Startup Founders: Classification and Its Consequences

Hey Reader,

One of the most epic truths about being a founder is knowing the real world exists, but you’re no longer living in it.

You still do all the muggle things. Grocery store. Family group chat. Kid’s soccer game. Grandma’s wifi.

But your mind now lives in a parallel reality. The universe of “burn” “MVP” “PMF” “conversion” “CAC”...

This is a follow-on from Reality ≠ Consensus: How people perceive your startup. This is about how you label it, and how those labels shape what you do next. That was perception (external), this is classification (internal).

Our shared lingo is not fiction and it's not fake. But it’s not neutral either. You inherited this language from VCs, advisors, X, Medium, me.

Sometimes you have to use the label, not because it’s accurate, but because the other person requires it. Clarity for them, tradeoff for you. Just don’t mistake shared language for shared reality.

It’s an alt-reality built on inherited systems. Labels, metrics, and models that alienate the muggles and form the founder tribe. These words hold us together, right?

We don’t question them. We build with them. We raise capital with them. We dashboard with them. We validate our identity through them.

No matter how disruptive your idea is, you're packaging it in the language of someone else's world. Someone else’s labels that distort, limit, and create default strategies that may not even apply to you.

Platform. Pre-PMF. Founder-Led Sales. Wedge.
Borrowed words. And borrowed words come with borrowed assumptions.

So yes. Everything uses labels. But in startups, it’s the tension founders feel but can’t name. Trying to build something original while using a vocabulary that already decided how the story goes.

You care because your strategy might be a reaction to a definition you didn’t choose.

This isn’t me getting philosophical. It’s not a meta-newsletter. It’s not semantics.

If you’re defining “working” by someone else’s criteria, you’re optimizing for someone else’s outcome. No?

These labels we think they just describe the world. Don’t. They shape it.

This book rewired how I think: 📚 Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Bowker & Star

A bit dense, a bit academic, but so applicable. How classification systems don’t just describe reality. They build it. They decide what gets seen, who gets served, and what gets missed.

Then you start seeing it everywhere in startup land.

We treat categories like they’re natural. They’re not. They’re inherited. They’re constructed. They’re embedded with power. They seem objective… but again, they’re not.

If you don’t challenge them, they’ll quietly shape you and your startup’s focus, strategy, and anxiety.

These startup terms we treat like hard truths are just containers stuffed with assumptions we don’t even think to check. They are facts.

You see it when a founder blocks “growth” in their calendar and no one, not even them, knows what that actually means.

If you don’t define what’s inside these folders clearly, you have no objective measure of progress.

It shows up everywhere.

You call it a “pilot” but don’t define success. It ends, and you don’t know if you should scale, stop, or start over. You didn’t run a test. You ran at best, a shrug.

You say “growth” and product hears features. Marketing hears leads. Investor hears revenue. Everyone’s working. No one’s aligned.

You have “active user” on the dashboard, but never define “active” — Is it a login? A click? A transaction completed? Actual value received? You hit 10k active users with no understanding of what that even means.

You panic at 16% churn without asking who’s churning. Free users? Trials? Annoying customers? Bad fit customers?

… And of course, the founder fave “We learned something” after a (failed) test. A test where we didn’t define what “success” looked like before running it. So are you just calling confusion “insight”?

Every folder you inherit without defining becomes a strategy you execute without understanding. That’s how you end up solving for the wrong thing.

Here is mine…

I run Meta ads to drive newsletter subscribers. Simple model, every subscriber has a value to my advertisers. I know my exact budget, my ceiling per subscriber.

Every agency I hired had the same playbook: “Get your CPC under a dollar. Use swaps. Optimize for scale.”

I accepted. It worked. My cost-per-subscriber looked beautiful. Ads sold. Business good. ROI fab.

Until I stopped and asked, why was I optimizing for scale?

The subscribers I actually wanted — the ones who reply, share, push back — came from my campaigns at 3x the cost.

Agencies defined success as “low CPC.” I defined it as “high subscriber count.” My advertisers? “High engagement.”

That’s a classification mismatch. The trap of vanity vs sanity.

And it had me optimizing around the wrong thing.

These classifications determine:

• What gets attention
• Who gets funding
• What counts as progress
• When you pivot vs persevere
• Whether you feel behind or ahead

And so when you think you’re reacting to your startup. You’re probably reacting to the way you’ve labeled it.

So maybe this is your roadmap.

You are:

• Defining what counts as a user
• Deciding what PMF looks like
• Interpreting what “traction” means
• Slicing churn, CAC, LTV, win rate, MQL, SQL ...all of it

The labelling we love, the common language, is not your fault. But it is your responsibility.

Because the only way to build clearly is to label clearly.

So maybe you could ask yourself:

• What am I treating as “true” that’s just a label?
• Where am I reacting to definitions I didn’t choose?
• What folders have I accepted without ever defining?

So maybe you could:

Stop building around someone else’s assumptions. Start building your own.

If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.
— James