David Simnick did not build Soapbox by chasing polish. He built it by staying close to the customer, moving fast, and learning how to scale a team that could compete against giants.
That matters because Soapbox is not a niche side project. Under David’s leadership, the company has grown into one of the fastest-growing beauty brands in the United States, landing in major retailers like Walmart, Target, CVS, Kroger, Sally Beauty, Wegmans, and Amazon. Along the way, the company has facilitated the donation of more than 50 million bars of soap through global partnerships.
That is the kind of story that sounds clean and linear from a distance. It was not.
David’s path offers a much more useful lesson for CEOs. Scaling a mission-driven company is not about choosing between purpose and performance. It is about building the kind of team and operating discipline that can support both.
The Risk of Waiting Too Long
David launched Soapbox while he was still in a master’s program at Penn, but he did not jump full-time into the company immediately. The business had to earn that leap.
He said, “we started Soapbox and we didn’t go full time until three years later.” That timing matters. It shows discipline. It also shows that conviction does not always mean reckless speed. Sometimes conviction means waiting until the signal is real enough to justify the move.
That signal came when the company had enough traction and enough meaningful customers to suggest the opportunity was not theoretical anymore.
That is one of the first hard calls founders have to make. Not whether they believe in the idea. Whether the market is starting to believe in it too.
Done Beats Perfect
When I asked David what scaling insight would have saved him the most time and effort, his answer was simple and important.
“Done is better than perfect.”
He was talking about the trap many early founders fall into. They want to hide the rough edges. They want the product, the pitch, or the brand to look fully formed before customers see it. They tell themselves they are protecting the business. Usually they are just delaying feedback.
David said, “don’t be afraid to just put something out there.” That is exactly right.
Perfection is comforting because it feels like control. Real learning comes from exposure. The market tells you what matters. Not your internal debates. Not the version in your head. Not the polished story you spent too long refining.
For founders, that is one of the hardest lessons to absorb. The things you are trying to protect are often the very things preventing you from learning fast enough.
Why Customer Experience Breaks Across Channels
One of the most useful parts of my conversation with David was his explanation of why retail brands struggle to create a seamless customer experience across physical and digital channels.
The answer was not technology alone. It was structure.
He pointed out that most brands are still not truly unified across those channels. Even when they sell under one brand, they often operate with separate teams, separate buyers, and separate incentives. The digital side and the retail side may use the same logo, but they are not always solving the same problems.
That distinction shaped how Endear positioned its platform. The company realized the bigger white space was not on the digital side, where leaders are overwhelmed by tools promising tiny performance gains. It was on the retail side, where teams had more to gain and more to lose.
That focus matters because physical retail has incredible economics once someone walks through the door. Higher conversion. Lower returns. Higher average order value. But the store itself often has limited control over traffic. Endear’s value proposition is built around changing that.
David said the biggest opportunity was giving store teams a way to influence top-of-funnel demand instead of passively waiting for people to show up.
That is a strong example of strategic positioning. They did not just build software. They identified the buyer with the clearest pain and the strongest motivation to act.
Product-Market Fit Is Not Enough
A lot of companies find a pocket of product-market fit and then assume the rest is just scaling execution. That is not how it works.
You still need to know exactly who the buyer is. You still need to know what part of the problem matters most. And you still need to understand what your product is actually replacing or improving.
David made that clear when he talked about how Endear fits into a retailer’s stack. The company started with the integrations that were non-negotiable, especially transaction data and ecommerce infrastructure. Then it expanded into adjacent integrations that gave brands more visibility into communication across channels.
That sequencing matters.
If you try to be everything too early, you create noise. If you solve the must-have problem first, you earn the right to become more central later.
The CEO’s Hardest Job Is Letting Go
David was especially thoughtful when we talked about the personal scaling journey of the CEO.
He said one of the hardest parts of growth is learning to take your hands off the work and trust that the team can execute without you in the middle of everything. He gave a great example. Some of the moments when his team performed best were when he was unavailable, like on his honeymoon or on paternity leave. In those moments, the team had to act. They had to make decisions. They had to own the business without waiting for him.
That is uncomfortable for many founders.
But it is necessary.
If every important choice still routes back through the founder, the company has not actually scaled. It has just added headcount around a bottleneck.
David described it well. You have to believe that you have created the right environment, with the right people and the right values, so they can make strong decisions when you are not in the room.
That is one of the clearest tests of whether leadership is really scaling.
