The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

1. Focus on the Benefits

Too much sales copy focuses on the features: two calls a month, it’s blue, app for iPhone and iPad! No one cares how it works until they believe in why they need your offer. Sell the benefits, the results, the dream and the why. Only then should you discuss how it all works.

- Kelly Azevedo, She’s Got Systems

2. Be Unexpected

In order for copy to be effective, it has to be read. People don’t want to read boring copy. To grab the attention of your desired audience, you can’t be predictable and use boring corporate speak. Instead, say something unexpected, use an unexpected word or phrase, try a bit of humor and, above all, keep it interesting.

- Rachel Rodgers, Rachel Rodgers Law Office

3. Use Your Successes

Use real-life examples that link your brand to your most reputable customers. This perspective and outside validation will drive conversions upward.

- Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics

4. Tap Into the Emotions and the Benefits

The biggest pitfall of most new entrepreneurs is focusing on the features that the product possesses. This is exciting for you as the business owner, but the customers generally don’t care — they want results! Focus your copywriting on eliciting the emotions that dig into the pain or pleasure that your product addresses. How does your product actually impact the customer’s life?

- Patrick Conley, Automation Heroes

5. Write for Skimmers, Not for Readers

Remember: “readers” and “website visitors” are different. 79 percent of website visitors only skim the content, so it’s up to us to make it as easy as possible to get the main points. Imagine you’re writing for someone who’s super impatient, running out the door to another meeting and gives you two seconds to tell her what you want her to know. That’s your visitors’ mindset.

- Leah Neaderthal, Start Somewhere

6. Lead With a Story

Your audience is inundated with messages from individuals and organizations trying to tell them what they need, what they should care about and how they should feel. Break through that clutter with storytelling that leads them to their own conclusions while positively reflecting on your brand and your products/services.

- Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

7. Use the Right Jargon

Your readers have their own language: the jargon and slang that are common to the industries and demographics you’re selling to. Make sure you’re using the right terminology to make sense to your audience, even if you have to get a “translator” to help you get the words right.

- Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

8. A/B Test

It is relatively easy to implement A/B testing for text content on Web pages. As you’re going through the copywriting process, look into A/B testing tools to help you finalize what text you’ll use on your site. Rather than blindly guessing which copy will lead to more online conversation, A/B testing will give you confidence in your copywriting based on quantitative, real-time information.

- Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

9. Be Human

Write copy like there’s actually a real person on the other end. Keep it concise, personable and emotional! Humanizing your brand captures a user’s attention and helps build trust.

- Bobby Emamian, Prolific Interactive

10. Make Your Call to Action Clear

Your call to action should not be limited to only one mention at the end of your content. Rather, it should be interspersed throughout your landing page or any other sales literature. Make it brief, but be clear with exactly what you want the reader to do and how he will benefit by taking action.

- Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

11. Use Your Clients’ Words

Ditch the industry jargon, and write from your ideal client’s point of view. A simple way to do this is to interview your clients about their struggles, concerns and questions as they relate to your business. Note the exact words/phrases they use and incorporate them into your copy.

- Melissa Cassera, Cassera Communications

Here are 3 questions to guide you:

1. Do you really NEED another employee?

When you’re first starting out, you’re hiring someone for one of two reasons: (1) because you have pushed your own limits of how much you can work in a day (aka you’re going insane by working so much), or (2), the person you’re hiring has a skill that you simply don’t have and the time spent learning that skill would not be worth it for your business.

Think of yourself — how many hours you put in, how much work you do to spur your business or the business you’re working for. Now duplicate yourself. Is there actually enough work to be done that there could be a clone of you working simultaneously and not be bored or off-task throughout the day?

And if you simply don’t have a skill needed, rethink that aspect of your business. Is there anyone else already on the team that has that particular skill? Is that task that you think needs to get done absolutely core to your business? If yes, then hire. If not, then hold off until it’s absolutely necessary.

2. How do you hire? Immediately, or a trial period?

Companies bring new hires onto the team in different ways. Some startups tend to hire people like developers on a Friday as salaried employees, and ask them to be at work on Monday — mostly because their skill set is definite and because their job takes place in a space that needs to be confined. (We can’t have our engineers working from Starbucks while writing all of our code to improve security on our site.)

Hiring business teams works a little bit differently. Many of these jobs rely on longer-term objectives and relationships that take time to build, combined with some sort of measurable ROI. At MySocialCloud, we help our employees transition from previous activities (working at another company, going to school, unemployment) to working on our team with a two-week “trial period.”

We give them a couple of tasks and some actionable items for the two weeks. They can choose how and when they go about accomplishing the tasks by the set date. After the two weeks, we go through an evaluation process: Did they complete the actionable tasks? How well were they completed? Did they go above and beyond? Did they, as ambitious people who know it takes more effort to work at a startup, take the initiative to add their own tasks to that list to help spur the business?

If all of these tasks are completed at a level that exceeds your expectation, it’s time to hire!

Pro tip: Interview A LOT of people. Look at a lot of different candidates. At the very least, it gives you a perspective of who NOT to hire, which helps you hone in on the qualities and skills of a person who truly fits on your team.

3. Do you offer equity and if so, when/how much?

When it comes to equity in a new company, there are two main pitfalls to avoid.

One is the overly generous mentality. There are some first-time founders who hand out equity for their startup like nobody’s business. They give equity to every new employee, and anyone who has helped them with advice or getting a meeting with an important person. DON’T do this! Equity at a startup is worth next to nothing, and the only way it becomes something is if you make it something. Only give it to people who really contribute (e.g. another co-founder, a technical lead on your team, etc.). And don’t forget to make it vesting.

The flip side is the “hoarding” mentality. These are the founders who know for a fact that their business is worth bazillions of dollars and they want to have it all. DON’T be this person, either. As mentioned above, startup equity means nothing unless your team makes it worth something — you can’t build a business by yourself.

You do need some people on your team to have equity (maybe not all of them, but definitely some of them). At the very least, it motivates them to work harder knowing they have a large potential payout once you reach your goals.

Stacey Ferreira co-founded MySocialCloud, a technology startup that allows people to store their usernames and passwords for all their online websites for auto-login and share websites with friends easily, during her senior year of high school with her brother, Scott. When she was just 18, she raised a seed round of funding of just under $1 million from Sir Richard Branson and Jerry Murdock.

Where, I wonder, are many of those startups now?

We wrote many moons ago about the inherent foolishness of trying to build a business by somehow staying under the radar. You can’t define a market need, develop a product to meet that need, secure the funding necessary for operations or build the team that can pull it all off without telling the world who you are and what you are trying to do.

Stealth mode would appear to be a concept as lost to history as nine-figure VC deals for photonics startups. But the term popped up again a few weeks ago when I sat down with an Ottawa CEO. She used the term to describe the operational philosophy of her business, despite the fact that her business, in the space of five years, has grown into a global competitor that is doubling and tripling its revenue each year and taking market share from incumbent rivals.

It’s a family-run business with a secret sauce that is disrupting the status quo of its industry, with its reasons for wanting to keep its cards close to its chest. The other shareholders, the CEO told me, are quite reluctant to engage in any overt marketing or media relations activity that would put the company, or its proprietary technology, in the spotlight. Instead, the company prefers to build its business by attending industry events and letting the quality of its offering speak for itself through customer referrals and word of mouth.

“But,” I said. “How can you be in stealth mode if you are attending conferences, walking tradeshow floors, talking to prospective customers and snooping out your competition with a name tag around your neck?”

I said to her, politely, of course, that she was in anything but stealth mode. If her concern was in competitors finding out too much about her company’s proprietary technology (which at this point isn’t patented, but only a trade secret), she sure as heck would not be walking around a tradeshow floor talking to people about it when there’s no telling who might be lurking around within earshot.

It’s a paranoia that seems all too common – keeping business development and marketing efforts within the envelope of closed industry events is perceived as less threatening than having exposure in well-read media outlets. Which is utterly counterintuitive – the media outlet is likely to have a much more diluted audience, even if it is a larger one, whereas the industry event is likely to have a higher concentration of the people you want to meet as well as the very people you don’t want looking under your skirts.

And in the context of that industry event, it is much easier for a member of your team to have a slip of the tongue. But if you are advertising in a media outlet, you have full control over the message and the information that is disclosed. Even if it is an editorial opportunity, you can prepare in advance to ensure you don’t disclose anything during an interview that you don’t want to see in print.

It’s my biased opinion that raising your profile through earned media coverage, advertising or some combination thereof is not only crucial to raising your company’s profile and driving your business development activities, it is often a safer way to do so without losing control of your message. I am not suggesting that the conference or trade show circuit be avoided – it’s a crucial element of an effective marketing strategy in most industries. But if you are already engaging with your marketplace through that channel, then you should have nothing to fear with pursuing other activities such as advertising buys, public relations and social media engagement.

In fact, the sooner you do pick up these other tools in the marketing tool box and put them to work, the sooner you will develop clear policies and communications strategies for your team that will mitigate the risk of the wrong information being slipped to the wrong pair of ears. If you want to build a business, you can’t avoid exposure, but you can manage that exposure wisely and, ultimately, to the benefit of your bottom line, which is the whole point.

Image: Game Informer

Francis Moran and Associates is an associated team of seasoned practitioners of a number of different marketing disciplines, all of whom share a passion for technology and a proven record of driving revenue growth in markets across the globe. We work with B2B technology companies of all sizes and at every life stage and can engage as individuals or as a full team to provide quick counsel, a complete marketing strategy or the ongoing hands-on input of a virtual chief marketing officer. 

Question by: Ashley

Blend Your Product With Consultancy

“Many successful “startups” were actually consultancies that went into product building (37signals, MetaLab, etc.). Use consulting to pay for the development of your products. You’ll never have to go into debt, and if you create a product that ties into your consulting, you’ll be your own best beta tester.”

