Mastering Startup Communication: Key Skills for Success

So you want to begin a startup company. What's the most important thing now? If it's a tech company, it certainly would be nice to have tech skills. That's a given. But the missing ingredient for so many people is they cannot speak about their startup in a way that's compelling to other people. Can I ask you a personal favor? I'm trying to help more people just like you all around the globe improve their personal communication skills and to be more successful. If you hit the subscribe button, not only will I be able to help you, but that'll send a message to others around the world that this is a place for them. So please, as a small favor, hit subscribe. When you have a brand new company, you're excited about it. You may be spending every minute of the day staying up till 3am working on your startup, but very few startups actually become something meaningful. If it's just one person, if it just stays in your brain, you've got to make this concept come alive to other people. Now maybe you have to go out and raise 10 or 20 million dollars in startup venture capital. You've got to be able to speak to investors quite often without showing them the car, whatever product it was. You've got to make them just see your vision by you speaking. So you've got to learn how to get people to not only understand your idea but but to get excited about it. They have to know what market are you actually serving? What problem are you solving in this business? Why is there a need for this product? What's unique about you? Why are you uniquely qualified and motivated to take this concept all the way to profitability, which in some cases takes 10 years between concept and a company going public. Why are you that committed to spend a decade of your life on this? These are questions you need to be able to answer when you are talking to people. Whether it's a formal presentation in front of venture capitalists or whether it is just talking one on one with someone you're trying to recruit. Now it's especially important for a startup to be able to talk to colleagues, other people to get them on board. The most successful startups are typically not completely controlled by one person. You have to put together a team and you have to get them excited about it. Venture capitalists, other investors these days will rarely just invest in one idea and one inventor, one founder who says, here's my idea, here's the napkin. You know, back in the 90s that could happen. It's not happening anymore. They want to see that You've taken a concept, turned it into reality, whether it's an app, a piece of software, something that you've already assembled a team and that you're already showing some traction with customers, ideally making revenue, ideally even profitable. You need all those things to happen. So let's say you are a non technical founder. You've got to use your communication abilities to convince an engineer to come work for you. You gotta get them so excited. You can't just talk about why it's a good idea. You have to convince this engineer that out of all the thousands of ideas he or she could be working on right now, this is the most important new business idea that the engineer can work on. And you have to convince them that the idea is so powerful, has so much potential that they should give up a salary, maybe even a full time salary, maybe even quit their job to come work for you. You don't do that unless you're highly persuasive, unless you are a skilled communicator. Now, you might not think of yourself as some big keynote platform speaker telling stories that motivate 10,000 people, not talking about that kind of speaking, but you got to be able to sit in the lab or a coffee shop and look at an engineer face to face and tell them why this idea is so compelling, why there's so much growth potential, why you can be really successful together doing. Now let's look from the other perspective. Let's say you're an engineer and you have devised the perfect piece of software. You know this is going to change the world. You can't do it yourself. You're going to need someone who perhaps has more people skills, can do management promotion. Someone who could be the CEO or the chief Executive officer, chief Operating Officer, chief Financial officer. Perhaps you need someone who can go out and hustle advertisers or sponsors or other partners. You can't do it all. And chances are, when you're just starting, you don't already have millions of dollars in investment capital that you can just spend on people to give them a salary. You're not going to be able to recruit them unless you can speak to them in a compelling way. So here are the main flaws most startups face when they're trying to do this. Most startup founders are so lost in the weeds, they want to tell people every single X and O and every single piece of their computer language. Meanwhile, the person they're talking to, scratching their head, saying, I don't really understand what they're doing. I don't really Understand their revenue model. Not quite sure why someone would want this. So the biggest problem most startup founders have is they're not able to communicate at a simple enough level. New investors, new potential employees don't have to know every single aspect of how you design the solution. They do need to know what the exact problem is you're solving. They need to know why you came up with a solution and why your solution is potentially better than anyone else's. They need to have some sense of the marketplace. Is this big enough to worry about? If I came to you and said I've got the perfect invention of buttons for bespoke suits, they are just a little bit shinier and the buttonholes have three holes instead of four. So you save thread. It might be an interesting idea, but I think you would say, okay tj, but aren't there already a lot of button companies? Is there any evidence people are really frustrated with the four holes in buttons? Why do they want to shift to 3? If I don't have good answers for that, doesn't really matter how good my technology is or that I can make a button for 50% less than other people, I'm not going to convince you. So that's what you need to focus on. These big picture questions. What is it your startup actually does? How do you make money? Are people going to be paying you a subscription fee? Is it a one off? What is the actual real problem that people have already told you in real life, actual business people have told you this is a problem? Boy, I wish I had a solution. You need to recount conversations like that that you've had with people. If you can do those things, then you will have the communication skills you need to give every proper attention and to increase the odds of success for your startup. Good luck.