Consumer Founders: Building the Impossible

From Irresistible to Unstoppable. Why I keep backing them ⚡

For years, consumer has probably been one of the most misunderstood, underrated categories in venture capital. Too emotional for some. Too trend-driven for others. Too risky. Too crowded. Too visible.

And yet, consumer creates a very particular kind of fascination.

Consumer is brutal

There is almost a love-hate relationship with the category, because some of the most beautiful companies can seem to collapse almost as fast as they became phenomenal in the first place. In consumer, the fall can be as visible as the rise.

Entire cemeteries are filled with products that once looked unstoppable. Companies that raised huge rounds, generated enormous hype, dominated conversations for a few years, and then slowly disappeared.

But despite all of that, I still believe consumer remains one of the most exciting categories in the world.

And when I say consumer, I do not only mean social consumer. I mean consumer as a whole: software, hardware, wearables, skincare, beverages, wellness, food, fashion — anything that needs to earn a place in people’s daily lives.

Because when consumer companies work, they do not simply create revenue. They create rituals, identity, and culture. They become part of people’s daily lives. And when you realize how few products actually manage to earn that place, it becomes far less surprising that consumer is such a difficult category.

People only have room for a very limited number of consumer products in their lives. One phone. A few messaging apps. A handful of skincare products. Maybe one wearable. A few brands they truly love in each category.

In many ways, it’s like the home screen of your iPhone. Space is limited. Attention is limited. Winning one of those slots, and especially by kicking out another product, is incredibly hard.

That is what makes consumer both terrifying and magical.

My own fascination with consumer goes back much further than venture capital itself. Long before becoming an investor, I remember obsessively backing Kickstarter projects simply because I loved seeing builders create things. It almost did not matter what category they were in. I was fascinated by people trying to invent new products, new rituals, new objects, new behaviors.

But the real turning point for me probably came in 2013 with Zenly. At the time, the company was still called AlertUs.

Watching Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo build what would eventually become Zenly was one of the most exciting experiences of my investing life. The pivots. The obsession with product quality. The intensity. The endless iterations. Then the successive rounds. Benchmark coming in. The connection with the Snapchat ecosystem. And eventually watching a product evolve from a simple idea into an actual cultural phenomenon.

That feeling is incredibly rare.

You suddenly realize you are no longer simply looking at a startup. You are watching behavior change happen in real time.

Later came BeReal, a deal we led at seed stage.

Even if the company did not ultimately become the $10 billion outcome some people imagined at one point, watching an app surpass 25 million daily active users, particularly with such strong US adoption, was still extraordinary. Once again, there was this fascinating sensation of seeing a product shape culture almost overnight.

But creating the moment is only the first battle.

A lot of consumer products can create a moment. The real challenge is turning a phenomenon into a behavior, and eventually into a tool people keep using every single day. That is probably one of the hardest transitions in consumer. Growth and virality alone are never enough.

Initially, Instagram was not really social media in the modern sense. It was fundamentally a photo tool. A beautifully designed, frictionless way to take, edit, and share photos from your phone.

Snapchat started as a messaging tool. Fast, lightweight, ephemeral communication between friends.

And Bump is fascinating precisely because it goes back to something extremely fundamental: location. Not location as a gimmick or a secondary feature, but location as a core behavioral utility. Knowing where your friends are. Understanding who is around. Reducing the friction of meeting people in real life. In a world where smartphones connected us digitally but often disconnected us from physical presence, Bump is rebuilding a reality graph.

And once that utility exists, the product can evolve into something much larger than the original use case itself.

But the real test of whether any of it actually works is retention. Because in consumer, retention is where the truth eventually shows up.

Most retention curves in social look the same: a sharp initial spike, followed by a brutal collapse, then a slow and painful decline over time. Even products that initially look successful often become what I call walking dead companies that slowly lose relevance month after month.

That is why what is happening with Bump fascinates me so much. Instead of simply flattening, the retention curves have followed the opposite direction. Users come back. Churn turns negative. Cohorts improve over time instead of deteriorating.

That is extraordinarily rare.

And I think one of the reasons those retention dynamics became so exceptional is precisely because the product is not artificially manufacturing engagement. It is attached to an existing human behavior that naturally repeats every day.

The more time I spend in consumer, the more I believe the greatest companies all share a very specific DNA.

The first thing I look for is founder obsession

Not opportunism. Not trend-chasing. Not purely mercantile ambition.

Real obsession.

The best consumer founders live inside their products. They notice details most people would ignore. They question everything. They revisit decisions endlessly. They care about texture, friction, packaging, onboarding, wording, timing, colors, emotions, perception.

And over time, obsession compounds.

That matters enormously because building a consumer company is emotionally exhausting. Ads stop working. Customers churn. Margins collapse. Inventory becomes a nightmare. Competitors copy you. Platforms change. Trends evolve.

Without deep authenticity and genuine obsession, most founders simply cannot survive long enough.

And consumers feel it.

You cannot fake obsession for ten years.

But the best consumer founders are not just obsessed with their own product.

They also have an unusual ability to understand consumers before consumers fully understand themselves. Great consumer founders often operate in that space. They feel an emerging behavior, frustration, desire, or shift in taste before it becomes obvious.

And that often makes the product slightly polarizing at first. Think of the iPhone or Snap, some people loooooved it, some others haaaaated it.

In consumer, if nobody reacts strongly, that is usually a problem. The best products create tension. Some people get it immediately. Others dismiss it. But neutral rarely becomes iconic.

The second thing I increasingly look for is depth inside the product itself.

