Joydev gives us a few practical tips for every startup founder. An exclusive for Different Truths.

Being a successful startup founder is not just about having an innovative idea and an energetic team. It is essentially something more than this. You need to be a good communicator, negotiator, smart recruiter, and a team manager to be a successful leader. And among all these qualities of the leader, leaving behind the tech skills in this digital age would be something that a founder would not wish.

However, every startup founder may not be that tech-savvy to deal with some technical aspects of the business. With a limited team in a startup, it is the founder who should anchor the business process and always be ready to take decisions at crucial points. There are numerous such examples where non-tech founders have initiated a tech start-up. If you too are one such founder, here are some tech skills that you need to master to run your startup smoothly and successfully.

1.      Data Analysis: Data is the new Oil. No matter what your startup is all about, you need data. Marketing data, customer data, website data are some of the data that you would need for various business decisions. With these data you can recognize marketing trends, customer behavior, and many more but it comes to use only if you know to analyze and interpret the data. Big and well-established companies have a distinguished team of business and data analyst who deal with the data and pass on the interpreted result to the higher managers. But in a startup, with limited resources and team, the founder him/herself should know the skill of data analysis and must be able to make decisions based on the data.

2.      Search Engine Optimisation: In this digital age, almost every business is online and is competing. It does not matter if you are a tech startup or a non-tech, having an online presence is mandatory for every startup these days. Not just online presence, every business strives to rank higher in the Google search results, and that is where the role of SEO jumps in. For an impactful SEO strategy, one needs to understand the customer behaviour and role of keywords (KW). The above-mentioned skill, data analyses, helps in this process too. Being a founder, you yourself should know the nuances of SEO strategy to take the major marketing decisions.

3. WordPress CMS Management:  When dealing with SEO for better search results, you need to post content or blogs in your website. These blogs carry KWs that help in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) rankings. Now to post those content or blogs, you need a content management system, and WordPress has one of the finest CMSes that is easy to use and operate. Every startup founder, looking for digital presence and ranking, must have the basic skills of WordPress to write, post, edit, and manage the blogs on the website.

3.      Social Media Marketing: Comes under the domain of Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing today has become the talk of the town. Be it Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter, marketing avenues in these platforms are humongous. Social Media marketing is the best option if you have a B2C startup model because a large group of target audience today is on social media. There are numerous ways one can capitalise the benefits of Social Media Marketing, but only if s/he knows the right strategies and tactics.

5. Basic Programming skills: If you are the founder of a tech startup, having basic programming skills is essential for you. There may be times when the programming team might need your suggestions and advice as a founder, and you cannot give that only in words and sentences. Sometimes, you must lead practically, with codes and programs. Knowing basic programming skills also lets you take your decision while no programmers are around, and you need to make an immediate update.

Startups are a very fun-loving place to work in. With limited human resources, people keep juggling their roles in a startup, from keeping account records to solving customer queries, as I have already discussed in one of my previous columns. In such a scenario, being a founder with multiple tech skills will always keep you updated and confident.

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Joydev Majumdar

Joydev Majumdar completed his Masters in Journalism and Mass Communication from Central University of Orissa and is working as Technology News Writer in CIO Review Magazine. He has also worked with a UK based company as Language Consultant on a project. He completed his graduation from the Steel City, Rourkela. Settled in Bangalore, he loves travelling, reading books, interacting, writing poems and stories. Has passion for photography and writes for theatre too.

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