I recently sent this email to Wes and Tyler:

“Guys I guess this is stating the obvious, but it’s so clear to me that when you don’t have any money to spend you are forced to be creative, and that’s how you innovate and come up with cool new ideas and elegant solutions. Let’s always always always take that approach, no matter how much revenue we are driving, so that we always force ourselves to innovate.”

Needless to say, they agreed. But you know what, it’s easy to lose site of this philosophy once you start growing quickly and turn profitable. It’s easy in business to think that since you have money, you should find creative ways to spend it. But if you pretend you don’t have money, you force yourself to figure out creative ways to do things as well (or often better) than you could with money. And you reap the additional benefits of enjoying the challenge of dreaming up creative solutions, and simply having more fun.

There’s a cool quote in a book called Founders At Work from Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple: “All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.” I couldn’t agree more!

Keepin’ It Creative,

Wil