Allow me to introduce myself.
My name is E.W. Gillett, and over a century ago I sold confidence in a can. They called it Magic Baking Powder, but the chemistry was never the point. I wasn’t selling white dust. I was selling certainty, something that made people believe their effort would rise.
You’re a founder, not a baker, yet we share the same problem: how to make people trust an invisible process. So here, from one maker to another, is my recipe for baking trust into whatever product or service you’re building.
1. Start with Purity. No Fillers.
In my day, competitors mixed plaster into their powder. It made them money until someone’s biscuits failed. Every founder faces the same temptation: pad the product with promises that look good on the label but collapse in the oven.
Purity means building what you say you’re building, even when no one can verify it. It means the code, the process, or the claim holds up under scrutiny. You can’t earn belief on top of contamination.
Ingredient: ruthless honesty in your formulation.
Measure: zero tolerance for hidden fillers, be it clickbait, vaporware, or spin.
2. Standardize Like a Chemist.
When I began, every can had to perform exactly like the last. A woman in Winnipeg deserved the same result as one in Toronto. Consistency became my brand long before I understood the word.
The same law governs your startup. If your product behaves differently on Monday than it did on Friday, you’re not scaling, you’re gambling. Reliability is reputation.
Ingredient: repeatable process.
Measure: one standard, everywhere, every time.
3. Teach the Chemistry.
The world told women they weren’t scientists. I told them they were—and showed them why their cakes rose. Teaching turned skeptics into loyalists.
Do the same. Explain the invisible. Walk your customers through the logic of your system. When you treat people as intelligent, they return the favor. Education is the yeast of trust: it multiplies quietly and feeds itself.
Ingredient: respect for the learner.
Measure: clarity greater than mystery.
4. Guarantee the Result.
I printed it on every can: Guaranteed to Give Satisfaction or Money Refunded. People thought I’d go broke. Instead, I went national.
A guarantee shifts the risk from the buyer to the maker. It says, I believe in this so much that your doubt costs me more than your coin. Founders often fear that promise. But when you offer proof instead of persuasion, you don’t need a marketing budget, you need a conscience.
Ingredient: courage.
Measure: one promise you’d stake your name on.
5. Disappear Gracefully.
Here’s the paradox: when you build true trust, you become invisible. The customer stops thinking about you altogether. No one looks twice at the yellow can today, and that’s the highest compliment a brand can receive.
If your users no longer notice your product, it means it’s doing its job perfectly. You’ve turned chaos into calm. You’ve become the silence beneath their confidence.
Ingredient: humility.
Measure: satisfaction without applause.
The Final Mixture
Purity. Consistency. Education. Guarantee. Humility.
Blend thoroughly. Test daily. Bake under pressure until golden.
You may think you’re building a company, but you’re really performing chemistry—mixing belief and behavior into something repeatable. If it works, your product will rise, your customers will return, and one day they’ll forget your name.
That’s not tragedy. That’s success.
Because when people no longer think about whether they can trust you, it means they already do.
This is one of nineteen “Trust Principles” from The Magic Powder, the business biography of E.W. Gillett. The book documents how a forgotten 19th-century businessman built an empire on education and proof—and what that pattern might mean for companies today.
