The Alignment Question

Description: Most businesses aren't built to harm people. The problem is incentives pointed at a different target than the one they advertised, and nobody notices until it's too late to unwind it. Meridian builds around one core question before anything else: does this business get better when its customers get what they came for?

Most businesses aren't built to harm people. That's not the problem.

The problem is that most businesses are built with incentives pointed at a different target than the one they advertised, and nobody notices until it's too late to unwind it. A social platform needs engagement to survive, so it figures out pretty fast that anxiety keeps people scrolling longer than joy does. A nutrition app that charges monthly has a subtle incentive to not fully solve your nutrition problem, because solved problems cancel subscriptions. A consultant who bills by the hour will never give you the 20-minute answer when a two-week engagement is available. Not evil people. Just a model that rewards the wrong outcome.

This is just what happens when you don't ask the right question at the start.

Meridian builds around one core question before anything else: does this business get better when its customers get what they came for?

That's it. That's the filter. Everything else is downstream.

If the answer is yes, you have something worth building. Every person who gets a real result becomes your best salesperson. You're not fighting churn, you're fighting for outcomes, and the outcomes feed the business. The flywheel runs on something real.

If the answer is no, you've got a retention problem disguised as a business. You'll spend forever trying to convince people who solved their problem to stick around anyway. You'll start optimizing for engagement instead of results. You'll drift toward dependency.

There are two other questions: does this solve something real, and is the person building it doing it for the right reasons. The second one is the one people skip. Founder conviction is load-bearing. A sincere founder with a clean model who doesn't actually believe in the problem will find a way to compromise it eventually.

All three have to pass. One failure disqualifies the whole thing.

It's not a values statement dressed up as strategy, though it's also that. It's just a smarter way to build. Aligned businesses compound. Misaligned ones churn until they don't.