Founder Manifesto
Chapters
chapter 1
An Overnight Success,
15 Years in the Making
I've spent fifteen years in the space between brand and technology — but I never thought I'd end up here. My real dream was to be a writer, but a quick detour in design school helped me visualize the stories I wanted to tell. Slowly, my career evolved from building brands on billboards and print ads and onto the web. While the 2008 financial crisis brought its fair share of heartache, more companies started coming out of the woodwork. We make fun of the proliferation of "disruption" today, but everywhere you looked, there was a founder looking to create a paradigm shift in an age-old industry.
I was in the right place at the right time, helping luminaries translate their napkin-sketch ideas into digital experiences that would become beloved brands with fervent cult followings. I worked to create the online experiences for Glossier, Reformation and The Honest Company, shaping their earliest touchpoints before they were household names.
Today, we take the idea of average order value and subscription best practices for granted, but I found myself quite literally inventing how to convey the idea of replenishment to customers, how to ensure women would buy beauty products online despite being used to swatching them at a beauty counter in a store. Somewhere along the way, I realized the thing I was best at wasn't design or tech — it was understanding what a founder was trying to build, and figuring out how to make the screen feel like that.
The gap between a brand's creative vision and what shows up online is one I'm still helping clients bridge.
chapter 2
Two Problems, One Root Cause
The tech side is well-documented. Brands scale fast, the digital experience gets stitched together by different vendors over time; eventually, nobody understands how the system works. Things break. Everything feels fragile. The team spends more time fighting fires than building digital experiences their customers actually remember. Time and time again, I'd see brands pour everything into the product, the packaging, the in-store experience — and then the digital flagship felt generic by comparison. Under the hood, the tech was brittle and hard to use.
But there's another problem nobody talks about — the relationship itself.
Most brands I meet have a horror story:
The one who treated every question as a change order.
The agency that disappeared after launch.
The partner who said yes to everything in the sales process.
The one who made the founder feel stupid for not understanding their own technology.
The dev shop that held the codebase hostage so they could keep sending invoices as long as the company was forced to rely on them.
The agency who sold you senior talent and expertise, but handed everything off to a junior team.
These aren't edge cases; this is, unfortunately, the norm. It creates something corrosive — a deep skepticism that any outside partner can actually be trusted with the thing you've built. That skepticism pushes brands toward a safer-feeling but equally painful path: hiring generalist internal teams who care deeply but don't have the specialized experience to scale a digital flagship.
Most agencies act like vendors, and their incentive structure is to ship as many projects as possible. In my opinion, that's the root of both problems — the brittle tech and the broken trust; they're symptoms of the same misaligned relationship.
chapter 3
I Built Pact to Be the Opposite
When launching a website, many people assume the hard work is in the lead-up to launch — but I started feeling like the opposite is true. I kept watching amazing founding teams get burned because they didn't have a partner to help them scale.
I considered an alternative; one that didn't rely on pumping out as many projects as possible, but a path where incentives were truly aligned, where partnerships didn't end at all. I wondered if I could do my job so well that we could forge long-term pacts with clients and help them scale.
I didn't dream about starting an agency, and I think that's very important — because I think about Pact more like a hospitality business than an agency. What makes a great dining experience or hotel stay is much more analogous to what I'm trying to build.
At Pact, we don't pitch one team and staff another. The people in the room on day one are the people doing the work on day 600. We don't hide behind jargon or make our clients feel like they need a translator to understand their own website. We don't treat scope as a weapon. We have hard conversations early, because surprises are how trust gets destroyed. Where others hoard information — a sort of professional "black box" that relies on the asymmetry of information — we are an open book. You'll always know what we're building, why we're building it, how much it costs, and what's coming next. What's more, we share our opinion. If we don't think what you want to build will actually serve your customers, we'll tell you. To me, transparency is not just a value to put on a website — it's the standard I hold myself to every day.
Opacity is how agencies keep clients dependent, and that's the opposite of what partnership looks like. Instead, I'm building Pact to be so good that you can't imagine scaling without it.
chapter 4
We Chose a Lane, On Purpose
The brands we work with — Hill House Home, Studs, Rifle Paper Co., Weezie, Roller Rabbit, Counter, Beekman 1802 — are all what I would call accessible luxury brands. Beauty, fashion, skincare, home, lifestyle are all categories where the way a product is presented isn't separate from whether it sells, where the founder's taste level and vision is the competitive advantage.
We're particular about this not because we're precious about it, but because it makes us better partners. When you work with Pact, you're tapping into a decade of pattern recognition across the brands that shape culture in your category. We've seen what works at $12M and what breaks at $40M. We know how subscription models behave differently in skincare versus home goods. We understand why your returns flow matters as much as your product page.
That depth means we don't need three months to get up to speed; we already speak your language.
chapter 5
Where This Is All Going
Accessible (or soft) luxury is at an inflection point, and I think the brands that understand what's happening next will be the ones that win the decade.
Customer acquisition is getting more expensive every quarter, and the old playbook — spend more on performance marketing, optimize the funnel, repeat — is running out of room. The brands that will thrive aren't the ones that outspend their competitors. They're the ones that build digital experiences so distinctive and so true to who they are that customers come back on their own, tell their friends, and feel genuine loyalty to the brand itself — not to whatever discount code brought them in.
We don't want to be the biggest agency. We want to be the one you trust with the thing that matters most — how your brand shows up in the world.
Allegra Poschmann, Chief Executive Officer, Pact