- Allie Siarto | Partner, Director of Analytics, Loudpixel

Field Friends and Family

“It may seem old school, but the investors who are the most willing to take a risk on your idea will be those who trust in you more than they do in the idea. Friends and family know you well and can be a great way to get help with your launch. We raised $150,000 this way, which set everything in motion.”

- Vanessa Nornberg | President, Metal Mafia

Pitch Business Plan Competitions

“There are many competitions that are out there where aspiring entrepreneurs can win seed money for their idea. In fact, my team won $10,000 from 100 Urban Entrepreneurs to get our Ujamaa Deals concept off of the ground. We were also in the running for other competitions as well. The hidden benefit to the competitions is that it gives you practice on selling your concept to others.”

- Lawrence Watkins | Founder & CEO, Great Black Speakers

Clear the Clutter for Dollars

“Look around. Sell everything you don’t need — you will have more room to work and more money to work with. Prior to moving from Chicago to Raleigh to start my business, I sold everything I could and was able to clear the clutter for startup dollars.”

- Nancy T. Nguyen | President & CEO, Sweet T Salon

The Crowds Will Flock

“Crowdfunding is a great tool for raising capital and there are plenty of websites that make it easy and quick to reach your goals, provided your idea is worthwhile. Instead of going to the bank and hoping that one person will believe in your dream, put your idea out there for the masses to decide. A wider net catches more fish.”

- Nick Friedman | President, College Hunks Hauling Junk and College Hunks Moving

Monetize Every Step

“It’s not always possible, but depending on the company you’re building, you may have some early opportunities for income. The research you do into your market maybe worth writing up and selling as an eBook. The skills you build may be worth teaching in a paid class. Your first runs of products may be worth selling, even if they aren’t perfect.”

- Thursday Bram | Consultant, Hyper Modern Consulting

Try Customer Financing

“Start to sell your product without spending any money on that product. Allow your customers to finance the production of your product. You can let them know when delivery will be, and this allows you not to spend any money before the product is sold. It also allows you to find out if it will sell before you even invest any money into testing out if it will sell. Let your customers finance you.”

- Louis Lautman | Founder, Supreme Outsourcing

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

“Day jobs (or night ones) are a great way to fund your new startup. Use a portion of your wages to invest in your new business. The art is in the balance. You need to be able to focus on each individually, so that neither is compromised.”

- Benjamin Leis | Founder, Sweat EquiTees

Pray to the Angels?

“Before you approach a seasoned entrepreneur wanting access to his or her VC or Angel investors, I highly recommend analyzing your business model and mastering three topics: market validation (purchase orders), technical model (how it works), and business plan. Take all three of those explanations and approach friends/family first. If they can’t give you a dollar, neither will an investor.”

- George Mavromaras | Founder and President, Mavro Inc. | Praetor Global LLC.

Incubators and Accelerators

“Not only do they provide you with the capital to get your idea off and running, but the access they provide to industry experts, startup attorneys and venture capitalists greatly improve the chance of your startup becoming a success.”

- Peter Minton | Founder & President, Minton Law Group, P.C.

Credit Cards Are a Last Resort

“I wouldn’t recommend this unless all other avenues were pursued first, but you can find credit cards that will give you sizable cash advances. If you can scrap together a couple of these offers, you should have some money to get you started.”

- Josh Weiss | Founder and President, Bluegala

In the course of building my first and second companies, I learned firsthand that a startup’s culture is built on its founders’ true values. With this in mind, I set out to discover and define my own values as I was finishing up my second year at Stanford Business School and getting ready to start Fig, my third company.

But how do founders identify their personal values? While I cannot provide a universal recipe, I can share three questions that helped me determine my core values, and some of the ways my current team aims to align our culture with our shared values:

1. When have you felt most alive? Building my first startup during my undergraduate years was a deeply fulfilling life experience. I pinpointed what made the experience so rich by asking “Why?” many times over. Our team, a group of 20-somethings, was on an adventure of self-actualization. Every day, we pushed one another to grow — not just because we wanted to see the startup succeed, but also because we longed to see each team member fulfill his or her potential, professionally and personally. Once I uncovered the root of my fulfillment, I was able to articulate my passion for the value of “Becoming and Achieving” — whether it means developing product design skills to create richer customer experiences or improving my listening skills to strengthen my marriage. At Fig, we reimburse team members when they invest in their own growth and share their learning with the rest of the team.
2. What behaviors stir up intensely negative reactions in you? During grad school, I examined the wide range of emotions I experienced while listening to speakers and interacting with my classmates. The vast majority of the time, I felt inspired and challenged. There were a few experiences, however, that got under my skin. When speakers or classmates demonstrated airs of arrogance or coldness, I felt frustrated. As I questioned why I had these feelings, I discerned the root of my discomfort: these airs created distance between the members of a community that was usually open and supportive. Meditating on my discomfort helped me understand just how much I value another value, “Cultivating Authentic Community.” To help us connect at at a deeper level, our current team holds weekly emotional check-ins, and alternating bi-weekly team workouts and book discussions.
3. Are there narratives you hold sacred or value systems you can borrow from? The Torah and The Prince are two texts I found helpful in discovering my values. The Torah speaks to human dignity in conveying that all people are created in the image of their creator. By contrast, The Prince encourages leaders to pursue power by any means necessary. Distinguishing between the perspectives I cherish and those I eschew helped me understand my commitment to a third value, “Affirm Human Worth.” We embrace this at Fig by striving to honor people’s time and avoid instrumental behavior.

While all our values will drive our behavior as leaders, don’t assume all of your personal values should become part of your startup. One of your chief roles as a startup leader is to prioritize and communicate what is most important. Startup coach Dave Kashen encourages founders to “select startup values that enable team members to flourish and the company to win in the marketplace.”

Finally, give yourself and your team members grace for the moments you fall short of the ideals you hold most dear. I miss the mark more often than I would like to admit. Perfect adherence isn’t necessary to create a life-giving and high-performance culture. Your startup culture is strengthened every time team members discuss and help one another better lean into your shared aspirations.

Kevon Saber is the CEO of Fig, a mobile startup focused on personal well-being. Prior to Fig, Kevon was VP of Sales & Marketing at GenPlay Games, a mobile games developer he co-founded which has created fifteen games and $40+ million in consumer revenue. Kevon holds a BS in Finance from Santa Clara University and a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Kevon and his family live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Your biggest break can come from never quitting.

Being at the right place at the right time

can only happen when

you keep moving toward the next opportunity.

Arthur Pine

Have you been dreaming about becoming self-employed, but feel that you do not have the money, the time, the knowledge, or the skills to get a business going? You have lots of company. Your concerns may well be unfounded, and grounded in some of the popular myths surrounding self-employment. As we recommend often, be sure to get the facts before you make big decisions that will affect your future.

Of course, the lure for anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit is that opportunity to increase your income and have a much more flexible schedule. These benefits are real possibilities when you are working for yourself. So let’s starting looking into a few of these myths to see them for what they really are.

1. Long hours

Self-employment means working long, hard hours. Many people who work for themselves do indeed work long hours, but this is often a conscious choice. They simply love what they are doing.

Some people begin their businesses to generate income after they have stopped working at their “regular” job. If you are able to succeed in a business that includes some passive, or recurring income, you won’t necessarily have to put in a lot of time working once you make the transition.

2. Less risky to work for…

Especially in our current economic times, employees get laid off all the time. And what do you do if you suddenly need to raise some extra cash quickly? That’s tough to do when you are working for someone else, and your income is fixed. Being self-employed may give you more a little more flexibility and control over your income and the assets of your business. Control helps to give you as sense of reduced risk.

3. All or none

Myth: Self-employment means putting all your eggs in one basket. If you are an working for someone else, how many people do you need to lose favor with in order to lose your whole paycheck? Usually just one. Either your boss or their boss. But, if you have a multiple customers or clients of your own, they would all have to fire you at pretty much the same time for your income source to dry up completely.

4. Its stressful

Myth: Self-employment equals stress. When you work for yourself, you can create the type of work environment you like, as long as you aren’t driving off your customers with your choices. You will feel a greater sense of stability over the long-term, and you have a little (or a lot) more control over your hours.

Of course, you can also choose a business that is inherently stressful. But, generally speaking, you can make it whatever you want it to be. You can make and tolerate the stress level that you find most acceptable.

5. Loneliness…

Myth: Being self-employed is lonely. First, I have an issue with the way in which people tend to use the word. Not everyone who is alone, works alone, lives alone is lonely. There is a world of difference between being alone and being lonely. But I digress…

Working for yourself can be a much more sociable lifestyle, if that is what you choose. With greater flexibility, you can sometimes rearrange your schedule to suit the other parts of your life. Also, it is entirely possible to become friends with some of your clients. But, be very careful about setting clear boundaries between business and social.

When you are working for someone else, your office co-workers tend to become your social life. Over time that can get old, and wear thin.

6. Do-it-(all)-yourself

Myth: Self-employment means having to do everything yourself. While you are certainly the one who has to ensure that all things get done, that hardly means that you have to do physically do each thing yourself. Hire people to do parts of the work for you. Your time should be focused on growing and expanding the business, not doing the grunt work. There is a difference between working in your business and working on your business. Learn it early, or risk burn-out.

7. It’s too hard

Myth: Running your own business is complicated. Yes, there is quite a bit to know, but not impossible to learn, or have someone to help you with. There are books and experts available to help you along the way. Yes, there are some intricacies to learning about insurance, payroll, taxes, and bookkeeping, but they are not impossible to learn. It is just a new area to you.

8. I don’t have enough money

Myth: You can’t start a business without a lot of money. Whether this is true or not really depends on the business you plan to start. A website and hosting can cost you less than $100 a year. Your home phone or cell phone is already being paid for as part of your normal monthly expenses. There are some free (most of the time) services like Craigslist and Ebay.

There are a lot of relatively inexpensive ways to start and market your business. Drive around and be on the lookout for potential clients. Call on the phone. Where there is a will, there is almost always a way.