Culture Is Not Perks
David’s view of hiring was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.
At Soapbox, they look for people who are humble, hungry, and smart. He credited that framework to an older leadership model, but what matters is how he applies it.
He emphasized humility first. Why? Because humility allows someone to know what they are not good at. It creates openness. It lowers defensiveness. It makes collaboration possible.
That is a powerful filter.
Too many hiring decisions overweight competence and underweight self-awareness. Then leaders wonder why the team struggles to work cross-functionally.
David also made another important point. Culture is not about fun. It is not free snacks or surface-level positivity. Culture shows up in how people work together, how they handle mistakes, how clearly they understand priorities, and whether they make the company stronger when complexity rises.
That is where hiring quality becomes a scaling lever.
The Tugboat Strategy
Soapbox competes with giants. David named them directly: L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, P&G, and Unilever. He described Soapbox as “this little tugboat going to war against aircraft carriers every day.”
That image is memorable because it is accurate.
When a company that size wins, it does not win by brute force. It wins with speed, focus, strong retailer relationships, and consumer loyalty.
David shared that Soapbox recently worked with Boston Consulting Group on consumer research. The findings were striking. Soapbox had the highest NPS, the highest loyalty, and was seen as the most clean and natural, the most community engaged, and the best value in its class. But it had the lowest awareness.
That tells you almost everything you need to know about the next chapter of the business.
The product is resonating. The brand is working. The consumer response is there. The challenge is distribution of attention.
In David’s words, the goal now is to get “our products on as many new consumers as possible.”
That is exactly the right growth problem to have.
Grit Still Matters
David is also an active investor, and his comments on founder evaluation were sharp.
He said one of the main traits he looks for is grit. “Can they take a couple punches, either literally or figuratively, and still want to fight?”
That line stayed with me because it captures something every founder understands once the company gets real. There is always a moment when the business stops being a concept and starts testing the founder.
Sometimes the market is slower than expected. Sometimes a big retailer says no. Sometimes a launch underperforms. Sometimes the economics are more painful than they looked in the spreadsheet.
That is when grit stops being a nice word and becomes an operating requirement.
David also made an important distinction. He has seen founders get hit hard and decide their energy belongs somewhere else. That is a choice. But there is also a reason seasoned entrepreneurs often have an edge. They understand the shape of the punches. They know setbacks are part of the terrain.
That pattern recognition helps them stay in the fight longer.
AI Should Amplify, Not Replace
When we turned to AI, David had a practical view that I think more CEOs should adopt.
Internally, Soapbox is using AI to improve efficiency, creativity, and execution across departments. He described it well. AI helps “take care of the menial so we can focus on the meaningful.”
That is the right frame.
The goal is not to use AI because it sounds progressive. The goal is to free smart people from repetitive low-value work so they can spend more time on decisions, strategy, and higher-impact execution.
He also talked about making AI adoption cultural, not just technical. Soapbox partnered with Chat Walrus to train teams on where AI can make a real difference. They did not just tell the team to go figure it out. They invested in capability building.
That is leadership.
On the commercial side, David is thinking about AI in terms of discovery and strategic thinking. He pointed to GEO, generative engine optimization, as the next shift. The question is no longer just whether your brand shows up in a search result. It is whether your brand becomes part of the answer when AI agents recommend products, summarize categories, or guide purchasing decisions.
That is an important shift for every consumer brand.
Why This Matters for CEOs
David’s story is not really about soap.
It is about building a company that can move with speed while still operating with discipline. It is about hiring people who can scale the business without making the founder the center of every decision. It is about staying close to customers, even when the market gets noisy. And it is about remembering that purpose can strengthen performance if it is backed by execution.
A lot of CEOs talk about mission. Fewer build the infrastructure that allows the mission to survive growth.
David has done both.
I Coach CEOs
If you are building a company and you can feel the strain between vision and execution, that is not a sign you are failing. It is a sign you are in the real work of leadership.
The challenge is not just growing revenue. The challenge is deciding what to let go of, where to stay involved, who to trust, and how to build a team that can carry the company without everything depending on you.
That is where leadership starts to become a multiplier.
I work with CEOs on exactly those transitions. We focus on how to scale yourself as the company scales, how to strengthen the team around you, and how to build the structure that allows growth to become sustainable rather than chaotic.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs. If you are trying to turn a strong idea into a company that can truly scale, that work starts with your leadership. Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO here.
