Never mix charity with business

The most expensive mistake I see mission-driven founders make is not a pricing mistake. It is treating a discount as a value, and a value as a discount.

If your work has a social purpose, that purpose is real and it should be visible. But the moment it starts subsidising the unit economics, you have built two organisations inside one and neither of them can be measured. The charity cannot report impact honestly, because its funding depends on the business. The business cannot report health honestly, because its numbers are softened by goodwill.

Keep them separate. Charge properly for the thing that is a business, and fund the thing that is charity out of what the business earns, on purpose, with a number attached to it. That way both survive a bad year.

This is not a cold position. It is the opposite. The people who depend on the social work deserve for it to be funded by something durable, not by a founder quietly absorbing losses until they cannot.