Hey, Aron here.

There's a word that gets thrown around in startup circles that I've grown to dislike. You've probably heard it or perhaps someone called you one. Maybe you called yourself this, half-joking, to hide embarassment.

Wantrepreneur.

The word was invented by people who launched things as a way to describe people who didn't. It says: we are real founders and you are not. You’re pretending. Wantrepreneurs have been described as a "wannabe" in the business world. Ouch, right?

If you give me two minutes, I’ll give you a new identity you can carry forward.

We have a unique view here, as we have watched 300,000 idea-curious founders explore their ideas. Here's what we see.

The majority of people who come to this platform are smart, curious, thoughtful people. They research the market, think through the customer and explore business models. They perform deep thinking then… they close the tab and go back to their lives. Many come back later, with a new polish to their idea, or even with a brand-new idea entirely.

For years I assumed something was broken since people explored, left and hung around in our newsletters. Wrong messaging on my part perhaps? Wrong tools that aren't prodding the masses to move forward? Then I started paying attention to what people were actually doing, and it reframed my thinking.

I wrote about this a while back using a car auction site as the example. The short version: enthusiast communities are full of people who will never buy the item they're obsessing over, and the best platforms don't shame them for it. They build experiences for them as these people become the heartbeat of the community. The startup world has never figured out how to do that. Instead, it invented a word for them and told them to try harder.

But here's why that’s wrong.

The journey of a dreamer and a builder are nearly identical, until the very last moment. Both research competitors / customers and both model the financials in their head. Both read the same newsletters, listen to the same podcasts and use the same tools. Both feel the same pull toward something that doesn’t exist yet… but could. It’s addicting and exciting for all of us.

The builder eventually leaps off the cliff. The dreamer reaches the edge and decides that the view from here is satisfying. That decision gets labeled as a character flaw or a lack of conviction. I think it's something else though. I think it's a completely legitimate relationship with the world of ideas, one that has no platform and no community built around it.

Think about the last time you looked up listings for a house way outside your budget or researched a vacation you knew you weren't going to take. Guilty here! I look at houses in Hawaii twice a month. I’m not failing to buy a house; I’m doing something that feels good and it costs me nothing. That's a real human need being met. Exploration, fantasy, constructive thought. On countless occasions I've received messages from ValidatorAI users that appreciate the ability to "safely explore my ideas." Safety is the key word here, and we’re all naturally hardwired to seek it out. Many of you are ready to take the leap, others want to stay on solid land.

The startup world just never built anything for that person. Every tool, every course, every accelerator, every newsletter (including this one) has been aimed at converting the dreamer into a builder. We're all treating the dream stage as a temporary phase.

What if the planning stage is the real thing for most people? What if this is the entire movie for them, and we're treating it as a prologue?

What if we've been pushing people toward a door they were never planning to walk through, and calling them broken when they didn't take the leap? Sad to think about, really. Hesitation simply surfaces your risk tolerance. Some of us have a higher tolerance for uncertainty than others. It doesn't make us smarter, braver or more heroic.

So let me say something clearly, because I don't think anyone in this industry has said it directly enough.

You aren't broken. You're exactly where 75% of idea explorers find themselves: exploring what could be. That’s the work you’ve chosen, and we all get thrills doing this work, regardless of what happens next.

And I'd like to settle one more thing while I'm at it: the idea that there are only two types of idea-explorers. Builders and everyone else. That's not what we see. What we see is a spectrum. Five distinct types of idea explorers, each one legitimate and doing something stimulating. And yes, we’ve given you an identity based on your habits here.

👉 Explorer 
Drawn to possibilities, energized by the early stage, thrives in the "what if"
👉 Analyzer 
Goes deep on the data, tests assumptions, needs to understand before moving
👉 Refiner
Takes a rough idea and sharpens it, iterates, improves with every pass
👉 Sprinter
Moves fast when ready, executes in bursts, high energy when the moment is right
👉 Builder 
Commits, ships, lives in execution mode

You aren't stuck. You're somewhere on this spectrum, and that's exactly where every early-stage thinker gathers. The Explorer isn't behind the Builder. They're just playing a different part of the same game. The goal isn't to rush you from one end to the other. It's to help you explore better, wherever you are right now.

What does that look like in practice? A few things we've seen make a difference regardless of where you sit on the spectrum:

Clarify your customer. 
Not "everyone who has this problem" but the one specific person who has it the worst and would pay to make it go away.

Narrow your idea. 
The biggest ideas almost always start smaller than you think. What's the version of this that serves one person, in one situation, really well?

Think through distribution.
It’s the number one reason, we see, that ideas stall. Think through who the customer is, where they hang out and how you can repeatedly reach them.

Next week I'm going to share some numbers that I think will change how you see yourself in this story.

300,000 people told us something with their behavior. What they said is surprising, a little uncomfortable for the startup industry, and honestly… amazing.

The wantrepreneur label was always wrong, and no one ever built anything for that audience.

More next week.

Happy to discuss your big idea, anytime.

Aron Meystedt
Chief Data Nerd - ValidatorAI

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