You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values.
💸 Who Gets To Decide What’s Worth Existing?
I was on a panel a few weeks ago called Capital As Activism, and one of the questions broke my brain:
If government funding is fragile and traditional markets keep failing the people who need them most, how do we actually move from passive resistance to real economic control?
My mind started swirling through years of working in affordable housing, banks, and then scrappy startups, before realizing I was closer to this question than I thought.
10 years ago, I started an activewear brand for Muslim women in my tiny NYC apartment on the weekends. A lot of people start thinking about money on day 1 of business building, but my big question was: do other Muslim women need activewear hijabs? And that question made me realize that yes, I need some money to test this out.
After a coincidental run-in with a friend from college, she recommended I launch a Kickstarter campaign to validate my product idea AND find my first potential customers and investors.
The cool thing about Kickstarter is that you have an opportunity to to get backing for a product that doesn't even exist yet. My campaign raised close to $30,000 through photos of a few prototypes and sketches, and created enough momentum for me to quit my job and go full-time on the brand for 4 years.
🔭 Your POV Is Your Superpower
My backers didn't need a 40-slide deck explaining the market opportunity for Muslim activewear. Many knew the problem through their own lived experience or through friends; they had layered shirts over workout clothes, figured out which hijabs could survive a run, and spent years trying to make products designed for someone else work for them.
Others had never thought about the fact that access to a healthy lifestyle isn't equal. They backed the project because my story helped them understand a problem they hadn't experienced themselves, and they believed in the mission of making movement more accessible.
And that's what I think is so interesting about storytelling: it can draw people in through a shared experience, while also helping people understand an experience they've never had.
As builders, we spend a lot of time making our ideas legible to institutions: designing the pitch deck, calculating the TAM, figuring out how to explain the opportunity to an investor, grant-maker, executive, or whoever controls the budget. And somewhere in that process, it's easy to start believing that if the person with the money doesn't understand the idea, maybe the idea isn't very good.
But the question this panel really asked is: should the people with the most money get to decide which products and ideas get to exist in the world?
My firm answer is: ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Because storytelling can give us access to alternative paths to capital. It can help us take an idea directly to the people who understand the problem, or help people who have never experienced it understand why it's worth solving. My Kickstarter didn't require one person with a giant check to believe in what I was building, but rather, it gave me the opportunity to share my story with enough people with smaller checks to invest in a world they wanted to see.
🎯 Validation ≠ Permission
Of course, identifying a problem doesn't automatically mean you've built the right solution. My Kickstarter could have raised $300 instead of $30,000, and that would have been useful information too.
But that's kind of the point: because of a tool like Kickstarter, I didn't need someone else's permission to test whether what I was seeing was real.
I could take the idea directly to the people it was meant for and find out if it had legs.
The numbers still matter. The market still matters. The fundamentals absolutely matter. Storytelling can't make a bad idea good. But it can change who gets the opportunity to decide whether an idea is worth betting on...and maybe that's one way we start moving from passive resistance to a little more economic control.
💭 Start Here
So if you're building something, pitching something, or trying to get other people to believe in an idea that feels incredibly obvious to you, start with one sentence:
What doesn't exist yet, and why are you the person who sees the gap?
🥨 Snacks
☕ Open Office Hours: Sign up for this month's Kismet Coffee Hour on Fri 9/18 at 9 am PST, an open conversation with senior leaders about the questions keeping you up at 2 AM, and some feedback on how to solve it...if you dare.
🤖 Off-Switch: Is AI coming for us all? Asking for...all of us.
🍿 What Snacks: I love snacks...but maybe I just love ingredients to make snacks?
🎧 Currently Listening: Why are American public schools still broken?
See you in next week's mess,
Arshiya
