I started calling myself a founder recently. Very quietly.
And not because I suddenly became certain that's what I am. If anything, the uncertainty is what made me start thinking about the question in the first place.
What actually makes someone a founder?
It's one of those words that feels obvious when it belongs to someone else. You can point at a company, a product, a team, a funding round, a headline, and say: founder. The category feels stable from a distance.
Up close, it gets much harder.
Partly because every definition seems to break when you look at it for long enough.
Is it the paperwork? That doesn't seem right. Plenty of companies exist on paper. Is it the product? People build products all the time and never call themselves founders. Is it revenue? Users? Investment? Employees? Growth?
Every answer feels convincing until you start thinking about the people it excludes.
The more I thought about it, the more the definition started moving. Or maybe I was moving it. That's the part I've become suspicious of.
Whenever I get close to a milestone, I find myself quietly replacing it with another one.
Launch the app. Okay, but lots of people launch apps.
Get users. Okay, but how many users count?
Generate revenue. Okay, but how much?
Build a company. Okay, but is filing paperwork the same thing?
The threshold keeps moving. And because it keeps moving, I've started wondering whether the threshold is the point at all.
For most of my tech career, I've worked on products inside larger organizations. I spent years helping build systems, shaping roadmaps, writing requirements, translating between users and engineering teams, and figuring out how ideas become things people can actually use.
I never questioned whether that work was real. There were job titles. Teams. Organizations. Structure. The legitimacy came prepackaged.
Building something yourself is different. Not because the work is harder. Though it is. Because there is no institution lending meaning to it.
You decide to build something. Then you keep building it. You make decisions. You live with them. You change your mind. You fix things. You launch. You keep going. And somehow the entire time you're still wondering whether what you're doing counts.
I think that's the part that surprised me most. Not the uncertainty around the product. The uncertainty around the identity attached to building it.
If the app had more users tomorrow, I suspect I would find another reason to hesitate. If it made money, I would probably start comparing it to people making more. If it grew, I would find someone growing faster. Every milestone feels like it should answer the question. None of them seem capable of doing it.
Which makes me think the question might not be about milestones at all.
What I know is that I had an idea I couldn't stop thinking about. I built a product around it. I launched it. I launched it and immediately started working on the next set of problems. I filed paperwork to create a company around it. I built the website. I write the essays. I'm already thinking about the next product while still improving the first one. I have plans that extend far beyond what exists today.
Some days that feels like enough evidence. Other days it doesn't.
I know exactly why.
When I picture a founder, I still picture someone else. Someone with more users. More revenue. More certainty. More legitimacy. Someone who looks more like the version of a founder I've absorbed from years of hearing founder stories.
Not someone who spends her evenings fixing bugs, revisiting product decisions, thinking about Android releases, planning future products, and wondering if any of it will work.
Maybe that's the real issue. Not the definition. The picture.
I still don't know what makes someone a founder. I don't know if I'm creating a studio or if I just want to. I don't know if founder is a title you earn or simply a description of a certain kind of work.
I only know that the alternatives have started feeling less accurate.
Maybe I'm just a woman who built an app. Maybe I'm a founder. At the moment, I'm not entirely sure those are different things.