You're not behind. You're just building in the wrong order.
- Paula Ironside
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Real Talk with investor Rich Gersten on what early-stage founders get wrong, and what the ones who make it do differently.
There's a specific kind of doubt that hits founders around month six or twelve. The brand exists. The product is real. You believe in it completely. And yet nothing is moving the way you thought it would. You're doing everything, the content, the outreach, the ops, the strategy, and it still feels like you're shouting into a room where no one can hear you.
Rich Gersten has sat across from hundreds of founders in exactly that place. As co-founder and managing partner of True Beauty Ventures, a sector-specialised fund investing in beauty, health, and wellness, he's spent over two decades watching brands break through and watching them quietly disappear. The patterns, he says, are almost always the same. And most of them have nothing to do with the product.
The market is not the problem. The order is.
Most founders, when they feel stuck, assume the market is working against them. Too saturated. Too noisy. Too expensive to compete in.
Rich doesn't disagree that the market is brutal. But he reframes where the problem actually lives.
"For every 100 opportunities we see, I can pretty much guarantee that 97 or 98 of them will sound the same. The beauty industry is a sea of sameness. And if you're only looking at 10 or 15 a year, you might not be able to tell they're all the same. But when you're looking at 100 and you see the 97 or 98 that are identical, it allows you to recognise the two or three that don't."
The brands that don't sound the same, he says, share one thing in common: they started with the brand, not the product.
"A lot of businesses start with product and then build the brand around the product. The businesses that have been super successful in our portfolio started with a very clear brand North Star and have slowly built product around that brand vision. And I think that's what makes them incredibly unique and differentiated."
This is the order problem. And it's more common than founders realise, because when you're close to what you're building, it feels like you know what you stand for. But knowing what you stand for internally and being able to make a stranger feel it immediately are completely different things.
"When we see a founder who can describe what they're doing in 30 seconds or less, why they need to exist, most can't do that. In the case of Vacation: leisure-enhancing sunscreen. Very clear. From the day it launched to today."
If you can't say it in one sentence, it's not that you haven't found the right words yet. It's that the brand North Star isn't clear enough to build from.
The thing investors actually look for, and founders rarely talk about
When founders pitch, they tend to lead with the product. The formula. The gap in the market. The numbers, if they have them.
Rich is listening for something else entirely.
"We get very sceptical when we think a founder is chasing an opportunity more than trying to solve something personal for them. There is something to an authentic founder story being credible."
He's not talking about a polished origin story. He's talking about the difference between deep intuition and outsourced insight, between a founder who genuinely lives the problem and one who identified a category that looked promising.
"When you have deep intuition in something, as opposed to outsourced insight, you're going to create a more authentic brand. The founders we look at in our portfolio, we often see founders who were trying to solve something that was very personal to them as their reason for being."
Crown Affair's Dianna Cohen wasn't a hairstylist. She had no professional credentials in the category. What she had was a genuine, lived relationship with the problem, and a point of view that came from that, not from a market report.
"It had the authenticity of a founder not chasing an opportunity, but trying to solve something that was very personal to her."
If you're feeling stuck, it's worth asking honestly: am I solving something I deeply understand, or something I thought I could make work? The market can feel both questions. So can investors.
Real white space isn't a new category. It's a new lens on an old problem.
One of the most paralysing beliefs for early-stage founders is that white space means inventing something that doesn't exist yet. It almost never does.
"Real white space looks like a problem that's probably hiding in plain sight, that consumers already feel, but don't necessarily see. A product and a narrative that makes people say, 'Why did this not exist before?' That would be real white space."
What he describes instead is almost always a reframing of something that already exists, a different audience, a different delivery, a different emotional register applied to a tired category.
Jupiter is a dandruff brand. The category has existed for decades, dominated by the same large players, in the same unimaginative packaging, with the same clinical messaging. Jupiter didn't invent a new category. It asked a simple question: what would this look like if it were made for a woman who didn't want to be embarrassed having it in her shower?
"Is that a real white space? No. But is there a white space within that category to carve out a unique positioning geared and marketed towards a certain audience? For sure."
Wizard Wellness is another. Allergy care , not a new problem. But a founder with a beauty background brought a regimen-focused, daily-care approach to a category that had only ever thought about treatment, not prevention.
"Along comes a little brand bringing beauty-like marketing to the category. Coming at it with a regimen of products focused on daily care, whereas allergies tends to be focused on: when I feel the allergy, I will take my medicine. There's no one going at the prevention of the allergy to begin with."
