# Know whether you are a starter, and stop designing companies for a finisher

- Category: mindset
- Author: Andrei Statescu (https://indie.md/people/andrei-statescu/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/andrei-naramine/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/design-for-the-starter-you-are/

Andrei's resume looks fragmented, Java to C# to Ruby on Rails, four years teaching at the Politehnica, an abandoned PhD, an outsourcing firm, a fantasy novel, until you apply his own reframe: he is a starter, energized by taking projects from zero to first results and drained by the long steady middle. Instead of fighting that, he now designs for it, picking products that can reach a self-sustaining state quickly and planning early for automation and helpers to carry the marathon stretch. The standard startup script quietly assumes a finisher, someone who wants to run the same company for fifteen years, and a starter who signs up for that script abandons it at year two and calls himself undisciplined. Temperament is an input to company design just like market size. Figure out which kind of founder you are from the evidence of your own history, then choose the product shape, exit points, and delegation plan that fit the person who will actually be running it.