The biggest expense for an early-stage entrepreneur is the opportunity cost of earning wages

As an entrepreneur, when you're investing your time into building your business, you're doing so at the opportunity cost of the money you could be earning as an employee.

I make the mistake of thinking, "I've only invested like $1,000 into my business."

But I've really invested thousands of hours of my time. If I value my time at $200/hour, it's really hundreds of thousands of dollars that I've invested into my business.

This realization has motivated me to outsource more of the work involved with building the business.

I've even had the thought that I should go back to being an employee as a source of funding for the business.

If I can earn wages as an employee at $200/hour and pay $50/hour for the services that I would have otherwise done myself to build the business, I can scale the business 4x faster.