Ask HN: What are the necessary skills for the "Business Person"?
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.
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?
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.
Thank you!
This comment from spencerfry might be useful:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...