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.

Ever wonder if there are more conservatives or progressives on Twitter?

If you use Twiangulate’s new bio search, you’ll discover there are 6,240 self-described “liberal” tweeps , 11,259 “conservative” tweeps, 4,234 “progressive” tweeps. 1,269 mention TCOT.

Started in Feb ’06, The Zonie Report is closing. Creator Adam Klawonn writes:

First, the Internet audience is incredibly fickle, so the expectant Zonie Report masses weren’t there. (It turns out there were only about 8,000 of them in a state of 6 million-plus residents.)

Second, the way we consume media online does not lend itself to a deep-reading format, so short stories and truncated video (from car accidents to Britney Spears sightings to bar fights in Scottsdale) proliferate. This says something about the format, about us and about news outlets in general.

Third, it’s tough to sell ads using today’s metrics (i.e., impressions, etc.). Online advertising prices continue to head toward the floor and may never recover.

Finally, people are generally more interested in what everybody around them is doing than what’s really going on in the world. There are some exceptions, but this is perhaps the harshest and saddest lesson of all. Who knows if/when this will change.

On recent nights I’ve been reading A Crooked Sixpence, a novel about London journalism in the 1950s by Murray Sayle. Published in 1961, the book portrays the many mechanisms and methods needed to crank out a newspaper before computers came along… and LONG before The Internets made hundreds of hours of labor and tons of machinery obsolescent. Here’s Sayle’s portrait of a Saturday before the weekly Sunday edition came out:

The sub-editors had already started work around the big horse-shoe table a few feet from him, trimming and shaping the smaller stories for the news pages. There were twenty of them, in shirt-sleeves, heads bowed and pencils flying over piles of copy-paper. The bare arms and furrowed foreheads, the unbuttoned collars and loosened ties made them look like aging schoolboys doing a grueling Eng. Lit. paper. The chief sub-editor, a one-eyed elderly man who looked after the answers to readers’ queries during the week, presided at the center of the outer curve of the table. He was working through a pile of stories from the basket at his elbow, reading the first few paragraphs of each, marketing a spot on a clipped bundle of page schemes and throwing the document to one of the labourers with his order, ‘Five pars with a single-column staggered two-line head in eighteen’ or ‘Two-par fill, early page.’ For more complicated prescriptions, he wrote he directions on the copy and sometimes drew the shape of headline he wanted.

As the sub-editors worked, O’Toole noticed that their left hands were periodically busy on the table, the fingere thumping in order like pacticing pianists’. They were counting letters, reducing political turmoil in far-off republics to RED GRAB BID because eighteen-point Roman Ultra-Bodoni makes nineteen units (including spaces) in a twenty-four em line over a shallow double, and even the Russians haven’t developed rubber type faces yet.”

For the record, Sayle is one of the journalists who Harold Evans, as editor of the Sunday Times, sent to Ulster to report on Bloody Sunday, the day in January 1972 when British troops shot dead 14 civil rights protesters in Londonderry. The results of the Sunday Times’ investigation — that the day was a massacre, not a battle — was never published because the commencement of British judicial proceedings put a lid on any and all publishing about the event.

Is a man with a 4.0 GPA and a masters degree in education likely to be better at teaching in an inner city school than a woman with a BA in history who had a 2.5 GPA in her first two years of college and a 4.0 her junior and senior year?

All other things being equal, the slacker-turned-star history major is probably the better teacher.

Teach for America, which last year sent 4,100 recent college graduates to teach at schools in lower-income neighborhoods, has turned hiring great teachers into a science. In this month’s Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley does a tremendous job profiling TFA and what it has learned about what makes a great teacher.

Each year TFA evaluates 35,000 applicants on 30 different datapoints. After their hires have taught for a year, TFA cross-references these characteristics against how much each teacher’s students have advanced during the year.

What to look for in hiring an aspiring teacher? According to Ripley, TFA looked at the data it’s been gathering on job candidates since 1990 and identified these qualities as correlating strongly with a recruit’s success:

Grit: “those who initially scored high for ‘grit’ — defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-chosce test– were 31% more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students.”

Happiness: Teachers who reported they were very content with their lives were 43% more likely to achieve great results in the classroom.

Achievement: “Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teacher. And the two best metric of previous success tend to be grade-point average and ‘leadership achievement’ — a record of running something and showing tangible results.” But a 4.0 isn’t essential: “an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college.”

XX chromosomes: It turns out “women are more likely to be effective in Teach for America.”

TFA also discovered that two factors that were expected to predict successful teaching — prior experience working in poor neighborhoods or a masters in education — had no correlation with classroom success.

All these characteristics are hard for a teacher to change post-facto. But it turns out there are a bunch of strategies that teachers can learn. These are detailed in a new book called Teaching as Leadership by Steven Farr, a former TFA teacher who now studies exceptionally effective TFA teachers. If the book is as good as Ripley’s article, my bet is that before long its a best seller among not only teachers and school administrators but biz execs and HR folks.

According to Ripley, in studying TFA’s best teachers, Farr found that “great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness…. Great teachers, he concluded, constantly re-evaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully — for the next day or the year ahead — by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

Does all this work? By refining its hiring and teacher training, TFA has nearly doubled the number of its teachers who advance their students more than 1.5 educational years in a single school year.

