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Want to be a good founder of a new business? Then you need to be able to talk to your team and work well with them. When you know what they do, this is easier.
Here are nine technical skills that will help you communicate better at your startup, making you a better leader as a result.
1. Microsoft Excel
People say that numbers don’t lie. Excel or Google Sheets are great ways to keep track of sales and growth data.
Lynn Perkins, the founder, and CEO of UrbanSitter says, “Excel is a great tool for modeling business scenarios and figuring out what factors are most important for business growth. I’ve been able to set our company’s priorities because I can accurately predict and keep track of spending.
Excel is also a good way to learn the basics of bookkeeping and accounting. With it, you can make financial models and keep track of your income and expenses.
2. Getting and analyzing data
Data can be used to make a business plan or a plan for marketing. Whether it’s customer data or website data, the goal is to find trends and patterns so that you can predict what will happen next.
Adam Beaugh, president and co-founder of Zignal Labs, says, “Being able to do a deeper analysis and wrangling of different data sets has allowed me to be an insights-driven leader and […] have a more complete understanding of our business by grabbing different datasets and looking for patterns, outliers, etc.”
In marketing, data can be used to figure out who to target and what will work to get the customer’s attention.
3. The basics of programming a computer
Aaron Epstein, who helped start Creative Market, taught himself how to code in college so that he could make ColorSchemer, an app for designers that is a digital color wheel. “Coding gave me the independence and freedom to come up with the idea for the product and make it happen on my own,” he says.
Epstein learned how to run design, development, customer support, product management, strategy, and partnerships while he was in charge of ColorSchemer. Later, he was able to use these skills to help start Creative Market and talk to his engineering team more effectively.
4. Front-end development skills (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
Front-end web development skills like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are more specific than basic programming skills.
Julian Cordero, the founder of Cordero Law LLC, is glad he taught himself these three languages: “Learning these skills helped me because it gave me more freedom to use my creativity. […] I wanted my law to stand out from others, so I had some of my ideas built into my website.
There are a lot of courses online that teach these skills. Cordero has taken classes through Codecademy and Udemy, which he says are “great resources that can help you learn new skills for little or no cost.”
5. Blogspot
WordPress is the most widely used system for managing content. (WordPress runs more than 12.5 million websites on the Internet.)
ProofPilot’s founder and chief executive officer, Matthew Amsden, taught himself WordPress for two reasons:
- He wanted the engineering team to work on building and improving the actual platform, not just a marketing site that people could see. He also wanted full control over how he told site visitors about his company’s goals and vision.
- Another reason to learn WordPress? He can update the site and make changes right away, “without relying on a third party to be both timely and accurate.”
6. Simple optimization for search engines (SEO)
Now that your site is up and running, you need people to visit it. SEO is a set of techniques that help you get to the top of the search results page, which is what every business owner wants.
“SEO is a long-term play,” says Aaron Schwartz, co-founder, and CEO of Modify Watches. As a founder, the first thing you need to do is “understand your customer and find out what they want.”
They are very important. “You can make content on your site, like a blog post, that is relevant to that search query” after you find out what words and phrases your audience is looking for on Google.
Just make sure to look up the best SEO practices so you don’t end up being “spammy,” which can get you in trouble with Google.
7. Social media marketing
In a nutshell, this means using social media to bring people to your website and spread the word about it. But you also need to know who your target audience is and what interests them.
Vishaal Melwani, cofounder and CEO of Combatant Gentlemen, says, “As a founder, I’m always thinking about making and improving a product that solves a problem. However, telling a compelling story and growing to a large size require technical skills that I had to learn from the ground up.”
Melwani, in addition to having technical skills, “delved into social media to better understand our market, pique the interest of early adopters, and keep the public engaged.”
8. Tools for Photoshop and design
Design and wireframing tool knowledge can help you build your website or app for the outside world or communicate with your team by showing them what you want to accomplish.
When John Waldmann started Homebase, he taught himself how to use Photoshop and Sketch. “I was not a good designer, but these basic skills helped me explain my product ideas to our engineers, customers, and possible investors in a clear way,” he says.
He was able to show what Home Depot was and how it could help small businesses because he knew how to use these basic tools.
9. Scrum project management
Use a project management method like Scrum, which is based on the agile software development framework, to manage all of your digital skills and your team.
Daniel Bjarne, cofounder and CEO of SchoolApply, says, “Learning how to use and implement scrum PM helped me manage my team’s time and resources much better and gave me a stronger framework for planning future development rollouts.”
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