🔶 5 Ways to Increase Profit Without Chasing Customers

Read time: 9 minutes

Hey! Sam here 👋 I’ve spent the last 10+ years leading marketing and growth for early-stage tech startups, helping them scale from 0 to 8 figures. Each week, I share actionable insights to help founders and marketing leaders like you drive sustainable growth.

Most founders think the only way to grow profits is to scale—more customers, more sales, more everything.

But what if I told you that’s not the whole story?

In fact, you can dramatically increase your profits without adding more customers at all.

I was listening to Mehtab Bhogal on the Operators Podcast, and his insights were eye-opening.

Here are 6 things you can try today to increase your profit margins and grow smarter, not harder:

• 🤝 Tactics to negotiate vendor terms

• ✂️ Simplify your product

• 🤖 Automate instead of hire

• ⚡ Create urgency

• 💸 Increase your prices

• 📨 Send more emails

Let’s go into it!

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1. Negotiate vendor terms 🤝 

Vendors can be your biggest expense, especially when you’re relying on a tech stack or third-party services to run your business.

If you're not negotiating aggressively, you’re paying more than you need to.

Mehtab’s strategy is simple but effective. You start by saying: “We need better rates. These aren’t competitive compared to other offers.” 

Show them quotes from smaller players in the industry (think LaserShip for shipping or less-known cloud providers for SaaS), and if they refuse, turn them off. Nine times out of ten, they come back with a better offer.

How it applies to you:

• You’re probably using a stack of tools. Now’s the time to get aggressive with those CRM or cloud providers.

• Shipping rates can make or break your margins. Don’t be afraid to pit FedEx or UPS against smaller carriers like LaserShip.

• Especially for ecommerce, fly out and meet your suppliers. Build rapport to get favorable terms like floating costs to big orders. Meeting in-person goes a long way.

Pro Tip: Don’t settle for “no.” Vendors want your business, and they know losing you could mean losing more. Hold firm—turn them off if needed, and they’ll come back hungry.

• Most suppliers won’t negotiate seriously until you stop working with them. When it comes to sourcing, aim to talk to at least 30–40 vendors for each product

Quick Win: Take 30 minutes this week to renegotiate with your top 3 vendors. Even a small 5-10% reduction can make a big difference.

2. Simplify your product ✂️

Building and maintaining unnecessary features or product components wastes your most valuable resources—time and money.

Yet, so many founders feel trapped in the “more is better” mindset.

Mehtab’s advice is clear: cut what isn’t working.

If a feature doesn’t drive real customer value or engagement, why are you wasting your team’s hours (and your cash) on it?

How it applies to you:

• Are there features you built that customers never use? Start simplifying now. Focus on what works, and cut the dead weight.

• Are you spending on packaging or product variations that customers don’t care about? Streamline your offerings to reduce costs without losing loyalty.

Pro Tip: Customers appreciate simplicity more than complexity. If you focus on delivering your core value, you’ll likely see retention improve while costs drop.

Quick Win: This week, review your product data and identify the bottom two features or components that aren’t moving the needle. Remove or reduce them.

3. Automate without hiring more 🤖

Your team is probably burning hours on repetitive tasks that don’t move the needle. Every hour spent on low-value work is an hour you could be focusing on growth.

Mehtab’s solution? Automate. Automate. Automate. Whether it's automating customer support, onboarding, or marketing—free up your team’s time for high-value activities.

How it applies to you:

• You’re likely still doing manual onboarding or reporting. Implement automation tools like Zapier or Integromat to handle these tasks.

• Automate email follow-ups, abandoned cart emails, and post-purchase flows. Keep the conversation going without wasting time.

Pro Tip: Start small. Don’t try to automate everything at once. Focus on the 3 biggest time-suckers and go from there.

Quick Win: Pick one task that eats up the most time for your team and automate it this week. For example, use Zapier to automate reporting or customer follow-up tasks.

