The Biggest Mistake Founders Make Isn’t Fundraising. It’s Choosing the Wrong Incentive
From investor selection to product quality, a founder’s core motivation often matters more than any growth strategy.
EXPERT OPINION BY BEN GOODWIN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, OLIPOP
There are essentially two ways to approach building a company, and the difference is less about the tactics used but the core motivation behind the business that drives many key decisions along the journey.
The first model is built around an exit: You identify a “white space”, you move fast, you scale top line and spend aggressively on marketing, and you position everything toward a liquidity event. The second model is built around a mission: You’re trying to create something that genuinely matters to people, that delivers layered value, and that could exist and compound and improve over a long arc of time.
Both models can generate meaningful returns, but only
Both models can generate meaningful returns, but only one of them tends to produce a company that’s still standing a decade later and is actually good for the people buying the product.
The standard entrepreneurial playbook doesn’t really have a chapter on self awareness. It has chapters on fundraising, distribution, hiring, unit economics, and exit strategy. What it tends to skip is the question of who you are underneath all of that—and why that question turns out to matter more than almost anything else on the list.
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The Catch-22 landscape every early founder knows
The early days of building a company are defined by a particular kind of impossible logic. You need shelf space to get a distributor, but you need a distributor to get shelf space. You need revenue to raise capital, but you need capital to generate revenue. You are navigating a series of Catch-22s with no obvious solution and a runway that is almost always shorter than you’d like.
What I’ve observed—in myself and in other founders—is
What I’ve observed—in myself and in other founders—is that if your only compass during that period is desperation for capital, you will make decisions that compromise the thing you’re building before it ever has a chance to become what it was supposed to be. You bring in the wrong financial partners, the ones whose incentives don’t align with yours and who will start quietly reshaping your company’s soul within eighteen months. You optimize for the metric in front of you rather than the mission underneath it. And by the time you realize what’s happened, the version of the company you actually wanted to build is significantly harder to recover.
The consumer pays for this too, often without knowing it. The shortcuts that look like smart regins on quality, marketing spend substituting for product investment show up eventually in what ends up in someone’s hands
Source: www.inc.com
