The Cost of Playing It Safe
When cutting costs might be the most expensive mistake you’re making.
In the early 2010s, startup culture had a script. You raised a seed round, then a Series A, then another. You hired fast, spent faster, blitzscaled if you could—and if you weren’t burning cash, were you even building?
The goal was growth, and growth was usually fueled by paid media. Facebook ads were cheap, CAC was king, and if your ROAS (return on ad spend—how much revenue you earn for every dollar spent on advertising) looked healthy, you were golden. It didn’t really matter if the business itself was profitable—as long as the next round came through.
But somewhere between Apple’s crackdown on ad tracking, rising interest rates, and VC pullbacks, the script changed. Founders suddenly had to make the math work—not just for investors, but for survival. We’re now in an era of capital discipline, bootstrapping, and real margin-focused metrics. As I’ve said before in The Path, this moment rewards craft. It rewards builders who can grow without burning out—or burning through their runway.
And yet, even in this new climate, a lot of businesses still operate on old assumptions. They think high ROAS means they’re in the clear. They slash ad budgets to “save money”—only to wonder why their revenue stalls or worse, why they’re still in the red.
That’s because most founders are working with partial math. They’re looking at top-line metrics instead of bottom-line health. They’re spending too little to get meaningful results, then blaming the platform, the market, or the customer. But as it turns out, the problem isn’t the tools—it’s how we’re taught to measure success in the first place.
Which brings me to this week’s featured guest. In a world where founders are told to grow at all costs—or not grow at all—Adam Callinan, Eggs! The Podcast alumni and founder of Pentane, offers a third option: do the math first.
The profit-first founder, meet Adam Callinan
Adam Callinan is a serial entrepreneur and former medical device executive who took an unconventional route to startup success. He didn’t raise big rounds. He didn’t hire a bloated team. Instead, he co-founded Bottlekeeper—a simple, smart consumer product—and scaled it into an eight-figure business with zero employees and no outside capital. After appearing on Shark Tank (and filming at $10M+ trailing revenue), Bottlekeeper was eventually acquired by a private equity firm, thanks in large part to a patent portfolio that Adam had the foresight to build and defend early.
After the exit, Adam took a step back—literally. He moved to Montana, took up woodworking, and stayed intentionally offline. But like many entrepreneurs, he couldn’t sit still for long. When he started advising e-commerce brands from his personal portfolio, he discovered a recurring blind spot: most founders didn’t actually know whether their businesses were profitable—or why. That insight became the seed for his new venture: Pentan.
Pentane is a finance-intelligence platform built to demystify profitability for sub-$50M brands. But more than just software, it reflects Adam’s philosophy: that smart growth starts with contribution margin, not gut instinct. That the biggest risk in business isn’t spending too much—it’s spending too little on the wrong things. His mix of no-BS pragmatism and deep operational knowledge makes him a rare voice in today’s noisy founder landscape. When Adam speaks, numbers follow.
How the new rules of search are forcing a smarter kind of marketing
In a world obsessed with growth hacks and fundraising headlines, Adam Callinan stands out by focusing on something far less glamorous—and far more sustainable: the math. His take is simple but uncommon: understand your numbers, and build a business that actually works on paper before you scale. In our conversation, Adam dropped practical gems for anyone building in 2025 and beyond. From navigating ad spend and contribution margin to avoiding the headcount trap, his advice is a field guide for founders trying to grow without burning out—or burning cash.
“You might be losing money because you’re not spending enough.”
Insight: Most founders try to cut ad budgets when margins are tight—but under-spending often leads to stalled growth and continued losses. The real move? Model your contribution margin and determine how much you need to spend to break even or hit target profit.
“High ROAS doesn’t mean you’re profitable. It might just mean you’re underfunded.”
Insight: A 10x return on ad spend (ROAS) feels great—until you realize it’s not generating enough overall revenue to cover fixed expenses. Stop optimizing for vanity metrics. Start mapping ad performance to actual profit targets.