The question for a stuck founder isn't: is my category too crowded? It's: am I looking at my category through a genuinely different lens, or a slightly adjusted version of the same one everyone else is using?
The part nobody talks about enough: you can't do it alone
Here is where Rich is most direct, and where founders most need to hear it.
The single most common reason brands fail in his portfolio is not product. Not market timing. Not funding. It's execution, specifically, founders who are exceptional at one thing and unwilling or unable to bring in people who are exceptional at the things they're not.
"When things don't work out, generally it's not because we got the brand or the product part wrong. It's because of the founder's inability to execute, or to bring in a team that can execute. You get the people part right, the execution follows. But if the team's unable to actually execute the strategy, it doesn't matter how good the brand or product is. You will fail."
For most beauty and wellness founders, the superpower is on the brand and product side. That's the gift. The gap is almost always in operations and finance — the functions that feel less urgent early on, and end up being the thing that quietly breaks everything.
"Finance and ops are always the functions that are ignored, especially in the earlier stages. I wish more of the money we put in was focused on building out the team."
This doesn't mean immediately hiring full-time senior operators. At early stage, fractional is often smarter, experienced people working part-time rather than the wrong person full-time.
"I'd rather get better skills for the same price three days a week than the wrong person with the wrong skills five days a week."
The honest version of this for a founder feeling stuck: where in your business are you avoiding hiring because you think you can manage it yourself? That's almost always the answer.
On building with less than you think you need
One of the more quietly radical things Rich says is about capital efficiency , and it matters especially for founders who are bootstrapping, or raising small.
"Brands that learn how to be more capital efficient and less reliant on the need to raise money will always be more attractive to investors when they're actually raising."
The logic is counterintuitive but consistent: the founders who treat every pound or krone as if it has to work harder than it should, who resist the pressure to scale before they've proven something, who build a direct relationship with their customer before they go near retail, those are the ones who arrive at investment conversations from a position of strength.
"We always try to recommend you start on a direct basis. And if you build enough direct momentum, the retailers will come after you at that point."
And in 2025, capital efficiency has a new dimension that early-stage founders are uniquely positioned to exploit.
"The advantage indie brands have over large brands isn't capital or resources, it's speed and innovation. So how does AI help you on speed and innovation? One of our CEO founders said to us: if I'm doing a million of revenue per employee today, with AI I'll do three million per employee in the future."
Rich uses AI to write his Substack every two weeks, something he says he couldn't sustain without it. Not because it replaces his thinking, but because it removes the friction between the thought and the page.
"It doesn't help me with the ideas. It doesn't help me with content. But it helps get the writing started. I've got to feed it, prompt it, iterate it. But I would not be able to generate these things every two weeks if I didn't have some AI assistance."
For a solo founder or a very small team, this is permission. Not to automate the soul out of your brand, but to stop treating limited bandwidth as a fixed constraint.
What the ones who make it actually do
Rich runs a mentorship programme for early-stage founders in partnership with Beauty Independent. Every cohort is different. Every brand, every founder, every category. But the number one takeaway from six months together is always the same word.
Focus.
"You have limited capital and limited resources. You can't do everything. You can't be all things to all people. You have to really drill down and focus on what matters most. And that's very hard for a founder chasing a dream."
Saying no, to the stockist who wants a custom SKU, to the collaboration that feels exciting but pulls you sideways, to the channel that isn't working but feels like it should, is one of the most underrated skills in early-stage brand building. And one of the hardest to practice when you're watching other brands do everything at once.
The other piece of advice he keeps coming back to is less tactical and more philosophical. But it might be the most useful reframe for a founder who's been measuring themselves against someone else's timeline.
"Run a business like you're going to own it forever. A lot of the mistakes founders make is they're just trying to build something to an exit. But if you run it and operate it like you're going to own it forever, the odds of making better business decisions are there."
And on the question of pace, of feeling behind, of wondering why it isn't moving faster:
"Be patient around what success looks like. Don't expect to be an overnight success. And if you are an overnight success, will you be alive five years from now? That's a question buyers will have. Because overnight success doesn't translate to long-term value creation."
It doesn't go up in a straight line. It never does. That's not failure. That's just how it works.
Rich Gersten is co-founder and managing partner of True Beauty Ventures, a sector-specialised fund investing in beauty, health, and wellness brands. True Beauty Ventures portfolio includes Vacation, Crown Affair, K18, Jupiter, and Wizard Wellness, among others.
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