The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose - Intro to Season Three | S3E1

Hey there, it's Melissa, your host here at ProfitLed, a podcast by and for Bootstrap founders, brave or crazy enough to grow a business to profitability with very few resources. Welcome to the first episode of season three. I want to tell you the intention behind this season and what to expect. If you haven't listened to the very first episode of this podcast, season one episode one, I'd love for you to go back to it.

It's where I share my own story and what compelled me to start this thing in the first place. The shorter version is that I'm a third-time bootstrap founder who grew a startup to profitability and acquisition without raising venture capital. And I'm on a mission to show other founders that you don't need VC's blessing to build something meaningful and that you get to define what success looks like for you. In season one, I brought in founders to share their stories and growth strategies that work for them.

In season two, Todd, my COO, and I pulled back the curtain on our own journey, bootstrapping e-webinar from zero to a million AR, one topic at a time over 27 episodes. We're going to explore something I don't think gets talked about enough. What happens after you figured out how to make money? And what happens when you've built a business, found some financial security, and look up and ask, now what?

The theme of season three is the intersection of passion, profit, and purpose and how those three things change as founders come into financial success. Because it turns out that getting to your final destination after you work so hard for it doesn't always feel the way you thought it would. Let me tell you why this topic resonates with me so much right now. I've been a founder for 15 years, and about a year and a half ago, I hit a wall.

It didn't happen overnight. I gradually lost the inspiration and motivation to create. Something I never thought would happen because my work has always been such a core part of who I am. At first, I thought I just needed a break.

I'd never taken a real holiday since leaving my last job. So I figured a few months off would be a good reset. I thought I'd come back refreshed and be ready to go again, but that didn't happen. Things only got worse.

I was more uninspired, more demotivated, and on top of that, I felt immense guilt for not showing up the way I was supposed to for my co-founder, my team, my family, and my friends. My relationship was the worst it's ever been. My company's growth plateaued. My friends didn't recognize who I was.

I didn't even recognize who I was. Through a friend's recommendation, I ended up going to something called the Hoffman process, which was a seven-day self-development retreat that helps you understand why you are the way you are, tracing it back to your childhood and your parents. I had no idea that stuff was going to matter, but that was the beginning of what I now call my healing journey. What I learned there took me by surprise.

The burnout I had been experiencing wasn't from working too hard. It was from the crushing weight of self-doubt I've been carrying my whole life, unknowingly, which had finally caught up with me and seeped into every part of my life. During that period, I had to really ask myself, why am I even doing this? I grew up in a materialistic culture where you were measured by where you lived, what you owned, and what you wore.

My parents didn't come from money, so they overcompensated by collecting things that they could then show off. And that really messed with my idea of success. I desperately wanted to be rich. I wanted my parents' validation, and I wanted them to be proud of me.

Yes, I wanted freedom. I started my first company because I didn't want a manager telling me what to do, but truthfully, I wanted to be rich. Ironically, what nobody tells you is that starting a company is one of the fastest ways to lose all your money. Through bootstrapping and a lot of failure, I eventually learned that you don't need much to live well.

When I sold my last startup a few years ago, things changed. It wasn't a retirement level outcome, but it was life-changing. It allowed me to start eWebinar completely on my own terms, the company that would give me the lifestyle I dreamt about when I walked out of my cubicle at SAP 15 years ago. David, my co-founder and life partner, and I have been building eWebinar together for five years now.

We're profitable, we work 100% on our own schedule with a fully remote team, we're surrounded by people we love, and life has been good. But that was exactly the problem. Because nothing was lacking, I started questioning the point of it all. What was this endless push for growth actually for?

More revenue, more money, more everything? But to what end? How much harder do we have to work? And for how long?

I had the life I wanted already. So what now? What's my purpose? At my lowest, I wanted to give up.

But I knew I'd be letting everyone down. My team, David, Todd, people who had given up other opportunities to invest in my vision. EWebinar was my dream. I had convinced them of it.

It felt selfish to walk away just because I couldn't get my head on straight. The business was doing well, but it wasn't doing well enough to fetch a multiple we could retire on in this economy. And I didn't think I had it in me at that point to start something new and wait another five years before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Because that's a reality.

Businesses are built in five to ten year timeframes, not months. I started negotiating with myself, how much do I actually need to have a good life? Do I even need to have a great life? I kept shrinking the number to fit my burnout narrative, looking for the earliest exit I could justify.

It was also during this time that I started having honest conversations with other founders about their journeys, not the business stuff, but the inner stuff. And I found that so many of them had been through something similar, a version of the same unraveling. Some had sold their companies and moved on to passion projects. Some, like me, had found a way back to rekindle their passion with a clear sense of purpose.

But none of them came out the same on the other side. And this is the part of startup journeys we almost never talk about the human journey, the part where the business forces you to look inward. We spend so much time talking about growth strategies, marketing hacks, the numbers, and almost no time talking about the person running the company. The most important variable in any startup success is you, the founder, the operator.

If you're not in a good place, nothing else can be. The thing about passion and profit and purpose is they don't stay fixed. You start a company chasing something, whether it's money, freedom, or an idea that you believe in. And then for a while, that's enough to carry you.

But as you grow and change as a person, so does what you need from your life and work. Your priorities shift, your world transforms, and your business is still there, constant and demanding, waiting for you to show up in the same way. One day you're building a business, and the next you realize you have to build yourself in order to keep going. You're not as fulfilled as you used to be.

So do you keep going or not? They say that business is not personal, but of course it is. It always has been. It's the thing that forces you to become the person you need to be to design the life you always wanted.

Business is self-improvement disguised as capitalism. After some help and a lot of reflection, I'm back, focused on getting my company back on track, reigniting my own creativity, and producing this season to share what I care about most right now, how passion, profit, and purpose intersect, and how that intersection changes as we evolve. So why did I come back? Because I'm not done yet.

If what I've talked about today resonates with you, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and head over to profitlet.fm for show notes. Share this with someone you care about who you think would enjoy ProfitLed as much as you. If you want to connect with me or share feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

Find me at melissaquan.com. That's M E L I S S A K W A N dot com. Thanks for listening to this episode, and I'm looking forward to sharing the season with you.

Bye now.