I Talk to Dozens of Outdoor Founders Every Year. I Back Two, Maybe Three. Here’s What Separates Them.
On coachability, cap tables, and what the dead brands had in common
A founder I backed early on in our fund spent two years fighting me on every piece of feedback I gave him. Good product. Real talent. The company didn’t fail — it capped out, and eventually sold for a fraction of what it could have been worth. That story tells you more about what separates outdoor brands that make it from the ones that don’t than anything else I can give you. The difference wasn’t the product. It almost never is.
I’ve been doing this for nearly ten years. I talk to dozens of outdoor founders every year. I back two, maybe three. That’s roughly twenty investments over a decade — a quarter thriving, half dead, the rest somewhere in the middle. Here’s the pattern.
Coachability is more predictive than product. More predictive than market size. More predictive than the pitch.
It’s the variable I look for first now.
Coachable doesn’t mean compliant. The best founders I’ve backed argue with me, push back, tell me when I’m wrong. But there’s a difference between disagreeing and defensive. A coachable founder sits with feedback and changes course when it’s true. A non-coachable founder hears feedback as a personal attack and doesn’t change.
The founder I described above couldn’t separate his identity from his original thesis. Being wrong about the brand felt like being wrong about himself. So he just wasn’t wrong. Ever. The brand stayed exactly where he’d put it on day one.
The founders who made it could be wrong, admit it, and adjust. That’s the whole thing.
The product rarely kills a brand. The cap table, the margin structure, or the timing usually does.
This one took years to see clearly, and I got it wrong early.
I’ve watched brands with mediocre products survive because the economics worked and the founder was disciplined. I’ve watched brands with excellent products die because the cap table was underwater, the margin structure couldn’t support a long enough runway, or the timing was off by two years.
The clearest example I have: one of the strongest pitches I’ve seen came from a founder who structured his financing to give himself seven years of runway at breakeven. Seven years! He could actually listen to the market. He could iterate without the clock killing him. He could make mistakes and correct them.
Most founders get three years if they’re lucky. Three years to find market fit in a category where most outdoor brands take five to build real traction. The math doesn’t work — and nobody says it out loud when you’re raising your seed round.
The brands that made it either had smart cap table decisions from the beginning or obsessive discipline about margin. Usually both. The product is the long game. The cap table is what determines whether you stay alive long enough to play it.
The brands that built real community found a way through almost everything.
Not social media community. Real relationships with actual customers.
I’ve watched brands with real community survive market shifts, funding crunches, supply chain failures, and shipping delays that would have killed a brand running on paid acquisition. The difference wasn’t product quality. It was whether the customers had decided they were on the founder’s team.
MODL is the clearest version of this I’ve seen. They initially built a water bottle — genuinely well-designed, lots of attachments, hugely flexible — the kind of product that earns real fans fast. It was also expensive to manufacture and a supply chain disaster. The economics didn’t work.
The pivot came from the ingenuity of the handle. The bottle’s handle design had something to it — near limitless utility, and myriad ways to attach to all of your gear. That insight became The Infinity Tool. Different product category entirely, vastly simpler supply chain, better unit economics. But getting there meant complete re-tooling, and it meant asking their existing customers to follow them somewhere those customers hadn’t signed up to go.
That’s the test. The people who backed them as a hydration company had to decide whether they were backing MODL or just buying a water bottle. They stayed. And not just passively — that early customer base became the engine of everything that followed. What MODL has built since that pivot didn’t come from paid acquisition. It came from people who had already decided they were on the team and spread the word for them.
The outdoor category punishes inauthenticity faster than almost anywhere else.
Outdoor consumers take your product into environments where the gap between your promise and reality gets exposed immediately. There’s no hiding it.
I’ve watched founders pivot from polished corporate language to actual honesty and see their brand strengthen almost overnight. I’ve watched founders try to manufacture authenticity and get punished for it just as fast. If you build a real brand, the category protects you. If you don’t, it exposes you.
The question every founder should ask every investor before taking their check.
What happens when your money runs out and we’re still not profitable?
The founders who asked that question and actually thought it through made decisions differently. They weren’t optimizing for growth. They were optimizing to outlast the runway. They understood the end date was real and coming, and they structured the business to still be alive when it arrived.
The founders who didn’t ask it got surprised by it. When the runway got short, they panicked. They raised at bad terms. They made product decisions based on speed instead of coherence. They burned out.
Build like your money runs out in three years. Because it probably will. That constraint is not a limitation. It’s a design requirement. The best outdoor brands I’ve backed understood that from the beginning.
What's the question you wish you'd asked before you took the money?
I’m Andrew Luter, founder of Rio Chato Investments. We back early-stage outdoor recreation and lifestyle brands — the kind of companies building gear and experiences for people who’d rather be outside. I’m based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is basically a full-time reminder of why this space matters.
If you’re building an outdoor brand and want a straight conversation about where you are and where you’re going, feel free to reach out. Happy to point you in the right direction.
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