“We built an eight-figure brand with zero employees.”
Insight: You don’t need a big team to build a big business. Instead of hiring, build a stack of integrated tools and contractors that scale with revenue. Treat every new hire like a fixed-cost anchor—only add one if you can’t automate it first.
“We started with a beach video, a landing page, and $500 in Google ads.”
Insight: Before you build, validate. Use scrappy MVP tactics—ads, no-code forms, basic funnels—to test if strangers (not just your friends) will pay for the idea. Real demand comes with a credit card.
“I wanted to build a business I could run from anywhere in the world—with internet and no team.”
Insight: Design your business around your non-negotiables—not just your ambitions. Whether it’s remote freedom, family time, or creative autonomy, define your guardrails early so success doesn’t come at the cost of your life.
“If you don’t know your contribution margin, you don’t know if your business is working.”
Insight: Contribution margin—the profit left after variable costs—is the single most important metric in business. Track it daily. It tells you if you’re on track to cover fixed expenses and hit profitability.
“Startups have the advantage of moving fast. But most of them waste it.”
Insight: Speed is your edge—use it. Run quick experiments. Make decisions with imperfect data. Ship ugly, useful things before you worry about polish. Your first mover advantage is in iteration, not perfection.
“The problem isn’t the platform. It’s the assumptions.”
Insight: Blaming Meta, Shopify, or “the algorithm” is easy. But it’s often operator error. Audit your assumptions, not just your dashboards. Most performance problems are strategy problems in disguise.
“Give the idea away first. If someone pays you to keep doing it—now you’ve got something.”
Insight: Before you build software or productize a service, manually do the work. If someone pays you for your messy version, you’ve validated both the demand and your pricing power.
“Every minute I spend on work is a minute I’m trading away from my kids.”
Insight: Time is the ultimate cost center. Treat your calendar like a balance sheet. If an opportunity can’t return more than what you’re sacrificing, it’s a bad trade—even if it looks good on paper.
Clarity Is the competitive edge
If there’s a thread that runs through Adam Callinan’s career, it’s this: clarity over chaos.
Whether it’s choosing not to hire, walking away from paid media, or building systems before spending money, Adam’s moves are deliberate. He doesn’t just chase growth—he designs it. And in a time when so many founders are still operating on noise and instinct, that kind of discipline feels almost radical.
His message is simple but transformative: the math doesn’t lie. If you can understand your numbers—not just the revenue, but the mechanics behind your margins—you can steer with confidence. You don’t have to scale recklessly. You don’t have to wait for permission. And you don’t have to burn out to build something great.
As the startup world continues its shift from funding-fueled chaos to margin-minded control, builders who know their numbers will win. The founders who think like operators—and the operators who act like owners. That’s the real unlock. Not louder. Not faster. Just smarter.
Thanks for reading,
—Ryan
Ready for more?
Catch Adam Callinan’s interview in its entirety on Eggs! The Podcast.
Don’t miss a show! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or really anywhere great podcasts are found.
Path Picks
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Note: The Path Weekly is reader-supported. As such, I may be using affiliate links below. If you want to support the newsletter at no additional cost to you, please consider using the links below. If you’d rather not, most items below are widely available anywhere you want to shop. Thanks! –R
Reading list
If you're looking to go deeper on the themes from this week's newsletter, here are a few books that pair well with the conversation and offer a broader perspective:
Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
The perfect philosophical companion to Adam’s approach. This book flips the traditional accounting model—Revenue – Expenses = Profit—into Revenue – Profit = Expenses, forcing founders to prioritize profitability from day one. Tangible, easy to implement, and deeply aligned with this week’s theme.The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Still essential. Especially relevant to Adam’s insistence on validating demand before building. The MVP-to-market feedback loop, plus the “build-measure-learn” framework, pairs directly with his Bottlekeeper origin story.
More to explore
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Eggs! The Podcast: https://www.eggscast.com
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