Don’t let a bunch of myths stop you from considering taking the leap to self-employment. You can even start a business on the side while you continue working at your current place of employment until your new business is bringing in enough money to transition from one to the other, full-time.

Now that you have a slightly different perspective, what;s next? Put some serious thought into this over the weekend, and begin to figure out a way to make your dreams a reality, rather than just a wish. There’s no time like the present to take control of your life.

Photo Credit: swamysk via Compfight cc

Sure, we nod in agreement with the advice we get, but only because the advice we get is pretty benign to begin with: hire people who complement your weaknesses, fall in love with the problem you are solving and not the product, get in touch with your customer’s feelings, add cheerful touches of color to your office, etc. I can feel you nodding.

Truly “good” advice, on the other hand, burns like dirt in an open wound. The scar tissue that forms is the armor you need to survive the entrepreneurship battle. What kind of advice is that? It’s what you remember verbatim after all the compliments are forgotten: the criticism.

Listed below, then, are my absolute favorite pieces of “advice” — and how each shaped my career to date:

1. “You know you aren’t good enough, right?” In the Lifetime movie of my life, I have a snappy reply, like, “Move over old man, ‘cause ladies are doin’ it for themselves!” In real life, I was stunned into submission as the advice-giver planted a big wet kiss on my cheek and whispered something about me reminding him of his daughter. Yuck!

But here’s what’s even more shocking: I agree with this criticism. I am not good enough to do a startup on my own. I am not a truly gifted and creative physics savant, but my co-founder and CTO, Robert Kester, is! I am also the type of person who would forget to pay quarterly payroll taxes. Luckily, the lovely Kayla Porche, our Accounts Manager, would never allow any such nonsense, and so our ship runs very smoothly.

I am not good enough in more ways than I can count, but I am very good in the few things that a CEO needs to be good at: I have excellent taste in people and technologies, I have a vision the whole company believes in, I can sell ice to Eskimos, and I am arrogant enough to ignore old dinosaurs who think they are doing me a favor.

2. “You won’t make any money.” Keep this between us friends, but I would totally do this job for free. Today I can earnestly say that my colleagues and I made the world a better place. And we do, in fact, make quite a bit of money — go figure!

On day one, you and your co-founders need to decide exactly when you want to cash in your chips and exit the company. The path you choose needs to fit your personality type as well as the true potential of your company.

Do you want to sell the company in two years for mega-bucks? OK, then you should probably follow the traditional VC route that looks to sell fast and inflated (think force-fed duck for foie gras). Generally, the company will need to have a massive market size and be easily scalable. This rules out most companies.

If you are a young founder, there is a very high chance that you will be pushed aside. Are you OK with that? When you spend your money, will it bring you joy?

Do not forget the joy multiple when considering how much money you want to make. When I go buy a new car, I get the happiness from the car and the extra joy from remembering how I came to afford that car. Unfortunately, I meet too many depressed founders who seem a bit lost. If the money does not bring you long-lasting pride and joy, then it was all for naught.

3. “You’re a b—h.” I was 12 years old when someone close to me first called me the b-word. I am all grown up now, and my response is, “Yes, but I’m a glorious b—h.”

I don’t get this said to my face so much anymore, but I still get that look. If you are confused about what this look is, try an experiment: Disagree with a 40-something-year-old VC about one of their recent investments.

Yes, ladies, being a young female entrepreneur is going to be much less fun for you than your male counterparts. The boys get more dates and the girls get thinly veiled hostility. You will not be liked for your success. But you’re not doing this to be liked, are you? (See: Sheryl Sandberg’s 2010 TED talk.)

Ignore the people trying to bring you down a peg. And do not, not, not give up and become an attorney/consultant/doctor. I am sick of being the only young woman on the entrepreneurship panel. Please join me!

Finding the starting line will be the hardest part. It may take years to form the right company, but you will be successful because you, my friend, are a glorious b—h.

Allison Lami Sawyer is the CEO and co-founder of Rebellion Photonics.

Some of us were born God’s gift to women (you bastards), and others manage their business like Warren Buffet manages his stocks. If you can be successful in either one area, I believe you can be successful in the other.

Here, I am going to share with you some observations from experience that can be applied to both entrepreneurship and dating with the same results.

Say “I’ll Pass on that”
Not every business opportunity is suited for you, just like not every girl on the street is your soul mate. Sometimes an opportunity comes up that sounds great on paper, being able to give you something like 1000% ROI within a year.

The returns are great no doubt, but if you had to scrub toilets forever and earn $50,000 a month, would that make you fulfilled? Unless you are highly interested in the sanitary well-being of others, I would recommend you pass.

If you are willing to do it just for the money, then you are not an entrepreneur. You are a corporate banker. In my humble opinion, which many will disagree, it’s not about the money; it’s about doing what you love.

The same thing applies to dating a trophy partner. You can tell your friends I’m dating a supermodel/celebrity/porn star and see their jaws drop. But is she really the one for you or are you doing it because she just happens to be there in your life.

Like acne, it passes. Do not enter into a relationship just because you can, and wait for that one person that is going to make you happy forever. There are plenty of fish in the sea, you do not have to use a net and eat them all including the fat puffer fish.

The same goes for finding a business for you.

Confidence is sexy
Whenever I go to a business negotiation, I walk in imagining I’m the boss of Gong Cha (a multi-chain bubble tea brand in Singapore, where people fight teeth and bone for a cup. Ok maybe not, but seriously, the queue is absurd).

“Ah yes, we most certainly can help you out, but what can –you- do for my bubbl… I mean milkshake shop?”

Having confidence makes everything you say believable. This is not an excuse to lie, but say anything with enough confidence and people will buy that you are Obama’s long lost Asian son who rebelled to Singapore to ‘do his own thing’.

Confidence is crucial in negotiations, as the other side will be looking for mutual support on your end in order to seal the deal. You can tip the bargaining scales purely using confidence, even if you do not have the actual leverage.

Personally, we have negotiated killer deals, going in blind without a better alternative, just because we thought we could.

In dating, there is nothing sexier than a man/woman with confidence. I like to let my prospective date know with utmost gusto that I am employed full-time in a dessert beverage shop. That’s all the detail I divulge.

I like my job, what’s it to you? Bam, that gets them even more interested.

The reason why women go for the ‘bad boys’ is not because of the ‘bad’, but for the confidence to do whatever the hell they want (which occasionally, might be bad stuff.)

So chin up, be absolutely confident of who you are, what you do, and soon you’ll have to start a company that generates random rejection excuses for dates.

Date an Angel investor
When starting a business, there are multiple ways to get funded and one of the faster ways at the beginning is to acquire equity investors who provide capital in exchange for ownership equity.

An individual investing in the early start-up stages of an entrepreneur is called an Angel Investor. Looking for angel investors should be the same as how you look for a girl that truly loves you no matter what you are earning now. They believe in your potential and will support you in achieving your goals.

At the onset, you do not have results yet and everything will be based on faith, like your university sweet heart who believes you will be the doctor that cures cancer. Once you have achieved credible results, you can start finding venture capitals for larger investment sums.

Note that Venture capitals however, are a different creature altogether. VCs are more like meeting your future mother-in-law. They arrive late, give mixed signals and constantly ask how much you are earning while scrutinizing your income statement.

Definitely not someone you want to be having dinner with on the first date. “Check please, I have to get home and bath my pet goldfish.”

Love to Fail
You have probably heard the saying that most first businesses never succeed. Statistically, the odds are against you starting a business, with 9 out of 10 businesses failing within a year.

This is precisely why you try, try and try again. Be the master of failure. Thomas Edison figured out over 9000 ways how –not- to make a light bulb. Thank goodness he was a master of failure, or you would be reading this under a candle trying not to set this paper on fire.

The ‘secret’ is not focusing on failure or shortcomings, but to focus on the process and the eventual goal. Those who never gave up, like monsieur Donald Trump coming back from bankruptcy, are those that eventually make it to the very top.

Steve Jobs was fired from his own company, and still went back to make the MacBook you have in your hands now. As the famous Chinese idiom puts it: ‘failure is the mother of success’.

Rejection of the heart is a very common thing. I have had it, you have had it, someone somewhere is probably having his confession of love rejected right now. Instead of curling up in a ball and watching Asa Akira with a box of Kleenex all day, we move on.

So what if someone broke your heart, that just means you get to pick someone even better. If you let the fear of failure control you, never making a move, you will never gain a meaningful relationship either.

Like business, most times your first childhood crush is not going to be the woman you marry and live happily ever after. Nonetheless, we never give up searching until some day, the only other woman you can love, is the daughter you will have together. And your mother.
I love to fail. I fail every day at something, and then I start to get better. And fail a little less. In business and matters of the heart, embrace failure and let it hold your hand till the end. After failing so many times, success has to eventually reveal itself, you shy bastard you.

Here’s a pick up line someone should try at an entrepreneurs event:

“Hey, you look like you could start an excellent shipping business.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure, I just feel like we could start a relationSHIP together.”

I swear this will work. Someone try it and let me know. Never give up guys!

Original article at Seth Lui’s Blog

The founders of three of the tech world’s hottest startups joined Marc Andreessen, inventor-turned-investor, to discuss what it takes to create “awesome” in a rapidly evolving world. Their wide-ranging discussion was part of Intuit’s annual Create the Offering Forum, the company’s annual event dedicated to inspiring product developers, managers and designers to create awesome products.

The panelists included:

• Andreessen – Moderator and cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Helped create the breakthrough Mosaic browser, which became popularly known as the Netscape Navigator. Company invested in more than 150 startups, including three that shared the stage with him.
• Chris Wanstrath – Cofounder of San Francisco-based GitHub. Company is a repository for developers of open source software, or as Andreessen said, “the place where code lives.” Named by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies of 2013.
• Justin Rosenstein – CEO and cofounder of Asana. Created a task-management tool designed to simplify workflows with a goal toward eliminating email. Cofounder is Dustin Moskovitz, who also was a cofounder of Facebook.
• Alfred Chuang – CEO and founder of Magnet Systems. Created a system to help enterprise IT departments develop business apps for mobile devices. Former chairman, president, CEO and the “A” in BEA Systems.

