I spent ten years in San Francisco watching founders hand over their companies piece by piece. First it’s a seed round, then a Series A, then suddenly the person who built the thing from nothing owns 8% of their own creation and answers to a board that’s never set foot in their office.

So when I moved to Charleston and started paying attention to the local business scene, Island Brands’ Scott Hansen caught my attention for doing something I rarely saw in the Bay Area: raising real money without selling his soul.

Hansen’s approach to crowdfunding isn’t the “please give us $50 for a t-shirt” model that cluttered Kickstarter a decade ago. Through his agency work, he’s helped brands like Proud Mary Coffee raise $1.23 million on StartEngine in under 70 days. That puts them in the top 5% of equity crowdfunding campaigns in the country.

The numbers are impressive. But what struck me during my conversations with Hansen is his philosophy about what capital actually means for a business.

“Most founders assume raising capital means giving up control,” Hansen told me. “But the truth is, community funding can be one of the most brand-aligned ways to grow, if you do it right.”

That last part is key. Hansen treats crowdfunding as long-term brand development, not a one-time cash grab. His team handles everything from pre-launch positioning to investor communications to post-campaign community retention.

I’ve seen what happens when companies chase growth at any cost. In San Francisco, I watched promising startups pivot away from their core mission the moment a VC partner raised an eyebrow. I’ve sat in rooms where founders were told to fire half their team and “focus on metrics” by people who couldn’t explain what the company actually did.

Charleston doesn’t have to follow that playbook.

Island Brands, the Charleston-born beer company Hansen co-founded in 2016, proved the model could work. The lifestyle beverage brand landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America before being acquired in 2024. Hansen’s experience building that company from the ground up without surrendering to venture capital informs everything he now teaches other founders.

Hansen represents something different. His model puts the people who fund your company and the people who buy your products in the same category. Your investors want you to succeed because they believe in what you’re building, not because they need a 10x return to justify their fund’s existence.

“The best campaigns don’t talk about numbers first,” Hansen said. “They start with the story, the values, the people. The money follows that.”

That’s not the kind of thing you hear in Sand Hill Road conference rooms. But it might be exactly the approach that lets Charleston build companies that last.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that not every crowdfunding campaign will hit $1.23 million. Most won’t. But the fundamental shift Island Brands’ Scott Hansen is championing, treating investors as community members and treating capital as a tool rather than a goal, feels right for a city that’s always valued doing things its own way.

The Lowcountry has never wanted to be Silicon Valley, and after watching that particular sausage get made for a decade, I’d argue that’s a good thing.

If Hansen can help Charleston founders build the companies they actually want to build, rather than the companies venture capitalists want them to build, he might be onto something more valuable than any Series A.