The Connect With Purpose Project
Your purpose is not some distant destination reserved for a few—it’s already within you, waiting to be heard. Often, it’s in the quiet whispers we try to ignore that hold the key to our deepest calling. This podcast is about listening to those whispers and taking the first steps, even when it feels scary.
Our guests have faced the same struggles—feeling stuck, unsure, or burned out—but found their way by trusting that inner voice. If you’re alive, your mission is not complete. You’re here for a reason.
The Connect With Purpose Project
Rebuilding, Reinventing, and Rediscovering Your Why
Katelyn Bourgoin has lived the entrepreneur’s rollercoaster — from the thrill of launching big ideas to the heartbreak of closing the doors on a business she poured herself into. Along the way, she’s faced failure, debt, and burnout, but also found resilience, clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose.
In this candid conversation, Katelyn shares the pivotal moments that shaped her journey, from building her early ventures to creating Why We Buy, where she helps marketers understand the psychology behind customer decisions. We dig into what it really takes to reinvent yourself, why connecting with your “why” matters more than ever, and how listening to your customers can spark your next big breakthrough.
Whether you’re navigating a setback, chasing your next chapter, or simply looking for insight into why people say “yes” (or “no”), this episode offers inspiration and actionable takeaways for building something that truly connects.
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Know someone who's flipped the table on their career to follow their life's purpose? Let us know at titan-one.co.
The people who I connect with that I trust the most, they're winning, but they're also losing and learning, right, and they're sharing all of that.
Nicole Gottselig:Hello and welcome to connect with purpose, where we uncover the journeys of remarkable people who have turned their passions into a Purpose Driven Life. I'm your host. Nicole Gottselig, and whether you're on your own quest for meaning or simply curious how others have navigated their paths, this show is here to inspire and guide you along the way. You I am so excited to have the one and only Katelyn Bourgoin on the show today. And I know I probably shouldn't say this, but Katelyn is probably my favorite marketer and LinkedIn personalities online out there. So Katelyn, first of all, welcome to connect with purpose. Thank you for having me. So great to have you here now, before I go into our conversation today, I would love for you to tell the audience who you are and what you do.
Katelyn Bourgoin:Yeah, so I'm a marketer, an entrepreneur, but I think of myself more as a marketer, because I just love marketing and product design, and so my company is why we buy it's a media and education company, and we help marketers and entrepreneurs understand the psychology behind why customers buy so that they can sell more stuff and create stuff people want to buy. Been in this business for a number of years now. It kind of evolved out of my original consultancy. It's a lot of fun. I get to geek out and learn along with my audience.
Nicole Gottselig:What were you chasing at the time, and what were you doing? Who was Katelyn? Then I've
Katelyn Bourgoin:kind of never had a real job. Well, I did for about six months. So I graduated out of a PR program, started working at an ADS agency, super excited about that, and then this person reached out to me, and he was like, Hey, I'm starting up this new agency. We're all independent contractors, but we can come together to work on projects together. And he found me through Twitter, which is like in 2010 and so I ended up stepping away from my first real job and deciding to become an entrepreneur at 25 with no freaking clue what I was doing. And was lucky, because he was kind of my primary client. So he had a couple big clients, because he used to have a big agency that he sold. And so I got to work with him on copy and marketing, and learned so much from him. And at the same time, I got to do my own freelance stuff. And so I had this kind of beautiful scenario of like a foot in both doors. I was kind of his employee, but I was also a free agent to go off and get my own clients. And within three years, my business had blossomed, and I was not doing as much work with him anymore. I built my own team. Think we were at four people, and I decided that I wanted to get out of selling services to sell something more scalable. Before I got there, I'd also co created a restaurant consulting agency that I'd sold. So that happened within like this window. So I'd sold that, and I'm running my branding agency, and like we're working with like clients like clients like Target and holiday, but how do I stop selling time for money? Went into it and decided we're gonna build a two sided marketplace for entrepreneurs to help them to buy, sell and swap skills with each other. Seemed like a great idea to me at the time. It turns out extremely effing hard, and we ended up pivoting, and it became a business network for women entrepreneurs. And from the outside, it looked awesome, like we had, like, Inc Magazine saying we were building the next LinkedIn, we got venture capital. We were getting all this, like, media coverage. We had 1000s of people signing up for the app. Inside, it was not freaking working, like it wasn't sticky. People would sign up. The app was