What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?

I&#x27;m running Savio[1], which is my fourth small internet company I&#x27;ve run since 2007 (the previous three were sold).<p>At the risk of sounding cliche, the three skills that have been most valuable are:<p>1. The ability to build software that meaningfully solves a customer&#x27;s problem<p>2. The ability to reach people who have the problem my software solves<p>3. The persistence to grind until we have a decent product and can regularly reach people who have our problem.<p>The above may seem like they&#x27;re outcomes. But understanding problems and building solutions is a skill. Finding and reaching people is a skill. Grinding effectively is a skill.<p>Every other skill (writing well, communicating well, selling the visions, giving good demos and customer service) is in service of the above.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savio.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.savio.io</a>

Here&#x27;s what NOT to do, from my experience in the first decade of this millennium:<p>1. What came first: More work or more developers? Don&#x27;t stress your development team for ages without hiring new employees. They&#x27;ll burn out and hate working for you.<p>2. Don&#x27;t focus all your energy on outward appearance. Your work should speak for itself, not your amazing expensive new car and tailored suits.<p>3. Don&#x27;t stop innovating. The developers who were there since day 1 who refuse to adopt new tech? Yeah, get rid of them. They&#x27;re pulling the rest down to their level.<p>4. Seniority isn&#x27;t a guarantee for superior knowledge; and being junior doesn&#x27;t mean their opinion is invalid. Don&#x27;t fall victim to playing favourites. If you hire people, then they&#x27;re equal.<p>5. If you are one of two founders: Don&#x27;t have sexual intercourse with the wife of the other founder of the company. He will find out and because you have 50&#x2F;50 shares in the company, everyone needs to pick a side. This destroys the company.<p>6. And that also means you can no longer afford to lease that $1400&#x2F;month luxury off road SUV that you only drive in a town without even a single hill in a 100 mile radius.<p>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&#x27;t.

Flexibility. Humility. Optimism.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.”

<i>A Willingness to Hire Fast and Fire Faster</i><p>I think you need to be really careful with this. Treating employees like fungible commodities doesn&#x27;t really foster any particular sense of commitment or a strong team. It&#x27;s okay, I suppose, if you&#x27;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&#x27;re done (or if they&#x27;re not performing well enough) - but if you scale beyond that, you actually need to treat people like they&#x27;re humans.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s well-intentioned by the author, but I&#x27;ve seen people really take this to extremes and behave like total bastards - and they didn&#x27;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 &quot;it was a tough decision, but we&#x27;re a startup, and we have to make tough decisions&quot;, you know you&#x27;ve reached the bottom of that slope.)

As someone who works for a small company, but doesn&#x27;t run it, I&#x27;d say resiliency is very important.<p>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.<p>Think Kayak vs Ocean liner.

Do such checkpoints really help in the long term? An athlete begins to learn by doing and then watching others. There&#x27;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&#x27;s own mistakes and doing one&#x27;s own best each day. It&#x27;s a deliberate practice.

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.

Marketing and sales.<p>As awful as that sounds to many people it just isn&#x27;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 <i>will</i> fail. In fact, in my experience at least, far more companies fail because they couldn&#x27;t reach customers than fail because they couldn&#x27;t build something. Building something is the easy bit.

I think &quot;undo&quot; is the wrong metaphor for decision making. It&#x27;s &quot;safe to fail&quot; or &quot;acceptable risk&quot; or &quot;acceptable loss.&quot; You always lose time and opportunity at a minimum, but in exchange for new information if you are willing to pay attention.

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.<p>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.

Definitely sales, marketing and having understanding of design, tech stacks, etc. I tend to cover all of these areas in my business at Bairmail (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bairmail.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bairmail.com</a>)

Empathy and listening.<p>You&#x27;ll need those customers.<p>You&#x27;ll need those for employees.<p>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.<p>Other than that, making realistic sales projections, especially as it relates to your burn rate.

A strong sense of ethics.

I actually just wrote a bit about this on an interview at brandfetch with regards to browserless.io (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.brandfetch.io&#x2F;automating-browsers-with-browserless&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.brandfetch.io&#x2F;automating-browsers-with-browserl...</a>, wish I could deeplink the section that&#x27;s relevant). The TL;DR here is get really good at both your written and verbal communication. You&#x27;re nothing if you can&#x27;t properly articulate what you&#x27;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.<p>Write, speak, blog and keep on doing it!

If you are running it you are sales first, management second, tech is third.<p>You are running a business not a tech company. You better be hustling and filling in the tech gaps later

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

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.

Surprisingly, no accounting...

Ministry of Testing link has the wrong url.

Ministry of Testing has the wrong url.

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

Money.