A founder we were working with paused halfway through a strategy session recently and asked a question that had nothing to do with go-to-market plans or cap tables. He wanted to know why he was doing this at all. Not in a dramatic, quit-everything way. More in the quiet way people ask themselves things at eleven at night when the deck still isn’t finished.
That question sits underneath almost every founder we meet, whether they say it out loud or not. It’s also, roughly, what the Japanese concept of ikigai is trying to get at: your reason for getting out of bed in the morning. It’s a genuinely useful idea for anyone building a company. It’s also widely misunderstood, and understanding where the popular version falls short tells you something useful about the founders who actually go the distance.
What ikigai actually means (before the Venn diagram version)
Most people encounter ikigai through a tidy four-circle Venn diagram: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, with your purpose supposedly sitting in the overlap. It’s a genuinely useful thinking tool. It’s also not where the concept came from.
Japanese author Ken Mogi, who has written extensively on the subject, points out that this diagram isn’t Japanese in origin at all, and that in Japan, ikigai tends to function more like the air people breathe than an explicit framework they consult. The diagram itself traces back to a Spanish purpose model from 2011, later adapted and relabelled “ikigai” by a British blogger in 2014 after he watched a TED talk on longevity in Okinawa. The pay-for-it component in particular is a Western addition, not part of the original concept, and researchers studying the authentic Japanese usage note that ikigai can be found in relationships, hobbies, and small daily rituals with no career or income dimension required at all.
We’re raising this because the diagram version quietly implies that purpose is a puzzle to be solved once, in a single perfect intersection. The founders we see build genuinely durable businesses tend to experience it differently: less as a solved equation, more as something that keeps proving itself true across a hundred small decisions.
Two founders who found theirs in an unlikely place
Ryan Clarke had recently retired from a full-time career in the Australian Football League, playing for the Sydney Swans, when he set off travelling for a year. He wasn’t looking for a startup idea. He kept running into the same annoying problem wherever he went: finding a short-term gym pass that didn’t lock him into a twelve-month membership. Most people would have filed that under minor travel admin and moved on. Clarke had spent his entire adult life around gyms, training programs, and the discipline that professional sport demands, and the gap between what existed and what should exist stuck with him. That frustration became GymGoer, which we worked with him on through Accelerate. It has since raised $400,000 at a $4 million valuation and is now live across gyms, connecting people with short-term passes while they’re on the move.
What made Clarke’s version of this work wasn’t inspiration. It was that the problem sat directly on top of a decade of lived expertise he already had, from a completely different career. He didn’t need to manufacture credibility in fitness. He’d been living it since he was a teenager.
You see a similar pattern, at a much larger scale, in Melanie Perkins. Before Canva became one of the most valuable design platforms in the world, Perkins was a university student in Perth teaching design software to her classmates. She watched capable people lose entire class sessions trying to find the right button in professional design tools built for people who already knew what they were doing. That specific, recurring frustration, watched up close and repeatedly, became the starting point for Fusion Books, then Canva. The idea didn’t arrive as a grand vision of disrupting an industry. It arrived as an accumulation of small, specific moments of watching people struggle with something that shouldn’t have been hard.
Neither of these founders sat down with a four-circle diagram. They noticed a real gap that intersected with something they already understood better than most people around them, and they stayed with it long enough to build something out of it.
What we notice in the founders who’ve actually found theirs
After years of running Accelerate, we’ve noticed a few consistent traits in founders whose motivation clearly comes from somewhere real, rather than from ego, boredom, or a desire to escape a corporate job they no longer enjoy.
They tend to talk about the problem before they talk about the product. Ask them what they’re building and most founders describe features. The ones with genuine purpose describe a person, a moment, a frustration they’ve lived through personally or watched someone close to them live through. The product comes second, as the medium.
They also treat feedback differently. Founders chasing validation for its own sake tend to get defensive when early customer research doesn’t confirm what they hoped. Founders with a clearer sense of why they’re building the thing tend to get curious instead, because the mission survives even when the first version of the solution doesn’t.
This is also where AI app development has changed something genuinely important for this generation of founders. A decade ago, someone with deep expertise in aged care, or trades, or professional sport, needed years of technical study or a very patient technical co-founder before they could translate that expertise into a product. AI-assisted development has collapsed a lot of that gap. We’re increasingly working with non-technical founders who understand their industry better than any developer ever could, and who can now get a genuine prototype into market testing far faster than was possible even three years ago. That shift matters for ikigai in a very practical sense: the distance between “this is what I know and care about” and “this is a real product people can use” has never been shorter.
The founders chasing everything except the ikigai
We also see the opposite pattern regularly, and it’s worth naming honestly. A meaningful number of founders arrive having convinced themselves that raising a large round, or building something with obvious hype potential, is the actual goal. One widely discussed piece on founder burnout described this as a quest for legitimacy rather than a rational strategy: many new founders become fixated on venture funding largely because startup culture has quietly positioned raising capital as the primary marker of being a “real” entrepreneur, rather than because they’re lazy or looking for an easy fix.
That pattern shows up in founder communities constantly, and it tends to end the same way. Research into founder burnout has found that the sustaining factor over the long, difficult middle of building a company is intrinsic motivation rather than external validation, and that founders whose work isn’t independently meaningful to them rarely survive the volume of setbacks the process requires. Australian startup failure data backs this up in a less philosophical way: lack of genuine market need remains one of the most commonly cited reasons startups shut down, well ahead of running out of money on its own. A founder chasing legitimacy rather than solving a real problem is, statistically, building on sand.
We covered a related version of this in What No One Tells You About Founder Burnout (And How to Avoid It), and it’s a piece we still send to founders early in their Accelerate journey, before the pressure builds rather than after.
How to tell if your idea is actually your ikigai
We don’t think a four-circle diagram is the right test, for the reasons above. What we’ve found more useful, working with over 1,500 founders, are a handful of blunter questions.
Would you still care about this problem if the business never made you wealthy? We mean that honestly, not as a romantic hypothetical. Some founders realise quickly that the answer is no, and that’s genuinely useful information rather than a failure.
Do you find yourself explaining the problem to people at dinner parties even when you’re not trying to sell anything? Founders with real ikigai tend to talk about their industry’s pain points unprompted, because the frustration predates the business idea, the way it did for Clarke on the road and for Perkins in a university classroom.
And when the first version of the idea gets challenged, does that challenge make you doubt yourself, or does it make you curious about what you got wrong? Almost every founder we’ve worked with has hit this moment. We wrote a longer guide on working through that specific feeling in Managing Self-Doubt as a Founder, because the founders who last aren’t the ones who never doubt themselves. They’re the ones whose doubt is about the approach rather than the mission.
Where this leaves you
Ikigai, stripped of its Venn diagram packaging, is really a permission slip to take your own expertise and frustration seriously as the foundation of a business, rather than assuming you need to invent something entirely detached from your own life to be taken seriously as a founder. The Australian founders we’ve seen build the most resilient companies are usually industry experts first and entrepreneurs second. They didn’t need a diagram to tell them what they cared about. They needed a structured way to test it, build it, and get it in front of real customers without burning a year and their savings finding out it wasn’t quite right.
That’s the part we help with. If you’ve got a problem you can’t stop thinking about and a sense that you’re the right person to solve it, we’d rather help you validate that properly than let you find out the hard way eighteen months in. You can read more about how that process works through Accelerate, or book a confidential session with a strategist to talk through where your idea actually sits.
Sam leads Hyper’s commercial strategy and works closely with founders to help them navigate the journey from idea to growth. As Managing Director, he oversees the teams, partnerships and strategic initiatives that support founders throughout their startup journey.