A lot of consumer startups know how to make something look good. Far fewer know how to make something feel inevitable once you use it.

That depth can take very different forms depending on the category.

In fashion, it can be a certain touch, cut, silhouette, or sense of style that is hard to name but instantly recognizable. Think Jacquemus. In skincare, it can be formulation depth: texture, stability, sensoriality, efficacy, the way the product absorbs, the way it performs over time. An end-to-end product obsession (Yes, obsession, again…). Think Bonjout - and yes, I am utterly biased here ❤️

In hardware, it can be elegant integration: the way every component, sensor, material, battery constraint, and user interaction disappears into one seamless experience.

In software, it can be reliability, speed, simplicity, or the feeling that the product just works exactly when you need it.

That is the kind of product depth I care about.

Not just a product that photographs well. A product that reveals more quality the more you use it.

Because in consumer, beauty can create the first purchase. But depth is what creates trust, repeat, and eventually attachment.

This is also why consumer categories commoditize so quickly. But true product depth is much harder to replicate.

You can copy the look of a fashion brand, but not necessarily its instinct for proportion. You can copy a skincare claim, but not the sensoriality and performance of a truly great formulation. You can copy a hardware feature, but not the elegance of a deeply integrated experience. You can copy a software interface, but not the reliability that makes people trust it every day.

That difference is subtle from the outside.

But consumers feel it.

And over time, that feeling matters.

You can see this across virtually every category. In skincare, hundreds of brands launch every year, yet only a tiny number become truly enduring. In beverages, shelves are filled with failed brands that once raised enormous rounds. In hardware, entire generations of products disappear almost overnight.

And yet, every once in a while, a company breaks through.

Oura transformed a connected ring into a mainstream wellness product because the product was not just a ring. It became a quiet, elegant, deeply integrated layer of self-understanding.

Whoop built an entire behavioral ecosystem around recovery and performance. It was not selling a gadget as much as it was selling a relationship with your own body, your own sleep, your own strain, your own discipline.

Liquid Death turned canned water into a cultural brand. On paper, that should almost sound absurd. But the brand, the format, the tone, the distribution, and the cultural insight were so coherent that the product became much larger than water.

But the common point is never just the product. It is the coherence between founder obsession, product depth… And brand identity.

And that is why brand matters so much.

Brand is not decoration. In consumer, brand is strategy.

People do not simply buy products. They buy what those products say about them. They buy the feeling of belonging to a certain world. They buy taste, identity, aspiration, comfort, status, rebellion, reassurance, performance, beauty, simplicity.

And in the strongest consumer companies, everything reinforces everything else: the founder, the narrative, the aesthetics, the pricing, the packaging, the product experience, the community, the tone of voice.

It all compounds into one coherent universe.

But ultimately, none of this matters if the product does not enter people’s lives repeatedly. In consumer, the first purchase is only the beginning. Sometimes it is curiosity. Sometimes it is hype. Sometimes it is great marketing. Sometimes it is a beautiful promise.

But the real question is what happens after that.

Do people come back? Do they reorder? Do they open the app again? Do they wear it every day? Do they talk about it? Does it become part of a morning routine, a workout, a night out, a weekend, a friendship, a skin ritual, a way of communicating?

That is where attachment is created.

Because without repetition, there is no real relationship with the brand. No touchpoint. No habit. No trust. No emotional memory.

Selling once is not enough.

The best consumer companies earn their place again and again, until the product stops feeling like something people bought and starts feeling like something they live with.

Then comes the question of critical mass…

That repeat behavior changes everything.

Because if a consumer company survives long enough, there is often a moment where it crosses an invisible threshold. It’s not surviving anymore, it’s thriving.

Before that moment, everything feels fragile. Pace, cash burn, inventory pressure, CAC instability, operational chaos, constant uncertainty.

Then suddenly, if the company reaches sufficient scale, the system starts to change. Repeat behavior fuels growth. Inventory becomes financeable. The brand starts generating organic growth. Economics make sense. Better talent joins. Cash generation appears.

Crossing that Rubicon, as efficiently as possible, is critical.

And today, AI is helping more consumer companies get there faster. Not because AI replaces great founders. But because AI amplifies execution.

A small team can now move with a level of speed and quality that previously required entire organizations. Better creative. Faster iteration. Stronger copy. Instant localization. Faster prototyping. Better customer support. More experimentation. Better communication.

For consumer startups, speed of iteration is often decisive.

AI dramatically increases that speed.

It does not replace taste. It does not replace obsession. It does not replace product depth. But it gives exceptional founders more leverage. It allows them to test faster, learn faster, improve faster, and operate with a level of intensity that used to require much larger teams.

This is also why my conviction around consumer is not theoretical.

Over the last decade at Kima Ventures, and since the inception of Cassius, consumer has always been a meaningful part of that journey. We have had the chance to back and observe a decent number of consumer founders.

When you spend more than ten years watching consumer companies succeed, fail, pivot, collapse, retain users, lose users, build communities, or become cultural phenomena, you start realizing how unforgiving the category really is.

But you also realize why it remains so fascinating.

When consumer works, it creates a level of emotional connection and daily behavioral integration that very few other categories can match.

And honestly, that fascination never left me.

If anything, after all these years, it probably became even stronger.

Because when you meet a truly exceptional consumer founder, someone with deep obsession, authentic passion, extraordinary execution, strong brand intuition, real product depth, and the ability to turn a product into a repeated behavior, something very special can happen.

And there are still very few things in venture more exciting than that.