Andreessen’s firm has invested millions of dollars in these startups, and he called them the best of a new generation of companies. “One of the great things about being a venture capitalist is going out and finding the guys who kicked our ass,” he said. Here’s a summary of their discussion.

On what they do:

Chuang was “laughed out of the room” several years ago when he predicted apps would one day run on the Web. “Now when I say 100 percent of your apps will run on mobile and in the cloud, they say ‘You’re right.’

“I happen to do stuff that nobody else likes to do. I’m in a strange business. I don’t get feedback or requirements from end users. I have to invent it. You have to invent on behalf of users. This is fun.”

Rosenstein: “Think about how much time you spend doing work, rather than work about work…What would it look like if you could understand what was going on and understand what was going on all the time.

“In the old days it was about building something that people tolerated and met the CIO’s checklist, rather than building something that users love.” The challenge, he said is straightforward: “How do we build software that people don’t just tolerate? How do we build software that they love?”

Wanstrath: GitHub began as an informal effort to collaborate on open source software. “All we wanted to do was work on open source software together. We were doing a lot of work about work,” he said.

The company grew from 1 million users in 2011 to more than 3 million users today, with more than 5 million software repositories for projects large and small. The key, he said, is communicating with customers.

“We hang out with them a lot. We do these things called drinkups all over the world. It sounds like a fun excuse to drink a lot of beer and it usually is. But you get the most important product feedback from someone who only has a few seconds to tell you what they think.”

On whether to ask customers what they want, or create it and let them decide:

Chuang: If you want to make a fundamental platform shift, to go from a dumbphone to a smartphone, you can’t ask the user for feedback, because they don’t know the shift. For me to ask users, they’re going to look at me with a blank stare. User testing doesn’t play a role until later. They’re blindfolded until it comes out.”

Rosenstein: “You have to understand what users want. They will phrase it in terms of a feature. Your job as a product designer is to look through that. What’s the deeper want? We don’t do what they ask for, we do what we think they want. Balance is one of the core values of Asana. Either extreme will lead you to a bad place.”

Wanstrath: “We like to start with something our people came up with and iterate until we come up with something people really like. We’ll test it with designers and employees. We try to iterate and get it out there and see what people think about it.

On the most impressive company in terms of product design, with the exception of Apple:

Wanstrath: “Amazon, because they keep going into new businesses and getting new customers — things that are completely different from their core. They started selling books online and they basically brought the cloud to the mainstream. That’s super impressive and a lot harder to do than it looks.”

Rosenstein: “Facebook. They amassed a great team, and they keep launching more and more functionality that does more and more over time. It has a huge wellspring of functionality.”

Chuang: “Tesla. The internal combustion engine is ending. Every aspect is so out there, yet they were able to get the traction they need. They’re innovating, inventing and grinding to be successful.”

Funding.

You don’t have it, and you know you can’t get your idea off the ground without it. Dipping into your own savings may be a possibility, as is asking friends and family for startup loans. But after those options, the complexities of startup business loans can intimidate even the most savvy of entrepreneurs. If you’re looking for ways to fund your big idea, here are five types of business startup loans that you should consider.

1.  SBA Loans | The US Small Business Administration (SBA) is an independent federal agency that works to strengthen the American economy by supporting small business entrepreneurship. As small businesses often struggle to secure startup financing, the SBA’s loan programs are worth looking into. SBA backed loans generally feature lower down payments and longer term financing, offering important flexibility to startups that will want to spend more time expanding their businesses and less time repaying their debts. Startup loans from the SBA can also be easier to secure than traditional bank loans. When lending to small businesses, the SBA guarantees a percentage of the loan, which means that companies that might not meet the financial criteria to secure standard startup business loans on their own might be able to obtain a loan through the SBA.
2. Microloans | Not all startups need a ton of money to launch their businesses. Sometimes, all it takes is a little bit of cash to get the ball rolling. Microlenders like ACCION and other non-profit, community-based lenders provide loan programs that offer up to $50,000 in startup funding to small businesses in need of working capital, equipment, furniture, or supplies.
3. Crowdfunding | When it comes to startup financing, crowdfunding websites have truly changed the nature of the game. By posting their business ideas on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, entrepreneurs can encourage users to back their ventures through either fixed or flexible funding. With fixed funding, campaigns only receive backers’ donations if they meet a specific funding goal, whereas with flexible funding, campaigns collect whatever amount of funding they receive. Entrepreneurs can also employ various tactics to encourage backers to donate to their campaigns. The most common method is to offer perks to backers in exchange for their contribution, thereby incentivizing backers to donate to a given campaign.
4. Venture Capital | Startup companies with demonstrated market potential and high rates of return can sometimes attract investment from venture capital firms. The only drawback? By investing in a startup, a venture capital firm assumes a percentage of your company’s equity, which often gives it a strong say in your company’s future business decisions. So while venture firms can connect startup companies with huge sources of capital, it can come at the cost of giving up a degree of ownership of your business.
5. Angel Investors | Angel investors are wealthy individuals who offer capital to early stage startup companies in exchange for equity. In this way, angel investing is similar to venture capital financing, except angel investors usually invest in companies that have potential for profitable growth, but are too small to attract the larger levels of funding that venture capital firms can provide. Angel investors sometimes organize in angel networks in order to produce collective research and consultation on startups worthy of investment.
   

According to the video, there are five phases of startup funding. First is the seed funding. This is usually a personal investment from the entrepreneur, angel investors, or crowdfunding sources. During this phase, the entrepreneur will shape a business plan and build a team of talented individuals to present to potential investors. After this, they will try to obtain funding from a venture capital firm.

These firms consist of a group of investors who agree to pool their resources, select a solid group of ventures, and fund them. In the first round of such funding, a VC firm will typically invest about one-third of their budget in these projects, with the knowledge it could take up to 10 years to see a return on this investment. After three to five years, VC firms will determine whether or not they will continue to support certain projects and dispense further funding for selected companies.

Once a company is close to making a profit on its own, they reach the expansion stage. As they progress, and no longer need VC assistance, executives for the startup may consider an initial public offer (IPO) or sale. This is where the big pay out comes for venture capitalists, typically raking in about 700% on their investment.

So, whether you are hoping to fund your own entrepreneurial endeavor or are just looking to expand your knowledge of today’s business world, this in an interesting crash course.

Image source

So, what should you do? Outsource — to professional consultants or groups.

The best plan is to outsource whatever services you can so as to save on the highest business costs of all — staffing costs — while getting the support you need and the assurance that these functions are being taken care of by professionals.

Specifically, you can outsource the following 3 functions:

1. CFO: If your company has closed a seed round of funding or is earning more than $250K per year, you need a CFO to handle your financial strategy and run your accounting team. Even if you’re not yet funded or earning significant revenue, you may still be in need of CFO services. For example, if you’re in high-growth mode or have a lot of activity or expenses, you definitely need a financial professional to oversee your financials.

Depending on your needs, a consulting CFO may be able to help with financial projections, cash forecasts, operating budgets, financial plans, pricing, reporting, debt management, M&A, equity and debt negotiations and liquidations. Overall, CFOs help you with business planning, providing your business plan with essential rigor. Your business is creating a product or service; finance is not your business. Look for a professional CFO who has experience working with startups.

2. Accountant: If your financial status doesn’t warrant hiring a CFO, you still need financial support; at the very least, you’ll need help with your day-to-day accounting and regulatory compliance. Outsourcing your bookkeeping to the right firm will give you the support you need for cash management, AP/AR, financial close and taxes.

You can also hire a consulting group to provide accounting support on a project basis. So, whether you need help with audit preparation or generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), your accounting partner can give your accounting issues the attention they need — so you can focus on other things.

3. Human Resources: Any entrepreneur can attest to the fact that HR can be a total time suck. From recruiting to managing personnel issues, from compensation to benefits, from payroll to employee policies and procedures, human resources management can take over your entire schedule. And HR costs include much more than wages — all HR functions, while non-revenue driving, have an associated cost. Outsourcing your HR functions is definitely a cost as well, but when you calculate it out per employee (and figure on the invaluable savings of staying in compliance) it becomes clear that this is a necessary business cost.

While your company is in its early stages, it’s essential to get support, but only as you need it. To outsource doesn’t mean you just hand over a function and forget about it. You’ll still want to be apprised of all aspects of your startup; hiring the right consulting groups will insure that you stay informed.

Remember, you don’t outsource to make a service disappear; you outsource to reduce your cost structure and keep your internal resources focused on your business. When you outsource necessary functions on an as-needed basis, you can concentrate your internal team efforts where they are most needed: growth. And the companies you hire will help you stay on track as your company grows to the next level.

David Ehrenberg is the founder and CEO of Early Growth Financial Services, a financial services firm providing a complete suite of financial services to companies at every stage of the development process. He’s a financial expert and startup mentor, whose passion is helping businesses focus on what they do best. Follow David @EarlyGrowthFS.

Fraser is a pioneer in the field of design as well as a serial entrepreneur. She was cofounder and CEO of Adaptive Path, focusing on design as strategy. Today she is the CEO of LUXr and is writing the book on lean design.

Fraser talked to Intuit employees about how designing for emotion and connecting the dots between people, methodology and outcome can make Lean Startup efforts more effective.

What Lean Startup is not

It’s not cheap. In fact, it has nothing to do with money at all. It’s about efficiency. In a Lean Startup context, when someone invents the next new thing there is uncertainty. Uncertainty is reduced by performing small experiments and obtaining real customer feedback. Iterations such as that reduce waste and increase efficiency.

It’s not fast. Experiments often tell that you’re wrong. Pay attention to the signs that you’re wrong, because you can get really far down the road of a bad product if you never test what you’re doing. Course corrections take time.

