Anyone else regret bringing on a partner too early?

I think I learned the hard way that bringing on a partner too quickly can backfire.

Earlier this year I started a small dropshipping store while studying abroad in New York. The idea came from spending way too much time reading posts in entrepreneur forums and wanting to finally try something myself. The concept was simple. A Shopify store selling festival and boho style clothing and accessories aimed at people into that whole artsy, hippie aesthetic.

I found products through suppliers on marketplaces like AliExpress and Amazon, built a simple Shopify store, and started running some Facebook ads. To my surprise the store actually started getting traction and orders started coming in.

The problem was I had no easy way to properly process payments at the time because of my situation as a foreign student. Instead of figuring out a proper setup, I made what I now realize was my first big mistake. I brought in a friend as a partner and gave him 50 percent of the business so we could use his credentials to set up payment processing.

Looking back, that was a terrible deal. I gave away half of something that was already working just to solve a problem that probably had other solutions.

Within the first three months the store passed my original goal of 100 orders and brought in about $1,500 in revenue with very minimal marketing. Around that time someone even approached me offering around $6,000 to buy the site.

Here comes mistake number two. I turned it down because I convinced myself I could keep growing it and eventually sell it for closer to $10,000.

Reality hit pretty quickly. Around May I started a full time research job that took up most of my energy and attention. I ended up handing over most of the day to day management of the store to my partner.

Unfortunately, almost nothing happened after that. The store basically went into maintenance mode and sales slowed down. Revenue eventually dropped to about 75 percent of what it had been before.

At that point I realized I was getting more frustrated than excited about the whole thing, so I decided to put the site up for sale and just move on.

The biggest lesson for me is pretty simple. If a business idea does not actually require two people to operate, bringing in a partner just for convenience can create more problems than it solves. In my case the business was mostly automated and probably only needed a few hours a month to maintain.

Next time I build something, I am doing it solo unless there is a very clear reason to share ownership. Curious if anyone else here has had a similar experience with bringing on a partner too early.