Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, and there’s no “typical” entrepreneur. But when it comes to first-time founders, we often observe behavior patterns which can be harmful to starting a business. If you recognize yourself in one of these ten attitudes, or even in several of them, don’t freak out but read on and take a different approach.

The Secretive Genius

The Secretive Genius has a startup idea but never wants to talk about it because he is convinced that somebody will steal it.

We’ve all come across such a paranoid founder at some point. You know, when you’re at a startup event and start discussing with someone about their idea, asking them what it’s all about, and suddenly they freeze, take a suspicious look left and right to make sure no one is spying on them and then go like “hmmm… sorry, can’t tell you, it’s confidential for now”.

So nobody really knows what are those multi-billions dollar ideas secretive geniuses have because they never talk about them.

One of the funniest examples is when the secretive genius wants to raise money without actually telling the idea to investors. Because they could steal it too, you know… But when he really can’t get around it anymore, he tries to use all kinds of legal documents to protect his precious idea.

The problem? You can’t develop a startup idea without ever talking about it to anyone. How else do you find your co-founders, partners and first clients? Anyways, if it’s so easily stolen, what’s the point of pursuing it altogether?

Execution is so much more important than the idea. There are even websites for people to steal ideas because the idea has no value on its own. It’s the execution that makes it valuable. Young startup founders around the world are struggling to get noticed at all, so they meet people, hustle, and pitch their ideas every time they have an opportunity to do it.

Airbnb seems like a great idea now but nobody believed in it in the beginning. Some major venture funds turned it down because the market was too small. They only got accepted into Y-combinator because the managers liked how the founders were hustling, even if they believed that the idea was too crazy: who would accept letting strangers inside their homes?

Also, if you google your amazing secret idea, chances are somebody, somewhere already thought about it, talked about it, tried it, failed, or is currently working on it. It’s not a bad sign at all, it just means that you should relax and stop hiding it.

Oh, and no serious VC will sign your NDA. Trust me.

The Corporate Strategist

The Corporate Strategist starts planning, calculating, strategizing and doing administrative tasks right from the beginning.

You can easily spot the corporate strategist when he starts talking to you about his new startup idea and then immediately hands you his freshly printed business cards with the tag “CEO”. Then you ask, “Cool, and, is it already running, do you have clients?”, and he goes like, “Nope, but we’re finishing the business plan and we will incorporate next week. We will be cash-flow positive from the start and turn a $1 billion profit by year 3.”

The corporate strategist is usually either a recent business school graduate or a former employee who applies the corporate world complexity to startups.

The problem? None of this is important for startups, and the business plan is an outdated document with no value. The only thing which counts for startups is customer validation. Did you validate your idea with customers? Did you sell or pre-sell it to customers? If the answer is no, start with this. You won’t need a business plan once you do. And for the financial projections, only do them if you really can foresee the future.

A last remark: Some of you will argue that a business plan and all of the above are necessary for traditional types of businesses, like a restaurant, a retail shop, or anything like this. And you’re right! But we’re talking about startups here, and it’s a much more uncertain environment.

The Overhyped Visionary

The Overhyped Visionary can’t sit still because he thinks he found the idea of his life that will make him ultra rich very quickly.

To picture the overhyped visionary, imagine someone holding a winning lottery ticket, but instead of the ticket, it’s their startup idea. The overhyped visionary already sees money raining down on him and can barely hold back his emotions. He is over-excited and has completely turned off his critical thinking.

In a meeting of several cofounders who recently decided to move on with a startup idea, the overhyped visionary will be shaking and sweating at the thought of their imminent success. He will talk erratically and cut everyone off during discussions.

The problem? Just like for the secretive genius, there’s no lottery ticket startup idea so calm the f*#k down. You might have a really good idea, but if you don’t control your emotions you won’t be able to make rational, pragmatic decisions in order to develop and grow it properly. Uber is an amazing idea, but they still had to do all kinds of complicated execution stuff and marketing in the beginning to get it rolling. Only after a certain point did they manage to have an almost self-fuelling growth machine. You will need to work hard and smart, no matter how amazing your startup idea is.

The Biased Market Researcher

The Biased Market Researcher thinks that a three-point questionnaire sent to extended family and friends can validate a startup idea.

“So, how did we validate this idea? Well, we did a questionnaire where we asked potential customers if they liked our idea. And we got a whopping 88% who said yes. So then we asked them if they would be willing to pay for it and we got 79% of positive feedback. So the market is definitely ripe for our idea!”

