I think you should start with your own personality and really understand yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. What are you drawn to and what do you avoid? In this game, when there is only a couple of people, and you don't have a lot of structured accountability you, can really go off the rails if you don't pay very close attention to the stuff you know you are going to avoid. It's like driving down a road, and you know there are going to be potholes. Why not plan to avoid them. Just see them ahead of time instead of bouncing your car through those.

I'm a really big fan of finding customers before you start building anything and that is what we did as well. We got early customers who believed in what problem we wanted to solve. And build the platform with some early feedback from them. It really helped us validate the idea we were working on. There were times when investors would be like, no, that's not a great idea. I don't think there is a big market for it. But, because we had so many customers, we could really believe in what we were solving for. I really value having those customers with our life cycle and, I give the same advice to everyone who is building a platform, product, anything. There is nothing better than getting customers involved in your journey early on, even more than investors.

You need to make sure that you are looking at sufficient cash flow to be able to do what you are doing. I think one of the biggest mistakes startups make is they don't recognize the amount of cash it will take to get a business off the ground. It usually takes twice as much as you think and twice as long. So it's really important to be mindful of that.

I would say three things: One is to work hard. The second is to be persistent. And third is to do things differently from others. A lot of times, people want to do what everyone else is doing and, that is just going to put you in a normal category. If you do things differently from everyone else, that makes you different from everyone else. There is a better chance of breaking out and reaching your goal.

Really figure out what KPI's you think make sense to track for whatever initiative you are working on. And don't let yourself get distracted or deviate from those. Actually iterate on improving those KPI's. If you decide click-through rate is what you want to improve, actually start measuring that. Layout a plan to achieve that. If you have to change the plan because it's not good or it's not working, that is one thing but, don't spend three minutes or three days working on click-through rate and then get bored and decide you want to focus on a number of impressions and then after that say no I actually want to work on ranking. Cause that is a recipe to get nothing done. And it happens a lot in digital marketing, unfortunately. Because these things do take so long, SEO in particular, you just have to have a certain degree of focus. I think that is going to be valuable to a lot of small business owners and start-ups.

We tend to think that intellectual property, patents, trademarks, that kind of thing are higher on the list. But, we also are ready to acknowledge that sometimes maybe getting together a prototype might be a little more important than getting that patent if you have to choose between one or the other. A lot of times being able to make those decisions and then commit to it. We are here to help businesses to make those decisions. We are not going to try and milk you out of money, and get you to make a decision that you are going to regret later. We want your business to be successful. So we can help you try and navigate what's the best path, particularly in regards to intellectual property.

Start with a brand strategy. I think a lot of people dive straight into trying to get their website up. Whenever somebody has an idea there are so many steps that tend to get skipped in the early stages. What I always like to tell people is to take these ideas that you have and put them into a strategy for how you want to be representing yourself and bringing it to your audience.

Start small and start with a minimal viable product. It does not have to be perfect when you launch it. It does not have to cost a lot of money. Even if you have to do it manually to see if you can get traction, interest, and an audience, then you are on to something. I feel like there is so much talk today about these startups. And you have to raise all this money and hire this team and build out this product. I would just say start really small and think hyper-local to get it started. Then you can grow from there.

I think managing your own expectations. We all want to manage our customer's expectations but, we forget about ourselves. When I get into a business, I know there are going to be a lot of hurdles.  I know there is going to be an issue. When those issues do come, you have to remember, oh yeah, that's what I expected. Instead of getting frustrated and stressed out about it, you work through it. You know it has to happen. There are going to be frustrations. There are going to be things that don't go right. If you can expect to expect the unexpected, you can probably handle those a little better.

This is my take from that. This is what Mark McCormack said who built IMG into an incredible company. He said: "when you are looking at your pnl, and you're looking at all your projections and everything, and you are feeling good, do this. Double your expenses and cut your revenue in half and tell me how you feel." The second is going back to being a smart guy. I kind of use proxies mentors, and one is Michael Dell. And Michael Dell says: " if you think your the smartest guy in the room, get new guys. If you still think your the smartest guy in the room, get a new room."