The hidden truth about cofounder relationships...

Choosing your cofounder is THE single most important decision you’ll ever make in business.

But for some reason, we assume that once we’ve found the right guy, everything will be sunshine and rainbows.

I rarely see anybody talk about the other side of being a cofounder:

Maintaining & developing your relationship.

As my friend, Tim He, said:

“As you grow your business, your relationship must grow with it. Otherwise, you’ll operate at the same level as you always have”

And today I’m sharing the 3 tactics I’ve personally used to ensure my cofounder relationship is going the way it should.

Let’s go!

1. Yin and Yang

My cofounder & I are business partners, therapists, and most importantly, great friends. A good cofounder ends up being your bestie too.

And it’s not uncommon for us to question our direction.

Where are we going?

Where do we wanna go?

Why aren’t we building something bigger?

Thankfully, we’ve figured out the formula.

When one of us is emotional, the other becomes super logical (and vice versa). It's a constant push and pull – one moment dreaming big, the next keeping each other grounded.

This dynamic is vital to keep us moving in the same direction.

Takeaway 1: You need to be in constant communication about the direction of your business. Listen to each other, keep your foot on the gas and don’t lose sight of why you started.

2. From Duo to Dream Team

Me & my cofounder took our SaaS from ZERO to $20k+ MRR… with just the two of us.

Obviously, we eventually ran out of bandwidth and were forced to make some hires.

And honestly, hiring people ain’t easy. You and your cofounder have to learn how to:

• Install your vision into new team members

• Communicate openly with each member of the team

• Build a positive team culture that aligns with your goals

The goal is to build a team that can be entirely self-sufficient, which comes from months (or even years) of reinforcing your mission and encouraging open communication within your team.

This frees up time for you & your cofounder to work ON the business, not IN the business.

Takeaway 2: Building your dream team requires more than just finding the right people - it’s about leading your team to the point where they can operate by themselves. This is both you AND your cofounder’s responsibility, and you both need to be pulling in the same direction.

3. Failure

To make exponential progress in your biz, you need to experiment. Make bold changes and see what happens.

But that means failure is INEVITABLE. And that’s okay*.*

My cofounder relationship allows for failure so we don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. We never wonder “I wonder if changing our pricing would work” because we just test it and let the numbers do the talking.

We’ve redesigned our landing page a hundred times because we spot little things we can improve, and our conversion rate has slowly gotten better.

We mock up optimization ideas every week, and simply test them.

For us, experimenting is better than stagnating.

And THAT is why our MRR has been increasing month over month - micro-optimizations.

Takeaway 3: Embrace failure. It means you’re going in the right direction. Be willing to test things and analyze the numbers. After 6 months, you’ll be unrecognizable.

I took all of these lessons from a book my buddy wrote, called the ‘Cofounder Code’. It’s been crucial in helping me develop my relationship with my cofounder so we could continue to grow the business. Check it out here.

Thanks for reading! And if you have any questions/topics you’d like me to cover in future shoot me a DM on Twitter.

Catch you next week 👋

Ryan, The SaaS Guy

Making SaaS less of a pain in the aaS, one step at a time.