5 Most Important Skills as Startup Cofounder

Over the last few years, I have met and connected with over 55% of founders who are non-technical (actually most are technical, but they are not developers). The standard advice I would give them was their role was to acquire users (or customers):

A plan to acquire, nurture and grow users (customers) with as little money as possible.

After spending time thinking about this over the last few days, I think there is more than just user acquisition that non-technical founders can help the startup with. There are 7 skills (in no ordered priority) that I think will help the company tremendously.

1. User acquisition and customer development. Getting early traction is critical and in most cases more important than most other things at your startup. While it is becoming easier to build and create apps and websites, getting early users who can give you feedback on the product and become fans and champions is hard. Understanding user behavior and motivations, spending time learning about how they would use the product is critical.

2. Generating shareable content (writing great headlines, producing videos, podcasting, etc.). While content is king, the more important skill is writing killer headlines. You need good content, but without great headlines, great content is useless. Getting awareness for your startup or product without the money early on to spend on advertising, is crucial to early traction and building your brand.

3. Learning about techniques to generate awareness (building connections with Press, Bloggers and Influencers) among customers and users. Besides generating content, figuring out ways to get more of your customers to share the product with new customers (increasing the virality coefficient) is a key skill.

The best way to generate awareness among potential customers is to get existing customers to say good things about the product. The next step is getting them to share their experiences with others.

4. Cultivating and managing relationships with a strong potential investor pool. Generating enough inbound inquiries because you built a great product and got good press and coverage around it is one of the top things you need to be skilled at doing.

Ensuring that you have a good product is half the battle. The next step is to get customers. To help you scale, would then require an early set of investors. Building investor relationships, targeting the right early stage funding sources is a crucial skill.

5. Signing up beta customers, creating activity flows and user models, building the wireframes. Even if you are not technical, you can build wireframes using standard tools to share the concept with users during your customer development phase. If all you have are PowerPoint skills, use them. If you understand the domain and can build the customer use scenarios, I’d build those.

There are some other “tactical” items that fall into the purview of the non-developer cofounder including the skills to negotiate contracts, get as many “free” services as possible, apply to many freely available programs such as accelerators, pitch showcases, etc., but those are secondary.

Over the next few days I will outline each of these in detail so I can help non-technical cofounders.