It’s not a shortcut. Instincts and intuition signify when engineers are right, so they push to manifest that vision as quickly as possible. That’s a shortcut. Fraser’s take is to use the learn-measure–build formula. These can be done in and order and even done backward to go forward.

Is there room for emotion in Lean Startup?

When there’s a high value placed on efficiency, it’s natural to ask where the emotion comes in. Emotions can be downright messy and inconvenient. She poses the question, “How do we design for emotional impact when everything we do is about rational experimentation?”

Her answer was a piece of cake.

June, who’s trying to find the perfect wedding cake, realizes her fiancé hates her favorite recipe. So she has him taste-test some cupcakes. He loves the cake part, but hates the pink flowers. Now June has learned something valuable, and goes back to the bakery. Cake No. 2 is still a hit in the taste department, so they’ve validated their findings. Although her fiancé loves the swirled texture on the cupcake, he still hates the color pink. So June and her baker develop a pure white, textured cake. It’s unique. It’s classy. It’s quirky. It’s interesting and they designed it together.

The search for meaning

Fraser believes designers try to inject humanity into the product to find something that means something important to somebody. The value proposition is “Where your business vision intersects with a real person in the real world and their real needs.”

“I want to design for meaning,” Fraser said. “I don’t just mean aesthetics or experience. I mean the entire role of that product in a person’s life. What does this product mean for one person? We have to look at people one at a time.”

As an example, Fraser referred to a pair of gun range headphones she bought for $10. Whether in her busy workplace, or writing her book at a coffee house, she is in constant need of quiet concentration. She tried the $300 Bose sound-cancelling headphones, but they didn’t work as well for her as the $10 ones. This is proof, to her, that the feature game – putting features into a product to meet what we think are the customer’s needs — doesn’t matter.

Get strong to get lean

Lean Startup also means throwing away everything that doesn’t help create meaning for one customer at a time. To be able to make hard decisions and step away from the feature game, means having a strong team.

“Most of your decisions as a team will be wrong,” Fraser said. “It takes resilience to keep coming back from wrong decisions. But flexible teams can solve almost any problem. Teams must start with courage, because it takes courage to get to effective communication, trust, simplicity, solutions, feedback and continuous improvement.”

It makes the repeated cycle of “fail fail fail, succeed” much easier to bear.

Along with this assertion, Fraser challenges: “How can we together build something greater than ourselves that has meaning for one person?”

Photo: Janice Fraser of LUXr discusses Lean Startup at Intuit’s Create the Offering Forum.

Of Being Rational

Traditional project management was cited as a reason why business ventures fall out by Benoit Hardy-Vallee because of its lack of proper engagement with the stakeholders and the team.

Also known as waterfall management, it follows rules and procedures to make sure that everything is in order. Even the tiniest of detail is to be listed down. Traditional project management’s well thought out planned can be seen as something great. However, this controlled and shelf process, more often than not, is the reason why ventures fail. The lack of versatility to meet unforeseen events and act upon them is one of its major flaws.

It forgets the human factor, especially the emotions of those in the project. People are likely to be concerned more on how to get the job done rather than the result once accomplished. Therefore, its lack of engagement and collaboration leads to failure.

Of Behavior and Emotion

Hardy-Vallee suggested the use of behavior-based project management in companies and businesses for a higher rate of success instead of the traditional approach.

It is done by aligning and measuring the engagement of team members and stakeholders. The engagement level of team members is based from motivation, involvement, and commitment. Meanwhile, stakeholders’ such as project managers, sponsors, and customer level of engagement are based from their integrity and passion for the project, confidence on the team, and pride on the team and project.

Unlike the traditional approach that concentrates on the process and rational side of things, behavioral management enables a team to have a better performance, involvement, and commitment to complete the task and project.

Optimized Combination

These approaches have been tried and tested by time. They are quite efficient in delivering the job on their own. But putting these two approaches together can create a higher rate of success.

Early 21st century businesses and companies started using the Agile Project Management when handling their day-to-day transactions. Based with the use of technology, it has a good grasp on organization that even the tiniest of detail is iterated, thus, exposing problems from lack of talents to defective work output. Through this, authorities can immediately address these issues, earning the name extreme project management.

A report by Standish Group  on 2012 shows its high success rate of 42% which is three times bigger than the traditional’s 14%. Meanwhile, agile has a lower failure rate with 9% compared to the latter with 29% rate. Putting businesses in a very advantageous position, the project management tools’ attention to detail which directly affects the project is its very strength .

Those involved can easily scrutinize the process and product and adjust to its shifting needs. It gives the stakeholders and the team, capability to move forward the desired results of their clients and customers. It goes to prove that the use of technology doesn’t mean forgetting the custom and the human side of things. It can combine contrasting approaches to create a better and optimize solution.

From the comic www.entrepreneurfail.com

Right up there on the list, along with “I want to be rich”, is “I want to be my own boss”.  This is the list the wantrepreneurs make when thinking about launching their own business. Dreamy-eyed and clueless, they are convinced they can leave the corporate rat race, the tyranny of a boss and an elusive promotion for the career-equivalent of paradise. Unfortunately this is a far cry from reality.

We all know that climbing the good ol’ corporate ladder is a tried, true, relatively predictable, yet slow, way to reach the top. Heeding the speed limit and traversing the dotted lines can get frustrating, as there is no magical formula for upward progression. And cracking office politics and the favoritism code can be a mystery.

This is a reason you may have pursued your own venture: so you could declare yourself the boss. Sure, the org chart will be leaner than in a corporation, but you are never actually your own boss. You are reporting to your customers, vendors, suppliers, and investors. They drive and dictate your promotions, pay raises, perks, annual leave, and responsibility. Welcome to your organization. It’s the flip version of the corporate org chart. You are barely hanging on as it grows larger above you. Be ready to adapt and draw the org chart as you go and the transition will be much smoother, as I realized much later into the game.

How can you ease this transition even further? Some simple steps you can take include:
1. Limit the number of investors you get early on and bootstrap your venture.
2. Decrease the dependence on one large customer
3. Create a back-up plan when it comes to vendors.

These little steps will ensure that, while you may never “be your own boss”, you have moved forward in your career as you create a sustainable, successful business.

Are you “your own boss”? What are your experiences in creating an org chart with your small business? Let us know in the comments below.

Three years and two weeks ago I called my wife to tell her I would become unemployed on May 1, 2010. I had accomplished my three year goal at the agency I was working at and it was time to move on to a new challenge — namely to return to a life of leisure more commonly referred to as Entrepreneurship. It was time for me to leave a life of 50-60 hour weeks working in an office for the 100+ hour weeks of the start-up. And three years ago today, I did just that. I launched Converse Digital.

The Five Rules For Launching A Company

If you’re thinking you want to launch your own company, allow me to share some advice and learning I’ve picked up along the way.

First, don’t bother to save up some money. The common rule of thumb is to have at least a few months income in your bank. Why bother? I mean, would it really help you to have at least six months of income in the bank before you need to actually earn a dollar that you can keep in the form of income? Would it really help to have the runway you need to make the right decisions versus the ones that will pay your mortgage?

Second, don’t believe that you can compete with the biggest names in your industry. Why would you want to pitch a Fortune 100 company anyhow? So what if they have more money, are more committed to marketing (in my case) and might just impress other companies as business proof that you’re company is the real deal. Just sell to the folks you can get to right now… the ones that are going to be an easier sale.

Third, don’t hire anyone to work for you. Holy shit — why would you want to take on that commitment? That would just mean you’d need to sell more widgets or bill more hours or something. Just save the money, ease the pressure on yourself and hire the cheapest employee you’ll ever find — YOU!

Fourth, don’t make it a point to sell yourself to your friends (online and offline). People will just figure out what you do. You’re awesome right? So why would you need to sell yourself to anyone?

Fifth, place family before business… as much as humanly possible. Those work-life-hippy-love folks got it all wrong. You’re starting a freakin business here. You’re an entrepreneur. If you’re not billing your dying man… so get your butt back to work — right after you finish reading this post — cause if you just work harder you’ll succeed. Trust me, I read a book about it.

The Real Secrets To Launching A Successful Company

Obviously I jest above. I’ve tried really hard to do exactly the opposite of each of those rule. Well except for the first one. When I launched Converse Digital I didn’t have anything saved, no investors… not even a line of credit to draw on and I regret it every day. There are so many great ideas just sitting on my chalkboard waiting for the day I can take my foot off the billing pedal and do a bit of investment spending in my own company in the form of money and time. So don’t make that mistake. Whatever you do…. give yourself that runway. I promise you if you take that one piece of advice, you’ll buy me a drink the next time you see me because it will make you a more successful company.

Now on to the real advice and learning that I truly believe is responsible for my still being here three years later.

Whatever you do — be fearless. There is no shame in failure or falling down. There is only shame in not getting your ass back up. And that goes for those of you that aren’t starting your own company. Too many people are scared of failure in this world. From where I sit, there is only one time in your life to fear failure — skydiving. When you jump out of a perfectly good airplane and finding yourself hurtling towards the earth at hundreds of miles an hour, then fear failure. Because if that chute doesn’t open you’re probably going to die. But in pretty much everything else, you’re just going to bruise an ego and scrape a leg, but you’ll live to fight another day. Trust me, I know of which I speak.

Surround yourself with people that love and support you. It’s easy to place business in front of family. And try as hard as you might, it will happen. You’re going to miss a baseball game, birthday or anniversary. But by God, please try not to. Your son will only pitch so many no hitters — do you really want to miss one? Your daughter will only learn to drive once. And your spouse, while they’ll put up with it, will grow to resent you. And then what will you have? Hell, half the fun of owning your own company is sharing it and the joy it brings you with the ones you love. So do your level best to see those folks more than your desktop.

