I want to invest in hungry, obsessed, cockroaches. But for some reason, I keep running into conversations where the founder doesn’t want to charge money for the service being provided. Since when is making money bad? No one doubts the impact that Steve Jobs made on the planet, or Elon Musk is making, you know how they made that impact…. they made money! MONEY IS EFFING GOOD.
The moment a non-profit makes a bigger impact than a for-profit company does, I will eat my words, but that day is not coming. That moment will never come. Because people do things for money, and money is good.
I just did an AMA with the Boost VC Slack groups, and the topic I wanted to talk about was that MONEY IS GOOD! I don’t understand why founders feel so averse to charging for their product!
A significant percentage of my time when speaking with founders is spent convincing them to: Charge more, not make decisions because of a competitor, or telling them to be less careful with their community and that if you piss someone off it means someone cares… and to again charge money!
When no one is paying for your product, there’s no customer. You have a project, not a company. I wish a company could be built on “happiness points” but it turns out that happiness points are positively correlated with the money printing button, and that requires an intimate understanding of the customer. It also requires a desire to win, a growth mind set.
We deal with artists in VR, Anarchists in Crypto and Activists in the Oceans - who are not entrepreneurs because they don’t want to make money they feel they are apart from making money. We spend 20% of our time explaining why they need to make money. We institute what progress is and that the impact they would make with money is paramount. Otherwise you aren't solving a big enough problem.
Some believe that “they will make money later”, like for some reason they think their community frowns upon making money and they would turn away from the product if you started to make money… if that’s true - Your company will be dead, and your community is not a good one.
I’m tired of people thinking that making money is bad. You know what you need if you are going to make an impact, you need a sustainable way to make money!
I am not afflicted by this ailment. Favorite scene in the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko. Greed is good!