
What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies? - ChanningAllen
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-skills-do-founders-find-most-crucial-for-running-their-businesses-e95d99d9ff
======
kareemm
I'm running Savio[1], which is my fourth small internet company I've run since
2007 (the previous three were sold).

At the risk of sounding cliche, the three skills that have been most valuable
are:

1\. The ability to build software that meaningfully solves a customer's
problem

2\. The ability to reach people who have the problem my software solves

3\. The persistence to grind until we have a decent product and can regularly
reach people who have our problem.

The above may seem like they're outcomes. But understanding problems and
building solutions is a skill. Finding and reaching people is a skill.
Grinding effectively is a skill.

Every other skill (writing well, communicating well, selling the visions,
giving good demos and customer service) is in service of the above.

[1] - [https://www.savio.io](https://www.savio.io)

~~~
shanecleveland
You may have listed in no particular order, but, if you did, I would argue #2
as the most important.

~~~
sshumaker
I disagree, and this is the mistake I made earlier in my career. Having the
market is most important. I have built great products that flopped and ok
products that were incredibly successful.

Quoting Andy Rachleff: If your startup addresses a market that really wants
your product, you can screw almost everything up and still likely be
successful. On the flip side, if you are really good at execution, but the
“dogs aren’t eating the dog food”, you have no chance at winning.

“When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets
a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something
special happens.”

~~~
shanecleveland
It sounds more like we agree. "Having a market" and "The ability to reach
people who have the problem my software solves" aren't so different.

But while "people who have a problem" equals a market, it's nothing if you
cannot reach them.

------
734129837261
Here's what NOT to do, from my experience in the first decade of this
millennium:

1\. What came first: More work or more developers? Don't stress your
development team for ages without hiring new employees. They'll burn out and
hate working for you.

2\. Don't focus all your energy on outward appearance. Your work should speak
for itself, not your amazing expensive new car and tailored suits.

3\. Don't stop innovating. The developers who were there since day 1 who
refuse to adopt new tech? Yeah, get rid of them. They're pulling the rest down
to their level.

4\. Seniority isn't a guarantee for superior knowledge; and being junior
doesn't mean their opinion is invalid. Don't fall victim to playing
favourites. If you hire people, then they're equal.

5\. If you are one of two founders: Don't have sexual intercourse with the
wife of the other founder of the company. He will find out and because you
have 50/50 shares in the company, everyone needs to pick a side. This destroys
the company.

6\. And that also means you can no longer afford to lease that $1400/month
luxury off road SUV that you only drive in a town without even a single hill
in a 100 mile radius.

I was just an employee for this company, I was in my teens when I started
working there, and I thought these 30-something owners of the company knew
what they were doing. They didn't.

~~~
bcrosby95
> 3\. Don't stop innovating. The developers who were there since day 1 who
> refuse to adopt new tech? Yeah, get rid of them. They're pulling the rest
> down to their level.

Sorry, but adopting new tech isn't innovating. Building new tech is. Adopting
new tech may make it easier. Or it might just be that your developers are
bored and need something to entertain themselves.

~~~
djm_
Re-read the first sentence.

------
karmelapple
Flexibility. Humility. Optimism.

Flexibility means you’re willing to do any task needed, whether it’s filling
out some spreadsheet or going to a conference or figuring out how to come up
with an intelligent database schema. Flexibility also means you don’t need to
build everything perfectly, that you have the flexibility to leave some things
a little less-than-perfect.

Humility to admit you don’t know what the best route is, because everything is
in the primordial state. It may involve a company-wide pivot, it may involve
something much simpler and easier, but admitting you might not know everything
is crucial.

Optimism helps you ensure all the things stewing about you don’t totally get
you down, and that you will find a way out. Some pragmatic thoughts and
realism are needed, too, but optimism in the early stages means “sure, I think
I can do that” comes to mind rather than “oh gosh that sounds really hard, I
think we shouldn’t even try.”

~~~
niknikson
Well said. Being humble is incredibly important. I think of it in the context
of having a beginners mind: having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and
lack of preconceptions.

I try to remind myself that every person I meet has something to teach me if
I'm willing to listen.

------
bshimmin
_A Willingness to Hire Fast and Fire Faster_

I think you need to be really careful with this. Treating employees like
fungible commodities doesn't really foster any particular sense of commitment
or a strong team. It's okay, I suppose, if you're a solo founder (or a couple
of co-founders) and you just hire an endless stream of Upwork freelancers to
do various tasks and then dismiss them when they're done (or if they're not
performing well enough) - but if you scale beyond that, you actually need to
treat people like they're humans.