buggy. They would leave. It was a nightmare. I had decided to stop taking clients in my agency, take my whole team and move them into building the startup, and to pay them out of my own pocket, while racking up debt in the process, while we closed our first round of venture capital funding. So I had gone into a bunch of debt. So I'm running this company that is not working. The company died. We ran out of money. I ran out of steam. I had never been that burned out. And I had to sit back and say, What am I going to do when I grew up? And I was incredibly lucky because our lead investor, who had invested at a bunch of other companies in our region, came to us and said, Hey, you guys are really good at the marketing stuff, but not so good at the product stuff. And I was like, Yeah, I know, but we've got all these teams that have the opposite problem. They suck at the marketing stuff, but they're really good at building product and can you work with some of them and help them? So I started consulting again and working with these incredible, brilliant leaders. They were building world changing technology, but they had a big problem, which was that they didn't understand who their best customers were and why those customers were buying. And so the more that I worked with these teams, the more that I saw that this was this consistent pattern, which was like, this is an issue. And so that led me to create customer camp, which was me as working as a consultant, but then also doing a lot of training with early stage companies to help them. Better understand their customers. My big vision was eventually to build an insights agency where we would help people to do this customer research and kind of like feed them insights so they really understood their customers better. Then the pandemic happened, and my whole plan changed. So with a three year span, my husband lost his job, the world shut down. We're relying on my income. We decide to do a business together. We find out I'm pregnant, we have the baby, and then my husband breaks his neck four months later, and thank God. Around the exact same time, some brands started reaching out to me asking if they could sponsor our little tiny newsletter, I built to kind of like, potentially build pipeline for this insights agency.
Nicole Gottselig:I know we can all relate to this. You know, how many of us just see the polished highlight reels? And Caitlin is about to share how failure, debt and burnout actually opened the doors to her next chapter,
Katelyn Bourgoin:that led to the newsletter becoming kind of a little media company, and me switching gears.
Nicole Gottselig:When you tell your story, it doesn't feel like it even phased you or broke you at all, and sometimes it can totally crush people or it can liberate people. So there's
Katelyn Bourgoin:this interesting thing I heard, this quote that I heard the other day that I didn't ever piece together. Shame can only exist in the shadows as soon as you share that thing that you're feeling so ashamed about publicly, and are you're vulnerable about it. So often people, they're understanding, they're actually inspired, because so many people are probably going through something similar. You share it, and in doing that, just that pressure that's built up of it, feeling this horrible secret that you need to keep goes away, and that's a beautiful thing,
Nicole Gottselig:really is. And I know recently you shared about your anxiety on LinkedIn, and I've shared a lot about anxiety on LinkedIn, and have shared about my struggles with it as well. And it's as you say, so as soon as we tell those shame stories, which I was mortified about, and kept it so hidden most of my life, except within the last 10 years. Then people go, Oh, she's real person. I can connect with her. I can work with her.
Katelyn Bourgoin:One of my favorite things that I've discovered is this thing called the pratfall effect, which is that we actually prefer imperfection to perfection because it feels more real. We're kind of hesitant and skeptical when something seems too good.
Nicole Gottselig:This really resonates for me. I mean, how often do we keep things hidden that would actually help us connect more deeply? Katelyn's thoughts on imperfection as a trust builder are really worth sitting with. And
Unknown:I think that this is a lesson that people have learned from social media. I think for a long time, for me, the people who I connect with that I trust the most, they're winning, but they're also losing and learning, right? And they're sharing all of that. And Amy Porterfield says this beautiful thing. She says, share your scars, not your bleeding wounds. And I think there's some truth to that, right like, if you're going through something really, really hard right now and you don't necessarily know what will come from it, it might be valuable to sit back and kind of like, share this in a month's time when you've got some distance from it, when you've had that moment to process it, where you have a lesson that you've learned that can be helpful to somebody else. And I think it's easier to do that when you've had some degree of success. So if you're really early in your career and just trying to kind of like position yourself as an expert and like somebody who's got some credibility, I don't want to see you undermine that by constantly talking about your mistakes, right? But I think for people like us, have been at this for a long time have gotten to the stage where we're at. Doesn't mean that everything's going well.
