We’re excited to announce that Carlos Aguilera, Founder and CEO of chillibeanmedia, has just released his second book: The Kindness Economy: Why the Next Twenty Years Belong to Organisations That Treat People Well.
And yes, we know what you’re thinking. Another book about “being nice” in business. Another feel-good manifesto that ignores the real pressures of hitting targets, managing budgets, and keeping the doors open.
This isn’t that book.
What This Book Actually Is
The Kindness Economy is Carlos doing what he does best: taking something we’ve been told is “soft”—treating people well—and proving with spreadsheets, case studies, and two decades of real-world experience that it’s actually the most strategically sound decision you can make.
It’s the business case for building organisations where kindness isn’t decoration. It’s infrastructure.
Where retention matters more than acquisition.
Where trust compounds faster than manipulation.
Where the long game beats the short game.
Every single time.
Why Carlos Wrote This Now
For most of the last decade, chillibeanmedia has been building at the intersection of technology, storytelling, and social impact. We’ve worked with hundreds of charities, social enterprises, and purpose-led organisations. We’ve helped raise tens of millions of dollars. We’ve built platforms like fundraiz.ai, gvr.app, and shopnate that serve thousands of organisations globally.
And through all of that, Carlos kept seeing the same pattern:
Organisations that treated people well—donors, staff, communities, partners—consistently outperformed organisations that didn’t.
Not by a little. By a lot.
Better retention. Lower turnover. Stronger reputations. More sustainable growth. Faster crisis recovery. Deeper trust that became a competitive moat nobody could cross.
Meanwhile, organisations built on extraction—squeezing more out of people, optimising for quarterly numbers, treating relationships as transactions—they’d spike fast and collapse faster. Burned through donors. Churned through staff. Damaged their reputations. Spent millions trying to rebuild trust they’d destroyed chasing short-term gains.
The math wasn’t close. Kindness won.
But every time Carlos would say this in a boardroom or a pitch meeting, someone would push back: “That’s nice, Carlos, but where’s the data? Where’s the ROI? How do we justify this to our board/investors/funders?”
This book is the answer to that question.
What You’ll Find Inside
The Kindness Economy is 231 pages split into 12 chapters that build a complete framework for understanding and implementing kindness-first organisational design:
Part One: The Case for Kindness
- Why the extraction economy is collapsing
- What the kindness economy actually is (beyond buzzwords)
- Why kindness isn’t weakness—it’s strategic advantage
Part Two: The Economics
- The math that proves kindness pays (Chapter 4 is essentially a CFO’s guide to retention economics)
- The five pillars of kindness-first organizations
- How to build systems that make kindness structural, not accidental
Part Three: The Infrastructure
- The tech stack that amplifies kindness instead of destroying it
- How to translate kindness into boardroom language
- Making values survive governance and capital decisions
Part Four: The Cost and The Choice
- When kindness will cost you (and why you pay anyway)
- How to raise capital without losing your soul
- The real stories of saying no to the wrong money
Part Five: The Future
- Building global networks without replicating colonial patterns
- Why the next 20 years belong to organisations people can deeply trust
- How to start (practical frameworks for Monday morning)
Every chapter ends with an “As Carlos Says” section—practical exercises and frameworks you can use immediately in your own organisation.
This Is Two Decades of chillibeanmedia’s Work, Distilled
If you’ve worked with us, you’ll recognize a lot of what’s in this book.
The donor retention frameworks we’ve built into fundraiz.ai.
The storytelling principles we use at cbm.agency.
The tech philosophy that guides how we build at techBean.
The culture we’ve tried to create (imperfectly, but consistently) across the chillibeanmedia ecosystem.
This book is Carlos putting into words what we’ve been trying to build into practice:
A different way of doing business. One where kindness isn’t the exception. It’s the system.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for you if you’re:
- A charity CEO or senior leader tired of choosing between mission and margin, between treating people well and hitting targets
- A social enterprise founder building something that has to be both sustainable and ethical
- A board member or trustee trying to govern well without defaulting to extraction
- An impact investor looking for frameworks that connect values to returns
- A middle manager or team leader who’s been the person asking “but what about the people?” and getting dismissed
- Anyone building anything who refuses to replicate the toxic systems they’ve escaped
Basically: if you’ve ever felt like you were crazy for believing that treating people well should be normal, not exceptional—this book is for you.
What Makes It Different
There are lots of books about organisational culture, about purpose-driven business, about doing good and doing well simultaneously.
What makes The Kindness Economy different is this:
It doesn’t ask you to choose between values and viability.
It proves, with numbers and case studies and real examples from organisations we’ve worked with, that kindness is viability. That the organisations optimising for trust and relationships aren’t sacrificing growth—they’re building the only kind of growth that actually lasts.
It’s not preachy. It’s not naive. It’s not asking you to be a saint.
It’s asking you to be smart. To see extraction for what it is: expensive short-termism that looks efficient until it collapses. And to recognise kindness for what it is: strategic long-termism that compounds over time.
Carlos writes the way he talks—direct, honest, occasionally uncomfortable, always practical. No jargon. No academic distance. Just the truth as he’s experienced it, with the spreadsheets to back it up.
A Personal Note from Our Team
We’re proud of this book. Not just because our founder wrote it, but because it articulates what we’ve been trying to build together.
chillibeanmedia exists to help organisations scale impact through storytelling, technology, and strategy. But more fundamentally, we exist to prove that you can build a successful business without burning people out, without manipulating donors, without extracting value faster than you create it.
Does that mean we’ve figured it all out? No. We make mistakes. We have hard seasons. We wrestle with the same tensions every mission-driven organisation wrestles with—how to be sustainable without compromising who we are.
But we’re trying. Consistently. Imperfectly. With kindness as infrastructure, not decoration.
This book is Carlos inviting you into that same experiment.
How to Get It
The Kindness Economy is available now on Amazon (ebook and paperback) and through major book retailers.
If you’re a charity, social enterprise, or nonprofit organisation, reach out to us directly at info@chillibeanmedia.com—we’re offering bulk discounts for teams and boards who want to work through it together.
What Happens Next
Books don’t change things. People do.
This book is an invitation. To look honestly at how you’re building. To ask hard questions about whether your systems create kindness or prevent it. To consider whether you’re optimising for this quarter or this decade.
And then to choose. Maybe one small thing. Maybe one big thing. But to choose differently.
Because the kindness economy isn’t coming from somewhere else. It’s being built by people who decide, in a thousand small moments: “I won’t participate in extraction. I’ll build something better.”
Those people are already out there. Working quietly. Building trust. Creating alternatives.
If you’re one of them, or you want to be, this book is for you.
Go read it. Then go build.
About the Author
Carlos Aguilera is the Founder and CEO of chillibeanmedia. Born in Chile under dictatorship, he’s spent over two decades building at the intersection of faith, technology, and social good. His work has helped organisations raise tens of millions of dollars through systems that respect people and build lasting relationships. He’s the author of Great Online Fundraising (2023, #1 Amazon bestseller) and lives in Sydney with his wife and two sons, who keep him honest by regularly asking, “Dad, what do you actually do?”
His answer, increasingly, is: “Trying to prove that kindness isn’t the opposite of profit—it’s what makes sustainable profit possible.”
From the chillibeanmedia Team
We’re one company, an ecosystem to change the world. This book is part of that mission.
cbm.agency | techBean | kindpeople.
Let’s build the kindness economy. Together.