Got a brilliant product idea? Thinking about starting a company? Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur over the last 12 years:

1. Your plans are already history…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/nnova/3976614059/

    

   Don’t worry about your product. Five years from now, there’s only a 1 in 20 chance you’ll be selling that wonderful product you’re sketching today on napkins.

2. Hire for tomorrow’s products…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/oaspetele_de_piatra/2680418274/

    

   iPad and Google and Twitter are an effect of great companies, not the cause. Focus on people before products.

3. Dream…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/getdown/452253741/

    

   At the heart of every start-up is a dream, a hallucination, a vision nobody else sees. Bandages for invisible wounds. Shampoo for bald men. A hot air balloon, not a pile of cloth. Every start-up needs a dreamer, someone who is, by conventional standards, a little crazy.

4. Partner well…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/nunoduarte/

    

   It takes (at least) two to tango. The dreamer needs partners — spouses, colleagues, investors, family, customers — sane, practical people willing to make a leap of faith and dance even when sometimes they don’t hear the music.

5. Ignore the champagne…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/jarbo/

    

   Start-ups require patience and humility. Don’t break out the champagne when you sign your first contract, or get featured in the Wall Street Journal. These events are bubbles, quick to burst, meaningless side-effects of your real, if tiny, daily achievements.

6. Stay late…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayeve/

    

   A start-up’s water boils only because of thousands of small actions: sending an e-mail at 7.45 AM before your competitors have gotten into the office, grabbing the thesaurus one more time to find the perfect verb, staying at your conference booth until everyone has left the hall.

7. Network…
    

   networkweaver.blogspot.com/

    

   Avoid being either too insular or too networked. Maintain a healthy mix of links to people near and far, but not so many that you’re overwhelmed. A study of Broadway producers found that shows by producers with a mixed social network did better than shows by producers who always work together or producers who’ve never worked together.

8. Reboot…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayeve/

    

   Amid the dreaming and screaming and scheming, take a vacation. Go away for a full week with no phone or computer. At least once every three to six months, you HAVE to unplug completely for at least a week to reboot your brain and reconnect with your family.

9. Hire happy people…
    

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/stollerdos/

    

   This rule seems obvious, but is easy to overlook amid piles of resumes and criteria. Happy teachers are 43% more effective than average teachers, and the same rule applies to small companies.

10. Meet the mate…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/8533266@N04/

     

    If you’re hiring someone with a significant other, you’ve got to meet that person. He or she shows a lot about your potential hire. Plus you’re all going on a long ride together and its a lot more fun if you all get along.

11. Don’t ignore warts…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdhc/

     

    When hiring, avoid wishful thinking. We all like to think the best of people, particularly when that person might make a great contribution to your cause. But once you’ve hired someone, their bad habits can quickly becomes horror shows.

12. Interview by e-mail…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/1827140411/

     

     

    Most extra-corporate interactions are now virtual — 94% e-mail, 4% IM, 2% phone? — so try to get to know job candidates the way your customers will. Before meeting in person, interview by e-mail, IM, then phone.

13. Climb two ways…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/kpalyu

     

    Some people are great at building ladders, some people excel at climbing them. Early in a start-up’s life, you need people who can build a ladder out of thin air. Then you hire great climbers.

14. Hire people who tolerate failure…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/acaben/

     

    A good baseball player misses roughly 90% of all pitches. Your staff need to keep swinging and missing as eagerly as any Major League slugger.

15. Hire people who enjoy each other…
     

     

    This is a photo I took of a Blogads cookout. A company is more than a crowd of people — put the right people together and some special fire kindles among them and great things happen. Get it wrong, and your company is cold and dark.

16. Hold on to great staff…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/joyoflife/

     

    Over time, your colleagues amass volumes of knowledge about your products, markets and customers. Increase retention of great staff by just 10% and you can double profits.

17. Beware your first sale…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/

     

    No matter how absurd the product, there’s always at least one buyer out there. Maybe your mom, maybe your college roommate. Never extrapolate from your first sale… or you may end up with a pile of purple eggs.

18. Court networked customers…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/svedek/

     

    It’s much better to sign three customers who know each other than ten who have no connection. Connected customers imitate, educate and evangelize each other. They’re the nucleus of growth.

19. Embrace smart customers and don’t let go…
     

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/formalfallacy/

     

    Smart customers demand smart products. And long-time customers value your service more. If you’ve tailored your products to their needs, you’ve helped make them happier or more profitable. Improving customer retention by 10% can boost profits by 30%.

The bottom line: a start-up needs to focus more on people than products. Only persistent, loyal, smart staff and customers can make a dream soar into the clouds.

(These are all lessons I’ve learned over 30 years of working for small, privately held companies, including 12 years running my own company with great partners. Some are tactics I’ve only recently articulated, some are ideals I’ve failed to live up to. Throughout, I’ve relied on invaluable books like The Innovator’s Dilemma, Crossing the Chasm, The Psychology of Persuasion, Connected, Linked, and The Loyalty Effect.)

Other blog posts of interest: Reid Hoffman’s 10 rules for entrepreneurs.

The gurus over at influence mapping firm Morningside Analytics recently built this map that illustrates the central of blogs in our liberal and conservative networks in the healthcare and energy policy debates.

Here’s the healthcare map, with our blogs highlighted.

And here’s their map for energy blogs with Blogads.

Here’s the post with more context.

Deborah Yao of the AP reports:

Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all. 

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

“If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk,” said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices. “Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.”

Marking “in kind” advertising clearly will not only be a huge boon for the public. If bloggers are to make a living from advertising, transparency and full disclosure are essential.

This could be bad news for players like Payperpost.com.

Here’s a link to the full FTC proposed guidelines.

Photo-essayist and bon vivant Tony Pierce spent yesterday trying to track down the text of a $56,000 Sean Penn anti-war ad in the Washington Post. Problem: the WPost doesn’t cover its own ads; the NYTimes certainly doesn’t cover the Post’s ads; A-bloggers and e-Pundits are watching foliage or baseball. Tony writes “bloggers are missing their windows of opportunity. people have plenty of ways to get to their news and columns from more famous writers who editoralize. what the kids want today are links to things that no one else is linking to. tell them something they dont know.” And “im trying to make this glorified science fair project actually provide a freaking service.”

Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I’ve spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don’t manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe’s law, which

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold ’em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday — some narcissistic publishers haven’t made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit’s utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply “publish” an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit [url=http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=36]traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky’s statement that “most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast”. Jarvis says “what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, ‘intercast’ communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community.” 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit’s equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe’s law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick’s 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That’s what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

Using Blogrolling, I just added a link to Hylton Jolliffe on my personal blog. I then went to Blogrolling’s “latest links” page, where Jolliffe was now The Latest Link. Amazing to see the synapses wire in real time. (Time-stamps would be nice addition.)