This is part of our Frequently-Asked Questions series. Be sure to also check out Starting a Scalable Non-Profit, Understanding Whether Your Idea Is a Business and Raising Venture Capital.

The short answer is yes.

While solo founders enjoy real advantages — keeping all the equity, avoiding co-founder disagreements and making decisions quickly — there’s only so much one person can take on. Even with AI tools, no-code builders and automated workflows, a solo founder is ultimately responsible for every domain: marketing, finance, operations, sales and engineering.

A strong co-founder can:

• Challenge your thinking: Someone who pushes back, debates and helps refine your ideas makes the product stronger.
• Expand your capabilities: Teams with diverse skills tend to move faster and solve more problems. An engineer paired with someone strong in customer development, or a designer paired with someone focused on operations, can cover far more ground together than alone.
• Build resilience: Starting a company alone can take a real emotional toll. A co-founder shares the weight, the uncertainty and the stress.
• Inspire customer and investor confidence: To outsiders, a one-person team feels riskier. Even a small team communicates stability, continuity and shared accountability.

Even with all these benefits, you don’t need a co-founder immediately. And your first collaborator doesn’t have to be your “co-founder for life.”

Founding teams evolve. People join and leave. Your startup will need different skill sets at different stages. Instead of treating the search as an urgent checkbox, think of it as relationship-building. Give it time, allow for experimentation and expect some trial and error along the way.

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