What Are The Benefits Of Having A Co-Founder?

While starting a business you might not only think about funding or product development but possibly also about getting a co-founder into the team. Finding a co-founder can be daunting but investing time and energy in this task will definitely benefit you and your business. 

We at Pitchdrive are in contact with many startups and cannot help but notice the advantage of startups with co-founders. 

Diverse Skill Set

Every person has her/his own respective skill set - meaning that when you are looking for a co-founder, seek out that one person who has a different skill set than you. True to the motto “teamwork makes the dream work”, your co-founder could take on other challenging topics - for example, while you are an expert in commercial efforts, your co-founder might be an expert in technology. 

Expand your Horizon

Furthermore, having a co-founder will expand your horizon - sometimes we all live in our own bubble and only take advice from the people closest to us but most often, this advice is filtered and created in a vacuum. Your co-founder will advise you unfiltered and bring up topics that you haven’t thought about. 

Strengths and Weaknesses

In addition to the diverse skill set, the personal strengths and weaknesses will be balanced out with a business partner as well. My weakness could be my partner’s strength and vice versa - while I am too detail-focused and get lost in the rabbit hole, my co-founder keeps an eye on the big picture.  

Network

The importance of networking for founders of early-stage startups can never be stressed too much. Be it to raise money, talk with potential clients, or build lasting relationships in the business community - networking can be hard work as a single founder. Why don’t you double the odds and benefit from your co-founder’s network? The co-founder’s network could offer possibilities that were not in reach so far. 

As we have seen many applications from startups and know what investors look for in startups and their founders, we cannot stretch the importance of having a co-founder enough. Even though it obviously comes with some disadvantages, the benefits of having a co-founder remain and trump the disadvantages.  

How to find a good co-founder

Now that you know what the benefits of a business partner are, you might wonder how to find a good co-founder? Finding the perfect co-founder can be a long and tiring process. However, we summarized some “matchmaking” sites online that make it easier to connect with potential business partners:

• CoFoundersLab: Access to over 400,000 potential cofounders, team members and advisors on the largest startup platform on the planet.
• AngelList: Global startup community to help startups with their challenges in fundraising and talent 
• Antler: Antler enables exceptional people to build impactful technology startups by building complementary co-founder teams, supporting the teams with deep business model validation, and providing a global platform for scaling their startups.
• Entrepreneur First: Platform to meet co-founders and build a technology startup from scratch

Apart from those platforms, we further recommend joining hackathons: During those hackathons, problems are being solved creatively and it is a great opportunity to meet people, and possible co-founders. With hackathons, the added value is definitely that you can already work with potential co-founders and identify how they could possibly add value to you and your business.

Another great possibility is a startup weekend: Startup Weekends are events where groups of project owners, startup enthusiasts, communications professionals, and others pitch new startup company concepts, create teams around those ideas, and collaborate to build a working product, demo, and ultimately, present those to each other.

Even though it is very beneficial to have co-founders, it should not stop you from starting to validate and grow your business. If you want to build value for your business, keep your eyes open for talented people along the way and bring in the strongest ones you can find by being generous with equity and giving them cofounder status even if ‘the business’ has been worked on for 6-12 months already. Hereby, do not forget to check out your own network for potential business partners.

All those benefits come down to the same goal: Scaling your business. As early-stage startups are still in their pre-seed phase, it can especially be overwhelming for one single founder. Having a co-founder can contribute skills, strategic thinking, execution, ideas, network, and possibly even emotional and mental support. Running a business is not easy - but there are ways to make it less difficult.