Entrepreneurial pitches often include stories describing that a firm’s offerings are motivated by its founder’s experience as a frustrated user, which we term “user motive.” This paper investigates whether and when the adoption of user motives generates a strategic value. Drawing on the concept of “economic disinterestedness,” we theorize that adopting a user motive may increase the product’s appeal because it signals the entrepreneur’s commitment. Building on real-world examples on Kickstarter and through controlled experiments, we show that product pitches with a user motive generate higher selection by audiences. We further validate two boundary conditions of our theory: the strategic value disappears (a) when product pitches lack sufficient quality signals and (b) when the audience evaluates the same set of pitches as an investment decision.
