What skill have you learned that's been most crucial to running your business?

I'm not a master of these, but this is what I've been trying to work on because I feel I keep reflecting on situations where these would have helped me out:

• Slowing down
• Patience/Accepting I'm not in control
• Empathy
• Communication
• Consistency

Slowing Down

I try to move fast (my mind races fast on ideas), sometimes at a pace that annoys others (and sometimes myself). I find this often causes me to lose people. Especially when it is people I'm collaborating with. To an outsider it appears if I'm jumping around and disorganized. I need to slow down when it comes to collaborating with others so it doesn't seem as chaotic.

Patience/Accepting I'm not in control

I hate feeling like I cannot provide meaningful input, but lately I've been realizing there is a lot that is not in my control in most situations. Especially when it comes to timelines and working with others. Changing my mindset has helped me think more about how to organize my time as well as respect the process of others. It's easy to ignore this when you are working alone, but this will be a barrier when trying to work with others.

Empathy

Similar to patience, but also realizing that not everyone has the same goals, needs, priorities, and feelings as I do. It's been important to understand what other people feel and need. This helps me be a better collaborator and of service to others both personally and in business.

Communication

I'm trying to be more concise. (not evident with my response :) This helps me get to the point in both seeking feedback as well as providing feedback.

Consistency

Combined with all of the above, being consistent builds trust. It helps me become someone people rely on. This goes beyond simply showing up (but that goes a long way). Consistency with point of view helps people understand your thoughts. Consistency with showing up/delivery lets people know you are reliable.

Not sure if this were the types of skills you've been looking for (: More people will see them as traits, but I don't think these are always obvious and universally valued.

Resiliency for the ups and downs. As a founder, you are responsible for everything. The highs feel like "you got the hang of this thing" while the lows feel like "I couldn't have f-ed that up worse". It took a few years to realize not every business challenge was a potential ding to one's reputation. If you are working in the best interest of the client, are genuine, and offer good ongoing communications, most clients are understanding and supportive if minor hiccups occur.

Two things:

• Developing a principled point of view.
• Ignoring what everyone else is doing.

These go hand in hand.

Figuring out your own principles and opinions upfront makes it so much easier to decide everything after that. You'll have a clearer sense of what to build, when to build it, and how to talk about it.

Having strong values helps you say NO to things, and that's essential when you're a tiny team getting started. Drawing a line in the sand and saying, "here's exactly what we stand for" helps you reduce uncertainty and know whether you're doing the right things. You'll have a strong foundation to measure decisions against, which is crucial, because you have to make a million decisions!

Once you've done that, you can go your own way with little regard for what your competitors are doing. When you're working on what you believe in, it doesn't really matter what someone else is up to. This helps you avoid the pressure of feeling like you need to live up to other companies' successes, or get into a race trying to match product features, etc. It's certainly fine to see what's out there, but that information shouldn't have much effect on what you're doing.

We learned this when we were first figuring out our ideas for Hello Weather. We were entering a market with 10,000+ existing apps, some of which are owned and backed by enormous professional weather corporations. As novice entrants into the market, there was no chance we'd ever match up to that.

So we focused on our unique point of view instead—building something extremely useful, readable, textual, with no fuss and no gimmicks—and then everything we did after that followed suit. We carefully curated our UI so it would be fast, straightforward, and simple: immediately understandable but rich with information. We didn't include ads because they're not compatible with our core values, which meant that we had to find another way to make money and sustain the business. And so on!

This worked out great for us. We're not the biggest app, and we don't want to be. We're doing exactly what we want, on our own timeline, and that's why we still enjoy doing it.

Getting sh*t done – is that a skill? 😄

There are lots of skills I've learnt over the years (programming, marketing etc..) but all of them are useless unless I can focus them on tasks that will move the needle in my business.

This is a lot harder for a solo-founder without someone else to bounce ideas off and keep them on track.

In my journey as an entrepreneur, the crucial skill I've developed is as powerful as it is simple. It's called: "Command+Z".

That's right, the undo button. Sounds dull, I admit, but this skill is unique to the digital age we live in, and it's a secret superpower, because it lets you learn new skills you might never attempt otherwise.

Example: when I was in 5th grade I ended up with a copy of Photoshop on my Macintosh Performa 550. I had no clue how to use it, no manual, and there was no internet to turn to for tutorials. It was like giving a helicopter to a kindergartener. But, because I could undo every step I attempted, I never felt intimidated or afraid to explore. I knew I could always just hit 'command-z'.

Imagine if, instead, I'd been given a stack of blank canvases and a box of paints. Just putting the brush down would have been expensive; each wrong stroke a waste of paint, difficult or impossible to take back. My learning curve would have been much slower. My helicopter would never have left the ground.

But the undo skill is really more than that: it's an entire mindset. Obviously, not everything you do will be easy to undo, but it's important to remind yourself that mistakes are, by definition, not permanent. If mistakes lasted forever, they wouldn't be called mistakes. Usually, the only way to get something right is to get it wrong first.

