How to Make Money Without Selling Your Startup’s Soul

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When my daughter was getting ready to go to grad school, she wanted to take a year off first and get some work experience to determine what specialty she should focus on in her master’s program. At first, she was having a hard time finding work, so she asked me if she should get a job unrelated to her field just to make some money.

My advice to her was: if it won’t help the career you’ve chosen, don’t bother.

I tend to feel the same way about startups and their missions. Staying on mission can be difficult when you spot opportunities to make revenue by pursuing different paths. But these can be distractions — and if you’re not careful, they run the risk of taking your business so far off mission that it becomes something neither you nor your team still recognize.

Still, you can’t execute a mission without resources. Idealism only goes so far, and at a certain point, you need money. But do you really have to choose one or the other?

Working with nonprofits at FutureFund, the free fundraising platform I started for K-12 school groups, has proved to me that these organizations can almost always honor their mission while succeeding at their financial goals. Below, I’m going to tell you why it’s the same for your startup.

Your mission is everything — assuming there’s a market for it

Most startups are mission-based: people find companies because there’s something they want to make better for everyone. They want to solve a common problem or improve a common process.

But startups are also running a race against time. Every day that passes without becoming profitable or attracting investors is a day you incur debt. They call this the runway: at a certain point, you’re either flying, or you’ve crashed and burned. This is similar to the school groups I work with at FutureFund, which often have limited time to raise the funds they need to save sports teams or after-school programs.

What I’ve found is that those school programs can often be saved if enough people believe in them and are willing to donate. The only difference with a startup is that you’re looking for customers instead of donors. As long as a market exists for the work your company does, you can find success. If there isn’t, maybe you haven’t chosen your mission very well.

That’s also why raising money can feel so important in the early stages of launching a startup: it gives you time and resources to focus elsewhere and expand your horizons. You just have to make sure you don’t get carried away.

It’s hard to turn down easy money — but sometimes, you still have to

Since you have a limited runway to get your company off the ground, giving up a promising opportunity to make money can feel like the hardest thing in the world for a startup to do. Turn down too many projects because they’re not perfectly aligned with your vision for the company, and you might not have a company for long.

But there are risks to abandoning your mission, too. For starters, what if that easy money isn’t actually as easy as you thought? If the opportunity doesn’t work out, you’ve lost valuable time and put yourself in unfamiliar territory. You’ve left the runway behind completely, but your company still hasn’t made it off the ground. And you have less fuel than when you started.

There are also potential branding problems. A good brand can forgive a lot, but it still needs to be maintained — and it can only take so much. I’ve been at companies where there were legacy projects we’d have loved to sunset, but they brought in significant revenue that funded other activities, so we couldn’t. In a way, we became shackled to services that no longer defined us. Those chains are hard to break until they start to tarnish your brand, and at that point, breaking them is usually painful.

Finally, there’s your culture to consider. If you’re prioritizing something revenue-making at the detriment of the mission you started with, what do you stand for at that point? I worked at one company that wanted to move away from building websites to focusing entirely on ecommerce. The execs thought it was well within our wheelhouse — but although they could justify the shift to themselves, it didn’t pass the sniff test with employees who had signed on to do one thing and suddenly found themselves doing another. People revolted and threatened to quit.

So money is important — but you know you’ve put it too far ahead of your mission when it creates major risks, impacts your brand, or threatens your culture. Use those as your guideposts for when you’ve strayed too far from your chosen path.

The right mission guides your growth — instead of hampering it

Your mission might be wonderful, but if you can’t find a way to make it work, is there a way forward?

Likewise, the path ahead is full of distractions, and some of them can be seductive. But they can lead to focusing disproportionately on things you don’t care about.

Here’s my advice: There’s always a risk that your mission might not prove sustainable, but everything you do should still be working towards it until you know for sure. You’ll be more focused and efficient, your team will be more loyal, and your brand will be more cohesive. That will give you the best chance to capitalize on the financial opportunities that do appear — the ones that are squarely aligned with your goals and values.

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