Solopreneurship Or Co-Founding: Which Is Better?

You have a great idea for a startup. What’s the next step? Do you want to start your startup by yourself or do you get someone else on board and find a co-founder? Ultimately the decision is yours – but here are some points to help you decide. We have collected some pros and cons for either option below!

Flying Solo To Success

According to Business Insider, co-founding is no longer a necessity. It has arguably moved from being absolutely essential to being a choice. As skills like marketing, selling and even coding are becoming cheaper and more accessible to all, solo entrepreneurs move from needing a partner to do half of the work to – theoretically – being able to do most of the work themselves. Moreover, many great startups were founded by just one person. You’re in charge of all decisions made for your startup without having to confirm your choices with anyone else. The direction your startup takes also completely lies with you, so you don’t need to adapt your vision to anyone else’s.

Many people still found alone (the average number of founders is 1.72 per startup) and there is no evidence that this works any better or worse than founding with someone else, or even founding in a team. As the story of Facebook has shown us, breaking up with a co-founder can also be extremely costly and time-consuming. By becoming a solo-preneur, you’re potentially saving yourself long and arduous (legal) disputes over ownership, intellectual property and profit sharing.

Co-Founding: Sharing The Everything

Even if co-founding or having a whole team of co-founders has moved to becoming a “nice-to-have”, it is still widely considered a solid decision to share those first steps of your startup with someone else. While yes, you are sharing profits, there are a million other reasons why founding with someone else makes your journey easier. For once, you will have someone by your side who understands your startup, the issues and the workload completely. Having a partner in crime may improve your startup immensely as you will push each other to work harder, smarter and better. Because your co-founder(s) understand what you are going through, they can help in times of crisis and are there for you when you need to bounce ideas off each other. On top of it all, investors are increasingly mitigating their risks by only investing in founding teams of two or more.

Now, finding that perfect partner to co-found with is a whole different story. It will be (one of) the most important relationship(s) you will have. Choosing a co-founder is incredibly tricky but there are frequent events throughout Europe for finding a co-founder as well as platforms like StartUs.

So, which one is better?

A co-founder partnership is like a marriage is what a wise man once said to me. It is the person you can ring in the middle of the night because you just had a new idea for your product. The one you share costs and success with. And the one you potentially share all disillusionment, setbacks and doubts with. Choosing to go the solo route, on the other hand, means that you keep 100% of all profits, being able to make your own decisions and be completely in control of what happens at your startup.

Which one will you choose?

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