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What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#22Marketing 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 bu…
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.
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?
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Building something is the easy bit. Building something is certainly easy. Building something people want and works well is pretty hard. Unless you have the latter, all the sales and marketing won't do much for you unless you have an established legacy walled garden that people are forced to use.
News flash. That’s part of marketing. Not programming. The past decades and even now, people tend to expect programmers to do everything related to tech. This fairytale is why so many fail.
I don't understand this claim.
Building something people want is marketing? Requirements gathering? Business analysis? Project management? Engineering? These are just subdivisions of marketing?
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#24Marketing 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 bu…
I am hearing that a fledgling startup needs to "Sell First" and then build it- They Will come. Any ideas on how I should balance the concept of the idea and the actual MVP that I would market to my early adopter customers? Thanks in advance for any insights.
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
News flash. That’s part of marketing. Not programming. The past decades and even now, people tend to expect programmers to do everything related to tech. This fairytale is why so many fail.
I don't understand this claim. Building something people want is marketing? Requirements gathering? Business analysis? Project management? Engineering? These are just subdivisions of marketing?
Yes, actually. Academically marketing is defined by the general marketing mix of: Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion. Product here relates to fully understanding the end users goals. You then need to design a product that meets those goals, and a brand which communicates to your user how those goals are met.
It's common place now for people to think of 'marketing' as 'advertising'. It is a much more robust subject than that. This is driven largely by the product management role being so closely integrated to the engineering flow. As I understand it, traditionally product management was a marketing department role. You can see this more with non-software companies like food or transportation.
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
News flash. That’s part of marketing. Not programming. The past decades and even now, people tend to expect programmers to do everything related to tech. This fairytale is why so many fail.
I don't understand this claim. Building something people want is marketing? Requirements gathering? Business analysis? Project management? Engineering? These are just subdivisions of marketing?
> I don't understand this claim.
I'd say it is more accurate to characterize your points as a "marketing feasibility analysis". But this is as much my opinion based on my understanding of marketing, as it is actual "marketing of a product" per se.
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#27Marketing 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 bu…
I'd also say that while there's a basket of broadly applicable skills, there's also a world of difference between high-touch sales like 7-figure services contracts vs low-touch mass market like driving 100k anonymous visitors to your site. And everything in between.
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#28Marketing 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 bu…
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.
My cofounder is in the Bay area, and we're looking for help in this area. How do we get in touch with you?
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#29Marketing 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 bu…
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.
Hey, I’m based in the Bay and would really like to pick your brain, let me know your fave joint for coffee.
Re: What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?
#30As 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.