So we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud or: why we are cofounding Double

Why are companies most frequently founded by more than one person? There has been a lot of discussion and analysis of this topic, which I will attempt to summarize below:

• Starting a company requires many functions to be performed, leading to the fact that splitting functions, or working on them together, will make the volume of work easier to bear.
• The emotional ups and downs when it comes to building the product, speaking to customers, seeking funding, etc. are balanced when there is someone there, in the shit, with you.

Despite being aware of these facts, it wasn't until I started working on Double that it clicked why I was so incessant upon building it with a friend. I soon realized that it is the same reason I'm building Double in the first place - it's easier for me to do something when I see someone else doing the same thing.

It's the same as why we develop some of our greatest friends in the most stressful of moments: staying up until the early hours to finish assignments, having "war rooms" ahead of important client calls to flesh out the details in real-time, pair programming because we just cannot find that goddamn bug. We bond in these moments because we see that they're in it with us too - that's the essence of body doubling and the reason I wanted a cofounder.

This idea reminds me of when Bubba and Forrest start to become closer friends. Bubba says to Forrest, "I'm gonna lean up against you, you just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud."

As I described in my previous post, body doubling can act as a proxy for motivation. [1] There is no restriction to who can benefit from this motivation, meaning that both solo founders and cofounders can each benefit from additional body doubling opportunities.

For example, let's say that two cofounders are working on separate tasks: founder A is debugging a piece of code, and founder B is writing documentation. It can potentially be more beneficial for each founder to Double with someone else doing a similar task rather than with each other. That is, founder A Doubles with someone else debugging code and founder B Doubles with someone also writing.

Moreover, for solo founders a body double could also be beneficial. Perhaps marketing is not your preferred task, and you'd much rather write code - having someone alongside with the same goals, to do email reachout or write informational posts, could accelerate the task completion.

[1] Body Doubling as a Motivational Proxy