We sat down with Alex Batdorf, a three-time founder who built two companies in fashion tech and sold one in 2019. Alex has been through the complete founder journey--from raising venture capital to scaling to bootstrapping. Somewhere along the way, she noticed a real gap in how we talk about fundraising, one that comes down to what we actually mean by success.

That gap is why she built Get Shit Done, an accelerator that speaks to it directly, focused on building business models that really grow. Today she also runs Scale Ready Studio, the accelerator New York City hired her to design and operate.

We asked her what founders get wrong when it comes to fundraising. Her answer flips the whole conversation: fundraising is not really the problem, the business model is. As she put it, "Your best investor is always your customer. Your number one shareholder."

Let's get deeper into the conversation.

Tell us more about the program, and the gap it serves.

We built Get Shit Done because fundraising is the loudest thing everyone talks about, and it was never the biggest problem. I spent thousands of hours with hundreds of women founders, and every time someone told me they needed funding, I'd ask what funding actually meant to them. Nine times out of ten the answer came back as revenue, profit, money they could take home and grow. That is not a funding problem. That is a business model problem. So we built a program that helps women get the model right, so they can grow whether or not a check ever shows up.

And the gap is real. Nearly 90% of women owned businesses in the US bring in under six figures total. Take out taxes and expenses, and the founder is walking away with barely minimum wage. Women aren't struggling to start, they start more businesses than men now. They're struggling to grow. That's the gap we close, and the founders who come through us go on to out earn their counterparts on revenue by 54%.

From your experience, what is the biggest misconception founders have about the ecosystem?

That we know what success looks like. We don't. We inherited it. We're in late stage capitalism, and the playbooks we've been handed are businesses that looked successful on paper while doing real damage on the way up. Extractive, growth at any cost, and somewhere along the line we all just accepted that as the model. 

It's not a women's problem, it's a collective one. Every one of us has to reimagine what success actually means. At Get Shit Done we're pro prosperity and anti extractive. Everyone should prosper. Just not at the cost of the communities, the people, and the environment that let us grow in the first place.

And on the way there, what do founders constantly overlook?

They focus too much on fundraising. I hear it constantly: I have a really cool idea, now I want funding for it. But ideas are cheap. Everyone has one, and whatever you're building has probably been done before, just a little differently. What actually matters is proof that the market wants it, and no one owes you a check to go find that proof. The founders who last do that work first. Everyone else is out pitching investors before they've done any of the work to show it's real.

If there's one thing you'd want every founder to walk away with, what is it?

Your best investor is always your customer. Your number one shareholder. Long before any investor shows up, it's the customer putting real money behind you, and that tells you more than any room full of VCs. The businesses that drift into toxic territory are the ones that forget it. They get obsessed with investors and start making decisions for them instead of for the people they're supposed to serve.

Take my friend Tiffany Dufu, who now runs the Tory Burch Foundation. Before she launched anything, no platform, no funding, she talked to women about her idea and built a $50,000 waitlist. People paid before the thing even existed. If a customer is willing to put money down, you're onto something. That's your best signal, and you can carry it anywhere.

Sixty seconds with a founder about to apply. What do they actually get from Get Shit Done?

If you're a woman growing a business, and you want to grow your revenue, your profits, and your personal income, that's who we serve best. And we help you do it in a way that centers your humanity as the founder, not growth at all costs. If you want to stand out when you apply, show why your business matters, to the people you serve and to you personally. Being able to articulate that is what sets you apart. What we're not is the place for "I want to raise money to raise money." But if you want to build something sustainable and scalable, something pro prosperity and anti extractive, that's exactly who we're here for.

Build the kind of business that makes investors come to you.