· Letter
You didn't overpay. You under-committed.
Why the thing you bought to grow became the thing you resent
Originally published on Substack (opens in a new tab). Subscribe (opens in a new tab) for the next letter.
There’s a particular way to waste money that almost nobody warns you about.
It isn’t buying the wrong thing. It’s buying the right thing and going half-in.
I see it with founders all the time. They invest in something real. A system, a process, a way of working that genuinely moves revenue. They mean it when they sign. And then the week happens.
The system needs twenty minutes a day. They give it twenty minutes when there’s nothing more urgent, which is never. It needs a weekly rhythm. They run it for two weeks, miss one, then quietly stop.
Six months later they look at what they spent and feel cheated.
But the system didn’t fail them. It was never switched on.
Here’s the line I keep coming back to. Anything worth doing becomes a very expensive hobby the moment you go half-in.
A gym membership you use twice a month is the most expensive way to not exercise. A CRM nobody updates is the most expensive way to forget your customers. And a growth system you run when you feel like it is the most expensive way to stay exactly where you are.
The cost isn’t the invoice. The cost is paying for the outcome and not collecting it.
Originally published on Substack (opens in a new tab). Subscribe (opens in a new tab) for the next letter.