Believe in God. Ok, for you non-religous folks, this one may be kind of a stretch. But hear it out non-the-less. If you truly think your success is completely in your own hands, that you and you alone are driving your destiny, great. But man that’s a whole lotta stress. And not that you won’t feel that even if you do believe in God, but believe me when I tell you, over the last three years I’ve had so many times where I truly needed a miracle to keep the doors open and the lights on. Funny thing — they always came. There are those out there that will tell you they are just “killing it” and “they can’t field all the business they have” and in some cases they might just be telling the truth. But for every one of those “killing it” companies there are a hundred, maybe a thousand that have dodged their fair share of close calls. And in those cases, sometimes believing that someone bigger than you has your back can be the thing you need to keep your sanity, focus your attention and find a way to live another day.

And that’s it folks — I truly believe that at the end of the day, the difference between those that succeed and those that fail in business is often as simple as just believing you can. So when you’re ready to pull that trigger, just believe.

Oh….. and work your arse off ;-)

Expense #1 – Office Space

First of all, with many of today’s alternative office space options, it’s entirely unnecessary to run out and sign a commercial lease to house your startup. Instead, look into incubator spaces, co-working offices and executive office rentals – all of which can provide you with flexible office space options at a much lower cost.

But if you absolutely must have a traditional office for your startup, contact property management companies in your area and ask to see non-traditional spaces or spaces that the agencies have had trouble renting out. With a little negotiation, you may be able to save big on spaces that would otherwise remain empty.

Expense #2 – Office Furniture

One word: Ikea.

Although, more seriously, if the world’s leading producer of cheap furniture doesn’t appeal to you, consider seeking out used or consignment furniture stores in your area, hitting up garage sales for discount items or even pulling the extra furniture out of your parents’ basement. When your startup is first growing, all you need is some place to sit and work – it doesn’t have to be pretty!

Expense #3 – Office Supplies

When it comes to purchasing the necessary office supplies for your growing startup, the lesson here is that the best offense is a good defense. Instead of looking for ways to save money on the supplies you think you need, focus instead on eliminating the need for physical supplies. As an example, if you pursue a “paper free” office, you remove the need for paper clips, staplers, staples, hanging files and a host of other associated products.

If you absolutely must purchase some supplies, try cashing in some credit card reward points to fund these expenditures. It’s an easy, creative way to free up the extra funds needed to purchase your must-have office supplies.

Expense #4 – Shipping Expenses

While there’s no way to eliminate postage fees (if your startup ships out a physical product), you can cut back on the cost of packaging products by reusing boxes, picking up free shipping containers from USPS or even collecting serviceable packing materials from other businesses in your area (grocery stores, in particular, get rid of sturdy boxes every day).

And, when it comes to the actual postage fees you pay to ship your products, be sure to shop around to get the best rates. Yes, you’ll wind up paying something, but you might be surprised by the variability in rates that exists between today’s major shipping carriers.

Expense #5 – Employee Costs

The hiring and training of employees typically represents a startup’s largest expense. As such, take the following steps to minimize unnecessary expenditures in this area:

1. Consider bringing on new employees as independent contractors. This will minimize your tax burden and give you more flexibility regarding the costs associated with terminating employees who don’t work out.
2. Invest in improving your interview process. Training a new employee, only to have him or her leave down the road due to a bad fit, represents a tremendous cost to startups in terms of lost productivity. You can reduce this fiscal waste by enhancing your hiring process so that you’re more likely to wind up with suitable candidates.
3. Offer benefit reimbursements – not benefit plans. Although providing employment benefits will help you to attract better employment candidates, it isn’t cheap to set up group health plans or other benefits packages. As a cost-saving alternative, consider offering employees a set monthly reimbursement for benefits that they purchase on their own.

Expense #6 – Advertising

Established companies can run pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, run TV spots during popular programs and send out highly-effective direct mail pieces. You probably can’t.

Minimize your advertising expenses by taking advantage of “free” (as in, free outside of your time investment) techniques like SEO, content marketing or social media marketing. It’s possible to generate a significant amount of traction in this way, which can drive the sales volume needed to make traditional paid advertising methods a possibility in your business’s future.

Expense #7 – Professional Fees

One last expense that you’ll likely encounter as a startup is professional fees – that is, the amounts that you pay to accountants, lawyers and others for their services.

While you shouldn’t cut them out of your budget entirely, look for opportunities to barter services or products in order to get a discount on your bill. No matter what professional skills you have to offer, you should be able to find the common ground needed to craft an arrangement that benefits both parties, while saving you some serious cash.

Sujan Patel is the founder and CEO of Single Grain, one of the top Digital Marketing agencies in San Francisco, CA. With more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, Sujan leads the digital marketing strategy for companies like Sales Force, Yahoo, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

The Lean Startup movement has spread like wildfire. Eric Ries’ book by the same name has inspired a whole generation of smart entrepreneurs who are getting early customer feedback on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) so they can decide whether to pivot or persevere.

But what if you want to test customer demand before even building a minimum viable product? What if there was a way to create a sort of minimum viable product without actually creating a minimum viable product?

But first, a little background on the Lean Startup movement.

Lean Startup in 10 seconds

The startup entrepreneur has become a mythic figure in the 21st Century. Business icons such as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg are seen as visionary innovators who create great ideas, and then build lasting companies based on these ideas.

The idea of the visionary business leader with future-predicting super powers is a myth.
Eric Ries debunked that myth in his book The Lean Startup. Ries recognized that most startups ended in failure. Countless investors and founders bet time and millions of dollars into visionary products that nobody wanted to buy.

That innovate idea that the heroic entrepreneur and his team of dedicated engineers developed in “stealth mode” typically gets shattered into a million pieces on the ragged rocks of reality. That reality is the customer, who didn’t want that innovative product.

Ries recognized that the real success stories come from entrepreneurs who produced an initial product, introduced it to the market, and found out their product was a total failure.
Undaunted, these entrepreneurs went back to the drawing board, and either tweaked their offering, or tossed it and created something completely new.

Key to Ries’ Lean Startup methodology is the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP). This is a product that has just enough features and functionality to offer an initial group of customers in order to gauge demand, because the goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build. To find out as quickly as possible, what customers want and are willing to pay for.
To offer a minimum viable product, you actually have to build one.This can take a weekend, or it can take 3 months.

But if you’re short on time or financial resources, you might want to consider a pre-MVP.

The Landing Page: Your Pre-Minimum Viable Product

The landing page is the perfect pre-MVP. It allows you to offer your product concept on the web, test your product’s value proposition, and see if your product idea is on the right track.

That’s precisely what Eric Ries did as CTO of his startup IMVU. In this blog post Ries describes testing a new product feature add-on that was appropriate for election season (during the 2004 election that pitted John Kerry against George W. Bush).

Ries and his team launched a fake PPC campaign using a simple web presence. Ries’ recommendations for entrepreneurs:

“Setup a simple website…you basically want to create two pages: a landing page that says what your product does, and a signup page that people can use to register for it…”

What Ries was talking about was a “Landing Page MVP.”

How to Create a Landinge Page MVP

So how do you structure your landing page to test your product idea? We’re going to provide an example from an experiment we recently launched during a recent startup weekend event in Austin, TX. Lander product manager Nico Roddz conceived of an idea for a web form analytics solution and created a landing page to sell it (you can see it here: http://www.formtuner.com/).

He promoted the landing page using a brief PPC campaign, and through social media sharing. In the span of 24-hours he had generated 19 leads for his fictitious product.

Here are the elements for a successful Landing Page MVP campaign based on that experiment:

1. Headline

Direct marketers know that headlines are super important. Brian Clark of Copyblogger says

“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”

The best headlines to use for your landing page are direct and describe what your product is, what it does, or what benefits to expect.Here’s an example of Roddz’s headline:

2. Value Proposition

Peep Laja, author of the blog ConversionXL, describes the importance of having a good value proposition for your website or landing page. He says:

“A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you.”

He describes a value proposition as having a compelling headline (as we show above), a 2-3 sentence sub-headline, 3 bullet points and a visual representation of the product or concept.

We presented our value proposition a little differently. You saw the headline above. Then we featured the 2-3 sentence sub-headline right below the headline:

Then we featured a compelling image, and below that we placed our three bullet points horizontally below the image.

3. Call-to-Action

If you want to actually gauge customer demand, you need to try to sell to potential customers, or at least have them show buying intent. How do you get clients to show buying intent? You need a call-to-action.

A call-to-action can be a “Buy” button, a 1-800 number, or an online form.

Our call-to-action was a prominent sign-up form. Did it work? You bet. We had 19 sign-ups after one day on the market!

4. An Offer

People get confused between a call to action and an offer. What is an offer? An offer is a specific promise of value in exchange for something else of value.

Your product (or the promise of your product) is not an offer. Your value proposition and call-to-action are not the offer.

An offer is something very specific that your customers will get right now.

In our test we offered a “free conversion optimization report”. A free report, white paper or eBook is usually offered for products or services with long sales cycles. You’re asking your client for their email address so you can continue to communicate with them via email.

In exchange, you’re offering them valuable information that can help them in their everyday life.

Another type of offer could be: “Buy now and get 7 free hours of videos.” That’s a product offer. It’s time-specific and provides an extra bonus to entice customers to buy now.

Other famous offers were Dominos Pizza’s “30 minutes or it’s free,” or FedEx’s “When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.”

“The Offer” is such as big deal that marketer Mark Joyner dedicated a whole book to it called “The Irresistible Offer”.

5. A/B Testing

When using a landing page as a Landing Page MVP to test your product idea, you should also test different versions of your landing page. This allows you to isolate what elements of your minimum viable product are attractive (or not) to your potential audience.

Serve up two or three different versions of your landing page. Isolate what you’ll change: focus on your headline, your value proposition, the offer or the call-to-action.

If none of the versions of your landing page do a particularly good job of attracting prospects, then it’s a safe bet your product idea is not really viable. Time to think of a different product idea.

If, however, you’re able to see a big spike in conversions from one version of your landing page to the other, then you should keep on testing so you can improve the winning version of your landing page.

You might just have a hit on your hands!

Build your MVP

Using a landing page to test your product or service idea is a great way to save time and will keep you from building a product that nobody will want. It’s a version of the MVP, but a much reduced version. It’s a version that’s not actually functional, but it does the job of testing your idea because you’re offering it to real customers in a real business environment.

