ADHD Meets Entrepreneurship: The Founder Brain Phenomenon

For the last year I’ve had an idea rolling around the back of my mind.

A question I knew the answer to, but was desperately avoiding…

Is it time to rebrand?

It has been nearly 14 years since I began using the name cyclone press, and it took well over six months to put together the original logo and supporting brand guidelines, collateral, etc.

I do NOT want to do that again.

But it’s time.¹

As soon as I acknowledged that thought, my brain kicked into high gear, recalling every weird word I’ve ever heard, mashing together color schemes, redesigning website layouts in my head…

This phenomenon is a thing I like to call “founder brain,” and it looks like buying domain names at 3 in the morning.

Founder brain is when an entrepreneurial streak meets the firehose of information from every book, article, hobby, video, conversation and random shower thought you’ve ever had. It culminates in a weird confluence of idea generation, usually related to business.

It’s incessant.

It keeps you up at night.

It gets stuck on very specific problems that simply MUST be solved, which is why many of us start businesses in the first place; to solve those problems.

Founder brain is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s why I’m never bored, always have a newsletter or podcast topic, work on too many projects, and have to stop myself from building new product ideas as soon as I have them.

If you don’t own 10+ domain names, are you even a founder?

• In the last two weeks, I have purchased three new domain names.
• I have sat in my car at soccer practice looking up words in the thesaurus.
• I have pulled up the dictionary app at 2 AM at night.
• I have started mapping out questions for client interviews to find out what words they use to describe what I do, because (re)naming a business is freaking HARD, people.
  

If you’re an entrepreneur, you recognize this thought train immediately, because you’ve already purchased several tickets, starting with station #1: “Maybe I should turn this into a business? …”

It’s unique, this mental disorder we all have.

I was talking to a friend about founder brain, and he said:

I bet entrepreneurs are just spectrum AuDHD (Autism + ADHD) types where their special interest is either “business” or solving whatever problem their business is based on.

Add a dopamine issue and hyper-fixation (ADHD) and make selling / talking about the business a big dopamine hit and bam.

Addiction / mental illness level behavior that makes some people very rich (and crazy) and everyone else just crazy.

We joke about this a lot, but for real… there’s some serious truth in it.

At least in my circles, there seem to be a disproportionate number of neurodivergent founders. Our brains are wired to create things after all. Living in an über capitalist society simply means that those “things” often happen to be businesses.²

This drive to create things lends itself to a brain that never stops working on ideas for how to do that thing differently, or better, or with a new twist.

It’s like art, if art was an LLC certificate and an invoice for services rendered.

So how does one deal with founder brain?

Honestly, you just have to roll with it. There are two angles on this die:

1. Idea Generation
2. Execution
   

And by die, I mean a dodecahedron, but I only have the bandwidth for two sides right now.

For idea generation, I have a hardcore system for note-taking. When I have an idea, I have a shortcut on my phone to save, date, and file it immediately. It gets logged, and I go on my merry way knowing it’s safe (and therefore out of my brain). I’ll work on it later, when it makes sense to do so.³

For execution, it’s important to understand that there’s an ebb and flow to projects, and even phases of projects. When I get into a flow state (spanning multiple days/weeks) I just acknowledge that fixation is what I’ll be working on. Everything else gets pushed to the side for a while.

I built the entire website for the Founder Problems podcast in two days. I built and refined my new website packages page (which included refining the packages themselves) within a week. When I get stuck on a problem with a certain level of intensity, I have to let myself solve it. It doesn’t mean dropping the ball on other projects, just working late for a while.

This isn’t a constant; more of a wildly unpredictable cycle of being struck by lightning on occasion.

The most difficult part is in identifying which things are worth spending time on.

Early on, many founders get caught up solving the wrong problems because of this drive. At this point in my career, I know my target market, their problems, and my problems well enough to make this distinction before I even entertain a new project.⁴

It might be why I resisted the rebranding question for so long, actually.

Do you have a million ideas a minute? What kind of systems have you built to capture and direct that energy?

I joke about this being a mental disorder, and it can certainly exacerbate unhealthy behaviors for some people, but on the whole I think it’s kind of great. The key is to build structure around how you work and when to pursue (or not pursue) the current obsession.

Footnotes:
¹ When I was brainstorming a new business name, I knew I wanted to use the word “press” (as in letterpress), because I originally started my business as a design and printing agency. Around that time, I wrote a haiku about how I was a digital tornado (apt, considering this post), which made me think of cyclone… and here we are. Unfortunately, it’s always sounded like a publishing company, and we’re purely a strategic website agency now (no printing), so it’s very much time for an update.
² Most of us would just build stuff for the sake of building stuff. We need money to live, but it’s often not our primary motivator (side note: you know you picked the right industry when you’d do the work for free).
³ I have written a lot of great things in the notes on my phone late at night after saving an idea, when the added context becomes a whole standalone post or business concept.
⁴ Where I do have to be careful is on solving individual technical problems, especially around code. Those push all my must-figure-this-out buttons when often the best thing to do is step away for a while.