At some point I stopped introducing myself as a founder and nobody said anything. I think because the word had already started to mean something I didn't recognise.
I've tried the alternatives. Owner sounds like I have a corner shop and a set of keys on my belt. Builder implies I'm the one writing the code – I'm not, and claiming otherwise would be dishonest. Entrepreneur implies I'm constantly hiring, partnering, delegating – more infrastructure than I've ever wanted. During my M&A training someone told me to use investor on LinkedIn. I lasted two weeks. Within days people were knocking on my door to pitch me things. I deleted it and moved on.
The problem with “founder” isn't the word itself. It's what it came to mean – pitching, funding, scaling, exiting to a logo you'd recognise. I was never going to do any of that, and I knew it from the start.
'Founder' often carries a specific set of associations: venture capital, growth at all costs, pitch decks, the dream of a nine-figure exit. It's a word that was shaped by Silicon Valley and its particular mythology, and it doesn't fit most of the people actually building digital businesses today.
I've co-founded a software studio that's been running for fifteen years. I acquired a newsletter with a website and rebuilt it into a marketplace. I'm building a platform for buying and selling digital businesses. None of these fit the founder narrative cleanly. There was no single founding moment. There's no VC cap table. The goal was never a unicorn – it was building things worth owning, operating, and eventually selling, repeatedly, over time.
'Digital asset builder' is a more honest description of what I actually do. It treats business-building as a craft and a practice, not a singular identity-forming event. It implies multiplicity – you don't build once, you build repeatedly. It separates the practitioner from the specific asset, which matters when the asset changes. And it centres the economics of the work: what you're making is an asset, something with transferable value, not just a job or a project.
The language you use to describe yourself shapes how you think about the work. If you're a founder, your value is tied to the company you founded. If you're a builder, your value is in the craft. That's a meaningful difference when you're thinking about whether to sell, whether to start something new, or whether a particular business has run its course.
The best operators I know don't think of themselves as permanent fixtures in the businesses they run. They think about what they're building, what it's worth, and when the right time to hand it on is. They build systems that run without them. They document. They treat the business as something to be passed to the next owner in good condition. These are not founder instincts – they're operator instincts, asset-builder instincts.
The best operators don't found once. They build repeatedly, improve with each iteration, and treat each business as one chapter in a longer practice.
My arc has been: studio to acquisition to platform. Each step informed the next. Machine Republic gave me fifteen years of understanding how client service businesses work. Acquiring a newsletter, rebuilding it as Indiemaker, and running it as a platform gives me a view across hundreds of transactions. None of this fits inside a single founder story. It's a practitioner's arc. That happens to also be a more accurate description of how digital business actually works.
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