The Landing Page MVP tests your product idea and messaging, and can help you decide whether to build an initial version of your minimum viable product, or build a different minimum viable product than what you actually intended.

What is your experience? Have you ever built a landing page to promote your MVP before building it? What’s been your experience? What do you think makes for an effective landing page to determine demand for your future MVP? Would love to hear your comments below!

This article originally appeared on Lander Blog and has been republished with permission.

Question by: Ashley

The Dating Game

“When searching for a potential startup founder, you must search based on how you would if you were looking for a long-term relationship. You need to look for someone that can share the long-term vision of the company. Founding and running a business is like being married and having a child — you’ve got to remember that its for better, for worse, for richer, for poor and in sickness and in health.”

- Aj Thomas | Founder & Executive Director, Infuse Entrepreneurship Foundation

Are You My Twin?

“Your startup partner should share the same vision for the business and have a skill set that compliments yours. Make sure the candidate is financially secure and equal to you in terms of past experience and future potential.”

- Alexandra Levit | President and Founder, Inspiration at Work

Aligned Goals

“It’s easy to get excited about the big launch and the early stages of the business, but make sure you sit down with your potential partner(s) and talk through the long-term vision for the company. How big do you want to be? Where will your home base be? How much money will you each need to live? Do you have other commitments that could be distracting? Are you all in for the long haul?”

- Allie Siarto | Partner, Director of Analytics, Loudpixel

Similar Work Ethic

“Working with someone who doesn’t seem to putting as much effort into your startup as you are is a fast way to break up a partnership. You can learn new skills, figure out scheduling issues and generally make every other part of a partnership work if you have to, but there is no way to change someone’s work ethic.”

- Thursday Bram | Consultant, Hyper Modern Consulting

Let’s Get Married!

“Starting a business together is a long term endeavor, and you shouldn’t consider co-founding with someone you wouldn’t be willing to marry. This means good communication, ability to adapt, and someone you can trust.”

- Nathalie Lussier | Creator, The Website Checkup Tool

Lifestyle Match

“Choose a startup partner who has similar lifestyle values and desires so you’re working for the same goals. If one partner wants to travel and the other loves 60-hour work weeks, then it’s harder to overcome the sense of imbalance — even if you reach your goals.”

- Kelly Azevedo | Founder, She’s Got Systems

Strong Communication

“There are many factors that determine whether or not a business partnership is going to work well. However, strong communication skills play an important role in every startup environment and are imperative in choosing a partner. There will always be disagreements and issues to work through, and good communication channels will make them that much easier to solve.”

- Lauren Fairbanks | Partner, Stunt & Gimmick’s

Authentic Realism

“You want to partner with someone who is firmly based in reality in terms of how much time, money and energy it will require to make the venture successful. You also want to be sure that they’re being realistic about their own passion for the business and about potential challenges that may arise. Talking through and planning for difficulties should be welcomed, instead of causing defensiveness.”

- Elizabeth Saunders | Founder & CEO, Real Life E®

Lose the Fluffy Support

“I’ve worked with thousands of women entrepreneurs and the biggest mistake I see women in particular make is that they often choose what I call a “moral support partner” which is usually a friend or spouse. Ask yourself why you really need a partner, what expertise that person brings to your business, what your day-to-day roles will be, and whether you’re willing to risk your personal relationship.”

- Natalie MacNeil | Emmy Award Winning Media Entrepreneur, She Takes on the World

Evergreen Partners

“When securing a new internal partner, it is best they work to help you throughout the life cycle of the business. Conduct a gap analysis (with them) of your business and inefficiencies and bring them in based off their skill set to overcome such challenges. External partners are primarily established when the net profits are favorable and other internal factors are considered (vision, focus, etc).”

- Carmen Benitez | Co-Founder and Managing Director, Fetch Plus

Complimentary Skills

“A startup partner is ideally someone who can bring a new set of skills to the table. Business is all about many functions coming together to create a top-notch organization that benefits customers — having redundant skills in the startup stage is not ideal when you’re contending with so many unknowns. Seek out a startup partner who can bring something new to the table.”

- Doreen Bloch | CEO / Founder, Poshly Inc.

You’ve likely seen the HBO Series “How To Make It in America.” It chronicles the story of two co-founders and their group of friends. There is luck, drama, rejection, implied success, real success, good marketing, poor marketing, and more luck. As difficult as they make it look in that wonderful series, they actually make it look easy. In reality, think less partying, more planning, and little dependence on gimmicks and luck. This being said, with the right approach it can be done. There is still room for innovation in textile manufacturing and fashion branding.

Starting a clothing brand can be one of the most worthwhile pursuits in all of startups. There are elements of: manufacturing, design, communication, marketing, probability and statistics, industrial engineering, timing, and the almighty of them all — foresight. There are so many variables that go into a success or failure. Right now (and I repeat, right now), we are somewhat succeeding. That being said, I thought I’d share some helpful hints.

Proof of Concept

Before a single shirt was manufactured, we had our initial concept feedback. “So, let me get this this straight,” the industry executive said. “You are going to manufacture in the States? You are going to use American-sourced fabrics? And you think you’re going to succeed in the textile industry?” Well, yes.

From July 2012 and through the fall, we focused on sales, feedback, construction revision, and regional media. Between Kevin and I, we bore the brunt of these tasks. Validation via earned media was the most difficult day-to-day task.

Through this initial stage, we were purely focused on “proof of concept” in our first test market — Dallas, Texas. The media response was great! And so, we continued. Active, driven, and confident men do want something more from their dress shirts.

Spring for Traction

After starting up in April of 2012 and launching the website in July 2012 (with only one product), we are now finally leaning into the Spring of Traction. Through the summer, fall, and winter of 2012, we were silently working on perfecting our first pieces, ginning up “first adopter” sales, building relationships, establishing brick and mortar presences, improving our supply chain, not paying ourselves, and paying our taxes. With that behind us, the fun begins. This spring is focused on the push for traction.

After the foundation that we’ve set over the past year, we can begin focusing on the brand’s opportunity and/or visibility to grow within several of our proven early-adopter demographics: professional athletics, military, collegiate, and metropolitan business.

The “How To” of This Blog

What does all of this mean to a young brand? It is a meticulous process that involves quite a bit of sacrifice, help, influence, and yes, just a little bit of luck. Here are some great tips that few in the industry will share:

1. Start with a concept that no one else is willing to attempt. Remember, it’s even better when people tell you, “Based on the industry precedent, this likely won’t work.”
2. The design and manufacturing process is expensive. Allot $20k-$50k for your first product run. You will need to achieve a volume of units manufactured to achieve reasonable margins.
3. Spend money on your branding and your collateral. I can’t say this enough.
4. Understand your supply chain and have a manufacturing backup plan when those sources, printers, and cut and sew shops are over capacity.
5. Spend money on your brand’s website and branding videos.
6. If you didn’t attend a top fashion design program, find a top designer who did and hire that person. Find a way to get that person on your team.
7. If there are no other options at the start, plan on pouring all of your personal income into the project for the first year or two.
8. Keep these elements at the forefront: be first to market, drive sales, gain traction.
9. Customers aren’t free. Find a natural pipeline that will serve as high-conversion customer acquisition.
10. Ask for help and be willing to pay for it.

The market is always looking for the next great idea; be willing to sacrifice to see it through. Design really well, depict great logo and lifestyle imagery, prove your concept in a transparent way, and then focus on gaining traction as you go. When you need the push, find a well-connected and cost-effective way to move your brand forward.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Web Smith is a Sr. Analyst, Co-Founder, and Sports / Entertainment / Political Marketing Consultant and a student of strategy. Follow him at: http://www.twitter.com/web.

Recently I visited The Factory in San Francisco, which might be described as a kind of ‘conceptual colony’. The facility is one that accommodates some 15 or 20 aspiring young visionaries in a very nice old Victorian-style home, complete with a full-time chef and a lot of white boards for jotting down ideas, the idea being to enable such individuals to focus on the business of creating new enterprises 24-7 without any interruptions or distractions. It was so much fun meeting the people who lived and worked there, I immediately wanted to somehow get involved. Unfortunately, my schedule demanded otherwise, and I haven’t been back to San Francisco since. I do, however, get the same feeling whenever I visit the Sunshine Suites in New York City where my friend Ashok Kamal is ‘in residence’.

These incubators of ideas, if you will, are very exciting, helping today’s innovators and inventors in much the way that artists’ colonies have made it easier for creative types to turn out artistic and literary masterpieces. In fact Ashok has been telling me for some time that it is the business to be in — and maybe in a few years, the investment community will prove how right that appraisal is. But whether you call it mentoring, inspiring, or encouraging and supporting, I believe it is our responsibility, especially as we get older and hopefully wiser, to share as much of our accumulated knowledge as we can with the young explorers and experimenters who are working on new ways to save the planet.

Admittedly, that not something that is easy for most of us ‘elderpreneurs’ — and in many ways the hardest thing is to acknowledge that we had our time to prove our mettle and that it’s now another generation’s turn to take up the challenge of trying to make the world a better place (or at least, keep it from becoming a worse one). But what we can do is to give them the benefit of our accomplishments, experience and hard-won understanding – and help them to steer clear of some of the pitfalls we’ve encountered along the way.

I’m talking, of course, about your relationship with a venture capitalist. You’ve probably heard grieving entrepreneurs who, after signing the dotted line, are quite unhappy throughout the relationship with their investors.

But there’s nothing wrong with the venture capitalist (VC) per se. You just made the wrong decision. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to choose the right VC to work with, because the right marriage can help define how successful your business will be and how happy you will be running it.

Here are 4 key points to consider for a happy and long-lasting marriage with a VC:

1. Expertise: Choosing a VC is just like a marriage — that is, it’s a long-term commitment. You need to court first to find out whether the VC is a right fit for you. Take the time out to research whether the VC has funded companies in the domain they are operating. Research to find out what companies they have invested in and what their level of involvement has been in each of those. Do they have potential conflicts (e.g., is the expertise a by-product of an investment in a potential competitor)?