I'm sure it's well-intentioned by the author, but I've seen people really take
this to extremes and behave like total bastards - and they didn't start out
being bastards, they just began their journey down the slippery slope of
sacrificing common decency to pursue the goal of doing what was, they thought,
necessary for their startup to succeed. (When you fire someone on the last day
before Christmas because "it was a tough decision, but we're a startup, and we
have to make tough decisions", you know you've reached the bottom of that
slope.)

~~~
louisswiss
Yep - _A willingness to hire slower and fire earlier_ would be much better
advice.

~~~
solatic
Part of the issue is that there isn't a single correct way to hire somebody.
Your hiring process must be able to adapt to a given candidate's
circumstances.

For example, say that you met somebody who is already working somewhere, and
through the course of networking you understand that they're not happy where
they currently are but they're not actively looking for new work either. If
you decide that you'd like to poach them, then you must necessarily take a
slower approach, since they're not being actively pursued by other companies
(since nobody knows that they're on the market) and you want to make sure that
they'll be happy at your company and everything else that's an essential part
of recruiting.

On the other hand, take a senior engineer who left their last startup because
the startup went out of business, and whose skills will be in high demand by
many competitors. You have less latitude as to how much time you can take
during your hiring process before they get hired out from under you by a
competitor. Committing to never hiring quickly is a recipe for filling your
ranks with mediocre talent.

~~~
louisswiss
Common advice is you only have to be good at _either_ hiring slowly _or_
firing early.

Google, for example, was apparently very good at hiring (slowly) - at least in
their early days. So it didn't matter that they were (are?) terrible at
firing.

Facebook was the opposite AFAIK. It didn't matter that they hired too soon and
too many of the 'wrong' people - because they were good at letting them go
before it did too much damage to the business.

On balance, I'd rather be good at hiring than firing, as it seems to be much
more fair on employees.

------
war1025
As someone who works for a small company, but doesn't run it, I'd say
resiliency is very important.

The smaller you are, the more you need to be able to ride the waves and expect
that things are going to shift out from under you very quickly.

Think Kayak vs Ocean liner.

------
kumartanmay
Do such checkpoints really help in the long term? An athlete begins to learn
by doing and then watching others. There's no playbook there, he just begins
by playing an abridged version of the pro. A highly successful athlete is the
one understands his game on his own and not following what the sporting greats
before him did. I believe ambitious journeys are a process of self-discovery.
If there is anything that helps is learning from the mistakes of successful
ones, learning from one's own mistakes and doing one's own best each day. It's
a deliberate practice.

~~~
edoceo
Have to have checkpoints and goals. Everything you're doing is an experiment
to increase revenue/velocity. So measure, frequently and correct.

~~~
kumartanmay
You are right but one doesn't need a checklist or a threshold for skills to be
an entrepreneur. My argument on comparison with athletes was that we all learn
on the go - no one is perfectly fit for any job until one starts doing it.

------
porsche959
Its been said time and time again but its being able to get things done, and
at a minimum being able to google the right thing. It gets harder from there,
but at least thats a start.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Agreed.

The one thing where smaller companies can excel is shipping a viable product.
Most people I know are willing to give smaller companies a break on a polished
product if they know they will see updates in a timely manner. This is
something smaller companies can outmatch their larger competitors and will
also get them more loyalty from their users.

Shipping a viable product, with timely, dependable updates is crucial.

------
onion2k
Marketing and sales.

As awful as that sounds to many people it just isn't enough to build an
amazing product, write great code, or design something beautiful. You need to
be able to get out there and tell people it exists in order to succeed.
Without that ability your startup _will_ fail. In fact, in my experience at
least, far more companies fail because they couldn't reach customers than fail
because they couldn't build something. Building something is the easy bit.

~~~
dfcagency
I'm a marketer here. If you want some help, reply. I'm happy to grab coffee in
the Bay Area and help give early direction to your startup.

~~~
smithmayowa
Hey man, would like to pick ur brain some regarding saas sales, sadly I am not
based in the valley or US for that matter, mind if I email you, quick question
what is the fastest no bullshit way to validating ur saas idea and seeing if
people needed it, I was thinking of driving google ad words traffic to a
landing page will that be sufficient?

~~~
niknikson
Google AdWords campaign is good way to gauge market demand. Key is to identify
granular high intent keywords in your market and setup your campaign to only
target those keywords. If you are able to capture a decent amount of exact
keyword search impression you can work backwards to get an idea of overall
traffic/demand for your product. Keep in mind if you run a short campaign you
will have to take into consideration seasonality - you can likely extrapolate
this info by analyzing monthly search volume in AdWords keyword tool.