One last resource: TFA’s strategies for teachers are promoted at teachingasleadership.org.

This weekend ornery web entrepreneur and visionary Jason Calacanis blasted Comscore, the web analytics firm, calling for a boycott of its data and products.

Jason says he hates Comscore not only because its data is fundamentally wrong, but because the company asks web publishers to pay to “correct” its data.

According to these folks it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn’t, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent “pay to play” product shows their true stripes.

For the record, my colleagues and I have always found Comscore’s data to be hilariously inaccurate. As I recall, for a long while Comscore showed PerezHilton.com to have a predominantly male readership, even when our multiple different surveys and data-sources showed his readers to be 88-90% women.

I don’t know what Comscore’s data shows today, because frankly, I gave up caring about Comscore years ago. But if Jason wants to rumble with them, I’ll give a damn again.

As Jason says, Quantcast and Google do a much better job.

Here are some old links that speak to both Comscore’s power and inaccuracies: Hulu miscount; IAB calls for auditing ; Comscore kills Canadian site.

(For the record, while I’ve considered shorting Comscore’s stock in the past, I’m going to take no position while I’m complaining about their services.)

“The way to kill a newspaper is to ask more for less.”

That’s how legendary newsman Sir Harold Evans’ sums up publishing economics in his autobiography My Paper Chase.

The New York Times should remember Sir Harold’s rule as it builds a paywall around its online content.

The paywall will mean not only that readers pay more, but that they’ll get less. Why? As the newspaper of record, The New York Times currently is a must-read for any card-carrying member of the commercial, media, educational, or government elite. The paper is read, in part, because everyone reads it.

With fewer post-paywall readers, the paper will become less relevant, less essential. Which means the NYT will be charging more for less.

So how might NYT add value for its online patrons even as it raises prices?

The paper should spend the next year ramping the social network, currently nascent, among its readers, writers, editors and partners. Some of these social functions could be built in-house, others should be bolted on from LinkedIn and Facebook Connect.

Under this scenario, the newspaper’s prodigious reporting and analysis becomes the excuse for people to come to NYT.com, but the people themselves and the insights they swap are the essential reason for staying.

In a world deluged with opinions, rumors, and billions pixels pumped out by anybody with a cellphone, smart Times readers might pay to hobnob with a self-selected elite community.

As with the Times’ planned content paywall, drive-by readers would be able to sample and peek inside the social network, but could not get inside the site’s functionality to really participate in the social hubbub.

Turning its paywall into a velvet rope might raise the value of NYT.com’s product enough to justify raising prices.

Sir Harold, hater of class snobbery and champion of the newspaper’s roll as spokesman for the non-elite, might well hate my idea. And I don’t don’t find the idea entirely palatable either. But I’d certainly prefer this solution to watching NYT.com disappear into penury and irrelevance behind a paywall.

Do I think the Club NYT idea would work? I’d say its odds of working well are only 50/50. But those odds are fifty times better than NYT’s current plan to charge for online content plan, which, with apologies to Sir Harold, seems like the way to kill a website.

All of us are still puzzling over the implications (and ambit) of NYT’s move to a paywall for its online content, announced this week for implementation in January 2011.

The initial announcement suggested each visitor would get a certain number of free visits — a teaser or sampler — after which they would have to start paying. Print subscribers (me!) would get free access.

Today, Jay Rosen read the NYT-leaves and highlighted statements suggesting that NYT plans NOT to charge people who are referred to an article via a link on another site. This is Rosen’s summary of the meaning of this loophole:

for those people who get their news from the web itself, using search, aggregators social media and blogs to find the stuff they want, the stuff they find from the New York Times will always be available, free of charge. That looks a lot less like a pay wall to me. It isn’t a metered system if I can access the Times via the link economy without limit. This scrambles a lot of what’s been written on the subject.

One reading is that this is a loophole big enough to drive (or steal) a newspaper through.

The outcome could be perverse: loyal patrons, the people deserving the newspaper’s best service and pricing, will pay extravagantly. Drive-by users, without any loyalty or long-term commitment, will be treated royally.

The net result: loyal customers are punished and the best and most relevant info, curated by the social media machine, will be free.

(Sent by a blogger friend. Write us if you’d like a t-shirt for your own mini Jedi.)

As you’ve probably already noticed, we’ve launched a redesign of the site. (This morning at 7am, in fact.) If you’re reading on an RSS reader, hustle on over and take a look at our masterpiece.

Here’s an overview of the changes:

In the words of one staffer deeply involved in the process, we are officially “pushing out of the 1970s feel and into the web2.0 feel… haha :P”

To which I can only say this… 🙂

Many thanks to Orsi, Megan, Kate, Peter, Vega and Zsolt for inspiring the rethink and grinding out the project’s many details.

Next week we’ll announce some changes in our commission structure — more money for bloggers — with other good news later in the spring.

For all the history majors (what, just me?) here’s a screengrab of our original site in the fall of 2002.

And, for those of you who’ve already forgotten, here’s what Blogads.com looked like yesterday.

To the many bloggers and advertisers who have been with us since the early days — some of you even stretch back to 2002 — thank you again for all your support and inspiration. We all remain incredibly proud to serve America’s greatest bloggers in their quest to carve out a viable new space for independent thought and creativity.