Hi friend, welcome back to the Good Fortune Newsletter.
Built to help you learn the business of sustainability, from those who've been there before.
This newsletter includes:
π The impact founder's superpowers
π’ How they can actually slow down your business
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What you can do about it
The impact founder's superpowers
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I LOVE working with impact businesses.
Not only because they are creating real change in the world, but because their founders are some of the most creative people to learn from.
I believe this is because of two big reasons.
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1. Outside in: constraints bread creativity
Whether it's ethical, regulatory, or otherwise, impact founders just have more constraints put on their business.
This means they are forced to be craftier, more flexible, and more creative at every stage of growth.
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2. Inside out: motivations and incentives
Most impact founders seem to be motivated not by sales and growth but by change.
This means that they are making different decisions than your average founder, for better or worse.
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Either way, after talking with countless impact founders, I've noticed a few superpowers that give their businesses a serious leg up.
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They are deeply empathetic
Their deep connection to not only the problem they're solving, but the community that feels it everyday makes them natural problem solvers.
They can go deep, speak the language of their customers, and build instant trust.
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They think at the system level
Where traditional entrepreneurs focus on singular pain points, impact founders are thinking BIG.
They see the interconnectedness of the world around them, letting their creativity (and ambition) run wild, which is super inspiring to see.
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They have diverse lived experience
Unlike the MBA'ers and startup hoppers out there, impact founders often come from non-business backgrounds, and that's a good thing.
This enables them to bring a fresh perspective to a problem space and develop more holistic and inclusive solutions.
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All of these traits (plus many more) make impact founders great, but they can also slow down their businesses...
7 traps of impact founders (and what you can do about them)
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Impact founders care deeply about solving big problems and helping as many people as possible, but that can lead to:
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1. Solving for universal problems
It's great to see the big picture, but trying to solve a monumental problem might lead to confusion on where to start and lack of focus on where to go next.
What you can do about it: try to start with a specific pain point within the larger problem you want to solve and zoom out only when you have really nailed a focused solution.
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2. Serving the market of everyone
I often see founders who are trying to sell to people who "care about impact", but that's not really a target market.
Trying to reach everyone means you'll likely reach no one effectively.
What you can do about it: find the audience who has a deep and measurable pain, and similarly to #1, only focus on them until you've really served their needs.
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3 Saying yes to everything
Being so engulfed in a community means they see opportunities everywhere.
This, plus their altruism leads impact founders to spread themselves way too thin trying to help everyone.
What you can do about it: the running theme in these first 3 traps is all about focus and trusting that solving for a narrow audience now will ultimately enable you to have more sustainable impact over the long term.
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4. System overload
Zooming out and seeing the whole system is an amazing skill, but that vision brings a ton of frustration when you realize just how tough it is to change an entire system.
What you can do about it: find your strategic entry points, and try to identify what small changes will have an outsized impact.
This will hopefully have a cascading effect as you work your way through the system.
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5. Relying on platforms
There is a huge collection of impact-driven projects on crowdfunding platforms, and it's inspiring to see a collection of people backing real change.
But these platforms aren't built for discoverability, and your passion for a particular cause doesn't always translate to other's browsing these sites.
What you can do about it: treat any sort of community or funding platform as a tool to be leveraged, not a replacement for the hard work of connection and community building to grow your business.
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6. Business blindspots
Lived experience and diversity of perspective is truly a creative superpower, but often I find that new founders don't always have the tools they need to build a healthy business.
What you can do about it: try to find people, programs, and content that you trust and resonate with, as most business content isn't always geared towards impact-driven folks.
*side note, I would love Good Fortune to be one of those places you turn to! If you are looking for specific people or content, please reach out! I'm happy to connect you to my network and create new content to answer your questions.
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7. Prioritizing the wrong things
Similar to having blindspots in your skillset, I see a lot of founders prioritizing things that I don't think will move the needle on their business the way they're intending.
What you can do about it: join founder communities or try to find a mentor with an extensive business background to help guide you through key decision making.
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These impact-driven traps can come from many places:
- Lack of entrepreneurship experience
- Support that's not impact-aligned
- Excitement to help others
But mostly, I think they come from the fact that impact founders are just built different.
They are working on problems most aren't.
They are taking angles most haven't considered.
They are swimming upstream in a system that's not built for them.
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I hope that Good Fortune can be the place where impact founders feel they belong, and can connect, learn, and change the world for the better, together.
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