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I’ve built five companies; GivMoo is number six.
I’ve had successful exits. I’ve had failures I’d rather not repeat. I’ve made decisions that worked better than I ever imagined, and others that left me wondering what on earth I was thinking.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of that, it’s this: experience doesn’t eliminate mistakes.
It changes the kinds of mistakes you make.
For some reason, people assume that after you’ve been an entrepreneur long enough, you eventually arrive at a place where you know what you’re doing all the time. I haven’t found that place yet. In fact, the longer I do this, the more I realize that every new company asks different questions of you. The answers that worked five years ago aren’t necessarily the ones you need today.
That’s exactly where we’ve found ourselves over the last few weeks at GivMoo. What started as a discussion about branding became something entirely different.
We weren’t talking about logos, colors, fonts, or products. We were trying to answer a much more difficult question: Who are we?
- Not, what do we sell?
- Not, how do we make money?
- Not, who wants what we have to offer?
Who are we as a company?
It sounds like a simple question until you actually try to answer it.
Once we started pulling on that thread, dozens of others followed. What deserves to carry our name and what should never carry our name? What do we want someone to think when they encounter GivMoo for the very first time?
Then someone asked a question that stopped all of us: What do we want someone to say about themselves when they choose one of our products?
That one question changed the conversation.
You see, I think we’ve all been conditioned to believe that branding is about getting people to recognize a company. That’s certainly part of it, but I don’t think it’s the most important part. People don’t wear a shirt because they believe in a logo. They wear it because they believe in what it says about them. That’s a very different responsibility.
If someone chooses one of our designs, I don’t want the loudest message to be, “Look where I bought this.” I want it to be, “This is what I believe.” That realization forced us to look at everything we’d been creating through an entirely different lens. Suddenly, being clever wasn’t enough. Being trendy wasn’t enough. Even creating something we knew would probably sell wasn’t enough.
It had to feel like us.
That sounds wonderfully simple until you’re staring at work you’ve spent hours, days, or even weeks creating. We had pieces that were polished. Professional. Marketable. And yet every time we looked at them, something felt off.
Not because they were bad; because they weren’t us.
That’s a difficult feeling to explain, but if you’ve ever built something you care deeply about, you probably know exactly what I mean. There are moments when your head tells you to move forward while your gut quietly whispers, “Don’t.”
I’ve learned to pay attention to that voice.
Here’s the elephant in the room.
Some lessons can be taught.
Others have to be felt.
You can read every branding book that’s ever been written. You can hire consultants. You can attend conferences and listen to people much smarter than you explain exactly how to build a memorable company. None of that compares to the moment you experience, firsthand, what it feels like to drift away from who you are.
That’s the lesson that sticks and it isn’t because someone explained it well, it’s because you lived it.
Ironically, I think we’ve learned more about GivMoo by discovering what we are unwilling to become than by trying to define what we are. We’ve become surprisingly comfortable saying no. No to ideas that don’t align with our values. No to products that create noise instead of meaning. No to chasing trends simply because everyone else is doing it.
Will those decisions cost us opportunities? Undoubtedly so.
Will they strengthen our company? Absolutely.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that clarity is one of the greatest competitive advantages any company can have. When you know exactly who you are, decision-making becomes dramatically easier. You stop trying to appeal to everyone because you finally understand who you’re trying to serve.
That’s where GivMoo is today.
- We’re still learning.
- We’re still refining.
- We’re still making mistakes.
But they’re better mistakes than the ones we were making a month ago because every one of them is teaching us something about who we are becoming.
If you’ve noticed changes in our products, our messaging, or the way we talk about the company, they aren’t accidental. They’re the result of dozens of honest conversations, disagreements, revisions, and moments where we were willing to admit that good wasn’t good enough.
We don’t want to build a marketplace that simply sells products; we want to build one where every product reflects a value worth standing behind and every purchase creates a meaningful impact for nonprofit organizations across America.
If that makes you curious, I hope you’ll spend a few minutes exploring what we’re building.
Not because I want to convince you to buy something, because I think the companies worth supporting are the ones willing to tell you exactly who they are, exactly who they aren’t, and why that distinction matters.
If, after that, you find something that reflects your own values, I’d be honored if you wore it.
Not because it says GivMoo.
Because it says something about you.
Signing off until next time,
There’s More
If you’re curious about other articles that tell you more about the interworkings at GivMoo – you can read more from our founder, Martiel Beatty. READ MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS!
