Insights from recent episode analysis
Audience Interest
Podcast Focus
Publishing Consistency
Platform Reach
Insights are generated by CastFox AI using publicly available data, episode content, and proprietary models.
Total monthly reach
Estimated from 2 chart positions in 2 markets.
By chart position
- 🇳🇿NZ · Entrepreneurship#142500 to 3K
- 🇨🇱CL · Entrepreneurship#166500 to 3K
- Per-Episode Audience
Est. listeners per new episode within ~30 days
700 to 4.2K🎙 Weekly cadence·44 episodes·Last published 5d ago - Monthly Reach
Unique listeners across all episodes (30 days)
1K to 6K🇳🇿50%🇨🇱50% - Active Followers
Loyal subscribers who consistently listen
300 to 1.8K
Market Insights
Platform Distribution
Reach across major podcast platforms, updated hourly
Total Followers
—
Total Plays
—
Total Reviews
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* Data sourced directly from platform APIs and aggregated hourly across all major podcast directories.
On the show
Recent episodes
Bootstrapped 20 Years to Life Changing Exit | Simon Swords, S3E3
May 27, 2026
52m 52s
In Pursuit of Freedom | Chris Walker, S3E2
May 13, 2026
52m 24s
The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose - Intro to Season Three | S3E1
May 13, 2026
7m 37s
The 12 Most Shocking Surprises on Our Way to $1M ARR | S2E27
Mar 25, 2025
46m 53s
9 Most Important PLG Lessons Learned | S2E26
Mar 11, 2025
45m 02s
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| Date | Episode | Description | Length | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5/27/26 |  Bootstrapped 20 Years to Life Changing Exit | Simon Swords, S3E3 | Simon Swords bootstrapped Fundipedia for nearly 20 years before selling to FE fundinfo in May 2025. He started in a garden shed with an Ethernet cable and a VoIP phone, ran three businesses at once for years, and eventually landed clients like HSBC, Barclays, and Legal & General. He negotiated the entire life-changing exit himself with his chairman and a ChatGPT subscription, without a corporate broker. In this episode, Simon and I go deep on what it actually costs to play the long game. ... | 52m 52s | ||||||
| 5/13/26 | In Pursuit of Freedom | Chris Walker, S3E2 | Chris Walker bootstrapped Refine Labs from $3,000 to over $20 million in revenue in three years, becoming one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. He had the audience, the recognition, and the revenue. Then he walked away from all of it. In this episode, Chris and I go deep on what happens when you do everything you're supposed to do and it still doesn't feel the way you thought it would. We talk about how he rated himself a 2 out of 10 on mental and time freedom while his busines... | 52m 24s | ||||||
| 5/13/26 | The Intersection of Passion, Profit, and Purpose - Intro to Season Three | S3E1 | 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. Profi... | 7m 37s | ||||||
| 3/25/25 | The 12 Most Shocking Surprises on Our Way to $1M ARR | S2E27 | It took eWebinar 16 months to go from idea to product launch, then another 36 months to hit $1M ARR; this is the core theme of this season. That's a total of 52 months from incorporation date. You might have read about companies that get to $1M in a year, much less now with AI startups and the world riding that wave. Those are outliers and not the norm. 36 months to $1M is actually the median, even for funded companies. “Normal” is not newsworthy and doesn’t get the media spotlight it deserve... | 46m 53s | ||||||
| 3/11/25 | 9 Most Important PLG Lessons Learned | S2E26 | When Melissa cofounded eWebinar, she had no idea it was going to be “product-led”. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she had always been in B2B sales and biz dev roles. She was always a sales-led founder as both her previous startups were enterprise SaaS. The word “product-led growth” didn’t even exist in her vocabulary! When she ran out of leads to sell to in her network 9 months after launching eWebinar, she asked other founders for help. You can imagine her surprise when she learned that lo... | 45m 02s | ||||||
| 2/25/25 | What Lifestyle Business Means | S2E25 | “This is fine as a lifestyle business.” Says every VC with a slight look of disdain after you pitch them your brilliant idea they don’t want to invest in. The industry has given “lifestyle business” such a bad reputation by commonly using it to describe non-venture scalable businesses with less ambitious founders. Only 1% of startups are venture funded, which means the other 99% are bootstrapped and by industry standard, lifestyle businesses. If anything between zero and unicorn is “lif... | 44m 37s | ||||||
| 2/11/25 | 5 Pricing Decisions that Turned Out to be Costly Mistakes | S2E24 | Should you “do right by your customers” at the expense of the company, your team, and your own wellbeing? Your answer might be “yes”, until you realize a small change that customers would barely feel could mean instant profitability for your bootstrapped startup. Having said that, hindsight is always 20/20. There are some mistakes that you just have to make yourself, no matter how many warnings you get. On this episode, Melissa and Todd share the five pricing mistakes they made, why the... | 46m 02s | ||||||
| 1/28/25 | Why We Stayed Away from Enterprise | S2E23 | Most companies think the answer to more revenue is to sell enterprise, but they aren't aware of the massive hassle and costs that come with going upmarket. There's no such thing as free money. The bigger the deal, the more attention you need to give your customer. The more customizations you offer, the more versions of your product you have to maintain. Many founders think the air is better up there because they think it'll solve their money problems. Spoiler alert: It won’t. On this episode,... | 57m 25s | ||||||