The other important factor is validating keyword intent. You need identify
some action that indicates the likelihood of a user paying for your service.
If you can measure that and combine this data with search volume, you will be
in a good position to assess your products feasibility.

~~~
FindMySocks
I've just run a nice unsuccessful Adwords campaign, and I think my lack of
knowledge on how to correctly use Adwords, alongside Analytics is where I'm
going wrong. Any chance you know of some decent resources / quick-start guides
to help understand Adwords and how to use it?

------
skmurphy
I think "undo" is the wrong metaphor for decision making. It's "safe to fail"
or "acceptable risk" or "acceptable loss." You always lose time and
opportunity at a minimum, but in exchange for new information if you are
willing to pay attention.

------
WheelsAtLarge
The obvious one that people seem to forget is persistance. The ability to get
from 0 to a company that serves a purpose takes a lot of work and grit.

I think that ultimately a true believe that you can do it is what gets you
there. A few people are able to believe that of themself, we see it as
eragance, but I think that over time we can build our confidante by building
bigger and bigger projects successfully. We can then use those past
accomplishment as inspiration every time we have dought about where we are
going in the future.

------
Jareddd
Definitely sales, marketing and having understanding of design, tech stacks,
etc. I tend to cover all of these areas in my business at Bairmail
([https://bairmail.com](https://bairmail.com))

------
chiefalchemist
Empathy and listening.

You'll need those customers.

You'll need those for employees.

Get them wrong and you could end up trying to solve the wrong problem(s);
perhaps with a team that is not team at all.

Other than that, making realistic sales projections, especially as it relates
to your burn rate.

------
pmoriarty
A strong sense of ethics.

------
mrskitch
I actually just wrote a bit about this on an interview at brandfetch with
regards to browserless.io ([https://blog.brandfetch.io/automating-browsers-
with-browserl...](https://blog.brandfetch.io/automating-browsers-with-
browserless/), wish I could deeplink the section that's relevant). The TL;DR
here is get really good at both your written and verbal communication. You're
nothing if you can't properly articulate what you're building, for whom, and
respond to critical feedback. This lone skill helps immediately in just about
every aspect of running a business: programming, sales, and more. You need to
be able to interact with your audience in a way that is concise and clear, and
communication skills are how you do that.

Write, speak, blog and keep on doing it!

------
paulie_a
If you are running it you are sales first, management second, tech is third.

You are running a business not a tech company. You better be hustling and
filling in the tech gaps later

------
colinjfw
Thanks ChanningAllen for the great work with indiehackers. This kind of
content is my favourite to read :)

------
Data_Junkie
You can learn in two ways, somebody can communicate( share, tell, write) the
truth to you, or you can do an experiment. People in a Capitalistic society
are rarely taught to do experiments, because what is learned by experiment
cannot be controlled. Knowing how, when and why to do the experiment is what
separates those who can create from the group that can only do what they are
told.

------
every
Surprisingly, no accounting...

~~~
kelseydh
The accounting profession exists, precisely because you need to get it right
and successful founders don't have the time to be wasting their time on it.

Trust me on this: don't think you can survive the tax system on your own. Hire
an accountant or bookkeeper.

------
xwowsersx
Ministry of Testing link has the wrong url.

------
xwowsersx
Ministry of Testing has the wrong url.

------
trpc
the skill of shamelessly shilling for yourself on HN, Reddit, Twitter, IH and
PH all day long, everyday until you make it.

~~~
adventured
> the skill of shamelessly shilling ... all day long, everyday until you make
> it.

It's one of the most important comments in the thread.

Not only is it an acquired skill (selling), it's bonded to an extraordinarily
valuable character trait: perseverance.

A lot of people can't do the necessary sales to drive their
product/platform/service because they either can't absorb the hits from doors
being constantly shut in their face (hearing _no_ all day long, or worse), or
they feel shame from pushing the thing on other people (most of whom do not
care and don't want to hear it and do not want you wasting their time, and
certainly initially that will all be true).

Promoting is selling. Selling is promoting.

The best sales people are shameless. Not in the sense that they're abusive,
rather, in the sense that they'll push their offering to every corner of the
globe as necessary, getting 99 no answers to get to that one yes answer. Being
told no a thousand times feels very shameful, low and hurtful to most people
and they can't handle it.

Promoting your thing, is always about selling. Shilling is nothing more than
the task of selling being categorized as a disparaged craft.

~~~
superasn
This reply resonates so much with me. I think it takes years of experience to
understand something like this (at least it took me a long time).

I too started from this thinking that promoting is shilling, but it's not.
Every successful company in the world does it and there is absolutely nothing
wrong with promoting your product or yourself as long as you're not breaking
the rules.

I think it's the part of geek culture that misunderstands selling as shilling,
which is probably the reason why so many good but small startups fail. They
just don't sell enough.

It's the same ideology that charging for a product or service is bad somehow.
I remember that a blog that reviewed a website of mine (a movie making
software in 2007) was all gaga over the product but as soon as we went from
free to paid, it put us in a special section called "website hall of shame".
Just because we decided to charge something for a product which users were
making money off.

I takes a lot of skill to sell, get rejected and hear 99 Nos for that single
Yes and sometimes that's the only thing missing between a win and a loss.

------
dillonmckay
Money.

