Why Movements Matter More Than Markets
And what founders like Nicole Casperson are doing differently.
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We live in an age where the word community is everywhere.
Investors want it. Founders pitch it. Everyone claims to build it.
But in reality? Most startups are still built around markets, not movements.
They chase trends, ride hype cycles, and optimize for CAC and TAM before anyone even knows why they exist in the first place.
And then they wonder why churn kills them, or why “user engagement” feels like pulling teeth.
Here’s a truth I’ve come to believe — not as a theory, but from lived experience:
Markets can give you customers. But only movements will give you momentum.
The tribe rules it all.
When I started building The First-Time CEO, it wasn’t because I had the perfect product idea. I didn’t. I had questions. I was exhausted. Now, I have stories from other leaders who, like me, are navigating chaotic transitions with no map.
I have a sense that we are all holding something quietly difficult.
And the more I speak to new CEOs, the more I see it:
We aren’t just building startups. We are unlearning toxic leadership models. We are healing. We are trying to lead teams while leading ourselves through grief, growth, and change. It isn’t a market opportunity. It is a calling.
That’s when I understood: before the product, there must be a people.
A tribe. A truth. A shared fire.
The Olympia product — my AI company — came earlier. But The First-Time CEO was the movement that started making shifts. It is the heartbeat.
A product solves a problem.
A movement solves a feeling.
When someone joins your newsletter, your Slack, your app — they’re not just looking for a tool. They’re often looking for relief. For validation. For a place where their values don’t feel weird or too much. For a world that mirrors the one they want to build.
And if you can give them that, it doesn’t just create loyalty — it creates identity.
We underestimate how powerful identity is in business. If someone sees your brand and thinks, "This is me. This is where I belong." — your LTV just multiplied. So did your impact.
Nicole Casperson understood this from the start.
Nicole is an award-winning journalist, a storyteller, and now a founder and a first-time CEO. But more than that, she’s a movement builder.
She looked at the traditional fintech media landscape — all suits, all sameness — and realized:
If we wait for the system to include us, we’ll be waiting forever.
So she built her own.
Her platform, Fintech Is Femme, doesn’t just cover women in fintech — it repositions them as the future of fintech.
She’s doing what all great movement-builders do:
Telling the stories that aren’t told
Centering the voices that have been historically left out
Creating a world her audience wants to be part of — and then handing them the mic
What she’s building isn’t content. It’s cultural narrative change.
And in the process, she’s helping redefine who gets to lead, who gets funded, and who gets heard.
Episode 8: This is the future of leadership.
As founders — especially those from underrepresented backgrounds — we can’t afford to build the old way. We can't rely on markets that weren't designed for us or wait for traditional validation before we dare to speak.
We have to build movements first.
Tribes first.
Truth first.
That’s what The First-Time CEO is about.
That’s what Fintech Is Femme is about.
That’s what Nicole and I talked about in one of my favorite episodes of The First-Time CEO podcast so far — Building a Female Movement in Fintech.
🎙️ Watch/Listen to our conversation here:
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If you’ve ever felt like you’re building something bigger than a product — something rooted in values, vision, and identity — this one’s for you.
Because movements don’t just win. They change the game entirely.
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