Well, well, well — look who’s back in your inbox.

Since we last connected:

• My business has grown 6% in revenue and 418% in EBITDA 🤑

• My family has grown by +1 baby (=3) 🍼

• And even I’ve grown (I hope) 🤔

I’m excited to slide into your Sunday with this new newsletter. 

It’s a 5-minute read, packed with bite-size learnings from running my business, and featuring killer interviews with founders…

👉 Which today includes the legendary Sam Parr. 

My goal is to address real problems that I and other founders are facing — so we can all build better businesses. 

Have a story to share, or a founder you want to hear from? Hit reply and tell me.

Now, let’s dive into our first issue with quite possibly the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and what Sam Parr has to say about it.

–Aleksandr

🤦 I lost millions because of my ignorance

In early 2023, Lemon.io was in a really rough place.

And it was all my fault.

Back in 2022, our revenue was on track to more than double what we earned the previous year. That gave me confidence to pour as much money as possible into growth.

I doubled-down on the (in)famous “grow at all costs” strategy — typically reserved for VC-backed startups. 

But I was doing it with our own money. 🤦

It was working for a little while, but toward the end of the year, the market slowed down significantly. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop us from spending like a congressman up for reelection. 🤑

That’s when things got bad. Take a look, and feel my pain:

I was miserable. I didn’t know how to fix it. I just kept asking myself:

• Are we gonna make it?

• Do I sell the business?

• Am I simply a dismal failure?

Suffice to say, I was pretty distracted when I bumped into a friend’s brother —a businessman in his 70s— who had recently acquired a failing commercial laundry business.

This guy was droning on about how he had read some book that helped him turn the business into an ultra-profitable cash cow.

I nodded along politely, while thinking to myself, “that’s cute, old man — now what kind of side hustle can I launch so my family doesn’t starve?” (I blame Twitter for this).

I soon turned to a couple of hustle legends for guidance, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, with an episode of their My First Million podcast.

Their guest that day was Andrew Wilkinson, founder of Tiny — a portfolio of digital-first companies known as the “Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet”, with a valuation at the time of ~$600 million. 🤯

At the end of the podcast Andrew shared his thoughts on why founders should NOT reinvest cashflow for the sake of growing at all costs:

It was like he was speaking directly to me.

To support his bold position, Andrew discussed the importance of prioritizing profit using principles from a book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz.

The framework is simple:

❌ Most businesses recognize profit as something that comes after you’ve paid your expenses: 

👉 Sales – Expenses = Profit

✅ By putting profit first, you establish the profit margin you desire, then manage your expenses appropriately, based on what’s left:

👉 Sales – Profit = Expenses

By implementing Profit First  into business operations:

• Predictable profit flows in each month. 

• Wasteful spending is eliminated.

• And you’re forced to get creative with how you grow your business.

This practice changed my life. 

At Lemon.io, we scrupulously followed the steps in Profit First. We immediately eliminated mountains of wasteful spending, and quickly began earning a profit.

If I had only discovered this book earlier, my company would have been a more stable business, a happier workplace, and we all would have made much more money along the way.

Well… 😬

A few months ago, I reconnected with the laundry guy, and was thrilled to share the story of my newfound success with him. I said “you’ve got to read Profit First, it will change your life.”

He grinned and said:

“Dude, that’s the book I recommended to you a year ago.” 🤦

I waited for advice to come in a shiny package from a business “celebrity”, but life-changing advice can come from unexpected places. 

Today, that unexpected place could be…

This newsletter? 🤞

P.S. — I’ve purchased over 50 copies of Profit First for friends and colleagues. If you’re a founder who wants to read it, hit reply and tell me about yourself. I’d be happy to send you a copy.

Q&A with Sam Parr

Earlier this week, I caught up with the man whose podcast changed my life — legendary founder, Sam Parr.

Here’s what he had to say about profitability. 👇️ 

Q: The Hustle was profitable from the early days. What lessons from that experience do you think entrepreneurs could apply to their own businesses today?

SAM: First — Act like you're a Korean immigrant, and your startup is a convenience store. 

There's this bodega I go to. I've become buds with the family who runs it. They're from Korea. They drive to Costco to get the stuff they sell, they give me free stuff sometimes since I'm a good customer, they smile, and always greet me nicely and say "here for the usual?". 

Too many startup founders get fancy. They say things like "does this scale?", or they get super into processes. They worry about which SaaS tool is the right one to start with. 

I think until you hit $10m in revenue or so, most everything should be done manually, without much process, without thoughts of scale. 

Treat your startup like a small business. Get to know your customers. Be scrappy. Treat your business like your family depends on it, and do whatever it takes to serve customers and make a profit.

Second — Go fast. I think companies should measure progress in weeks, not quarters. 

Third — Pick 1, maybe 2 metrics. That's it. 

At The Hustle we had this meeting we called "the numbers meeting". It was basically just saying "how many subscribers do we have and did we grow at least 3% from the week before?".

That was it. 

Social media didn't matter, Twitter didn't matter, nothing else mattered. Because I knew if I grew my subscribers, revenue would grow.

Q: What book changed your life, and why?

SAM: It’s called Rewind. It’s a fictional book about a guy who dies in his 50s and gets to constantly relive his life. 

The day I finished it, I booked a trip for me and my parents to go to Europe. 

Life's so short. Make it rich. It made me realize what's important — which is my family, my health, my friends, my fulfillment, in that order. Everything else is dumb.

Catch you next Sunday! Don’t forget to hit reply and tell me what you think of this newsletter.