| 1/14/25 | 5 Wrong Hires that Ended Up Costing $450k | S2E22 | Hiring is one of the biggest challenges every company faces. For bootstrapped startups, this challenge is even bigger as we have to compete against funded companies and tech giants. Part of building a startup is trial and error, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. Hiring is no different - it’s a learning process that can sometimes get expensive if you don’t “fire fast”. On this episode, Melissa and Todd dives into their 5 most costly hiring mistakes, what happened, and what t... | 58m 12s | ||||||
| 12/10/24 | When Our Startup Became a Real Business | S2E21 | eWebinar was built in a silo for 18 months before the first person signed up for a trial. Melissa and her team had no idea if this business would become “real”, and if people were going to pay for the service. On this episode, Melissa and Todd recount stories of when they knew they were onto something, through customer interactions and feedback, outgrowing their marketing website, and hitting scaling issues from increased usage. Takeaways: • Signs of our business business becoming “real” post... | 43m 12s | ||||||
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| 11/26/24 | Social Selling and Personal Branding | S2E20 | If you’ve been following Melissa on LinkedIn, you’ll know that she’s a frequent contributor on the platform, sharing lessons and stories from her journey bootstrapping three startups. What you might not know is the backstory of WHY she turned to social selling after running out of leads to sell to. On this episode, Melissa shares her “hacks” of building a content machine starting with taking Justin Welsh’s “LinkedIn OS” course, how she experimented with different content styles, and eve... | 44m 50s | ||||||
| 11/12/24 | 12 $0 Marketing Strategies | S2E19 | Spending money on marketing is often not an option for bootstrapped startups, at least not enough to make a meaningful impact. Without an abundance of resources, there’s no choice but to get creative. While found-led sales can get you off the ground, your network can exhaust pretty quickly, leaving you with the challenge of figuring out new ways to generate demand. On this episode, Melissa and Todd share the 12 most effective zero-dollar marketing strategies that got eWebinar to $1M ARR. Take... | 1h 08m 52s | ||||||
| 10/29/24 | The Customer is NOT Always Right | S2E18 | 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 t... | 48m 25s | ||||||
| 10/15/24 | You Pay Peanuts, You Get Monkeys | S2E17 | 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... | 35m 37s | ||||||
| 9/24/24 | Our $130k Mistake in Affiliate Marketing | S2E16 | 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 fr... | 35m 43s | ||||||
| 9/10/24 | How We Decided on Our Roadmap | S2E15 | 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 wit... | 45m 37s | ||||||
| 7/30/24 | 10 Go-to-Market Strategies that Didn't Work | S2E14 | 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. • Wh... | 34m 14s | ||||||
| 7/16/24 | Owning SEO When Marketing Agencies Suck | S2E13 | 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 → Reali... | 47m 25s | ||||||
| 6/25/24 | Staying Super Duper Lean | S2E12 | 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 mistake... | 45m 12s | ||||||
| 6/11/24 | Leveraging Customers to Sell Our Product | S2E11 | 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 • ... | 41m 01s | ||||||
| 5/28/24 | Importance of Founder-Led Sales | S2E10 | 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 ... | 58m 40s | ||||||
| 5/14/24 | Product Launched, Now What? | S2E9 | 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 • Rea... | 44m 48s | ||||||
| 4/30/24 | Launching Our MVP and Converting 85% of Trials | S2E8 | Melissa and Todd dive into the thrilling and nerve-wracking experience of launching eWebinar's MVP. While many people see product launches as the end goal and celebratory occasion, Melissa explains why it's often more stressful instead because that's when the dreams you've sold become reality. They reminisce about getting stuck in a never-ending rabbit hole of features, how frustrated David (CTO) was, and how they ultimately had to choose a launch date just to get the produc... | 38m 06s | ||||||
| 4/9/24 | Coming Up With Our Business Model and Price Point | S2E7 | Melissa and Todd discuss how they established eWebinar's pricing model, focusing on aligning their business strategy with their lifestyle goals and market approach. Melissa shares insights from her past ventures, highlighting her shift towards a product-led strategy to ensure the business supports a hands-off lifestyle, avoiding the demanding nature of sales-led models. Melissa explains why she’s against freemium and opted for free trial instead, and the reason they chose a low cost pricing s... | 52m 50s | ||||||
| 3/26/24 | Going from Idea to Product Launch in 16 Months | S2E6 | When Melissa first went to Todd with the idea of eWebinar, he wasn't immediately convinced the product was solving a much needed problem. She engaged him as a contractor to write the first version of the website which started with competitive research. During that process, he grew passionate about the idea because he identified a gap in the market for a product that could offer a superior automated webinar experience. On this episode, Todd describes the process he went through in doing market... | 49m 38s | ||||||
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Chart Positions
2 placements across 2 markets.
Chart Positions
2 placements across 2 markets.