Here's why one should remain as a solo business!

That's most of the plus column. If you want to balance it with the negatives I would start with "Nobody to give you a reality check" and "nobody to watch the store so you can completely check out for a while, like on a vacation"

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

If you have a great fit with your partners, you can multiply the total output while focusing on what you do best. Of course, it is not easy to find such co-founders, but one should never stop searching for it IMO.

You are right, but there are also benefits of working with someone else, here are some that comes to my mind:

1.- Complementary knowledge
2.- If someday you want to disconnect, you can request the other person to take the decisions.
3.- Is also usefull to have a person that question yourself or put your feets on the ground.
4.- Bigger commitment, specially on meetings. This is useful if you are a procrastinator, knowing that you have a meeting on Monday makes you more productive.
5.- If the relationship is healthy, you can build/test faster.

I agree, Tejas. In terms of speed of execution and freedom/work-life balance, the solo business is the way to go.

On the flip side, there's a natural ceiling to how much growth you can have with a solo business, plus you're also at a disadvantage competing with other companies will teams/funding on their side.

If you can carve out a niche for yourself and still compete, that's fine.

But otherwise you're at a severe disadvantage in the free market, and sometimes it may very well be fatal to your business.

I think, and this point has also been made in "Company of one" it's always good to question growth, this is much harder to do if you have externals in there like VCs etc.

Nothing much to disagree with on the upsides, but no major decisions are without trade-offs.

I look at that list and I see it score high on the autonomy scale, but very low on others. The repeated singular "you" can be both a blessing and a curse.

Some solo businesses fall into the "very profitable job" category too—not that I love that description—but there is some truth in it.

Should more people build solo businesses? Sometimes I think so, but then I realise that other people are optimising for very different things.

All this reminds me of—"what's normal for the spider is chaos for the fly".

For me, the important thing is self-awareness, knowing what path aligns with what you want more and appreciating there are things on each path that are not so fun.

Most dichotomies are false—much like the bootstrap vs. venture-backed divide.

Agree with all the benefits that you pointed out. However, I think one major disadvantage of working alone is that you do not have a sparring partner to throw ideas at and brainstorm with. You might end up taking wrong decisions, which could have been prevented if brainstormed with a partner.

Another positive I see is in the likely event that the first product doesn't work out there's no problem with any claims on ownership. Nobody else owns 50% of the company, you can take all the code, automation setup, backlinks and organic traffic and apply it to a (hopefully) similar new idea.

A lot of great reasons listed. But...

You also carry all of the stress.