And why the tool that feels too expensive today is almost always cheaper than the years you will spend without it
There is a bottleneck in your business. Maybe in your life too.
You know the one. The task that consumes hours every single day. The process that two or three people manage between them — that grows more demanding the more you grow — that sits quietly at the centre of everything, costing you time, salary, energy, and human potential that could be directed somewhere so much more valuable.
And you have learned to manage it. To work around it. To hire another pair of hands when it gets overwhelming. To accept it as simply part of how things work.
But what if it did not have to be?
What if the right investment — made once, upfront, at a cost that feels uncomfortable — could eliminate that bottleneck permanently? And what if the real question was never whether you could afford to make that investment — but whether you could afford not to?
That is what today’s story is about. And it starts with a marshmallow.
From $200 to $300,000 a Month
Lindsay did not set out to build a marshmallow empire.
Her business partner was in law school, looking for an inexpensive gift she could make for her large family. She found a Pinterest recipe for marshmallows. Started experimenting with flavours. And after graduation, told her parents — I do not want to be a lawyer. I am going to figure out this marshmallow thing.
Lindsay was on the other side of Chicago going through something remarkably similar. She had gotten her master’s in psychology, started a clothing store as an undergrad, and realized somewhere in the middle of her academic career that she was an entrepreneur who had accidentally ended up in academia.
They met at a pop-up shop. Started selling marshmallows at farmers markets and craft fairs — negotiating free booth space wherever they could, showing up the next day if someone cancelled a table. People kept asking the same question: where can we get these all the time?
So, they launched a Kickstarter — a crowdfunding platform where you share your idea with the public and invite people to financially support it before it exists. Instead of going to a bank or an investor, you go directly to the people who believe in your vision. If enough of them back you, the project gets funded. It is essentially the market telling you — before you spend a single dollar of your own money — yes, we want this. Go build it.
They were fully funded in less than three weeks.
They opened the world’s first marshmallow café. Built their e-commerce business on a combined investment of $200 — one hundred dollars each, spent on ingredients and packaging. And today EXO Marshmallow does $300,000 a month in revenue. 1.4 million social media followers. Products in 2,500 retail locations across the country. A cookbook generating royalties. And a direct to consumer website that accounts for 70% of their business.
From $200 and a Pinterest recipe.
But the moment in this story that I cannot stop thinking about — the moment that this entire post is really about — has nothing to do with the numbers.
It has to do with a $40,000 machine.
The Bottleneck That Was Costing Everything
For years as EXO Marshmallow grew, one of the biggest bottlenecks in the entire business was cutting.
Marshmallows must be cut after they set. And for a long time that meant people. Two to three people whose entire day — every single day — was spent cutting marshmallows by hand. Hours of human labor. Hours of salary. Hours of management and oversight and a task that was repetitive, physically demanding, and completely without ceiling — because the more the business grew, the more marshmallows needed cutting, and the more people needed to stand there and cut them.
And then Lindsay asked a different question.
Not — how do we manage this better? Not — who else can we hire to help? But — what is the right investment to eliminate this problem permanently?
The answer was a machine. Not a marshmallow cutting machine — those do not exist. A sheet cake cutter, custom retrofitted and modified specifically for marshmallows. Every orange tab on the machine marks exactly where it will cut. Perfectly. Every time. Without a salary. Without a sick day. Without a bonus negotiation or a performance review or the invisible complexity of managing human beings whose entire working day was consumed by a single repetitive task.
The machine cost $40,000.
And I want you to sit with that number. Because I think $40,000 is exactly the kind of number that stops most of us in our tracks. It feels large. It feels risky. It feels like a lot to spend on a single piece of equipment when you could just hire someone, or ask the existing team to absorb it, or find a workaround, or wait until the business is bigger and the investment feels more justified.
But here is what Lindsay understood that most people miss.
The machine was not a cost. It was the elimination of a cost that was compounding every single month. Two to three salaries. Every day. Indefinitely. Growing as the business grew. The $40,000 machine did not just cut marshmallows — it freed human beings to do work that actually required human beings. It removed the bottleneck that was limiting how fast the business could grow. And it paid for itself not once but continuously — compounding month after month after month.
That is investing differently. Seeing a cost that feels large upfront and understanding that the real cost is not buying it.
The Machine You Are Not Buying
Lindsay’s $40,000 machine is not really about marshmallows. It is about a pattern I see everywhere — in businesses large and small, in households, in the lives of women who are building something and wondering why they are exhausted, why they cannot scale, why they keep hitting the same ceiling no matter how hard they work.
The pattern is this: we underinvest in infrastructure and overinvest in effort.
We hire more hands when we need better systems. We add more hours when we need better tools. We manage complexity when we could be eliminating it. And we tell ourselves the investment is too expensive — while quietly paying a price that is far higher, spread across so many months and so many hours that we never see it as a single number on a single invoice.
Think about the companies that kept armies of data entry clerks long after software existed to automate the work. The businesses that hired teams of customer service agents to answer the same questions repeatedly rather than investing in a system that could handle them at scale. The entrepreneurs who spent their entire day doing tasks that a $50 a month tool could do in seconds — because the $50 felt like an expense and the hours felt like just part of the job.
This is the machine you are not buying. And it is costing you more than you know.
Because the real cost of not investing in the right tool is not just money. It is time you will never get back. Energy spent on tasks that do not require your specific human gifts. The opportunity cost of everything you could have built, created, or grown if you had freed yourself from the bottleneck sooner.
The Tool You Need Is Not Always What You Expect
There is one more thing about Lindsay’s machine that deserves to be named.
It was not designed for marshmallows. It was designed for sheet cake. And it would never have worked in its original form. But Lindsay did not look at it and say — this is not for me. She looked at it and asked — what would it take to make this work for what I need?
She retrofitted it. She invested not just in the machine but in the vision of what the machine could become with the right modifications.
And I think this is true of almost every tool, system, or investment that will change your business or your life. It rarely arrives in the exact form you need it. It arrives as something that requires your vision, your creativity, your willingness to see possibility where others see limitation — and to invest in making it yours.
This is the spirit of investing differently. Iman did not find a foundation that worked for her skin — she created one. Arlan did not find an investment community that welcomed her — she built one. And Lindsay did not find a marshmallow cutting machine — she took a sheet cake cutter and made it into one.
The tool you need may not yet exist in the form you need it. But it may be closer than you think — if you are willing to look at what is available and ask the right question.
What Is Your Machine?
I want to leave you with the question that Lindsay’s story keeps bringing me back to.
What is your machine?
What is the bottleneck in your business, your work, your life — the thing consuming your time, your energy, your people, your resources — that the right investment could eliminate permanently?
It might be software that automates something you do manually every day. A tool that systematizes what your team spends hours on. A process, a system, a piece of infrastructure that feels expensive upfront and would pay for itself within months.
Or it might be something less tangible. The coach you keep putting off while you make the same mistakes alone. The course that would give you the knowledge to stop outsourcing something you could own yourself. The system that would free you from the operational chaos that is consuming the hours you should be spending on growth.
Whatever it is — stop managing the bottleneck. Start asking the question that Lindsay asked.
What is the right investment to eliminate this problem permanently?
Because the machine that feels too expensive today is almost always cheaper than the years of salaries, hours, energy, and opportunity cost you will spend without it.
Buy the machine. Retrofit it if you have to. Make it yours.
And watch what becomes possible when the bottleneck is gone.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here