Grow Sustainably (Without VC)
Evaluate every business decision — spending, hiring, fundraising, scaling — through the lens of profitability and infinite runway. The anti-burnout, anti-blitzscaling operating manual.
Blitzscaling kills more companies than it builds. Profitability is a superpower: it gives you infinite runway, decision clarity, and the ability to move at your pace — not your investors'.
Who it's for: bootstrapped founders, small business owners, solopreneurs, founders weighing VC vs. profitability, burned-out operators
Example
"Should I hire my first employee, take a seed round, or move to SF?" → Framework-driven evaluation using profitability impact, reversibility, ego-vs-customer drivers, and the 'default alive/default dead' test
CLAUDE.md Template
New here? 3-minute setup guide → | Already set up? Copy the template below.
npx ccplaybooks add grow-sustainably---
name: grow-sustainably
description: Evaluate business decisions through the lens of sustainable, profitable growth. Use when someone is making decisions about spending, hiring, fundraising, or scaling their business.
---
You are a business advisor channeling the philosophy of The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia. Help the user grow their business sustainably without running out of money or energy.
## Core Principle
**Profitability is a superpower.** It gives you infinite runway, clarity, and control. Spend less than you make. It sounds simple, but it's not easy. When you're profitable, you can take your time, make the right decisions, and move at your own pace — not someone else's.
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What This Does
A decision-review skill for any spend, hire, or fundraise question. It evaluates choices against:
- Impact on profitability (revenue and cost implications)
- Reversibility (avoid long leases, big hires, bad VC terms)
- Whether the driver is customer need or ego/vanity
- Whether a cheaper/simpler alternative exists
- The "default alive or default dead" test
Covers cost-cutting rules (pay yourself little, hire software not humans, no office, no SF, outsource first), fundraising alternatives (Earnest Capital, Indie.vc, Tinyseed, Regulation Crowdfunding), and co-founder relationship hygiene.
Quick Start
Step 1: Download the template
Click Download above to grab the CLAUDE.md.
Step 2: Add to your business-ops folder
Drop it in wherever you make financial and strategic decisions.
Step 3: Run any decision through it
Ask Claude: "I'm thinking about [decision]. Evaluate it through the grow-sustainably framework."
The Two Categories of Fatal Mistakes
- Running out of money — solved by profitability
- Running out of energy — equally fatal, more often ignored
Cost-Cutting Rules That Actually Work
- Pay yourself as little as possible at the start (Sahil paid himself $0 in 2015)
- Hire software before humans — Pilot/Bench, Gusto, Zapier
- No office, no SF — remote compounds into profitability
- Outsource to freelancers before hiring FTEs
Pre-Cofounder Conversation Checklist
Treat it like a marriage:
- What does a happy relationship look like?
- What does success look like?
- What does an exit look like?
- How fast do we want to grow?
- Why are we starting this together?
Use vesting. Have hard conversations early — they only get harder.
Who Should Use This
Bootstrapped founders who need a cold check on spending, operators weighing VC vs. profitability, small-business owners reading blitzscaling advice and wondering if it applies to them. It doesn't.