Neat™ did $1M last year. We’re trying to do it in 3 months. This is Week 3 of “The Million Dollar Summer.”

Here’s the question that keeps me up at night:

Can we actually afford to grow this fast?

Most founders think the biggest risk of scaling is demand.

Can we get enough customers?
Will the ads work?
Will people buy?

That’s not our problem right now.

Our problem is cash.

Here’s what nobody talks about with fast growth: inventory replacement costs money before the revenue from your last batch catches up. You sell 500 shirts. Great. Now you need to immediately fund the next 500 before that first batch has fully converted to cash in your account.

And if you want to double then that should be 1000 shirts.

The faster you grow, the bigger that gap gets.

We modeled this out recently and it was a sobering exercise.

The math works — but only if we’re disciplined about how we spend, when we reorder, and how much we put into ads versus inventory.

So we made a decision.

We’ve tapped into a line of credit to help fund the growth. It’s not something I take lightly. Bootstrapped founders don’t love debt. But the way I see it — if the unit economics work, if the CAC holds, and if we execute the summer plan, the return justifies the risk.

It’s a bet on ourselves.

Right now we need to go from 200 new customers a week to 500. That’s big growth in one summer. The demand is there. The product works. The ads are improving every week.

But none of that matters if we run out of cash and inventory before August.

The line of credit buys us the runway to find out.

Boring stuff. High stakes stuff.

The Million Dollar Summer isn’t just a marketing goal. It’s a cash flow management challenge with real money on the line.

More next week.

(This photo is me holding up the paperwork needed so we can YOLO with the banks money. Kidding . . . just in case our banker is reading this. This photo was not made with AI and involved zero showers.)

1M