ProfitLed Podcast

Companies like Amazon and Costco who pride themselves on customer service conditioned consumers (me and you) to think that customers are always right - but, are they?

In the faceless world of software, customer demands can be brutal, leading to soul crushing and demoralizing support. Training your customers to respect your team and product sets the foundation for healthy business relationships that make you feel appreciated.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd recount customers from hell, the things they did to try and get around paying for the service, and how they dealt with demanding and rude customers.

Takeaways:
• What happens to your business when the customer is always right
• Our customer horror stories and what they did to game the system
• How we set expectations for customer relationships
• How to deal with customers from hell

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

15 years ago, Dropbox spread like wildfire with their freemium product and that gave us the impression that free = more users. It deluded companies to think that giving something away for free is a go-to-market strategy, when it’s far from that.

Giving away something for free has many negative implications that aren’t often talked about. The most irritating one being the fact that it attracts the worst customer profiles. The people who are least tech savvy, most time consuming on support, and never end up converting.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd share stories about the different campaigns they tried to get users into eWebinar and why removing price friction is one of the worst things you can do for your business..

Takeaways:
• How price perception affect how people evaluate products 
• Types of users who have never activated on our platform
• Why free users are the worst and suck all your time and energy
• Reasons we no longer offer discounts, no exceptions
• What happened when we charged more and shortened trial period

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

If you have a great product and offer a commission for people to promote it, they’d happily do it and you’d just make money, right? Not so fast…

On this episode, Melissa and Todd recount the painful memories of spending $130k on affiliate marketing over 10 months; an experience Melissa considers the “biggest financial mistake she’s made in her career”.

Takeaways:
• Why we jumped into this channel too early
• Reasons why this strategy was a colossal failure for us
• Why you should stay away from affiliate marketing (for now)
• The complexities of affiliate marketing nobody told you about
• Things you need in place before affiliate marketing might work

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Everyone says you need to measure everything so you can make data-driven decisions on your product. That's exactly the strategy eWebinar DID NOT follow, especially when there's not going to be enough data when you don't have enough users.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd shares how they decided on priorities even before having a significant customer base, and the lean process their product team goes through to execute on feature development and roll out.

Takeaways: 
• How we came up with an initial wishlist as a guideline
• How we prioritized by listening to customers (but not always)
• Why we didn't measure anything nor make data-drive decisions
• The process of deciding on features per quarter and executing
• Things we do that are significantly different than large companies

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Running a startup is a lot of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks (and what doesn't). The hard truth is, majority of things you do won't work...but you need to do them anyway to find the few things that do.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd dives into the 10 go-to-marketing strategies that didn't work for them, why, and what they learned from each one.

Takeaways: 
• Think twice before putting effort into Product Hunt.
• Things they wasted too much money on too early.
• What they thought would have a huge impact, but didn't.
• Should you pay to be in a newsletter with massive reach?
• There are a lot of things you think will move the needle, but do they?

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

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

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

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

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Melissa and Todd talks about how (and why) they leveraged their best customers to sell and market eWebinar by using the language they used to describe value propositions and how the product solves their problems.

Takeaways: 
•  The moment Melissa realized 1on1 sales was never going to cut it
•  How to extract the best product marketing language from your customers
•  The process of doing customer interviews and deep dives to create a database of marketing language
•  Identifying your best customers and creating an "Ideal Customer Profile" (ICP)
•  What to do with the content you extract and how to get help
•  Why this is the most valuable exercise you can do for your startup

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Founder-led sales is the ONLY way to get your startup off the ground. If you can't sell your own product, how can you expect someone else to? On this episode, Melissa digs into why every founder needs to be the first to sell their product, and how anyone can learn how to sell today.

Takeaways: 
•  Where to find your first set of prospects to sell to
•  Using sales as a way to get customer feedback
•  Separating good feedback from bad
•  Using objections to prioritize your roadmap 
•  Disconnect between what you're selling and they're buying
•  Verifying/discrediting assumptions about the product
•  How anyone can learn how to sell by using my demo script

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Launching eWebinar after 18 months was a huge milestone, but then what? On this episode, Melissa and Todd discuss what it was like to wake up from the dream that if you build it, they'll come. Spoiler alert: That didn't happen.

Takeaways:
• When reality set in after months of daydreaming
• Product assumptions that worked and didn't work
• Initial user reactions, the good, the bad, and the ugly
• Why the market wasn't as ripe as they thought
• Things that went well and things that didn't
• Realizing people didn't always understand the solution
• What to do when it's going to take way longer to hit profitability than anticipated

Show notes:

• Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. 

Connect with our host:

• Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• 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 @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:

Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.