

Ask HN: What are the necessary skills for the "Business Person"? - chrisduesing

I have been mentoring several startups recently, and helping people build their prototypes/betas. I want to put together a more formal program to help recent grads get their first startup off the ground. I have a laundry list of things that a programmer needs to know how to do, but I am coming up short on the exact skills needed by the business guy/gal. From my personal experience there is no shortage of things that they could/should be working on, but I am not sure what the most critical things that someone coming out of a business program would need to learn to operate in a beneficial manner in a startup.<p>Just to clarify, I don't believe the business person in a startup should ever think of themselves as the boss, or the idea person, etc. Eventually they may grow in to a CEO / captain of the ship type role, but initially they need to focus on very practical things such as finding customers, getting feedback, potentially pitching to investors. Even more practically perhaps they should be answering customer emails, doing the bookkeeping, etc?<p>I would love to get a list of the actual skills and day to day things that someone who is not a programmer can be doing to help a tech startup get off the ground.<p>Thank you!
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ryanwaggoner
This comment from spencerfry might be useful:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779448>

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spencerfry
Thanks! I expanded on that in an article:

<http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do>

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r0s
This is great, I help run a small business with the hope of starting my own
someday.

It's heartening to see the experience I'm getting now is almost exactly what
you describe here.

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il
Selling. That's all. Selling your vision to investors, selling your company to
potential employees, and, most importantly, selling/marketing your product to
customers.

You can outsource noncritical tasks like bookkeeping, but the business people
must absolutely know how to sell. If they do that, you're in good shape. Of
course selling well requires in-depth knowledge of your product, your target
market, your industry, etc.

~~~
chrisduesing
Interesting. I have 2 questions:

1\. What does the business person do in the weeks/months before there is
anything to sell?

2\. How do you teach people to sell? Judging by the stories coming out of the
major incubators pitching to investors is just a matter of iterating on your
elevator speech and answering questions until you have sharpened your vision
to a sentence or two. How do you formalize that process in a classroom
setting?

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jakestein
1\. Before we had a product I spent a lot of time taking care of
administrative stuff that was necessary to get the company going. I also wrote
the copy for the website. The biggest thing though is to talk to the people
who you will eventually sell to and see if they are interested in what you are
building.

2\. Practice is a huge part of it. I also think its worthwhile to learn about
the training programs bigger companies put their employees through. I have a
few cd's from <http://www.sandler.com/> that have been very helpful. If you
have a friend who works in sales, they probably have a bunch of these.

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porter
Put together a simple lead gen page and run some adwords to capture emails
from interested people. Then start talking to those people who sign up. You
can do this by sending out surveys or asking for permission to call them up
directly. This should keep the business guy busy, your market will like your
MVP much better, and you'll get some loyal customers to boot. If you're not
getting enough leads from adwords, try other paid advertising, and also face
to face stuff. If you still don't get any leads your business guy needs to
start coming up with a new idea.

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ndl
From my personal experience:

The "business" person should learn a little about computability and
feasibility. You don't necessarily have to understand the theory and
mathematics of it all but should have a sense of when a problem is
intractable. I had one startup try to recruit me as an intern to build an AI
that would pass the Turing test and generate their marketing content for them.
I had another "business guy" push strongly for an idea based on AI that could
predict the future, then quit when it finally got through to him that I was
not going to spend my life researching an intractable problem. I've had
marketing people try to explain that solving the traveling salesman problem is
an easy opportunity.

I'd like to see a business person who really understands market research,
especially pricing. Make sure you're finding stuff that the programmer
wouldn't have found himself. Avoid making premature statements of strategy -
many quantitative people will (rightly) see this as a weak attempt to appear
decisive.

Legal and accounting are great things to take off the programmers' shoulders.

Let the engineers handle at least half of the "idea" phase. Let them take some
support as well, since they'll be able to answer technical support queries
best. Don't jump to grab "all the networking" unless you've been asked to -
programmers who found companies often rebel against being shoved into the
backroom.

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ryanmickle
The friction between the "business guy" and "programmer" (as in your startup
us worth X for every programmer and -X/2 for every MBA) seems to always pop up
in startup discussions, and it might lead some astray. Startups aren't about
which tasks a business guy should take off a programmer's shoulders or which
features a business guy should direct a programmer to build. Startups are an
organism, a team. Every founder is going to do stuff, like selling, or
something analytical, that is uncomfortable at first. That's what it's about.

The problem seems to arise when once founder/contributor values his or her
skill set more than others. This is where you'll find the business person who
thinks he/she just needs a programmer to build the killer app he/she designed.
BS. But the same goes for a programmer... it is the business that must
succeed, finding a product/market fit, building, launching, selling, etc.,
more than just lines of code.

Ask an advisor/mentor who has built a successful startup before what will be
involved in growing the startup you're aiming to build. Look at that list
closely and be humble. Think of people who are much better than you at the
things at which you're not necessarily at the top of your game, and get them
involved. Not people who can sort of do it, people who will rock at it.

Good luck.

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glen
In no particular order...

1\. Conscientiousness - ability to track details and be organized - huge
predictor of success in most domains.

2\. Grit - it is going to be incredibly hard. These people need to know how to
persevere.

3\. Interpersonal skills - tough to navigate/lead a small team of people.
Person should be able to help people individually and collectively.

4\. Willingness to GLADLY do whatever it takes

5\. Strategy - ability to look at market and competitors and clearly
articulate how your business is going to reach its objectives.

6\. Finance - they don't have to be a MBA; knowing how to use quickbooks is
good and to basically keep more money coming in than money going out.

7\. Willingness to admit limitations and ask for help - this is really key.
There are plenty of really smart people out there that want to help. This
person should be humble enough to ask for help and to then be very thankful
for the help they receive.

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gallerytungsten
As others have noted, the key Business person skill is selling. But there's a
lot more than that. That's just to get in the door. And "selling" comes in
many flavors, make sure it's the right one for that business. (Big Corp people
may have trouble or be trouble, if they have no entrepreneurial experience.)

Beside the selling? Marketing, writing, understanding enough of the tech side;
creativity; being able to see the "big picture" of the business. There's also
the finance and accounting stuff; that would normally be a separate job, but
your business person can do some of that too; they must understand financials.

Someone straight out of an MBA program is probably not so great, unless they
have hands-on experience.

Although your business person will start off doing all kinds of things,
another skill is if they can "hand off" responsibilities as the business
grows.

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nprincigalli
A few come to mind: learning the ways of the lean startup, coming up with
hypothesis and metrics, learning about traction, boostraping, who's who in the
Angel & VC game and build the network, other funding sources, opportunities
and RFPs, investigate monetizing options and payment processors; finding the
visionary early adopters, interviewing and keeping in touch with those,
investigate the competition and their execution of the idea, contribute to
build the vision and philosophy, manage the project (deadlines, resources,
priorities), it's a never-ending list, don't even need to throw clerical work
on it to make it so...

