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Host Sohin Shah speaks with Linnette Le, co-founder and COO of MyStudio and co-owner of InCourage Martial Arts. She shares her path from consulting to building a multi-location business and a fully bootstrapped software company.

The conversation takes a deeply personal turn as Linnette describes the nine months she lived in a children’s hospital while her infant son fought leukemia. The experience reshaped her views on time, leadership, and risk, and strengthened her belief that systems and software should give owners the freedom to step away when life demands it.

Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:

1. Start with a real, painful problem
   MyStudio began as an internal tool to fix specific operational issues at InCourage Martial Arts. The pain was real enough that other owners started asking to use it—product–market fit followed the problem, not the other way around.
2. Pair deep domain expertise with a beginner’s mind
   Tu brought decades of martial arts and studio ownership; Linnette brought a fresh student’s perspective and digital transformation. That combination—“inside the industry” plus “new eyes”—let them see gaps others missed.
3. Borrow what works from other industries
   Instead of reinventing the wheel, they studied tools like Shopify and Eventbrite and adapted patterns. Great innovation often means creatively recombining existing ideas in a niche that’s been ignored.
4. Bootstrapping forces discipline and clarity
   MyStudio has been profitable since year one and remains 100% founder-owned. With no outside funding to fall back on, every dollar had to work hard. That constraint sharpened focus on real customer value and lean operations.
5. Systems should buy owners freedom
   When Jayce was in the hospital for nine months, strong systems and software meant the martial arts business could keep running, and key metrics were available from a hospital room. Linnette wants other owners to have the same ability to step away without the business collapsing.
6. Surviving a true crisis resets the risk bar
   After navigating a life-threatening illness for a newborn and countless ambulance rides, most business “fires” feel manageable. Linnette now asks, “Is it cancer? Is someone going to die?” If not, it’s a problem to be solved, not a catastrophe.
7. Hyper-intentional scheduling protects what matters most
   Family time, work blocks, weekly date nights, and kid routines all go on the calendar. If it isn’t scheduled, it’s vulnerable to being taken over by someone else’s priorities. Structure becomes the guardrail that protects relationships.
8. Lead by modeling the behavior you want
   Motherhood and leadership converged into one principle: children and teams copy what they see, not just what they hear. If patience, feedback, or transparency are expected, they have to show up consistently in the leader’s own actions.
9. Assume positive intent to keep the culture healthy
   As an owner, Linnette encourages teams to interpret decisions and feedback through the lens of “best intent,” and in return, she treats anonymous feedback with the same generosity.
10. Don’t let fear of ‘no’ limit your life
    To her younger self: try more, risk more, and don’t measure self-worth by how many people say yes. Most of the opportunities that shaped her journey, from entrepreneurship to OPM, came from being willing to step forward even when rejection was possible.

Book: The Road Less Traveled