[SaaS Series] Revenue You Lose When You Stay Live With Melissa Kwan

Melissa Kwan is the CEO and Co-founder of eWebinar, an on-demand video platform that turns prerecorded videos into interactive experiences with chat for demos, onboarding, and training. Before eWebinar, she founded Spacio, a real estate technology platform acquired by HomeSpotter in 2019. A three-time bootstrapped founder with more than 15 years of startup experience, Melissa specializes in B2B sales, business development, and building profitable companies with limited resources. She is also the host of the ProfitLed Podcast and the author behind the Your Founder Next Door newsletter.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [5:45] Melissa Kwan on selling growth instead of founder exhaustion
• [11:17] How unexpected use cases helped eWebinar reach new customers
• [15:25] Why customer delight matters more than adding new features
• [22:57] Building a lean, remote team of self-motivated professionals
• [29:54] AI tools that boost content creation, coding, and marketing
• [33:13] How personal values shaped Melissa’s company and leadership style
• [45:20] The power of self-talk in shaping founder mindset and business growth
• [50:59] Lessons from the Journey to $1M podcast season and costly founder mistakes

In this episode…

Scaling a SaaS business often means finding ways to grow without sacrificing your time, energy, or values. But what happens when the message that inspired you to build your product no longer resonates with customers? How do you break through a growth plateau while staying true to the business you want to build?

According to Melissa Kwan, a bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneur and experienced founder, sustainable growth starts with understanding what customers truly value — not what founders assume they value. She explains how shifting eWebinar’s messaging from saving time to driving business growth unlocked new opportunities, while customer conversations uncovered unexpected use cases like recruiting and onboarding. Melissa highlights why creating delightful user experiences, maintaining integrity in product design, and building a lean, remote team have been key to long-term success. She also shares how AI has accelerated her marketing and operations and why defining personal non-negotiables helped shape both her company culture and leadership approach.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Melissa Kwan, CEO and Co-founder of eWebinar, to discuss building a scalable, customer-centric SaaS business. They explore refining product messaging for growth, creating software customers genuinely love, and building a high-performing remote team. Melissa also shares how changing her self-talk transformed her confidence as a founder and marketer.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Melissa KwanLinkedIn | Website
• eWebinar
• ProfitLed
• Spacio by HomeSpotter
• eWebinar Integrations
• SAP
• Zoom
• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Slack 
• Monday.com
• Asana
• Crisp
• Attio
• Day.ai
• Cursor
• ChatGPT
• Claude 
• Our Journey to 1M ARR at eWebinar: Full Podcast
• Substack
• DoorLoop Webinars

Special mention(s):

• David Dawson on LinkedIn
• Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn
• Jason Fried on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series & Israel Business Series] The SaaS Growth Playbook With David Bitton of DoorLoop” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Webinar Framework That Turns Trust Into Sales Calls With Jon Schumacher” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “What makes you special isn’t one feature — it’s the care behind every detail.”
• “The cost of staying the same is often invisible, but it’s real.”
• “Build your work around what makes you happy first.”
• “We’re not selling webinars — we’re selling time and freedom.”
• “The story you tell yourself shapes your future.”

Action steps:

1. Validate customer needs before solving problems: Talk directly with customers to understand their real challenges instead of relying on assumptions.
2. Define your non-negotiables: Build your business and career around the values and lifestyle that matter most to you.
3. Refine your messaging as you grow: Position your product around the outcomes customers value most, not just the features you offer.
4. Learn from unexpected customer use cases: Use customer feedback to uncover new opportunities, markets, and applications for your product.
5. Challenge limiting beliefs and keep learning: Replace self-imposed barriers with a growth mindset and embrace tools like AI to expand your skills.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I am the Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Melissa Kwan of eWebinar. You can check them out at ewebinar.com. Melissa, before I formally introduce you, this is part of the top software series that I do. Some of the interesting episodes to check out in the past is one of the co-founders of Zapier, Wade Foster. That was a really good one. One of the founders of Jotform. And he talked. Melissa, it was interesting how he built the company to 25 million users on the back of a freemium model. And that was kind of like product-led marketing.

