I've started more things than I've finished. A lot more.
For a long time I read that as proof I wasn't cut out for things. Three ventures, before my own diagnosis, each one exciting at the start and each one quietly dead within a few months. Same shape every single time. A brilliant opening burst, then a slow fade into the stuff I simply couldn't make myself do.
Here's what nobody warned me about.
The dangerous part of building a business isn't the beginning. It's the middle. The follow-up emails, the invoicing, the weeks when nothing feels urgent and nothing gets done. The start plays to every strength an ADHD brain has. The middle attacks every single weakness.
Starting a business was never your problem. Finishing the boring bits is.
I want to explore why this happens, what the research says about it, and why it hits people like us with ADHD the hardest. Then I'll tell you what we did about it, because it's the reason we built Loops.
A 2026 meta-analysis, pulling together 298 effect sizes from 47 studies, found that hyperactivity and impulsivity are positively linked to entrepreneurial attitudes and to actually starting a business, but inattention is negatively linked to what happens after launch. Overall, ADHD symptoms and diagnosis predict getting into entrepreneurship while predicting worse outcomes once you're in it.
So let's just sit with that for a second, because it's the whole story in one sentence. The traits that pull you towards building something are not the same traits that keep it alive.
That fits with the research on what draws people to entrepreneurship in the first place. The autonomy, the novelty, the need for independence. It all lands early, when the work is new and interesting. And then the work stops being new.
There's a popular version of this conversation that leads with the strengths. The creativity, the risk tolerance, the speed of thought. Those things are real, and qualitative research does back up genuine positives that adults with ADHD experience.
But telling someone ADHD is a founder superpower, without naming where it creates friction, sets them up for the exact cycle I kept living myself. The honest version is more useful. ADHD creates specific, predictable breaking points. And a breaking point you can name is a breaking point you can design around.
The first place it breaks is execution. Occupational guidance for adults with ADHD describes a drift from "planned mode" into "reactive mode", where the day gets taken over by whatever shows up rather than what actually matters. You start with good intentions, get pulled into a dozen small urgent things, and reach the evening with the important work untouched.
This isn't laziness. Inattention is strongly associated with work-related problems for adults with ADHD, and the pain is usually felt as not working to your own potential rather than as any obvious failure. The business feels busy. It just doesn't feel like it's adding up. A lot of motion, not much compounding.
Then comes the part that killed every attempt I made. The admin. Bookkeeping, invoicing, tax, follow-ups, contracts. Repetitive, error-sensitive, emotionally loaded, and offering almost nothing back in the moment. There's a real mechanism here. Delay discounting is elevated in ADHD, which means immediate rewards get weighted far more heavily than larger rewards later on. And business admin is nothing but delayed reward.
So the invoice doesn't go out. The books fall a month behind, then three. The specific task that triggers the shutdown varies from person to person, but the pattern doesn't. The business keeps running right up until the admin catches up with it.
This is the part that turns a business problem into an identity problem. Emotion dysregulation is a major source of impairment in ADHD, and growing evidence suggests it's central rather than a side issue. Qualitative studies of working adults with ADHD describe careers marked by persistent anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of never quite staying on top of things.
When tasks pile up and the dread builds, quietly abandoning the whole thing and starting a shiny new idea isn't a character flaw. It's emotion regulation. It's you protecting yourself from the pile. The trouble is it also ends the business.
And the ones who don't abandon it often overcorrect instead, running on evenings, weekends and crisis energy until they burn out. From the outside that looks like drive. Up close it's a brittle operating model with no slack in it for a bad week.
The standard reading of all this is that founders with ADHD just need to try harder. I hate that phrase, because the evidence points the other way.
The experts, Barkley and Hallowell among them, keep landing on external structure and environmental supports rather than willpower. And when researchers actually measure it, psychosocial support, especially CBT, shows more robust effects than medication alone on work-relevant outcomes. Even NICE recommends environmental changes first, before medication, when impairment shows up at work.
The frustrating bit is how little is actually built this way. A systematic review of ADHD support at work found almost no studies run in real workplace contexts, and the evidence for what genuinely helps remains thin. Most productivity tools assume stable self-regulation and linear time. That's precisely the assumption an ADHD brain breaks. Which is why the planner graveyard is such a familiar thing for us, and why the tool you loved for a fortnight is now a tab you never open.
That gap is the whole opportunity, and it's where we decided to build something.
Loops is our answer to a problem like that. At its core, Loops is a daily coaching app for people with ADHD, and with starting a business in mind, it's built on the boring middle rather than the superpower story.
It gives you small clear daily actions to keep the business moving, so you're in planned mode instead of reacting to whatever's loudest. A missed day, or a missed week, doesn't wipe you out. You pick up where you left off, because the moment a system shames you for stopping is the moment you stop for good.
It lets one person you trust see you keep going, because brains finish for people in a way they never finish for a sheet. And it puts a coach at the point of performance, one that already knows what you're building and where you keep getting stuck, so there's help at 11pm when you're avoiding the invoice you've dodged all week.
I'm not writing this to sell you anything. I'm writing it because the problem underneath Loops is one I lived, three failed starts over, before I understood it later in life.
If you've abandoned more than one thing, you've probably started to wonder whether the problem is you. I don't think it is, and the evidence doesn't either. For most founders with ADHD, starting was never the problem. Finishing the slow, repetitive, unglamorous parts is, and those parts can be designed around.
You don't need a perfect business or a different personality. You need one small thing to do each day, a way to restart that doesn't punish you for the gap, and ideally one person who gets to watch you keep going. The goal was never a perfect business. It's one that's still going.
Starting a business is rarely the problem for people with ADHD. Surviving the slow, repetitive middle is.
There's a real paradox in the research. A 2026 meta-analysis found that the traits linked to starting a business, like impulsivity and drive, are not the ones that keep it alive. Inattention, in particular, predicts worse outcomes after launch. ADHD can pull you towards entrepreneurship and still make sustaining it harder.
The failure tends to follow a predictable shape:
Admin is punishing because delay discounting is elevated in ADHD, so tasks with no immediate payoff are unusually hard to start. And emotion dysregulation, a major source of impairment, turns a pile of overdue tasks into dread. Left alone, that dread turns a business problem into an identity problem. You stop asking why the admin slipped and start asking what's wrong with you.
The evidence favours external structure over willpower. Psychosocial support, especially CBT, beats medication alone on work outcomes, and NICE recommends environmental changes first. What actually helps looks like:
Loops turns "keep the business going" into one daily action and stays with you through the slow weeks. It helps you:
Abandoning things before doesn't mean you can't do this. For most founders with ADHD, starting was never the problem. The boring middle was, and it can be designed around.
You don't need a perfect business or a different personality. You need one small thing to do each day, and an easy way back in when you stop.
Matt has worked in design and marketing for 14 years and is fascinated by how AI will shape the future of both. Diagnosed with ADHD in his early thirties, he writes and researches the ideas that help him better understand his own brain.
At Loops, Matt helps train the AI coach, speaks with users and shapes the app around how people with ADHD actually think and work. It's the kind of tool he wishes he'd had years before his diagnosis.
Outside work, Matt lives with his wife, dog and cat, grows pine trees and dreams of one day owning a patch of land to plant them on.