"Don't be cheap with your business. Spend as much as you can as quickly as you can."

Verdi Kapuku is a "cheapo" in his personal life, but when it comes to business, the only thing that he wants to save is time.

And as someone who is trying to get his side hustle, Appshine, off the ground while raising a family and working full-time as a senior software engineer, time is tight.

I caught up with him to understand his outlook on time and money. Let's take a peek. 👇

Influence and abundance

💰 "Money is a tool of influence. It comes mainly from self-education." —Verdi

Verdi grew up in what he refers to as a "relatively poor household". He was taught that money was meant to be saved; not spent. In his family, it was viewed as a scarce resource.

But he doesn't believe that to be true.

💰 "Money is abundant and it's a tool meant to be spent to acquire more of it in an infinitely growing feedback loop until, one day, you have enough money to materially influence not only your life and your family's lives, but the world around you too." —Verdi

In fact, he says this is the number one principle of business: You must spend money in order to make money.

💰 "Don't be cheap with your business. Spend as much as you can as quickly as you can. Not every task deserves your time. Especially if you can hire cheaply for that skill." —Verdi

As he says it, you have two resources: time and money. Time is finite. Money is not. You can earn your money back, but you can't earn your time back. Therefore, he feels it's foolish to save the money that you just spent time earning. Invest it in saving future time.

💰 "Time is the most valuable resource! I get it, it's a necessary trade to make a living in the beginning. But find ways to spend money to get back your time. That's what the best entrepreneurs do to grow very big businesses very fast." —Verdi

A cheapo who invests in business

While Verdi loves to spend on his business, he considers himself a "cheapo" in his personal life. He says he barely spends money, not because he doesn't want things, but because he wants wealth more.

That's probably why two out of three of the "personal splurges" he mentioned are actually business investments.

The first splurge is travel. He makes a point to travel to maintain relationships.

A mentor once told him that whenever he had a decent-sized contract on the line, he would book a flight and go sign it in person. According to the mentor, customers are way more likely to sign on the dotted line with the person who was committed enough to meet them in person.

Verdi took that advice to heart, and not just with clients. He says he likes to maintain the relationships that he has built, particularly if they might be fruitful one day.

💰 "Especially if this person is smart, ambitious, and working on an interesting career trajectory, then I for sure want to be able to give them a phone call in 6 years when they're the CPO of XYZ and I need a favor. It's too late to try to make friends with people when they're already powerful. You gotta get to them before they become too important." —Verdi

The second splurge is tech. He buys the latest tech because he knows it will benefit his work and his ability to earn. But he admits that this is half true and half an excuse to have the latest gadgets.

The last splurge... well that's just for him. It's steakhouses. He says he dines out at a steakhouse at least once a quarter and typically spends $200-300. Why?

💰 "It's a way for me to live in the present and enjoy the fruit of my hard work." —Verdi

Hard numbers

Let's take a quick look at what he's bringing in:

• Appshine revenue: ~$4,090/mo
• Founder pay: ~$400/quarter
• Additional funding: $165k/year
• Personal account: $400
• Business account: $600

$400 a quarter isn't much. But he says that, frankly, he doesn't need that money and he'd rather reinvest revenue into growth — that way he can get to $1M/year faster.

Here are his business expenses:

• Total: $938+
• Freelancers: $500+/mo
• Customer acquisition: $200/mo
• Figma: $50
• Slack: $45
• G-suite emails: $40
• Trello: $15
• Ghost CMS: $33
• Loom: $15
• GPT-4 plans: $40

As far as customer acquisition, that's mostly advertising on Upwork, and he has started experimenting a bit on Twitter too.

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Investments and debt

Based on what he said about spending money to make money, you might imagine that Verdi is big on investments. And you'd be right.

He invests in individual stocks and index funds — he didn't want to give me exact numbers on this, but he said it's somewhere south of $100k.

He invests in individual stocks because he believes in the companies and thinks they'll grow. He makes sure to pick companies that he understands well. He knows what they make, how they make it, who their customers are, and so forth.