4. Create urgency ⚡

One of the main jobs of a founder is to create urgency. Without it, projects drag and your team becomes complacent.

According to Mehtab a sense of urgency can increase productivity by 15-30%. I’ve seen this with multiple startups, those who have a sense of urgency in their DNA tend to win.

Set tighter deadlines.

Break long deadlines into shorter sprints to keep things moving. And constantly challenge dates—“Is that really the soonest you can deliver this?” 

When urgency is baked into your culture, you’ll see faster results and fewer wasted hours.

How it applies to you:

• Implement shorter sprint cycles for projects. Long deadlines kill creativity and momentum.

• Apply urgency to product launches or marketing campaigns. Tight deadlines force better focus and sharper execution.

Pro Tip: Don’t give your team unlimited time, money, or resources. Constraints lead to creative solutions. When people know they can’t “buy” more time or tech, they innovate.

Quick Win: Look at your current project timelines and challenge your team to move faster and see how they rise to the occasion.

5. Increase your prices 💸

Raising prices might seem risky, but it’s one of the easiest ways to increase profit without adding new customers.

In fact, when you look at acquisition, retention and monetization (pricing). Pricing is the lever the holds the most impact all things being equal.

Mehtab stresses the importance of testing small price increases to find the "cliffs"—the point where you can raise prices without losing too much volume.

Start small. A 5-10% price increase often goes unnoticed by customers, but it can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Alternatively, if you don’t want to increase prices directly, you can reduce the quantity or features in a product (think shrinkflation). You’ll get the same effect without customer pushback.

How it applies to you:

• Test price increases on your most engaged customers. They’re usually willing to pay more for the value you provide.

• Try unbundling freebies or reducing product quantities while keeping the price the same—like dropping from 5 to 4 items in a bundle.

Pro Tip: Always test price increases on a small group before rolling it out company-wide. You might find you can increase prices without any impact on conversions.

Quick Win: Run an A/B test on your pricing this month. Try increasing prices by 5-10% for a segment of your customers and measure the impact on churn.

6. Email more, earn more 📨

The fear of “spamming” your customers is holding back your business.

Mehtab’s advice: double your email frequency. More emails = more engagement = more profit. Simple math.

How it applies to you:

• Increase your email frequency for product updates, tips, or engagement prompts. Your users want to hear from you more often than you think.

• Use email to drive sales. Cart recovery, promotions, product launches—push them harder through more frequent emails.

Pro Tip: Track your unsubscribe rates. You’ll probably find that most people stick around as long as your emails provide value. And, of course, your revenue will climb.

Quick Win: Double your email cadence this week and watch your engagement rise. Focus on delivering helpful content or timely offers.

It’s easy to get caught up in chasing the next customer or the next big sale. But here’s the truth: Real profit comes from optimizing the systems you already have in place. 

These small changes—renegotiating vendor terms, creating urgency, increasing prices—are profit multipliers. They don’t just add to your bottom line; they multiply it.

Focus on one of these tactics today, and you’ll see just how powerful it is to work smarter instead of harder.

🔍 Sam Pick’s - resources worth your time

• Turning $1k to $28M ARR by Kyle Poyar

• Stealing from the competition by Failory

• From 0 > $277k in 2 months by Bootstrapped Giants

Three ways I can help you, whenever you’re ready:

• Follow me on Twitter/X and LinkedIn for content during the week.

• Stuck in a growth plateau? Let’s uncover your growth levers and build a defensible growth engine to scale your business to $10MM ARR. Only taking 2 clients in October. Let’s chat.

  If you're a founder who’s reached $1M-$5M ARR and now wants to scale.

• Need help running ads? We’ve built an ads agency for early-stage startups that handles customer research, creatives, and media buying. Let’s chat.

Until next time 👋

Sam

PS. I’m here to help YOU grow. What’s the one thing you’re struggling with in your business that you’d like advice on?