Burn the Ships: What Mike Apostal Learned Scaling Factor from $200K to $185 million

When Mike Apostal officially joined Factor (then called Factor75) as a co-founder in September 2015, the company was doing about $200,000 a year in sales a year.

Then, when the team pulled up the balance sheet, there were roughly two weeks of cash left. Mike’s stomach dropped.

Mike had come from the other side of the table, as an investor, and here he was betting his family's stability on a nearly broke meal-kit startup.

Five years later, HelloFresh acquired Factor for $185 million.

I caught up with Mike recently, who is now building a men’s health startup called Rugiet.

I pulled six lessons from our conversation that I found helpful for founders in competitive markets. Anything marked 💬 is Mike in his own words.

Mike did not join with a safety net. He had already told his family and his old employer he was all in, before he even understood how bad the cash situation was. That commitment carried him through the next several years.

💬 "I burned the ships. And I think that's one thing for a lot of entrepreneurs. People like to have one foot in and one foot out. Ultimately, I think to be successful… you have to burn the ships. You have to be all in."

The lesson: 100% commitment changes what is possible. Founders who leave themselves an easy exit rarely dig deep enough to find the hard one.

Because Mike started with two weeks of runway, he never developed the habit that sinks so many start-ups interested in venture capital: assuming more money is always one round away. Over Factor's life he turned about $12 million of capital into a few hundred million dollars of revenue.

💬 "I'm operating as though I'll never be able to raise capital again. We've been in a cycle for a long time where you have a lot of businesses that can get cash, and then they just believe that they're going to be able to raise forever. That's not a great way to run a business."

The lesson: Treat every dollar as your last raise. A business that funds its own growth controls its own fate.

By 2017, Factor was offering too many meals, too often. Mike surveyed his customers and learned something critical: the highest-rated meals drove retention. So he cut the menu down to the favorites and cleaned up how each one looked before it shipped. Revenue climbed to about $10 million in roughly two years.

💬 "We started tracking meal ratings... I said, we need less variety and we need to focus on what customers rate the best because if they rate it high, they'll retain. There's a strong correlation between a high meal rating and retention."

The lesson: Focus beats variety. Double down on what customers already love instead of adding more. It is the same pattern we heard from Luke Liu, Ryan Coon, and Linxen Wen: the founders who win tend to be the ones willing to focus.

After an acquirer bailed at the eleventh hour, Mike brought Factor’s production in-house and built out a facility in about a month. They called it Hell Week, even though it ran far longer. He slept at the plant and his CTO washed dishes at three in the morning. Mike stood on the line at 1 a.m. in a 32-degree room, plating meals.

💬 "I slept at the facility effectively for weeks... I'd have my CTO washing dishes at three in the morning, I'd be on the production line, in 32 degrees, plating meals... The whole team was all in. And it was a really great culture building time, even though it was terrible."

The lesson: A founder willing to do every job earns the trust and loyalty of their team.

Mike knew heroics alone would burn everyone out. So one Sunday he gathered his ops leaders and turned each function, from dishwashing to fulfillment to procurement, into a game with a clear scoreboard: the two or three metrics that mattered, with public rewards for hitting them. (The rallying cry, half in Spanglish, became "Pero no dinero.") Sales went from $22 million to $50 million in 2019, with a run rate near $90 million heading into 2020.

💬 "I called in all my ops leaders, and we sketched out how we could gamify each of the different functions in our operation... what are the two to three metrics that will move the needle, and how do we reward people, do it in a public setting, and make them care more about it? All of a sudden we started scaling. The metrics improved and we scaled dramatically."

The lesson: People care more when the scoreboard is clear. Pick the few metrics that matter and make winning visible.

In March 2020, Mike finally had one term sheet in hand after meeting dozens of investors. Then COVID hit, and the investor backed out. Factor was deemed an essential business and stayed open, growing to a $185 million run rate by year end, roughly 10x in 18 months. HelloFresh reached out on LinkedIn that August, and the deal closed on the last day of the year.

💬 "Factor was such an exhausting experience, but such a rewarding one. It was the journey... those moments of where your back's up against the wall, and you have a team making it happen is awesome."

The lesson: Endurance is a skill. Holding the team and yourself together through the worst stretch is often the whole game.

What strikes me most is that Mike is not coasting on the Factor exit. He is running a simiar playbook at Rugiet, his remote men's health company. Remote makes culture harder, he admits, so his answer is to stay closer, not further away.

💬 "I've been an on the field general. It's important to show your team you're super engaged, show them how you think, confront them in real time if needed, and constantly reiterate your core values."

He has taken Rugiet from $20 million to a projected $250 million and he is blunt about the goal:

💬 "I believe we can be the number one men's health brand in the United States, similar to how we built Factor to the number one prepared meal brand in the United States."

If Factor taught him anything, it is that the founder who commits fully, funds their own growth, and leads from the front tends to be the one still standing when everyone else has folded