And who did they send the questionnaire to? You know what, it doesn’t even matter. The fact that your mom and friends like your idea and that it’s not a representative sample in any way is not even the point. The point is that this kind of questionnaires are useless altogether. Even if you send it to a large enough batch, the questions “would you pay for that product” and “how much” will never tell you the truth.

It’s like with poker, you won’t play the same way depending if you’re playing with fake or real money. You only get validation once you actually convince a completely new customer to give you money for your product, whether it’s through direct sales, pre-selling or through crowdfunding.

The Emotional Chicken

The Emotional Chicken is like a roller coaster: he can get as quickly superexcited about an idea as he can get totally disappointed by it.

The Emotional Chicken is overexcited about their idea just like a lot of the other founder stereotypes we talked about but has the right reflex from the start and googles it to see what’s out there already. And that’s where the emotional side kicks in: “Oh no! Someone has already thought about this idea. Well, I guess I’ll have to look for another one. Dammit, it’s the second time I have an amazing idea like this and it’s taken”.

Like we said earlier, in most cases your idea has already been thought of. But that’s not necessarily a bad sign. It depends on many factors that we will not explain in detail here. But you can check out our course here and find out which strategy to follow depending on the quantity and quality of your idea’s competition.

If there’s no competition, it’s actually a bad sign because it usually means that there’s no market. But otherwise, there are always ways to keep going with your idea, no matter at which stage your competition is.

It’s obviously unpleasant and stressful to find out that somebody is doing the same thing as you, especially if they are more advanced. But you shouldn’t chicken-out because you will always have competition, and you’ll need to deal with it.

The Premature Gold Digger

The Premature Gold Digger asks investors for money at the very start, even before actually starting to work on the idea.

“I’m looking for an investor”. That’s the sentence you’re going to hear most of the time from the Premature Gold Digger. It can be the same founder as the Corporate Strategist, looking for investment with his fictional business plan. Or worse, looking for investment and grants right away, even without having thought about anything.

“What do you need to start this business?” — “We need an initial investment of 250K to develop our multi-sided cloud-based encrypted mobile marketplace for sushi sticks and chips”.

The Premature Gold Digger believes that money money money is what he needs to launch his startup. Like it’s the one and only key to start the business. And if not the 250K, then at least a tiny grant of 5K. Any coin will help, pweeeaassseee.

Look, you don’t need money to validate an idea, not even to start selling something. There are so many steps that you can and should take before you actually need money to scale your startup. The days where VCs shoot money at ideas are gone. Money is raised from investors only when you have thoroughly validated your idea. That’s the minimum. Usually you’ll even need to go much further than that, for example having dozens of thousands of free users or a growing number of early adopers. Unless of course you raise from FFFs, that is, family, friends and fools.

We see a lot of entrepreneurs asking for money prematurely to develop their products, but that’s not the way to go anymore. There is so much you can accomplish without having any working product, and without even having an MVP.

So stop looking for investment and try to get as far as you can without it. Once you’ll get far enough, investors will come to you.

The Eternal Wannapreneur

The Eternal Wannapreneur mingles with entrepreneurs, talks about startups, attends startup events, has plenty of ideas but never takes the leap.

You can meet him at your local Startup Weekends, Startup Factories, Startup Bootcamps, Startup Saunas, Startup Alleys, Startup Whatever… Yep, the same person attending all of them. Every time. Always pitching. He has read all the books and can recite The Lean Startup by heart. On his Facebook feed he always posts inspirational stuff about entrepreneurship, and sometimes more concrete stuff like “Who acquired whom” or “Top rules for UI design in 2016” to seem tech savvy.

But he never takes the leap. Look, I don’t mean to make fun of the Eternal Wannapreneur. He is genuinely into startups and entrepreneurship which is a great thing. If you recognize yourself in this stereotype, don’t be offended or discouraged. Just realize that you have to take the leap at some point, and the sooner the better.

Learning is important because it will help you to avoid many mistakes but you can’t procrastinate with the action. The sooner you start to apply everything you learn about entrepreneurship, the sooner you’ll become an entrepreneur. Guidance and resources are extremely useful to get you started on the right track, but the actual founding experience is a prerequisite for long-term success.

If you need some ideas about how to transition from employee to entrepreneur in terms of personal finance, read our short article here.