2. Adding Value: Look for investors who can add value to your business and not just give you funds. The best marriages between entrepreneurs and VCs happen when the latter can contribute to the growth of the former and when it isn’t purely transactional. Entrepreneurs need to ask, when things get tough in my venture, will this VC be a part of the solution?

3. Term Sheets: This is where you really find out what the intentions are of the person putting in the money. Look out for exit clauses; if not clearly defined, ask for them to be. Although they are not cast in stone (I know of one venture where the exit was clearly defined, but deferred as the company entered a new vertical and that added to their top line immensely, adding to a bigger valuation), it helps to know what the person with the money is really looking for.

Term sheets are very carefully crafted to fool even the best of people into believing that they’ve struck a great deal, but in reality, for the entrepreneur, that’s not always the case. So if you’re at this stage, it wouldn’t hurt to have your term sheets validated by experienced entrepreneurs who’ve gone down this road and/or a lawyer who has the relevant experience.

4. Set Expectations: Many deals are left to ambiguity, either because of lack of clarity at the stage of getting into a deal or because of assumptions made by either party. It is very important to set expectations from both ends and be clear about it. Entrepreneurs need to build trust with their VCs and vice versa. If you don’t have trust at the beginning of the relationship, it is bound to cause heartaches at the later stage.

Whatever you do, do not take this relationship for granted. You are in it for the long haul, and giving up because of a failed marriage is the last thing that you want to do with your venture. So take caution before you enter into a contract.

That said, all the best with your pitch! If it has worked out well for you, I’d like to hear your experiences and what makes your marriage successful.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Rahul Varshneya is a startup coach and the co-founder of Arkenea, an enterprise mobility and cloud solutions provider. He writes on starting up and mobile strategy at http://rahulvarshneya.com/blog.

“We three friends used to travel to places like Bangalore/Chennai to attend events and conferences. We used to get inspired from the product guys and wanted to do the same but coming from Mangalore had its own challenges, “ shared the excited co-founder and CEO Jazeel Badur Ferry at Eventifier.

Well, the dream has turned to reality with Eventifier, a smarter way to archive all the event photos, videos, slides, tweets, conversations at one place, for Jazeel and his two buddies – Nazim Zeeshan and Mohammed Saud. All of them studied engineering together at Mangalore, the chief port city of Karnataka. After completing their graduation, the lads had no intention to join a tech company but were inspired by the dream of doing something on their own.

The thought of building something that solves a pain point took the guys to The Startup Centre hackathon, Chennai. The guys pitched their idea, which was to build an app related to stock market integrating the SMS feature. But, unfortunately, their idea got the cold shoulder from the jury which demotivated the guys.

“We were quite demotivated and decided there is no point in developing a prototype of an idea which has not been liked by the jury. But then we decided to give a try to another idea, which was at the back of our mind for some time. And thus Eventifier was born,” informed Jazeel.

Jazeel shared that whenever they visited different events or conferences, they realized that there was no online archive of social media discussions that happened while the event was on. With social networks proliferating, keeping a tab on all networks was also a challenge and hence Eventifier was born.

Indeed, the startup that is presently evolving at The Startup Center, does solve a crucial problem in today’s world that we had observed while reviewing it last year. However, with time, Eventifier has evolved and it is not just archiving social conversations around an event.

“We knew that we were solving a real problem but the big question is that will our users be ready to pay for our service. We did a small survey and asked our users if Eventifier provides an admin/dashboard that allows them to control the service, moderate content, list top tweets on a big screen, etc., will they be ready to pay for it? And, the result was quite positive and we also have a bunch of paid customers, “ added Jazeel.

In addition to the features mentioned above, the startup is working on an Enterprise Edition for a customer where the startup is providing branded content. In other words, the archives will have a white labeling and will be entirely branded the way the customer wants.

However, Jazeel has no issues when people compare Eventifier with Storify. In fact he feels that it is a great thing but they are not too much worried because Eventifier is in the market to solve different problems.

Eventifier is fully automated and works in real time unlike Storify where you have to do lot of hard work. Features like Highlight where you can pull the tweets to an offline big screen really sets us apart

The startup which was recently funded by for its efforts from KAE now plans to concentrate to tap the huge event market that is out there waiting for Eventifier. With 10% of its users turning into customers like Kred, NASA, Pearson, etc., one gets the hint that the friends are already kicking some great business.

Before we could wind up our discussion, Jazeel informed me that Twitter has been a great support for the startup in reaching out to people.

“Twitter has been the tool for us. Most of our content was on Twitter so we concentrated on it. We got great results and really fast. We tried the same with email for reaching out to people but it didn’t work the same way Twitter does. And now with Twitter Cards coming out in the market, content discovery has been really easy and credible too.”

Smaller towns have bigger dreams and the guys from Eventifier are proving it right.

Image courtesy: www.thehindu.com

It’s what distinguishes talkers from doers, which I touched upon in last week’s post about lessons learned at a literacy conference that apply to entrepreneurs as much as they to do authors.

While I was at that conference, I ran into Canadian fantasy fiction author Ed Greenwood. Over a span of less than 30 years, this man has published scores of books, hundreds of magazine articles, a pile of short fiction and worked on countless other related projects. He is a working writer well accustomed to navigating the often-absurd complexities of the publishing industry and trying to earn a fair living while doing so. Anything beyond a month to crank out a draft of a novel is a luxury for him. He’s scarce on social media and I’ve probably just given you the reason for that.

On one panel, Greenwood talked about how as a youth he chose to study journalism. This was back in the day when classrooms (and newsrooms) were filled with rows of clattering typewriters rather than computers. He had no intention of becoming a journalist, but he wanted to develop a journalist’s work ethic – that ability to just sit down and hammer out clean copy on a deadline whenever it was necessary to do so.

Such conference sessions are always filled with new writers eager to glean mystic secrets from the veterans that will turn them into the next Big Thing. But it starts, simply, with developing the good habits that result in getting words to page on a consistent basis. Many new authors preoccupy themselves with having everything just right – the right music, the right pair of fluffy slippers, the right ambience in the coffee shop, or what have you.

And that’s fine, if all you want to do is putter around. If you want to make a serious business of it, you must learn to produce on demand—just sit down and do it.

But creativity often does not come easily, even for creative people. And this is where it becomes another lesson that applies to the exhaustive effort to get technology to market as much as it does to the discipline of writing.

Make the most of your golden hours

It doesn’t matter if it is high-level marketing messaging, that pitch you have to make before a room of angel investors, or resolving an issue that users are having with your new interface. Sometimes, the door just needs to be shut, the email and the social media channels turned off, and the phone sent direct to voicemail.

The road to product launch is riddled with potholes that have signs reading “insert content here.” And as the roguish Tara Hunt has written before on this blog, content doesn’t just appear out of thin air. Content, by my definition, is anything that will be heard or read by a target audience, which includes that investor pitch as much as it does that next blog post or the tutorial for your app. Even if the purpose and the audience differ, each situation requires a creative process.

While there are always those eureka moments that strike in the most inopportune times and may leave you reaching for a notebook, dripping shampoo suds on the bathroom floor, producing the final polished output is still a grind. That’s where it comes back to focus and carving out those necessary blocks of time in which casual interruptions by co-workers, clients and others are reduced as much as possible.

In this shop, one approach we take is to schedule all meetings in the afternoon and reserve the mornings for writing, phone calls and the like. I personally find that my creative juices flow best before noon. It’s not that I can’t produce good material after that, but it comes easier earlier in the day when my brain is fresh.

I’ve met many business people who start the work day at the crack of dawn and assert that they get a day’s work done before most of their team arrive in the office. One author at the conference said that she enjoyed a big gain in her productivity after getting in the habit of rousing herself early and blocking off time to get her creative writing done “before they find me.”

It all comes back to striking a manageable balance between the natural ebb and flow of your workplace, your workday and your own ultradian rhythms. Try to schedule everything else in your day around that period of time when you are at your creative best and use that time exclusively for whatever creative tasks are on your to do list. As Canadian sci-fi author Julie Czerneda said in one panel (I paraphrase), “these are your golden hours. Honour them and don’t let them go to waste.”

But as Ed Greenwood would add, sometimes you just have to sit down, isolate yourself from all distractions, and grind away until the job is done, regardless.

Image: Do It In Time Diva

Here’s why you need to give yourself a salary:

So you won’t use up all your finances.

You know what this means. Day in and day out you strive to turn your business into something profitable, trying out new marketing strategies and ways to generate more sales leads. You may hire a home-based telemarketer to be your assistant at first, but when that person fails to deliver, you decide to hire a telemarketing call center. Doing this of course uses up your finances, and because you still have to find a steady flow of sales leads, you have no means of getting cash flow into your reserves. Eventually, you end up using your own savings. In this scenario, you would certainly dry up your personal funds. On the other hand, if you were paying yourself just as you did that telemarketer or call center, even if your business fails to become profitable, you would still have money remaining in the bank.

To accurately measure business net income.

A business is not measured by how much you can get, as the owner. It is measured by how much the business earns minus all the expenses of operations, or the net income. If there is no clear distinction between how much you pay yourself and how much your business earns, how are you to accurately measure your annual income and expenses?

To ensure you have money for business emergencies.

Once you’ve calculated all the operational expenses of your business and subtracted that from your gross income, what is left doesn’t all go directly to you. Or rather, it shouldn’t. By paying yourself a specified salary every month, you will have extra finances should an emergency occur at the office. For example, your sales leads generation team informs you that your telemarketing list is already outdated, but they do not have the time to spend on validating every contact information. So, you hire a lead generation firm to do this for you without needing to dip into your own pockets for the money.

Properly allocating your income even before you start earning those millions is a sure fire way to become successful.

This post also appeared at CallboxInc Blog