The co-founder you don't need

My old self: "I need a co-founder because I can't build something this big by myself."

My new self: Nine times out of ten, that wasn't actually true for me. What was true is that I was afraid of being alone in it. I hadn't figured out what I actually needed help with, so I went looking for a person instead of an answer, and that's how I ended up with the wrong match even when I thought I was choosing carefully. It wasn't even that I ran the process badly. I just didn't know what I was solving for, so any smart, motivated person looked like the answer.

In practice that meant I kept drawing out the search, getting distracted and procrastinating on the actual problems I needed to solve, the business side, the sales side, while telling myself I'd just delegate all of that to someone else eventually.

So what do you actually need a co-founder for? Figure out what you're good at, what business you're trying to build, and how big you want it to get, before you decide you need a partner. If you're an engineer who hates leaving the basement building something that needs sales, sure, maybe you want a sales founder, and if you're a business person who hates figuring out how to build things properly, you probably want a technical co-founder instead. But if you just want to make a comfortable living off a straightforward product in a low cost of living city, you can probably learn enough sales yourself to get there.

Those are two completely different games. Wanting to make a comfortable living off a ten thousand dollar a year product somewhere affordable is not the same decision as wanting to build a hundred million dollar company out of an expensive city with a family to support. The second one probably needs a partner. The first one probably doesn't. Get honest about which game you're actually playing before you go looking for someone to play it with.

If the honest answer is that you just don't want to do this alone, that's real, but it's not the same as needing a co-founder. Go as far as you can by yourself first. When you hit something specific you're missing, hire a contractor for that specific thing, not a partner for life.