Why Doing Good Is Good Business

In the contemporary business landscape, success is often measured exclusively by revenue growth, profit margins, and shareholder returns. This narrow definition has created an ecosystem where companies optimise for quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term sustainability, customer wellbeing, and societal benefit.

SocialScoreKeeper was founded on a fundamentally different premise: that businesses can—and should—create genuine value for all stakeholders whilst remaining financially successful. This is not altruism; it is strategic alignment of incentives that produces superior long-term outcomes.

This document explores the economic, scientific, and philosophical foundations that support stakeholder capitalism as not merely a moral choice, but as a strategically superior business model for companies solving human problems rather than exploiting human weaknesses.

"All you can take with you is that which you've given away."

— Peter Bailey, It's a Wonderful Life

The doctrine that corporations exist solely to maximise shareholder value stems from Milton Friedman's influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine. Friedman argued that corporate executives are agents of shareholders and thus have a fiduciary duty to maximise profits within legal bounds.

However, this interpretation has been widely challenged—even by Friedman's own intellectual successors. Legal scholars have demonstrated that corporate law does not mandate profit maximisation; directors have broad discretion to consider multiple stakeholder interests. The Business Roundtable's 2019 statement on corporate purpose, signed by 181 CEOs, explicitly rejected shareholder primacy in favour of stakeholder value creation.

More critically, the empirical evidence suggests that companies explicitly optimising for shareholder value consistently underperform those with broader stakeholder missions.

One of the most robust findings in business research is what economists call the 'paradox of profit': companies that explicitly prioritise profit over purpose consistently underperform those with stakeholder-focused missions on the very metric they optimise for—profitability.

Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter's longitudinal study (2011) found that companies with strong social purpose had 10-year growth rates 682% higher than the S&P 500. Raj Sisodia and John Mackey's research on 'Firms of Endearment'—companies that explicitly prioritise stakeholder value—showed 1,026% returns over 15 years versus the S&P 500's 122%.

The mechanism is straightforward: profit is a byproduct of creating genuine value. The harder you chase profit directly, the more elusive it becomes. Companies that solve real problems create sustainable customer relationships; those that extract value create adversarial dynamics and inevitable backlash.

Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof's 'Market for Lemons' theory demonstrates that markets collapse when information asymmetry destroys trust between buyers and sellers. In the digital age, this manifests acutely in the relationship between users and advert-supported platforms.

Parents understand—implicitly or explicitly—that major advertising-based platforms profit from data harvesting and attention manipulation. This knowledge poisons the relationship: users know the platform's incentives are adversarial to their wellbeing. The result is declining trust, increasing regulation, and user exodus when alternatives emerge.

SocialScoreKeeper's privacy-first, subscription-based model eliminates this information asymmetry. Our success requires families to renew subscriptions, which requires genuine value creation. There is no hidden extraction; incentives are transparently aligned.

The evidence supporting stakeholder capitalism spans multiple disciplines: economics, organisational psychology, neuroscience, and business management.

These advantages compound over time. A company built on stakeholder value creates reinforcing loops: loyal customers recruit new customers, engaged employees drive innovation, and authentic mission attracts top talent. The result is sustainable competitive advantage that cannot be replicated through capital alone.

Functional MRI studies reveal that purpose activates reward centres in the human brain more powerfully than financial incentives alone. When individuals believe their work contributes to something meaningful, the brain releases oxytocin—the neurochemical associated with trust, bonding, and social connection.

This has profound implications for organisational performance. Teams working on missions they believe in:

• Work longer hours without experiencing burnout
• Exhibit higher creativity and problem-solving capability
• Demonstrate greater resilience in the face of setbacks
• Collaborate more effectively with colleagues
• Remain loyal during difficult organisational periods

For SocialScoreKeeper, this means our team doesn't just work on a product—they work on protecting families and empowering parents. This emotional investment produces innovation, dedication, and quality that mercenary cultures cannot replicate.

SocialScoreKeeper's 'anti-social media' positioning creates a structural competitive moat that incumbents cannot cross without destroying their business models.

This is the essence of strategic positioning: we have chosen a market position that aligns economic success with customer wellbeing. Competitors face a tragic choice between short-term profits and long-term sustainability; we face no such tradeoff.

The subscription model creates a virtuous cycle: satisfied customers renew and recruit others; improving unit economics fund product development; better product creates more value; and increased value supports pricing power. The advertising model creates a vicious cycle: extractive practices erode trust; declining trust requires increased advert spending; higher costs pressure further extraction; and extraction accelerates user departure.

The character Peter Bailey's insight—'All you can take with you is that which you've given away'—is not merely philosophical wisdom. It describes the mechanics of network effects and brand equity in stakeholder capitalism.

This is the paradox at the heart of stakeholder capitalism: by explicitly optimising for stakeholder value rather than shareholder value, we create deeper, more defensible, more valuable shareholder returns in the long term. The companies that 'give away' the most—in the form of genuine value creation—accumulate the most durable competitive advantages.

The business philosophy underlying SocialScoreKeeper is not altruism masquerading as strategy. It is strategy informed by economics, psychology, and organisational science.

The evidence demonstrates that for companies building products to solve human problems (rather than exploit human weaknesses), stakeholder capitalism outperforms shareholder primacy across every meaningful dimension:

• Customer acquisition costs decline rather than rise over time
• Customer lifetime value expands rather than contracts
• Employee retention and productivity compound competitive advantages
• Regulatory environment becomes tailwind rather than headwind
• Innovation emerges from authentic problem-solving rather than engagement optimisation
• Brand equity deepens through trust rather than erodes through exposure
• Economic resilience increases through relationship depth rather than decreases through commoditisation

Major platforms built on shareholder primacy and extraction achieved scale—but at enormous negative externalities that society is beginning to price in through regulation, litigation, and cultural rejection. They represent 20th-century capitalism: extract maximum value, externalise costs, optimise for quarterly earnings.

SocialScoreKeeper represents 21st-century capitalism: create genuine value, internalise alignment, optimise for sustainable relationships. This is not a tradeoff between profit and purpose—it is a recognition that profit and purpose are inextricably linked for companies whose success depends on solving real problems.

"The businesses of the future will be defined not by how much value they extract, but by how much value they create. Success will accrue to those who recognise that in markets built on trust, doing good and doing well are not competing objectives—they are the same objective, expressed in different languages."

— The fundamental insight of stakeholder capitalism

SocialScoreKeeper exists because we believe families deserve technology that serves them rather than surveils them. Our business model reflects that belief—and the economic evidence suggests it will serve us well.