Nicole Gottselig:There's also this the other side too. It's like, how do we get into and find the spaces where people aren't being so vocal? Like for me, reviews. I remember getting into one of my first B to B SAS companies seven years ago, or something. The first place I went was Google reviews to figure out what the actual company actually did. They kind of told me I actually had no idea. I didn't even know what g2 was, or Capterra, or any of the brands were at that time. And that's what I started going through Google reviews. And that was a copywriter instructor I had in University of Toronto. He said to me, he goes, you want to learn about where you're going to work or what you're doing, go to review sites. I'd never even heard of this before. So what about what people aren't saying out loud? Was there a way to dig into that?
Katelyn Bourgoin:The best way to get it is through interviews, because then it forces them to consider their purchases and share it. But there's always going to be some bias in that. You know, people are going to potentially create memories that didn't exactly exist. They're going to justify things they're not gonna necessarily know.
Nicole Gottselig:Now we get into one of my favorite parts of this conversation, how human behavior is often driven by hidden forces we're barely even aware of, and how marketers can honor that psychology.
Katelyn Bourgoin:And so this is where the behavioral science piece really comes in. One of my favorite concepts is. The like system one and system two brain. Most of your time is spent in the system one, where things are just happening at an automatic rate, and then system two is when you're being analytical and you're thinking, this is a harder effort for our brains, and so we don't like to do it as much because it burns more calories, and so we're averse to it. So when you learn behavioral economics, you learn about a lot of what might be happening in that default system, one mode that people wouldn't be able to tell you. Like, as marketers, we know about urgency and scarcity and reciprocity, but the average person doesn't realize, no, that company did something nice for me, and then later, when they came to promote their thing, I kind of felt indebted to them, so I did it. And so I think behavioral economics gives us a lens to get into things that people don't realize. So for instance, another one of my favorite concepts is the Fresh Start effect, which is this idea that when something happens in life that feels like a fresh start, we're often willing to make changes, because we see there's been this shift between what happened in the past and maybe past challenges that we had, and we feel like we've got this kind of new lease on life, and we can start over. You know, the godfather of all fresh starts is New Year's Eve, right? We all believe that when it's a new year, it's like, I don't care what happened last year, that person she might have had all over, you know, her poop was not in a group, but like, this year, everything's changing. I'm completely different, right? But these fresh starts actually happen at all sorts of stages. Like, every Monday feels like a fresh start for your diet, right? Every beginning of the new quarter feels like, Okay, we might have, like, not hit any of our sales targets last year, but this quarter is going to be different. And so I think when you ask somebody you bought a bunch of new software this month, why they're going to justify it very logically. The Fresh Start might not be something they realize. You know, you can learn these concepts and then you can see how you can apply those to your own marketing. And that's, I'd say, the best way to market to people that don't necessarily have the means of telling you. This is exactly why I did this thing, because they don't know that. That's why they did the thing.
