SO YOU WANT TO START A BRAND: well... should you?

Should you start that Instagram olive oil cake business? Should you launch a new mascara brand? Should you sell your crochet purses on Etsy? Come one, come all... let's debate it.

There is, as with everything, a great case to be made for both sides of the aisle when it comes to the age old question: should you start a brand? This is, of course, why I started my SO YOU WANT TO START A BRAND series. If you’re new here, welcome— we have issues on “launching” and product development in the archive.

We’re dialing it back to high school debate era today. I have sources and opening arguments for each side. I realize for those of you actually on the fence in this very moment, this is perhaps more objective than subjective— if you’d like to talk about your life or opportunity specifically shoot me an email and I will anonymize and give you a more personalized “answer” (in my opinion, of course) that is relevant to the category, your experience, etc— all in a future issue of First Rodeo.

Listen, I’ve been loud about how I think too much stuff exists. There are too many people putting out the exact same thing in different packaging. There are some things we just do not need more of. Unless you’ve just patented an incredible new technology, can you really bring a material, extremely different innovation to mascara? And more importantly, why would you want to make something that has no differentiation from what’s already on the market? Why make your life harder?

I promise not to harp on that here more than I did above. That was as much complaining about that as I am allowed in this issue!

I was listening to

Annie Kreighbaum

and Nick Axelrod-Welk’s podcast Eyewitness Beauty on a walk this weekend, as I do every weekend, and they were discussing Youthforia’s black face paint scandal. But— inadvertently— the topic of why founders be founding crept in, and I think they did a particularly good job of laying out why the motives are usually… impure… and when combined with venture capital, terribly misaligned with reality.

I understand why founders do that “morning routine” press junket where every mid women’s media outlet asks them if they drink lemon water after they wake up— press is invaluable when you’re an early stage founder, and you take it however people want to give it to you (barring scandal). If you become an “influencer” in the process and you’re able to sell your products more effectively… it’s hard to be mad at that too, even if it’s a little ick.

But there are people who really actually go into it fantasizing about this part, to Nick and Annie’s point, more than the reality of running a business which actually looks like: your fifth marketing coordinator in a row quitting, your 3PL’s Shopify integration breaking and having to manually export a CSV of order data every single day, finding out one of your employees has been outsourcing their work to offshore virtual assistants in the Philippines and pocketing the $ difference, getting an unexpected bill from your manufacturing partner for $250,000 of ashwagandha that you didn’t order, the state of Delaware sending you an alarming tax bill out of left field, breaking up with your co-founder.

My friends are laughing because they know which of these things have happened to me recently, my founder friends are laughing because when you’re a founder, all of these things tend to happen in a single day— and then something goes wrong in your personal life to boot.

If you are die-hard passionate about what you sell, the above sucks, but it doesn’t deter you from selling more of it. If you are die-hard passionate about being famous, you probably hire someone else to try to take care of all of this so you can go do founder interviews and then are pissed and devastated when that third party you hired isn’t able to drive the big outcome or massive exit you wanted— likely because you were absent.

I see this difference so clearly with founders I know, am friends with, or have worked for in the past— the ones who are deeply, deeply passionate about the product they sell are able to resist burnout for longer and have insane longevity. The ones who are passionate about their brand but not the monetized product that gives the brand all its revenue? A little more lost. (Am I saying those businesses or founders are “bad”? Absolutely not. It’s a lot easier to look backwards after you’ve done something, harder to know or see these things in the moment as you’re filing Articles of Incorporation. I sure as fuck didn’t know which I was when I started.)

Nick and Annie also touched on something that I think we’ve not yet openly discussed here, but has come in bits and pieces: what of the people who just want to be founders— by any means necessary? Those who don’t have ideas or a meaningful invention to contribute to the market, but really want to be an entrepreneur?

I was one of those, so it’s funny that I am coming down on the other side of the aisle