The Perfectionist Postponer

The Perfectionist Postponer is never ready to launch anything — the name, the logo, the website, the product — because it needs to be perfect.

The Perfectionist Postponer is obsessed with the product and won’t get it out there until it’s absolutely perfect. His motto: “There’s never enough features”. He does the exact opposite of the Lean Startup and Customer Development methodologies popularized in the past years.

It often happens with technical first-time founders. They are savvy developers who have an idea they want to work on, and they love it so much that they keep working on coding, tweaking the product, adding features… indefinitely. And they never launch because it’s never ready. They have no idea if customers want their product at all, or which features are truly necessary and which ones are totally useless. They follow the wisdom “Build it and they will come”.

There are also perfectionist designers. Visuals are never good enough, colors never perfectly match, and fonts… Urgh, fonts have to be custom made, don’t you know??!!! Everything has to be universally harmonious. And don’t even get them started on UI!

Call them both perfectionists with OCD. They do have great skills which are crucial to most startups today: the ability to build a product by yourself without outsourcing is a big advantage, and design is a critical component for product adoption. More and more, design alone can make the difference between mild success and wild success.

But the best startup practices push towards getting feedback from customers even before you have any working product. If anything, what you really need is a minimum viable product. But it’s ugly and buggy and an absolute horror to even consider for the Perfectionist Postponer.

Still, if you’re one of those, force yourself to be minimalistic and get your product in front of customers as soon as possible. You will quickly realize if there’s demand for it, which features are important, get new ideas for UI, and much more. And then you will be able to build your product according to what customers want and not what you imagine they want.

Don’t be like Daenerys and wait six seasons to cross the fù$king narrow sea, ffs…

The Delusional Dictator

The Delusional Dictator is so confident that his startup vision is perfect that he is willing to force it upon everybody who disagrees with him.

The Delusional Dictator considers himself a visionary and has a poster of Steve Jobs in his living room. He’ll be like, “I know what customers want. I know what is the right business model. I have no competition. Fùkc all of you.”

Ok, that last one was a bit exaggerated, but the Delusional Dictator often engages in condescending behavior with anyone who’s even slightly critical towards his idea or who has some suggestions. Not that he simply dismisses criticism like the Overhyped Visionary, he actually becomes really angry.

How dare you suggest him an interesting additional revenue source?! You think there can be a better delivery channel for his product? WTF! No, he knows exactly how everything should be. So STFU, listen and admire the CEO.

Delusional Dictators usually have no cofounders because, what for? The real reason is that no one wants to work with them but whatever. They want to act like famous tough founders, but they often miss the point.

Steve Jobs was a jerk but a genius one. If you’re only a jerk, it won’t cut it.

The Startup Hipster

The Startup Hipster jumps on anything as soon as it gets trendy. no exception made to startups and entrepreneurship.

The Startup Hipster just got into the Startup world because it’s trendy. It’s like everyone is doing startups these days. Plus it sounds cool to introduce yourself like, “So, what do you do in life?”, “Well, I have my own startup”. And suddenly, the lives of everyone else around you seem sooo boring.

The Startup Hipster reads “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, gets excited by it and decides to quit his job and become a founder… right away, without any idea what it actually means. And since he isn’t prepared, he’s burning his savings just like when he was an employee and has no idea what he’s doing with his startup.

Final Thoughts

So watch out for these bad habits in your own startup experience. Don’t fool yourself, you will fall into one of these stereotypes at one point or another. It’s part of the learning experience. Just make sure don’t get too much into it and get back on the right track as fast as you notice it.

Just imagine the mess if all of these personalities get together. The Startup Hipster teamed up with the startup dream team: a Corporate Strategist, a Biased Market Researcher, a Premature Gold Digger and an Eternal Wannapreneur.

Meanwhile, no one knows what the Secretive Genius is up to. The Emotional Chicken freaked out after discovering that their 4th startup idea is already taken too. The Overhyped Visionary is still erratically running around and engaging in positive imagery. He bumped into the Delusional Dictator and it almost created a black hole. The Perfectionist Postponer just finished the pre-beta and starts the closed gamma.

All aboard the Startup Hype Bandwagon! Yeeehaaaa!

Can you think of other bad behaviors you noticed on yourself or while observing other first-time founders? Share it with us in the comments section below and we’ll come up with the most representative visual!