Nicole Gottselig:That's brilliant. You've run really successful cohorts, master classes, authored books, newsletter speaker. Was there ever a moment, or was there, like, something from a client, or any kind of message you got where you just realized, like, yeah, I'm really on my path right now. This is really my purpose. Is there anyone you can think of or remember
Katelyn Bourgoin:the thing that's easy for you and seems hard for everybody else, that's your sweet spot. And so for me, like, I bought a lot of digital products in the early stage of being a marketer, and so many of them were bad. They weren't good at explaining what it is you needed to do. They didn't provide you with tools or resources to actually take the next step. It was like you just got buried in like, 40 hours of video lessons, and it was like, none of this is actually helping me to do the thing that I want to do. And it all, I was always so frustrated. It's like, why is education, particularly marketing education, so shitty? What I realized that I was, like, deeply nerdy about is, like, I love designing educational experiences, because I wouldn't say it's just educational content, because, like, if you haven't actually done something different, as from completing a course or going through a challenge or reading an e book, if you can't do something different immediately, and you're not enabled to do something different immediately, then you didn't learn. You just consumed, right? And so I feel like learning is actually changing your behavior. And so I've always just really enjoyed teaching people, but I the thing I always would go to is like, I don't want them to learn. I want them to do it's like, how can I actually enable them to do the thing and empower them to know why it works? Because that's, I think, the thing that's missing with a lot of people jumping to AI tools to do all of their marketing work. But if you don't know why that was a winner, then you're not gonna be able to replicate it, right? And it's gonna be too hit and miss. So I love the idea of, like, teaching while enabling the action. When
Nicole Gottselig:I hear this, you made marketing feel really fun and interesting to me. You actually really bring people in, and that's by connecting with customers. What have customers taught you? Like in your own entrepreneurial unfoldment,
Katelyn Bourgoin:I'm constantly learning it's incredibly humbling, because we have this real desire as humans to simplify things. Right? We want simple answers because we can those are easier for us to accept. It makes it creates less tension. And when you sit down and you like, so you might come up with this thing in your mind where you're like, our customers look like this. And then you go out and you actually have a bunch of conversations with your customers. You're like, Oh snap, like they actually look very different than what I was expecting. One of my favorite quotes about marketing comes from Rory Sutherland. He says, marketing isn't about being right. It's about being less wrong. And once you start like adopting that mindset, I think it's very freeing, because that's it, like it's you're never going to be right, but you can be less wrong.
Nicole Gottselig:Pausing here, because that's such a that's really the essence of marketing,
Katelyn Bourgoin:and nobody wants to hear. Hear that marketers included, but particularly executives right, like leaders who don't come from marketing backgrounds, they don't think that that should be true, like they need you to get it right, but like at the end of the day, the only way you get it right is by being less wrong. And that takes time, whether we like it or not.
Nicole Gottselig:So as we close out just, you know, very briefly, you have really built a business from zero to, I think, nearly a million in revenue.
Katelyn Bourgoin:Last year. We did almost million this year. We're actually things have slowed down a little bit. We're not necessarily on target to do that. But I also have another product I plan to launch so we'll see it this year, if we end up exceeding that, or if we end up kind of below,
Nicole Gottselig:like did you have to let go of anything in order to achieve that? Because to me, it's just so inspiring to me. Caitlin Burgoyne at the table, child on the way, husband who gets in this horrific accident to now we're talking you're working from home, and you have a business that brought in nearly a million dollars last year. Did you have to let anything go? Like, was your mind, like, going, I know that this is going to happen. Or do you believe in manifestation, or the science behind that, even too, not even the woo, woo stuff.
Katelyn Bourgoin:A lot of what I've been letting go of is, like, my sanity, like, I've been stressed to the max. It's been really hard. The reality of always being launching something new, always play the next campaign. Like, my business is not there's not a lot of stability in my business. It's very much a business of creation, and that's incredibly stressful. And so what I would say to people listing is, like, again, like, that whole like, it looks good from the outside, but inside, inside, I've been really burned out, and I've not taken my foot off the gas because I was so afraid that, if I did, everything would fall apart, right? And maybe that comes from the bankruptcy, maybe that comes from growing up like, you know, in, you know, single mom on welfare, like I have some money issues I probably need to work out, but I've been grinding, grinding, grinding.
Nicole Gottselig:So this next part really stayed with me. Katelyn's honesty about burnout and redefining what enough looks like will resonate if you're feeling stuck or if you're on that never ending hamster wheel of achievement.
Katelyn Bourgoin:The things I'd say that I want to bring into this next season of my life is a real understanding of what enough is for me and an acceptance that I don't need to keep pushing, and then I'll always find a way to be okay. Because I think there's a lot of, you know, a lot of my activity, and a lot of like, my push, push, push, has been coming from a place of fear, and so well, it looks good on the outside, it's not felt particularly good on the inside. There's been big wins, and there's been a lot of burnout, and there's been a lot of not taking time to even stop and celebrate those wins. My husband reminds me of that often. I'm very lucky to have such a supportive partner. But like, he's like, You got to step back and like, appreciate this. But in my mind, I'm like, by no, I need to be launching the next thing. We need to be doing the next campaign. And so there's always this like intensity that's been there. So the thing that I let go of is a bit of my sanity, and the thing that I want to regain is a Stiller and more calm approach to the rest of the year. If I don't, I'm at a stage now where I'm kind of really quite burned out, and I really need to take that pause. And so for people listening that are like, ah, Caitlyn does it. How does she do it? I'll say that it comes with sacrifice, and sacrifices that I don't want to keep making and that you probably shouldn't make either. So figure out what enough is.
