5 Advantages of Building a Startup with a Co-Founder

Our startup is based in a co-working space which means I often meet other founders. Sometimes, some of the early-stage founders ask for advice on building a startup and without a doubt my advice every time is, find a co-founder. It makes building a startup that much easier. Let me break down why.

There are so many advantages to having a co-founder and I have been lucky enough to experience over the last 3 years.

Collaboration

You can bounce ideas of one another, and two brains are better than one. When building ideas you can collaborate and come up with a better solution than if it’s just one person on their own. Barry and I often start new features and ideas on a whiteboard, then together to fine-tune and improve the workflows. Almost every time, the product benefits from having two minds solve problems for our customers.

Different Perspectives

Running a startup can be extremely difficult - you go from the highest highs to some of the super lows. What I’ve found is whenever I’m feeling challenged with a certain scenario and maybe feeling a little more negative about a situation, my cofounder is there to challenge me on my thought process. It pulls me back up and really helps put certain situations into perspective. And the same goes whenever need another pulling up, sometimes it is easy to show them how awesome our situation is.

Different Skills Sets

Having a Co-Founder means your startup is potentially starting off with 2 different sets of skills. My advice is to get a co-founder that compliments you. Barry and I worked together for years, my rapid development methodologies matches his world-class design abilities. We knew we could put a highly polished product out in a matter of days. On top of that, I’m quite extraverted whereas my co-founder is introverted, we balance each other out nicely. I would recommend having a co-founder that does something different to yourself - if you’re an engineer look for a sales or business dev or maybe marketing.

Get more done

Having a co-founder means your not doing everything by yourself. The workload is shared and more progress is made. When working together and sharing each of your skill sets you can quite often work on the same tasks like content, blogs or brand new features. At GoRoadie, we automate any templates that need to be created or we have a style guide so both of us can go and build new pages or features in our own time.

Accountability

I work every workday with my business partner and speak every day. We agree our commitments together and we hold each other accountable. We know what we are responsible for and we both keep each other up to date with progress. Having someone to check in with ensures that we complete tasks, features and support issues quickly and effectively.

Hope this has helped with building a startup or if you are needing to decide if you want a co-founder or not.

Read more about GoRoadie’s story, on either giving your teams a performance boost or 5 pitfalls when writing goals.