That mindset has helped me develop the right attitude toward learning new things. When you face a challenge you've never encountered (which happens every day as an entrepreneur), you can't be encumbered by fear of failure. You need to be willing get in there, open things up, tinker around, and know you can always go back to where you started, and try again.

Being an entrepreneur is not something you learn, and then do. It's something you do, and then learn. And for me, having a command-z mindset has been essential to making progress along the way.

I have learnt many new skills over the last two years since starting VEED. However, one skill that I am most proud of having learnt is to write.

To many, this is a basic skill that feels like second nature to them, but for me, it was extremely hard.

I have never been good at writing or reading. This is because I am dyslexic and have only managed to pass my high school English exam while only at college, after 3 painful attempts.

Over the past 2 years, I have been reading and writing a lot more out of necessity.

Now I have written articles read by tens of thousands of people. Many readers reach out saying how much they enjoyed the articles, it is really rewarding.

Focus and delivery

1. As a founder there are many things to do all the time, and many things to deliver in a time frame, so if you are not focused on goals, you are always starting and never finishing something, because you try to deliver all of them.

You need to focus on just one thing at the time and if you are working as a team, asking the same to your team, giving some goals and trying to deliver it as quickly as possible.

2. I started many companies and invest in others and something that i always see is that people need to learn how to organize their time and be focused on "small goals" part of a bigger goal.

Hire Fast, Fire Faster

1. If your resources are limited, always are. You need to hire fast and ask for "focus and delivery", if the people is not delivering... you need to fire faster, because the scarce resource in a startup is money and money is time, so if you are losing money with a bad hire you are spending time.

2. As a founder is always hard to fire people, i think is one of the hardest things to do in a company, but you need to do it if you want to prevail, and if you want to save more jobs.

+1 to Negotiation, maybe Game Theory

In several occasions growing the businesses I had to assess my counter-party position/state, and best outcome for them and for my party, and negotiate taking into consideration human feelings, expectations, responsibility (if a client is affected by an outcome of an error of your product?), equilibrium (if you are too sharky they will resent, if you give too much they could abuse), enthusiasm, etc.

for example, when negotiating with:

• Investors
• Co founders
• Contractors
• Employees
• Clients !

I had to take all those variables and knowing how to negotiate correctly has bring several new revenue streams or grow the existing ones, how to communicate correctly, how to take the correct variables for the context of the counter-party, is crucial for your business

I'd say the best way to get better is to do actual practice, but it helps a lot having a mentor and/or a network of entrepreneur friends to assess situations together and get specific advice

Patience and resilience seems covered...and those are also true for me, so I'll pick a secondary skill.

Communication. Communication is the real key to creating shared expectations and efficient workflows, as well as maximizing your time. A lot of times I enter meetings and conversations with the goal of completing that conversation as quickly as possible.

To me, economy is language is a beautiful thing. How quickly can we create shared expectations and move on? A great example of doing this well is coordinating a time to meet up with someone -- suggesting dates and locations at the same time can cut out one round of back-and-forth.

A lot of good communication comes down to asking good questions. And asking good questions is something I picked up studying journalism and interviewing players/staff of the OSU football team (more on that here if you're interested: https://jayclouse.com/cheat-code-learning-faster/)

Corrigibility.

The capability to correct or reform yourself. Most entrepreneurial people have a keen eye for problems "out there in the world," but I'm not convinced we apply this corrective lens to ourselves at a higher rate than normal. Behavioral continuity seems to be the rule and not the exception: we all internalize a narrative of who we are and how we do things, and we have a hard time revising the narrative in real time.

This doesn't go well with running a small business. You simply have to wear too many hats, and some inevitably fit your head better than others. My personal narrative identity in the early days of Indie Hackers was fairly narrow. I was a writer of words and code. I was a passable web developer. I was a good "thing maker."

But I needed to be a capable strategist, recruiter, manager, and a whole lot more. Many of these duties violated a kind of homeostasis I was hardly even aware of, and I performed some of them grudgingly, resulting in less-than-inspiring output on the production side. (Paul Graham famously described the inherent tension of makers working with managers given the different demands of each role. You almost have to expect a little cognitive dissonance when you place these demands on the plate of a single person.)

Change was inevitable. "Entrepreneurial people" can get away with simply telling you what's broken about the world, but founders have to be able to tell you what's broken about themselves. For me that meant stripping everything down to its component parts and building up from there. Passively "narrativizing" myself was the main bad habit to break. I stopped being "a writer who can code" or "a coder who can manage" and turned into "a head that can squeeze into any hat." In practice, this means if I ever catch myself asking, "How do I do this thing I don't like to do?" I reframe it to, "How do I become the kind of person who enjoys doing this thing?" Only then do I solve for X.