The Two Most Important Skills For Bootstrapping An Online Business
If you are serial entrepreneur, jack of all trades, master of none, like me, then you probably have dozens of brilliant business ideas for the Internet. However, chances are that you are stuck for a number of possible reasons. Typically, these reasons boil down to two general problems. First, you might lack the technical skills to execute your ideas (and not have the funds to outsource). Second, you might have the technical skills but lack the psychological insight to build something people *really* want and then market it to them. It no longer suffices to just build something great – you need to build something great that targets a sizeable demographic and then market the hell out of it – the more it fits a real need for a sizeable group, the easier it is to market.
Time and again I see people confronting these two basic issues. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work and commitment to acquire these skills. If you’re just starting school or thinking seriously about running an online business, then let me offer the following advice: double major in computer science and marketing psychology. Let me emphasize this: choose to be educated in such a way that you will become an expert both with programming and development skills and also in the fine art of human psychology.
The more time you spend trying to understand the fundamentals of human psychology, the more successful you will be. You will be more likely to execute wide-appeal business ideas, and to avoid the trap of building a product or service from self-projection. You will learn to think like your target group, which shouldn’t be equivocated with your own preferences. To build these skills, consider getting either a marketing degree, a psychology degree or a marketing psychology degree if your school offers it.
Personally, I think that have a robust understanding of human psychology is even more important than have technical skills, but if you are going to really bootstrap your way to success, you will need to have the skills to do some development. Spend as much time as you can learning the basics of building web applications. Learn PHP, ASP, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc. Learn the basics of CSS. Learn how to do link building and SEO with sophistication and nuance.
Many of the technical skills that you will need for running an online business are best learned through practical application. So don’t just rely on your college education which often doesn’t provide enough opportunity for real-world projects. Instead, expect to spend some free time developing your own projects. Think of it as practice for when you get out of school. And if you are like me, project development almost feels like playing a video game, so if you can learn to enjoy development, you can get some pleasure out of the process too.
At the end of the day, if you are going to have the bug to build online businesses the rest of your life, like I’m sure I will, consider getting a college education that trains you to 1) understand human psychology at its core and 2) to develop web apps. Take a nice blend of pure psychology courses with marketing courses and through in some computer science courses that focus on web development.
Hey,
I love ya man, and I dig your articles (still reading all the time).
But you’ve got to work on breaking up your content a little bit. Give us lowly readers
some headings in text, bulleted/numbered lists, bold items, etc…
Keep on keeping on!