In 2022, Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo made an unusual commitment — she vowed never to raise money for her startup again. 

Yoo came up with the idea for Blueland nine years ago, when she was researching if New York City tap water was safe to mix with formula for her infant son. That’s when she started to connect the dots between single-use plastic production and microplastics, which have been linked to various health problems. She set out on a journey to eliminate single-use plastics in her own home and realized she could have a greater impact by giving others more and better choices for cleaning products.

Yoo launched Blueland in April 2019, selling dry tablets that customers mixed with water at home to create cleaning products. Blueland’s first products were cleaning tablets and hand soap tablets, and the startup expanded to laundry detergent and dishwasher tablets — all packaged in paper instead of plastic. Over the course of its first several years of business, Blueland raised $35 million from external investors.

By 2022, Yoo decided that Blueland had to become profitable to remain competitive and survive as a company — so it could exist even if external funding dried up. When the startup raised its final round of funding that year, Yoo was clear with new and existing investors that she never intended to raise money again. Her number one priority from that point forward was becoming profitable — even if pursuing profitability meant pausing growth. 

Related: She Took Her Business From a $5,000 Investment to Over $1 Million in Revenue — Here Are Her 3 Profit Hacks for Small Business Owners

“I think that was an important thing for investors to be aligned with because profitability is very much at times at odds with growth,” Yoo, 41, tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “It sent a signal to everybody in the room that we are saying it’s more important to be profitable than to grow.”

With that decision in place, Yoo and her team looked at the company’s financials to figure out how to reach profitability. She realized that the startup was spending over $1 million a month on Facebook and Instagram ads for marketing. 

“It was just very clear that marketing spend was the largest line item,” Yoo said. “If you just took away the marketing spend, we could be profitable within the year pretty quickly.”

Yoo decided to cut the marketing spend. She eventually started layering it back on, but in a measured way that enabled the company to be profitable instead of starting from a base case of running an unprofitable business. 

“Take away the ad spend, not focus on growth,” Yoo says. “Instead, focus on investing those marketing resources in building a stronger engine and foundation for the business.”

Related: This 29-Year-Old Founder Took a $150,000 Pay Cut to Become CEO of His Own Startup. Here’s Why He Says It Was Worth It.

Yoo credits that tough early decision to prioritize profitability with enabling Blueland to survive and become what it is today — a brand found on the shelves of Costco, Whole Foods and Target that has done over $300 million in lifetime sales. 

“We made some tough decisions early on,” Yoo says. “If we didn’t make those decisions as early and make those turns as hard as we did, I don’t think we would still be here today.”

Yoo says the fundraising market for consumer products companies has shifted since she decided to stop taking on outside investment in 2022. If Blueland hadn’t prioritized profitability, the startup could have run out of money and may not have been able to raise more, according to Yoo. 

Blueland now has 60 employees across a range of functions, from legal to customer experience. The company had 45 employees in 2022 when Yoo made this decision, per PitchBook. She prioritizes transparency, sharing details on the business’s financial performance with the entire team every quarter.

Related: He Went From Food Stamps to Co-Founding a $9.3 Billion Startup. Here’s Why He Walked Away.

She also conducts engagement surveys twice a year to ask if employees are happy there and what she can do to improve. She shares the results of that engagement survey with the entire company in a presentation that breaks down the areas where people are the most and the least happy, and employees’ views on what she could be doing better. 

“That’s the way we prefer it, for there to be transparency for people to understand what’s most important and how everything’s going,” Yoo says. “It’s really reaching the full team, and the full team can feel that closeness to the information that five years ago, our original five-person team felt.”