Nicole Gottselig:You know, it's not easy. And I always think of that song by Ringo Starr, it don't come easy, right? Like you, like it does. It doesn't come easy. And it's never the grass is always greener. The
Katelyn Bourgoin:reality of what's happened behind the scenes of their business, right? There's a lot of people who are like, you know, this is how great everything's going. I went from like, zero to a million in like, a year, and like, ever. And like, like, you know, I only work four hours a week. And like, I think there's a lot of smoke and mirrors of people who want to sell you stuff, and I don't love that, so I think that be inspired. But also, like, take time to decide what's enough for you. And a book that was really helpful for me on this is the book wanting the author, I'm blanking on his name, but like, it's, it's based on behavioral science, and it's about this idea of mimetic desire. We often don't know what we want because we haven't really taken the time to deeply understand ourselves and to know what that what makes us really fulfilled. And so we mirror and mimic what we see other people wanting. And in a world where social media is showing us this constant feed of this is how great my life is, you start to think, oh, I want that, right? Like I thought I wanted to be a solopreneur. And through the, you know, through reading this book, and also through the experience of being a solo printer, I very much realize I don't want that. It's incredibly lonely for me. It's very overwhelming. It's not what I want. But I think that there's it's if you're not cautious about really being thoughtful designing your life, you can end up chasing things that you think you want. Want just because you're mirroring what other people want.
Nicole Gottselig:They felt that. And actually, something that came to me when you were speaking is, it's lonely at the top,
Katelyn Bourgoin:yeah, it's lonely. I mean, it's it's lonely and it's lonely depending on how you build the company, too, right? Like, I think I've always had a lot of like, envy for CO but people who have a co founder or two that are their partner in crime were in this together. And all of my businesses I've been I started it on my own. In my tech startup, I ended up having a friend join me like, you know, within a year in we didn't have the same, you know, stakes for me, if I'm gonna work this hard, I want somebody to do it with. So I think there's a reason why a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs are often the ones that had a strong founding team, because this is just hard to do alone.
Nicole Gottselig:You continue to inspire me and your authenticity, your openness, and so I'm so happy we finally got to sit down, and you finally got to be on, connect with purpose, because you, to me, are just epitomize somebody who has connected their life with purpose.
Katelyn Bourgoin:And I'm still a work in progress, and I'm still figuring that out. So thank you for letting me share with your audience. I'm hoping that maybe we you can have me on again in a year's time, and I'll have an update on how I've been shifting. I would absolutely
Nicole Gottselig:love that it was such a pleasure to have you here. Katelyn
Katelyn Bourgoin:thank you for having me on
Nicole Gottselig:Thanks for being part of this episode of connect with purpose. If you found today's conversation inspiring, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps us reach more listeners like you who are seeking meaningful stories and insights, and remember living with purpose isn't some far off destination. It's a journey that we're all on together. So if you aren't living your purpose fully right now, don't worry. You're still alive. Your mission on earth is not complete. So until next time, I'm Nicole gotzelig, and this is connect with purpose.
Mark Glucki:Thanks for joining us on connect with purpose, produced by Titan One. Connect With Purpose is hosted by Nicole Gottselig, executive producer Mark Glucki, producer Sian Sue editor in Sound Design by fina Charleson, show creator Scott lanaway, special thanks to Bernard Magri at beast collective and Mark Edwards editing Monica Lowe and Dave Chau design and Charlie the office dog. Do you have an inspiring story, or maybe you know someone who's followed their passion to find a new purpose? Reach out at connectwithpurpose.ca we'd love to hear from you.
