Consumer investing is a completely different game than B2B.
In B2B, you have a lot of very similar buyers. You develop an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), do a bunch of discovery, understand the pain points, and find a path to solve those. A lot of those are pain pills aka hair-on-fire problems.
Consumer is full of vitamins. In consumer, you may do discovery, but you want to do the opposite of what people are telling you.
It reminds me of what Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” You can’t predict consumer behavior, and that makes things a lot more challenging.
In B2B, it’s simpler. There’s a problem, people are going to solve it, save time, save money, or make more money. Certain things in consumer obviously make sense — car warranties, lending products, commodities people already buy, where you just need a better way to distribute. But a lot of consumer apps are pure speculation. It’s extremely binary: either it flops, or it’s billions.
That makes it riskier than B2B. The outcomes can be bigger, but B2B isn’t as binary… you can have a company doing fine, get acquired for $200 million, and call it a win. You don’t see that as often in consumer.
Before GPT, consumer was brutal. It took forever to build mobile apps. Now it’s easy to build the app but you still need the downloads, the multiple cohorts, the daily/weekly/monthly active user numbers, the retention curves, the cohort demographics, the usage patterns. Some of that matters in B2B too, but it’s not as make-or-break.
We are keen to do more consumer investing. We haven’t done as much as we’d like, and it’s not for lack of trying. It’s just harder to build conviction. B2B at pre-seed doesn’t require checking every box. Consumer does. UI, UX, branding, distribution, hustle: all of it has to show up at once.
It’s a roll of the dice, but in a consumer company at pre-seed is a lot like investing in a science company before the science has been proven, aka consumer behavior.
For a founder raising in this category, you need to be a genuinely good storyteller. Someone with a real thesis, real passion, and a distinct read on where the world is headed. It can’t look like every other consumer company that’s come before it. There has to be a non-obvious insight underneath it.
The best founders in this category can paint a picture of how people will behave in five years and get you to believe it’s true.
That’s the hard part: getting the flywheel going. Consumer founders have to be scrappier than almost anyone else raising capital.
But that’s exactly why there’s opportunity here.
Consumer investing has spent the last few years in the wilderness. DTC venture investment fell 97%, from over $5 billion in 2021 to roughly $130 million in 2023, the steepest correction in the category’s history (Crunchbase News). But AI is starting to prop the category back up: excluding the big LLM labs like OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic, consumer AI startups raised $17.5 billion in 2025, growing for the third straight year (PitchBook).
The catch is where that money lands: roughly 95% went to late-stage and growth rounds, while the median consumer seed round fell below $1 million for the first time in at least six years (Carta). Consumer is waking back up, but almost no one is funding it at the earliest stages.
Most investors have pulled back, while building in consumer is easier than it was even a year or two ago.
When everyone else stops paying attention, the opportunity usually shows up.
