The single most important skill for an early stage founder
In the early days, founders often have to juggle many tasks to get their startup off the ground and reach the rocket-ship trajectory that is known as product-market-fit. There is a wide array of skills required in those days, but I thought there was one worth noting because I think it slightly supersedes all others.
Most of us can probably agree that in the early days, the most important things are building product and talking to users. You talk to users to get feedback, and then you implement the feedback to improve the product - it's the product-feedback-iteration cycle (or whatever you want to call it). There's a few reasons why I believe communication is the MOST important skill for an early stage founder to possess.
- In order to build product, you must either convince a technical co-founder to come build the product, convince a non-technical co-founder to help you gather feedback from users, OR talk to users yourself in order to continuously improve the product. You cannot do any of these things effectively without communication skills.
- You have to convince customers to buy, or try your product. If you can't be an evangelist for your product, then who will be? You need to be able to sell the vision to those whom you would like to join your team, and sell the product to those who you think might buy your product. You cannot sell without communication skills.
- If you need to raise capital (which a majority of startups do) you absolutely must be able to communicate what it is you are doing in a clear and concise manner. If you have amazing communication skills and a bad product, you might be able to raise capital. But if you have a great product and terrible communication skills, chances are you will struggle to convince an investor to write you a check.
This was a tough one for me because I believe there are a lot of very important skills in the early days - for example time-management, sales, leadership and hiring to name a few others. But I thought communication was a big part of many of these. Anyhow, I'm curious to hear other people's opinions and thoughts on this.