One of the co-founders of Pipedrive and how they grew, you know, maybe near and dear to your heart, Melissa, you’ve been in real estate, and you helped those companies. DoorLoop actually was a good one, and they grew really fast. You know, actually, we’ll have to give a shout-out to DoorLoop and tell them to check out the webinar. I don’t know what they’re using now for their, you know, there’s a lot of use cases for webinars. I got a lot of ideas. I have to say, Melissa, just by looking through, if someone goes to ewebinar.com and they go to use cases, it’s just stuff maybe I wouldn’t have thought of as an evergreen webinar presentation.

You know what I should be using it for, right? It’s onboarding, training rollouts, sales and lead gen demos. I’m like, oh, I didn’t think of that. So I encourage people just to go to the site and you get ideas from it, right? So check out that many more in InspiredInsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. Actually, Melissa has a podcast which we’ll talk about.

You can check it out. We do the strategy, accountability and full execution production number two, an easy button for a company’s gifting. So gifting, staying top of mind could be clients, partners, prospects, even staff. From a culture perspective, just give us a list. We’ll do everything else, kind of white glove. And we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background. And I don’t like to send necessarily tchotchkes. Melissa. It’s like, I like to get food. So think of sending someone every four months a sweet treat in the mail for four years. Okay, that’s what I like. So check out Rise25.com. If you have questions, you can email [email protected].

I’m really excited to introduce Melissa Kwan. She is the Co-founder and CEO of eWebinar. And I mentioned a little bit, basically, if you’re tired of running live onboarding and training on repeat, they can help, you know, they, you know, can run hundreds of engaging webinars without you having to be there in front of the camera. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I read somewhere like over 5000 times, you’ve onboarded like 50,000 people, you’ve done a lot of webinars in your day and you just didn’t want to do it anymore, which I don’t blame you for doing that many, but it turns your webinar, turns your pre-recorded video into an automated webinar that performs better than a live webinar, you know, and they have a lot of attendance rates, double 90% watch times, etcetera. She’s 15 plus years working in startups. She founded Spazio in 2014, acquired in 2019. She, like I said, runs a profit-led podcast. Author of Your Founder Next Door newsletter. Melissa, thanks for joining me.

Melissa Kwan: 04:00

Thank you so much for having me. I feel like I should just not speak and let you continue talking.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:04

I’ll just keep talking about you.

Melissa Kwan: 04:06

You’re just doing such a good job.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:07

Well thank you. You make it easy. And I do want to thank Jon Schumacher for introducing us. And you can check out the episode we did together. And he obviously loves Melissa’s products, and he is an expert to help people create their webinar. So then you can put it on a webinar or another platform. So maybe just start off. I have a lot of questions, you know, from your journey, but let’s just start off with eWebinar and what you do. I’m going to pull up the site so we can poke around.

Melissa Kwan: 04:37

Well, we are going through a massive repositioning right now. So every single web page that you see is going to change in the next 2 to 4 weeks. So, but I mean, in a nutshell, what we do is we turn any pre-recorded video into kind of an on demand, interactive experience that people can join any time with asynchronous chat. So as people are watching anywhere in the world, they can ask you a question. You can respond in real time if you happen to be there. And if you’re not, you can respond on email, just like any kind of support chat bubble that you see on any website.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:14

I love it. I wanted to pull this up and I know we talked before, which is about framing and how you’ve thought about framing the product and the service and everything you have here. And maybe we just talk this through a little bit, right? Because we’re on here right now. If you’re listening to the audio, there is a video portion, but it says, say it once, reaching everyone live is great, but doing everything live can only get you in front of so many people. That’s limiting your growth. How will this piece change from how you’re thinking of framing?

