiness should be the foundation of a career rather than the result of one, and that it comes from designing your life with intention.
Melissa writes about bootstrapping with limited resources, on-demand delivery, product-led growth, life design, and the founder journey. Her writing has appeared in Forbes and Business Insider. She hosts the ProfitLed Podcast and writes a weekly Substack newsletter, "your founder next door," where she documents building eWebinar without outside funding.
She's a digital nomad who travels 10 months of the year and calls Amsterdam, New York, and Hong Kong home.
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.
Most agencies can’t go from 0 to 1 which requires trial and error but can go from 1 to 2. It’s a very different skill set.