Index funds are for family investments, like for his kids' future. That's because they're more stable, and he's happy to trade fast growth for stability in this case. He went with the S&P 500.

As far as debt, his wife and he have about $25K between the two of them.

A system for tracking cash flow

Verdi's personal guilt-free budget for spending is $1,200. He says he'll spend more if he has to, but it's rare — him being a "cheapo" and all.

He doesn't use any fancy tools for budgeting. But he does use the heck out of a spreadsheet. It's his system for tracking the flow of money. Obviously, I needed to hear more about that.

It goes something like this.

• Column 1: Income
• Column 2: Cash flow allocation
• Column 3: Assets and liabilities

Every month, he looks at his income. Let's say he made $10k. Then he looks at cash flow. This is where that $10k will go. Pretty straightforward. But here's the key: The third column gives him an idea of what percentage of his cash flow is going toward growing his assets.

💰 "It's like a river coming in from the left, and I have to try to direct as much of this water as possible to go towards the permanent storage buckets (assets) while losing as little of it as possible through either expensive/bad debt, wasteful spending, high lifestyle, etc." —Verdi

He's big into the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad", where he learned that working for money is a bad trade. He also learned that to grow wealth, you have to use your monthly cash flow to grow your assets until your assets produce more than your monthly spend.

Back when he was single, he says he was generally able to allocate 30-40% of his income toward assets. Now, with a wife and kids, he jokes that he's lucky if he hits 20%.

Another part of his system is a series of three accounts that automatically transfer to each other.

💰 "With this, the budgeting is essentially "forced" because I only get $300 in my personal card a week. That's all. If I spend it all, it will get declined until the next Friday when I get the next $300. Same principles for groceries and dates. Savings is at a different bank so it's not so easy to do a quick transfer if the Central Bank is running low." —Verdi

Being rich can be hard

Verdi has big ambitions money-wise, but he also has his reservations.

💰 "Having lots of money is actually a very difficult position to be in. It requires more discipline to be a good steward of those funds. It also exposes you to a greater level of temptation that reveals the ugliest part of your character." —Verdi

When he was 21, his income suddenly went from $5k/mo for two people to $14k/mo for just him. He didn't know what to do with it. His budget went out the window and he traveled multiple times per month, sometimes flying other people and paying their expenses.

He says it was for fun at first, but after a few months, he realized he was more interested in posting about these trips to flex on social media than actually enjoying himself.

He felt like he had to prove to people that he had made it. He wanted people to know that he was ahead of them in terms of financial success. He bought the car. He brought women to fancy steakhouses to impress them. And it all felt shallow.

💰 "All of this came from a core belief that I wasn't worthy, which came from childhood trauma. I was trying to prove myself by action. I only got out of this by the grace of God. The day my innermost fear was exposed I cried for 2 hours, then I got up and decided to go back to church. At least there, I knew I could be loved unconditionally by the gospel." —Verdi

Learn to eat glass, but don't have a tight booty

According to Verdi, if you can learn to love to "eat glass", you'll not only enjoy the outcome (financial freedom) but the journey (many rejections) too.

But how do you learn to love things that most people don't like doing? He says you have to break your mind out of "soft mode". He likens it to Navy Seals who break the limitations of their minds and discover that they were only using 30% of their physical capabilities.

💰 "In your own way, you have to put yourself in hard situations and endure the fire until you are at the end of the rope. Then, continue to endure for another 50% of the time it took you to reach your breaking point. People who quit before this typically don't have the fortitude to become successful business owners. But if you've gone through this kind of mental turmoil, gotten crushed, and gone back for more? You are officially crazy, and this is the kind of dogged perseverance that fate tends to smile upon." —Verdi

Sounds intense. But it doesn't always have to be hard.

💰 "Have fun, man! Life is too short to have a tight booty about entrepreneurship." —Verdi

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You can find Verdi on X. Or check out Appshine.

Please note that the above are opinions. This is meant for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be financial advice.

And if you'd like to be featured as a guest in a future interview for this series, let me know in the comments!