Beat the Startup Founder Stigma Without a Cofounder Crutch

The worst reason to take on a cofounder is to add legitimacy

Joe Procopio
5 min readJun 24, 2021
image by wayhomestudio

Starting a business is one of the easiest things you’ll ever do. You can literally do it right now. Dust off an idea that’s been in the back of your mind and start making world-conquering plans. Congratulations. You’re a startup founder.

On the other hand, actually being a working startup founder is fraught with complexities, difficulties, and flat-out impossibilities. From the moment you flip that mental switch and call yourself an “entrepreneur,” you’ll face doubt, dismissive attitudes, maybe even ridicule. All of this can fester into a stigma that we’ve only recently begun to label as imposter syndrome.

There’s one thing I don’t want you to do to combat that stigma, because I see it happen over and over again, with new and even experienced founders.

I don’t want you to take on a cofounder.

Why it’s hard be an entrepreneur

Being an entrepreneur requires more skill, experience, connections, and just plain effort than any one human being can muster.

Even folks like me, who have succeeded more times than we deserve and failed more times than we’d like to admit, know that if…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com