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The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose - Intro to Season Three

The intersection of passion, profit, and purpose, and how those change once founders come into financial success.
Melissa Kwan

Melissa Kwan,

Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, ProfitLed Podcast

About this episode

Hey, it's me again, Melissa, back for Season Three. I'm the cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, and your host here at ProfitLed. This episode is the backstory behind this season's theme: Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those three things shift as founders come into financial success.

About a year and a half ago, after 14 years as a 3x bootstrapped founder, I hit a wall. I lost my inspiration, my motivation, and somewhere along the way, myself. From the outside, everything looked great. Profitable company, loving partner, life on my own terms. But inside, I was unraveling.

What I went through forced me to look at a part of the founder journey we almost never talk about. We spend so much time on growth strategies, marketing hacks, and the numbers, and almost no time on the person running the company. But the most important variable in any startup's success is you. And what you want, what drives you, and what success even means to you doesn't stay fixed. It shifts as you evolve. Your business stays constant and demanding, but you don't.

That's what Season Three is about. The conversations we don't have enough of. The ones about what happens after you've built the thing, found some financial security, and look up and ask, now what?

If this resonates, and you're curious how other founders have navigated this human journey, this season is for you.

Connect with Melissa

  • Connect with Melissa at melissakwan.com and subscribe to  'your founder next door', Melissa's weekly newsletter on what it's like to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.
  • 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

Most startup advice is built around venture capital, hypergrowth, and unicorn exits. ProfitLed is for the rest of us. Hosted by Melissa Kwan, 3x bootstrapped founder and CEO of eWebinar, ProfitLed explores what it's really like to build a company on your own terms, without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.

Season Three goes beyond strategy as we explore the intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose and what happens when founders evolve and come into financial success. If you're building something real, this one's for you.

This podcast was brought to you by eWebinar.

Next episode

S3E2
S3E2: In Pursuit of Freedom | Chris Walker
In Pursuit of Freedom | Chris Walker

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