Melissa Kwan: 05:45

So the piece that you just read won’t. Because this is. So we basically took a whole bunch of new languages that we wanted to put on the new website, but we didn’t want to wait so long. So we’re like, okay, what fits in the current website today? And that was the one piece that we thought like, okay, this could fit because before.

So just to backtrack a little bit in space, you know, I was always doing all the demos, onboarding, training, like you name it, because we were bootstrap. We’re a very small company. You can imagine like one person doing everything for every customer. And I was always exhausted kind of doing like doing this thing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:25

So a sense for a second space, you know what it did.

Melissa Kwan: 06:29

So Spacio it’s a real estate tech product and it’s an iPad open house check in. So we sold it to brokerages, franchises. All that data automatically goes into a CRM and you get an automatic follow up after you visit an open house, which is primarily, I guess, in North America. And so previously when you came to a webinar, it would say, are you tired of doing the same webinar over and over again? So I was almost exhausted, but that was my personal pain.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:59

Just because you were exhausted, right?

Melissa Kwan: 07:00

Because I was exhausted. And I literally I’m telling you, Jeremy, I couldn’t imagine somebody doing a webinar and enjoying it because that was that was me. Like, I’m just projecting my own experience. But in the last half year, as we’re reviewing, okay, why has our company stopped growing? Let’s go back and talk to customers. It turns out the people that are actually doing these webinars, they like doing them because they’re connecting with customers. That’s what they’re hired for. They feel valuable. So then I’m realizing, oh, actually, the exhaustion is something that’s really unique to me.

And it’s actually also not quantifiable, right? If I say, oh, like, if you do everything live, you can’t reach everybody. Nobody can dispute that. But if I say, hey, aren’t you exhausted from doing this? They could say, well, no, I’m not. So then instantly the product is not for them. Right. So that’s kind of part of the reframing work that we’re doing. And also in these conversations, I realized the only thing that sells is more money. So you can sell productivity, you can sell time saved, you can sell, you know, more, rest more, you know, less exhaustion. But ultimately, the thing that people pay for is quantifiable revenue.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:18

So you were selling the pain point of exhaustion. You’re like, after talking to these people, you know, more and more people and realizing, okay, it’s really growth that you’re selling. And even if you talk about saving time, you’re still talking about saving money in the end.

Melissa Kwan: 08:34

Well, even if I’m talking about, you know, are you tired of doing this over and over again? The reason you’re doing it over and over again is because you need the growth, right? It’s just a different way of saying the same thing. But if you say, hey, aren’t you tired of doing this? Well, not everybody is. And people aren’t really that imaginative, right? So you kind of got to spell it out for them. So the new website will have the cost of an inaction calculator. Right. What is your cost of staying exactly where you are? Because the thing is, what we’re competing against is not another piece of software. It’s behavior, right?

It’s either not doing anything because I don’t have the bandwidth or I’m just doing this on Zoom because this is what I know. And it’s okay that my attendance rate is 30% because everyone else’s attendance rate is 30%. So when everyone is sick, it’s not a disease. So that’s kind of what I realize is, okay, like we really got to kind of start from scratch because we’ve grown to a certain point and we’re not growing anymore. So we have to ask ourselves why. And I think having this growth in the last few years has kind of prevented me from looking elsewhere because I was like, oh, everything is kind of okay, but you don’t know what you don’t know. And revenue not gained is still revenue lost.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:51

I love the cost of inaction. You know that that’s for any company talking to a customer. There’s that. At least I don’t think about that a lot. Right. But that’s a reality.

Melissa Kwan: 10:04

Well, it’s like salespeople. It’s very, very typical. I was in sales for many years. So you think about all the demos you’re getting, right? This week I did five demos or, you know, 20 demos, 50 demos. However, there are, but your entire prospect list has like a thousand people in them. So are you doing as much as you can? Right. You’re staying busy. You’re staying productive in theory doesn’t mean that you are getting to everybody that actually wants to buy your product. So that’s revenue not gained. That’s your cost of staying exactly where you are and not figuring out a way to actually market to everybody who wants to buy from you?

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