This week, I met an early-stage software entrepreneur who’s grown his revenue from $400k last year to about $2.5m and intends to close the year at about $4m. That’s about 6x so far this year and around 10x at year’s end. What’s the secret to this hyper growth?

The most important thing is a great software product. They’ve iterated over the last two years and finally found something that resonates with customers. The big unlock was social media marketing. They’ve been using a strategy that involves paying an army of smaller creators for content, then repurposing it as paid ads across social media platforms.

The idea is to get as many shots on goal as possible so you can find the handful of videos that have viral potential. Once you find those home-run videos, you run them as ads with a ton of money behind them. Of course, you have to run the numbers to know your customer acquisition cost, payback period, etc.

I really like this strategy, and I think it’s worth studying for entrepreneurs who are selling products or goods to individual consumers online.

This week, I listened to two founders debate a well-known quote:

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

~Unknown

One founder thought the saying holds true and means you should do everything to the best of your ability, regardless of how big or small the task is. The other founder thinks you should be selective. He believes you have limited bandwidth, and you should allocate it accordingly based on the importance of the task. Some things don’t require perfection. Done is better than perfect for things that don’t require perfection. But for items of high importance, a high level of execution is required.

Two interesting perspectives.

A few years ago, I shared the power of sending update emails with the founder of an AI start-up. Shortly after that, he began sending updates to investors and supporters. I was included on the list, and even though we haven’t chatted in over a year, I’ve been following his progress closely.

This week, he sent an update notifying everyone that he’s shutting down his start-up. His reason is that the market he’s in is too competitive and consolidation has begun. Everyone is building essentially the same AI product, so I’m assuming margins were either not great or nonexistent.

This founder raised seven figures of venture capital. Interestingly, he’s shutting the company down with tons of cash in the bank. He has $1.1 million in cash, but instead of burning through it in a hyper-competitive market, he’s returning it to investors. He plans to work on something more promising.

I’m sure there’s more to this story, and I’ll reach out to the founder. My gut tells me that he’s optimizing for the best and highest use of his time in his prime years and concluded that his start-up isn’t the best use of his time anymore.