Why You Should Stay Single and Not Marry

Staying single and frugal gives you the power to take calculated risks.

Recently I was thinking about all the risks I've taken in my business. And I also thought about the times when I took those risks. I found a pattern.

When I graduated in 2008, I had no job in hand. But I lived with my parents and had no people depending on me. I also didn't have to pay rent or spend money on groceries.

I started a motorcycle blog and wrote 1 article every day. After 6 months, the blog was making around $200 a month (15,000 INR). Instead of taking that money out and using it for my personal expenses, I reinvested all of that back into the growth of the blog.

I kept doing that for 4 years and that's how the blog grew to more than 1 million page views per month.

I did not feel like taking the money out because I had nothing to lose. Worst case, I would lose all the money that I reinvested, and come back to square one and I had no problem with that. I started from square one anyway.

For me, it was a game that I played. Where I went all in, every month.

The mindset of being ok to come back to square one is what helped me grow something in the first place.

Because growth requires capital reinvesting capital back into the business comes with the risk of losing that capital. And you can only do that if you are ok coming back to square one.

When Elon Musk had a huge payout from the sale of PayPal, he invested $100m into SpaceX knowing that there was a 90% chance he would lose all the money. He almost did because 3 of his rockets blew up.

He just about made it with the 4th rocket reaching orbit and NASA signed a contract with them for $1.6B after that. Today, SpaceX is a $53B company.

This is the exact reason why most people are not able to quit their jobs and start a business. They cannot risk going back to square one. They are stuck in the hamster wheel.

I got married in 2012 (the first time) and moved out of my parent's house. And all of a sudden I had to spend for personal expenses. It was not much. But I still had to spend around 20,000 per month to run the house. I was just 24 and the burden of having to run a family was imposed on me.

I couldn't take the money out of my motorcycle blog because money being taken out of it would mean that the blog wouldn't grow as much as it could. I am a liability to the business by burdening the business. The money that I am taking out could've been reinvested back into the business to grow it further.

I panicked and sold the blog. I sold it for $25000 (12.5 lakhs approx at that time). The dollar was around 55 at that time. I had an exit. I also didn't feel like you could grow a business through display advertising.

Then I took a job in Bangalore. Why? Because now I have to take care of personal expenses. House rent, groceries, and whatnot.

I had needs because now I am a family man. In a few years, my daughter was born. More expenses. This went on until 2016. I couldn't quit my job because I had needs and didn't have the guts to burn down my (little) savings.

By 2016 I was so frustrated with being in jobs and I couldn't take it anymore.

I still had family and expenses, but I took risks. I took a part of my salary and started investing in Facebook Ads for lead generation.

I started nurturing the leads and sold some courses to my list. I generated some revenue and started reinvesting back into lead generation.

I had my job and salary coming in for personal expenses, and I did the same thing I used to do.

Reinvest 100% of the revenue back into the business. Then I quit my job. Again, I had to burden the business with my personal expenses. I got stuck and the business stagnated again.

The courage to reinvest 100% of the revenue back into the business just doesn't come when you depend on the business for personal expenses.

I don't know whether it was the stress of having to manage my personal expenses while doing a job, or maybe the relationship ran its course, or maybe we were just not right for each other anymore, or it was the 7-year itch, me and my wife at that time just couldn't stand each other and decided to separate.

By 2018 I was single again. It was not a completely thought-out decision. Such decisions are never planned properly. It just happened. One thing escalated to another and things fell apart. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise.

Guess what, no high personal expenses anymore. I didn’t have to pay any alimony because they took away all my property as a one-time settlement.

Yes, there was a little bit, but for a man to survive by himself, he doesn't need much. To take care of myself in terms of living expenses, nutrition, and some solo travel, my cost was just 20,000 a month. That means I could survive for an entire year at just 2.4 lakhs.

My business was making 10+ lakhs a month in revenue and more than 1cr a year in revenue. 2.4 Lakhs a year was 2.5% of my entire business revenue.

Guess what I started doing again? I started reinvesting all the revenue back into the business and started growing it from scratch slowly again.

For a year or two I was stuck at 10 lakhs a month in revenue but I was investing almost 40-50% of that back into lead generation.

I was generating 1000+ leads every day. My email list grew by leaps and bounds. That period of lead generation was still the best thing I have done to date because a significant portion of those leads are on my email list today.

You are part of this list if you are reading this and you are here because you opted-in for one of the lead magnets that I had advertised on Facebook Ads or Google Ads.

By the end of 2019, I had an active list of 300,000+ subscribers.

As I said before, I had nothing to lose. I had already lost everything in my divorce. And I had low personal expenses.

So I launched the Internship Program Batch 1.

I was crazy enough to promise 15,500 cashback on a 10,000 rs program.

How crazy is that?

1500 people were live in that webinar (I had to take a 3,000-person Zoom plan). 500 people (33%) converted on the same day. That was 50 lakhs in revenue hitting our account on a single day.

In Batch 1, we made no profits. Almost all the money was given back as cashback. But it built such a strong brand that I continued to launch up to 27 batches in that program over the next 2.5 years.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you were a part of my internship program.

We trained more than 12,000 students in this program and created a massive impact in the market. My personal brand grew as a result of this scale.

Part of the reason for such a scale was again my being low on my personal expenses. By 2020 I had come back to Salem from Bangalore and again, was able to live with my parents with no personal expenses.

I had no ongoing commitments toward family (I had given up everything I had already). Being single, without anyone depending on me, was a superpower. The people who have needs just couldn't compete with me.

By 2021, I was spending 20 lakhs a month on ads. That was more than 1 lakh leads a month. It was possible because of my bullish behavior of reinvesting revenue back into the business while staying low on my personal expenses.

This philosophy will remain for the rest of my entrepreneurial life. I will be aggressively reinvesting back into the business. That's what gives me the kick. The high. To see things scale to big numbers and fast.

If you are an entrepreneur and want to scale, but if you have personal expenses, then sell some assets and keep 3-5 years of liquid cash for personal expenses.

That will help you treat the business as a separate unit without having to strain the business for your personal expenses.

As the business landscape becomes more competitive, you have to be innovative with your cash flow.

The big money will come in the form of equity value later when you scale to big numbers.

Be frugal and just take the minimum amount required from your business for survival (at least for 3-5 years).

That's the only way to grow a business that I know of.

I hope this post made some sense and rubbed off my thinking pattern on you.

Do you just want to survive, or do you want to thrive?

You decide for yourself.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju